The Popular Magazine/Volume 73/Number 4/Twice in the Graveyard Watch

by Bertrand W. Sinclair

Twice in the Graveyard Watch

By Bertrand W. Sinclair
Author of “North of Fifty-three,” “Loot,” Etc.

Is the romance of the sea entirely dead? Have steam and wireless telegraphy, and the thousand mechanical aids to modern navigation eliminated the factor of danger in ocean transportation? Is the brass-buttoned watch officer on the steel bridge of the passenger greyhound any less admirable than his rougher forerunners who stumped the quarter-decks of the clipper ships in the earlier days of wood and canvas? Perhaps you will answer yes to these questions now. But wait till you have read this story of Sinclair's. The odds are twenty to one that you will change your mind before three pages are turned. The sea has lost none of its romantic terrors. And the men of the sea are the same sturdy breed they have always been. Here is a tale of seamen and sea adventure that will catch your interest and stir your emotions from the first sentence.—The Editor.

(A Complete Novel)

CHAPTER I.

The Lights.

Stone heard the ship's bell strike seven in the graveyard watch, which is three thirty a. m. by shore time. Night still lay like an ebony mist over the land, and the land pressed close on port and starboard, crowding the sea into a narrow pass, a danger-studded sea lane between high-wooded mountains, an artery through which flowed all the commerce between Puget Sound and Alaska.

The channel opened ahead of the Mandarin a faint shade lighter than the general gloom. Still, a lookout could see little more than the white curl that spread fanwise from the vessel's bow. The Mandarin plowed up Johnstone Strait by time-and-compass courses, checking her position by known points, beacons, marks established for navigators. If she ran her courses true, so many minutes on a given course at a given speed, with proper allowance for all known factors, she avoided danger. She did not need to see—no more than a blind man needs to see in a familiar room.

Stone stepped out on the bridge. The end of his watch was taking him into tricky waters and forthright dangers, chances that must be accepted by every vessel making that run through the inside passage.

The tide ebbs and floods through the long constriction of Johnstone Strait at from three to seven knots' speed. Dead ahead of the Mandarin, slashing south at fourteen knots per hour, helped onward by the full strength of the tide, Helmcken Island split the strait in twain, each narrowed pass made doubly dangerous by powerful surging currents, eddies, whirls that swung a great ship as if it were a toy. There was a clear channel on each side of Helmcken, a choice of two evils with little to recommend either in the way of ease or safety. Helmcken Island Light threw a red sector over Earl Ledge, an ugly reef standing two hundred yards out from shore a mile west ward of Helmcken. That passed, a navigator could take his choice of chances, the north passage or the south, with the south generally favored—and with the O. S. S. steamers taking the north, known as Current Passage, for the very reason that traffic favored the south side. The less-used pass offered less chance of meeting another ship in close quarters.

On Helmcken Light Stone kept his gaze fixed, to hold his ship just outside the red sector until he cleared Earl Ledge. He could mark the Mandarin's course and position by that. He could feel the slight swing of her as she gave to cross currents. She was sweeping down on Helmcken under the combined thrust of her screw and the six-knot current at very close to twenty miles an hour over the ground.

In seven years of making the inside run Billy Stone had never been able to clear Helmcken Island by day or night without his nerves growing taut, without a feeling of relief once Speaker Rock and Ripple Shoal and Earl Ledge all lay astern. The Mandarin displaced five thousand tons dead weight. She carried a hundred and ten passengers and a light cargo. Her strong room held four wooden, iron-strapped boxes said to contain ninety thousand dollars in gold bullion from the Tanana mines. It wouldn't have made much difference if she had been merely in ballast and ship's stores and the only lives aboard her a capable crew. Billy Stone was the officer on watch. The ship was in his hands; he was responsible for her safety.

That curious tensity began to creep over him now while the Mandarin still lacked half a mile of the outer danger, Earl Ledge, thrusting its rock-barbed shoal two hundred yards into the fairway from the Hardwicke shore. Over this when the tide ran strong the sea boiled and swirled with a sinister grumble. The depths about the ledge fell sharp to many fathoms. Its water-worn teeth bared at low tide. Stone stared over the port bow, straining his eyes for the white line of broken water that marked Earl Ledge on the blackest night.

As he stood there a queer jumble of thought traversed his mind. He was acutely conscious of his vessel's course, speed, position, alert to each detail of his duty, prepared for any contingency as it might arise. Yet he thought of a girl in Seattle, the long years of his service at sea, the slow drag of promotion. A hundred associated ideas flashed across his mind. He felt toward life, in that moment, a touch of the strange tension that he always experienced in clearing these dangers. He was merely a cog in the machine. Watch after watch, voyage after voyage. Years slipped by. Goals he hoped to reach stood far on the horizon. Regarded with the inevitable impatience of youth his progress toward them seemed a snail's pace, a road beset with as many difficulties as the passage of a ship through these rock-lined narrows.

He glanced in at the quartermaster gripping the wheel. He would not have changed places with the man, but for a fleeting instant he envied him his utter freedom from responsibility. The quartermaster had only to keep eyes steadfast on the compass card and shift helm as ordered. He did not have to exercise a judgment which might prove fallible. And in the merchant service there is no excuse for an error in judgment. Masters and mates in coastwise shipping stake their reputations and livelihood on the two-spoke turn of a steering wheel. One blunder unrectified puts an officer on the beach, wrecks whatever standing he may have gained in his profession as effectually as—sometimes even more effectually than—his vessel is wrecked.

Again Stone turned to look for the breakers and white foam on the reef. Presently it showed dim on the port side, well clear. The Mandarin swept by at train speed. Three minutes straight ahead at that pace would pile her with a crash on the end of Helmcken Island. Stone smiled. In one minute and thirty seconds precisely he would order the quartermaster to put her over just enough to stand fairly into the middle of Current Passage. He looked backward, marking the overfalls and swirls and confusion over the ledge vanish astern—and as he swung to look forward his eye caught something which a moment before had not been there, something which caused his heart to give one tremendous leap and stand still.

The running lights of a vessel, the red and green and white triangle, bore head on as the Mandarin swung into the course she must run. The current set across the end of Helmcken. A powerful eddy worked there. If she bore to starboard and was caught in that fast water all the Mandarin's power would not keep her offshore.

And this other vessel, mysteriously flashing out of the darkness, had the right of way. Under the rules of the road at sea she must hold her course and speed. The Mandarin must give way. To give way meant a surety of being forced into the eddy. To stand on meant certain collision.

A multitude of possibilities, chances, questions, flashed through Stone's mind in that one transfixed instant—even to a seaman's solution of why this vessel's lights so suddenly opened near at hand.

They stood out terrifyingly clear, converging rapidly. Behind and below the red and green he seemed to see the faint haze of cabin windows. He knew that without a quick shift the two would cut each other down. There was a chance to shave the eddy; there was no chance in a collision.

Thought outstrips lightning. All these things occupied no more than a fraction of time in Stone's mental process. He acted almost instinctively, yet with a clear knowledge of the possible consequences of his act. So crystalline clear was his perceptive faculty that as he shouted his order he saw that the helmsman's eyes were on the compass, but that his face was yellow in the pale reflection from the binnacle light and that his lips were parted over tight-set teeth. He was braced and ready. The wheel spun in his hands at Stone's first word.

Billy stood in the doorway watching the lights that seemed to rush down on him. They were so close they must scrape sides in passing, and he prayed for the Mandarin to turn on her heel. She had never seemed so sluggish. But she swung. Her bow shifted in an arc until at last she showed her red to the other red and Stone heard the quartermaster's held breath go out in a shuddering exhalation.

Then—just as Billy Stone's mind grasped the fact that although the two ships were nearly abreast the other had not answered his passing signal, nor could he mark a single gleam beyond the red and white and a range light astern—he felt the Mandarin heel sharply over, and he knew that he had been forced into the eddy.

As he ordered the wheel over again to stem that savage current and pass clear under the stranger's stern he found himself staring blankly into the empty night. There were no lights, no sound—nothing but the dark loom of the Helmcken shore to starboard and the smother of white water where the current snarled at the rocks.

And as the master of the Mandarin, clad only in his pajamas, burst into the wheelhouse the strong side sweep of the tide carried the deflected ship into the Helmcken shore against all the thrust of her engines working full speed.

They felt the dull crunch, the sickening shudder that ran through her steel frame as she took the ground.

CHAPTER II.

Aground.

Looking aft from a position by the forward winches, Billy Stone stood at rest for a minute. The Mandarin lay impaled upon a hidden ledge. She heeled badly. Her stern was awash while her bow stood if anything a trifle in the air. Her situation was rather bad. She had struck with a good deal of force, filled and settled astern within half an hour after stranding. They had determined by the sounding lead that the hull was supported only from amid ships forward. The sternward half of her projected out into a watery space. A tiny slip back, a slight movement, and the ponderous hulk would upend and slide stern first into over sixty fathoms deep. A swift current, eddying and surging this way and that, a twelve-foot rise and fall of tide were unreckonable factors. She might shift; she might not.

Since at sea life comes first and treasure afterward the passengers were all ashore, camping now pleasantly enough in a fir grove with stewards to tend them. They had food and blankets, all their personal belongings. To them, after the first shock, an unavoidable wave of excitement in that dusky hour that comes just before dawn, the thing began to take on a certain aspect of adventure. Shipwrecked. Cast away on an island. There were no hardships to destroy an air of romance for those romantically inclined. The morning was warm and still. The sunrise breeze brought fragrant odors out of the forests to mingle with the smell of kelp, and coffee boiling in great pots over camp fires. Stone could hear them talking and laughing. For them, he knew, the situation was dramatic or comic or merely inconvenient, according to personal bias. They had no sense of any tragic element—nothing of the mingled anger, pain, and incredulity that filled Billy Stone's heart with conflicting emotions in this, the first breathing spell since the Mandarin struck.

He stood there reckoning up the consequences. No life had been lost, or even imperiled. The underwriters, not the owners, would shoulder what monetary loss accrued. But for him, red ruin; literally just that. He had given an order. By his command the ship had been turned from her proper course and wrecked.

And now, in the cold light of day, it seemed that no danger had ever threatened. There had been no running lights; no steamer. No one besides himself had seen anything in the shape of another vessel bearing down on the Mandarin. Not a soul. The quartermaster, when Stone demanded: “You see those lights?” had looked startled, uncertain, confused for a second. But he answered, with a shake of the head and a look of surprise:

“Didn't see nothin'. What was it?”

Stone knew the man lied. But he couldn't convey that knowledge to any one else. It was based on the expression of the quartermaster's face, on a momentary flash of something in his eyes.

The man, like Stone, had a job at stake, only unlike Stone he had no responsibility. He had only to keep his eyes on the compass and obey orders. He was not supposed to keep lookout nor to report what he saw. His only duty was to obey orders. But Stone felt that the man, like Peter of old, denied for his own safety. In the merchant marine it is not well for a man's future to admit himself subject to visual hallucinations.

Was it a hallucination? Had he conjured up a set of phantom lights to his own undoing? Stone might have doubted the evidence of his eyes—only for the startled, tense expectancy of the quartermaster at the moment. The man had seen what Stone saw, understood what it implied, stood ready for the only possible order that could adequately meet the occasion. No, Billy Stone was thoroughly mystified. There hadn't been any steamer. A vessel could not so quickly have vanished out of hearing, out of range of searchlight and signal blast; the very sounds of her passing must have filled that narrow channel, and the wash from her must have broken against the Mandarin and the Helmcken shore with a noise like ocean surf. And there hadn't been a sound.

Nevertheless Billy had a positive conviction that whatever he saw in the shape of well-defined running lights the quartermaster also saw in spite of his denial—and the same hallucination does not affect two separate sets of optic nerves at the same moment. Not that this conclusion promised to be of any service to him in the outcome, but it served to steady him. The sea annually tots up a respectable score of mysteries, and some of them have broken men's hearts, to say nothing of driving them mad.

The Mandarin's skipper came clawing forward. He stood beside Stone, glancing over the muddle of his ship, at the passenger groups showing on the rocky beach, at the great hawsers running from bollards on deck to tree trunks on the bank—a tentative effort to minimize the danger of her slipping off.

“Everything's done that can be done?”

He spoke as much to himself as to the mate.

“Yes, sir, I think so,” Stone replied.

The skipper looked him over keenly. He seemed about to put a direct question, then refrained. Probably, Stone reflected, he thought the board of inquiry would attend to that. Stone had already told him why he put the Mandarin off her course.

Captain Stevens had taken his own time to consider and verify that. Then he had observed slowly that there was neither sight nor sound of a vessel, and lacking corroboration Billy Stone's story didn't hold water—didn't account for anything.

“I'm sorry for you, Stone,” he had said, almost pityingly. “You weren't drunk and you weren't asleep. I guess you just naturally cracked, Billy. Too bad.”

The Old Man was sorry. That was explicit in his attitude. In his speech he confined himself to orders and casual remarks.

Now, standing by, with nothing to do but stand by until a salvage vessel and the underwriters' representatives arrived, and a steamer picked up the passengers, Billy Stone wondered if he had momentarily “cracked.” Had he simply seen things?

He didn't believe it. Visual realities ordered the world of navigation. Instruments and calculations alike depended upon the verification of the human eye. If a man couldn't trust his vision the world became pure phantasmagoria. His had never failed him, even in the moments of stress. He couldn't believe it had failed in this instance. The facts in the case were incomprehensible, that was all.

But he knew very well and it pressed upon him with an intolerable heaviness that whether those lights were realities or phantasms he had issued an order that put his ship ashore. As an officer in the American merchant marine his day was done, short of proving the existence of those lights—for which there was only his unsupported word. They would take his ticket away from him and put him on the beach higher and dryer than the Mandarin. They would see to it that an officer who saw lights where there were no lights would never stand on any ship's bridge to issue another order.

CHAPTER III.

The Strong Room.

Stone had a chance to look at the wreck from shore the evening of the third day. The Arethusa, a black, ungainly vessel with powerful cranes lifting above her decks, lay close in to the half-submerged Mandarin. The wrecking experts had looked over the sunken ship and pronounced her tolerably safe as she lay. In the morning their divers would go down. By and large within twenty-four hours they would know if the steamer could be refloated; and if not whether any or all of her cargo could be salvaged.

It might have been worse, Billy reflected. No life lost, no great material loss perhaps, if the salvage job was successful and easy. Perhaps, thought he, the black mark against him might not be too great to wipe out. But he couldn't get much comfort out of that hope. What a board of inquiry would do to him was pretty well established by precedents which had been a long time in the making.

Helmcken lay silent in the shadows that crept out from the western shore. Day faded. The little noises aboard the wrecking ship seemed muted sounds in a great hush. The passengers who had filled with their clatter the grove of fir trees where Stone now stood were speeding south on another O. S. S. boat. In the last of a sun which he could not see for the great mountain barrier of Vancouver Island the mainland ranges on the east lifted in great tiers, one behind the other, shading from a dusky green to far-off purple, out of which white peaks stood stark against the blue. In another mood Stone might have marked this beauty, been moved a little by it; he wasn't altogether insensitive to form, to color, even to such an intangible thing as an atmosphere; few men are.

But as matters stood the tremendous reach of forest and hill and mountain, immobile and unchangeable, as vast as the sea itself and filled with uncanny silences, gave, him a sense of desolation. It wasn't beautiful in that aspect. It wasn't friendly. It was even hostile in its immensity, its aloofness. The space and the heights and the silence dwarfed him. The mutter of the streaming tide against the rocky shore had a sinister sound in his ears. Perhaps he was too greatly weighed upon by the associations of that particular spot—the grave of many a seaman's reputation and a trap for ships.

He stood thinking absently until he became aware of some one whistling in the woods behind him. His curiosity aroused, he moved toward the sound. In a short distance he came out of the screen of trees and thicket bordering the shore, into a slashing brightened and made faintly aromatic by piles of split red cedar. A man sat on a low stump by one of these smoking a pipe and whistling a little tune, an old sea chantey that Stone recognized and thought incongruous in that setting. As Stone drew near the man looked up.

For an instant Billy Stone gaped in astonishment.

“Well, for the love of Mike!” he exclaimed at last, “you're the last man I expected to find here, Joe. How goes the battle?”

“So-so,” the other answered casually, as he stuck out his hand. “Surprise party for me, too. Didn't know you were on the Mandarin. Looks like the O. S. S. is due to lose another boat. Who's in dutch, this time?”

He laid a peculiar emphasis on the “this.”

“I am,” Stone replied tersely.

“Tough luck,” the other responded. “Too bad. Think you'll lose your ticket?”

“Pretty sure to,” Stone admitted. “I'm in wrong—in deep.”

“You never can tell.” The man's tone was edged with cynicism. “They might strike an average by overlooking you. You know they made me the goat to save a pet skipper, don't you?”

“I heard something like that.”

“Fact.” Joe Molter smiled sardonically. “It isn't supposed to be done, but they did it to me. But it was a good turn in the long run. I've made out all right ashore. I expect you're like me. I thought I couldn't live off the bridge. Darned near broke my heart to be kicked out. But I discovered that a man don't have to be brassbound to get along in this little old world. Sit down and make a smoke, Bill.”

They talked desultorily for half an hour. Molter was working in timber, shingle stuff. He had a stumpage contract on all the red cedar growing on Helmcken. With two partners he ran a show that was making money. Molter had been the youngest master in the O. S. S. service four years earlier; a wreck had put him on the beach. He disclaimed any feeling for the sea or ships, yet there was a faint note of regret in his voice as he mentioned vessels and men they both knew. Stone got up off the stump to go when twilight began to fade into dusk.

“Say, Billy, if they beach you for keeps hop on a local boat and come up here for a while till you got your bearings,” Molter suggested. “You might find something that looked good to you in this neck of the woods.”

“Maybe I will. I don't know,” Stone said. “I don't know just what'll happen, nor what I'll do.”

“You don't stop living because you get kicked out of the merchant marine,” Molter drawled. “I know how it goes. It's a jolt. But you get over it. A man has to live. He sometimes finds out that he can live better ashore than afloat.”

Stone went back to where the Mandarin's crew camped on the beach, since the angle of the vessel's decks prevented cooking, eating, or sleeping with any degree of comfort. Two days of hanging on by their eyebrows had made them glad to have level ground under their feet. There was besides the thoroughly understood, although never mentioned, fact that the Mandarin might slip sternward—and if she slipped in the night with her crew aboard there would be a casualty list that nobody particularly desired to figure in.

Dusk faded into a velvet-black night. Lights on the wreck and the wrecker standing by glowed like fireflies. A night wind sighed in the channel. Sleeping by snatches, wakeful because of the constant dwelling of his mind on things both inexplicable and unalterable, Billy Stone was glad when day came again. Action of any sort was a relief.

The Arethusa spraddled like a black spider in the center of a network of mooring cables to hold her stiffly in that rapid tide race that was full of savage cross currents. From her side a sturdy work boat with a flat scow deck moved alongside the Mandarin.

Stone watched the copper-domed, triple-eyed diver sink beneath the surface—a creature like some fish's nightmare. Stone didn't envy him his job and he had a first hand knowledge of that sort of job because he had once tried his hand at the diver's game. Down there among rocks and seaweed, buffeted by heavy currents, life hanging on an air pipe and a signal rope—it took nerve as well as skill.

Billy turned away to some minor task on deck. An hour passed, perhaps more or less; he didn't mark the time. But an exclamation, a quick movement of men to the Mandarin's lower rail, drew him also.

He looked down. The diver in his ungainly suit was stretched on the work boat's deck. Two men hovered over him. Half a dozen others stood about, craning their necks, expectant. Hands worked at fastenings with evident haste. They drew off his windowed headpiece, the great breastplate. One remained on his knees, staring fixedly into the diver's white, set face. The other stood up. After a second he threw out his hands in a brief, expressive gesture that chilled Stone. There was a terrible significance about that motion.

The master of the Arethusa, with the underwriter's agent, climbed aboard half an hour later.

“We're out of luck,” he complained. “Curry was dead as a mackerel when they hauled him up. Funny thing. Markham, our second-string diver, absolutely refuses to go down. Says a man has no chance. Thinks Curry must either have gone into the place where she was bilged and got foul of the ragged plate edges, or else the current banged him about till it killed him. Anyway, he won't move.”

“What's the next move?” inquired the Mandarin's skipper.

“Wire for another diver—one with some nerve,” the wrecking captain snorted. “Meantime, the insurance man's hunch is to get off what cargo we can reach. We don't like her looks so well. She's shifted a trifle.”

This was true. Stone had marked the change, a slight vibration once or twice. He hadn't said anything. He was under a cloud, his opinions manifestly not worth much to those in charge. He felt that implied rather than stated.

“That bullion first out of the strong room,” the underwriter put in. “That'll be so much to the good. It should have been off before now.”

“She's about on a balance,” Stone impulsively pointed out. “You can only reach the cargo forward. A few tons out of her forward hold and she might upend like a seesaw.”

“'S true,” the wrecking skipper agreed. “But we can clean out the strong room.”

They proceeded about that at once. But there was a hitch. The Mandarin's strong room held treasure besides the bullion, but the gold was by far the most outstanding item on the ship's manifest. And the strong room was under water many feet. The wrecker went overside saying that Markham could go down within the hull without risk. He came back in twenty minutes swearing like a pirate.

“That yellow dog won't even look at his suit,” he raged. “He says there's no use talking to him about going down on this job.”

“I'll go down for that strong-room stuff, if you like, while you wait for another diver,” Stone volunteered. “I wouldn't tackle the outside because I'm out of practice. But I don't mind taking a shot in the hold.”

“You ever been down in a suit? Much experience? I don't want to drown another man just because he's willing,” the salvage skipper said.

“Two years at it,” Stone replied curtly. “Long time ago.”

“Want to chance one of your officers in a diving rig?” the wrecker addressed Stone's captain.

“If he wants to,” the Old Man replied casually. “I have nothing to say.”

The work boat came back from the Arethusa. They hoisted the pump equipment and gear and diver's suit aboard. They fastened Stone up, adjusted his helmet, tested his air line, and he went down the companionway that led to a lower deck and so to the treasure room, with the purser's keys tied by a cord to his waist. He had an electric lamp to light him on his way.

Below, in those shadowy depths full of strange sights in the glimmer of his lamp, Stone lost track of time. He did not know how long he stayed down, but long enough to learn more than he bargained for. He parted the upper waters that laved a grand staircase and presently heaved his unwieldy bulk to the deck and the light of day. They freed him of his deep-sea harness. And for a moment Stone stood staring blankly at the salvage chief, his own skipper, the purser and the underwriter's agent. Then he found his tongue:

“There's nothing there. The door was open. Lock bursted. The strong room's empty. Nothing but a few soggy sacks of mail. The bullion's gone.”

“Stone,” the captain of the Mandarin said quietly, almost with a trace of pity, “that can't be. You know it can't be so. The strong room was intact when we went aground. It's been submerged twenty feet below the surface where no one could get at it ever since. You've gone clean off your head. First you see running lights where there are no running lights and put the ship ashore. Then you tell us that a steel-plated room locked and bolted, proof against any thing but an expert safe cracker, is wide open and empty. You're either crazy—or—or——”

“I tell you, captain, it's——” Stone burst out hotly, but he didn't finish the sentence. He bit it in two. A strange tremor ran through the dead hull beneath their feet—a tremor followed by a faint, dull shock. She seemed to shake from below as if her dead engines had mysteriously begun to turn the great propeller once more. And slowly, very slowly, her bow began to rise.

“She's going! Overside everybody!” the salvage skipper barked. The Mandarin's captain issued orders, cool, unhurried instructions to his men. Boats for all lay alongside, hooked to the falls.

Inch by inch, yes, foot by foot, as they clambered down rope ladders she settled by the stern and rose by the head until, as they backed water with their oars her red fore-body, fouled with clinging weeds, speckled with barnacles, rose dripping above the run of the tide.

There for a moment she seemed to hesitate, then heeled sharply to starboard and slid backward in the same motion, and the boat crews lay on their oars staring at the eddies and swirls that played back and forth across the depths into which the Mandarin had vanished.

CHAPTER IV.

On the Beach.

When a man, even a very young man with all of youth's happy disregard for unpleasant consequences, has worked for years toward a definite purpose he may be pardoned a temporary discouragement in the face of finding all his pains and labor gone for naught. To work and feel that his work has been wasted; to plan and see his plans destroyed; to strive for a future that shall be better than the past and see that future shattered—only a superhuman being could face that dismal prospect undismayed.

Something like that loomed up before Billy Stone, without the superman's egotism to support him. He couldn't admit that he was merely suffering the usual penalty for careless or ill-judged navigation. There would have been a simple justice about that which he could have appreciated and accepted as his due. But he hadn't been careless. His judgment—ah, there was the rub! It would have been better—in retrospect—to risk collision rather than stranding, since it seemed proven that there had been nothing with which to collide. Still, he asked himself peevishly, how could he tell that from the bridge of the Mandarin in the dark of the graveyard watch with the lights of a steamer staring him in the face?

He had to hold fast to the evidence of his own eyes that night by Helmcken Island. Otherwise he found himself spinning in the whirlpools of sheer fantasy, with his own sanity in doubt. His imagination reënacted that stirring sequence of events in Johnstone Strait. Those running lights—the orders he gave—the startled face of the quartermaster braced at the wheel—the shock of grounding—— The scene would assume form for Billy without a single detail missing.

And the logic, the coherence of his detailed account of what he saw and did and why he did so condemned him the more effectually before the board of inquiry that sat on the Mandarin case. He could not have seen the running lights of a steamer. The movements of coastwise shipping proved conclusively that no vessel was near Helmcken Island or indeed anywhere in Johnstone Strait that night. Therefore it followed that Billy Stone simply lied to cover up a dereliction of duty, or a gross error in estimating his ship's position at a critical change of course. Those lights had shown to no eyes save his own. The quartermaster denied again. There had been no answer to the Mandarin's passing signal. And whether he had been the victim of a hallucination, of a momentary confusion or what not, as the officer on watch he had wrecked a ship and the board of inquiry duly dealt out a punishment to fit the crime.

That was a closed chapter now, Stone thought with a tinge of bitterness as he breasted the steep slope of one of Seattle's famous hills. It was distinctly unpleasant to be the sacrificial goat, and that was precisely how Stone regarded himself—although sacrificed to what definite purpose he could not say.

Stone's destination was a bungalow on Queen Anne Hill, a bungalow entirely surrounded by other bungalows, and occupied by a retired mariner named Captain Amos Powell. The captain's age ran around seventy, but he was yet hale. He had been born a Cape Codder, nurtured in Martha's Vineyard aboard fishing schooners, spent his early manhood on the broad bosom of the Atlantic and gone into steam upon the Pacific too late in life ever to be off with his earlier love, the full-rigged ship.

For many years this worthy seaman had been compelled to repress a dislike that amounted to contempt for steamers and steamship men. He couldn't forget that steam had driven sail from the sea and he had been reared on the feel and sight and sound of sail. In the very necessary pursuit of a competence he had spent the last twenty years of his life going up and down the Pacific—which belies its euphonious name—in command of screw-propelled ships. Bottling up his real feelings during this long period as regards “wallopin' cargo boxes operated by a gang of marine motorists,” which was his favorite way of describing steamers, once retired he felt free to air his opinions and indulge his dislikes—which extended to the modern breed of navigator who goes down to the seven seas in twelve-thousand-ton ships capable of doing twenty knots.

The captain had a daughter. The captain's daughter liked Billy Stone. Martha cherished also a good deal of affection for her irascible parent, although he was occasionally a trial. Said irascible parent disliked Billy. And Billy was sub rosa engaged to Martha Powell.

These things complicated Billy Stone's shore life considerably. As he climbed the hill he wondered just where this latest development would leave him standing in the Powell ménage.

Billy turned a corner. The front of the Powell home loomed across three narrow lawns. A yellow taxi stood at the curb. A male figure in gray tweeds detached itself from the Powell porch, came down the steps, entered the taxi, which thereupon departed in the well-known manner of taxis.

Stone had a keen eye. He recognized the man. He was also pretty sure the recognition had been mutual, even at the distance. And while there was no definite reason for such a feeling Stone was immediately beset by a slight irritation, an increase of the depression that afflicted him. He was, he said to himself, getting infernally touchy.

Martha herself let him into a tiny hall. Whatever else Billy Stone found lacking in life at that particular moment he had reason to be thankful for the quick glow in her eyes.

“Oh, Billy boy,” she whispered from within the encircling pressure of his arms, “I'm so sorry. Why did they have to be so perfectly savage? I'd think a six months' suspension would have been severe enough, wouldn't it?”

“I told you what I'd have to expect,” Stone replied. “How did you happen to know what I got?”

“Joe Molter told me. He's in town and called. Left just a half minute before you came. Didn't you see him?”

“I thought that was Joe,” Billy answered. “Shows you how bad news outruns a man. The board only handed out its decision a couple of hours ago. I wonder how Joe got hold of it so quick? He told you they took my ticket away for keeps, did he?”

The girl nodded.

“I'm sorry, Bill,” she murmured. “It doesn't seem fair.”

“It's the regular thing in cases of this sort,” he commented a little grimly. “You couldn't expect a bunch of hard-boiled old salts to be easy on a young man who has just wrecked a very fine ship for a total loss. On the evidence presented—unless they believed my wild yarn without any supporting proof—I'm not a fit man to be put in charge of a ship. I see things.”

Martha disregarded the irony of his words for more practical considerations.

“What'll you do now, Billy?” she asked. “It seems a shame to have a career stopped short like that. But after all, the sea isn't the only thing that matters in our young lives, is it?”

“It's been pretty much all there is to mine,” he said moodily. “It's about all I know. I'm a little bit up in the air yet I haven't made any particular plans. I've got to start in at something, but I haven't even begun to figure where or how to begin.”

A little silence ensued. Billy looked intently at Martha Powell. She was very dear to him. He had never been able to define her charm. It was enough to feel it, to know that for him it existed. Martha was good looking without any claim to beauty; intelligent without being clever. If Billy Stone had been compelled to say why he loved her he could only have replied that he found her lovable.

“In another year or so I should have had a command,” he continued. “We would have had something to go on. Now everything is all shot to pieces. I did have a future as a seaman. Unless I can get rid of this black mark against me—— It seems to me I've got to do that somehow.”

He knitted his brows in thought for a moment.

“There's something about this particular wreck, Marty, that keeps nagging at me. I can't help thinking—— Well, never mind. Are you game to wait, Mart? Or does it look like—like——”

She put one soft hand firmly over his mouth.

“If you start talking like that to me, Billy Stone,” she said severely, “I'll sue you for breach of promise.”

They smiled at each other.

“I'll tell you something,” Billy said impulsively. “Maybe you'll think it sounds foolish. But it amounts to this; either there was a set of running lights showing off Helmcken or I'm given to hallucinations and delusions. In other words, I'm crazy. And I don't think I am. Nobody else saw them but me and the quartermaster. The quartermaster never admitted seeing anything. But I'd stake anything he did. I'll never be satisfied until I know. What I'm getting at is this: I'm going after this mystery instead of doing what common sense tells me I ought to do—which is to hunt up a shore job that amounts to something. There's a gambling chance that I might uncover something that doesn't show on the surface. I'm not superstitious. There's generally a man or men behind every queer thing that happens on land or sea. I would like to prove to 'em that there were lights over my bow—and that the Mandarin's strong room was empty when she slid off into deep water.”

CHAPTER V.

Twice!

From Queen Anne Hill, Billy Stone made his way downtown to a certain chophouse near the O. S. S. docks. He was hungry and old habit led him to this place patronized by sailors, longshoremen, the marine fraternity in general because good food was served there and it was handy to their stamping ground, the water front. Other than food Billy had at that moment no objective. He hadn't formulated any plan. He was groping in his mind for some possible course of action without having as yet found a feasible one. He didn't take much stock in intuition. A navigating officer's training embraces technicalities, empirical conclusions—but not hunches. Hunches have put many a good ship on the beach, so the coastwise maxim runs.

Nevertheless Billy experienced something akin to a hunch as he stepped over the threshold. Nothing definite; mostly a state of feeling, an anticipation, an awareness that he was about to encounter something or some one. When man's psychic life ceases to be the riddle it is, Billy Stone may possibly find the true reason for that certainty that he had come suddenly, without rhyme or reason, to a focusing point on something of importance.

Whatever the basis of that conviction the thing itself brought him out of the shell of his self-communing, aroused an expectancy, made him instantly alert. He seated himself at a table, but his gazed roved. Men of all sorts and sizes lined a counter along one side of the room, perched on swivel stools that turned squeakily on iron pedestals. As his eyes swept down the line of the mirror behind, which had reflected many a grand elbow crooking in the days before the Eighteenth Amendment troubled the land, Stone's gaze matched glances with an other—and having made sure of his man Billy left his table and took a vacant stool beside Dave Branston, ex-quartermaster of the lost Mandarin.

“Hello, Dave,” he greeted.

“Why, hello, there—ah—ah——” The man seemed uneasy, uncertain whether to address Stone as a fellow being or as his superior officer.

Billy grinned inwardly. A purpose leaped full formed into his mind; the first logical step in a sequence.

“What are you doing?” he asked casually.

“Nothin' yet,” Branston replied. “I'm on the O. S. S. waitin' list, but I'm lookin' for a berth any place I can get in. Got to eat, 'n' if you don't work you soon run out of eatin' money these days.”

“They have plenty of ships,” Stone observed. “They'll probably sign you on again pretty soon. There's nothing against you.”

“I've a darned good mind to go back on the tugs.” Branston grew confidential. “I went quartermaster coastwise with a first mate's ticket because I thought I'd get experience and a chance at promotion. But it don't look so good to me now. Yes, sir, I have a darned good mind to go back on a tug. The pay's as good.”

“Why did you deny seeing those lights off Helmcken?” Stone asked crisply. “Why were you afraid to admit you saw them?”

The man's mouth opened. His face flushed.

“It doesn't matter now, of course,” Stone continued dispassionately. “It might not have made any difference to anybody. But what made you lie about it?”

“The hell it wouldn't have made any difference to anybody!” the man sputtered, his face growing redder. “What makes you so darned sure I saw anything? 'N' you got a nerve to accuse me of swearing to a lie.”

“You're a seaman, and pretty level headed,” Billy went on calmly. “When I barked at you to put her over you didn't even look up. You were waiting for it, and you put the wheel over—bang! You were scared—not at the order, but at what you saw—what you had seen—the same thing I saw—a set of steamer's running lights right on top of us. You knew she had the right of way, and that we had to swing quick or crash.”

“Hell's bells!” Branston grunted. “You're a regular mind reader, ain't you? What are you gettin' at?”

“Why you declared you didn't see those lights.”

“There was nothin' to show runnin' lights, was there?” Branston muttered.

Billy smiled wearily.

“Did you lie deliberately, or did you think you simply imagined seeing those lights and were afraid to admit that you thought you saw them?” he asked point-blank.

“Them's strong words, Mr. Mate,” Branston growled. His face was now a rich brick color. He looked at Billy, and then turned to his cup of coffee and gulped half of it.

“Look here,” he said finally, with a sulky sort of frankness. “I got to admit that I've been feelin' kinda rotten about this business. But it didn't make any particular difference to you—did it?—whether I said I saw 'em or didn't see 'em. You was the officer in charge. You'd 'a' lost your ticket anyhow, for puttin' her ashore, just the same.”

“True enough,” Billy admitted. He did not explain that the shaking of his confidence in himself was equally as important as losing his license.

“Well, then,” Branston said bluntly, “I seen them lights just like you did. But the minute we took the ground—while you're all centered on your own ship and what's happening to her, I step out of the wheelhouse to look for the other packet. And there ain't a sight nor a sound. No wash from her passing. There's no ship in the channel at all. I know it. And I'm scared. It's creepy. And while I'm rasslin' with this crazy idea that I've seen ghost lights in the dark, the Old Man jumps me. He's been talkin' to you and he's pretty near foamin' at the mouth.

“He says: 'What in hell did you see, quartermaster?'

“He's excited, and mad as a hornet—and I'm scared. 'Nothin',' says I. 'I ain't supposed to see. Only to obey orders—which I done.'

“That's all,” Branston confessed. “Havin' said one thing I stuck to it; I wouldn't back water. I figured it out before the board sat. They'd break you anyhow. That was a cinch. And I got a wife and two kids to keep. If I back up your story it don't help you, because if there ain't no ship to show her lights they wouldn't believe the two of us on a stack of Bibles, and you know it. And it leaves me marked. Every time I ask for a job, they'll say: 'Oh, yes, you're the guy that sees runnin' lights where they ain't. Guess we couldn't use you.' Now you got it straight.”

“It's straight enough, Branston,” Stone replied quietly. “I don't blame you. But doesn't it strike you that if we both saw the same thing at the same time there must have been something to see?”

But Branston only shook his head, looking deeply puzzled.

“No sabe,” said he. “Funny things happen in this little old world—specially at sea. It gets my goat. There certainly wasn't no ship.”

“There was something,” Billy Stone affirmed. “And whatever it was it put the Mandarin on the rocks. And I shouldn't be surprised if a piece of the same hocus-pocus cost that diver his life.”

Branston looked at him queerly.

“You ain't mentioned it yet,” he said with apparent irrelevance. “But I suppose you seen the mornin' papers, ain't you?”

“No. Why?” Stone asked. Some curious quality in the man's tone made the question come out with a snap.

“The Manchu went ashore on Helmcken Island last night in pretty darned near the same spot,” Branston told him gravely.

They sat for a half minute staring fixedly at each other. The same thought ran in their minds. They knew it without speaking.

CHAPTER VI.

A Sack of Gold.

Stone immediately got a newspaper. The details of the latest wreck on Helmcken were meager enough, he discovered on perusal. The Manchu was one of the finest ships on the Alaska run and her master was a particular friend of Billy Stone's, almost a contemporary. The simple fact of another wreck in the same place carried a certain significance to Billy. It revived and strengthened to a conviction what had been little more than a troubled impression that more than mere chance was involved in the disaster to his own ship.

Coming on the heels of his conversation with Branston, and the quartermaster's frank admission, the Manchu wreck spurred him to some pretty far-reaching speculation, caused him to evolve a theory and hunger for a hand in evolving a solution.

Lightning, he said to himself, strikes once by chance. A second stroke in the same place implies attraction. The attraction on Helmcken Island held sinister implications when he reflected upon that looted strong room.

But a theory leading to action requires some colorable support to be taken seriously. The things that had happened were wild enough. But that didn't guarantee that an even wilder surmise as to the effective cause would get a hearing. Warned by the way the board of inquiry took his own story Stone realized the necessity of corroboration. That was his first need. He had Dave Branston tagged. The man would testify when needed, he promised Billy. Now, Stone set out in search of Markham, the diver off the Arethusa who, after a look at his dead mate, had refused to go down in his deep-sea harness at any price.

But Markham was not to be found in any of the usual places. After diligent search Stone finally got track of him. Markham had gone out of town leaving word that he would return in a few days. Billy left a message to be given the man as soon as he reported back to the Divers' Association. Then he sat down to wait more or less patiently until Paul Ackley, master of the wrecked Manchu, arrived in Seattle.

He hadn't long to wait. Within a week the crew of the wrecked steamer abandoned her to the underwriters and shipped south. Stone called up Ackley, set a rendezvous, and they forgathered in the Master Mariners' Club.

Ackley didn't look glum; merely thoughtful, inclined to be silent. Stone wasted no time in skirmishing.

“We went ashore, according to the Arethusa's say-so, within a hundred feet of where the Mandarin did,” Ackley answered Billy's first question. “But we went on solid. They'll salvage her without any great loss. She can't slip off. She's aground practically the full length of her keel. But——”

“Go on,” Stone urged. “But what?”

“I'll tell you after a while.”

“All right,” Billy acquiesced. “Tell me this. What put you ashore?”

An odd expression flitted across Ackley's face.

“What put you ashore?” he counter-queried.

“The board of inquiry,” Billy retorted sardonically. “They took away my ticket for keeps. Permanently suspended.”

“Oh. I didn't hear what the finding was. In fact I had no line on the Mandarin wreck at all. I mean what put the Mandarin ashore. It was in your watch, of course.”

“Running lights dead ahead. Right on top of us. Other fellow had right of way. Altered course to pass port to port. Eddy put me on the beach.”

“Running lights!” Ackley murmured. “Phantoms!”

“No,” Stone declared positively. “There is no such animal. In your case—how many of you saw these lights?”

Ackley stretched his arms above his head and laughed mirthlessly.

“The fact is,” he snorted contemptuously, “three of us saw them, but only one man admits it—myself, the commander. It's very odd, Stone. I'm bound to get it in the neck because it happened while I was still on watch. Yet I didn't open my mouth to issue an order. I should certainly have done so in another instant—and yet I don't know. Let me tell you just how it happened.

“I was on the bridge just outside the wheelhouse door. I had been looking up Current Passage with a very good pair of night glasses. It was dark, but not too dark to have made out another vessel even if she hadn't shown a gleam. I could see the white water on Earl Ledge well astern. We had turned to enter the fairway. I lowered the glasses, turned my head. Next thing there were those lights, bright and clear—out of nowhere. You know how it feels when a set of running lights loom up close. You act instinctively. Everybody knows instantly what is to be done. Yet I was so absolutely sure no vessel could possibly be in that position off our bows that I just stared in amazement—until I felt the Manchu list as she always does when the helm goes hard over. The quartermaster was spinning the wheel. The mate—who had come up and was standing by to relieve me as soon as we cleared Helmcken—stood humped up, looking scared, pointing with his finger at those lights. He had told the quartermaster to put her over. They were both scared stiff at the idea of being cut down in that hell of a tide race. Nobody said a word until our bow swung. And the minute the eddy took hold of us those lights snapped off as if somebody had turned a switch.”

“Probably did,” Stone grunted.

“I shouldn't be a bit surprised, now you mention it,” Ackley commented. “Anyway, you know there's no leeway in that passage. Before we could swing around to buck the eddy we were aground.

“Now, here's the rub. We whistled. No answer. Swept the channel with the searchlight. Nothing in sight. Then the mate and the quartermaster fudged. Swore they saw nothing. Quartermaster said I ordered the wheel over. Mate backed him up. Can you beat it?”

“Afraid of their jobs,” Stone said contemptuously. “My quartermaster did the same. Only he thought better of it eventually. He's willing to go to bat now. That makes three of us for corroborative evidence. Might help at your hearing. I think perhaps I can get something that bears on another phase of it out of the Arethusa's second-string diver—who looked at his drowned partner and refused to have anything more to do with the Mandarin, inside or out. Now fell me something more, if you can. Did the divers go down and survey the Manchu? What did they report? Did you have any valuables, gold or securities in the strong room?”

Ackley looked at him soberly.

“I know what you're driving at,” he said. “But how do you know what to expect? We did have treasure—bullion—a shipment from the Yukon to Seattle. The divers report the strong-room door open and the bullion gone. She got a hell of a bump and is badly holed—but that wouldn't open the strong-room door, would it, and remove two or three boxes of gold?”

“The question is,” Billy mused, “was it looted before she went ashore, or after. There's a point. In other words, was the Manchu, like the Mandarin, wrecked to cover a robbery, or was she wrecked to make a robbery possible?”

“I wonder,” Ackley echoed. “The same thing did happen to you?”

“Identically,” Stone declared. “And while they didn't believe me, and it can never be proved since the old Mandarin slid off into depths where no diver can ever work,” Billy continued, “I know that something crooked was pulled, because I went down in a diving suit to bring the bullion up after one diver had been killed and the other refused to work. It had already been taken. If the Manchu stays on the beach perhaps the story I told will get verified. There may be a chance for us yet.”

They sat reflecting on this.

“What can we do?” said Ackley. “As it stands we're as apt—either or both of us—to be suspected, as any one unknown.”

“It sounds difficult, and probably will be some job,” Billy Stone ventured, “but I believe it's up to us to get to the bottom of this. Here are two wrecks, two robberies, and a man's death. I'm blacklisted; ruined as far as a career at sea is concerned. The sea is all I know; the thing I've been trained for and care most about, if you want the truth. You'll be in pretty much the same boat. Damn it all, we've got to do something about it.”

“It'll take time. It generally takes money to camp on crooked trails until you find out where they lead to,” Ackley put in moodily. “Maybe the Pinkertons'll clean it up. I'm no detective.”

“Pinkertons—blah!” Stone fleered. “This is a job for seamen. I'm going to get hold of Markham. Maybe he knows something, or has his suspicions. If he does—or if he doesn't—let's get him and Branston and our two selves together and put it squarely up to the O. S. S. superintendent and the underwriters and bring it up at the hearing on the Manchu case if necessary. I want my ticket back—and you don't want to lose yours, do you?”

“Not unless I lose it on the square,” Ackley admitted.

“All right. As soon as I get hold of Markham we'll have a mother's meeting and see what we can do,” Stone declared.

With that they separated.

Before he got fairly seated in his own room Stone was called to the telephone. Markham had come back to town. Stone made an engagement with him at once.

“Would you mind telling me,” Billy asked when they got together, “just why you refused to go down on the Mandarin job?”

The diver shrugged his shoulders.

“Shucks, I told 'em plain enough,” said he. “Too dangerous. Fierce undercurrents there. Man's got to have some chance—for his life, as well as to get his work done.”

“You have the reputation of not minding dangerous work underwater,” Billy replied. “Loosen up, Markham. This is strictly between ourselves. There's something fishy about this whole Helmcken Island business. It has cost me my license. I figure there is a good deal more there than mere accident of navigation. Was there anything more than accident in Curry's drowning?”

The diver caressed his chin, frowning to himself.

“Well,” he said at last, “a man can't prove nothing by wild talk. It sounds wild—and it might be that sawing across broken steel plates, and being bumped around down there along the Mandarin's keel, could have done it—but when I looked over Curry's gear I got so strong a hunch that a knife or a hatchet had gashed his air line and slit his suit that I wouldn't 'a' gone down for fifty thousand dollars, I had that creepy feeling so strong. Neither inside nor out. You went down into her hold, I understand. What did you find?”

“Nothing,” Stone replied. “It doesn't sound reasonable, Markham, that a diver could be knifed secretly in ten fathoms of water.”

“I know it doesn't,” Markham admitted. “I told you it sounded like a pipe dream. Still, funny things happen below. The way the Mandarin went off that ledge wasn't natural. She should 'a' hung there till kingdom come. She went off almost as if she was shoved.”

“Did you know the Manchu went ashore in the very same place a few days ago?”

“The hell you say!” Markham stared.

“Under precisely the same conditions,” Stone explained. “The same queer set of things happened her that did my ship. I have a theory, Markham, and I'd like to see it verified or disproved. Will you repeat to the underwriters and the superintendent of the O. S. S. the idea and opinion you've given me?”

“Sure—if you think it will do any good to tell those boneheads anything,” Markham observed caustically. “I never found 'em very open to other men's ideas. Still, from what you tell me these wrecks have funny angles that look darned suspicious. I don't care a deuce of a lot about either the O. S. S. or the underwriters nor what they stand to lose, but”—he paused to run his fingers through a mop of curly black hair—“Jack Curry was a good friend of mine. If he was put out to make this gold-stealing play strong I'd take a chance or two to get my hands on the parties concerned. I'd guarantee there'd be new faces in hell before long. How in blazes could we go at this? Where would we start in?”

“I have an idea,” Stone observed thoughtfully. “I'll open up if I can get any backing. The place to start is where these things happened; right on Helmcken Island—or on board any O. S. S. ship that happens to be bringing gold from Alaska. It's one or the other, maybe both places in cahoots. Anyway, the thing to do is get busy without the slightest delay.”

They made arrangements to keep in touch, and from there Stone went straight to the Ocean Steamship Services dock and got himself admitted to the august presence of the chief superintendent. But he was not permitted to get very far with his subject.

“We're not interested in fantastic theories, Stone,” the super interrupted crisply. “Incompetent navigation has lost us two valuable ships. Personally I think those mysterious lights you fellows give as a reason for altering your course are pure bunk. You and Ackley were either soused or dreaming on watch. In any case you are both done as ship's officers. If you must agitate this question see the underwriters. They bear the loss. It's a waste of time to discuss it with me.”

Incompetent navigation! Drank or dreaming!

Billy Stone went away from there without giving in to a burning desire to smite the O. S. S. superintendent on his angular jaw. Perhaps this sense of injustice keyed him up a little, made his manner more aggressive, gave his conversation a force that carried over. For whatever reason, he got the attention of the chief of the underwriters with his first blunt sentence. The man heard him out, asked a number of questions, sat thoughtfully silent at last, tapping his desk with a pencil.

“There is more in this than meets the naked eye, my worthy mate,” he said dryly, at length. “Pity we didn't take you seriously at first. You see, Stone, your unsupported account at the hearing was too much like the action of a man grabbing at a straw to save himself. Nobody believed you, either, when you reported the Mandarin's strong room empty of bullion. That was a little too much. Now your story seems to have some foundation. We know that the Manchu's gold was looted. Whether before or after the wreck, or by whom, is of course still to be determined. I am interested. These two wrecks have cost us a lot of money. There does seem to be more to them than the act of God or peril of the sea. Can you get hold of these two men, and also Captain Ackley at about—say, three this afternoon?”

At three sharp Stone had his companions ushered in. The insurance man questioned them from a dozen different angles. When he signified that the interview was over, he also motioned Stone to remain.

“Now,” said he, when the door closed on the other three, “let's get down to brass tacks. You want your ticket back and a clean sheet, eh? That's why you're so keen on this, isn't it?”

“That's motive enough, isn't it?” Stone countered.

“All right. How do you propose to go about getting at the bottom of this peculiar series of happenings?”

Stone hesitated. He had no clear-cut idea. But he did have a feeling that Helmcken Island somehow held a clew to dark secrets.

“I'll be frank,” said he, “I'm going it blind, and probably will until I get hold of a definite lead. I have only a hunch that to go back to Helmcken, lie low, keep my ears and eyes open and my mouth shut, might put me on the right track. To do that means I must have a gas boat, grub—and time. I'd like to take either Markham or Branston—preferably Markham, because he's a bright man and a diver besides, and he's game. I haven't got much capital to start a detective bureau. But I am willing to gamble my time if you'll stake me to an outfit to get about the country. I have more in proportion at stake than you have, to make me keen on getting results.”

“H'm!” The man relapsed into a silent study of his desk, beating his little tattoo with the pencil end. For a considerable time he remained locked fast in this deeply reflective state. Then said he:

“Might get somewhere that way. All right. I'll supply you with a motor launch, and allow you three hundred dollars for expenses. Take a chance on you. Go to it your own way. But you haven't any definite clew, you say?”

“No. That's what I expect to find at Helmcken.”

The insurance man again sat briefly silent. Then he opened a drawer, took out a parcel and laid it on his desk. His eyes, narrowed and quizzical, never left Stone's face while his fingers removed a paper wrapping. He displayed a small white canvas bag, about four inches wide by six deep. He flirted open one end and exposed native gold in coarse grains, dust, nuggets.

“You recognize that?” he asked casually.'

“Gold, by the looks,” Stone answered.

“Don't seem familiar at all?”

The man's eyes burrowed into Stone's.

“No. Why should it?”

“I thought perhaps it might,” Cleary drawled. “You see, we've had some Burns operatives at work on this case already. We don't usually take a loss on a mysterious wreck lying down. All sorts of queer kinks in this marine-insurance game. One of these sleuths got a hot tip on you from some unknown source. While you were in seeing me this morning he frisked your room. Understand? He found this. Came pretty near pinching you right off.”

“Well?” Stone demanded hotly, in the pause.

“Happens to be one of the original sacks out of that bullion shipment on the Mandarin. In your room, you see?”

“I don't see,” Stone challenged angrily. “Do you mean to say——”

Cleary held up his hand with a deprecating smile.

“I don't say,” he remarked evenly.

“What do you think, then?” Billy demanded.

“I don't know what to think,” Cleary responded. “But I know what I consider is the wise thing to do. I'm going to take you on trust—in spite of this. Let you go the limit. Give you all the rope you need. Then if you hang yourself——”

He stopped to smile encouragingly.

“But I don't think you will.”

CHAPTER VII.

Joe Molter.

When he left the underwriter's office Billy walked along the street a prey to very mixed emotions indeed. He was angry, resentfully puzzled at a deliberate attempt to incriminate him. Why should any one plant stolen property in his room and anonymously incite a detective to look there for plunder? Who could hate him enough to stab in the dark with such a deadly weapon? Vain queries. The thing was serious enough to stir him deeply. Men had gone to the penitentiary on just such circumstantial evidence. He could only feel grateful that the crudeness of the enemy's strategy had defeated its own end. Cleary had unequivocally voiced his own belief that the whole thing was a plant. It was just a little too raw. And he had repeated his promise to supply a launch so that Stone could be on his way to tackle the mystery on its own ground.

Nevertheless Billy realized the added complication of being suspect. Somebody was interested in him with a vengeance, with a wholly malevolent interest. He hadn't the least idea who or why. His career had been such as to make that kind of reprisal likely. It didn't matter much, he reflected, unless it went farther. If wilful, unlawful, malicious and felonious intent to do him injury took form in other overt acts he rather welcomed that in his present mood, because the man or men might thereby show their hands, and so give him a definite lead in the right direction. He was pretty sure of one thing; whoever planted that tiny sack of stolen gold in his room had a finger, if not both arms to the elbow, in the Mandarin pie.

True to his word, Cleary at once transferred to him a chunky gas boat. She was neither handsome nor large, being only some thirty feet over all, but she was stanch, heavily built, and powered with a good engine. She looked able and she was; a typical fisherman's craft, with living quarters for two men.

Stone put it up to Markham the diver. He would a little have preferred Paul Ackley, but Paul was out of the question. He had to stay in Seattle and go on the carpet. Markham jumped at the chance.

“Sure,” he said simply. “I'll go.”

Whereupon, certain details of food and fuel being attended to, Billy set out for Queen Anne Hill to bid Martha Powell good-by. He made sure of Martha being at home. But he did not know and could not reckon on Captain Powell's movements. He did not desire contact with that worthy ex-mariner. The captain didn't like him and made no bones about his feelings. For that matter, Billy had lately come to the conclusion that the old man didn't like any one who manifested too lively an interest in his daughter. Martha professed to regard that attitude with amusement but it irritated Billy Stone.

The captain's motive seemed quite clear and rather ignoble, to Billy. Captain Powell looked on Martha as the crew of the good ship Home. He found himself very comfortable on this quarter-deck in his declining years. He did not take kindly to any chance of being superseded. Martha kept his house, served his food, supplied him with companionship as a dutiful daughter should. And it appeared to Billy that Martha's irascible old parent desired only that this—for him—most comfortable schedule should be continued regardless of any wish or affection or passion his daughter might be moved by. Personally Billy looked on Captain Powell as a domineering and utterly egocentric old person with a waspish tongue—an elderly dragon from whom a lovely and altogether desirable girl stood in need of rescue.

It had been troubling Billy Stone for some time that his salary didn't quite permit him to insist on marriage with the corollary of a decent home in which to install a bride. That was one reason why he so desired a command, and why he took it so hard that his prospects as a seafaring man had been snuffed out like a blown candle. Hence his distaste for Captain Powell grew, if anything, more acute since he recognized that the old man had now valid ground for his objection to him as a son-in-law. For a long time he had avoided any meeting with Martha's truculent father unless it was necessary.

This day, because he particularly wanted a quiet hour with Martha, fate brought the captain on the scene as soon as Billy rang the doorbell. He joined them in the living room, planted himself in his favorite chair and gazed a trifle maliciously—or so it seemed—at Billy.

“Lost your ticket, heh?” he suddenly gave the conversation a disagreeable personal twist. “What you goin' to do now?”

Stone shrugged his shoulders. Privately, he felt that was none of the captain's business. But he tried to be polite.

“If I don't get reinstated,” he answered, “I dare say I can make myself a place on land as well as at sea.”

“If you were a seaman, you'd know better,” quoth Captain Powell. “Man that falls down at sea hasn't much chance ashore. But there ain't any seamen any more,” he snorted. “Nothin' but a bunch of machinists and dog-barking navigators shoving cargo boxes up and down the coast.”

“You spent a good many years, daddy, doing just that,” Martha put in a defense of her own generation. “And you seemed to think it took some skill, then.”

“Yeah, I had to keep you and your mother going,” he growled. “And I was a sailing master before I had to go into steam in order to make a living. And I never lost a ship, sail or steam,” he ended boastfully.

Billy said nothing. Captain Powell sat tight, and Billy tried to outsit him. He probably would have failed in this had not some crony of the captain's, living near by, reminded him over the telephone that he had a chess engagement. His departure gave Billy and Martha a little while to themselves. Not that they had a great deal to say. It was sufficient to be together. There existed between them that rare understanding which does not always require expression in words.

When Billy was at last compelled to go Martha walked with him a little way. Within a block of the house they met Joe Molter. He halted only long enough to shake hands and exchange a few sentences, then went on. Martha glanced after him and somehow Billy Stone got the impression of trouble in her eyes.

“Vot iss?” he asked.

She looked at him wonderingly.

“Clairvoyant!” she retorted, but she did not smile.

“What's bothering you?” he persisted. “Is Joe Molter still preying on your young mind?”

“N-no,” she said hesitatingly. “But I'm still on Joe's mind, it seems, and I don't like it much. He has been in town for a while. Dad, I think, rather encourages him to come to the house. I used to be sorry for Joe. Now he just makes me uncomfortable.”

That was an old story. Joe Molter, Martha Powell and Billy Stone had grown up together in the Rainier Valley, wrangled and chummed through grammar and high school—with Molter two years in the lead, and always assuming a natural leadership that went unquestioned until as a man Joe began to regard Martha with more than friendly eyes—and Martha had chosen to love Billy Stone instead. Joe had accepted that a little sadly, but without rancor, as the fortune of war—or of life. Billy wondered why Molter should choose the present to renew that old siege.

“Maybe you'd do better to take him seriously,” he joked. “I believe Joe is ready money; seems to have done pretty well in timber up North. Good second string if it's going to take me half my young life to make a stake.”

Martha pinched his arm. Her blue eyes glowed.

“Billy,” she said bluntly, “does it ever strike you that we stress this money thing too much? Why should we have to have a—a cinch? Suppose you don't get this mess cleared up and get a ship. Suppose you do have to start in somewhere at the bottom. Let's start together.”

Billy's heart leaped. Without regard to street traffic and possible amused eyes he bent over and kissed her.

“God bless your soul!” he said tenderly. “We'll do it. I wondered—but I didn't have the nerve. It doesn't seem quite fair to you—and still——”

“Why should we wait forever?” She voiced his own thought wistfully. “We've only one life to live. If we wait too long we'll——”

She made a little quick gesture with her hands, and Billy understood. The same thought had been often in his own mind.

He was sailing on the next tide. A street car came rumbling along.

“I've got to get this one,” he said.

“Take care of yourself, Billum,” she whispered. “Good-by.”

Deep in his own reflections as the car went clanging and shuddering downtown Billy wondered from what subtle pressure Martha wanted to take refuge in his arms. She hadn't said so. No. But Billy had a curious prescience of something that troubled Martha more than she cared to own, something that constituted a threat to their chance of happiness. Or was it simply that she was like himself, lonely and unsatisfied? He wasn't sure. Probably both. He smiled and then wrinkled his brows. He was getting almost psychic in his capacity to scent trouble. Idly he wondered if evil either in thought or deed could fling its own form of disturbance into the ether—like radio. And if now and then somebody could, so to speak, unconsciously tune in so that they could catch vague impressions without being aware of the source. Fantastic? Of course. But there was no denying the fact that he was getting abnormally sensitive to impressions, tones, even to so indefinable a thing as personal atmosphere. Probably because his nerves were strung up tight.

By that time he was at the docks.

CHAPTER VIII.

The Hidden Boat.

Free of Canadian waters by virtue of a cruising permit, Stone and Markham drove the Wasp up sheltered channels, across The blowy stretch of the wide Gulf of Georgia, and at last through the swift tide races of Discovery Passage into the swifter tidal surges that ebbed and flowed by Helmcken Island.

Evening of the third day saw them two hundred and fifty miles from Puget Sound, nosing into a bight at the upper end of Helmcken, a little bay well out of the heavy swirls that troubled the channel. They edged the Wasp in beside a rough log float before Joe Molter's bolt camp and made her fast.

There was a definite purpose in Stone's selection of this berth. Molter knew everybody in that region, and he knew Billy Stone. Billy had a choice of guesses. One, that the wrecking was done to cover the looting of ship's treasure, to mask an “inside” job; the other that the Mandarin and Manchu had been fooled into a change of course that must put them on the beach for the specific purpose of looting them by operations from shore. In either case those mysterious vanishing lights involved confederates ashore. Ashore could only mean Helmcken Island or the immediate vicinity of Helmcken.

Hence every man in the region was tentatively suspect to Stone and he took it for granted that any casual stranger touching there in a boat would likewise be suspect to the unknown wreckers unless said stranger was logically accounted for. Billy reasoned thus, to Markham:

“I've lost my license and naturally I'm done as a ship's officer. Naturally I have to look about for a fresh start in life. Molter knows me since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. Nobody can very well question us openly about our private affairs, even if he should be curious. Therefore if they know nothing about us and especially if we keep more or less under cover and do any snooping around, we'll be pretty closely watched by anybody with an interest in keeping tab on what goes on around this island. Molter, knowing all the local people, can, and altogether likely will, talk about who we are and what we're after to any one who happens to mention us or the Wasp. Therefore we tie up to his float in his bay, and we're scouting for the main chance, logging on a small scale, a whack at land settlement or anything that promises to beat working for wages. People are always nosing about on this coast looking for a chance to make something.”

As camouflage it seemed natural. It did account for them and it left them untagged as possible investigators of a puzzle that was perhaps more formidable than it looked.

“Joe may not be here,” Stone observed. “He was knocking around in Seattle the night we left.”

But Molter was on hand when they went ashore to call at the camp. He had come up on one of the coasting steamers the day before.

“Well,” said he to Billy with a genial grin, “couldn't you resist coming back to the scene of your crime? Or do you like the looks of the country? Or are you just on a holiday since you've retired from the merchant marine?”

“There's lots of good-looking country laying around loose up here,” Billy rejoined. “It struck me that since I've been chucked ashore I may as well try to do some good for myself ashore. This looked like it might make a jumping-off place. I'm willing to listen in on any dope you have on timber, if you've got any you want to pass along. I've got to live, and I'd like to make money.”

“Most of us have ambitions of that sort,” Molter remarked dryly.

However, Joe not only talked timber with them, but he volunteered to show Billy Stone just how he could best go about making a start in either shingle bolts or hand logging. He introduced a dark-faced man named Perez as his partner in the cedar operations, and an obvious Scandinavian as the foreman. They worked thirty Japanese as cutters. There was money in cedar, Molter observed casually, if a man went at it right. He further invited them to make themselves at home in the camp.

The wrecking of the O. S. S. steamers naturally came in for comment, but Molter, like most people not particularly concerned, took that as the ordinary chance of navigation in those tricky waters. The whole coast of British Columbia, with its network of channels and rapid tidal currents, bold rocky shores and periods of thick weather, is a nightmare to seafarers. From Vancouver's voyage of discovery down to date its history is sprinkled with wrecks, strandings, a long roll of disabled ships and total losses.

“It's simple as A B C,” Molter dismissed the subject at last. “The O. S. S., like every other steamship company, lays out a schedule from port to port that calls for speed. You make time or you lose your job. The law of averages under such navigating conditions would put a certain percentage of vessels ashore under any circumstances. And when one goes up on the beach there always has to be a goat to take the blame. That's the system. A coastwise skipper gets penalized for acts of God and stress of weather and the demands of owners who insist on fifteen knots where ten would be safer. And he takes that chance year after year for about a good carpenter's wages. Pah!”

Molter snorted and changed the subject. A collision in the foggy reach of Grenville Channel had cost him a captain's papers, and he was frankly prejudiced.

Once aboard the Wasp Markham said:

“That big Swede has a darned familiar look to me. Know anything about him, Bill?”

Stone shook his head.

“I can't place him,” Markham admitted. “But his mug certainly reminds me of something or somebody.”

They slept, soundly, dreamlessly. Once Billy wakened, listened drowsily for a minute to the sibilant murmur of agitated waters outside the sheltered bay, to the sighing of a night wind among the close-ranked trees ashore. When he opened his eyes again the sun was peeping over the high, green crest of Hardwicke on the east and Markham was laying a fire in the galley stove.

They ate breakfast and went ashore. The Japanese were just beginning to stir. Around the Molter quarters no life showed, except a streamer of blue smoke from the cook-house chimney.

“Let's take a walk to the upper end,” Billy suggested.

They made their way along a path cut through the cool, green forest. In the heart of Helmcken, back from the tide-swept shores, the cedars stood bough to bough, thick-trunked noble trees whose feathery crests shut out the sun even at high noon. Heavy moss overlaid the floor of these woods so that a man walked softly as on a thick-piled rug. Here and there thickets of salmonberry, devil's-club, salal, giant bracken, made a jungle in which birds were merry and the small life of the forest stole furtively about its affairs.

They tramped half a mile to the first workings. Down trees, a litter of broken boughs, chips, peeled bark, stumps, a most unlovely confusion amid which stood ricks of split cedar, bolts cut to a size one man could handle, ready for their journey to the shingle mills. The woodsy odors of shrub and vine of Oregon grape and wild honeysuckle mingled with the new-cut cedar smell to make a fragrance that teased the nostrils. And Stone reflected, as he stood for a moment sniffing that scented air, that a man might do worse than quit the sea to work at such tasks amid such surroundings. But he stiffened himself with the thought that the quitting should be voluntary. A man doesn't like to be kicked out. He wanted a clean sheet. That was why he was there.

In another fifteen minutes they came to the last slashing where Stone had talked with Joe Molter while the Mandarin still hung on the rocky beach. Here was more piled cedar, a horse-sled path that meandered away to some loading point. In the edge of this working, almost on the shore itself, stood a couple of shacks, one of logs and very old apparently, the other built of cedar shakes only slightly weathered. The log cabin was abandoned, windowless, occupied only by a rude bedstead in one corner on which lay a mattress ravaged by rats and mice. The other served as a sort of storage for tools and fresh-filed saws of the bolt cutters. The two looked in briefly and passed on through a narrow fringe of shrubbery and fir trees. Less than a hundred feet brought them out almost under the bows of the stranded Manchu.

She lay canted to port, half submerged. A twinge of pity ran through Stone; he was a seaman with a seaman's strange personal feeling for a crippled ship. She looked so forlorn. The bow of the same salvage vessel which had served the Mandarin—the black-hulled Arethusa—was pushed in close beside the after part of the wreck. Her powerful crane was lifting up and transferring cargo to great lighter scows. The salvage work went on under a double shift. Once lightened they would patch the holes below water, pump the Manchu out and refloat her. Stone knew the process. It did not then greatly engage his interest. He would have liked a word with the Arethusa's skipper, but there was no connection between the salvage steamer and the shore. The wreckers lived afloat. Their only connection with Helmcken was the mooring cables that held the Arethusa against the strong surge of changing tides.

“We might have rowed up here,” he said to Markham. “We could have got aboard.”

They stood a little longer. Two ships wrecked. One man's life forfeited under water. The careers of two others stopped short, besmirched. Somewhere, many fathoms below those swirls and eddies that spun and swayed in jade-green whorls, flecked here and there with white splotches of foam in the sunlight, the Mandarin rested her bones on the bottom. And behind those linked events lay plan and purpose, Stone felt very sure. He discounted chance. The sequence was too orderly. Yet it seemed incredible at that moment, in that place. Evil seemed to have no lurking place there. The sea muttered as it hurried through its pent channel. The deep green of forested shores looked calmly down on the tide. Immobile and silent mountain ranges stood afar, purple and blue and white tipped be hind the nearer hills. An atmosphere of peace. A great silence. The tidal murmurings and the whisper of a morning wind in the fir tops were muted notes in the hush. Until, as they stood there gazing, the winches and gears on the Arethusa—which had been silent for a time—began to clank and whir and grind once more.

“When you stand off and look around,” Billy remarked, “it don't seem promising. No place to begin. Still, we're here to try and pick up a lead. Suppose we split up, Mark? I'll go back along one side of the island. You take the other. It may stand us in hand to know the lay of this island. We can row up here later on. I don't know that there is anything to be gained by going aboard the Arethusa, after all.”

They parted. Markham disappeared in the thickets lining the shore that faced Vancouver Island. Billy stood gazing at the wreck for a minute or two longer, thinking, reckoning the chance that seemed so slender now that he was on the ground. He soon gave over that. He had to begin, even if it was to grope blindly for he knew not what.

He began to traverse the opposite side of Helmcken. Without any objective, except that he sought a taking-off place which might be supplied by unlikely chance in the most unlikely spot, Billy painstakingly looked into and over every dent, cove, crook and brushy pocket that lay along the shore. He marked how the tidal stream swirled wickedly here and lay like dead water there. He conned swampy hollows, penetrated dense thickets, marked the contours of the land.

He got his reward—or at least he found something which vastly stimulated his curiosity.

In a narrow, V-shaped break in the shore line, well masked by overhanging clumps of willow and alder he came down to the beach to seek freer progress along the rocks. The cleft, rather a jump-off, barred his way. He turned to the right and went about skirting the head of this cove. He came presently to low ground running out of the woods down to this notch. Soft earth, leaf mold, rotten logs, rank vegetation filled the hollow. There were signs of some one or something having lately passed through the heavy fern growth. It was trampled, pushed aside. And when Billy stooped to examine the moist soil to determine whether a man or a deer had crushed the vegetation his eye caught the glint of water under the thicket.

He turned back toward the beach. It was getting hot in the woods and he was tired of fighting brush. The jungly undergrowth and the primeval forest offered nothing but lessons in woodcrafts He decided to confine himself to the open shore. And making his way thence down the gut of the hollow he was in he came fairly into the brush-screened mouth of the little cove—and nearly ran into the sharp stem of a boat drawn well up into the mud and her topsides completely covered by a green tarpaulin.

“Hidden,” was the first word that popped into Stone's mind. Then followed the inevitable “Why?”

He examined his find. The query grew more insistent. It wasn't the type of craft common to those waters or indeed likely to be used by any one in that region. It was the costly and powerful toy—from a sea faring man's point of view—played with by people with money who craved the thrill of speed. Barely twenty-five feet long, broad beamed, with the pronounced V-bottom of the speedster, and powered, Stone surmised from the length of her locked engine compartment, to do anything from twenty to thirty knots. Mahogany and brass and copper—all hidden under a recent coat of dull-green paint. “Camouflage,” Billy hazarded. She wasn't abandoned in that secluded place. By the feel and appearance of her exhaust outlet her motor had been firing within twenty-four hours.

The whole thing had an air of concealment; costly paint and metal and fine joiner work smeared with base paint; that perfect hiding place which he had only stumbled on by accident. Even the green tarpaulin, blending perfectly with the foliage, spoke of design in its selection for a cover. A man rowing alongshore, or passing twenty feet inland through the brush, could look straight at the spot and not distinguish a boat. Yet with the tide high she could be pushed afloat at will.

Billy took a last careful look and turned away. At least his mind had something tangible to chew on. The idea which immediately took substantial form was that this hidden craft would bear watching—by night!

CHAPTER IX.

The Lights Again.

Markham had seen nothing more impressive than rocky shore line backed by thickets and shadowy forest. It was ten o'clock when they got together aboard the Wasp. They rested a while, ate luncheon, and went ashore to talk with Joe Molter about timber and land and such chances as the B. C. coast offered a man who had to make his way without much capital. Stone was not wholly simulating interest in those matters. For all he knew he might be on a wild-goose chase. If it turned out that way opportunity might still beckon somewhere along these wooded shores.

When the noon hour ended in the bolt camp the conversation ended also. Molter had business at Elk Bay, a few miles along the strait, and he departed thence in a gas boat that was almost the double of the Wasp.

“We're going to start loading a scow with shingle bolts to-morrow,” he said before he left. “You'd better come along and take a look if you have nothing else to do. I'm going to tow the scow into a bight near the other end some time to-night.”

Stone and Markham went back aboard and took a nap. Dark closed in without Molter's appearance with the scow, but that made no difference in either their plan or intentions. They slid their rowboat into the water and rowed softly down the eastern shore of Helmcken. Little swirls twisted them this way and that. A hundred feet offshore the tidal stream swept by like a river in flood, strongly on the ebb. Clouds that were fleecy tufts at sundown banked thick above, hiding the stars. In that narrow waterway, little more than a deep cleft between high-forested slopes, the dark of a cloudy night was like a shroud of crape. The channel was only a vague paleness in the general gloom; the shore a mass of solid black.

In that uncanny blackness Stone made repeated efforts to locate the cove that held the hidden launch, but failed. Half the time they rubbed the rocks on shore without being able to see them. At the best they could only feel with an oar and listen. Poking tentatively into one spot after another they presently found themselves nearing the northern end of Helmcken, far past the spot they wished to locate.

“No good. Too black to find anything against that timbered land,” Billy grumbled. “May as well go ashore here on the point and wait for slack tide. We could never row back against this current. And the clouds may break after a while.”

They landed, fumbled their way to a seat on a mossy ledge. In the silence Billy Stone reflected how futile, how aimless a course they must follow. Yet they could do nothing else. Be opportunists; wait and watch; they could do no more than that.

Through the fringe of shore trees over the lower end lights gleamed aboard the Arethusa. In the stillness, broken only by the monotone of broken water grumbling over Earl Ledge down channel, they could hear voices over the water, laughter, the faint tinkle of the ship's bell ringing off thirty-minute stretches. Some one on the wrecker began to play an accordion, and ceased at ten thirty. The lights blinked out, all but a bright lamp at the masthead. The night was warm. Inaction made for drowsiness. At midnight the changing tide brought slack water.

“I tell you Mark, we're foolish. We can't go all day and all night too, this way,” Billy said. “Suppose you take the dinghy and row back. I'll stick around here until it begins to break day. Then to-morrow night you can take a shot at doing this sentinel stuff.”

Markham, thoroughly sleepy, grunted assent, got into the dinghy and pushed off.

They had come down there very quietly. Their talking had been done in discreet whispers. Even if they had not felt the necessity for caution the hour and the surroundings and their quest would have called for silence, indeed for stealth. Their oarlocks were muffled with bits of cloth. Markham vanished without a sound, melted into the darkness and for half an hour thereafter Billy sat amid a hush that was tomblike. The sepulchers of long-dead kings knew no silence or darkness more profound.

Billy Stone fell to regarding matters dubiously. He began to doubt the wisdom of being there at all. What could be seen, heard, discovered? The dark border of a forest at midnight awed him a little, it was so melancholy, so utterly forsaken of light and life. The night air began to chill his body. A vain watch and a futile undertaking. In the little hours a man leans toward pessimism.

Then his shifting gaze marked the lights of a steamer showing far up Johnstone Strait. He reckoned her position as about opposite Blenkinsop Bay. She had a turn of speed by the way she bore down on Helmcken. In less time than it took to weary his eyes with watching she was abreast of Earl Ledge, surging up on the breast of a fair tide. Stone could see the phosphorescent gleam where her bow wave curled aside—luminous waves spreading out in a great V.

From his rock he marked her lights and estimated her size, felt a touch of envy for the man on her bridge. To feel a ten-thousand-ton ship surging under his feet! Never again—except as a passenger. A lump rose suddenly in Billy's throat. He had chosen the sea because the sea drew him with all its subtle magic. And it still drew him—the sea and all that moved upon it by steam or sail. It hurt him to sit by like a discarded lover; hurt him the more because he had not failed his chosen mistress. He had simply been a victim of chance. That or a sinister purpose that took no reckoning whatever of himself as a factor.

He sat probably within a hundred yards of the two tumble-down cabins, not more than two hundred yards from the beached Manchu. As the oncoming steamer drove down on Helmcken, swung a little to port to make the fairway end on and avoid being set ashore by the eddy, Billy Stone half rose and involuntarily gasped.

In mid channel, dead in the path of the steamer, he saw another steamer's running lights—the red port lantern, above it the white, the range light higher aft. Incredible—but there it was. Stone knew no steamer bore those lights. From his fixed position he could see that they were trick lights, false beacons. They simulated an approaching steamer, but they were fixed, immovable.

For a moment he was tempted to cry out, to warn that southbound vessel. Then he realized how useless that would be, and in the same instant there flashed across his mind the possibility that here, now, to-night he perhaps stood within grasping distance of the key to the Helmcken riddle.

He stood tense, eager-eyed. Two shrill blasts woke a resounding echo. Stone started. She wasn't going to alter her course. He could interpret the mind of the man on the bridge. Perhaps he had heard how the Mandarin and Manchu had been put ashore. Or faced as he thought by the alternative of stranding or collision, he took the chance of crashing into the other vessel rather than the certainty of being swept ashore by the eddy. Stone could understand.

She came on full speed, undeviating by a hair's breadth. Her searchlight flashed on, a dazzling beam. But before it fell on the phantom lights, burning where no lights should burn, they vanished—but not so quickly that Stone failed to note that they did not simply blink out. The ruby red and the yellow lamps seemed to move backward in a short arc before they snapped out. And the southbound steamer passed fairly over the spot where they had shone so bright, the blazing ray of her searchlight playing from side to side, revealing nothing but gray-green water broken by swirls and eddies and miniature tide rips. She drove on past Helmcken, vanished up the pass toward Discovery Passage, with only the bright speck of her stern light and a few dim portholes showing astern.

Stone leaned against a tree, pondering. He had seen the unexpected, but he was little the wiser. He wondered if the night watch on the Arethusa marked those lights. He doubted if they were visible from the salvage ship's position, but he determined to find out in the morning.

Alert in spite of concentrated thought, he got an impression, out of one corner of his eye, of something moving in the line of his vision between himself and the Manchu. For just a moment he thought to distinguish against the lighter background of a small open space a blurred shape or shapes that moved, flitted in and out of the field of his gaze. He didn't move. He didn't think his eyes had played any trick. He was quite sure that he had seen momentarily a dim figure or two moving softly.

It struck him for the first time that the situation might contain an element of personal danger. He was spying. He was unarmed. If he did by chance, under cover of the night, come into the vicinity of those wrecking and robbing operations he would certainly be up against men who would slit his throat and throw him to the dogfish if they caught him warm on their trail.

There was no sound and no further movement—though Billy held his post till dawn brought a pallid gleam into the east. He waited until the sun cleared the Coast Range, hunting the heavy shadows before it. And when the strait began to sparkle and the forest glowed warm as green plush he made his way down the shingle-bolt trail and out the float landing to board the Wasp.

Markham poked his head out the cabin door. He grinned and pointed to the dinghy, hauled out on the float.

“What the devil!” Stone exclaimed as his gaze took in the little boat.

One side was badly splintered all along the rub strake. Her upper planking along that side was cracked till the joints gaped. One rowlock block was split and torn clean off.

“That's what I said,” Markham grunted. “Believe me I come near taking my final bath in the salt chuck, last night.”

“How come?” Billy inquired.

“I don't know, exactly, but I have my suspicions,” Markham told him. “I was rowing along a little offshore. You know if you got in too close under those trees you couldn't see past the end of your nose. It was black enough anywhere. First thing I knew there was a phooo—oo and a humming like a big bee and something hit me biff. I was rowing with my back up channel. I only saw a faint shape slide past. Pretty near spilled me. I heard somebody say, 'Damn it all!' and the shape was gone. Then the rumble stops. Somebody plays a bright little flash lamp on me out of the dark, holds it on me till they get a good look, I suppose, then shuts it off. I'm still afloat, although she's leaking like a sieve. Then the light snaps off. I hear this hum and the phooo—oo sound again for a few seconds. Then I don't hear anything at all. After which I bail and row and bail and row until I land in here with water in the bottom up to my ankles. And I'd guess it was your hidden speed launch that bumped into me.”

“I shouldn't be surprised,” Billy said slowly. “It strikes me we'd better get breakfast and go look see if she's still there—or if she's been used. And we'd better stick a gun apiece in our pockets, because you never——”

As tersely as possible he related to Markham what had befallen after he left. Markham whistled. Billy sat in the cockpit of the Wasp smoking a cigarette as he talked. Markham began fussing with the galley stove. He paused with one lid uplifted in his hand.

“I wonder,” said he, “if those birds that ran me down weren't on their way to the upper end of the island to do their stuff with those lights?”

And after a minute he added:

“You wouldn't think that even the damndest sort of pirate would try to wreck everything that comes down the channel, would you? They'll pull that stuff just once too often and something'll come down on 'em like a ton of bricks. It looks to me like we got a good start, Bill.”

CHAPTER X.

The Arrow.

Billy lay down to take a sleep. His forty winks extended well into the forenoon. Whereupon, having stowed away a bite of luncheon, he and Markham patched up the sprung seams and torn rub strake of their little rowboat. After this task they went ashore. Noon had passed. No one but a grinning Japanese cook was about the place, and his conversation was limited to two words: “No sabe.”

“Probably loading that scow Joe mentioned,” Billy surmised. “Let's row along and see. Incidentally we'll take a look for that hiding place. I can find that speed boat by day, all right.”

He located the tiny cove after one or two trials. Coming at the place by water it was even more effectually concealed than he had thought. But the launch was no longer there.

“Flown the coop,” Markham commented. “Well, it looks suspicious and yet for all that it might be a blind lead, Bill. The crowd responsible for this launch might not have anything to do with the wrecking.”

“That,” Billy replied, “remains to be seen.”

“Well, what next?”

“You go on alongshore in the dinghy,” Stone directed. “I'll take another cruise through the woods. If you see 'em at work stick around until I turn up. If I don't see any scow loading I'll walk on to the point.”

Stone plunged into the brush. He had no object except to look over the ground. Chance must supply him with anything more than general results. It would do no harm to know Helmcken from end to end, inside out and across. Such knowledge might at any moment become important. For anything more he trusted to luck. He had seen enough in twenty-four hours to convince him that Helmcken Island had some very peculiar aspects, to say the least.

Halfway between the little bight and the northern end Stone, moving softly through the thickets and timber, stopped to listen. Unconsciously he had flitted through the woods as stealthily as a hunting Indian—a reversion to the days spent as a youngster with a rifle after deer in the Olympics. Now he stood still with ears a-cock. He had been arrested by a sound, a breaking branch, the rustle of foliage—something. He had paused beside the bole of a massive fir. Salal stood all about him; wide-fronded bracken lifted waist-high. Beyond that, thickets lifted in a jungle that might hold anything besides the tall trees that thrust pillar trunks toward the sky. Stone had no reason to suspect danger. But for the moment he was swayed by a primitive instinct to be wary.

And as he stood at attention, listening, looking, something flashed by his head with a faint, swishing sound. He didn't know what it was. A small bird darting might have made such a whir. He hadn't seen it. But he had felt the breath of its strange passing and heard the rustle of slightly disturbed foliage beyond. He stared. It was like a flash of something in the air. And while he stared, within the space of ten seconds, he heard very faintly a sound that he recognized and instantly there came a second flash and something went pluck in the bark of the fir tree at about the level of his breast.

The human eye is quick; and the mind quicker. Billy Stone's optic and aural nerves conveyed a definite message to his brain. He dropped prone among the fir and salal. There he lay looking curiously up at a missile lodged in the tough brown bark, knowing now what that first flash had been and realizing just how narrowly he had escaped death.

It quivered a little yet—a long, broad-head arrow—the cloth-yard shaft of the old English archer. Stone himself had practiced archery as a sport for a year or two before he went to sea. He knew the history of the bow, more especially the English long bow, which the careless modern reckons as obsolete, except for savages and children playing Robin Hood. But Billy Stone was aware of it as a very deadly weapon. He knew the broad-head, the hunting shaft of the bowman. Twenty-eight inches from nock to point, three eighths of an inch in diameter, barbed with a piece of spring steel an inch and a quarter wide by three inches long that was ground to a lancet edge.

He lay quietly looking up at a beautiful specimen now, a deadlier killer than the revolver his hand gripped. He noted the white cock feather, the scarlet binding. The barb was buried deep. Driven from a long bow full drawn that arrow would have gone through his body like a knife. He had seen like shafts range a deer from shoulder to flank and fall twenty yards beyond. He would be a dead man now where he lay, instead of being very much alive and angry and vindictively hopeful that the hidden bowman would show himself.

But though he lay there until an hour had elapsed and his body grew cramped with inaction his eyes beheld no enemy, nor did his ears warn him of any movement in the surrounding brush. He therefore decided that it was his move. Finding that the arrow stood at about the level of the fern-tops where he could reach it without exposing more than his hands he dug around the buried barb with his knife and gently worked the arrow loose. After which, with his trophy in hand, he crept and stole from tree to tree until he was well clear of that vicinity.

It might have been accident. But Billy knew that no archer sufficiently up in the craft to possess such equipment would ever drive two shafts at random. Nor, having missed his mark, would he fail to seek his shafts on the line of flight. A good bowman treasures his arrows. No, that was not an accident. The broad-head was meant for him.

But by whom? And why? Stone's face darkened. He thought he knew the answer to the second query. It was not a pleasant or encouraging conclusion. He perceived himself at a grave disadvantage. He didn't fancy that particular mode of assassination.

If he were correct then certainly he was getting on a warm trail. But it was a blind one yet; and promised to be a rough one. A dead man here and there didn't seem to matter much to the crowd whose apple cart Billy Stone was desperately seeking to upset.

CHAPTER XI.

Complications.

Sound guided Billy to the scow loading. He hid the arrow in a hollow cedar near the bolt trail and went down to the shore. Markham sat on a log talking to the Scandinavian. Perez was on the scow, and Molter was fussing around in a row boat, outside the boom sticks—a string of which, chained end to end across a dent in the shore, confined hundreds of cedar bolts four feet long. and roughly a foot thick, shingle material in the raw. Japanese in pairs heaved them up on the scow with stout pike poles. Others stowed them in place. There was a lot of activity, none of which greatly interested Billy Stone after he had watched for half an hour.

Perez and Molter remained on the boom and scow directing operations. The Swede did not bestir himself except to drawl an occasional order to a Jap. So Billy left Markham to continue his conversation and strolled on to the end of the island to stand staring at the wreck of the Manchu and the salvage operations that went on apace. And while he stood looking a curious thing happened.

A man on the Arethusa's bridge squared himself erectly and, thrusting one arm straight out before his body, drew the other hand back to his jaw. Something glistened in his hand.

Involuntarily Billy dodged behind the nearest tree. He recognized the archer's stable stand and he took no chances. But a second look convinced him the shaft was not aimed his way. As it flew his eye followed the low, graceful arc of its swift flight, and marked its quarry—a hair seal hauled out on a flat rock above tidewater. The shaft missed by inches only. The animal raised on its flippers, sniffing. The archer drew his bow again. His second-arrow struck home. The beast flopped off the rock into a shallow pool. There, lacking strength to gain the deep, it thrashed in its death struggle.

A boat put off from the Arethusa. Billy walked quickly to the spot, looked down at the dead seal, retrieved the shaft which had missed and the other which had passed clear through the animal's body and dropped a few feet beyond. The points of both were turned and blunted by contact with the granite. But they were true broad-heads, cloth-yard shafts, beautifully feathered and barbed.

So a skilled bowman stood on the Arethusa's bridge. And two hours since a skilled bowman had tried to spit him as this one had spitted the dog seal.

What if the two were one? Stone stared at the arrow in his hand. He knew shafts as a dealer in antiques knows period furniture. The arrow he had hidden in the cedar was a hunting shaft like these, as beautifully fashioned. There the resemblance ceased. There was a different finish to the nock that fitted the bowstring; a different cut of feather; a decided variation in the broad-head point; a distinctive color scheme.

Every archer worthy of the name has his individual colors, his own style of finish, whereby he identifies his shafts in addition to elaborating his personal idiosyncrasies in arrow making. Having once known the sport Billy was aware that the shafts in his hand as well as the hidden one were equally the work of a practiced fletcher; and they had likewise all been shot by a practiced bowman.

He didn't know what to think. Now he turned his attention to the man stepping ashore from the rowboat and saw at a glance that he was a typical deck hand.

“You kill the seal?” Billy feigned ignorance.

“Lord, no!” the man grinned as he hauled the animal by a flipper to the dry bank. “That was the mate. Regular bug on the bow 'n' arrow. Some shot, too, I'll say. Hate to have him plunk one of them things through my gizzard.”

The man talked on while he skinned the seal. It was part of his job, Billy learned, to retrieve arrows and game for the Arethusa's mate.

“Was he ashore hunting this morning?” Billy asked.

“Dunno. Don't think so,” the man answered differently. “He don't shoot much ashore. Mostly from the deck—unless he takes a target on the beach to shoot light arrows. He's always making new ones. Spends all his spare time monkeying with them things.”

So that was that. The bowman of the Arethusa might have been in the woods that day—and he might not. But if there was uncertainty about the man there was no uncertainty in Billy's mind about the weapon and the intent. The archer who shot at him in the forest meant to get him. He was master of his weapon. Here was also a master of the bow, who could put a shaft through a seal at eighty yards.

Billy went back to the scow loading with this added complication turning over in his mind. The work continued monotonously. Midafternoon was gone. Markham and the Swede still sat on the log carrying on their interminable conversation. They had been joined by Perez and Molter. They sat comfortably in the shade while the Japs sweated in the hot sun. They talked timber and hunting and navigation along the Pacific coast until five o'clock ended the day's labor. Then the woodsmen took the path to camp.

Billy signed Markham to wait. When the others had vanished up the trail through the slashing he slipped through the brush to his hollow cedar and retrieved the arrow. As they rowed alongshore he told his tale to Markham.

“The plot thickens to beat hell, don't it?” Markham frowned. “I got a sort of an eyeful this afternoon myself.”

“How?”

“Your green speed boat is stowed in chocks on the after deck of the Arethusa,” Markham stated bluntly.

“Are you sure? How did you find out? How do you know it's the same boat that I found cached in the cove?” Billy asked.

“I can't swear to it, naturally,” Markham replied. “But remember I lived aboard the Arethusa until a month ago, or less. I know her boats inside out. You described this launch to me. I took a look at the wreck with a pair of corking good binoculars I borrowed from Perez. And I got about a ten-second squint at this speed boat when a deck hand lifted off the canvas cover. The green tarp you mentioned was folded across her forward deck. A green speed boat about twenty-five feet long with a hard-knuckled bilge and automobile controls. There isn't likely to be two such combinations here at Helmcken at the same time, is there?”

“What about this archer mate?” Billy asked. “Ever see him shoot?”

Markham shook his head.

“He's a new one on me. Never saw him or a bow and arrow aboard the Arethusa in my time.”

The dinghy slipped into Molter's bay and Markham sidled up alongside the Wasp. He sat holding the rub strake, his gaze on the camp ashore.

“Another thing,” said he slowly. “That big Swede foreman of your friends is a diver. He don't know I've got his number but he tipped his hand talking to me this afternoon. I recalled him perfectly when he made the slip. Worked with him once. I was on a job in San Diego about ten years ago—where he was head diver.”

“Huh!” Stone grunted. “By the way, were all three of them at the scow when you rowed down there?”

“Now, I'll be darned if I can say for sure,” Markham replied. “I started talking to the Scandihoovian and I don't remember. Maybe they were. And again I have a sort of impression Molter and Perez came along after a while. Strikes me one of 'em came in a boat, and the other come hiking down the trail.”

“Oh, hell!” Billy threw out his hands. “It's getting so darned complicated it makes my head swim. We're up against something that isn't small-time stuff by a long shot. It isn't exactly a healthy place for us, Mark, this Helmcken Island.”

“I wouldn't fancy being found in the brush with one of those things sticking through my middle.” Markham eyed the broad-head distastefully.

“Nor I,” Billy agreed. “But I'm not quitting. There's a combination here that has started in to hunt me—and I'm going to hunt back. Watch and wait. Go armed. Be careful. There's no reason anybody should try to pink me like that fellow did to-day, except that I'm getting close to something that needs to be kept dark. I don't like crooks and I don't like murder. But I'm willing to take my chance.”

“Same here,” Markham returned. “I'm with you. Do you suppose, Bill, that this shingle-bolt crowd, including your friend Molter, is in the show?”

“Do you suppose,” Stone enlarged the field of speculation, “that the Arethusa crowd may be putting it over? It isn't a small undertaking to wreck two steamers and get away with close to a hundred and fifty thousand in gold out of their strong rooms. That looks almost too big for a couple of ordinary men, don't it?”

“Maybe they're all in cahoots,” Markham suggested. “Whether they are or not—how was it worked? How is it worked?'

“God only knows,” Billy Stone replied soberly, “and He's not telling. It's our job to find out.”

CHAPTER XII.

Tragic News.

If the first forty-eight hours had given them something to chew upon in the way of incident, the succeeding forty-eight proved utterly barren. The salvage work went on at the wreck. The bolt loading continued. Stone and Markham visited more or less at Molter's camp. They watched, and by night they prowled surreptitiously around the northern end—drawing only a blank. They seemed to have come to a dead stop after a fairly exciting start.

“Let's run down to Rock Bay,” Billy suggested the third morning. “There should be some mail for me.”

The Wasp chugged down stream to this branch post office at a big railway logging camp. Billy's journey was rewarded by a letter from Martha Powell. It was brief, but slightly disturbing, inasmuch as Billy sensed an agitation uncommon to his sweetheart. It ran:

 

Dear Bill: I must see you as soon as possible. Since we always take a two week's vacation somewhere during the summer I've persuaded Papa Powell to go to Campbell River for a few days. He likes the salmon fishing there. We leave Victoria on a Union boat early the tenth and arrive at Campbell River late that night. I do want to see you, Bill. I can't tell you why in a letter. I'll be looking for you every day till you come. Lovingly, Martha.

 

Billy looked up the date—the eleventh. Martha was at Campbell River now, expecting him. He wondered what could so trouble her. He felt that she was troubled beyond the mere wording of her letter. And he wanted to see her. He always wanted to see her. That longing had been coming over him at intervals for five years like touches of homesickness. Yet he was of a divided mind as he sat on the Rock Bay wharf reading his letter. Helmcken Island claimed his attention. Even in this short run to the post office he felt himself derelict in a duty. Any hour, he felt, might see some clew put in his hand there. The same sense of responsibility that rides a ship's officer on watch bore on Stone in this task of seeking the key to the mysterious agency which had destroyed his ship. Yet it was a task wholly self-imposed, a matter in which he was comparatively his own master.

In the end he decided that lie must see Martha. He could not carry on wholeheartedly his job at Helmcken while any sort of appeal from her went unanswered. She was too sturdy a soul to be troubled without cause.

But somebody had to be on the job. It wouldn't do to go on to Campbell River with the Wasp. She was too slow. They would lose too much time. He remembered that coasting steamers invariably called at Salmon Bay, a little distance above the northern end of Helmcken. They were fairly fast boats. If he could get one that afternoon——

He inquired of the Rock Bay storekeeper. Yes, two local boats southbound touched Salmon Bay that afternoon, one at two o'clock, one in the evening. The following morning early a northbound steamer called at Campbell River. He could make close connections.

He talked it over with Markham.

“Sure, I'll hold it down if you want to go,” Markham declared. “We can easily make Salmon Bay to catch that two-o'clock boat. Tell you what I'll do while you're gone. I'll go aboard the Arethusa, just for luck. They don't think much of me since I fudged on the Mandarin job. But the skipper won't throw me off. And I might pick up a thread.”

That settled they drove the Wasp up channel to Salmon Bay, catching the steamer with a little time to spare.

In the dusk of that evening Billy strode into the office of a quaint old hotel built to house guests who came from far afield to try their angling skill on the Tyee salmon that had made the place famous. He looked over the register, and turned from that to see Martha coming toward him across the lobby.

“Let's go for a walk,” she suggested. “Papa Powell is roaming around the hotel somewhere. If he finds you're here he'll stick so close we won't have a chance to talk.”

They left the hotel, went down past a row of cottages and found a seat on a beached log facing the tide that streamed like a river current toward the choked gate of Seymour Narrows.

“Shoot,” Billy said. “What's on your mind? What's the trouble?”

“Did I sound like trouble?” she murmured. “I didn't mean to. But I was disturbed when I wrote that letter. In fact I was really frightened. Perhaps I exaggerated things a little. And the funny thing is I can't tell you why. Except that if you love me, Billum, you won't stay around Helmcken Island.”

“Why?” he asked quickly.

“I can't explain,” she answered. “I simply can't. Only it worries me to think of you being at that place. I'm afraid. It's dangerous. Let the old wreck go, Bill, and come back to Seattle. You can get into something there. We can manage. I've been a dutiful daughter long enough. I'm about ready to—to break away.”

Billy Stone's heart fluttered. He knew what she meant. He knew also that they could manage. Waiting because he wanted promotion, a decent income on which to make a home, had been partly dissembling between them. There had always been Captain Powell and his necessities, his natural demands. Martha's sense of loyalty to a rather exacting parent had been as much of a bar to marriage as material circumstances. But there was more behind this mood of Martha's than a weariness of sacrifice to her father and a longing for her lover. And Billy tried to find out what it was. He had an impression that Martha was afraid, not for herself but for him.

“I wish you'd tell me why, Mart,” he repeated gently. “You know I'd chuck almost anything, honey bunch, to play the game with you. But I'm in this rather deep—other people too. It seems to me there's something important at stake. My own reputation as an officer—even if I never go to sea again. What has scared you so? Why do you think Helmcken is a dangerous place for me?”

“I can't tell you,” she sighed. “It doesn't seem like a logical or sensible reason sometimes. Not even to me. And I'm sure it wouldn't to you. But just the same I'd give anything if you'd drop this detective work. I'll be uneasy as long as you're around in Johnstone Strait.”

Dangerous to him on Helmcken? Well, Billy recalled that broad-head shaft quivering in the fir tree on a level with his breast and was quite willing to concede danger; danger with malice behind it. If on or about Helmcken Island those responsible for the wrecks were aware of his presence and purpose then certainly the element of danger was very real. But he had discounted that risk, and he wondered where Martha Powell got this new, keen apprehension for his safety. Was it based on something she had learned? Or merely on something she felt? Billy had never taken much stock in pure intuition. He knew that there was that odd thing called a “hunch.” Of late he had been inclined to believe that a “hunch” was as likely to be correct as an elaborately reasoned process.

But he couldn't get anything definite out of Martha. She put her arms about him and pleaded with him to go back to Seattle. She would marry him on twenty-four hours' notice. Anything. And the more she talked the more certain Billy grew that Martha had acquired a definite cause for fear on his behalf. Nevertheless she wouldn't tell what she knew—only what she felt.

And Billy's pride was involved. He had set his hand to the job. He didn't want to quit. He wouldn't be a yellow dog. He told Martha that. She could see his point. Still, being a woman and fearing for him—although she stubbornly refused to say on what valid grounds—she pleaded that after all neither their lives nor their real material welfare depended on his personally solving the Helmcken Island mystery.

And in the end Billy said good-by to catch the northbound steamer rather unhappy and no wiser for his coming.

He brooded over unanswerable questions all the way north. He knew Martha pretty thoroughly. She. wasn't panicky. Something tangible had stirred her up. He was still pondering when he debarked on the Salmon Bay wharf and looked about for the Wasp.

Neither the Wasp nor his partner was in sight, although it was getting on for noon. Billy cooled his heels on the wharf for two hours, growing both uneasy and impatient, until at last he hired a fisherman to run him across to Helmcken.

When they were drawing up to the island so that Stone could plainly see the canted hull of the Manchu overtopped by the Arethusa's deck gear, her enormous crane and winch engines spitting jets of steam, a power cruiser came surging by. It passed close, drew up under the Arethusa's broad quarter. Billy watched with idle curiosity a man or two clambering up the wrecking ship's side. Then a point of Helmcken cut off his view. A minute or two later his fisherman drove into Molter's bay and stopped at the float landing.

The Wasp lay in her accustomed berth. But her dinghy was gone. Billy scanned the beach in vain. He looked in the cabin. The galley stove was cold. He stood a moment wondering where Markham could be—why he hadn't met the steamer. Then he shrugged his shoulders and paid off the fisherman. When the man swung clear Stone dived into the cabin and began getting into his boat clothes. He was a trifle puzzled, uneasy, and he intended to cast off and skirt the eastern shore of Helmcken with the Wasp and pick Markham up. He must be poking about in the rowboat. But why hadn't he met the steamer?

Stone was dressed and just about to start the engine when a boat came swinging around the point; the same craft which had landed at the Arethusa. She bore in beside the Wasp, looming over her, a chunky forty footer painted a businesslike gray, with a good deal of varnished oak and polished brass about her decks. By the blue ensign aft, Billy knew she was in the government service. One man made fast her lines to the float; the other stepped into the Wasp's cockpit.

“My name is Pearce, provincial constable from Rock Bay,” he announced briskly. “Are you William Stone, one of the two men on this Seattle power boat?”

Billy verified this.

“Where you been the last twenty-four hours?”

The man put the question bluntly, almost brusquely. Both the tone and question nettled Billy.

“I don't see how or why that's any of your business,” he replied. “But as a matter of fact I was at Campbell River.”

The constable grinned genially.

“I'll say it's my business,” he remarked. “Don't get peeved. I got to know these things. I'm not asking questions for fun. Now, you left here yesterday. Did you get one boat to Campbell River, stay there part of the night, and get the next one back?”

“I did,” Stone replied.

“You can verify that, I suppose,” the constable asked, “by steamship men and wharfingers, and people generally, eh?”

“If necessary, yes.” Billy was startled. “What's the idea.”

“I guess that accounts for you,” the constable nodded, disregarding Stone's query. “Now, who do you know around here that had it in for your partner? Anybody he was likely to quarrel with?”

“Nobody that I know of. What's wrong?” Billy demanded. “Markham was to meet me with the Wasp at Salmon Bay. Has something happened him?”

“I'll say something happened him,” the man replied grimly. “Somebody killed him. He come drifting down past that wrecking ship about daylight this morning, laying dead in a rowboat.”

Billy stared, with a chill creeping over him—to be followed by a hot wave of anger.

“How was be murdered?”

“That,” the constable said, “is one of the funny things about it. Looks like a knife. But I never saw a knife that would make a neat slit about an inch wide clean through a man's body.”

Across Billy Stone's mental vision flashed a picture of a dead seal—of an arrow quivering in the bark of a tree. The long bow and the silent shaft with its deadly broad-head point! He knew what weapon made such a wound as puzzled the constable.

CHAPTER XIII.

The Mysterious Archer.

In the gray of dawn that morning the anchor watch aboard the Arethusa had seen the Wasp's little dinghy drift on the tide out from behind the eastern shore of Helmcken. Caught in the sweep of the big eddy it circled within a few yards of the wreck, and the watch saw then that it was not empty as he first thought. There was something in it that looked like a man, asleep or drunk or disabled. Whereupon he called an officer. They lowered away a boat. Thus they found Markham lying in a pool of blood that was still warm.

This Stone learned upon boarding the Arethusa with the constable. They had lifted the dinghy to chocks on the after deck and Markham still lay huddled in the bottom with his sightless eyes staring at the blue sky when Billy drew aside the canvas they had spread over him.

He stood looking down at his partner. The wrecking winches groaned and whirred and clanked. Men talked, shouted, machinery ground on. The constable stood beside him, gazing at the corpse with a speculative air.

“Something funny about all this excitement around here,” he observed at last. “Two steamers run aground. A diver loses his life below. A man is murdered. I hear one of these wrecks had a lot of gold stolen out of her. All in the last four weeks. And I understand that this fellow was a diver aboard this ship we're on now, and that you were the officer on watch aboard the Mandarin when she drove ashore.”

“All true,” Billy said.

“Like to know the answer to it all,” the constable drawled. “Helmcken's in my district.”

“So would I,” Stone replied. “I will know, if they don't get me too.”

“They?”

The constable was a short, almost fat man, with the countenance of a sunburned cherub. His innocent air altogether belied his capacity.

“They got him!” Billy pointed to the dead man. “You don't suppose people who wreck ships to rob 'em, mind killing anybody who might be likely to find out who they are and how they turned the trick, do you?”

“That what you fellows are after?”

Stone grew cautious.

“I didn't say,” he evaded. “Only Markham's partner was the diver who was drowned when he went down to survey the Mandarin. And I lost my ticket over the wreck. We weren't exactly disinterested parties to what's going on here.”

“Is there anything going on here,” the constable murmured quizzically, “more than can be seen with the naked eye? If there is, seems like I ought to be in on it as a matter of business.”

“Maybe. I don't know for sure,” Billy returned. “This rather looks it.”

“I'll say so,” the constable agreed. “Murder's no parlor game. I wonder what he was killed with.”

“With a thing like this,” said a voice behind them.

Billy turned. At his elbow stood a man who had come up silently in rubber-soled shoes, a compactly built man in uniform. He carried in his left hand the most perfect specimen of an archer's weapon Billy Stone had ever seen. The bow was of fine grained yew, the rich-brown heartwood worked into graceful tapered contours, its back of sapwood gleaming white as polished ivory. The lower limb rested on the deck by the officer's toe. The curved upper nook stood four inches above his peaked cap—a six-foot English long bow, that historic weapon that turned the tide for England at the battle of Crecy and with the like of which Robin Hood and his merry men slew the king's deer in Sherwood forest. A strange anachronism on the deck of a modern steamer.

The mate carried in his hand a broad-head arrow, banded with blue, green, gold, the feathering on the shaftment of snow-white turkey wing. For a moment Stone had a feeling as of the hair on the back of his neck rising, as if he were an animal facing an enemy. That subsided at once. Reason conquered instinct. Stone stiffened to attention on the man's words. He noted too that the mate's eyes glowed with feeling and that his speech, though concise enough, was shot through with a peculiar tensity—as if he were repressing anger, or laboring under some excitement.

“That may surprise you. But it is true. I know what I am talking about. I happen to be an archer,” he continued, addressing himself to the constable. “I have been shooting the bow for years. I have killed a variety of game with the bow. The thing that killed your man was an arrow like this—nothing else could make that precise sort of wound.”

He held out the broad head.

“A bow drive an arrow clean through a man?” The constable's tone was slightly incredulous.

“Take a good look at it.” The mate handed over the arrow.

The constable fingered the broad steel blade, edged like a knife, brushed the symmetrical feathers contemplatively, balanced the shaft across a finger.

“Nasty little sticker, all right,” he commented. “But it don't look reasonable that the stick in your hand could shoot it through a foot or more of flesh and bone.”

“You think not? Try this.”

The mate of the Arethusa placed the lower nock under his left instep, grasped the bow midway with his left hand, and slid his right palm to the top of the upper limb, heaved sharply till the yew arched and so slid the loop into the slotted horn. He twanged the rigid bowstring with his thumb. It gave out a faint musical note.

“This is an eighty-pound bow,” said he. “You are a strong man, I should say. You cannot draw it arrow length. Try.”

The constable braced himself, drew till bis face reddened and the cords in his neck stood out like small ropes—yet the bowstring was still short of his face.

“Left arm fully extended. Bowstring back to a point on the jaw directly below the right eye. You're five inches short. Draw full.”

There was a peremptory note in his voice. The constable let down the bow, looked at it with respect.

“It ain't so much of a toy as it looks,” he conceded. “It might do the trick. Still I can scarcely——”

“Watch.”

The mate picked up a piece of board fully an inch thick, set it up against a boat chock. He took up his bow, walked back a few paces, nocked an arrow, drew the head to his jaw, back till the wide end of the barb touched his gripping finger, and let fly.

For a second he held his graceful archer's pose, bow arm extended rigidly, string fingers at his ear. The broad-head flashed to its mark, struck with a sharp pluck, passed through the board and split it apart. Twenty feet beyond it stuck in the Arethusa's deck planking as if it had been tapped in with a hammer. The archer lowered his weapon. They walked up to the arrow. The broad head was driven so deep in the wood that he worked half a minute with a pair of small pliers to draw it free.

The constable eyed the arrow, the bow and the splintered board; then the man.

“That's reasonable proof that it can be done,” he said slowly. “It also happens to be fairly strong circumstantial evidence as to who killed Cock Robin. Eh? That strike you, Mister Mate? You're the only bow-and-arrow expert that I know of running loose in this neck of the woods. If you haven't got an alibi you're wide open to suspicion.”

“I have an alibi if I need one,” the officer eyed him gravely. “I merely show you that it can be done. I have something else to show you, Friend Constable. Likewise something to tell you. There's a bowman—or a madman—as good or better an archer than I, here on Helmcken Island.”

The constable stared. Billy Stone's pulse took on a quicker beat.

“Come up on the bridge with me,” the mate continued. “Both of you.”

They followed him.

On the port side, facing the timbered point on which Stone had seen the mate kill the dog seal, he stopped by a latticed door abaft the wheelhouse.

“See that mark—and that?” he asked, pointing.

They looked. In two places the teak-wood slats were cut and splintered as if a broad-bladed knife had been driven through with considerable force.

“Now come in.”

Within the cabin he opened a locker and took out an arrow. The barb was bent slightly and the shaft cracked. But as a whole it stood intact, a broad-head hunting shaft—and Billy Stone's attention focused sharply because he had its mate, feather for feather, color for color, nock pattern and general design in every detail, stowed in a drawer aboard the Wasp. It was twin to the shaft that had missed his breast by a hand's breadth that day in the woods.

“Yesterday evening about sundown,” the ship's officer told them in a dry, matter-of-fact tone which his look somehow belied, “I was standing alone on the bridge. I had shot a couple of light arrows at a dead tree on shore. This broad-head whizzed across and drove through the lattice. If I hadn't seen the flash and known what it was and dodged instinctively, it would have spitted me fairly amidships. I'm not panicky. It didn't occur to me then that I was being shot at. I took it for a wild flight. And I was much interested in the mere fact that another bowman was about. They're rare. I stood looking at the shaft and glancing toward shore for the archer. Then he shot again. The second landed within a few inches of the first, as you can see. I realized then that I was the mark he aimed at.

“Now, I'm not a fool. I know the work of a bowman when I see it. If an archer wants to shoot with me or at me I'll play the game with him. That's the way I feel about it. So I put a boat out and went ashore, bow in hand, with one of the crew. We beat the brush together. I didn't tell him what I was after, except that I had lost an arrow. We heard nothing—saw nothing. Whoever it was shot his shafts at me and stole away. There are his arrows. Perhaps one out of the same quiver killed this man you found in the boat. I don't know. Take your choice. I didn't kill him. He was killed by a broad-head. There is a skilled bowman on Helmcken Island. Take your choice.”

“Don't seem to be a choice so much as a blind guess.” The constable fingered the arrow. Then, after a brief silence he said: “A police boat with the coroner from Campbell River will be here shortly. Perhaps we'll get some light shed on this at the inquest.”

Stone went back to where the Wasp rubbed beside the constable's power boat at the Arethusa's quarter. He climbed down, seated himself in his own tiny cabin and tried to figure it out.

Was the mate of the Aretkhusa lying cleverly? He was a bowman. Every one aboard his ship knew his weapon and his skill. Was he simply covering up his tracks, establishing an invincible alibi against a possible charge? And if—and why—— Stone found himself in a maze of bewildering conjecture out of which only two things emerged clearly: his partner had been murdered; his own life wasn't worth much in or on or around Helmcken Island.

Behind these sinister events he couldn't help seeing a definite motive—and that motive had to do with those trick lights and the looted strong rooms. But what had the mate of the Arethusa to do with that? And if he had aught to do with it would he deliberately have made such open display of his skill with the bow?

It was a maze in which Billy Stone felt that he must wander alone from now on. He wondered if Martha had some strange prescience of what had occurred, of what might yet come about, that made her fear for him? Either she had learned something she feared to tell, or she must have the gift of second sight; a phase of the occult Billy frankly disbelieved in.

He couldn't quit now. He sat on the side of his bunk and fingered the six-shooter in his pocket. He wouldn't. A man couldn't be broken by plundering crooks, see his friends assassinated, and run when the trail grew dangerous to follow. Somewhere near at hand crafty minds were planning, unseen eyes were watching, strong predatory hands were ready to act with ruthless decision.

It wasn't precisely a cheerful prospect. Billy knew he had to beat them at their own game if he beat them at all. He conceded that his chances were slender. But he meant to keep trying. It was that or quit cold. And he wasn't quitting.

CHAPTER XIV.

Groping in the Dark.

The heavens may open and the floods descend; the tragic consequences of human folly may set ugly specters stalking abroad; but even in the midst of battle, pestilence, murder and sudden death, a healthy man must eat when he is hungry if food is at hand.

So Billy Stone busied himself in the Wasp's galley. He wasn't worrying. He was saddened a little without being depressed. If anything, he was angry—and determined. It was not his idea of a happy ending to lie stark and stiff in the forest or drift dead on the tide like his partner. But neither could he entertain the idea of drawing back now that the going promised to be rough. There was a dirty mess to be cleaned up here on Helmcken and the cleaning up seemed to be quite definitely his job—more so now than ever. He felt as if he somehow had a debt to pay on behalf of Markham. His own vital interest seemed even less than that obligation.

So he cooked and ate, and meanwhile pondered, without getting any light on what might come next, nor what his next move logically should be. While he was thus engaged the police launch from Campbell River drew up alongside, then Molter's launch with Joe, his partner, and the Scandinavian. And finally a strange cruiser which sidled up against the Wasp and made fast to her bow and stern. Through a porthole in this craft, to Stone's amazement, he saw Martha Powell's face, wearing a strained anxious look. She put her fingers on her lips and beckoned him to come aboard.

There were two men on this trim, raised deck cruiser. They sat down on the top deck and lit pipes. Beyond a nod and a brief “Howdy do,” they paid no attention when Billy stepped aboard and went down the companion, ladder.

Martha met him at the foot of the steps. She put both hands on his shoulders, looked long and earnestly into his face before she kissed him with a passion that set Stone's blood dancing. Yet that shadow never left her face and there was a suspicious hint of wetness in her eyes.

“Is Joe Molter on the Arethusa?” she asked. “I thought I saw him look over the rail as you came aboard.”

“Yes. He just came from his camp. Why? And how come you to be here?”

“I don't want him to see me,” she confessed. “That's why I kept inside. I heard about your partner getting killed. They wired in to the coroner and the police and there was a lot of talk. I just had to come, Bill. I'm scared stiff something will happen to you. Something will happen you if you stay around Helmcken Island. Billy, it isn't worth while.”

“Sometimes a man has to go through with a thing he has started, whether it's worth while or not,” he answered quietly. “But what are you scared of? Look here, you don't get away from me this time without telling me exactly what's on your mind.”

“I don't want to get away from you, ever,” she sighed, and lay passively within his encircling arms. “I'd be willing to stick right at your elbow from now on, Billum, if we could just put about two hundred miles between us and this place by snapping our fingers.”

“Well,” he said tenderly, “I'd be willing as far as the first part goes. But that's not telling me what has frightened you this way.”

“Joe did—the day you left Seattle. You remember we met him when you were getting a car? Well, he came back to the house later in the evening,” she said. “I think he must be crazy. He acted like a crazy man. You know he always had quite a crush on me, Bill?”

“I knew he did once,” Stone replied. “But I thought he'd got over it long ago.”

“So did I,” she murmured. “But evidently not. He's been dropping in at the house more or less the last three months. I always liked Joe—only not the way he wanted me to like him. I thought he understood that well enough. But somehow or other Papa Powell began to take an interest in Joe's case. Joe's made some money. At least he has made that sort of impression on dad. The pressure began to grow. I didn't say anything to you. It only amused me. I didn't take it seriously. Then the day you left Seattle to take up this wreck thing, Joe came as I told you. He asked me to marry him. Insisted that I must. Got quite excited about it. And when I managed to make it quite plain that there wasn't the ghost of a show he—well, he simply went wild. He raved. I never saw a man in such a state. Before he got through he had flatly assured me with the most frantic earnestness that he'd wipe you off the map. He hinted all sorts of dark, mysterious things. I can't begin to describe the way he talked and acted. It was like the raving of a maniac. Only when he did calm down he apologized for frightening me; but he came back from the door to repeat that I might just as well forget about you, because you were done. He wouldn't explain what he meant by that. But it sounded like a threat. And he seemed to fairly gloat when he was putting forward these hints and threats. He'd do anything to you, Billy. I know it.”

“Was that what worried you so?” Billy asked. “Why didn't you tell me at Campbell River.”

“I wanted to—intended to when I wrote you to come,” she confessed. “And then I was afraid to, for fear you'd come back here and start something. It did seem childish.”

“And it is childish,” Billy soothed her. “Joe can't do anything to me, and I don't believe he'd want to. You know he always was like a tornado for a few minutes when he lost his temper. But I'm as good a man as he is if it did come to a clash. I go armed around here, besides. I'm much less worried about what Joe might try to do to me in a spasm of jealousy than I am about other things that go on here at Helmcken Island. Hang it all, Mart, if it was childish to warn me of Joe Molter at Campbell River wasn't it even more so to hire a boat and come all the way here to tell me now?”

“It seemed a good deal more significant when I heard that your friend Markham had been murdered.” She shivered a little. “I am afraid of Joe Molter. There's no use talking, Bill. I know how devilish he looked and acted. He'd do anything. Maybe he mistook Markham for you. If you're going to be in danger of that sort I want to be with you.”

“You wouldn't scandalize everybody by staying here with me offhand?” Billy smiled down at her.

“There's a Church of England minister at Rock Bay,” Martha whispered against his breast.

Billy stood with one arm around her, stroking her hair. He was sorely tempted.

“You'd want me to drop this job,” he muttered. “And I can't. Don't you sabe what it means to me, Martha, to clear myself of this wreck and robbery? They're trying to hang this bullion theft on me now. There's more than just a jealous man camping on my trail. I've got to go through with this, or at least try.”

“I'd like you to quit, Bill,” she said softly, after a brief silence. “I'll have my heart in my mouth until it's over. Do you imagine it's nice for me to think of them holding an inquest on you? But I'm not yellow. I'll do whatever you say. If I can't help I won't try to hinder. If you'll only be careful.”

Stone stood for a little while holding her close to him. Then said he:

“You put me in a hard place, old girl, and I've got to lay down the law to you. You have to go back to Campbell River. I have to go on with this. If, in a week or ten days, I get nowhere, and the people who are backing me are satisfied, I'll quit. We'll get married and I'll make a fresh start somewhere. We have waited long enough haven't we?”

“Yes,” Martha murmured agreement. “Too long. I've only begun to realize that. Oh, Bill, I don't like it. I don't want to be a cry baby. But I'm afraid—for you. I don't like it—I don't.”

“Neither do I, much,” Stone admitted. “But it's got to be done.”

“From out the mesh of fate our heads we thrust,
We can't do what we would, but what we must.”

Martha quoted plaintively.

“Ho, Stone!”

A voice from the Arethusa's rail broke in. Billy put his head out the hatch. The Rock Bay constable beckoned him.

“Inquest's on. Come up. You're wanted.”

“I've got to go,” he said to Martha. “Go straight home. Don't worry. Any time I have a chance I'll send you word.”

“You'll be careful, won't you, Bill?” She clung to him for a second.

“Careful!” he echoed. “Careful is my middle name. I'll be so darned careful I'll side-step my own shadow. You'll see. I'll come out right side up. I always do. So long, honey bunch.”

He turned at the head of the ship's ladder. The launch was swinging free of the Wasp, the exhaust of her motor beating like a snare drum. She bore off southward. And there wasn't even a wave of Martha's hand. Stone turned to face along the Arethusa's deck. Joe Molter stood looking along the rail at him. Joe nodded.

“Kinda tough thing to happen Markham,” he said casually. “Wonder how it happened. Kinda creepy to think of somebody around here bumping him off like that. Helmcken'll get a bad rep if this rough stuff keeps on.”

“Liable to,” Stone returned. Fresh from that conversation with Martha Powell he felt a quick stirring of anger against Molter for so disturbing her, a touch of contempt for a man who blustered and threatened an absent lover. But he no more than exchanged those brief sentences than he was called before the empaneled jury backed by a little knot of witnesses, all clustered around the Wasp's dinghy with the dead man huddled in the bottom.

How little one man counted in the general scheme, Billy Stone reflected as he listened to the inquiry. Forward the great crane swung slings of dripping cargo up from where the divers worked in the submerged holds. The winches puffed and whirred. A tug lay by pouring black smoke from her funnel, getting ready to tow away two heavy-loaded scows. Industry proceeded in spite of death and disaster. Markham's life, his own, the life of any single one there counted for so little in the unremitting mass effort—yet the mass effort was made up of individual efforts. That was why, Billy surmised, a man couldn't lie down on the job without a penalty—because of the mass pressure behind him, unseen, perhaps never even comprehended, but a driving force always. Always something to be lived up to, to be carried on countless little necessary jobs making up the one big job—which was nothing less than life itself.

He roused out of this abstraction. The coroner summoned him by name. He was sworn. He identified his partner. Gave a full account of his own movements.

The Rock Bay constable took him in hand for a minute or two. Afterward Billy stood by, alert. Man by man they testified, not to anything of far-reaching importance, but to simple facts. No one remotely connected with the affair, having acquaintance with the dead man, was overlooked. The watch that saw and rescued the masterless boat; the wharfinger from Salmon Bay who saw Markham bring Stone to the steamer and go away in the Wasp alone; Molter, the Swede and Perez, who saw him last alive—who in fact conversed with Markham on their own float late the evening before. The constable had them all tabbed. He put scores of questions. None shed light on either the nature or motive of the killing, nor gave the faintest clew to a possible murderer. That remained a blank. No one even hazarded a guess. In the end the only possible verdict was rendered by the jury: “Death by wounding at the hands of some person or persons unknown.”

Only when it was over did Stone realize that neither the mate nor the constable had once mentioned the bow and arrow. Why? It was an important point. He got the constable's ear and asked him. That worthy shrugged his shoulders. He glanced about to see that no one was within hearing.

“Don't do to get romantic,” said he in a low tone. “Take a tip from me. Keep that arrow stuff dark for the present. Might 'a' been a knife. If it was a bowman——”

He spread his hands in a gesture of indecision.

“Keep your weather eye peeled around here, Stone,” he concluded quietly. “You don't tell all you know. Neither do I. There's a few queer kinks to this whole business. You going to stick around Helmcken?”

“Yes,” Stone informed him curtly.

“All right,” the constable nodded. “I'm comin' back to-morrow to talk things over with you.”

Markham's body was wrapped in a canvas, lowered to the police launch for shipment to Seattle. The blood-stained dinghy was dropped astern of the Wasp. And as Billy prepared to follow overside he paused by the Arethusa's rail, his eye caught by the sharp bow the green speedster showing from under its canvas housing. Markham had been right—the craft Billy had found hauled up in the cove was the one that now stood in chocks on the deck. But he couldn't establish any connection. The green boat might be an implement of piracy; it might be a perfectly innocent part of the Arethusa's equipment. It was merely another tantalizing angle of affairs. He stood looking at it, wondering if it would be prudent to quiz a deck hand, or perhaps the mate, about this green packet.

And while he hesitated by the rail a short, thick-bodied man in blue trousers and khaki shirt, a benevolent-looking individual with the butt of an unlighted cigar clamped in one corner of his mouth, sidled up, laid elbows on the rail and appeared to gaze earnestly down into the green depths overside. In reality he was addressing Billy Stone without looking at him, speaking in a very discreet tone out of one corner of his mouth.

“Don't pay any attention to me at all,” he said. “I'm here on the same lay you are—tryin' to get a line on these pirates for the insurance people, see? I sneak around in the green speeder at night now an' then. Bumped your partner in the dinghy the other night. That was me. You wanta keep close watch this end of the island. That's where them fake lights is worked from. Watch out they don't get you.”

“Who?” Billy muttered.

“Like to know myself,” the man answered. “I'd know it all then.”

“What about your arching mate?” Billy asked.

“Got nothin' on him yet. But nobody's barred in this game. Blind alley so far. Cinch he didn't kill Markham. I see the watch wake him up, and the man hadn't been dead more'n half an hour then. Look. You got a police whistle?”

“No.”

“I'll drop one by my foot. You pick it up, after I go. Case you get in a mix-up and need help. Blow one long, two short, and I'll get to you if I can. She'll sound half a mile. If you hear that signal from me hop to it as fast as you can, because I'll be needin' help darned bad. Get the idea?”

“Yes,” Billy answered—a little dubiously. It sounded plausible enough, and it was more than likely that the underwriters would have several strings to their bow. But it might also be a trap. Billy couldn't help being suspicious of everything and everybody.

There was a faint tinkle in the scuppers. The man strolled forward. Stone looked down. A bit of bright metal glistened. He moved sidewise. After a few seconds he picked it up, put it in his pocket and went down a rope ladder to the Wasp. Molter and his partner had nodded and gone as soon as the inquest ended. Billy looked at the nickel-plated police whistle when he got aboard and wondered if he had found an ally. Or if part of the Arethusa crowd did have some connection with those wrecks and were craftily preparing a deadfall of some sort for him. The mate was almost too convincing with his demonstration of archery to the Rock Bay constable and his story of being shot at from the shore. Certainly he had two arrows of the same sort as were shot at Billy in the woods. It was all damnably puzzling, exasperating.

From the spot where the Mandarin had struck and afterward sunk to where the Manchu lay beached was a matter of two hundred feet. Between, a cleft in the rocky shore seemed to offer a mooring for the Wasp out of the sweep of the big eddy that made the Arethusa strain at her cables. Into this nook Billy headed his launch. He had no desire to go back to Molter's bay. Here he was on the spot where things had happened and where, he had an unreasoning conviction, they might happen again before long.

With the Wasp swinging between two anchor lines so as to scantily clear the rocks at low tide Billy lay down on his berth to consider his next move. For the life of him he couldn't see any positive action indicated. There was no clew that led anywhere or pointed to a single man. Nothing but mere conjecture. All he could do was to watch and prowl, wait his chance.

He fell into a doze. When he wakened from an hour or two of fitful napping the sun had dropped behind the ragged backbone of Vancouver Island. Billy sat in the cockpit with a cup of tea. The evening hush lay heavy as a fog. Not a voice sounded, not a solitary gear clanked on the salvage ship. The eastern mainland rose from dusky-green slopes to rocky palisades, beyond which loomed tall peaks shining with a rosy tinge in the afterglow. Smells from the forest drifted on imperceptible airs. It was very beautiful with a holy sort of peace that charmed Billy Stone into momentary forgetfulness.

He presently roused himself out of that. Certain aspects of nature, the forest and those majestic mountain ranges and the cool green sea hurrying in its channel might be lovely indeed, but the works of man as lately demonstrated on and about Helmcken had a decidedly evil cast. And he had to do something about that, besides sit and admire scenery. There was a matter which he thought that he would attend to that very evening.

He put his revolver in one pocket, a fairly powerful but compact electric flash light in the other, and went ashore in the dinghy. The dark stains in the bottom gave him a queer feeling for a moment, a distinctly unpleasant feeling. Once on shore he passed through the thicket and bordering trees into the shingle-bolt slashing and so struck the rude trail that led up to the other end of the island.

For the time he was not so much concerned with wrecks and wreckers, with murder and mystery, as he was with himself and Martha Powell. He had been brooding more or less on that for several hours, and the more he thought the more resentful he grew at Molter's outburst which had frightened Martha so. Direct, outspoken, aboveboard in everything, Billy felt an overwhelming desire to tell Joe Molter that caveman stuff with a girl was out of date. He was headed for Molter's camp for that specific purpose.

But he changed his mind. Halfway up Helmcken, in the gathering shadows, he stopped, sat down on a log. What was the use? He wasn't angry with Molter. Merely irritated, annoyed. Molter had made his wild declarations to Martha. He was not likely to repeat them. He knew Joe's explosive, ungovernable temper; had in fact wondered sometimes at its manifestations when they were youngsters together. And he had liked Joe in spite of his occasional spasms of fury. Billy wasn't afraid of Molter because he was not afflicted with fear of anything in the shape of a man. But he did realize that for him to broach such a subject to Joe would almost surely lead to a direct clash. Better to pass it up this time.

So he reasoned. Also the thought struck him that with the slow-gathering dusk he made a fine mark sitting there in the edge of the open. He didn't become at all uneasy, but motives of prudence urged him to caution. He had Markham's memory to suggest that caution did not come amiss anywhere or at any time, on Helmcken. So he moved quietly back into a screen of brush. There he waited until dark made an archer's aim uncertain. Then he decided that he would camp on the point outside the two cabins and keep watch.

He fingered the police whistle in his pocket. Would its shrill blast bring help if he needed help? From whom and from where? Or would that signal bring a hornets' nest about his ears? In the mood of that moment one possibility seemed as likely as the other.

If he could just get hold of one real thread in this tangled skein! He wondered how much longer he would grope, quite literally, in the dark.

CHAPTER XV.

The Underground Chamber.

Seated on the same mossy rock where he and Markham had kept vigil not so long before, Billy felt the chill and gloom of night creep into his soul rather than into his bones. To sit alone in the edge of a brooding forest with the sea making faint mysterious noises in its tidal race and darkness hanging like a shroud about him is not a joyful occupation for any normal man. Dim racial memories quicken in him; old ancestral impressions of fearsome things questing in the dark. When in addition he has a real sense of personal danger haunting him his nerves are apt to tighten, his hearing grow abnormally sensitive. He becomes, by proxy, his savage forbear of a forgotten generation, caught in the forest by night and listening warily for the saber-tooth tiger nosing his trail in the dark.

Thus not a leaf stirred nor a bough scraped nor any little lapping of water by the shore but came with uncanny distinctness to Billy Stone's ears. And by midnight sheer inaction, pure nerve strain, made it impossible for him to sit still. He began to move very softly across the point in the direction of the Arethusa. He would stir his blood and settle his mind by a reconnaissance of the whole lower end of the island. As well that, futile as it might be, as sitting still like Micawber.

Halfway between his abandoned roost and the log cabin he froze against the base of a tree in brush shoulder high. He had heard a noise, faint, indefinable as to cause or direction. Still as the dark forest itself he waited. The clear evening sky had grown hazy with clouds. Only a slight glimmer of reflected light from the sea lane enabled any sort of vision whatever. And in this gloom Billy strained eyes and ears to an ultimate reward.

He had stopped just short of the comparative open about the two cabins and now across his narrow field of view certain dim shapes seemed to move slowly. The subdued noise he had heard and could still hear at intervals was the cautious tread of feet. Whether one or more persons he couldn't tell. There was only an indistinguishable moving blur, shadowy but in motion. He was quite positive of that.

They passed almost immediately from view. Men who prowled by night on lower Helmcken had a vital interest for Billy Stone. Risk or no risk he must follow them, learn who they were, what they did, why they stole through the forest like nocturnal animals.

He moved stealthily. Ahead he could hear slight sounds of the others' progress. They were distancing him but he dared not hurry. Haste meant betraying noise. He took a pace or two and listened, another pace or two and listened again. Eventually all sound ahead of him ceased. He stopped.

The formless shape of the log cabin showed before him. Was that the destination of these nighthawks? What rendezvous could it be they held there?

There was only one mode of learning. He went on. Drawing nearer he got down on all fours, crawled even, until he could touch the wall of the cabin under the paneless east window. There he lay listening breathlessly. His guess had been correct. Whoever they were they had business in that deserted cabin. He could hear movements, scrapings. Whatever they did was done without speech. Honest men, Stone reflected sardonically, do not prowl silently in unlighted houses after dark. His heart quickened. His mind took cognizance of various possibilities, modes of action, to find out who they were and what they were about without betraying himself as the watcher. Foolhardy to break in on them. Better wait. Luck might be with him for once.

He waited. Sound ceased. The night hush held the spot so jealously and so long that Stone was tempted to believe himself the victim of his own imagination. Then a faint scuffling within the cabin that continued for several minutes. After that a man's body loomed, scarcely discernible at one corner of the cabin. Then another and a third. They melted into the night one behind the other, each stooped a little as if he bore some burden.

For one instant the desire to flash his light on them tugged at Stone. He had the torch in one hand, his thumb on the button, his revolver gripped in the other. But he desisted. Better first explore that cabin. There must be something important to be discovered in there. If there was aught to draw those prowlers they would return. If not that night then another.

He lay quiet for half an hour. Then he crept to the door. It gave to his fumble at the wooden latch. Once within he took to his hands and knees again and with the torch shaded so that it cast only a round spot on the floor and no gleam could be reflected from the walls he began a systematic exploration of the floor. The scuffling sounds had been low. Back and forth he moved until he had covered the sixteen-foot-square area save the space under the decrepit bedstead in one corner upon which rested a torn, mildewed mattress. Searching beneath this his hands encountered loose soil, which his flash light showed him had been freshly disturbed. He pawed and scraped, burrowed his fingers in the loose earth, encountered something hard. He swept the loam aside until he reached a depth of six inches. Then he bared flat iron. Moving still more earth and gradually baring this surface he laid clear a square of boiler plate with a ring handle. Tapping of knuckles gave a hollow sound. He tugged at the ring and lifted the iron sheet clear of a square hole.

For a depth of three feet it was cribbed with timber. Below that stood walls of solid rock. Stone stared down into a shaft three feet square, ten feet in depth. It was like a well, down one side of which a ladder ran. He could see the floor and an opening leading thence ten or twelve feet below his vantage point.

Without an instant's hesitation he let himself down. Playing the light below, carrying his gun ready for he knew not what, with every nerve in his body tight as a fiddle string, Stone descended.

He found himself in the mouth of a tunnel cut through solid granite. It ran toward the shore, dipping down at a moderate incline. His light picked out the way. For fifty feet, a hundred, two hundred almost, he followed and came at last into a chamber twelve feet across hewn out of solid rock, and stood there in amazement.

For it seemed to him that of a certainty he had entered the cavern of the Forty Thieves, with all the equipment of modern science and industry suborned to their unlawful ends.

He guessed that this room stood at or about the level of high tide. Another tunnel, man-high and fairly wide dipped down under the sea. Stone traversed it a little way until his feet touched water. He marked the pulsating rise and knew that the tide was on the flood. He went back to the storeroom, power house, magazine. It was all these things. He stood in the center casting his beam over the separate items, cataloguing in wonder.

Along the tunnel that ran seaward there was stretched a pair of lead-insulated electric cables leading away from a switchboard that was in turn connected up to a storage battery. Likewise along this passage and out—to the channel, he surmised—ran a quarter-inch flexible steel rope wound on a drum with a handle like a small winch—an arrangement very much like that of a steering cable on a boat. For other items there were tools, a box half full of sticks of sixty-per-cent dynamite, a complete diving suit with all its equipment, air pump and hose and signal rope.

Lastly, but almost first in importance to Billy Stone because it verified the significance of all the rest, was a small wooden box which he recognized. There were several others, but the end of this one he remembered very well. He had examined it himself when it was being lowered into the Mandarin's strong room at Skagway with more than casual interest. If he had not known it, the name of the consignee lettered in black, “U. S. Assay Office, Seattle, Wash.,” would have told its own tale. The lids of all had been forced. Billy looked into the Mandarin box. It was still half full of small canvas bags. He opened one. Yes, the gold was there—part of the loot at least.

The modus operandi, all but a few unimportant details, flashed clear to Stone. He knew enough about mechanics to guess that from this secret chamber those false running lights were raised and lowered, flashed off and on. Electricity and some mechanical contraption operated by that steel rope and winch. That was obvious. The tunnel gave egress under the sea. A diver could reach either wreck unseen. He could walk the bottom without risk and do his nefarious work at his leisure.

So then, here was the wreckers' nest, and all the tools of their trade.

With that Billy realized that he was in a very deadly trap indeed if those pirates returned while he was underground. He knew enough now. He could trap them in their own rendezvous—once he was out and they were in.

But if they caught him in there. Well, he had Markham for an object lesson—and he did not know how many men, nor whom, might be involved in this craftily designed undertaking. He did know that from any of them he could expect short shrift.

He moved quickly to the foot of the ladder, eager now to be aboveground, all at once a little apprehensive. Life had never looked so good to him as it did at that moment. The key to a deadly mystery, his own rehabilitation in his chosen career, the recovery of the plunder—he held it all in the hollow of his hand once clear of that pit. And he wondered briefly as he paused to listen at the foot of the ladder why he should at that moment feel the deadly implication that he might not get out.

Above him the silence and the dark. He snapped off his torch, climbed the ladder, listened again, shoved the iron cover into place, drew the earth back over it.

Then as his head and shoulders emerged from beneath the rude bedstead the darkness of the cabin interior became for him a blackness in which he floated for one sickening instant before unconsciousness freed him from a blast of pain that seemed fairly to shatter his head.

CHAPTER XVI.

Seven Bells in the Graveyard Watch.

Stone came back to consciousness in the characteristic fashion of a man who has been clubbed insensible; that is, he opened his eyes in very much the same bewilderment that affects one untimely awakened from a sound sleep. Only there was in addition to mental confusion an intolerable ache in the back of his head. His body felt as if it had been beaten with a club.

His head cleared in an instant. He recognized his surroundings. He was back in the rock chamber, back in the thieves' den. Electric light from two bulbs shed a glow over the details he had picked out by the gleam of his torch. Feeling his hands cramped beneath his body as he lay flat on his back Billy essayed to move. Unavailing—his wrists were lashed tight. So were his ankles. He twisted himself over on his side and so faced Joe Molter sitting on a box and staring at him with a curious blend of derision and triumph. When their eyes met Molter's face broke swiftly into an ugly smile.

Billy looked at him. He hadn't quite expected that. If it had been the bowman off the Arethusa he would not have been surprised. And still—at any rate there sat Molter and he seemed wholly at his ease. The inference was obvious. Perez and the big Swede, whom Markham had asserted was a diver, would be confederates. They were the three figures he had seen stealing up to and away from the log house. He continued to look at Molter. There didn't seem to be anything to say.

“Have a good sleep?” Molter inquired sardonically. “You'll have a better one by and by.”

“Think you can get away with it?” Billy tried to make his tone casual.

Molter didn't answer. He continued to stare. There was a strange fixity in his gaze, as if he saw something besides Billy Stone.

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“Dog draw, stable stand,
Back beyond, bloody hand.”

He droned the words twice, and yet a third time.

The unfamiliar phrases, curious terms, seemed meaningless to Billy—for a second. Then he recalled them as a couplet in an old work on medieval archery which he had once read. It dealt, in the chapter that carried that blunt rhyme, with the drastic penalties bestowed by the early Normans on a Saxon suspected of hunting the king's deer. If the man was caught following a hunting dog, set in the pose of an archer, with venison on his back or the blood of butchery on his hands he was hanged forthwith to the nearest tree with his own bowstring!

And Molter was mumbling this.

“You would butt in,” Molter growled presently. “I knocked you on the head and chucked you back below. But I'd rather have hunted you in the forest. The good yew bow and the cloth-yard shaft!”

His eyes glowed with a sudden fire.

“Damn your soul!” he cried fiercely. “I'll get you all! All! Down to yon upstart archer who stands on the bridge of a ship and shoots my seal. Broad-head for broad-head I'll match him if he'll come ashore. You”—he snorted contemptuously—“you and your diver partner! I nicked him with a good, clean shot at daylight.”

He stopped, cocked his head on one side in an attitude of listening. Billy could hear sounds in the passage echoing hollowly. The grim expression faded suddenly from Molter's face.

“Come on; look what I got,” he said in an entirely different tone. “Lord, you fellows are slow!”

The Swede and Perez advanced into the light. They looked startled at sight of Stone bound on the floor.

“Caught him crawling out of the shaft,” Molter chuckled. “Tapped him on the bean and here he is.”

“What'll we do with him?” Perez drawled. “Why didn't you tap him for keeps?”

“Oh, we'll leave him here with the works when we take the last of the stuff out,” Molter said. He shrugged his heavy shoulders. “He'll be dead safe—down here.”

The Swede looked down at Stone, across at Molter.

“By God, Ay am seek of dis keel, keel!” he said thickly. There was disgust, a trace of something like horror in his tone and on his face. “You are a dam' butcher, Joe.”

“What the hell!” Perez grumbled. “We got to protect ourselves. If these guys will butt in!”

“Dat Markham he don't butt in,” the Swede muttered resentfully. “He don't see nothin', hear nothin', know nothin'. Joe keel heem for fon—dat same crazy fon Ay tank why he shoot the arrow at the Arethusa's mate. You like to keel with the bow. Ay tank you go crazy, Molter. You keel an' keel until the whole dam contray is hunt dis island anch by anch.”

“You started it, Ole, by bumping off that first diver,” Molter laughed.

“Ay was scare when he come on me by the hole,” the Swede muttered. “I bump him before Ay tank. Ay want dat gold, but Ay don't wan keel no more man.”

“Never mind. Don't be scared,” Molter told him easily. “We'll take the last of this stuff this time. We can divide it up tonight and you can take your share and beat it, Ole, if you're getting cold feet. Back to Sweden and the flaxy-haired dames for yours, eh? I'm going to stay around here. It's good hunting.”

The Swede shuddered. Perez grinned broadly. Molter laughed outright. Something seemed to amuse him vastly.

“I'll be back in a second,” Molter said, rising from his seat on the box. “There's just about a good load for one man, but you can split it in two if you like. We'll go together. And we'll seal up the tomb for keeps this time.”

He bent a malicious grimace on Billy Stone and stepped into the tunnel that ran undersea. Stone turned his gaze on the other two. They paid no attention to him. There was nothing to be gained by talk. He was trapped. They had him. It was his life or theirs. And though he was sure the Scandinavian was horror-stricken, aghast at this new turn in which both Molter and Perez held a man's life so very cheaply, Billy knew an appeal was useless. The Swede might be inclined to mercy in that revulsion of feeling, but he wouldn't dare. Billy lay still, looking on. If he was not butchered like a sheep before they left, he might have a fighting chance.

Perez and his companion emptied the wooden box into a stout pack sack muttering brief comment on whether the load should be packed singly or divided between them. Both men were bent over a little. Their backs were turned to the tunnel.

Something flashed silently in the rock room. Perez straightened with a cry, clutching at his middle. Stone stared at the sight with a fascination bordering on horror. Perez was transfixed by an arrow. The yellow-and-black-and-scarlet shaft with a white cock feather that Stone knew and hated now had buried itself in him to the feathered shaftment. As he spun around and around uttering fearful sounds Billy saw the steel broad-head stand clear of his ribs.

And as the Swede stood hesitating, open mouthed, another arrow, aimed higher, struck him fair in the throat. It passed through, smashed against the rock wall, and clattered to the floor. The Swede staggered. His hands went involuntarily to his neck.

Perez sank to his knees. His hands pawed feebly. There was a bloody froth on his lips. But the Swede was game. Perhaps his viking forefathers had died lunging at the enemy with arrows in their throats. He rushed at the tunnel mouth. Another broad-head met him. Stone heard the bowstring twang, the curious sound of the arrow as it drove into the man's breast. He heard Molter laugh.

The Swede's knees buckled under him. He wilted, cursing hoarsely with his last breath, fumbling with uncertain hands for some weapon in his pocket. But he was dead before he could get it free. Perez too had ceased his spasmodic struggling. He sprawled face down on the floor, the barb of the cloth-yard shaft standing straight up out of his back like a miniature spear.

And Molter stepped out of the tunnel into the light, a quiver in one hand, a short, beautifully finished yew bow in the other. He stood head up and chest thrown out, looking first at one dead man and then at the other, resting the lower nock of his weapon on his toe. Then in a terrible sing song voice he began to chant:

“Oh, Robin Hood was a merry, merry wight,
Who slew his enem-e-e-e
With a clothyard shaft from the good yew bow
Beneath the greenwood tree.
Ho! Ho!
Under the greenwood tree.”

Then he laughed. He leaned on his bow and shook with laughter—a hollow mockery of ribald mirth.

“Dead men tell no tales and divide no prizes,” he chuckled to himself. “To the victor belongs the spoil. Good old Horrible.”

He patted the bow; took out a handkerchief and diligently polished the glistening wood. He placed the lower tip under his instep and bent the bow to release the string from the upper nock. Then he stood it carefully against the wall, and callously set about retrieving his arrows.

His eyes fell upon Stone as if he had but remembered him. He frowned. Then he seated himself on a box between the two murdered men, with a bloody arrow in his hand, and began to talk to Billy. And it struck Stone with an inward chill that he was not listening to a normal man gone bad, but to a homicidal maniac afflicted with an archery complex.

“They were all against me,” Molter said boastfully, “and I've beaten them all. If I could find a few men like myself we'd take the damned country. But I guess I'm the last of the bowmen. And I have to keep it dark. Hunt 'em when they don't see. Hunt 'em in the green forest. Hunt 'em on the shore. I've got one more to get on Helmcken. He thinks he's a bowman but he isn't. If he walks the bridge at sunrise I'll drive a shaft through his liver.” Molter's voice rose to a snarl. “What business has that brass-buttoned archer shooting my seal on my beach?”

He muttered away to himself for a minute. Then he strode up and down the rock chamber, back and forth three steps and a turn, three steps and a turn, like a caged leopard, mumbling unintelligible phrases. At last he sat down again and put his head in his hands. He kept this posture so long that Stone thought he had fallen asleep.

When he looked up again there was a totally different expression on his face. The wild-eyed look had vanished. He gazed down at Stone with a calm, satisfied air.

“I won't waste steel and wood and good turkey feathers on you,” he said with a touch of contempt. “You're here and you're damned well tied, and you can stay here to keep this carrion company until you all rot together. You couldn't get out even if you were loose. When I leave I'll pile rocks over the iron door and set a match to the old cabin. I've got the plunder—enough to last me a long time—in spite of you. If I ever need more maybe I'll come back and hoist the running lights again and put another Ocean Service boat ashore. I can easily get a diver who knows how to handle giant powder to walk the bottom and blow in a plate so he can get at the strong room. And after he's got it for me I'll add his bones to the collection. It was handy to have been a skipper on the O. S. S. once. I know the ropes. I'll beach the Ming for them some day. They beached me. But I have a good stake now. I can hunt and hunt—with the bow. A good yew bow, a quiver full of broad-heads, a flagon of ale, and a maiden fair. Ah, she can't refuse me now. You fool,” he frowned darkly, “you should have kept away from here!”

He bent over Stone, felt of the knotted cords. A grin of satisfaction spread over his face, to be darkened immediately by a look of hatred. He stood up and kicked Stone savagely, with a muttered curse.

“I wanted to catch you in the open and put a broad-head through you!” he gritted. “There would have been some satisfaction in that.”

He turned to the wooden boxes and examined them. Satisfied that they were empty he belted on the quiver that bristled with feathered shafts, shouldered the pack sack with the last of the gold and took up his bow. His footsteps died away up the rock passage.

Lying there, Billy expected that any moment the lights would blink out and leave him in utter darkness with two dead men for company. The full realization of his plight brought a clammy sweat out on his face.

But the lights shone. Whether Molter would come back or not he did not know. The man might be seized by any sort of vagary, Billy surmised. His first task was to be free. Even with his hands tied behind his back and his ankles lashed he could move his body. He wriggled into a sitting posture, strained and struggled to get his hands before him. If he had been a contortionist he might have accomplished that; for the ordinary man it was an impossible feat. He tugged and twisted in an effort to work loose. All in vain. A sailor had tied those knots. They would never come unfastened under strain.

Stone ceased struggling. He was afraid with a fear no direct menace of physical danger had ever brought on him. And he knew that to lose his head and grow shaky with panic was fatal now. He could scream his soul out in agony and no one would hear his cries. He had to think himself out of this mess. And he thanked God for the light—even while he wondered if Molter had left the light burning for a purpose or had merely forgotten to add the horror of darkness.

So he sat looking about for something sharp and found nothing that he could reach or use. Until as a last resort he rolled himself over to Perez, who lay nearest, and fumbled and touched the dead man's pockets for a knife. He failed there, and hitched himself over to the Scandinavian. Here he had better luck. Lying with his back to the Swede so that he could use his fingers he located a knife and again thanked God—this time that Molter had neglected to search his victims.

It took him minutes to work the knife free, half an hour of fumbling to get a blade open, less than ten seconds to cut the cord; slashing both his wrists in the blind process so that blood ran down his hands and made them slippery. But he stood at last free of his lashings.

His revolver and electric flash light were gone. But he did find a loaded automatic in the hip pocket the Swede had grasped as he fell. Armed with that Stone hurried up the tunnel to the foot of the ladder. The trap door was in place. He put his shoulder against it and heaved. Solid, unyielding; his greatest effort did not budge it a fraction of an inch. He understood, he thought, why Molter was careless of the lights—what he meant by “hermetically sealing the tomb.” Above that half inch of iron doubtless by now lay hundreds of pounds of rock. He knew at last that Molter had made good his word, because as he stood on the top rung with his shoulder against the piece of boiler plate he felt it slowly growing warm. Molter had fired the cabin!

Billy went back to the room, examined every article in it. The dynamite was useless; there was neither fuse nor cap. There was no tool of any service against stone or iron. He stripped naked and walked down the seaward tunnel under water until his heart was ready to burst and he was within an ace of drowning before he got back. He couldn't use the diving suit. A man couldn't fit the breastplate and helmet on himself and work the air alone. From any angle that he viewed the situation he was trapped in that rock chamber with two dead men for company. He had no food, no water—unless he drank brine. Already his throat was dry. A pleasant prospect!

Billy sat down again to think. It was an effort. There was a horrible suggestiveness about those two inert figures that disturbed him. Absently he looked at his watch. Three thirty. Seven bells in the graveyard watch! It was daylight—out in the world of green forest and singing birds and running water.

He leaped to his feet with an exclamation. Why hadn't he thought of that before. Seizing the handle of the small winch that carried the steel rope running out to sea he began to turn. He wound until it came to a heavy pull and a dead stop; waited five minutes and reversed the winding. He could tell by the greater effort required at a given point that some unseen mechanism was operating. Doggedly he kept this up. Hour after hour, it seemed to him, he turned that handle. His palms blistered with the friction. The blisters broke and the raw skin stung and burned, his back added an ache to the ache in his bruised head, and still he turned.

And the reward of his wits and dogged persistence came at last when he heard a slow clump—clump and looked up heavy eyed from his labor to see the circular, Cyclopean eye of a dripping diver regarding him from the seaward tunnel's mouth!

CHAPTER XVII.

Captain William Stone.

Billy sat down on a box. He didn't need to be told that the diver came from the Arethusa. His plan had worked. They had seen whatever mechanism and framework Molter and his confederates had devised rising and falling in mid channel and they had traced it to its source by the run of the steel cable. For a few seconds the sense of relief made him shaky. His knees trembled and he became acutely aware of the soreness of his hands, the dull ache in his head where Molter had struck him, and the great weariness that crept over his body.

That tremulous reaction passed. The diver stood like some grotesque copper-headed idol. Billy could see his eyes behind the round window. He carried a diver's underwater lamp in one hand and a hatchet in the other. His air hose and signal rope trailed away behind him like a pair of tentacles. He spoke to the man. Then, realizing the difficulty of hearing his words through that deep-sea armor, he made signs for him to unscrew his faceplate.

The diver advanced a step, fumbled at his helmet. The faceplate and glass came away in his hands. In the opening was framed a rotund face, bright-blue eyes, a stubby red mustache.

“By heck!” said he, looking down at the two dead men. “What's been goin' on here? How come? What's the big idea?”

“Get me out of here,” Billy said. “We can talk afterward.”

“How'd you get in,” the diver asked.

“Knocked down and dragged in,” Billy told him. “There's an opening into a tunnel in a log cabin ashore. I have an idea maybe it's burned, though.”

“She is. Saw her ablaze a while before daybreak. Regular Hell's Kitchen, this Helmcken Island. Some galoot started shooting arrows at the mate this morning. Spiked him in the arm, too. Mate's ashore with a bunch of men hunting him yet. And then this framework with lamps on it starts rising up and going down in the water. You worked that, eh?”

“It was the only chance. I figured they had this winch rigged to raise and lower those fake running lights. If I hoisted 'em up and down often enough somebody would see them and work along the cable and in here. Otherwise I was done for. What about the tunnel you came in? Can I make it out there? You could help me on with this suit. One good inflation ought to see me above water.”

“Uh-uh. Too far. You'd drown sure as hell,” the diver replied. “I'd better go up and have some of the crew locate that land opening. Where the old log shack stood, you say?”

“The opening was in the northeast corner,” Billy told him. “They'll probably find rocks piled over it. Then if they root around they'll find a square of boiler plate about five or six inches under the level of the dirt. Hurry. I'm kinda keen to see the sun once more. I'm hungry and thirsty, and I don't relish these dead men for company.”

“I don't blame you,” said the diver. “I'll get up and ring for full speed ahead. Here we go.”

He screwed the window of his helmet back into place and clump-clumped on his heavy leaden soles down the way he came. Billy heard him splash into the water. After that a silence in which he could almost hear the beating of his own heart.

Then he moved up to the shore end of the long tunnel and sat down at the foot of the ladder to wait.

The Rock Bay constable, the archer mate, the underwriter's representative on the wrecking job, the skipper of the Arethusa, flanked by half a dozen deck hands stood about the mouth of the shaft when Billy Stone climbed the ladder to stand blinking in the bright sunshine. The ground was still hot from the fire. They moved clear. It was good to be out in the clean air once more. He looked at the ring of inquiring faces.

“Well,” the skipper of the Arethusa broke the silence, “looks like you might have something sensational to talk about. Eh?”

Billy made concession to the weariness of his body by sitting down on a convenient stump.

“There's a tunnel leading to a room hollowed in the rock, where there is all the necessary apparatus for working those fake lights. There is a complete diver's outfit that I imagine was used to get into the Mandarin and the Manchu from the bottom.”

The skipper nodded.

“Sounds reasonable. We looked over that light rig before we took to following the cable. Very ingenious—and simple. Outfit anchored about ten feet below the surface. Pipe framework on a couple of logs. If a vessel passing over it fouled the thing it merely shoved aside. Electric cables to the lamps. Very ingenious indeed. How'd you get into their plant?”

Billy told them.

“Good work,” the skipper nodded again. “Our diver found a hole in the bottom of the Manchu that he swears was never made by a rock. The diver that went down on the Mandarin didn't live to tell what he found. You were there when we hauled him up. Markham was right.”

“The big Swede who dived for Molter killed Curry, I think, from something I heard said last night,” Billy related. “The bullion was in that room below, or most of it, until last night. They were packing it out when I sneaked in on them and they caught me. I have an idea you'll find most of that gold in or around Molter's camp. I think they were fixing to make their getaway with it. Only Molter spilled the beans. He was the bow-and-arrow man who killed Markham. He shot at me twice in the brush one day. I have one of the arrows aboard the Wasp. Last night—or early this morning—he killed both his partners—shot them with the bow in that place underground. He left me tied hand and foot to keep them company. I got loose and worked that light gear, hoping to attract your attention. That's all. That's the solution of the wrecks. Molter and Perez and the big Swede who was a diver. Two of 'em are dead as doornails. Down below.”

“Some detective work, I'll say.” The Arethusa's skipper turned to the stout, jovial-faced man who had dropped the police whistle for Billy the day of the inquest. “He beat you to it, Sullivan.”

The heavy-set man grinned.

“I've seen simpler cases of crime,” he observed. “I guess Stone deserves all the credit. He took long chances, and he was pretty lucky to get away with it. I had my suspicions. But he got results. I suppose you know,” he addressed Billy, “that the underwriters offered ten thousand dollars for the recovery of that gold bullion and the identification of the wreckers—if there were wreckers.”

“I didn't know,” Billy murmured. “They didn't offer it to me. I only knew I'd never walk a steamer's bridge again if it wasn't cleaned up. I knew I saw a steamer's running lights that night. So did my quartermaster—only he lied.”

“You'll get a clean sheet now,” the Arethusa's captain assured him. “By gad, you sure did take long chances with a hard gang. You ought to get a command.”

“All I want, right now,” Billy confessed wearily, “is something to eat and a sleep. But there's a job to be done yet. Look here.” He turned to the detective and the Rock Bay constable. “We'll have to get Molter. I think he's mad—in fact I'm sure of it. He's loose here somewhere, if he hasn't taken a boat and skipped with the plunder.”

“Don't worry about Molter.” The Rock Bay man grinned. “He sure is crazy, but we've got him. He tried to spike the mate here at sunrise this morning. And the mate—who is some punkins with a bow himself, I want to tell you—went ashore with some men and rounded him up; pinned him to a tree with an arrow through his shoulder. Whaddye know about that? Say, if anybody ever tackles me with a long bow and them broad-head arrows I'll move in a hurry, believe me. Yes, they've got Mr. Molter where he's harmless—chained to a mast aboard ship. Now, about this gold. That's important. You think it's around Molter's bolt camp?”

“I'm guessing it is,” Billy replied. “They were packing it away somewhere, last night. I'd try their camp. They felt pretty safe and they might have it up there, ready to be taken where they could spend it.”

The upshot was that after the constable and the detective had made a brief examination of the underground workings and what it held, they set off with a party to search Molter's camp for the loot. And the captain and mate took Billy Stone aboard the Arethusa.

The skipper went into his own quarters. The mate bore Stone company aft toward the dining saloon. And when they came by the after part of the ship Billy stopped to gaze for a moment at Joe Molter, handcuffs on his wrists, chained by one ankle to the butt of the mast. A deck hand stood by to keep watch over him.

They passed on.

“Man's insane—I should say that's clear,” the mate volunteered quietly.

“How did you come to go after him and get him?” Billy asked.

“That Rock Bay man told you. We had him cornered on a point. We were sneaking and he was watching for us when I got a lucky shot. You see, he drove a third arrow into the front of the wheelhouse this morning with a note tied around the shaft, challenging me to come ashore and shoot it out with him,” the mate concluded quietly. “And I went.”

Billy washed his sore hands and doctored them with salve. Then he ate, and lay down to get the sleep he needed so badly. But though his body was wishful for rest, his mind was too abnormally active to permit sleep. He lay on a berth in a shaded cabin dozing lightly, until he heard the unmistakable voice of the Rock Bay constable on deck. He went out to see what luck had brought them in the search, and discovered to his satisfaction that they had found the bullion, still intact in the canvas sacks, up at Molter's camp, dumped carelessly beneath the covers of Molter's bed.

Whereupon Billy returned to his berth, heaved a sigh of complete relief, and let himself slide peacefully off into dreamland.

 

The steamship Ming—rated the crack boat of the Ocean Service Alaska fleet—drove full speed up channel past Helmcken Island. The sun was shining. The sky was as blue as the proverbial maiden's eyes. The Ming did her seventeen knots per hour so easily that she seemed to glide through the water; an illusion quickly dispelled by a glance over her bows. Then the great white bone in her teeth showed her power.

“This,” said Captain William Stone to his wife, “is a very special privilege, d'ye know it, honey bunch, for a coastwise skipper to be allowed to take his wife with him on his maiden voyage? And there's the historic spot where all the excitement came off. You know, sometimes it hardly seems as if any of that crazy business really happened to me.”

Martha squeezed his arm. She had nothing to say that needed words, and that was her way of saying it. They stood for a minute on the rail along the main deck just under the bridge. Passengers, singly, in pairs and groups, sauntered along the promenade. Presently there halted near them a man of the type perhaps best described as a prosperous-looking merchant, probably retired and doing a little globe trotting. A great many such people made that Alaska trip on O. S. S. steamers during the summer, lured partly by the cool sea winds of the high latitudes and partly by the gorgeous scenic effects that begin on Puget Sound and reach their climax among the tidewater glaciers and famous gorges that border the inside passage to the Land of the Midnight Sun.

This gentleman eyed Captain Stone in his blue uniform and gold braid. Brass-bound men aboard ship appear to exercise an unholy fascination upon certain types of passengers. This tourist nodded genially to the captain. Also he began a conversation with the usual commonplaces. He remarked favorably upon the beauty of a highly diversified shore line. Finally, said he:

“Beautiful country and all that sort of thing. Extremely so. But tell me, captain, don't you officers who make this run all the time find it monotonous? Don't you get tired of going over the same ground?”

Billy shook his head and smiled. Monotonous? He looked at the green stretch of Helmcken alongside. He thought of the Manchu and the Mandarin, of Joe Molter as he saw him last—striding up and down the incurable ward of Steilacoom Asylum, happy in the delusion that he was Robin Hood and that his merry men would soon come to set him free, after which he would lead them once more to the green forest where with the good yew bow they would slay the king's deer to their hearts' content. Billy Stone recalled a number of other incidents in connection with night and narrow passes, the infinite variety of incidents that go to make up a watch on deck. Monotonous? He shook his head and smiled again. It was no use explaining to a landsman what it was that held a seaman to his calling.

“The romance has all gone out of a seafaring life,” the man continued. “I don't see how you fellows stand it; although I suppose a command is a good thing in itself. But you take such vessels as this. Like a floating hotel. Everything mechanical perfection. Every move is made on schedule. Port to port like a railroad train. Must be about the same as sitting in an office attending to business. Nothing ever happens.”

“Well, perhaps it's as well not to have too much excitement,” Billy observed dryly. “Operating a passenger ship is not classed as a sporting proposition—although sometimes it may be.”

“As a sporting proposition,” the gentleman laughed as he turned away, “I'd about as soon operate a street car.”

He passed on; a portly, well-fed, well-clothed person, with a portly, well-fed, well-clad female of the species on his arm. Billy looked after them thoughtfully. He looked across at Earl Ledge where the white water boiled over the sunken shark-tooth rocks. He looked back at Helmcken. And he smiled again.

Nothing ever happened!

The Mandarin rested in seventy fathoms for the codfish and red spanners to house in if they wished. The Manchu lay in a Seattle dry dock with steel riveting hammers clanging on her torn bilges. A half-point shift of the compass in close quarters, Billy reflected humorously, might make that rotund person change his mind about the monotony of life at sea.

Nothing ever happens! He looked down at Martha fondly. So far as he, Captain Billy Stone, master of the steamship Ming, was concerned, he hoped the clocklike regularity of that port-to-port schedule would never again be complicated by such matters as rose before him in a swift series of unbidden memory pictures when he looked back at Helmcken Island, now rapidly falling astern.