CHAPTER XX

IN WHICH MISS MARY BREWSTER SPEAKS HER MIND

Blind and helpless, gagged and bound, his eyes bandaged, Desmond felt himself lifted up and carried swiftly along. Presently he heard the sound of the sea and his bearers’ feet grinding on shingle. Then through his bandage he was conscious of a brilliant light. He was flung violently down and the cloth removed from his face.

Silhouetted against the garish light of an acetylene hurricane lamp in the cheaply furnished living-room of a seaside bungalow, Clubfoot stood before him. A hideous tweed cap pulled down until it rested on the tips of his large projecting ears lent him a horribly grotesque appearance. He looked like a great ape dressed in man’s clothes. Mary Brewster, trussed up even as Desmond was, reclined in a chair. She had lost her hat and her soft brown hair was disordered by the wind. Her small face, pale and piquant, was enigmatic in its absolute serenity.

“He has not got the jewels, either, Herr Doktor!” said a voice.

Desmond could not turn to see the speaker. He glanced down at the pocket of his overcoat where the packet had been. The parcel had vanished. It had certainly been there when they had set out to walk to the bungalow. Had that rascally pilot stolen it? It didn’t matter much now what had become of it.

Clubfoot snarled out an order in German. Rough hands brutally searched the Englishman’s clothes. Clubfoot looked on impassively.

“Nothing!” reported the voice.

“It must be there!” thundered Grundt, “unless one of you has stolen it.”

“The Herr Doktor was himself present when we seized the Englishman,” the voice protested. “The Herr Doktor knows that nothing was found.”

“Ungag them!” ordered Clubfoot. “And clear out! Warn the pilot to have the machine ready for instant departure!”

The order was obeyed, a door was softly closed, and Desmond nerved himself to face what he divined was to be the crucial ordeal of his career. Never had he been in so tight a place. It wanted hours to daylight, and he was bound and helpless in a lonely district in the hands of a ruthless and remorseless enemy.

“A false trail, eh?” said Grundt slowly, his nostrils twitching ominously. “You’d play tricks with me, would you, you dog? Do you know what I’m going to do with you, Okewood? I’m going to kill you, yes, and the girl as well!”

Desmond felt his throat grow dry. “Not the girl,” he said in a low voice. “She’s not even of the Service, Grundt!”

“It shall be a lesson to her to mind the company she keeps!” said Grundt grimly, and produced an automatic from his pocket. He bent to examine the magazine. Slowly he raised the pistol.

Then the girl spoke. “I shouldn’t do anything hasty!” she said. “Kill us and your career is at an end. You speak of retiring voluntarily. One shot and your retirement will be compulsory. And Stauber takes your place!”

Clubfoot recoiled. “Stauber!” he muttered, frowning.

“You’ve made a mess of things in England, Grundt,” the girl continued serenely. “Your employers, the big industrialists, granted you this last chance. It rests with you whether you give your employers your own version of this affair, or whether they take it from the English newspapers. Do you understand me?”

Clubfoot stared at her like a man hypnotized.

In the same business-like manner Mary Brewster proceeded: “Kill us and there’ll be such a rumpus that the echoes of it are bound to reach Germany. You can’t suppress murder in England, Grundt. You’ve missed your chance of getting the jewels, and what you’ve got to do now is to put up the best explanation you can. I know that you have the reputation of being the man that commands success. If you touch us, that reputation is gone forever, for, you can take it from me, the whole story, the true story, will then come out and you’ll be saddled with the greatest failure of your career. And your rival, Stauber, gets your job . . .”

“That Schafskopf!” muttered Grundt. He seemed half dazed by the vigour of the girl’s onslaught. Then, “What have you done with the jewels?” he roared suddenly, recovering himself.

“They’re out of your reach!” said Mary Brewster.

“But you’re not!” snarled Clubfoot. “And you shall tell me where they are. Herr Gott! You’re not the first woman whose tongue I’ve loosened!”

But it seemed to Desmond that, for all his bluster, much of Clubfoot’s wonted assurance had disappeared.

The girl never flinched. “Make the best of a bad job, Grundt,” she said. “Leave things as they are and return to Germany and you will hear no word from us to dispute or disprove any story you like to tell those who sent you. I repeat: You can kill us, you can torture us, but you’ll never recover the jewels. Make up your mind to that and go—while you can!”

The hairy hand that clutched the pistol faltered and slowly dropped to the cripple’s side. Of a sudden he seemed to have grown older. For a full minute he stood and glowered at Desmond—the girl he ignored. As the two men faced each other, it seemed to the Englishman as though the scroll of the years were unrolled and that, like him, Grundt was telling over in his mind the many bouts which these two had fought out between them. Then slowly, listlessly, the great hand went up and he thrust the Browning into his breast pocket.

“I told your Chief, Okewood,” he said in his deep, stern voice, “that this would be my last case. Though he has taken this trick, I think I may let my decision stand. But tell him this from me—that, though he has gained this trick, he has not won the game. The cards have been against me throughout. I have played a losing hand, dealt me by the blinded, besotted fools”—his voice hissed with anger—“who, in overthrowing my master, destroyed our country. But do not forget that in politics nothing is stable, that the enemies of to-day may be the friends of to-morrow, and vice versa, Okewood—vice versa!”

He broke off, and for an instant the dark, expressive eyes rested on the young man’s face.

“Do not fall into the error of believing that I am grown sentimental in my old age, my young friend,” he resumed. “I have always been a Realpolitiker, and in this instance I have bowed my head to the unanswerable logic of your companion just as in different circumstances, should my interest, or the interest of those I serve, have required it, I should have had no hesitation in putting the pair of you to death. Your luck is in to-night, Herr Major. You can tell your Chief that you owe your life to a woman’s tongue!”

On that he turned and left them, and limped, a lonely defiant figure, to the door, where the night received him and swallowed him up.

“My dear,” cried Desmond when the door had closed behind him, “you’re a marvel! In all the years I’ve known him such a thing has never happened before. You beat him fair and square! It was like a miracle the way you laid him low! How on earth did you come to think of it?”

“The man’s a mass of vanity like the rest of you,” little Miss Brewster ejaculated scornfully. “A little knowledge, a little intuition, a little bluff”—she smiled rather wanly. “You men take each other too seriously, anyway . . .”

“But what has become of the chamois leather packet with the jewels?” demanded Desmond.

“It is in a rabbit-hole by that German aeroplane,” said Miss Brewster. “When you would not heed my warning about that odious-looking pilot, I took the packet out of your overcoat pocket—I thought the jewels would be safer with me than with you. And as that man attacked you from behind, I let the packet slide into a rabbit-hole at my feet and they saw nothing in the dark. It seemed to me it was time I took charge. They’ll never find that packet in the dark. But I know the spot, and when it’s light and we’re free, we’ll . . .”

Her head drooped suddenly forward. She had fainted. Out of the night resounded, loud and challenging, the roar of propellers . . .

At noon next day the Chief received Desmond Okewood and Mary Brewster. They found Francis Okewood in the office with a grey-haired man of distinguished appearance who was in the last stage of restless anxiety. It was to him that the Chief, having received it from the hands of Mary Brewster, presented the chamois leather packet sodden with damp and stained with Kentish marl. With trembling hands he examined the seal, and, having found it intact, muttered a broken phrase of thanks and fairly bolted from the room, carrying the packet under his arm. The Chief shook his head and laughed.

“Cabinet Ministers have great responsibilities,” he remarked, “only they are too fond of shoving them off on other people’s shoulders. And now, Miss Brewster, to hear your story.”

But Mary Brewster, who had faced The Man with the Clubfoot unabashed, was tongue-tied in the Chief’s rather forbidding presence. It was Desmond who ultimately narrated their adventures of the night ending with their release at dawn by an astonished fisherman who, on his way to inspect his lobster pots, had answered Desmond’s cries for help.

“They drugged and kidnapped the pilot I had engaged for you,” the Chief said after Miss Brewster had taken her leave, “and slipped their man in his place. I have here a telegram from Brussels about it. There’s been a leakage somewhere which,” he added grimly “is being investigated. In the mean time, thanks to you, Okewood, and to this young lady, with whom I intend to hold some converse regarding her future career, we’re rid, it would seem—for the present at any rate—of Clubfoot and his gang.”

His manner grew reflective. “I wonder,” he said, “when and where we shall see him again!”

A silence fell on the three men. Each felt that a fourth was present, invisible save in the mind’s eye—a vast figure of a man who, with misshapen foot drawn up beside him, leaned on his crutch-stick and glared at them defiance from savage, cruel eyes . . .

THE END

Transcriber’s Notes

--Copyright notice provided as in the original—this e-text is public domain in the country of publication.

--Silently corrected palpable typos; left non-standard spellings and dialect unchanged.

--In the text versions, delimited italics text in _underscores_ (the HTML version reproduces the font form of the printed book.)