Part 10

As soon as his vision grew reconciled to the change from light to darkness, he discovered the slender figure of the lieutenant skulking on tip-toe after the retreating anchor watch; about midway on the landing stage, however, he paused and bent over one of the piles, apparently fumbling with the painter of a small boat moored in the black shadows below.

At this Lanyard began to move along the deck, one by one working the mooring lines clear of their cleats and dropping them gently overboard, till but two were left to hold the U-boat in place.

Throughout he kept watch upon the manoeuvres of the lieutenant--saw him drop over the side of the stage, heard a thump of feet as he landed in a boat, and a subsequent creak of oar-locks.

The small boat was rounding the bows of the submarine when the adventurer ducked back through conning tower to hold.

He was standing where he had been left when the lieutenant came below.

"It's all right," this last announced with shabby bravado as he stepped over the body in the doorway. "We are rid of that damned watch for a time. They won't return within half an hour at least. I have the dory moored amidships. If we are lively, this dirty job will be over in no time at all."

Lanyard nodded. "I am ready."

"No need to hurry--plenty of time for one more drink." The Prussian splashed brandy into the cup, filling it to the brim. "And God knows I need it!"

Lanyard watched critically as, with head well back, he drained that staggering dose of raw spirit gulp by gulp without once removing the cup from his lips. No mortal man could drink like that and stand up under it: it was now a mere question of time....

Hardly that: the hand of the murderer shook and wavered widely as he put down the cup. For a moment he swayed with eyes fixed and glazing, features visibly losing plasticity, then lurched forward, knocking the brandy bottle to the floor, swung around a full half turn in blind effort to re-establish equilibrium, fell backward upon the table, and lay racked from head to foot with savage spasms, hands clawing empty air, chest labouring vainly to win sufficient oxygen to combat the poison with which his system was saturated.

Moving to his side, Lanyard laid a hand upon the left breast. The man's heart was hammering his ribs with agonizing blows, at first rapid, by degrees more slow and feeble.

No power on earth could save him now: he had committed suicide as surely as murder.

Wasting not another glance or thought upon him Lanyard hurried aft to the central operating room.

The time he had spent there, an hour earlier, was by no means lost in purposeless marvelling. He boasted a certain aptitude for mechanics, perhaps legitimately inherited from that obscure origin of his, largely fostered by the requirements of his craft; into the bargain, he had been privileged ere now to gain some slight insight into the principles of submersible operation. If obliged to work swiftly and in some instances upon the advice of intuition rather than practical knowledge, he went not unintelligently about his task, made few false moves.

Turning first to the diving controls, he adjusted the hydroplanes to their extreme downward inclination, then made the rounds of the vent valves, opening all wide. With a sharp hissing and whistling the air from the auxiliary tanks was driven inboard, and as Lanyard manipulated the wheels operating the forward and aft groups of Kingston valves, to the hissing was added the suck and gurgle of water flooding the main and auxiliary ballast and adjusting tanks.

Immediately the U-boat began to sink. Lanyard delayed only to close the switches which controlled the electric motors. As their drone gained volume he grasped the rifle and swarmed up the companion-ladder, passing through the conning tower to deck with little or nothing to spare--with, in fact, barely time to throw off the two mooring lines and jump into the small boat before water, sweeping hungrily up over deck and bridge, began to cascade through conning tower and torpedo hatchways.

Constrained to cut the painter lest the dory be drawn down with the fast-sinking submarine, he fitted oars to locks and put his back to them, swinging the small boat hastily clear of whirlpools which formed as the waves closed over the spot where the U-boat had rested.

From first to last less than five minutes' activity had been needed for the task of scotching this water-moccasin of the salt seas and putting its keepers at the mercy of the country whose hospitality they had too long abused.

Well content, after a little, Lanyard lay on his oars and contemplated with much interest what the night permitted to be visible: the landing stage, no more than a dark, vague mass in the darkness; the land picked out with but few lights, mainly at windows of the base buildings, painting dim ribbons upon the polished floor of the lagoon.

Methodically these were eclipsed as a moving figure passed before them.

Listening intently, Lanyard could distinguish the slow footfalls of an unsuspecting sentry--no other sounds, more than gentle voices of the night: murmurs of blind wavelets, the plaintive whisper of a little breeze belated amid the tree-tops of that dark forest, and a slow, weary soughing of swells upon the distant ocean shore.

Perceiving as yet not the slightest indication of an alarm ashore, Lanyard ventured to continue rowing, but with utmost caution, lifting and dipping his blades as gingerly as though they were fashioned of brittle glass, and for want of a better guide keeping the stern of the dory square to the shank of the T-stage.

In time the bows grounded lightly on sand. The melancholy voice of the sea now seemed a heavier sighing in the stillness. He pushed off and rowed on parallel with a dark shore line, so close in that his starboard oar touched bottom at each stroke.

At intervals he paused and rested, striving vainly to garner some clue to his bearings. Inexorably the blackness forbade that. He might have failed ere dawn to grope a way out of that trap had not the disappearance of the submarine been discovered within the hour.

A sudden clamour rose in the quarter of the landing stage, first one great shout of dismay, then two voices bellowing together, then others. Several rifle-shots were fired in the air. More lights broke out in windows ashore. Many feet drummed resoundingly upon the stage, and the confusion of voices attained a pitch of wild, hysteric uproar. Of a sudden a flare was lighted and tossed far out upon the bosom of the lagoon.

Surprised by that sharp and merciless blue glare, Lanyard instinctively shipped oars and picked up the rifle. He could see so clearly that huddle of figures upon the head of the landing stage that he confidently apprehended being fired upon at any moment; but minutes lengthened and he was not. Either the Germans were looking for bigger game than a dory adrift, or the dazzling flare hindered more than aided their vision.

At length persuaded that he had not been detected, Lanyard put aside the rifle and resumed the oars. Now his course was made beautifully clear to him: the blue light showed him that outlet to the sea which he sought within a hundred yards' distance.

Presently the flare began to wane. It was not renewed. Altogether unseen, unsuspected, Lanyard swung the dory into the breach, and drove it seaward with all his might.

Swiftly the lagoon was shut out by narrow closing banks. The blue glare died out behind a black profile of rounded dunes. Lanyard turned the bow eastward, rowing broadside to the shore.

After something more than an hour of this mode of progress, he struck in toward the beach, disembarked in ankle-deep waters, slung the rifle over his shoulder by its strap and, pushing the dory off, abandoned it to the whim of the sea.

Then again he set his face to the east, following the contour of the beach just within the wash of the tide: thereby making sure that there should be no trail of footprints in the sand to guide a possible pursuit in the morning.

The rising sun found him purposefully splashing on, weary but enheartened by the discovery that he had left behind the more thickly wooded section of the island.

Presently, turning in to the dry beach for the first time, he climbed to the summit of a dune somewhat higher than its fellows, and took observations, finding that he had come near to the eastern extremity of the island.

At some distance to his right a wagon road, faintly rutted in sand and overgrown with beach grass, struck inland.

Following this at a venture, he came, at about eight o'clock, upon the outskirts of a waterside community.

Before proceeding he hid the magazine rifle in a thicket, then made a wide detour, and picked up a roadway which entered the village from the north.

If his disreputable appearance was calculated to excite comment, readiness in disbursing money to remedy such shortcomings made amends for Lanyard's taciturnity. Within two hours, shaved, bathed, and inconspicuously dressed in a cheap suit of ready-made clothing, he was breakfasting famously upon the plain fare of a commercial tavern.

The town, he learned, was the one-time important whaling port of Edgartown. He would be able to leave for the mainland on a ferry steamer sailing early in the afternoon.

Ten minutes before going abroad he filed a long telegram in code addressed to the head of the British Secret Service in New York....

Consequences manifold and various ensued.

When the telegram had been delivered and decoded--both transactions being marked by reasonable promptitude--the head of the British Secret Service in New York called the British Embassy in Washington on the long distance telephone.

Shortly thereafter an attache of the British Embassy jumped into a motor-car and had himself driven to one of the cardinal departments of the Federal Government.

When he had kicked his heels in an antechamber upward of an hour, he was received, affably enough, by the head of the department, a smug, open-faced gentleman whose mood was largely preoccupied with illusions of grandeur, who was, in short, interested far more in considering how splendid it was to be himself than in hearing about any mare's-nest of a German U-boat base on the south shore of Martha's Vineyard.

He was, however, indulgent enough to promise to give the matter his distinguished consideration in due course.

He even went so far as to have his secretary make a note of what alleged information this young Englishman had to impart.

During the night he chanced to wake up and recall the matter, and concluded that, all things considered, it would do no harm to give the United States Navy a little amusement and exercise, even if it should turn out that the rumour of this submarine base was a canard.

So, the next morning, he went to his desk some time before noon, and issued a lot of orders. One of them had to do with the necessity for absolute secrecy.

During the day several minor officials of the department might have been, and indeed were, observed going about their business with painfully tight-lipped expressions.

Also many messages were transmitted by wireless, telephone, and telegraph, to various persons charged with the defense of the Atlantic Coast; some of these were code messages, some were not.

That same night a great forest fire sprang up on the south shore of Martha's Vineyard, both preceded and accompanied by a series of heavy explosions.

The first United States vessel to reach the lagoon found only charred remains of a landing stage and several buildings and, at the bottom of the lagoon, an incoherent mass of wreckage, a twisted and shattered chaos of steel plates and framework that might possibly have been a perfectly sound submarine, though sunken, had somebody not been warned in ample time to permit its destruction through the agency of trinitrotoluene, that enormously efficient modern explosive nicknamed by British military and naval experts "T.N.T.," and by the Germans "Trotyl."

XII

RESURRECTION

The early editions of those New York evening newspapers which Lanyard purchased in Providence, when he changed trains there en route from New Bedford to New York, carried multi-column and most picturesque accounts of the _Assyrian_ disaster.

But the whole truth was in none.

Lanyard laid aside the last paper privately satisfied that, for no-doubt praiseworthy reasons of its own, Washington had seen fit to dictate the suppression of a number of extremely pertinent circumstances and facts which could hardly have escaped governmental knowledge.

Already, one inferred, a sort of censorship was at work, an effective if comparatively modest precursor to that noble volunteer committee which was presently with touching spontaneity to fasten itself upon an astonished Ship of State before it could gather enough way to escape such cirripede attachments.

Presumably it was not thought wise to disconcert a great people, in the complacence of its awakening to the fact that it was remotely at war with the Hun, with information that a Boche submersible was, or of late had been, operating in the neighbourhood of Nantucket.

Unanimously the sinking of the _Assyrian_ was ascribed to an internal explosion of unknown origin. No paper hinted that German secret agents might possibly have figured incogniti among her passengers. There was mention neither of the flare which had burned on her after deck to make the _Assyrian_ a conspicuous target in the night, nor of any of the other untoward events which had led up to the explosion. Nothing whatever was said of the shot fired at the submerging U-boat by a United States torpedo-boat destroyer speeding to the rescue.

Still, the bare facts alone were sufficiently appalling. Reading what had been permitted to gain publication, Lanyard experienced a qualm of horror together with the thought that, even had he drowned as he had expected to drown, such a fate had almost been preferable to participation in those awful ten minutes precipitated by that pale messenger of death which had so narrowly missed Lanyard himself as he rested on the bosom of the sea.

Within ten minutes after receiving her coup de grace the _Assyrian_ had gone under; barely that much time had been permitted a passenger list of seventy-two and a personnel of nearly three hundred souls in which to rouse from dreams of security and take to the lifeboats.

Thanks to the frenzied haste compelled by the swift settling of the ship, more than one boat had been capsized. Others had been sunk--literally driven under--by masses of humanity cascading into them from slanting decks. Others, again, had never been launched at all.

The utmost efforts of the destroyer, fortuitously so near at hand, had served to rescue but thirty-one passengers and one hundred and eighty of the crew.

In the list of survivors Lanyard found these names:

Becker, Julius--New York Brooke, Cecelia--London Crane, Robert T.--New York Dressier, Emil--Geneva O'Reilly, Edmund--Detroit Putnam, Bartlett--Philadelphia Velasco, Arturo--Buenos Aires

Among the injured, Lieutenant Lionel Thackeray, D.S.O., was listed as suffering from concussion of the brain, said to have been contracted through a fall while attempting to aid the launching of a lifeboat.

In the long roster of the drowned these names appeared:

Bartholomew, Archer--London Duchemin, Andre--Paris Von Harden, Baron Gustav--Amsterdam Osborne, Captain E. W.--London

Of all the officers, Mr. Sherry was a solitary survivor, fished out of the sea after going down with his ship.

No list boasted the name "Karl."

Lacking accommodations for the rescued, it was stated, the destroyer had summoned by wireless the east-bound freight steamship _Saratoga_, which had trans-shipped the unfortunates and turned back to New York....

Throughout the best part of that journey from Providence to New York Lanyard sat blankly staring into the black mirror of the window beside his chair, revolving schemes for his immediate future in the light of information derived, indirectly as much as directly, from these newspaper stories.

Retrospective consideration of that voyage left little room for doubt that the designs of the German agents had been thoughtfully matured. They had been quiet enough between their first stroke in the dark and their last, between the burglary of Cecelia Brooke's stateroom the first night out and those murderous attacks on Bartholomew and Thackeray. Unquestionably, had they bided their time pending that hour when, according to their information, the submersible would be off Nantucket, awaiting their signal to sink the _Assyrian_--a signal which would never have been given had their plans proved successful, had they not made the ship too hot to hold them, and finally had they not made every provision for their own escape when the ship went down.

Lanyard was confident that all of their company had been warned to hold themselves ready, and consequently had come off scot free--all, that is, save that victim of treachery, the unhappy Baron von Harden.

If the number of that group which Lanyard had selected as comprising a majority of his enemies, those nine who had discussed the Lone Wolf in the smoking room, was now reduced to five--Becker, Dressier, O'Reilly, Putnam, and Velasco--or four, eliminating Putnam, of whose loyalty there could be no question--Lanyard still had no means of knowing how many confederates among the other passengers these four might not have had.

And even four men who appreciated what peril to their plans inhered in the Lone Wolf, even four made a ponderable array of desperate enemies to have at large in New York, apt to be encountered at any corner, apt at any time to espy and recognise him without his knowledge.

This situation imposed upon him two major tasks of immediate moment: he must hunt down those four one by one and either satisfy himself as to their innocence of harmful intent or put them permanently _hors de combat_; and he must extinguish utterly, once and for all time, that amiable personality whose brief span had been restricted to the decks of the _Assyrian_, Monsieur Andre Duchemin.

That one must be buried deep, beyond all peradventure of involuntary resurrection.

Fortunately the last step toward the positive metamorphosis indicated had been taken that very morning, when the Gallic beard of Monsieur Duchemin was erased by the razor of a New England barber, whose shears had likewise eradicated every trace of a Continental mode of hair-dressing. There remained about Lanyard little to remind of Andre Duchemin but his eyes; and the look of one's eyes, as every good actor knows, is something far more easy to disguise than is commonly believed.

But it was hardly in human nature not to mourn the untimely demise of so useful a body, one who carried such beautiful credentials and serviceable letters of introduction, whose character boasted so much charm with a solitary fault--too facile vulnerability to the prying eyes of those to whom Paris meant those days and social strata in which Michael Lanyard had moved and had his being. Witness--according to Crane--the demoniac cleverness of the Brazilian in unmasking the Duchemin incognito.

Suspicion was taking form in Lanyard's reflections that he had paid far too little attention to Senor Arturo Velasco of Buenos Aires, whose avowed avocation of amateur criminologist might easily be synonymous with interests much less innocuous.

Or why had Velasco been so quick to communicate recognition of Lanyard to an employee of the United States Secret Service?

For that matter, why had he felt called so publicly to descant upon the natural history of the Lone Wolf? In order to focus upon that one the attentions of his enemies? Or to put him on guard?

It was altogether perplexing. Was one to esteem Velasco friend or foe?

Lanyard could comfort himself only with the promise he should one day know, and that without undue delay.

Alighting in Grand Central Terminus late at night, he made his way to Forty-second Street and there, in the staring headlines of a "Late Extra," read the news that the steamship _Saratoga_ had suffered a crippling engine-room accident and was limping slowly toward port, still something like eighteen hours out.

Wondering if it were presumption to construe this as an omen that the stars in their courses fought for him, Lanyard went west to Broadway afoot, all the way beset with a sense of incredulity; it was difficult to believe that he was himself, alive and at large in this city of wonder and space, where people moved at leisure and without fear on broad streets that resembled deep-bitten channels for rivers of light. He was all too wont with nights of dread and trembling, with the mediaeval gloom that enwrapped the cities of Europe by night, their grim black streets desolate but for a few, infrequent, scurrying shapes of fright.... While here the very beggars walked with heads unbowed, and men and women of happier estate laughed and played and made love lightly in the scampering taxis that whisked them homeward from restaurants of the feverish midnight.

A people at war, actually at grips with the Blond Beast, arrayed to defend itself and all humanity against conquest by that loathsome incubus incarnate, a people heedless, carefree, irresponsible, refusing to credit its peril....

Here and there a recruiting poster, down the broad reaches of Fifth Avenue a display of bunting, no other hint of war-time spirit and gravity....

Longacre Square, a weltering lake of kaleidoscopic radiance, even at this late hour thronged with carnival crowds, not one note of sobriety in the night....

Lanyard lifted a wondering gaze to the livid sky whose far, clear stars were paled and shamed by the up-flung glare, like eyes of innocence peering down into a pit of hell.

Inscrutable!

Yet one could hardly be numb to the subtle, heady intoxication of those cool, immaculate, sea-sweet airs which swept the streets, instilling self-confidence and lightness of spirit even in heads shadowed with the woe of war-worn Europe.

Lanyard had not crossed the Avenue before he found himself walking with a brisker stride, holding his own head high....

On impulse, despite the lateness of the hour, albeit with misgivings justified in the issue, he hailed a taxicab and had himself driven to the headquarters of the British Secret Service in America, an unostentatious dwelling on the northwest corner of West End Avenue at Ninety-fifth Street.

Here a civil footman answered the door and Lanyard's enquiries with the information that Colonel Stanistreet had unexpectedly been called out of town and would not return before evening of the next day, while his secretary, Mr. Blensop, had gone to a play and might not come home till all hours.

More impatient than disappointed, Lanyard climbed back into his cab, and in consequence of consultation with its friendly minded chauffeur, eventually put up for the night in an Eighth Avenue hotel of the class that made Senator Raines famous, a hostelry brazenly proclaiming accommodations "for gentlemen only," whereas it offered entertainment for both man and beast and catered rather more to beast than to man.

However, it served; it was inconspicuous and made no demands upon a shabby traveller sans luggage, more than payment in advance.

Early abroad, Lanyard breakfasted with attention fixed to the advertising columns of the _Herald_, and by mid-morning was established as sub-tenant of a furnished bachelor apartment on Fifty-eighth Street near Seventh Avenue, a tiny nest of few rooms on the street level, with entrances from both the general lobby and the street direct: an admirable arrangement for one who might choose to come and go without supervision or challenge.