Part 20

The blind man’s lips tightened; he ignored the outstretched hand as he pulled on a glove. “Make it _auf wiedersehen_,” he said wearily. “Shrimp and I are going to catch the boat for Brazil at five o’clock!”

IV.

The Fee, red-haired, freckle-faced boy, who had become a member of the Colton household as the blind man’s only pay for solving a particularly baffling murder case, eased his plaster-encircled arm on the rail of the _Carracas_, and watched with all the power of his round blue eyes the lowering of the big cage on the forward deck. As it swung for an instant on a level with the promenade deck on which they stood, the boy caught a glimpse of the shaggy animal under the canvas protecting-hood that covered the top and fitted tightly halfway down the sides.

“Gee, Mister Colton, it’s certain’y got some claws on its feet!” observed the boy admiringly. A hitch of the rope jarred the cage, and brought forth a deep growl that could be heard above the creaking of ropes and the squeaky wheels of the stevedores’ trucks as they rushed the last few cases of freight on deck. “There she bumps!” cried the boy as the cable touched the deck.

Then came a shriek of pain. “Gee whiz!” gasped the boy, and the blind man’s cane felt him jump a foot. “One of the workin’men bent down to get the rope off the bottom of the cage, and the bear reached under the canvas, tore his arm with its claws. Darn it, but he’s wicious!”

The bawling voice of an officer broke in: “Here, you men that own that bear! Unsling the cage!”

Three ragged, dark-skinned men jumped to the cage, and unslung the tackle ropes without arousing even a deep-throated growl from the animal.

The tense look left Thornley Colton’s face as he heard the block slip to the deck, and for the first time in hours there came the slightest trace of satisfaction in the curve of the thin lips. He was right! Once more he had risked everything on his judgment and his wonderful mental ability to find logic in seeming chaos by following to their end the mind processes of men against whom he was pitted.

The proof had come with the shriek of the clawed stevedore. Thornley Colton’s whole mind had been concentrated to catch one other sound among the multitude of noises. He had heard it and recognised it--the musical clink of glass on glass--the ring of a goblet! That had been the thing that had aroused the fury of the bear at exactly the instant that the workman was within reach of the tearing claws. That was the thing that had sent Dryden F. Nelson’s daughter to jail, and had caused Sydney Thames to renounce the man who loved him.

“I’ll bet nobody but them guys that own the bear’ll go near him after this,” observed the boy sagely.

“I don’t think they will,” the blind man said grimly. “Let’s take a walk around.”

The boy’s eyes squinted along the deck from his feet to the rail at the other side. “It’s ten steps,” he calculated. “They’s a man an’ a fat woman five ahead lookin’ down at the front deck, an’ at the other rail there’s a guy in a chair readin’ a paper. Yuh gotta step out a bit for him.”

“All right,” nodded the blind man, as he started.

The boy walked at his side, and he avoided the man and the woman, but his foot seemed to slip at the steamer chair, and he fell sprawling into the lap of the seated man, sending the thin glass he had held in his hands behind the paper in a hundred pieces to the deck.

“What the devil!” snapped the hoarse voice of the man, as he angrily brushed away the sparks of fire that had fallen on his coat when the black-brown cigarette had fallen from his lips.

Instantly Colton was on his feet, apologising. “I am blind; I made a false step,” he said contritely.

“Oh, all right,” growled the man ungraciously.

The problemist started again on his walk. The grim lines had returned around his thin-lipped mouth, but there was no other change in the blind man’s expression, not even triumph. Yet he had located the man he wanted; the man who had fooled the entire secret service of the country for months! Reasoning had done it; the pure eliminative reasoning that was made possible by his lack of sight. The man into whose lap he had just fallen was the one who had aroused the bear’s anger with the tap of his glass. He was the man whose pectoral cigarette papers and tobacco had scented the closet at the Nelson home. And he had recently handled a bear!

As his brain worked at lightning speed behind his high, white forehead, the blind man walked with the boy aimlessly around the decks, hardly hearing Shrimp’s delighted chatter. The _Carracas_ was in mid-stream now, her nose pointed toward the Narrows. Most of the passengers had gone to their state-rooms, and the steam hissed from the winch cylinders forward as the last pieces of cargo were lowered into the hold. The blind man’s ears were strained to catch each sound, or suspicion of sound that would tell him the things he could not see, and his brain counted the steps, measuring distance, memorising directions as years of training had taught it to do. Suddenly Colton realised that some one was following them, watching every move. A growingly familiar furtive footstep every little while as the shadow quickly dodged, whiffs of the Brazilian tobacco smoke wafted to his nostrils on sudden gusts of wind, told him more than eyes could have told. His fall, crude because of its necessity, had aroused the other man’s suspicion.

“Show me our stateroom, Shrimp,” he said finally. “Then you can come up on deck again. I’ll remember all the steps.”

“Gee!” grinned the boy, in huge relief. “I’m glad I don’t have to stay down there. I wanta watch that little yacht that’s comin’ out.”

Colton nodded. He knew why the “little yacht” was coming out. He knew she should be flying a flag with perpendicular red stripes--the flag of the revenue service. And he knew that on board her was Chief Whittson and his men, who awaited his signal.

The boy proudly opened the door of the little white room, and Colton closed it behind him. “Wait a minute, Shrimp,” he said quietly. From his pocket he took a memorandum book and pencil. For a minute he wrote, then he handed the torn-out leaf to the boy, who read, with widening eyes:

If you miss me for fifteen minutes, or see me on deck with the man I fell over, run to the wireless house and give the operator this message: John Jones, 56 Cedar Street, New York. Close.

PAYTON.

“Gee!” whispered the boy joyfully. “I _knowed_ it was a case! I knowed you didn’t mean what you said about not lettin’ me in on any more when I broke this arm. Gee!”

“Go up on the deck and see all the sights you can, Shrimp,” smiled the blind man. “See you later.”

The problemist sat down on the edge of the brass bed to go over the situation again and make sure that there was not a loose end. He had figured out on deck the only way, but he wanted to prove his reasoning by mental tests. The master counterfeiter, cunning, desperate, could do only one thing--eliminate the man he knew suspected him. And Thornley Colton could do but one thing--“watch” every minute the head of the gang. The success of the whole case depended on Colton’s alertness in preventing the criminal from making one move that the problemist knew he would make the instant the master rogue discovered all was lost. Yet the presence of the man at the dénouement was _necessary_! Colton rose. He must take a desperate chance, just as he had taken them many times before.

He opened the door, and went down the narrow corridor, his brain automatically counting the steps it had registered when he entered. He stopped. He smelled the heavy licorice odour of the pectoral papers again. For an instant a grim smile flashed to his lips. He had followed the mind-processes of the man correctly once more. The smell of the smoke was too obvious; it had been overdone.

A stateroom door opened before him.

“Got a match?” asked a voice, and Colton understood the disguising of tone instantly.

The blind man held out his match safe; then the snarling whisper of the man cut the stillness, and he felt a gun-muzzle jab viciously into his ribs. “Get in here!” Colton quietly obeyed the order, and stepped over the threshold into the stateroom that was filled almost to suffocation with cigarette smoke.

“Put ’em over your head! Up!” The snarl changed to a sneer. “So you’re the slick blind man that sister of mine talked about, eh? The lonehander that makes boobs of the police and secret service? Well, little bat-eye, I’ve been laying for you ever since I got wise to that slick fall trick. Got a damn’ fine nose, eh, smelling that pec smoke I’ve been filling the lower deck with ever since you and the kid came down.”

“Humour palls when the audience is forced to stand in so uncomfortable a position,” said the blind man evenly.

He felt his own pistol snatched away.

“Back up a step, and you’ll find the bed!” ordered the voice.

The blind man sat down and waited patiently. When the other man spoke again there was grudging admiration in his voice. “I’ve got to hand it to you,” he admitted. “I didn’t think there was one man on earth that’d get wise. Now I suppose you want the old man?”

“I want you first,” Colton told him.

“You got me!” laughed the man with the gun. “But you haven’t got me like you got that sister of mine, have you? She wouldn’t say a word, would she? Well, it’s a damn’ good thing she didn’t!”

“I knew that,” said Colton quietly.

“You didn’t think the wayward son could come back after ten years, with a counterfeiting process that couldn’t be beat, and then get his father in on the scheme to pass the phony money through his bank, did you? And you didn’t know that staid old Dryden Nelson would ever become head of the gang, and then slide out under the noses of the secret-service men. I guess he’s the man you want to get, eh? Well, I’m the little man that’s going to see that you don’t!”

“I will find him when the time comes.”

“You will, eh--you will!” Snarling viciousness dominated the voice. “Well, you won’t! You, with your lone hand! Why, you poor boob, it’d take a gang to get me!”

“I had about concluded you were just taking a chance on a word dropped by Miss Nelson and a thing or two you might have heard of me,” Colton said quietly. “I didn’t think you’d dare have any one near enough to get real information. This is one of the games where I don’t play a lone hand. The boat that’s been following us ever since we left the dock is the revenue cutter _Proctor_, with Chief Whittson and his men aboard.”

The man ripped out an oath. “So that’s it!” he snarled. “Fooled me, eh? Stand up! Put your hands behind your back! No funny work! I’ve tied men before with one hand.”

Colton smiled at him sardonically. “If I am off the deck fifteen minutes Chief Whittson and his men will board the _Carracas_, and nab the fake owners of the bear. Quite a scheme, that. No one would ever suspect ignorant, ragged-looking, brown men with a dancing bear as counterfeiters, would they?” His tone was a burlesque of the man’s own. “And what do you suppose the chief’ll do when he finds me here? Tied up or dead makes no difference. I promised myself to get you, and get you alone. But it’ll be just as good that way.” The mockery had died out of his voice at that last sentence; there was a tinge of bitterness that the man instantly recognised.

“Well, you couldn’t put him wise to _me_!” gritted the man. “So you _are_ a lone-handed worker, after all. Get up!” he commanded. Colton obeyed the jabbing gun-barrel. “I’m a single-hander, too!” went on the counterfeiter. “We’re going up on the deck, and if there’s a move to get me, out you go! This gun’ll be in my pocket, jamming your kidneys every minute. Let ’em get the gang! I’m through with ’em! Let ’em have the bear, too! It’ll be no good to anybody! I’ll see to that. But if you even lift a finger to point me out----” He made a horrible gurgling sound in his throat that was more than significant. “Come on!” he ordered sharply.

They left the stateroom, Colton idly twirling his slim stick, the man at his side talking commonplaces in a grim tone that made them anything but commonplaces. To the passengers who saw them on the deck they were only ship acquaintances, but the blind man felt the gun-muzzle now and then in his side.

“We’ll stop here,” growled the man at the forward rail, overlooking the open deck below. “I want to be where I can watch those men of mine. Put your hands on the rail where I can see ’em!”

Colton quietly obeyed, resting his elbows on the wood and dangling his cane over the edge. The crash of the wireless sender broke out; the blind man felt his companion grow tense as his trained ears read the dots and dashes. Then he knew that the message he had written so that the man who was an expert telegrapher could not suspect had flashed to the revenue cutter, “John Jones, 56 Cedar Street,” meant nothing but a business deal.

Minutes passed. Below them the three ragged men lounged around the cage. Four or five other men, of the crew off watch, stood around, scowling vindictively at the bear cage and its sleeping animal. Then came the thing that the blind man had been waiting for. He felt the big engines slow down. Not a muscle of his body seemed to move, but the knuckles of his right hand whitened as he gripped the end of his cane.

An oath came from the man at his side. “So you tricked----”

So sudden that it seemed but a whir in the light, the slim cane in the hand of the blind man swished around, straight for the other man’s eyes. There had been not a warning move but a lightning turn of the wrist. The first instinct man has is to protect his eyes. The criminal obeyed it, forgetting all else. He dodged with a gasp. Colton’s knees seemed to give way under him, he spun around on the balls of his feet like a cat; then his whole body straightened like a suddenly released whalebone, his right fist found the jaw of the other, and the master counterfeiter fell without a groan and lay still.

Colton’s whistle rang out shrilly. A screamed oath came from the deck below. The sound of a struggle.

“Get the bear!” shouted Colton.

A shot rang out. Another. He could hear the big cage rattle and groan as the dying animal thrashed out its life. Around the cage seven men were struggling, the three ragged, dark-skinned men who had guarded the cage and the four men who had been apparently lounging sailors.

The blind man listened for a moment, then he smiled a grim smile. “A lone hand!” he murmured. “I hate assistants--but I’m not such an egotistical fool as all that!”

On the port side of the boat he heard the scrambling of men to the high, white deck. Then Chief Whittson’s voice came:

“Did you get him?”

Colton touched the unconscious body of the man near the rail just as he would have touched the body of a snake with his foot.

“Where’s Nelson?” asked the chief eagerly.

“Down there in the false, canvas-covered top of that bear cage!”

“What!”

“Yes. Drugged! For God’s sake get that suffocating cover off, and send for the ship’s doctor.”

The order was bawled to the men below. Willing hands ripped the cover to pieces, and on a thin mattress, in a steel-floored, steel-meshed upper compartment of the cage, was Dryden F. Nelson, white-faced, unconscious!

“By Heaven, he had his nerve with him to take that chance to get away!” gasped the chief, in admiration. “It’s a new one! We’d never have suspected a bear cage in a thousand years. And we had every way out of the city guarded.”

“Yes!” The word came as a half groan, half snarl, from the man on the deck, whom one of the secret-service operatives had just manacled. “He had his nerve! He’s my father! And he’s the greatest counterfeiter of them all!”

Thornley Colton leaned forward. He grasped a wrist of the man, and almost pulled the arm out of its socket.

“You dirty, lying cur!” he said, and his tone was one that he had never used before. “You forced that old man to serve you after he had discovered what you were doing! You forced the girl who thought you were her brother to protect you! By God, if ever a man deserved hanging you’re the one!”

“He’s my father!” grated the handcuffed man. “If I go to jail he’ll go, too! He knows I’m his son!”

“You dog!” Colton’s voice fairly shook with passion. “You fooled him into believing that you were his rotten-hearted son that died ten years ago. But you can’t fool me! You may look like Joe Nelson! You may deceive even the eyes of a father! But I’m blind! Blind! I talked for an hour with a school chum who played in the football game in which Joe Nelson broke his wrist. You never had a broken wrist in your life! The bones are perfect!” He turned to the chief. “Keep a careful guard on that cage, chief, until we get to the cutter. I think there’s a million or so dollars that this dog got from Nelson’s bank stuffed into that mattress!”

“Damn you!” The man half rose to his knees as he shrieked it. “I tricked them all! And you----”

“That’s the confession I wanted to vindicate Nelson,” said the blind man contentedly.

V.

Nadine Nelson rose as the blind man entered the room, her lips curved in a wonderful smile of joyous greeting, and she hurried across the floor to meet him.

“Can you ever forgive me?” he asked, in his rich, musical voice.

“Forgive you?” she cried happily. “Why, I could--kiss you!” She stopped, crimson-cheeked.

He smiled seriously down at her. “It was necessary, the way I spoke to you,” he said gently. “Before, I did not realise how desperate the game was. I knew that your father’s life hung on the thread of your silence. And I knew that the only way I could assure myself that you wouldn’t break down and talk was to arouse every bit of that wonderful fighting gameness you have. The men who had your father would have killed him rather than risk getting him away if they thought there was a breath of suspicion.”

“I know,” she said; “I know--and understand.”

“The ringleader talked a little to the chief on the way back in the revenue cutter,” went on Colton. “He had been a pal of your brother’s for years in South America. They worked together in a telegraph office in Rio.”

“He was a wonderful operator,” murmured the girl. “He is the only man I ever knew of who could imitate another man’s touch on the key. That was the proof that convinced father that he was Joe. You know the touch of an operator on a sender is as individual as handwriting.”

Colton nodded. “My knowledge of that fact is what threw me off the track at first. You knew your brother was implicated the minute you spoke of him in your room. I remembered then the stories I had heard of him. I remembered that he was fifteen years older than you, and was supposed to have been shot in South America ten years ago, where he went following some trouble here.”

“Joe always was wild,” the girl confessed softly, “though I only remember him as a big, strong brother who used to hold me on his knee while he told me wonderful stories. I couldn’t believe sometimes that the man who was making daddy do such horrible things could be the brother I knew. But I couldn’t convince father. The counterfeiter knew every incident of Joe’s life, and there was the touch of the operator that father thought was so indisputable. I tried to get father to confess it all. I refused to carry him the messages that were left in my room after we knew the secret-service men were watching us, and that Joe and his men were next door. Then Joe--I can’t call him anything else----”

“That is the name he has gone under for years,” put in Colton.

“Then Joe rigged up the magnets and key,” went on the girl. “He had to give father instructions every night where to distribute the counterfeit money that was packed in the vaults of the bank in place of the reserve. And he made father sell all his bonds to cover the shortage. Then, with the help of a watchman, who was another of the gang, they got the counterfeit money in to take the place of that father had gotten to make good. Every day Joe promised that he would make restitution, for he had made father believe that he had sent the money to Brazil for investment, and it would double in a month. So father hoped and prayed, and got years older every hour. The secret-service men were dogging every step, watching every move. Jail stared him in the face--and he believed the man he thought his son, believed that he would have the money to look the world squarely in the face once more.

“Then Joe told him one night, over the wire, that he had lost all. Father must go. I watched outside my door every night to see that Paul did not come near. I caught a word. I pleaded with father. For four days I fought against them. Then they won. I was at the door last night when father came running up the stairs, panting, half dead with the excitement of having slipped past the secret-service man. He darted past me. I followed. Joe grabbed me by the arm when I started to protest. ‘Get downstairs and throw a fit because your father has gone!’ he hissed. ‘You’ll be along in a little while, and be with him!’ he finished, and there was a look in his eyes that frightened me. So you see it wasn’t only acting in the library.” She shuddered.

Colton understood, even more than she, for he had heard the confession of the master counterfeiter on the revenue cutter that had brought them all back to the city. He had learned then why he had taken such pains to get the old man away. The crook had not been satisfied to take every dollar of the old man’s fortune. He had seen the girl; he had wanted her, and she was to have been the price of her father’s life!

“The chief’s men got the whole plant next door,” he put in hastily. “It’s a new process of bleaching one-dollar bills, and making hundreds from them with a new photographic process. The master crook had been perfecting it for years in Brazil, waiting for a big stake in New York. He put one of his assistants as correspondent of your father’s bank down there. A year ago he had him write a humble letter asking for a position in New York. Your father gave it to him.”

“Yes,” admitted the girl. “And the man who took the position was the one who posed as my brother. He pretended to be very dull. That’s why the secret-service men never suspected him. When he had been in the bank three months, father discovered a shortage of sixty thousand dollars. He accused the man who came from Brazil. Father’s bank, you know, is a private institution, and only has seven employees. The man confessed, and convinced father that he was Joe. He said he would make good the loss. And he did, with the clever counterfeits. That was the entering wedge. After that father was only putty in his hands. Six months ago he resigned, after seeing to it that one of his gang was put in as watchman and another took his place.”

“That is when he took up his role as doctor,” put in Colton, “and got his scheme of taking the poor Frenchman’s house. And at the hospital they say the Frenchman will recover fully.”

“And father is upstairs sleeping,” she said softly. “You brought him back to me--and he knows that the man who tried to ruin him, the man who would have killed him if you had not been there to prevent him when the revenue men came, was not his son! That is the greatest of all! We owe you a debt that we can never repay; you and Sydney, here, who stood so bravely by when I thought all the world had turned against me.”

She touched the arm of the black-haired man who had sat silent beside her, and he looked at her with a wonderful new light in his eyes. Gone, now, was Sydney Thames’s great fear of women that had been his obsession all his life. He had met _the_ woman.