Complete Works of Earl Derr Biggers, page 216
“It won’t go,” the general cut in curtly.
“It’s the truth — it’s got to go!” she cried.
Jaimihr, at a second nod from his master, was approaching the double doors. Jane, leaping in front of them, pushed the Indian back.
“General Crandall, for your own sake — don’t let this Indian leave the room. You may regret it — all the rest of your life. He still has a paper — a little paper — he took from that safe. I saw him stick it in his sash.”
“Nonsense!”
“Search him!” The girl’s voice cracked in hysteria; her face was dead white, with hectic burning spots in each cheek. “I’m not pleading for myself now — for you. Search him before he leaves this room!”
Jaimihr put strong hands on her arms to force her away from the door. His black eyes were laughing down into hers.
“Let me ask him a question first, General Crandall — before he leaves this room.”
The governor’s face reflected momentary surprise at this change of tack. “Quickly then,” he gruffly conceded. Jaimihr Khan stepped back a pace, his eyes meeting the girl’s coldly.
“How did you come into the room — when you found me here?” she challenged. The Indian pointed to the double doors over her shoulder. She reached behind her, grasped the knob, and shook it. “Locked!” she announced.
“Why not?” Jaimihr asked. “I locked them after me.”
“And the general’s door was locked?”
“Yes — yes!” Crandall broke in impatiently. “What’s this got to do with — —”
“Did you lock the general’s door?” she questioned the Indian.
“No, Sahibah; you did.”
“And I suppose I locked the door to Lady Crandall’s room and my door?”
“If they, too, are locked — yes, Sahibah.”
“Then why” — Jane’s voice quavered almost to a shriek— “why had I failed to lock the double doors — the doors through which you came?”
The Indian caught his breath, and darted a look at the general. The latter, eying him keenly, stepped to his desk and pressed a button.
“Very good; remain here, Jaimihr,” he said. Then to Jane: “I will have him searched, as you wish. Then both of you go to the cells until I sift this thing to the bottom.”
“General! You wouldn’t dare!” She stood aghast.
“Wouldn’t I, though? We’ll see whether—” A sharp click sent his head jerking around to the right. Jaimihr Khan, at the door to the general’s room, was just slipping the key into his girdle, after having turned the lock. His thin face was crinkled like old sheepskin.
“What the devil are you doing?” Crandall exploded.
“If the general sahib is waiting for that bell to be answered — he need not wait longer — it will not be answered,” Jaimihr Khan purred.
“What’s this — what’s this!”
“The wires are cut.”
“Cut! Who did that?” The general started for the yellow man. Jaimihr Khan whipped a blue-barreled revolver out of his broad sash and leveled it at his master.
“Back, General Sahib! I cut them. The sahibah’s story is true. It was she who came in and found me at the safe.”
“My God! You, Jaimihr — you a spy!” The general collapsed weakly into a chair by the desk.
“Some might call me that, my General.” Jaimihr’s weapon was slowly swinging to cover both the seated man and the girl by the doors. “No need to search that drawer, General Sahib. Your pistol is pointing at you this minute.”
“You’ll pay for this!” Crandall gasped.
“That may be. One thing I ask you to remember. If one of you makes a move I will kill you both. You are a gallant man, my General; is it not so? Then remember.”
Crandall started from his chair, but the uselessness of his bare hands against the snub-nosed thing of blue metal covering him struck home. He sank back with a groan. Keeping them both carefully covered, Jaimihr moved to the desk telephone at the general’s elbow. He took from his sash a small piece of paper — the one he had saved from the packet of papers taken from the safe — laid it on the edge of the desk, and with his left hand he picked up the telephone. An instant of tense silence, broken by the wheezing of the general’s breath, then ——
“Nine-two-six, if you please. Yes — yes, who is this? Ah, yes. It is I, Jaimihr Khan. Is all well with you? Good! And Bishop? Slain coming down the Rock — good also!”
Crandall groaned. The Indian continued his conversation unperturbed.
“Veree good! Listen closely. I can not come as I have promised. There is — work — for me here. But all will be well. Take down what I shall tell you.” He read from the slip of paper on the desk. “Seven turns to the right, four to the left — press! Two more to the left — press! One to the right. You have that? Allah speed you. Go quickly!”
“There is — work — for me here.”
“Room D!” Crandall had leaped from his chair.
“Correct, my General — Room D.” Jaimihr smiled as he stepped away from the telephone, his back against the double doors. The sweat stood white on Crandall’s brow; his mouth worked in jerky spasms.
“What — what have you done?” he gasped.
“I see the general knows too well,” came the Indian’s silken response. “I have given the combination of the inner door of Room D in the signal tower to a — friend. He is on his way to the tower. He will be admitted — one of the few men on the Rock who could be admitted at this hour, my General. One pull of the switches in Room D — and where will England’s great fleet be then?”
“You yellow devil!” Crandall started to rush the white figure by the doors, but his flesh quailed as the round cold muzzle met it. He staggered back.
“We are going to wait, my General — and you, American Sahibah, who have pushed your way into this affair. We are going to wait — and listen — listen.”
The general writhed in agony. Jane, fallen into a chair by the far edge of the desk, had her head buried in her arms, and was sobbing.
“And we are going to think, my General,” the Indian’s voice purled on. “While we wait we shall think. Who will General Crandall be after to-night — the English sahib who ruled the Rock the night the English fleet was blown to hell from inside the fortress? How many widows will curse when they hear his name? What — —”
“Jaimihr Khan, what have I ever done to you!” The governor’s voice sounded hardly human. His face was blotched and purple.
“Not what you have done, my General — what the English army has done. An old score, General — thirty years old. My father — he was a prince in India — until this English army took away his throne to give it to a lying brother. The army — the English army — murdered my father when he tried to get it back — called it mutiny. Ah, yes, an old score; but by the breath of Allah, to-night shall see it paid!”
The man’s eyes were glittering points of white-hot steel. All of his thin white teeth showed like a hound’s.
“You dog!” The general feebly wagged his head at the Indian.
“Your dog, my General. Five years your dog, when I might have been a prince. My friend goes up the Rock — step — step — step. Closer — closer to the tower, my General. And Major Bishop — where is he? Ah, a knife is swift and makes no noise — —”
“What a fool I’ve been!” Crandall rocked in his chair, and passed a trembling hand before his eyes. Sudden rage turned his bloodshot eyes to where the girl was stretched, sobbing, across the desk. “Your man — the man you protected — it is he who goes to the signal tower, girl!”
“No — no; it can’t be,” she whispered between the rackings of her throat.
“It is! Only a member of the signal service could gain admittance into the tower to-night. Besides — who was it went with Bishop down the Rock after the dinner to-night? And I — I sent Bishop with him — sent him to his death. He was tricking you all the time. I told you he was. I warned you he was playing with you — using you for his own rotten ends — using you to help kill forty thousand men!”
It needed not the sledge-hammer blows of the stricken Crandall to batter Jane Gerson’s heart. She had read too clearly the full story Jaimihr Khan’s sketchy comments had outlined. She knew now Captain Woodhouse, spy. The Indian was talking again, his words dropping as molten metal upon their raw souls.
“Forty thousand men! A pleasant thought, my General. Eight minutes up the Rock to the tower when one moves fast. And my friend — ah, he moves veree — veree fast. Eight minutes, and four have already passed. Watch the windows — the windows looking out to the bay, General and Sahibah. They will flame — like blood. Your hearts will stop at the great noise, and then — —”
A knock sounded at the double doors behind Jaimihr. He stopped short, startled. All listened. Again came the knock. Without turning his eyes from the two he guarded, Jaimihr asked: “Who is it?”
“Woodhouse,” came the answer.
Jane’s heart stopped. Crandall sat frozen in his seat. Jaimihr turned the key in the lock, and the doors opened. In stepped Captain Woodhouse, helmeted, armed with sword and revolver at waist. He stood facing the trio, his swift eye taking in the situation at once. Crandall half rose from his seat, his face apoplectic.
“Spy! Secret killer of men!” he gasped.
Woodhouse paid no heed to him, but turned to Jaimihr.
“Quick! The combination,” he said. “Over the phone — afraid I might not have it right — stopped here on my way to the tower — be there in less than three minutes if you can hold these people.”
“Everything is all right?” Jaimihr asked suspiciously.
“You mean Bishop? Yes. Quick, the combination!”
Jaimihr picked the slip of paper containing the formula from the edge of the desk with his disengaged left hand and passed it to Woodhouse.
The latter stretched out his hand, grasped the Indian’s with a lightning move, and threw it over so that the latter was off his balance. In a twinkling Woodhouse’s left hand had wrenched the revolver from Jaimihr’s right and pinioned it behind his back. The whole movement was accomplished in half a breath. Jaimihr Khan knelt in agony, and in peril of a broken wrist, at the white man’s feet, disarmed, harmless. Woodhouse put a silver whistle to his lips and blew three short blasts.
A tramp of feet in the hallway outside, and four soldiers with guns filled the doorway.
“Take this man!” Woodhouse commanded.
The Indian, in a frenzy, writhed and shrieked:
“Traitor! English spy! Dog of an unbeliever!”
The soldiers jerked him to his feet and dragged him out; his ravings died away in the passage.
Woodhouse brought his hand up in a salute as he faced General Crandall.
“The other spy, Almer, of the Hotel Splendide, has just been arrested, sir. Major Bishop has taken charge of him and has lodged him in the cells.”
A high-pitched scream sounded behind Lady Crandall’s door, and a pounding on the panels. Jane Gerson, first to recover from the shock of surprise, ran to unlock the door. Lady Crandall, in a dressing gown, burst into the library and flung herself on her husband.
“George — George! What does all this mean — yells — whistling — —”
General Crandall gave his wife a pat on the shoulder and put her aside with a mechanical gesture. He took a step toward Woodhouse, who still stood stiffly before the opened doors; the dazed governor walked like a somnambulist.
“Who — who the devil are you, sir?” he managed to splutter.
“I am Captain Cavendish, General.” Again the hand came to stiff salute on the visor of the pith helmet. “Captain Cavendish, of the signal service, stationed at Khartum, but lately detached for special service under the intelligence office in Downing Street.”
The man’s eyes jumped for an instant to seek Jane Gerson’s face — found a smile breaking through the lines of doubt there.
“Your papers to prove your identity!” Crandall demanded, still in a fog of bewilderment.
“I haven’t any, General Crandall,” the other replied, with a faint smile, “or your Indian, Jaimihr Khan, would have placed them in your hands after the search of my room yesterday. I’ve convinced Major Bishop of my genuineness, however — after we left your house and when the moment for action arrived. A cable to Sir Ludlow-Service, in the Downing Street office, will confirm my story. Meanwhile I am willing to go under arrest if you think best.”
“But — but I don’t understand, Captain — er — Cavendish. You posed as a German — as an Englishman.”
“Briefly, General, a girl secretly in the pay of the Downing Street office — Louisa Schmidt, — Josepha, the cigar girl, whom you ordered locked up a few hours ago — is the English representative in the Wilhelmstrasse at Berlin. She learned of a plan to get a German spy in your signal tower a month before war was declared, reported it to London, and I was summoned from Khartum to London to play the part of the German spy. At Berlin, where she had gone from your own town of Gibraltar to meet me, she arranged to procure me a number in the Wilhelmstrasse through the agency of a dupe named Capper — —”
“Capper! Good Lord!” Crandall stammered.
“With the number I hurried to Alexandria. Woodhouse — Captain Woodhouse, from Wady Halfa — a victim, poor chap, to the necessities of our plan, fell into the hands of the Wilhelmstrasse men there, and I gained possession of his papers. The Germans started him in a robber caravan of Bedouins for the desert, but I provided against his getting far before being rescued, and the German agents there were all rounded up the day I sailed as Woodhouse.”
“And you came here to save Gibraltar — and the fleet from German spies?” Crandall put the question dazedly.
“There were only two, General — Almer and your servant, Jaimihr. We have them now. You may order the release of Louisa Schmidt.”
“The captain has overlooked one other — the most dangerous one of all, General Crandall.” Jane stepped up to where the governor stood and threw back her hands with an air of submission. “Her name is Jane Gerson, of New York, and she knew all along that this gentleman was deceiving you — she had met him, in fact, three weeks before on a railroad train in France.”
The startled eyes of Gibraltar’s master looked first at the set features of the man, then to the girl’s flushed face. Little lines of humor crinkled about the corners of his mouth.
“Captain Cavendish — or Woodhouse, make this girl a prisoner — your prisoner, sir!”
“Your prisoner, sir.”
CHAPTER XIX. AT THE QUAY
FIVE O’CLOCK AT the quay, and already the new day was being made raucous by the bustle of departure — shouts of porters, tenders’ jangling engine bells, thump of trunks dropped down skidways, lamentations of voyagers vainly hunting baggage mislaid. Out in the stream the Saxonia — a clean white ship, veritable ark of refuge for pious Americans escaping the deluge.
In the midst of a group of his countrymen Henry J. Sherman stood, feet wide apart and straw hat cocked back over his bald spot. He was narrating the breathless incidents of the night’s dark hour:
“Yes, sir, a soldier comes to our rooms about three-thirty o’clock and hammers on our door. ‘Everybody in this hotel’s under arrest,’ he says. ‘Kindly dress as soon as possible and report to Major Bishop in the office.’ And we not five hours before the guests of General and Lady Crandall at Government House. What d’you think of that for a quick change?
“Well, gentlemen, we piled down-stairs — with me minus a collar button and havin’ to hold my collar down behind with my hand. And what do we find? This chap Almer, with a face like a side of cream cheese, standing in the middle of a bunch of soldiers with guns; another bunch of soldiers surroundin’ his Arab boy, who’s as innocent a little fellah as ever you set eyes on; and this Major Bishop walkin’ up and down, all excited, and sayin’ something about somebody’s got a scheme to blow up the whole fleet out there. Which might have been done, he says, if it wasn’t for that fellah Woodhouse we’d had dinner with just that very evening.”
“Who’s some sort of a spy. I knew it all the time, you see.” Mrs. Sherman was quick to claim her share of her fellow tourists’ attention. “Only he’s a British spy set to watch the Germans. Major Bishop told me that in confidence after it was all over — said he’d never met a man with the nerve this Captain Woodhouse has.”
“Better whisper that word ‘spy’ soft,” Henry J. admonished sotto voce. “We’re not out of this plagued Europe yet, and we’ve had about all the excitement we can stand; don’t want anybody to arrest us again just the minute we’re sailin’. But, as I was sayin’, there we all stood, foolish as goats, until in comes General Crandall, followed by this Woodhouse chap. ‘Excuse me, people, for causing you this little inconvenience,’ the general says. ‘Major Bishop has taken his orders too literal. If you’ll go back to your rooms and finish dressin’ I’ll have the army bus down here to take you to the quay. The Hotel Splendide’s accommodations have been slightly disarranged by the arrest of its worthy proprietor.’ So back we go, and — by cricky, mother, here comes the general and Mrs. Crandall now!”
Henry J. broke through the ring of passengers, and with a waving of his hat, rushed to the curb. A limousine bearing the governor, his lady and Jane Gerson, and with two bulky hampers strapped to the baggage rack behind, was just drawing up.
“Why, of course we’re down here to see you off — and bid you Godspeed to little old Kewanee!” Lady Crandall was quick to anticipate the Shermans’ greetings. General Crandall, beaming indulgently on the group of homegoers, had a hand for each.
“Yes — yes,” he exclaimed. “After arresting you at three o’clock we’re here to give you a clean ticket at five. Couldn’t do more than that — what? Regrettable occurrence and all that, but give you something to tell the stay-at-homes about when you get back to — ah — —”
