The Sleuth of St. James's Square by Melville Davisson Post (black authors fiction txt) 📕

Sahib, against this thing? It does not die, nor wax old, nor grow weary.”

“The lad knows nothing,” replied my uncle, “and old Andrew will keep silent.”

“Without trouble, Sahib,” the creature continued, “I can put the young one beyond all knowledge and the old one beyond all speech. Is it permitted?”

My uncle got up from the fireplace, for he had finished with his work.

“No,” he said, “let there be an end of it.”

He turned about, and under the glimmer of the candle I could see that the man had changed; his big pale face was grim with some determined purpose, and there was about him the courage and the authority of one who, after long wavering, at last hazards a desperate venture. He broke the glass box and put the Buddha into his pocket.

“It is good silver,” he said, “and it has served its purpose.”

The Oriental got softly onto his feet like a great toy of cotton wood. His face remained in its expression of equanimity, and he added no further word of gesture to his argument.

My uncle held the door open for him to pass out, and after that he extinguished the candle and followed, closing the door noiselessly behind him.

The thing was like a scene acted in a playhouse. But it accomplished what the playhouse fails in. It put the fear of death into one who watched it. To me in the dark hall, looking through the crack of the door, the placid Oriental in his English uniform, and with his precise words like an Oxford don, was surely the most devilish agency that ever urged the murder of innocent men on an accomplice.

The wind was continuing to rise and the mist now covered the loch and the open sea. It was of no use to stand before the window, for the world was blotted out. I was cold and I lay down on the bed and wrapped the covers around me. It seemed only a moment later when old Andrew's hand was on me, and his thin voice crying in the room.

“Will you sleep, sir, and God's creatures going to their death!”

He ran, whimpering in his thin old voice, down the stair, and I followed him out of the house into the garden.

It was midmorning. A man was standing before the door, his hands behind him, looking out at the sea. In his long trousers and bowler hat I did not at once recognize him for the Highlander of my yesterday's adventure.

The coast was in the tail of a storm. The wind boomed, as though puffed by a bellows, driving in gusts of mist.

The ship I had seen in the night was hanging in the sea just beyond the crook of the loch. It fluttered like a snared bird. One could see the crew trying every device of sail and tacking, but with all their desperate ingenuities the ship merely hung there shivering like a stricken creature.

It was a fearful thing to look at. Now the mist covered everything and then for a moment the wind swept it out, and all the time, the silent, deadly struggle went on between the trapped ship and the sea running in among the needles of the loch. I don't think any of us spoke except the Highlander once in comment to himself.

“It's Ram Chad's tramp.... So that's the craft the man was depending on!”

Then the mist shut down. When it lifted, the doom of the ship was written. It was moving slowly into the deadly maw of the loch.

Again the mist shut down and, when again the wind swept it out, the ship had vanished.

There was the open sea and the long swells and the murderous current boiling around the sharp points of the needles; but there was no ship nor any human soul of the crew. Old Andrew screamed like a woman at the sight.

“The ship!” he cried. “Where is the ship and the master?”

The thing was so swift and awful that I spoke myself.

“My God!” I said. “How quickly the thing they feared destroyed them!”

The big Highlander came over where I stood. The burr of his speech and its sacred imagery were gone with his change of dress.

“No,” he said, “they escaped the thing they feared.... What do you think it was?”

“I don't know,” I answered. “The creature in the English uniform said that it did not die, nor wax old, nor grow weary.”

“Ram Chad was right,” replied the Highlander. “The British government neither dies, ages, nor tires out. Do you realize what your uncle was doing here?”

“Molding images of Buddha,” I said.

“Molding Indian rupees,” he retorted.

“The Buddha business was a blind.... I'm Sir Henry Marquis, Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard. ... We got track of him in India.”

Then he added:

“There's a hundred thousand sterling in false coin at the bottom of the loch yonder!”

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Sleuth of St. James's Square, by Melville Davisson Post