The Secret of the Silver Car by Wyndham Martyn (best classic romance novels txt) 📕

Sutton had been the officer; Trent the enlisted man and the discipline of the service prevented a friendship that would have been possible in other days and, now war was finished, might again become practicable. The space of an hour was the time the officer had been with the man and yet he was determined to fight for his interests. And he suddenly realized that he had begun his fight by antagonizing a very shrewd purser.

“My dear sir,” the purser said gently, “I am sure you are taking this too much to heart. Nobody is accusing your client of anything more serious than risking a broken leg which, after all, is more his affair than even his counsel’s. Captain Kingscote will ask you a few questions which you must understand, as a lawyer, a ship’s commander ought to ask. There is such a thing as a log and it has to be written correctly. Tomorrow morning perhaps? You will be offered an excellent cigar and a drink that you can’t get in all the length and breadth of your native land.”

“Any time at all,” Sutton answered with an effort to be as genial as the purser. “I only resented the idle chatter that centred around a man who fought very gallantly.”

“If you mean me by that reference,” Colliver said angrily, “I’d like to say that I have as much right to talk as anyone on board.”

“Certainly,” said Myers Irving, “and I can’t see why anyone wants to get excited about it. It was that professor who began it. Mr. Colliver what do you say to a little smile?”

Colliver looked at the card Irving handed to him. He did not like advertising men as a rule but he felt this debonair head of a big agency was an exception. He had come to the aid of big business.

“It must be the salt in the air,” he confessed, “I don’t mind if I do.”

Left to himself Sutton closed his eyes and lived over again those moments in France when Anthony Trent had been brought before him as adjutant on extraordinary charges.

Once or twice he had seen Private Trent and had been vaguely reminded of a forgotten face. It was only when Anthony Trent had been recommended for promotion and had declined it that he remembered the name. Trent had been the Dartmouth football captain in that historic year when Harvard was humbled. Sutton, a graduate of ten years previously, had shouted himself hoarse at the great run by which Trent had passed the crimson score.

Private Trent had been chosen on very dangerous business and the adjutant had no chance to speak to him as he had determined to do. Anthony Trent was one of those who volunteered to clean up machine gun nests left behind to harass the advancing troops of the Allies. He had done so well that Captain Sutton was proud of him for the sake of the old college in Hanover.

He remembered the shock he had when Lieutenant Devlin, a former detective in New York and a man to whom he was not drawn, declared that this same Anthony Trent was the most famous criminal of the day, a matter craftsman who had never been in police toils.

Sutton laughed at the very suggestion. It was absurd. Devlin’s answer to this made the soldier-lawyer less confident. Devlin said that Dr. Trent had left his son but a few hundred dollars and a rambling mortgaged home among New Hampshire hills. Young Trent had come to New York and settled down to writing detective and criminal stories for the lesser magazines. Then, suddenly, an Australian relative had died and left him a fortune. This was a lie, Devlin declared. There was no such relation. It was done to explain his sudden giving up of writing and living in a far better style.

Trent owned, so the detective asserted, a beautiful camp on Kennebago Lake in Maine, two automobiles and sundry other aids to a comfortable existence which his writings would never have gained for him.

Still ‘disbelieving, Captain Sutton was shown the dying depositions of an English soldier who had been butler to a New York millionaire whose house had been robbed. Austin, the butler, had seen Trent and assumed him to be a friend of his employer. He had recognized him when British and American troops were brigaded side by side and had told only Devlin a detective who had worked on the case.

Evidence at last seemed conclusive. Devlin, dying in hospital wished for the downfall of a man who had beaten him in three big cases. The adjutant remembered well one case when the Dangerfield ruby worth almost two hundred thousand dollars was taken.

Private Trent seemed quite calm. He assured his officer that these charges were preposterous. “What else could they be?” he had asked.

“They might be the truth,” Button had said gravely.

He remembered the visit to the hospital where Devlin lay dying but eager to sign the testimony he had woven about his enemy. The ending of the incident was very curious. It made him like Devlin after all. When Devlin knew his end was come and the last rites of his church had been administered he had given up his plans for revenge. He had looked into the fearless eyes of the master criminal and he had seen there an unconquerable spirit which he admired. And so, with his last effort he had torn up the written evidence and declared that Anthony Trent was not the man; that it was all a mistake.

Sutton remembered the relief with which he had put his hand on the shoulder of the younger man and that he had said, “Trent, you were in luck this time. Don’t take a chance again.”

After the signing of peace he had determined to look up the old athlete and see if he could not offer him such opportunities that he could go straight. Sutton was a man of immense wealth and had mining properties in South America which needed supervision.

And now to find that Trent was aboard the ship and at the last moment had risked a broken limb in order to escape. It was not likely that a man who feared detection so much dare rely on the generosity of a man who knew his secret. There were probably rewards for his capture which, in the aggregate, offered immense inducement to deliver Anthony Trent to justice. How was Trent to know that Sutton the adjutant was financially secure enough to make the sacrifice? Undoubtedly he had seen Sutton and made the desperate leap.

Sutton determined to safeguard his interests. The baggage for instance, that should not be searched. There might be in it evidence as damaging as that which the brothers of Joseph put into the younger’s sack. It would be far better to see the captain and make a friend of him. Why had not Trent been a better reader of character and recognized that in Captain Sutton he had a friend?

Sutton did not know that long ago Trent had seen that in the rich lawyer there was one whom he need not fear. Few were more skilled than the master criminal in the reading of those signs by which men reveal for a second or so the depths of their natures.

Anthony Trent had not jumped from the rails of the big ship because he had seen Sutton. He had no idea his old adjutant was on board. He had not jumped ashore because of any person on the liner. He took his reckless leap because among those who waited on the pier he heard the voice of the one man he feared, the man he had been trying to find since that day in France when death seemed at last to have claimed him.

One day late in October when the Allies were moving with such speed against the enemy Private Trent had been struck with a piece of shrapnel. There was the recognized noise of the flying fragments and then a sudden naming pain in his left arm followed by black unconsciousness.

He came back very slowly to the realization that he was not seriously hurt. His wounded arm was bandaged. He was still rather weak and lay back for some moments before opening his eyes. Then he opened them to meet only a wall of unrelieved night. “I’m blind!” he thought.

Groping about him he felt dank earth, the earth he had been accustomed to in the trenches, slimy, sweating clay. With his undamaged hand he felt the bandages that were about his head. There was no wound near his eyes; but that would not be necessary, for he had seen so many cases of blindness due to the bursting of high explosives. It might be temporary blindness or it might be permanent.

There was a great silence about him. Gone were the myriad sounds of war that had enveloped him before his injury. Perhaps he was deaf, too. “My God!” he groaned thinking of this new infliction and then grew a little less miserable when he recognized the sound of his own voice. Well, blindness was enough! Never again to see the green earth or the morning sun stealing down the lake where his home was. At a little past thirty to see only through the eyes of others. No more golf, no more hunting and fishing trips, and of course no more of those taut nerved nights when he, a single human being, pitted his strength and intelligence against the forces of organized society—and won. There was small consolation in thinking that now, at all events, Anthony Trent, master criminal would not be caught. He would go down in police history as the most mysterious of those criminals who have set the detectives by the heels.

A little later he told himself he would rather be caught, sentenced to a term of life imprisonment if only he might see a tiny ribbon of blue sky from his cell window, than condemned to this eternal blackness.

Then the miracle happened. A few yards from him came a scratching sound and then a sudden flame. And in that moment he could see the profile of a man bending over a cigarette. He was not blind!

“Who are you?” Anthony Trent cried not yet able to comprehend this lifting of what he felt was a sentence imposed. “Where am I?”

The man who answered spoke with one of those cultivated English voices which Trent had once believed to be the mark of decadence or effeminacy, a belief the bloody fields of France had swept from him.

“Well,” said the man slowly, “I really don’t see that it matters much now to anyone what my name may be.”

“The only thing that matters to me,” Trent cried with almost hysterical fervor, “is that I’m not blind as I thought I was.”

The answer of the unknown man was singular; but Trent, who was not far from hysteria on account of bodily pain and the mental anguish through which he had been, did not take note of it.

“I don’t think that matters much either,” the voice of the man in the dark commented.

“Then where are we?” Trent demanded.

“There again I can’t help you much,” the unknown answered. “This was a common or garden dug-out.”

“Was,” Trent repeated, “What is it now?”

“A tomb,” the stranger told him puffing at his cigarette. “I found you bleeding to death and I bandaged your arm. I was knocked out myself and your men and