Sinister Island by Charles Wadsworth Camp (desktop ebook reader txt) 📕

“He hinted at some money trouble,” Miller urged gently.

“Yes. He had a good jewellery business. Then the government fined him heavily for evading customs duties. He paid the fine, but it drove him into bankruptcy. He swore he would get even with the government. It became a passion.”

“Then you knew his plan when you came here!”

“No, oh, no. Don’t think I’m bad.”

Molly seated herself beside her on the sofa and took her hand. The girl glanced at her gratefully, wonderingly.

“I knew nothing at first. He made excuses for introducing those two men as his brothers to the Andersons. One had been his partner. The other was in the same business. He told me things that weren’t true about the Andersons. That was why I wouldn’t be friendly even at first, why I held them away. Sooner or later I had to discover everything. That day came. I suffered alone. I tried to find the right thing to do. You don’t know the unhappiness of that time. What was I to dot There was no one to whom I could go. And I had no money. I couldn’t leave the island, and I couldn’t betray him. One doesn’t find it easy to betray a father. It was the same thing. So I went to him and begged him to give it up. I couldn’t move him. In the end he made me promise.”

“I see,” Miller said. “That was why you told me he had stayed because of you.”

“Yes, because I had promised not to betray him. Do you blame me for that?”

“I blame you for nothing,” he said softly, “unless it is that you tried to hold me away from you too.”

“I had to, yet I failed. I wanted no friends here, and you see I was right. You see how it has worked out.”

“Why were you treated so brutally tonight!” Molly asked.

“Because I knew the boat was coming tonight. It was to be the biggest stroke. I tried to make him promise there would be no murder. He wouldn’t promise. He said he would send the man to the coquina house at midnight. He said he would try to keep you interested there, so you wouldn’t hear anything outside and be tempted to meddle. But he swore if you did meddle you would have to pay his price. Then I told him I couldn’t let it go on. I couldn’t risk it. I took back my promise. I said I would warn you. I started to run out of the house.”

She raised her torn wrists to her face.

“He lost his temper. It was terrible.”

After a moment she continued.

“But I got free. Without their knowing it I went to the edge of the clearing at the coquina house. I made up my mind to stay there all night, and, if you heard anything, if you ran out, to keep you from coming this way where the danger was. Then some one called from the boat and you came. When the blue light burned I knew it was too late. I knew you would take your life in your hands to find out what the blue light was.”

“We know it was a signal,” Anderson began, “but—”

Miller raised his hand.

“Understand,” he said to the girl, “I appreciate—I know the strain. I hate to put you on the rack, but the fisherman—I’ve tried. He won’t talk.”

“No,” she said. “He wouldn’t anyway. But he is dumb.”

“Dumb!”

“Yes. That was why they used him. Because of that he has been an outcast. He hates normal men. The rest were my uncle’s own people. He could trust them. Well—my uncle is dead. Oh, I know! If you wish, I think I have a way of making the fisherman speak, and, since there is much that I can’t tell you—”

“How?” Miller asked.

“It isn’t—I don’t like—I’ve succeeded with him easily before. When we first came my uncle asked me to do it. I thought it was fun then, but later I understood why it was.”

She hesitated. She sighed.

“It makes no difference,” she said. “I’ll do what you wish. Where is he?”

“In the cupola. Will you comet”

She arose, stood unsteadily for a moment, then walked across the room. Miller took the lamp. He helped her up the stairs. Anderson and Molly followed.

Miller placed the lamp on the floor. The fisherman’s eyes blinked at first, but as they grew accustomed to the light his countenance resumed its statuesque expression.

The girl faced him. She looked in his eyes. She spoke to him quietly, soothingly. Her voice went on with a droning quality. Suddenly Miller understood. He understood, too, the barrier she had tried to raise between them when he had startled her that first morning on the beach. He could define now the sense of unreasoning contest that had swept him when she had suggested his inability to hold her, to find her lips. It was her trick, natural or acquired, that she had used to save herself the torture of seeming friendship with the Andersons, that she had flung with all her will to avoid an acquaintanceship and its possible complications with him, the newcomer. But his own will had been too strong. It had always accepted the challenge.

“Where did you learn that?” he whispered.

She motioned him to be quiet. After a few moments she began to question. The right arm of the fisherman slowly rose at her command while the fingers flashed the short-hand of the dumb.

In a dreamy voice, as though she were almost hypnotic herself, she translated these signals. They told how the goods had been shipped by Morgan’s accomplice in Europe to one of the Bahama Islands; how the brothers had gone there in their small schooner with a Jamaican crew, received the goods, stowed them away in a miscellaneous cargo, and cleared for Martinsburg; how it had always been arranged for the schooner to reach the inlet bar in the middle of the night, when the fisherman would slip out in his silent tug and take off the boxes; how the blue signal light was burned as a necessity to give the schooner her course for the mouth of the river and to guide the fisherman to the entrance of the risky channel across the inlet bar.

Tonight, she translated, the storm had alarmed the fisherman. He had not dared wait for the light. He had taken his chances and come on in. One of the brothers had come with him. He supposed he had taken alarm and had escaped with the boat. As for himself, the blue light had shown him Miller on the shore, hesitating before the entrance to the dangerous forest. He had followed him, and, when Miller was about to enter the forbidden quarters, had struck him on the temple from behind. Locking him in the building with the snakes, he had delayed for a time the necessary execution while he had tried unsuccessfully to find Morgan.

She turned to them wearily.

“There is nothing else, is there?”

Miller shook his head. He walked to the rear window of the cupola. The flames had done their work quickly. Only a red glow hung sombrely over a blackened desert. It failed to reach the clouds where the skirmishers of the dawn with quiet confidence fought it back.

“There’s nothing else,” he said. “Bring him out of it.”

He went down the ladder, beckoning to Molly and Anderson. When they were in the lower hall he took their hands.

“Would you mind?” he asked. “Will you take her home with you, shelter her until she can forget this nightmare through which she’s lived in pleasant dreams! You’re my best friends—until she can tell whether—for me—it’s real!”

“Jim!” Molly cried. “You know!”

Anderson laughed softly.

“To think, after all, it was on Captain’s Island!”

They heard her descending the ladder. Molly went to meet her at the foot of the stairs. Miller led Anderson to the verandah.