The Wrecker by Clive Cussler (book club reads .TXT) 📕

“I wish you could ride with me, Lillian,” he said, “but Van Dorn policy ...”

“I know. I’ve heard it already. You don’t bring friends to gunfights.”

46

JAMES DASHWOOD LOCATED ST. SWITHUN’S MONASTERY FROM A clue dropped by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union orator Captain Willy Abrams: “A heck of a spread.”

Its boundaries encompassed thirteen thousand acres that sprawled from the foothills of the Santa Lucia Mountains to the bluffs that reared over the Pacific Ocean. A muddy road miles from the nearest town led through iron gates onto an undulating plateau planted in orchards of fruit trees, nut trees, and vineyards. The chapel was a spare, modern building with simple Art Nouveau stained-glass windows. Low stone buildings of similar design housed the monks. They ignored James when he asked to see a recent arrival, a blacksmith named Jim Higgins.

Man after man in swaying robes walked past him as if he did not exist. Monks harvesting grapes and picking nuts just kept working no matter what he said. Finally, one took pity, picked up a stick, and wrote in the mud vow OF SILENCE.

Dashwood took the stick and wrote BLACKSMITH?

The monk pointed at a cluster of barns and corrals opposite the dormitories. Dashwood headed there, heard the distinctive clank of a hammer on iron, and quickened his pace. Rounding a barn, he saw a thin column of smoke rising through the branches of a chestnut tree. Higgins was bent over a forge, pounding a horseshoe on the horn of his anvil.

He wore a brown robe under his leather apron. His head was bare to the cold drizzle. The robe made him look even bigger than Dashwood remembered. In one powerful hand, he gripped a massive hammer, and in the other long tongs that held red-hot iron. When he looked up and saw Dashwood in his city clothes carrying a suitcase, Dashwood had to suppress the strong impulse to flee.

Higgins stared long and hard at Dashwood.

Dashwood said, “I hope you haven’t taken vows of silence like the others.”

“I’m just a novice. How did you find me?”

“When I heard you stopped drinking, I went to temperance meetings.”

Higgins gave a snort that was half laugh, half angry growl. “Figured the last place the Van Dorns would find me would be in a monastery.”

“You were scared by the sketch I showed you.”

Higgins raised the hot horseshoe in his tongs. “Guess I figured wrong ...”

“You recognized him, didn’t you?”

Higgins threw the horseshoe into a bucket of water. “Your name is James, ain’t it?”

“Yes. We’re both Jims.”

“No, you’re a James, I’m a Jim ...” He leaned his tongs against the anvil and stood his hammer beside it. “Come on, James. I’ll show you around.”

Jim Higgins lumbered off toward the bluff. James Dashwood followed him. He caught up and walked beside Higgins until they had to stop at the bluff’s crumbling edge. The Pacific Ocean spread as far as they could see, gray and forbidding under a lowering sky. Dashwood looked down, and his guts clenched. Hundreds of feet below them, the ocean thundered on a rocky beach, hurling up spray. Had Higgins lured him to this lonely precipice to throw him to his death?

“I have known for some time that I was going to Hell,” the blacksmith intoned gravely. “That’s why I stopped drinking whiskey. But it didn’t help. Stopped beer. Still going to Hell.” He turned to James Dashwood with burning eyes. “You turned me inside out when you came along. Scared me into running. Scared me into hiding.”

James Dashwood wondered what he should say. What would Isaac Bell do under these circumstances? Try to clamp handcuffs around his thick wrists? Or let him talk?

“Bunch of big shots started this monastery,” Higgins was saying. “Lot of these monks are rich men who gave up everything to live the simple life. You know what one of them told me?”

“ No. ”

“Told me that I’m blacksmithing exactly like they did in the Bible, except I burn mineral coal in my forge instead of charcoal. They say that working like folks in the Bible is good for our souls.”

He turned his back on the cliff and fixed his gaze on the fields and meadows. The drizzle strengthening into rain shrouded the vineyards and the fruit trees.

“I figured I was safe here,” he said.

He stared for a long time before he spoke again.

“What I didn’t figure was liking it here. I like working outdoors under a tree instead of cooped up with trucks and automobiles stinking up the air. I like being with weather. I like watching storms ...” He whirled around to face the Pacific, which was checkered with dark squalls. To the southwest, the sky was turning black as coal. “See there?” he asked Dashwood, pointing to the blackness.

Dashwood saw a grim, cold ocean, a crumbling precipice at his feet, and rocks far below.

“Look, James. Don’t you see it coming?”

It struck the apprentice detective that the blacksmith had gone crazy long before the train wreck. “See what, Jim?”

“The storm.” The blacksmith’s eyes were burning. “Mostly, they angle in from the northwest, a monk told me, down from the northern Pacific where it’s cold. This one’s coming from the south where it’s warm. From the south brings more rain ... You know what?”

“What?” Dashwood asked, hope fading.

“There’s a monk here whose daddy owns a Marconi wireless telegraph. Do you know that right now, four hundred miles at sea, there’s a ship telegraphing to the Weather Bureau what the weather is out there!” He fell silent, contemplating that discovery.

It was a chance to prime the pump, and James seized it. “They got the idea from Ben Franklin.”

“Huh?”

“I learned it in high school. Benjamin Franklin noticed that storms are moving formations, that you can track where they’re going.”

The blacksmith looked intrigued. “He did?”

“So when Samuel Morse invented the telegraph, it made it possible to send warnings to folks in the storm’s path. Like you say, Jim, now Marconi’s wireless telegraph lets ships send radiotelegraph