CHAPTER XIII
THE RECOVERED GROUND
It took McKinnon but half a minute to reach the passageway that led to Ganley's cabin. He felt, as he paused for an instant before his enemy's closed door, that his entrance into the room before him involved a final and unequivocal betrayal of his own position. His line of advance from that time forward could no longer be the circuitous and subterranean one he had hoped to make it. The contest between him and Ganley, thereafter, would have to be open and aboveboard.
Then, preparing himself for the scene he was to face, he turned the knob and swung open the door.
The cabin was empty. The electric lights were turned on, the disordered berth stood before him, and Ganley's massive pigskin wallet lay on the floor. But the room was without an occupant.
McKinnon, now thoroughly alarmed, turned and ran to the second door farther down the passageway. This door, he remembered, led into the cabin of Alicia Boynton, and for just a second or two he hesitated about entering it.
Then a great sense of gratitude welled up through him, for as he stood with his hand still on the knob the sound of the girl's voice came out to him. He had no time to resent the tumult and poignancy of this newer feeling, for it was the woman's words, and not her voice, that coerced him into sudden attention. "How dare you!" cried the voice beyond the closed door.
"How dare you come into this cabin!" she was crying. McKinnon could hear her gasp of what might have been either indignation or increasing fright.
"This is a little dose of your own medicine, young woman!"
It was Ganley who had spoken. His voice was still low and unhurried. It seemed almost casual in its studied deliberateness. Yet it held a tremolo of restrained passion that made the deliberating McKinnon wait there for a minute or two with his hand still on the door-knob.
It was Alicia Boynton's voice that sounded out of the quietness.
"How dare you!" she gasped again.
"Cut out that play-acting and stand back against that wall there! So! Now hand out that stuff of mine—every line and rag of it!"
It was the woman who spoke next.
"I have nothing to hand out."
"I'll give you ten seconds," protested Ganley. "I'll give you ten seconds to get those papers of mine into my hand here, every shred of 'em!"
"I have no papers of yours," declared the more and more terrified woman.
"I'm no fool—I saw 'em—I caught you at it!"
"Will you leave my cabin?"
"Then explain what you ve got stuck down your waist there!"
"It's nothing of yours."
"Hand it out, or I'll rip those clothes off your back!"
"There's nothing to hand out."
"Hand it out—or I'll blow it out!" came the low-toned threat, driven home with an oath.
"I can't," came the woman's answer, scarcely more than a whisper.
"Hand it out!"
Then came a second or two of unbroken silence.
"You're going to shoot!" gasped the woman. It was only too evident that Ganley had stepped closer to her.
"No," he said, his thick voice shaken a little with his close-held passion. "I'm not going to shoot. But I'm going to pound your lying head in with this gun-grip—I'm going to pound you till your own mother wouldn't know you!"
The woman uttered a little cry, not shrill enough to be a scream, not low enough to be called a moan. It was then that the waiting McKinnon swung open the door and sprang into the room.
He was barely in time to behold the infuriated Ganley, with his heavy black-handled Colt revolver held by its barrel, charge on the girl, who stood with her back against the cabin wall. He was not in time to prevent the blow that fell on the girl's out-thrust forearm, as blindly and instinctively she threw it up to guard her head. But as the clubbing gun-butt raised for its second frenzied blow the intruder sprang. As he sprang he caught the swinging revolver in his hand. One quick movement, one twist of the levering grip, wrenched it free. The next moment McKinnon's fingers were clamped on Ganley's fat and pendulous throat and he had the man in the black raincoat thrust flat back against the berth-edge, gasping for breath, pawing the air with his thick, fat hands.
"You hound, to treat a woman like that!" was all the overwrought McKinnon could say.
"Let me breathe, you fool!" gasped Ganley. "Let me breathe!"
"You hound!" repeated McKinnon, thrown into a primitive and unreasoning passion of revolt against the brutality of the scene.
"I caught the she-cat—I caught her red-handed—I caught her coming through my door!" cried Ganley, getting his breath again.
"Are you hurt?" the operator demanded of the woman still motionless against the wall.
"No," she answered.
"Then I'll settle this with the gentleman myself, in his own cabin, or in the captain's, if he prefers."
But Ganley was on his feet at once.
"Nobody's going to leave this room," he declared with a gavel-like thud of an oath. "That woman's lifted documents o' mine that aren't going to get out o' this cabin."
McKinnon's less primordial instincts were slowly reasserting themselves. He looked from the one figure to the other, as though mystified by the case, as though uncertain of the charges being bandied back and forth.
"Who is this woman?" he demanded of Ganley with a sudden assumption of uncertainty.
"Who is she!" cried the exasperated Ganley. "I know who she is, and she knows I know!"
"Have you anything of this man's?" McKinnon deliberately demanded of the girl, realising that his intrusion had not yet amounted to a complete betrayal of his own position.
The upturned gaze of the girl against the wall and that of the wireless operator met. Ganley moved closer to the door, as though to guard it. No one spoke until McKinnon repeated the question.
"Yes," said the panting and puzzled woman, "I have something of his."
"What is it?" asked the operator.
"A slip of paper."
"Where is it?"
"I have it," was all the girl answered.
"Then hand it out to me," ordered Ganley.
Her eyes were still on McKinnon's as her hand went to her breast.
"No, hand it to me," interposed McKinnon as he watched the slowly withdrawn hand that held a crumpled sheet of white paper. The wide, troubled eyes of the girl turned from one man to the other. Then she opened the slip of paper and glanced down at it. Ganley's hand went out for it authoritatively. The look in McKinnon's eyes was equally imperative.
It was then that the girl fell back a step or two along the cabin wall. She held the paper between her hands, as she did so. Then, with a quick movement of her trembling fingers, and before either of the men could stop her, she tore the sheet in two, again and again.
"I'll kill you for that!" choked Ganley, his face contorted like a wrestler's, shaking and twitching, but not moving from where he stood.
McKinnon, with the revolver still in his hand, stepped between them.
"There's been enough of this prize-ring work," he cried as he faced Ganley. "I want to know what all this means."
"It means I'm going to get that woman," panted the other man, his face still grayish purple with rage.
"How get her!"
"Get her in irons, where she belongs."
"I stole nothing," interrupted the white-faced girl.
A stab of inapposite remorse went through McKinnon as he remembered that he himself was the cause of this last and unlovely scene.
"She lies!" Ganley was saying.
"Hold on there!" said McKinnon, getting a firmer and firmer grasp on both himself and the situation. "I came into this cabin and found you beating a girl over the head. Say what you've got to say about it. Then the girl can say what she has to say."
Ganley stared at his self-appointed judge.
"Are you the master of this ship?" he demanded.
"I'm the master of this situation," calmly replied the wireless operator with a pregnant upthrust of the revolver which he still held in his hand. "And before our little party breaks up I'm going to understand what it means."
"Then ask this woman what she stole from me."
McKinnon had to feel and test his way as he went, like a man on thin ice.
"You mean for the woman to speak first?"
"Yes," retorted Ganley; "and she's going to do more than speak."
McKinnon turned to the woman, who stood still staring at him in unbroken and puzzled silence.
"Well?" he said at last.
"What must I explain?" she finally asked, still studying his face.
"What you carried out of my cabin," answered Ganley.
"You want me to explain that?" she asked, her eyes on the younger man's face.
"Yes," answered the operator.
"Must I tell you?" still parried the perplexed woman.
"You must," McKinnon replied.
"It was the contract made between this man and the wireless operator of this ship," she deliberately answered.
"A contract?" said McKinnon.
"It was the agreement you signed to become a partner of this man."
"And you tore this agreement up?" demanded McKinnon with an assumption of incredibility. He waited for her glance of intelligence to show him that she had caught some vague inkling of his position, of the attitude of armed neutrality he was struggling to retain in that strange tangle of interests; but she did not seem to understand.
"You saw me tear it up," she replied, wondering in turn just what was expected of her, anxious not to endanger him by any foolish misstep on her part.
"Why?" asked McKinnon.
"I could not see any one tied to a man whose hands are stained with blood."
Ganley laughed a heavy and mirthless laugh, as though resenting the theatricality of the woman's phrase.
"That's a hell of a reason!" he mumbled in his sullen guttural.
"I did it because I know what this man is," went on the woman, turning her slow and puzzled stare from the operator to Ganley.
McKinnon, now in perfect control of himself, wheeled about to the Columbinelike figure in the black raincoat and the Chinese silk pajamas.
"You are Richard Duffy, acting with the Consolidated Fruit Concern and the authorities at Washington for the capture of a man named Ganley, are you not?"
"I am," answered the man in the raincoat, doggedly facing the young woman. McKinnon could see her lip pucker up with its little curl of unspeakable scorn.
"The man lies!" said the girl in her calm and deliberate tones. "This man is Ganley, 'King-maker Ganley,' himself!"
The man in the raincoat once more laughed his sullenly derisive laugh. His contemptuous defiance seemed to nettle and anger the woman into more coherent thought. When she spoke next she uttered her words more incisively, more quickly.
"This man," and her scorn was infinite, "is the buzzard of the tropics, the creature who waits and watches over sick republics, who prowls about after dying governments to pick their bones!"
"You're crazy!" scoffed the man she was accusing.
"He's called 'Kaiser Ganley,' the gun-runner, 'Pasha Ganley,' the agent of every Central American patriot," she continued. "He's the fighter who never comes to do his own fighting. He's the man who sucks his living out of a blinded and ignorant people's gun-wounds."
"She lies!" declared Ganley, blinking up at McKinnon indifferently, as though to note the effect of her words on him.
"He drugs these simple-minded people with war talk and blinds them with the glitter of a little gilt braid," went on the woman, with increasing bitterness. "Then he turns and robs them. And there he is, the colleague, the intimado you have found, the man who made a tool of Juan Parra and murdered him or had him murdered in the swamps of the Magdalena, the man who was given twelve hours to make his way out of Brazil, the man that even Zelaya refused to stand by. He is the upholder of the weak who shipped twenty-five thousand rounds of ammunition into Locombia, embedded in lard, and twenty-eight hundred carbines crated and invoiced as laundry equipment, and nine cases of dynamite that went out of Mobile as land fertiliser for the Costa Rican coffee plantations."
The man in the raincoat, who had been squatting contemptuously on the berth-edge, swung forward to his feet at this. His many-lined, heavy, red face had lost its colour until it remained only a faded brick-dust tint.
"You see!" cried the woman more tumultuously. "He even confesses it is true. It surprises him that I should know so much. But there are other things I know. I know that he was the instigator of the Orinoco Colonisation frauds. I know he was once a Cuban blockade-runner, and once an agent of Don Carlos, the Spanish pretender. I know that he was a gun smuggler into the Balkans at the same time that he was being made a pasha by his friend, the Sultan of Turkey."
She paused for breath and pointed mockingly at her enemy's short, thick fingers as they slowly clenched and unclenched.
"Look at his hands and you will see! He went to Lhassa in the pay of a Russian secret agent. And they caught him and crucified him on one of their convent walls—they nailed him there through the hands. You can see the marks! He can't lie those away, for he hung there twelve hours until a tribesman set him free and spirited him across the frontier. And this is the great soldier who gave you money"
Ganley once more broke in on her as she stopped to pant for breath.
"These are a pack o' lies!" he cried, and his voice was rasping and forced, as though it required a great effort for him to utter the words, "These are all damned lies!"
The woman pointed to the little particles of white paper scattered about the floor.
"And that was not an agreement with this man?" she derisively asked.
"This man made an agreement with me, an open and honest agreement."
"Honest!" interpolated the scornful woman.
"And he had the right of saying yes or no to it. He's past the age of being wet-nursed into what he wants to do."
"Then he had the right to know what he was tied up with," parried the scoffing woman.
"He still has the right of saying yes or no to that agreement," declared Ganley as he brought his great, russet-coloured hand down on the berth-edge with a sudden blow. "But what's he to you, anyway?"
She looked from one to the other of the two men before her. But McKinnon gave her no chance to reply. The moment he had been waiting for had already arrived.
"I've had enough of this," he said as he held his hand out towards the sullen-faced Ganley. In this outstretched hand was a roll of bills held together by a rubber band.
"What's this?"
"It's your money!" said McKinnon.
"I won't take it!" retorted the other.
"You won't take it?"
"Not until you show me a reason why we should split." He jerked a contemptuous thumb towards the staring woman. "And I don't call that a reason!"
"The whole thing's too tangled up for me," equivocated the operator.
"There's no tangle when it's pared down to the truth."
"But we can't argue about that all night, and I've got my key to attend to," complained the watchful McKinnon.
A new look of anxiety flashed across the other man's face at the mention of the key. It was a flash, and nothing more.
"Then you believe what she says?" asked Ganley more soberly, looking from the paper-littered floor to the woman still standing motionless against the cabin wall.
"You haven't disproved it," said the operator with a gesture of simulated bewilderment.
"I'm proving and disproving nothing," was Ganley's reply. "I haven't been doing the talking. I'm not the talking kind. But I've come into touch with this kind o' woman before. I know her, and she and her whole gang can't hoodwink me!"
"Well?" said McKinnon a little impatiently.
"Oh, I've known her ever since she hitched up with that crooked little concession hunter called Boynton."
"Stop!" cried the girl.
"For three years now she's been a feeder for that one-lunged climber, that Yankee renegade who's been trying to pose as a Spaniard. They're the team who went down yonder with a cooked up claim on the Cornruche Rubber Treaty territory."
"Stop!" cried the indignant girl, more shrilly. The scene in some way reminded McKinnon of a meeting between a cat and a mastiff. More and more he grew to resent the fact that this fragile and isolated figure should be dragged through such demeaning mires of scurrility. But Ganley was not to be stopped.
"And when they'd wrung their money out of that," he declared, "they dished up a Locombian nitrate claim and drained that dry. And when that was picked clean they wheedled their way into Duran's good graces. And then, to cinch her graft, this woman, this pink-and-white beauty right here before you, married a Santo Domingan half-caste filibuster who'd made a half million out of brandy smuggling and counterfeiting!"