CHAPTER XVI
BLACK PABLO MAKES HIS PREPARATIONS
They pushed me into the cool dimness of the cave. An odour of unwashed humanity, which blended gratefully with a searching smell of garlic, hung about my unseen captors.
“Herr Gott!” cried Grundt, “it's as dark as pitch in this hole. Cut away this cursed plant, some of you, and let's have some light!”
The creeper fell away. The golden sunlight that flooded the cave showed me Clubfoot, his black-tufted hands folded across the crutch handle of his heavy stick, grim and lowering.
Black Pablo, and a regular Hercules of a man, a broad-chested, yellow-bearded giant, a good type of the German bluejacket from the Frisian seaboard, were holding me. Grundt made a quick gesture of the hand.
“Take away his gun!” he ordered.
The fair young man I had seen at the graveside stepped forward. Roughly, vindictively, he ran his hands over me. He found Carstairs's automatic in my side pocket and transferred it to his own.
“You see these men,” said Clubfoot, bending his bushy eyebrows at me. “Their orders are to shoot to kill in the event of any attempt on your part to escape. And whatever your private views on suicide may be you will probably bear in mind that Miss Garth—the charming Miss Garth—will, in any case, be left to mourn you...”
This allusion to Marjorie frightened me. There was no suavity about Clubfoot now. He was in his blackest, most menacing mood. His face was positively baleful: and there was a twitching of his black-bristled nostrils which warned me that he was on the verge of a paroxysm of fury.
“Leave me alone with him!” he commanded brusquely—his voice was harsh and snarling—“but remain outside within call!”
I felt the blood rush back into my numbed arms as the men relaxed their grip and withdrew.
Nervously Grundt's great fist beat a little tattoo on his open palm. He appeared to be making an effort to control himself.
“You would play a double game with me, would you?” he said. “No man has ever double-crossed me and got away with it, do you hear? My master may be in exile, my country fallen from greatness; but I am king here. Do you understand that?”
His pale lips trembled and he stuttered as he strove to master his rising passion.
“This cipher message is useless, as well you know. Without the preliminary indication, it is unintelligible. So Itzig, who in his day was the greatest cipher expert the Russian Okhrana ever had, has reported to me. And you knew it, you ... you...”
He pawed the air with his huge hand, the fingers outstretched.
“They have examined the grave again. There are signs that something was attached to the timber-work. What that was the drunken Englishman who first visited the grave must have known. And he confided it to you. 'I know when I'm beaten, Herr Doktor,' and 'I'll give you the cipher,' say you! You thought you were too clever for old Clubfoot, the cripple, the beaten Hun. But I'm master here, Herr Major, and you shall do my bidding!...”
“You are misinformed, Herr Doktor!” I said, trying to speak calmly. My lips were dry and my heart-beats thumped in my ears. But I was not thinking of myself. I was tormented with anxiety for Marjorie—Marjorie in the hands of those men.
“Don't answer hastily!” counselled Grundt, changing to a tone of deadly calm that struck chill on my heart. “Ulrich von Hagel, who wrote that message, left it for one who should come after him, who would be a naval officer like himself. He wrote it so that it should be unintelligible to the casual person into whose hands it might fall, yet as clear as day to one of his own caste. And you would tell me that the message as it stands is all he left behind? Nein, nein, Herr Major, es geht nicht! I know that you have this information”—he crashed his fist into his open hand—“and you are going to give it to me!”
I shrugged my shoulders. I would not speak yet. Sooner or later, I knew, they would use Marjorie to break my silence. Then it would be time to speak. Till then, I must await developments. After all, time was on my side.
My gesture seemed to rekindle all Grundt's rage. Slowly the colour faded out of his face, leaving it livid save where that hideous scar on the cheek-bone made an angry patch of red. His bushy eyebrows drew together and his mouth trembled.
“So you'd still play with me, would you, you scum?” he shouted, his voice rising to a roar. “You'd pit your wits against mine, would you? Herr Gott, I have an account to settle with you and that brother of yours and, by God! I'm going to settle it! And you shall pay double for the pair of you! Do you know”—his voice dropped to a savage whisper—“that these German seamen of mine would cheerfully abandon all claim to the treasure for the pleasure of taking vengeance on you for all your country has made them suffer in these long years, hunted, degraded, outcast?
“Do you realize that I have but to raise my hand and you're a doomed man, and not the whole might of the British Empire could save you? But we shall take our time. You will not die too soon, my friend. First you shall speak! And if you remain obstinate, there is always the charming English girl...”
He clapped his hands. On a sudden the cave seemed filled with angry shouting men. My head swam, for I was worn out with want of sleep and faint with hunger. Something struck me on the back of the neck a violent blow. I felt myself falling, falling...
••••••••••
How long I remained unconscious I don't know. When I regained my senses, it was to find myself in semi-darkness in a long, low-roofed shed. It was dimly lit by a ruddy light which fell through some kind of grating near the roof. I could see no windows. The atmosphere was stifling, and the floor and walls fairly swarmed with enormous cockroaches.
They had laid me down on a pile of sail-cloth in a corner. My head was splitting and I had a raging thirst. My pockets had been rifled and my brandy flask was gone. I leaned back on my hard couch, my head against the rough wall of planks, and idly watched the flickering reddish light that filtered through the grating. I was vaguely aware of some unpleasant news that lurked, like a robber in ambush, in some unfrequented corner of my brain, ready to pounce out upon my first conscious thought....
Somewhere outside a guitar was thrumming random passages of Spanish dances, punctuated, now and then, by a little burst of castanets. The soft murmur of voices became audible every time the guitar stopped, with here a laugh and there an exclamation. Presently a voice called “Pablo”: the lilting rhythm of a dance theme stopped—suddenly in the middle of a bar—and the click of the castanets was stilled. Then, to soft, plaintive chords heavily stressed, an exquisite liquid tenor voice began to sing:
“Se murio y sobre su cara
Un panuelito le heche...
Por que no toque la tierra
Esa bocca que yo bese...”
The chords broke off abruptly on a single string that sang reverberatingly. There was laughter, applause, the confusion of men speaking together. Then a voice said distinctly in German:
“He hadn't come round when I looked in ten minutes ago. Karl knows how to send them to sleep with that blow of his...”
“He'll come out of dreamland quick enough when Der Stelze gives Black Pablo the word!” another voice replied.
“O Pablo,” cried one in Spanish, “O Pablo! You shall try your little persuasions on the señor!”
“Si, si!” came from many throats.
“Madre de Dios!” answered a voice in guttural Spanish. “He shall speak for me, muchachos! And if he will not speak, then, caramba! maybe he'll sing for us—and for the lovely señorita as well!”
There followed a roar of acclamation. Then Black Pablo said:
“Patience a little while, amigos, until the Chief comes. I go to make ready the fire!...”
I sprang to my feet. I heard no more of the talk outside, the cries, the laughter, the chaff. The time had come for action. I must decide at once between complete capitulation to Grundt or one last bid for liberty.
But what guarantee had I that Grundt, with the heliograph in his possession, would respect any promise he might give me as the price of surrender? None. I could not trust him, and, as he had told me, he had an old score to pay off. And if anything should happen to me before the yacht returned, what would become of Marjorie? Free I might help her: therefore, any risk was justifiable to secure my escape.
Escape? But how?
The shed was solidly built of heavy logs, the door the only visible means of egress. The grating which admitted the air was a steel-bound frame, too narrow, as I could see at a glance, to admit the passage of my body. I scrutinized the floor. It was of planking, well-made and seemingly in good condition. It struck hollow to the foot, and I surmised that, as is generally the case with sheds of this kind, the structure was laid on a concrete foundation.
In the course of my examination of the boarding I moved the pile of sail-cloth. Beneath it was a plank in which an iron ring was sunk. The sheer unexpectedness of my discovery, the prospect of escape it opened to me, left me with brain numbed, irresolute. The talk and laughter had died down outside, but from time to time my ear caught a measured foot-tread as though a guard were walking up and down before the shed....
The plank came up easily enough. My heart sank within me. It revealed merely a shallow trough about three feet deep going down to the foundations of the shed which, as I had guessed, were set in concrete.
I got down into the hole and crawled in under the floor. It was pitch-dark and abominably hot down there under the boards, with a strong smell of rats. Face downwards, my head frequently scraping the planks above me, I crawled along the concrete bed, hoping against hope that I might find some hole, where the outer wall of the shed rested on the concrete base, which would enable me to scramble through to freedom.
But I was doomed to disappointment. Here and there I found a cranny big enough for the flat of my hand to pass. But nowhere was there an opening wide enough to take anything bigger than a cat. I could only conclude that the trap I had found was made for the purpose of allowing repairs to be effected to the lower woodwork of the shed.
Half-suffocated with the heat and almost blinded with dust, I was painfully crawling back to my trap when my head hit a plank along the wall with more than usual violence. The beam seemingly rotten underneath, eaten perhaps by ants, splintered like touchwood, and my head came up through the floor. I found myself looking into the shed.
Then germinated in my mind the seed of a great idea. The next best thing to escaping is to give the appearance of having escaped, a theory which many of our war prisoners in Germany turned to good account. If my captors were not acquainted with the construction of the shed, if, as I calculated, they would, from the discovery of a large hole in the floor, jump to the conclusion, without further investigation, that I had burrowed my way out under the floor, the guard over the shed would be relaxed, and I should, at any rate, have a little breathing-space in which to think out my next move. There were a lot of “ifs” about my plan. But it was the only one I could think of for the moment, and I set about putting it into operation at once.
Where the rotten plank had given way, I enlarged the hole as much as possible. Then I climbed through it back into the shed, replaced the plank with the ring and covered it up again with the pile of sail-cloth, and without further delay, dived down again through the hole I had made under the floor. I crawled away among the beams and joists as far as I could go in the direction of the other side of the shed, and then lay still.