“The treasure!” exclaimed Val.
“The treasure!” exclaimed Jessica.
She clapped her hands in childish glee. He reached up and lifted down the box, which was quite heavy. A rapid glance around the cave convinced him that there was nothing else there. This natural chamber in the hillside was the end of the cave. There was no need to stay there longer.
With scarcely concealed excitement they turned toward the entrance and made their way out. They blinked in the sharp sunlight for a moment, scarcely able to see, so great was the transition from the dense gloom of the cave.
“That’s it!” exclaimed Elizabeth as the box came to view. “I remember that box.”
It was an ordinary tin box, such as is used to hold valuable papers, black, with a band of thin gold drawn about it, and a handle on the top. Val placed the box on the ground in front of the entrance to the cave and tried to open it. It was locked.
“The chisel, Eddie,” he said.
With the chisel he forced the lock quickly, the others gathering close over the box in their eagerness to get a first glimpse of its contents. He threw the cover up. The box was filled almost to the top with banknotes, in denominations of one hundred to one thousand. Under the banknotes were piles of stocks and bonds. A rapid calculation on the spot showed them that there was nearly half a million dollars in money and negotiable securities in front of them.
Rapt in their interest, the small group clustered around the box, lost to everything but what was before them. Half a million dollars!
“Oh!” murmured Jessica, clasping her hands together. “To think⸺”
There was a movement behind them, and they heard a voice. So absorbed were they that they had forgotten all else—forgotten the chance of Teck’s appearance. They whirled now.
In front of them stood Teck and his three roughnecks, the three carrying revolvers menacingly.
“I rather think we’ll have to relieve you of all that,” remarked Teck pleasantly, his eyes gleaming at the open box, at the wealth displayed therein.
A swift, determined glance passed between Eddie and his employer—it was a thing of a fraction of a second, but it was enough. They knew that this was no time to give up.
A lightning kick of Eddie’s foot disarmed one of the men, and at the same moment both Val and he leaped for them. There was no time to use the weapons, so swiftly did they attack. It was a rough and tumble fight.
A sudden lunge by Val, and Horseface dropped to the ground, knocked out clean.
“Clean ’em up, Eddie!” he shouted.
They were all over their opponents in an instant. Val was the poetry of motion in his actions, lithe as a mountain cat, and as terrible. Closing with his man, he grasped his gun-hand, the weapon being discharged in the air. There was a dull crack, and the gun dropped from his hand, the wrist hanging uselessly, broken. Val lifted him and threw him at Teck, who was now jumping at him.
Kicking the body of the tough aside, Val leaped at Teck. The two great bulks met in midair and hung there for an instant, their big bodies straining. Eddie was getting the best of his opponent, forcing him back and down, pounding violently at him with his fists.
Val could feel the muscles of Teck swelling under his arms as they strained backward and forward. This was no mean opponent, with his great weight and his terrible passion. Teck’s face was livid in his anger, and against the pasty skin his scar throbbed and glowed evilly, his mouth sending forth a stream of foul curses. He wrenched an arm loose and started to flick it upwards at Val’s head, but Val had had that done to him once; he was watching for him. He seized the arm in the nick of time, and it never landed.
“Now, Iggy!” panted Val, forcing him backwards, landing blows on his stomach as he spoke, to each one of which Teck grunted in pain. “Over you go!” They were now on the edge of the cleared space, overhanging the valley below.
Backwards he forced him, and still backwards, always holding that right arm of his where it could do no harm. Over . . . over . . . still further . . .
A calm voice broke in on them, cold as steel, and emotionless.
“That will be about all of that, Teck.”
Everything stopped in a moment, arms suspended in air, muscles taut. They looked in the direction from where the voice came.
A great gasp came from Teck and Jessica. Val stared in his astonishment.
It was the mysterious man he had seen last night in the lightning—the old man of mystery. With him were four policemen, with drawn revolvers.
Jessica grew ghastly pale; she swayed on her feet, staring unbelievingly at the apparition. Teck could not draw his eyes away. It was Jessica who spoke first, a cry drawn from her, involuntarily, amazedly.
“Father!”
Teck stared. “Peter Pomeroy!” he gasped, stepping backward as though from an apparition. It was his last step.
Behind him was a rock, on the very edge of the cliff, over which he tumbled. The last thing they saw was his pale face, disfigured by the scar, disappearing backward down the long drop. A hoarse scream echoed back, there was a crashing of underbrush, and silence.
The policemen jumped for the three toughs and took charge of them, but nobody noticed. Slowly Jessica was advancing to the aged man, who gazed at her, his face transfigured.
“Father!” she breathed again.
“Yes, it is I,” he said.
In an instant she was sobbing on his breast, softly.
Val stared at Eddie and Eddie stared back just as wonderingly at Val.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” Val exclaimed at length.
“So will I, sir,” replied Eddie.
The scene between father and daughter was a touchingly pathetic one, and Val and Eddie discreetly busied themselves in diverting their attention to something else. They leaned over the cliff and tried to discover the body of Teck far below, but he had evidently rolled under a tree, because they could see nothing of him.
“Suppose we go down, sir,” suggested Eddie. “We might come across him—he might not be dead; he might need assistance.”
“Right, Eddie,” assented Val.
Jessica and the old man, her father, were by now regaining coherence. “He told me you were dead, father,” she said. “I’ve been laying flowers before an urn supposed to contain your ashes for over a year.”
The old man smiled grimly. “I deny that I’m dead, Jessica,” he said. “Though I’ve been as good as dead all that time. It’s rather too long a yarn to spin here—let it wait till we get back to the house. We’d better go down with these young men to see if we can find Ignace.”
So they made their way down the mountainside, Val and Eddie in the van, the officers with their prisoners following next, and Jessica and her father bringing up the rear. It was a pale Jessica who walked the down trail with her father; a pale one, and a weak one. The shock had been great, and she was still feeling it.
On a ledge near the bottom they found the body of Teck. Looking curiously smaller than he looked when he stood erect, sallow, his ugly scar a streak of lurid color across his face, he lay staring up at the sun, motionless. Only his eyes moved—played within his range of vision unceasingly.
Val felt his heart—it was still fluttering gently, but it was plain that he would not last long. They grouped around him and eyed him—not triumphantly, not gloatingly, but pityingly; pity that at the last he should be so broken and so helpless. And then, surprisingly, his lips moved and he spoke. He spoke in a hoarse whisper, but his old bravado was still there; the sneering timbre of his voice still rang as of old.
“I’ll be going now,” he was saying in his whisper, weak, but steady voiced, retaining his consciousness with the sheer power of his will. “I’ve played my last trick.” They bent over him to catch his words.
“Before I go I’d like to clear up a few things. I’ve lost, but the game was worth it.” He spoke slowly, distinctly. The sergeant in charge of the police detail left the prisoners in the hands of the three subordinates, and took down what he said on his pad.
“In the first place, as you know,” Teck smiled, cynical even in the face of death, “Peter Pomeroy had the bad grace not to die. To all intents and purposes he did die, and an hour after his death—it was sudden—the news of it went out to the papers, where it was printed the next day. He was removed to an undertaker’s chapel, where he regained consciousness that evening.”
He paused for a moment, wearied, but went on almost at once, forcing himself on, low voiced, distinct, even.
“I had him taken to my own rooms—you know them, Morley⸺” he smiled quietly. “That was when my great idea came to me. Although he regained consciousness, he had completely lost his voice and his memory. He remembered nothing, and the vocal chords were paralyzed. In some way, the news of his recovery did not get into the papers—that was the day of the great explosion in Wall Street, when so many lives were lost, and it crowded out small items of news. After that it wasn’t news any more—I fixed the undertaker, and nothing was said about it. It wasn’t hard to place an urn in a crematory and label it ‘Peter Pomeroy.’ To all practical purposes, Peter Pomeroy was dead.”
He was silent again for an instant. “As soon as he recovered sufficiently to be moved, still paralyzed vocally, still memoryless, I entered him in an asylum in the Middle West—you’ll know where it is, Mr. Pomeroy—and told the superintendent that he was my brother, though he suffered from the delusion that he was someone else, a dead man. I paid for his keep there. My idea was to get hold of his money—as we all know, his money was never kept in banks, and I thought I’d have no great difficulty in locating it. With his daughter abroad and no other member of his immediate family alive, it should have been easy—and it would have been if he hadn’t concealed the money so cleverly. As it was, Jessica returned and the money was still unfound.
“Slowly—by very gradual changes—his memory was beginning to come back to him, and he was able to talk a little, as I learned on my frequent visits there. His brain, I could see, was still not quite clear, and it was my hope that I’d be able to get the secret out of him—the hiding place of the money. I met with no luck until the last time I was there. He was incoherent, and fragmentary, but thoughts of his money seemed to be running through his mind, to the obscurity of almost everything else. He kept saying to me, in answer to my questions—‘It’s in the books . . . Virginia!’”
“‘The books’ didn’t mean much to me until, on the way back, I suddenly recollected that he had a couple of dozen of them in the house—and that he had seemed rather attached to them. Virginia, of course, was a live clew, but this is such a big place that one could hunt here a lifetime without result. Probably, then, he had made a memorandum of the hiding place somewhere in his books, intending to tell Jessica about it, if he hadn’t ‘died’ so suddenly.
“When I returned I found that Jessica had sold the books that same day. That was the reason I was suddenly so anxious to get the books, after disregarding them for so long. Luckily—for me—I never left town without having Jessica watched. I found out where she had sold the books, and also that Morley here, who was recognized by my man, had taken some of them away with him. It was easy enough to get them out of Morley’s house, but the old man, Masterson, had not been so easy earlier in the evening. I had driven down there in a taxi and asked the driver—a friend of mine whose name I won’t tell you—to wait outside. I found the old man alone, ready to go home, with the blinds pulled down. I offered to buy back the books, and he became suspicious, for some reason or other, and refused to sell until he had time to examine them at his leisure. He probably thought that if they were so valuable to me, they would be just as valuable to him. Anyway, I had no time to spare—I was afraid to spend too long a time at the job—and, after unsuccessfully trying to induce him to sell, I tried to take them away by force. The old man struggled hard, harder than I would have believed such an old man could fight—and I had to hit him. I didn’t mean to hit him so hard, and I only wanted to quiet him, but he was fighting fiercely and I could not judge the force of the blow very well. It smashed his head in.”
He was silent again for a moment. It was Val who spoke, eagerly.
“But how?” he asked. “With what?”
The other smiled grimly at him. “The same way I did for you in the haunted house—and your friend. Look here.” He drew attention to his right arm, which nobody had noticed before, so interested were they in what he had to say.
The stump of his wrist was covered by a cap of metal, a heavy, bulky iron cap that must have weighed eight or nine pounds, fitting closely on his wrist. Such a weapon, swung by the arm of a strong man, was enough to kill an opponent with one blow easily—enough to smash in his head. Val drew it off, and found that there was a spring arrangement that clamped the wrist tightly, holding it firm on the stump.
“You see, I kept it in my right hand trouser pocket, always,” explained Teck. “All I had to do was to push my wrist into it—it was fixed so that it seized my wrist firmly and stayed on. It was my own idea,” he said, with a trace of modest pride.
“Nobody ever expected anything of the sort from me—and all I needed was the chance for one blow. I usually got that, because they weren’t looking for it. Anyway,” he went on, a little wearied, “I killed Masterson—nobody else had anything to do with it. I’m sorry for it, but it couldn’t be helped. I was getting desperate in my haste; back in his asylum Pomeroy was recovering his memory and his voice, and I knew it would not be long before he was back here—they would not have been able to keep him, even had they been willing to take the chance, which I doubt. I may as well say that they acted in good faith there—they believed my story.”
Pomeroy nodded. “That’s true,” he supplemented. “They released me as soon as I was able to explain the circumstances.”
“I—I think that’s about all,” he said in a lower tone, evidently finding difficulty in continuing. “You know most of the rest. I’m ready to go now. It was a good game, and I nearly won⸺”
“If you had had a chance to examine the papers in the tin box,” remarked old Pomeroy, “you would have discovered a memorandum to Jessica in which I direct her to pay you the sum of one hundred thousand dollars. I owed you that, I felt.”
Teck’s eyes clouded. “I might—have—known⸺” he murmured wearily. “But I took my chances and⸺” His head dropped back and his eyes closed. There was a silence on the little group, and they stood immovable for a few seconds.
The sergeant bent down and examined the body. “He’s gone,” he announced.
“I’ll take charge of these men,” he said briefly; “and of—this.” He motioned to the body of Ignace Teck.
“We’ll go back to the cottage—you can find us there if you need us, sergeant,” said old Pomeroy. The police officer nodded.