Black Caesar's Clan Part 22

Standish's face, as she spoke, was foolishly vacant. Then, a lurid blaze began to flicker behind his ice-blue eyes, and a brickish color surged into his face. Wheeling on Gavin, he cried, his voice choked and hoa.r.s.e:

"If this crazy yarn is true, Brice, I swear to G.o.d I had no knowledge or part in it! And if it's true, the man who did it shall--"

"That can wait," put in Brice, incisively. "I only let her waste time by telling it, to see how it would hit you and if you were the sort who is worth saving. You are. The Caesar crowd has found where the tunnel-opening is,--the masked opening, back in the path. And the last of them is on his way here, underground. The tunnel comes out, I suppose, in that high-fenced enclosure behind the house, the enclosure with the vines all over it and the queer little old coral kiosk in the center, with the rusty iron door. The kiosk that had three bulging canvas bags piled alongside its entrance, this morning,--probably the night's haul from the Caesar's Estuary cache, waiting for Hade to get a chance to run it North.

Well, a bunch of the Caesars are either in that enclosure by now, or forcing a way out through the rusty old rattletrap door of the kiosk. They--"

"The Caesars?" babbled Standish. "What what 'kiosk' are you talking about?--I--That's a plantation for--"

"Shut up!" interrupted Brice, annoyed by the pitiful attempt to cling to a revealed secret. "The time for bluffing is past, man! The whole game is up. You'll be lucky to escape a prison term, even if you get out of to-night's mess. That's what I'm here for. Barricade the house, first of all. I noticed you have iron shutters on the windows, and that they're new. You must have been looking for something like this to happen, some day."

As he spoke, Brice had been moving swiftly from one window to another, of the rooms opening out from the hallway, shutting and barring the metal blinds. Claire, following his example, had run from window to window, aiding him in his self-appointed task of barricading the ground floor. Milo alone stood inert and dazed, gaping dully at the two busy toilers. Then, dazedly, he stumbled to the front door and pushed it shut, fumbling with its bolts. As in a drunken dream he mumbled:

"Three canvas bags, piled--?"

"Yes," answered Brice busily, as he clamped shut a long French window leading out onto the veranda, and at the same time tried to keep Bobby Burns from getting too much in his way.

"Three of them. I gather that Hade had taken them up to the path in his yacht's gaudy little motorboat and carried them to the tunnel. I suppose you have some sort of runway or hand car or something in the tunnel to make the transportation easier than lugging the stuff along the whole length of stumbly path, besides being safer from view. I suppose, too, he had taken the stuff there and then came ahead, with his mocking-bird signal, for you to go through the tunnel with him from the kiosk, and bring them to the enclosure. Probably that's why I was locked into my room. So I couldn't spy on the job. The bags are still there, aren't they? He couldn't move them, except under cover of darkness. He'll come for them to-night .... He'll be too late."

Working, as he cast the fragmentary sentences over his shoulder, Gavin nevertheless glanced often enough at Standish's face to make certain from its foolishly dismayed expression that each of his conjectures was correct. Now, finishing his task, he demanded:

"Your servants? Are they all right? Can you trust them?

Your house servants, I mean."

"Y--yes," stammered Milo, still battling with the idea of bluffing this calmly authoritative man. "Yes. They're all right. But where you got the idea--"

"How many of them are there? The servants, I mean."

"Four," spoke up Claire, returning from her finished work, and pausing on her way to do like duty for the upstairs windows.

"Two men and two women."

"Please go out to the kitchen and see everything is all right, there," said Brice. "Lock and bar everything. Tell your two women servants they can get out, if they want to. They'll be no use here and they may get hysterical, as they did last night when we had that scrimmage outside. The men-servants may be useful. Send them here."

Before she could obey, the dining room curtains were parted, and a black-clad little j.a.p butler sidled into the hallway, his jaw adroop, his beady eyes astare with terror, his hands washing each other with invisible soap-and-water.

"Sato!" exclaimed Claire.

The j.a.p paid no heed.

"Prease!" he chattered between castanet teeth. "Prease, I hear.

I scare. I no fight man. I go, prease! I s-s-s-s, I--"

Sato's scant knowledge of English seemed to forsake him, under the stress of his terror. And he broke into a monkeylike mouthing in his native j.a.panese. Milo took a step toward him.

Sato screeched like a stuck pig and crouched to the ground.

"Wait!" suggested Brice, going toward the abject creature.

"Let me handle him. I know a bit of his language. Miss Standish, please go on with closing the rest of the house.

Here, you!" he continued, addressing the j.a.p. "Here!"

Standing above the quivering j.a.p, he harangued him in halting yet vehement j.a.panese, gesticulating and--after the manner of people speaking a tongue unfamiliar to them--talking at the top of his voice. But his oration had no stimulating effect on the poor Sato. Scarce waiting for Brice to finish speaking, the butler broke again into that monkey-like chatter of appeal and fright. Gavin silenced him with a threatening gesture, and renewed his own harangue. But, after perhaps a minute of it, he saw the uselessness of trying to put manhood or pluck into the groveling little Oriental. And he lost his own temper.

"Here!" he growled, to Standish. "Open the front door. Open it good and wide. So!"

Picking up the quaking and chattering Sato by the collar, he half shoved and half flung him across the hallway, and, with a final heave, tossed him bodily down the veranda steps. Then, closing the door, and checking Bobby Burns's eager yearnings to charge out after his beloved deity's victim, Brice exclaimed:

"There! That's one thing well done. We're better off without a coward like that. He'd be getting under our feet all the time, or else opening the doors to the Caesars, with the idea of currying favor with them. Where did you ever pick up such an arrant little poltroon? Most j.a.ps are plucky enough."

"Hade lent him to us," said Milo, evidently impressed by Brice's athletic demonstration against the little Oriental.

"Sato worked for him, after Hade's regular butler fell ill.

He--"

"H'm!" mused Brice. "A hanger-on of Hade's, eh? That may explain it. Sato's cowardice may have been a bit of rather clever acting. He saw no use in risking his neck for you people when his master wasn't here. It was no part of his spy work to--"

"Spy work?" echoed Standish, in real astonishment. "What?"

"Let it go at that," snapped Brice, adding as Claire reentered the room, followed by the lanky house-man, "All secure in the kitchen quarters, Miss Standish? Good! Please send this man to close the upstairs shutters, too. Not that there's any danger that the Caesars will try to climb, before they find they can't get in on this floor. The sight of the barred shutters will probably scare them off, anyway. They're likely to be more hungry for a surprise rush, than for a siege with resistance thrown in. If--"

He ceased speaking, his attention caught by a sight which, to the others, carried no significance, whatever.

Simon Cameron, the insolently lazy Persian cat, had been awakened from a nap in a rose-basket on the top of one of the hall bookcases. The tramping of feet, the scrambling ejection of the j.a.p butler, the clanging shut of many metal blinds--all these had interfered with the calm peacefulness of Simon Cameron's slumbers.

Wherefore, the cat had awakened, had stretched all four shapeless paws out to their full length in luxurious flexing, and had then arisen majestically to his feet and had stretched again, arching his fluffy back to an incredible height. After which, the cat had dropped lightly to the floor, five feet below his resting place, and had started across the hall in a mincing progress toward some spot where his cherished nap could be pursued without so much disturbance from noisy humans.

All this, Brice had seen without taking any more note of it than had the two others. But now, his gaze fixed itself on the animal.

Simon Cameron's flowingly mincing progress had brought him to the dining room doorway. As he was about to pa.s.s through, under the curtains, he halted, sniffed the air with much daintiness, then turned to the left and halted again beside a door which flanked the dining room end of the wide hall.

For an instant Simon Cameron stood in front of this. Then, winding his plumed tail around his hips, he sat down, directly in front of the door, and viewed the portal interestedly, as though he expected a mouse to emerge from it.

It was this seemingly simple action which had so suddenly diverted Gavin from what he had been saying. He knew the ways of Persian cats, even as he knew the ways of collies. And both forms of knowledge had more than once been of some slight use to him.

Facing Milo and Claire, he signed to them not to speak. Then, making sure the house-man had gone upstairs, he walked up to Claire and whispered, pointing over his shoulder at the door which Simon Cameron was guarding:

"Where does that door lead to?"

The girl almost laughed at the earnestness of his question, following, as it did, upon his urgent signal for silence.

"Why," she answered, amusedly, "it doesn't lead anywhere.

It's the door of a clothes closet. We keep our gardening suits and our raincoats and such things in there. Why do you ask?"

By way of reply, Gavin crossed the hall in two silent strides, his muscles tensed and his head lowered. Seizing the k.n.o.b, he flung the closet door wide open, wellnigh sweeping the indignant Simon Cameron off his furry feet.

At first glance, the closet's interior revealed only a more or less orderly array of hanging raincoats and ap.r.o.ns and overalls. Then, all three of the onlooking humans focused their eyes upon a pair of splayed and grimy bare feet which protruded beneath a somewhat bulging raincoat of Milo's.

Brice thrust his arm in, between this coat and a gardening ap.r.o.n, and jerked forth a silently squirming youth, perhaps eighteen years old, swarthy and undersized.

"Well!" exclaimed Gavin, holding his writhing prize at arm's length, "Simon Cameron must have a depraved taste in playmates, if he tries to choose this one! A regular beach combing conch! Probably a clay-eater, at that."

He spoke the words with seeming carelessness, but really with deliberate intent. For the glum silence of a conch is a hard thing for any outsider to break down. He recalled what Claire had said of the Caesars' fierce distaste for the word "conch."

Also, throughout the South, "clay-eater," has ever been a fighting word.