The Bandbox by Louis Joseph Vance (10 best books of all time .txt) 📖

has established headquarters on a little two-by-four island in the Sound—Wreck Island. Used to be run as a one-horse summer resort—hotel and all that. Went under several years ago, if mem’ry serveth me aright. Anyhow, they loaded Nelly aboard this motor-boat and took her across....

“Spelvin was told to wait. He did. In about an hour—boat back; native running it hands Spelvin a note, tells him to run up to Hartford and post it and be back at seven P.M. Spelvin back at seven; Ismay comes across by boat, is driven to town....

“That’s all, to date. Spelvin had begun to suspect there was something crooked going on, which made him easy meat for my insidious advances. Says he was wondering if he hadn’t better tell his troubles to a cop. All of which goes to show that Cousin Artie’s fast going to seed. Very crude operating—man of his reputation, too. Makes me almost ashamed of the relationship.”

“How are we going to get to Wreck Island from Pennymint Point?”

“Same boat,” said Iff confidently. “Spelvin heard Ismay tell his engineer to wait for him—would be back between midnight and three.”

“He can’t beat us there, can he, by any chance?”

“He can if he humps himself. This is a pretty good car, and Spelvin says there isn’t going to be any car on the road tonight that’ll pass us; but I can’t forget that dear old New York, New Haven & Hartford. They run some fast trains by night, and while of course none of them stops at Pennymint Centre—station for the Point—still, a man with plenty of money to fling around can get a whole lot of courtesy out of a railroad.”

“Then the question is: can he catch a train which passes through Pennymint Centre before we can reasonably expect to get there?”

“That’s the intelligent query. I don’t know. Do you?”

“No—”

“Spelvin doesn’t, and we haven’t got any time to waste trying to find out. Probabilities are, there is. The only thing to do is to run for it and trust to luck. Spelvin says it took him an hour and thirty-five minutes to run in, this evening; and he’s going to better that if nothing happens. Did you remember to bring a gun?”

“Two.” Staff produced the pistol he had taken from Ismay, with the extra clips, and gave them to the little man with an account of how he had become possessed of them—a narrative which Iff seemed to enjoy immensely.

“Oh, we can’t lose,” he chuckled; “not when Cousin Artie plays his hand as poorly as he has this deal. I’ve got a perfectly sound hunch that we’ll win.”

Staff hardly shared his confidence; still, as far as he could judge, the odds were even. Ismay might beat them to Pennymint Centre by train, and might not. If he did, however, it could not be by more than a slight margin; to balance which fact, Staff had to remind himself that two minutes’ margin was all that would be required to get the boat away from land, beyond their reach.

“Look here,” he put it to Iff: “suppose he does beat us to that boat?”

“Then we’ll have to find another.”

“There’ll be another handy, all ready for us, I presume?”

“Spare me your sarcasm,” pleaded Iff; “it is, if you don’t mind my mentioning the fact, not your forte. Silence, on the other hand, suits your style cunningly. So shut up and lemme think.”

He relapsed into profound meditations, while the car hummed onwards through the moon-drenched spaces of the night.

Presently he roused and, without warning, clambered over the back of the seat into the place beside the chauffeur. For a time the two conferred, heads together, their words indistinguishable in the sweep of air. Then, in the same spry fashion, the little man returned.

“Spelvin’s a treasure,” he announced, settling into his place.

“Why?”

“Knows the country—knows a man in Barmouth who runs a shipyard, owns and hires out motorboats, and all that sort of thing.”

“Where’s Barmouth?”

“Four miles this side of Pennymint Point. Now we’ve got to decide whether to hold on and run our chances of picking up Ismay’s boat, or turn off to Barmouth and run our chances of finding chauffeur’s friend with boat disengaged. What do you think?”

“Barmouth,” Staff decided after some deliberation but not without misgivings.

“That’s what I told Spelvin,” observed Iff. “It’s a gamble either way.”

The city was now well behind them, the car pounding steadily on through Westchester. For a long time neither spoke. The time for talk, indeed, was past—and in the future; for the present they must tune themselves up to action—such action as the furious onrush of the powerful car in some measure typified, easing the impatience in their hearts.

For a time the road held them near railroad tracks. A train hurtled past them, running eastwards: a roaring streak of orange light crashing through the world of cool night blues and purple-blacks.

The chauffeur swore audibly and let out another notch of speed.

Staff sat spellbound by the amazing romance of it all.... A bare eight days since that afternoon when a whim, born of a love now lifeless, had stirred him out of his solitary, work-a-day life in London, had lifted him out of the ordered security of the centre of the world’s civilisation and sent him whirling dizzily across three thousand miles and more to become a partner in this wild, weird ride to the rescue of a damsel in distress and durance vile! Incredible!...

Eight days: and the sun of Alison, that once he had thought to be the light of all the world, had set; while in the evening sky the star of Eleanor was rising and blazing ever more brightly....

Now when a man begins to think about himself and his heart in such poetic imagery, the need for human intercourse grows imperative on his understanding; he must talk or—suffer severely.

Staff turned upon his defenseless companion.

“Iff,” said he, “when a man’s the sort of a man who can fall out of love and in again—with another woman, of course—inside a week—what do you call him?”

“Human,” announced Iff after mature consideration of the problem.

This was unsatisfactory; Staff yearned to be called fickle.

“Human? How’s that?” he insisted.

“I mean that the human man hasn’t got much to say about falling in or out of love. The women take care of all that for him. Look at your Miss Landis—yours as was.... You don’t mind my buttin’ in?”

“Go on,” said Staff grimly.

“Anybody with half an eye, always excepting you, could see she’d made up her mind to hook that Arkroyd pinhead on account of his money. She was just waiting for a fair chance to give you the office—preferably, of course, after she’d nailed that play of yours.”

“Well,” said Staff, “she’s lost that, too.”

“Serves you both right.”

There was a pause wherein Staff sought to fathom the meaning of this last utterance of Mr. Iff’s.

“I take it,” resumed the latter with a sidelong look—“pardon a father’s feelings of delicacy—I take it, you’re meaning Nelly?”

“How did you guess that?” demanded Staff, startled.

“Right, eh?”

“Yes—no—I don’t know—”

“Well, if you don’t know the answer any better ’n that, take a word of advice from an old bird: you get her to tell you. She’s known it ever since she laid eyes on you.”

“You mean she—I—” Staff stammered eagerly.

“I mean nobody knows anything about a woman’s heart but herself; but she knows it backwards and all the time.”

“Then you don’t think I’ve got any show?”

“Oh, Lord!” complained Iff. “Honest, you gimme a pain. Go on and do your own thinking.”

Staff subsided, imagining a vain thing: that the mantle of dignity in which he wrapped himself successfully cloaked his sense of injury. Iff smiled a meaningless smile up at the inscrutable skies. And the moonlit miles slipped beneath the wheels like a torrent of moulten silver.

At length—it seemed as if many hours must have swung crashing into eternity since they had left New York—Staff was conscious of a perceptible diminution of speed; he was able to get his breath with less effort, had no longer to snatch it by main strength from the greedy clutches of the whirlwind. The reeling chiaroscuro of the countryside seemed suddenly to become calm, settling into an intelligible, more or less orderly arrangement of shining hills and shadowed hollows, spreading pastures and sombre woodlands. The chauffeur flung a few inarticulate words over his shoulder—readily interpreted as announcing the nearness of their destination; and of a sudden the car swung from the main highway into a narrow by-road that ran off to the right. A little later they darted through a cut beneath railroad tracks, and a village sprang out of the night and rattled past them, serenely slumbrous. From this centre a thin trickle of dwellings straggled along their way. Across fields to the left, Staff caught glimpses of a spreading sheet of water, still and silvery-grey....

On a long slant, the road drew nearer and more near to the shores of this arm of the Sound. Presently a group of small buildings near the head of a long landing-stage swam into view. Before them the car drew up with a sigh. The chauffeur jumped down and ran across the road to a house in whose lower story a lighted window was visible. While he hammered at the door, Staff and Iff alighted. A man in his shirt-sleeves came to the door of the cottage and stood there, pipe in mouth, hands in pockets, languidly interjecting dispassionate responses into the chauffeur’s animated exposition of their case. As Staff and Iff came up, Spelvin turned to them, excitedly waving his gauntlets.

“He’s got a boat, all right, and a good one he says, but he won’t move a foot for less ’n twenty dollars.”

“Give you twenty-five if you get away from the dock within five minutes,” Iff told the boatbuilder directly.

The man started as if stung. “Jemima!” he breathed, incredulous. Then caution prompted him to extend a calloused and work-warped hand. “Cross my palm,” he said.

“You give it to him, Staff,” said Iff magnificently. “I’m short of cash.”

Obediently, Staff disbursed the required sum. The native thumbed it, pocketed it, lifted his coat from a nail behind the door and started across the road in a single movement.

“You come ’long, Spelvin,” he said in passing, “’nd help with the boat. If you gents’ll get out on the dock I’ll have her alongside in three minutes, ’r my name ain’t Bascom.”

Pursued by the chauffeur, he disappeared into the huddle of boat-houses and beached and careened boats. A moment later, Iff and Staff, picking their way through the tangle, heard the scrape of a flat-bottomed boat on the beach and, subsequently, splashing oars.

By the time they had reached the end of the dock, the boatbuilder and his companion were scrambling aboard a twenty-five-foot boat at anchor in the midst of a small fleet of sail and gasoline craft. The rumble of a motor followed almost instantly, was silenced momentarily while the skiff was being made fast to the mooring, broke out again as the larger boat selected a serpentine path through the circumjacent vessels and slipped up to the dock.

Before it had lost way, Iff and Staff were aboard. Instantly, Bascom snapped the switch shut and the motor started again on the spark.

“Straight out,” he instructed Spelvin at the wheel, “till you round that white moorin’-dolphin. Then I’ll take her.” ...

Not long afterward he gave up pottering round the engine and went forward, relieving Spelvin. “You go back and keep your eye on that engyne,” he ordered; “she’s workin’ like a sewin’-machine, but she wants watchin’. I’ll tell you when to give her the spark. Meanwhile you might ’s well dig them lights out of the port locker and set ’em out.”

“No,” Iff put in. “We want no lights.”

“Gov’mint regulations,” said