Part 6 (1/2)
The girl seemed astounded; her face surged in vivid colour as he unlocked the handcuffs and pocketed them and the little steel chain.
Her lip was bleeding again. He washed it with wet moss, took a clean handkerchief from the breast of his tunic and laid it against her mouth.
”Hold it there,” he said.
Mechanically she raised her hand to support the compress. Stormont went back to the sh.o.r.e, recovered her rifle from the shallow water, and returned with it.
As she made no motion to take it, he stood it against the tree to which he had tied her.
Then he came close to her where she stood holding his handkerchief against her mouth and looking at him out of steady eyes as deeply blue as gentian blossoms.
”Eve,” he said, ”you win. But you won't forgive me.... I wish we could be friends, some day.... We never can, now.... Good-bye.”
Neither spoke again. Then, of a sudden, the girl's eyes filled; and Trooper Stormont caught her free hand and kissed it;--kissed it again and again,--dropped it and went striding away through the underbrush which was now all rosy with the rays of sunset.
After he had disappeared, the girl, Eve, went to the cleft in the rocks above.
”Come out,” she said contemptuously. ”It's a good thing you hid, because there was a real man after you; and G.o.d help you if he ever finds you!”
Hal Smith came out.
”Pack in your meat,” said the girl curtly, and flung his rifle across her shoulder.
Through the ruddy afterglow she led the way homeward, a man's handkerchief pressed to her wounded mouth, her eyes preoccupied with the strangest thoughts that ever had stirred her virgin mind.
Behind her walked Darragh with his load of venison and his alias,--and his tongue in his cheek.
Thus began the preliminaries toward the ultimate undoing of Mike Clinch.
Fate, Chance, and Destiny had undertaken the job in earnest.
EPISODE TWO
THE RULING Pa.s.sION
I
n.o.body understood how Jose Quintana had slipped through the Secret Service net spread for him at every port.
The United States authorities did not know why Quintana had come to America. They realised merely that he arrived for no good purpose; and they had meant to arrest and hold him for extradition if requested; for deportation as an undesirable alien anyway.
Only two men in America knew that Quintana had come to the United States for the purpose of recovering the famous ”Flaming Jewel,” stolen by him from the Grand d.u.c.h.ess Theodorica of Esthonia; and stolen from Quintana, in turn, by a private soldier in an American Forestry Regiment, on leave in Paris. This soldier's name, probably, was Michael Clinch.
One of the men who knew why Quintana might come to America was James Darragh, recently of the Military Intelligence, but now pa.s.sing as a hold-up man under the name of Hal Smith, and actually in the employment of Clinch at his disreputable ”hotel” at Star Pond in the North Woods.
The other man who knew why Quintana had come to America was Emanuel Sard, a Levantine diamond broker of New York, Quintana's agent in America.