Part 34 (1/2)

CLEAR DECKS

The bit of head-gear which Lorrimore had taken down a.s.sumed a new interest; Scarterfield and I gazed at it as if it might speak to us.

Nevertheless the detective when he presently spoke showed some incredulity.

”That's the sort of cap that any Chinaman wears,” he remarked. ”It may have belonged to any of them.”

”No!” answered Lorrimore, with emphatic a.s.surance. ”That's my man's. I saw him making it--he's as deft with his fingers, at that sort of thing, as he is at cooking. And since this cap is his, and as he's not amongst the lot there on deck, he's the man that you, Middlebrook, saw escaping in the boat. And since he is that man, I know where he'd be making.”

”Where, then?” demanded Scarterfield.

”To my house!” answered Lorrimore.

Scarterfield showed more doubt.

”I don't think that's likely, doctor,” he said. ”Presumably, he's got those jewels on him, and I should say he'd get away from this with the notion of trusting to his own craft to get un.o.bserved on a train and lose himself in Newcastle. A Chinaman with valuables on him worth eighty thousand pounds? Come!”

”You don't know that he's any valuables of any sort on him,” retorted Lorrimore. ”That's all supposition. I say that if my man Wing was on this vessel--as I'm sure he was--he was on it for purposes of his own.

He might be with this felonious lot, but he wouldn't be of them. I know him!--and I'm off to get on his track. Lay you anything you like--a thousand to one!--that I find Wing at my house!”

”I'm not taking you, Lorrimore,” said I. ”I don't mind laying the same.”

Scarterfield looked curiously at the two of us. Apparently, his belief in Chinese virtue was not great.

”Well,” he said. ”I'm on his track, anyhow, and I propose to get away to the beach. There's nothing more we can do here. These naval people have got this job in charge, now. Let's leave them to it. Yet,” he added, as we left the galley, and with a significant glance at me, ”there is one thing Middlebrook!--wouldn't you like to have a look inside those two chests that we've heard so much about?--you and I.”

”I certainly should!” I answered.

”Then we will,” he said. ”I, too, have some curiosity that way. And if Master Wing has repaired to the doctor's house he's all right, and if he hasn't, he can't get very far away, being a Chinaman, in his native garments, and wounded.”

The chests which had come aboard the yawl with Miss Raven and myself the previous afternoon--it seemed as if ages had gone by since then!--still stood where they had been placed at the time; close to the gangway leading to the main cabin. Lorrimore, Scarterfield, the young naval officer and I gathered round while a couple of handy blue-jackets forced them open--no easy business, for whether the dishonest bank-manager and Netherfield Baxter had ever opened them or not, they were screwed up again in a fas.h.i.+on which showed business-like resolves that they should not easily be opened again.

But at last the lids were off--to reveal inner sh.e.l.ls of lead. And within these, gleaming dully in the fresh sunlight lay the monastic treasures of which Scarterfield and I had read in the hotel at Blyth.

”Queer!” said the detective, as he stood staring meditatively at patens and chalices, reliquaries and pyxes. ”All these, I reckon, are sacred things, consecrated and all that, and yet ever since that Reformation time, they've been mixed up with robbery, and now at last with wholesale murder! Odd, isn't it? However, there they are!--and here,” he added, pulling the parchment schedules out of his pocket which he had discovered at Baxter's old lodgings in Blyth, and handing them to the lieutenant, ”here is the list of what there ought to be; you'll take all this in charge, of course--I don't know if it comes within the law of treasure trove or not, but as the original owners are dust and ashes four hundred years ago, I should say it does--anyway, the Crown solicitors'll soon settle that point.”

We went off from the yawl, the three of us, in the boat which had brought Lorrimore and me aboard her. The group on sh.o.r.e saw us making for the point whereat the escaping figure had landed in the early morning, and followed us thither along the beach. They came up to us as we stepped ash.o.r.e, and while Lorrimore began giving Mr. Raven an account of what we had found on the yawl I drew his niece aside.

”You had better know the worst in a word,” I said. ”We were more than fortunate in getting away from the yawl as we did. Don't be upset--there isn't a man alive on that thing!”

”Baxter?” she exclaimed.

”I said--not one!” I answered. ”Wholesale! Don't think about it--as for me, I wish I'd never seen it. But now it's a question of a living man--Wing.”

”Then it was as I thought?” she asked. ”Wing was there?”

”Lorrimore is sure of it--he found a cap of Wing's in the galley,”

said I. ”And as Wing isn't amongst the dead, he's the man who escaped.”

Scarterfield came up, the local policeman with him who had joined Mr.

Raven's search-party as it came across country.