Peter the Brazen: A Mystery Story of Modern China
glimpsed a long, bright, and exceedingly dangerous-looking dagger, with
a jewel-incrusted hilt.
The singular thing about this knife was the shape of the blade, which
was thin and with three sides, like a machinist's file. It would be a
good dagger to throw away after a killing because of the triangular
hole it would leave as a wound, a bit of evidence decidedly
incriminating.
Peter straightened up, round-eyed, accepted the automatic, and slipped
it into his pocket, smoothing his coat and the sarong over the lump,
and approached the door.
For a moment his heart beat in a wild desire, a desire to take her in
his arms as she stood so close and so quiet beside him, smiling
wistfully and a little sadly; and unaccountably she seemed to droop and
become small and limp and pitifully helpless in the face of him and of
all mankind.
"Good night, Mr. Moore, and thank you so--much," she murmured. "And I
do hope you will forgive me for being a--a thief."
He thought that she was on the point of kissing him, and his eyes swam
and became of a slightly deeper and more silky blue than a moment
before. But she faltered back, while the faintest suggestion of a sigh
came from her lips.
In the next instant, as the door closed quietly behind him, Peter was
mighty glad that neither he nor she had yielded to impulse. He was
not, in the light of the literal version, the owner of a wholly
untarnished record, for he had given in to weakness, as most men do
give into weakness.
But he was above temptation now, not because temptation was put behind
him, but because he had had the strength to resist; and it was his
full, deep desire to hold himself until that girl, far across the
Pacific, who inspired the finest and best in him, should bear the name
he bore.
It was a splendid thing, that feeling. It gave him courage and
confidence, and took him quite light-heartedly, with head erect and
shoulders back, out of the dreariest of his moments.
So, quick in a new and buoyant mood, Peter joggled the key in the lock
of his stateroom door, slipped in, and was before long dreaming of a
cottage built for two, of springtime in California, albeit snoring
almost loud enough to drown out the throb of the _Persian Gulf's_ old
but still useful engines.
CHAPTER VII
Because of the fatigue which possessed his every muscle, fatigue
springing from the arduous, the trying hours now past, Peter the Brazen
was sleeping the slumber of the worthy, when, at a somewhat later hour
in the night, some time before dawn crept out of the China Sea, a
figure, lean and gray, flitted past his stateroom on the narrow orlop
deck, peered in the darkened port-hole, and passed on.
Awakened by an instinct developed to a remarkable degree by his
training of the past few months, Peter established himself upon one
elbow and looked and listened, wondering what sounds might be abroad
other than the peaceful churn of the engine.
Quite as intuitively he slipped his hand under the pillow and
encountered the reassuring chill of the blued steel. Half withdrawing
this excellent weapon, he shifted his eyes, alternately from the door
to the port-hole, conscious of an imminent danger, a little stupefied
by his recent plunge into the depths of sleep, but growing more widely
awake, more alert and watchful, with the passage of each instant.
The port-hole loomed gray and empty, one edge of it licked by the
yellow light of some not far distant deck-lamp. With his eye fastened
upon this scimitar of golden light, Peter was soon to witness an
unusual eclipse, a phenomenon which sent a shiver, an icy shiver, of
genuine consternation up and down his backbone.
As he watched, a square of the yellow reflected light was blotted out,
as though a bar of some nature had cast its shadow athwart that
metallic gleam. This shadow then proceeded to slide first up and then
down the brass setting of the port-hole, and the shadow dwindled.
As Peter sat up on the edge of his cot, gripping the square butt of the
automatic in his hand and tentatively fingering the trigger, the origin
of the shadow moved slowly, ever so slowly, into the range of his
perplexed and anxious vision.
What appeared at first glance to be a cat-o'-nine-tails on a rather
thick stem, Peter made out to be, as he built some hasty comparisons,
the Maxim silencer attached either at the end of a revolver or of a
rifle; for the black cylinder on the muzzle was circumscribed at
regular intervals with small, sharp depressions, the clinch-marks of
the silencing chambers.
As this specter crept up and over the edge of the port, Peter, with a
deliberate and cold smile, raised the automatic revolver, slipped out
of the berth with the stealth and litheness of a cat, crept into the
corner where the stateroom door was hinged, and leveled the weapon
until his eye ran along the dark obstruction of the barrel.
Slowly and more slowly the silencer moved inward until the blunt end of
it was registered precisely upon a point where Peter's head would lie
if he were sleeping in a normal attitude.
This amused him and perplexed him. All Peter wanted to see was the
head or even the eye of this early morning assassin, whereupon he would
take immediate steps to receive him with a warm cordiality that might
forestall future visitations of a kindred sort.
In the space between heart-beats Peter stopped to inquire of himself
who his visitor might be. And even as he stopped to inquire, a bright,
angry, red flame spurted straight out from the mouth of the silencer,
and Peter would have willingly gambled his bottom dollar that the
bullet found its way into his pillow, a wager, as he later verified,
upon which he would have collected all of the money he was eager to
stake.
The lance of yellow-red flame had occasioned no disturbance other than
a slight smack, comparable with the sharp clapping of a man's hands.
In the second leaping flame Peter was far more interested. Having
delivered himself of one shot, the assassin could be depended upon to
make casual inquiries, and to drop at least one more bullet into the
darkness between the upper and lower berths, to make a clean job of it.
And it was on the appearance of the inquiring head that Peter relied to
repay the intruder in his own metal, that metal taking the form of a
wingless messenger of nickel-sheathed lead.
But the visitor was cautious, waiting, no doubt, for sounds of the
death struggle, provided the shot had not gone directly home, its home
being, as Peter shuddered to think, his own exceedingly useful brain.
He waited a little longer before his guest apparently decided that the
time was come for his investigation; and thereupon a small, square head
with the black-tasseled hat of a Chinese coolie set upon it at a rakish
angle was framed by the port-hole.
Smirking nervously, Peter released the safety catch and brought
pressure to bear slowly and firmly upon the trigger.
_Click_! That was all. But it told a terrible story. The weapon was
out of commission, either unloaded or tampered with. And Peter's
panic-stricken thoughts leaped, even as the square head leaped away
from the window, to the Borria woman, to the cause of his desperate
helplessness.
Romola Borria, then, had tampered with this revolver. Romola Borria
had plotted, that was sure, with the coolie outside the port-hole for
his assassination. That explained the visit to his room. That
explained her perturbation over his discovery of her visit, of her sly
and cool evasions and dissimulations.
It was with these thoughts hammering in his brain that Peter dropped
out of range of the deadly porthole and squirmed, inching his way into
the doubtful shelter provided by the closet. At any instant he
expected another red tongue to burn the now still darkness above his
head, to experience the hot plunge of a bullet in some part of his
slightly clad anatomy. And then--death? An end of the glorious
adventures whose trail he had followed now for well upon ten years?
And still the death bullet was withheld. Groping about in the darkness
with one hand as he loosened the magazine clip on the butt, and finding
that the clip of cartridges had been removed, he finally discovered the
whereabouts of the suit-case, and dragged it slowly toward him, with
his eyes pinned upon the vacant port.
Fumbling among the numerous objects contained in the suit-case, his
fingers encountered at length a cartridge clip. He slipped this into
the magazine, and indulged in a silent grunt of relief as the clip
moved up into place. He drew back the rejecting mechanism, and heard
the soft, reassuring _snick_ of the cartridge as it slid from the
magazine into the chamber.
Then sounds without demanded his attention, the sounds of a tussle, of
oaths spoken in a high, feminine tongue, in a language not his own.
Peter would have shouted, but he had long ago learned the
inadvisability of shouting when such grim business as to-night's was
being negotiated.
Slipping on his bath-robe, he opened the door and tentatively peered
out into the half-light of the orlop deck from the cross corridor
vestibule-way, for indications of a shambles.
They were gone. The deck was deserted. But he caught his breath
sharply as he made out a long, dark shape which lay, with the inertness
of death, under his port-hole, blending with the shadows. He rolled
the man over upon his back, and dragged him by the heels under the
deck-light, and, dragging him, a dark trail spread out upon the boards,
and even as Peter examined the cold face, the spot broadened and a
trickle broke from it and crept down toward the gutter.
Stabbed? More than likely. Pausing only long enough to reassure
himself that this one was the assassin whose square head had been
framed by the port, Peter looked for a wound, and shortly he found the
wound, and Peter was not greatly astounded at the proportions thereof.
It was a small wound, running entirely through the neck from a point
below the left ear to one slightly below and to the right of the locked
jaw. Upon close scrutiny the death wound proved to be small and
thorough and of a triangular pattern.
Just why he had expected to find that triangular wound Peter was unable
to explain even to himself, but he was quite as sure that Romola
Borria's hand was in this latest development as he had been sure a
moment before that her steady, small hand had deliberately removed the
clip of cartridges from the butt of the automatic, to render him
helpless in the face of his enemies.
Silently contemplating the stiffening victim of Romola Borria's
triangular dagger, Peter heard the rustle of silk garments, and looked
up in time to observe the slender person of Romola Borria herself,
attired exactly as he had left her a few hours previous, detach itself
from the corridor vestibule-way which led to his stateroom. She
approached him.
A thousand questions and accusations swam to his lips, but she was
speaking in low, impassioned tones.
"I knocked at your door. God! I thought he had killed you! I was
afraid. For a moment I thought you were dead."
"You stabbed him," said Peter in an expressionless voice.
She nodded, and drew a long, sobbing breath.
"Yes. He tried to shoot you. I saw him pass my window. I was
waiting. I watched. I knew he would try. Oh, I'm so glad----"
"You knew? You knew that?"
"Yes, yes. He was the--the mate of the coolie you threw overboard in
Batavia. You know, they always travel in pairs. You didn't know that?"
"No; I did not know. But I could have defended myself easily enough if
it had not been for----"
"Your clip of cartridges? Can you forgive me? Can you ever forgive me
for taking them out? I took them out. Oh, Mr. Moore, believe me, I am