Read Ebook: Waring's Peril by King Charles

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Ebook has 133 lines and 17778 words, and 3 pages

but he claims to know nothing." And this, too, Doyle eagerly seconded, but was sent along in the ambulance, with the doctor to keep him out of mischief, and a parting shot to the effect that when the coroner was through with him the post commander would take hold again, so the colonel depressed more than the cocktail stimulated, and, as luck would have it, almost the first person to meet him inside the gloomy enclosure was his wife, and her few whispered words only added to his misery.

The water still lay in pools about the premises, and the police had allowed certain of the neighbors to stream in and stare at the white walls and shaded windows, but only a favored few penetrated the hall-way and rooms where the investigation was being held. Doyle shook like one with the palsy as he ascended the little flight of steps and passed into the open door-way, still accompanied by "Little Pills." People looked at him with marked curiosity. He was questioned, re-questioned, cross-questioned, but the result was only a hopeless tangle. He really added nothing to the testimony of the hack-driver and Bonelli. In abject remorse and misery he begged them to understand he was drunk when he joined the party, got drunker, dimly remembered there was a quarrel, but he had no cause to quarrel with any one, and that was all; he never knew how he got home. He covered his face in his shaking hands at last, and seemed on the verge of a fit of crying.

But then came sensation.

Quietly rising from his seat, the official who so recently had had the verbal tilt with Cram held forth a rusty, cross-hilted, two-edged knife that looked as though it might have lain in the mud and wet for hours.

"Have you ever seen this knife before?" he asked. And Doyle, lifting up his eyes one instant, groaned, shuddered, and said,--

"Oh, my God, yes!"

"Whose property is it or was it?"

At first he would not reply. He moaned and shook. At last--

"Sure the initials are on the top," he cried.

But the official was relentless.

"Tell us what they are and what they represent."

People were crowding the hall-way and forcing themselves into the room. Cram and Ferry, curiously watching their ill-starred comrade, had exchanged glances of dismay when the knife was so suddenly produced. Now they bent breathlessly forward.

The silence for the moment was oppressive.

"If it's the knife I mane," he sobbed at last, desperately, miserably, "the letters are S. B. W., and it belongs to Lieutenant Waring of our bathery."

But no questioning, however adroit, could elicit from him the faintest information as to how it got there. The last time he remembered seeing it, he said, was on Mr. Waring's table the morning of the review. A detective testified to having found it among the bushes under the window as the water receded. Ferry and the miserable Ananias were called, and they, too, had to identify the knife, and admit that neither had seen it about the room since Mr. Waring left for town. Of other witnesses called, came first the proprietor of the stable to which the cab belonged. Horse and cab, he said, covered with mud, were found under a shed two blocks below the French Market, and the only thing in the cab was a handsome silk umbrella, London make, which Lieutenant Pierce laid claim to. Mrs. Doyle swore that as she was going in search of her husband she met the cab just below the Pelican, driving furiously away, and that in the flash of lightning she recognized the driver as the man whom Lieutenant Waring had beaten that morning on the levee in front of her place. A stranger was seated beside him. There were two gentlemen inside, but she saw the face of only one,--Lieutenant Waring.

Nobody else could throw any light on the matter. The doctor, recalled, declared the knife or dagger was shaped exactly as would have to be the one that gave the death-blow. Everything pointed to the fact that there had been a struggle, a deadly encounter, and that after the fatal work was done the murderer or murderers had left the doors locked and barred and escaped through the window, leaving the desk rifled and carrying away what money there was, possibly to convey the idea that it was only a vulgar murder and robbery, after all.

Of other persons who might throw light upon the tragedy the following were missing: Lieutenant Waring, Private Dawson, the cabman, and the unrecognized stranger. So, too, was Anatole's boat.

"The difficulty just now is in having a talk with the widow," said this official to Cram and Reynolds, whom he had met by appointment on the Thursday following the eventful Saturday of Braxton's "combined" review. "She is too much prostrated. I've simply got to wait awhile, and meantime go about this other affair. Is there no way in which you can see her?"

Cram relapsed into a brown study. Reynolds was poring over the note written to Braxton and comparing it with one he held in his hand,--an old one, and one that told an old, old story. "I know you'll say I have no right to ask this," it read, "but you're a gentleman, and I'm a friendless woman deserted by a worthless husband. My own people are ruined by the war, but even if they had money they wouldn't send any to me, for I offended them all by marrying a Yankee officer. God knows I am punished enough for that. But I was so young and innocent when he courted me. I ought to of left--I would of left him as soon as I found out how good-for-nothing he really was, only I was so much in love I couldn't. I was fastenated, I suppose. Now I've sold everything, but if you'll only lend me fifty dollars I'll work my fingers to the bone until I pay it. For the old home's sake, please do."

"That's all very interesting," said the little civilian, dryly, "but what we want is evidence to acquit him and convict somebody else of Lascelles's death. What has this to do with the other?"

That night, or very early next morning, there was pandemonium at the barracks. It was clear, still, beautiful. A soft April wind was drifting up from the lower coast, laden with the perfume of sweet olive and orange blossoms. Mrs. Cram, with one or two lady friends and a party of officers, had been chatting in low tone upon their gallery until after eleven, but elsewhere about the moonlit quadrangle all was silence when the second relief was posted. Far at the rear of the walled enclosure, where, in deference to the manners and customs of war as observed in the good old days whereof our seniors tell, the sutler's establishment was planted within easy hailing-distance of the guard-house, there was still the sound of modified revelry by night, and poker and whiskey punch had gathered their devotees in the grimy parlors of Mr. Finkbein, and here the belated ones tarried until long after midnight, as most of them were bachelors and had no better halves, as had Doyle, to fetch them home "out of the wet." Cram and his lieutenants, with the exception of Doyle, were never known to patronize this establishment, whatsoever they might do outside. They had separated before midnight, and little Pierce, after his customary peep into Waring's preserves, had closed the door, gone to his own room, to bed and to sleep. Ferry, as battery officer of the day, had made the rounds of the stables and gun-shed about one o'clock, and had encountered Captain Kinsey, of the infantry, coming in from his long tramp through the dew-wet field, returning from the inspection of the sentry-post at the big magazine.

"No news of poor Sam yet, I suppose?" said Kinsey, sadly, as the two came strolling in together through the rear gate.

"Nothing whatever," was Ferry's answer. "We cannot even form a conjecture, unless he, too, has been murdered. Think of there being a warrant out for his arrest,--for him, Sam Waring!"

"Well," said Kinsey, "no other conclusion could he well arrived at, unless that poor brute Doyle did it in a drunken row. Pills says he never saw a man so terror-stricken as he seems to be. He's afraid to leave him, really, and Doyle's afraid to be alone,--thinks the old woman may get in."

"She has no excuse for coming, captain," said Ferry. "When she told Cram she must see her husband to-day, that she was out of money and starving, the captain surprised her by handing her fifty dollars, which is much more than she'd have got from Doyle. She took it, of course, but that isn't what she wanted. She wants to get at him. She has money enough."

"Yes, that woman's a terror, Ferry. Old Mrs. Murtagh, wife of my quartermaster sergeant, has been in the army twenty years, and says she knew her well,--knew all her people. She comes from a tough lot, and they had a bad reputation in Texas in the old days. Doyle's a totally different man since she turned up, Cram tells me. Hello! here's 'Pills the Less,'" he suddenly exclaimed, as they came opposite the west gate, leading to the hospital. "How's your patient, Doc?"

"Well, he's sleeping at last. He seems worn out. It's the first time I've left him, but I'm used up and want a few hours' sleep. There isn't anything to drink in the room, even if he should wake, and Jim is sleeping or lying there by him."

"Oh, he'll do all right now, I reckon," said the officer of the day, cheerfully. "Go and get your sleep. The old woman can't get at him unless she bribes my sentries or rides the air on a broomstick, like some other old witches I've read of. Ferry sleeps in the adjoining room, anyhow, so he can look out for her. Good-night, Doc." And so, on they went, glancing upward at the dim light just showing through the window-blinds in the gable end of Doyle's quarters, and halting at the foot of the stairs.

"Come over and have a pipe with me, Ferry," said the captain. "It's too beautiful a night to turn in. I want to talk to you about Waring, anyhow. This thing weighs on my mind."

"Done with you, for an hour, anyhow!" said Ferry. "Just wait a minute till I run up and get my baccy."

Presently down came the young fellow again, meerschaum in hand, the moonlight glinting on his slender figure, so trim and jaunty in the battery dress. Kinsey looked him over with a smile of soldierly approval and a whimsical comment on the contrast between the appearance of this young artillery sprig and that of his own stout personality, clad as he was in a bulging blue flannel sack-coat, only distinguishable in cut and style from civilian garb by its having brass buttons and a pair of tarnished old shoulder-straps. Ferry was a swell. His shell jacket fitted like wax. The Russian shoulder-knots of twisted gold were of the handsomest make. The riding-breeches, top-boots, and spurs were such that even Waring could not criticise. His sabre gleamed in the moonbeams, and Kinsey's old leather-covered sword looked dingy by contrast. His belt fitted trim and taut, and was polished as his boot-tops; Kinsey's sank down over the left hip, and was worn brown. The sash Ferry sported as battery officer of the day was draped, West Point fashion, over the shoulder and around the waist, and accurately knotted and looped; Kinsey's old war-worn crimson net was slung higgledy-piggledy over his broad chest.

"What swells you fellows are, Ferry!" he said, laughingly, as the youngster came dancing down. "Even old Doyle gets out here in his scarlet plume occasionally and puts us doughboys to shame. What's the use in trying to make such a rig as ours look soldierly? If it were not for the brass buttons our coats would make us look like parsons and our hats like monkeys. As for this undress, all that can be said in its favor is, you can't spoil it even by sleeping out on the levee in it, as I am sometimes tempted to do. Let's go out there now."

It was perhaps quarter of two when they took their seats on the wooden bench under the trees, and, lighting their pipes, gazed out over the broad sweeping flood of the Mississippi, gleaming like a silvered shield in the moonlight. Far across at the opposite shore the low line of orange-groves and plantation houses and quarters was merged in one long streak of gloom, relieved only at intervals by twinkling light. Farther up-stream, like dozing sea-dogs, the fleet of monitors lay moored along the bank, with the masts and roofs of Algiers dimly outlined against the crescent sweep of lights that marked the levee of the great Southern metropolis, still prostrate from the savage buffeting of the war, yet so soon to rouse from lethargy, resume her sway, and, stretching forth her arms, to draw once again to her bosom the wealth and tribute, tenfold augmented, of the very heart of the nation, until, mistress of the commerce of a score of States, she should rival even New York in the volume of her trade. Below them, away to the east towards English Turn, rolled the tawny flood, each ripple and eddy and swirling pool crested with silver,--the twinkling lights at Chalmette barely distinguishable from dim, low-hanging stars. Midway the black hulk of some big ocean voyager was forging slowly, steadily towards them, the red light of the port side already obscured, the white and green growing with every minute more and more distinct, and, save the faint rustle of the leaves overhead, murmuring under the touch of the soft, southerly night wind, the plash of wavelet against the wooden pier, and the measured footfall of the sentry on the flagstone walk in front of the sally-port, not a sound was to be heard.

For a while they smoked in silence, enjoying the beauty of the night, though each was thinking only of the storm that swept over the scene the Sunday previous and of the tragedy that was borne upon its wings. At last Kinsey shook himself together.

"Ferry, sometimes I come out here for a quiet smoke and think. Did it ever occur to you what a fearful force, what illimitable power, there is sweeping by us here night after night with never a sound?"

"Oh, you mean the Mississip," said Ferry, flippantly. "It would be a case of mops and brooms, I fancy, if she were to bust through the bank and sweep us out into the swamps."

"Exactly! that's in case she broke loose, as you say; but even when in the shafts, as she is now, between the levees, how long would it take her to sweep a fellow from here out into the gulf, providing nothing interposed to stop him?"

"Matter of simple mathematical calculation," said Ferry, practically. "They say it's an eight-mile current easy out there in the middle where she's booming. Look at that barrel scooting down yonder. Now, I'd lay a fiver I could cut loose from here at reveille and shoot the passes before taps and never pull a stroke. It's less than eighty miles down to the forts."

"Well, then, a skiff like that that old Anatole's blaspheming about losing wouldn't take very long to ride over that route, would it?" said Kinsey, reflectively.

"No, not if allowed to slide. But somebody'd be sure to put out and haul it in as a prize,--flotsam and what-you-may-call-'em. You see these old niggers all along here with their skiffs tacking on to every hit of drift-wood that's worth having."

"But, Ferry, do you think they'd venture out in such a storm as Sunday last?--think anything could live in it short of a decked ship?"

"No, probably not. Certainly not Anatole's boat."

"Well, that's just what I'm afraid of, and what Cram and Reynolds dread."

"Do they? Well, so far as that storm's concerned, it would have blown it down-stream until it came to the big bend below here to the east. Then, by rights, it ought to have blown against the left bank. But every inch of it has been scouted all the way to quarantine. The whole river was filled with drift, though, and it might have been wedged in a lot of logs and swept out anyhow. Splendid ship, that! Who is she, do you suppose?"

The great black hull with its lofty tracery of masts and spars was now just about opposite the barracks, slowly and majestically ascending the stream.

"One of those big British freight steamers that moor there below the French Market, I reckon. They seldom come up at night unless it's in the full of the moon, and even then they move with the utmost caution. See, she's slowing up now."

"Hello! Listen! What's that?" exclaimed Ferry, starting to his feet.

A distant, muffled cry. A distant shot. The sentry at the sally-port dashed through the echoing vault, then bang! came the loud roar of his piece, followed by the yell of--

With one spring Ferry was down the levee and darted like a deer across the road, Kinsey lumbering heavily after. Even as he sped through the stone-flagged way, the hoarse roar of the drum at the guard-house, followed instantly by the blare of the bugle from the battery quarters, sounded the stirring alarm. A shrill, agonized female voice was madly screaming for help. Guards and sentries were rushing to the scene, and flames were bursting from the front window of Doyle's quarters. Swift though Ferry ran, others were closer to the spot. Half a dozen active young soldiers, members of the infantry guard, had sprung to the rescue. When Ferry dashed up to the gallery he was just in time to stumble over a writhing and prostrate form, to help extinguish the blazing clothing of another, to seize his water-bucket and douse its contents over a third,--one yelling, the others stupefied by smoke--or something. In less time than it takes to tell it, daring fellows had ripped down the blazing shades and shutters, tossed them to the parade beneath, dumped a heap of soaked and smoking bedding out of the rear windows, splashed a few bucketfuls of water about the reeking room, and the fire was out. But the doctors were working their best to bring back the spark of life to two senseless forms, and to still the shrieks of agony that burst from the seared and blistered lips of Bridget Doyle.

While willing hands bore these scorched semblances of humanity to neighboring rooms and tender-hearted women hurried to add their ministering touch, and old Braxton ordered the excited garrison back to quarters and bed, he, with Cram and Kinsey and Ferry, made prompt examination of the premises. On the table two whiskey-bottles, one empty, one nearly full, that Dr. Potts declared were not there when he left at one. On the mantel a phial of chloroform, which was also not there before. But a towel soaked with the stifling contents lay on the floor by Jim's rude pallet, and a handkerchief half soaked, half consumed, was on the chair which had stood by the bedside, among the fragments of an overturned kerosene lamp.

A quick examination of the patients showed that Jim, the negro, had been chloroformed and was not burned at all, that Doyle was severely burned and had probably inhaled flames, and that the woman was crazed with drink, terror, and burns combined. It took the efforts of two or three men and the influence of powerful opiates to quiet her. Taxed with negligence or complicity on the part of the sentry, the sergeant of the guard repudiated the idea, and assured Colonel Braxton that it was an easy matter for any one to get either in or out of the garrison without encountering the sentry, and, taking his lantern, led the way out to the hospital grounds by a winding foot-path among the trees to a point in the high white picket fence where two slats had been shoved aside. Any one coming along the street without could pass far beyond the ken of the sentry at the west gate, and slip in with the utmost ease, and once inside, all that was necessary was to dodge possible reliefs and patrols. No sentry was posted at the gate through the wall that separated the garrison proper from the hospital grounds. Asked why he had not reported this, the sergeant smiled and said there were a dozen others just as convenient, so what was the use? He did not say, however, that he and his fellows had recourse to them night after night.

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