Diamond Tolls/Chapter 17
CHAPTER XVII
DELIA had fled from the staring of the shantyboat town. Half the men were trying to flirt with her, and others who did not make open advances and who lurked in the background, sullen, watchful, and menacing, were worse than the clowns who sought by gyrations to attract her favourable notice. Accordingly, seizing a favourable moment, she slipped aboard her boat, told Roy Mahna that she was going to drop down, and that she would see his mother later, cast off the lines, backed out into the eddy, and left for other scenes.
She was conscious of a serious qualm of regret that she had burdened the unsuspecting Murdong with that parcel of stolen gems. She wondered if she ought not to have warned him in some way—ought not to have given him some hint, so that he would be prepared for what might follow him down the river? She knew, now, that the diamonds were known to be down the Mississippi—forty covert hints had fallen upon her ears, as watchful men and women sounded her for a look or a gesture that would again betray her own knowledge.
"Sho!" one evil-faced little creature had sniffed, "nobody'll eveh throw sparklers ovehboard. No, indeedy! What she'd do, she'd have a pal, and her pal'd get to go with 'em!"
The shot had struck home. Despite her held-taut composure Delia felt that a little start she gave had betrayed her secret—or enough of it to let the truth be known. Her heart ached when she thought of the young man who had unquestioningly done her bidding, not knowing what Pandora's Box she had left in his charge.
"I must warn him!" she whispered to herself. "I mustn't let him go down this dreadful river unwarned! I ought to have told him he'd be in danger—someone would watch him."
Accordingly, she scurried down the river, trying to find the man whom she had sent down to hide out. She had told him that. If he should find the gems, then he would understand.
"Don't trust any one," she had warned him. "Hide—hideout!"
She kept her motor at half speed, and steered by the steamer lights down bends and over crossings. Carrying no light on her own boat, she was invisible. She travelled till dawn, and then sought the mouth of a bayou which was deep enough for her to enter. Around the first turn in the bayou she let the boat drift up to a snag, to which she made fast.
Very tired, she turned in to make up for her lost sleep. At her hand, ready for instant service, rested her automatic pistol. Personally, she was content. Nothing mattered much—but her conscience had rebuked her for sending the friendly young man down the river unwarned of his jeopardy. She dreamed, in her sleep, as she remembered, while awake, that he was in trouble, perhaps without knowing it.
"I must find him!" she murmured in her dreams. "I must find him!"
So she ran on down the river, and stopped at Mendova because she was not sure that she had not passed him without seeing the boat in some of the huge horse-shoe bends through which she followed the mid-channel. All things seemed small in those terrific windings of the unimaginable torrent. Again and again she discovered boats in little bays and eddies, just by accident. She was sure she must have passed dozens of boats which she had not seen.
In Mendova she endeavoured to learn from other shantyboaters if they had seen such a craft as Murdong travelled in. Although Murdong had gone on by, she did not learn it for a day. Thus she was sitting reading newspapers which she had purchased when there swung into the eddy a motorboat which she recognized even out of the corner of her eyes. It was Macrado's boat, and Gost was at the wheel. Urleigh was sitting back in the cockpit watching her from under the brim of his gray felt hat.
She knew their purpose instantly. They were on the trail of the diamonds. They would not rest until they knew the truth about them. What else they had in mind she did not know or care. It was enough for her to know that her instinct had truly spoken when she trembled for the safety of the man whom she had sent, all unawares, with such a treasure in his possession as a prince might carry.
Immediately she threw down her paper, and beckoned to the two, who could not have been more surprised. Gost hesitated, but Urleigh, more interested in the story he was following down, suggested the turn of the wheel that brought the boat alongside her own.
She threw a rope, and in half a minute the two craft were moored side by side in a most amicable way.
"Won't you boys tell me frankly what your game is?" she asked, with an expression of grave anxiety. "There's something I want to know—and there's something you want to know. Won't you talk right out?"
Gost flinched under that demand. He could have slid from under almost any other attack, but his mind did not work in direct lines. Urleigh took the voice:
"This is it; I am a reporter"
"Oh, I know that,' she exclaimed, impatiently.
"And I am after the story of those diamonds, which disappeared with Goles, the salesman, in Cincinnati. You said you threw them overboard, and we simply wanted to verify that."
"Search this boat if you wish!" she exclaimed. "I don't want men chasing me down this river. I didn't come down here to have men chase me"
"There aren't more than a dozen after you now," Urleigh smiled. "I may be mistaken, though. Let's see, there's Macrado, and Frest, and"
"Don't!" she cried. "Do you want to search this boat? I had the diamonds—I'll show you that."
She darted into the cabin, and brought out a handful of papers, little sheets of linen paper, creased to make envelopes of card size. With these white papers were grayish tissue sheets folded the same way—some with one another. On the linen paper were prices, carat weights, and symbols as to quality.
"There are the envelopes," she cried. "I knew you'd chase me"
"You threw them into the river!" Gost asked, hoarsely.
"I said so. Of course I did."
"Who's your pal?" Gost demanded, sneering. "You played me for a sucker, all right. You're the slickest pair ever dropped down Old Mississip'—I mean the lad who went on down in your shantyboat, when you moved into my gasolene there."
"Mr. Man!" she turned on him with cold ferocity, "I shot you once for your insolence, and I'll shoot you again. You're a scoundrel. You stole those diamonds and rubies—what murder you did to do it I don't know, but you mind your business, now, and I'll mind mine. I don't know who you mean"
"What—Murdong!" Gost retorted. "Oh, I know. Roy Mahna was a-listenin', and his eyes are good at night, believe me."
Delia flushed. Her bluff, which was half truth, had failed. These two men knew, at least Gost knew. Urleigh was not Gost's kind. She knew that. She knew the reason Urleigh was there—he was daring much to find the truth of the story of the gems.
"You'n Murdong meet down in Spanish Moss Bend," Gost declared, with venom in his tones. "You got those sparklers, or he has. I'm tellin' you."
Urleigh was surprised at Gost's statements. He turned and looked at his partner, and showed his surprise. Gost felt the rebuke, and he turned to say:
"I wanted to break it to her, sudden! See? I'd 'a 'told you, but I kinda overlooked hit"
"After all I've done for you!" Urleigh exclaimed. "You're holding out on me. Is that the way you treat a pal?"
Delia listened with impassive countenance. Gost shrivelled under the scorn of Urleigh, whose quality he had underestimated. He now tried to bluff through himself.
"Well, if you don't like my company, you can give er take! I'll pay you two hundred for your int'rest in the boat"
"Done!" Urleigh exclaimed.
Gost drew out his billfold and began to count down the bills. Urleigh entered the cabin and packed up his suitcase and returned into the cockpit. He accepted the money with relief. Gost had been an ill-at-ease companion, and leaving him seemed the best luck in many a day.
"Thank you." Urleigh nodded, and as he stepped out of the boat on to the splash-deck of Delia's, she said to him:
"I'll cast off his bow line. Will you throw off the stern one?"
In a moment Gost was adrift, sulking at his wheel. He watched the two as Delia whispered something in Urleigh's ear. Urleigh stared, but she ran over the bow and cast off the line mooring her boat to the bank. Before Urleigh fully realized her purpose she had thrown over the engine and started it. A moment later she pulled over the reverse, and they backed into the eddy, following which, she steered around, and then headed down the river.
"Good-bye, goosie," she called across to Gost. "Mind your eyes, now!"
"What! What!" Cost shrieked. "You two pals! You—you"
She laughed merrily, and with a nod she said to Urleigh:
"Throw your suitcase into the cabin, and make yourself to home."
A little dazed, Urleigh did as bid. It was a fine, large cabin and it was prettily decorated, bright and cheerful. Books were in racks on both the stateroom ends, and a desk had been fitted up under one of the stacks of shelves.
He returned to the open and sat down opposite the young woman, who was steering into the main channel. The engine purred at full speed, and the boat swayed and rocked to the low river swells. She did not once speak to him during the eight or nine miles down the bend and around out of sight of Mendova on the bluffs.
At last she looked back and saw that they were clear of the town and were swinging between a sandbar and a caving bend. She looked then at Urleigh, and laughed at the expression on his face.
"You were almost shanghaied that time, for a fact," she laughed. "I just had to do it, though. You understand why—he fell for it beautifully. If he thinks you and I and Murdong, down the river, are all in a gang together, he'll think twice before he bothers any of us any more. He told you about it, didn't he?"
"The diamonds, you mean?" he asked, "and the"
"And the shooting? Oh, I did shoot him, if that's what he said."
"Yes," Urleigh admitted.
"What did he say about the shooting?"
"He said he had been taking coke—snow—and he was dippy. He said he just went aboard your boat, to make a social call, so to speak, and you shot him, careless-like, smiling. He said if only you had acted frightened, he wouldn't have thought anything about it. He made up his mind that you had played him, somehow, and coaxed him to follow you and brought him aboard, just so you could have an excuse to shoot him."
"He thought I had flirted with him!" she exclaimed. "Aren't men fools, anyhow—I mean about women!"
"Well, you know, really—I'm—I'm in no position to judge," Urleigh answered, really somewhat bewildered.
"Oh!" she laughed, and then seriously: "It's this old river. Here I am in that man's boat. I've kept it—just as though"
"Oh, it's yours, according to river practice," Urleigh declared. "Even Gost said that when a lady has shot a man she has a right to the loot."
"Of course, it's the diamonds that worry him."
"And me, and everyone else," Urleigh shook his head. "At least, that's what did worry me. Now"
"Now it's something else," she took his words. "Never mind that. I'm perfectly competent. It's my boat. I'm a river pirate, I suppose. And you're a shanghaied victim, held for ransom, so to speak. Really, I don't know, yet, how much you are worth."
"Eh?" he demanded.
"Just accept conditions as they are," she told him, coldly. "I'm perturbed about the man down the river. You were following us both. I haven't the diamonds—and that man Gost would kill him just to search his boat. The worst of it is, if we don't find Murdong first, Murdong will be murdered, and Gost'll get the diamonds."
"Then—then you gave Murdong the diamonds?" Urleigh exclaimed. "Gost was right then?"
"Do you suppose I'd have done what I did, that I'd have you here on this boat for any other reason except to save a life—the life of a dear boy who doesn't suspect what danger he is in? I almost died, worrying about him. It was to save him that I hurried away from Yankee Bar. I thought—I hoped I would find him right away! I don't know where he is. No one could tell me there at Mendova. No one remembered him. We just must find him. I thought perhaps you knew"
"No—but I'm obliged to you for taking me away from that man. I was getting worried about him. He was growing uglier every day," Urleigh shook his head. "Anything I can do to help your friend, I'll be glad to!"
"Oh—he's not my friend, exactly," she exclaimed. "He's—he's just one of my—one of my dupes. That's what they call it, isn't it?"
"One of your dupes?" Urleigh saw only a smile on her face, and she made no reply. He took off his hat and gazed at the river.
"Some river, isn't it?" she suggested, a minute later.