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Updated: June 6, 2025
He could see that boat crowded with men, men in uniform, and he could see that each man carried a carbine. He could also see that it would surely cut across the bow of his own steamer. A moment later he knew that Tankred himself had seen this, for high above the crack and whine of the shooting and the tumult of voices he could now hear Tankred's blasphemous shouts.
"But she 's going to carry me," asserted Blake, lighting a fresh cigar. "What as?" demanded Tankred. And he fixed Blake with a belligerent eye as he put the question. "As an old friend of yours!" "And then what?" still challenged the other. "As a man who knows your record, in the next place.
Blake knew, at that sound, that Tankred or one of his men was firing straight into the dial of the searchlight, that Tankred himself intended to defy what must surely be an Ecuadorean gunboat. The detective was oppressed by the thought that his own jealously nursed plan might at any moment get a knock on the head.
"How do I know that?" "You 'll have my word for it!" Tankred swung round on him. "D' you realize you 'll have to sneak ashore in a lancha and pass a double line o' patrol? And then crawl into a town that's reekin' with yellow-jack, a town you 're not likely to crawl out of again inside o' three months?" "I know all that!" acknowledged Blake.
And on the next count, as the man who 's wise to those phony bills of lading of yours, and those doped-up clearance papers, and those cases of carbines you 've got down your hold labeled bridge equipment, and that nitro and giant-caps, and that hundred thousand rounds of smokeless you 're running down there as phonograph records!" Tankred continued to smoke.
Every light went out again, every light except a faint glow as a guide to the first boat at the foot of the landing-ladder. Along this ladder Blake could hear barefooted figures padding and grunting as cases and bales were cautiously carried down and passed from boat to boat. He swung nervously about as he felt a hand clutch his arm. He found Tankred speaking quietly into his ear.
The following morning Blake, having made sure of his ground, began one of his old-time "investigations" of that unsuspecting worthy known as Pip Tankred.
Already, overhead, he could hear the continuous tramping of feet, with now and then a quiet-noted order from Tankred himself. He could hear other noises along the ship's side, as though a landing-ladder were being bolted and lowered along the rusty plates. When he went up on deck he found the boat in utter darkness.
Her ventilators were askew and her funnel was scrofulous and many of her rivet-heads seemed to be eaten away. But this was not once a source of apprehension to the studious-eyed detective. The following evening he encountered Tankred himself, as though by accident, on the veranda of the Hotel Angelini. The latter, at Blake's invitation, sat down for a cocktail and a quiet smoke.
He knew, by the slowly diminishing sounds, that he was drifting further and further away from Tankred and his crowded fore-deck. But he was still within the area of that ever-betraying searchlight. Some time, he knew, he must drift beyond it. But until that moment came he dare make no move to keep himself afloat.
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