Odor of Violets, Baynard Kendrick [best short novels .txt] 📗

come and set him free. Somewhere his carefully laid plans must have slipped.

He pressed his cheek down against the roughness of an unplaned board. Unhampered by any extraneous distraction, he reviewed the events of the past few days, checking each item from the time the man who he thought was Madoc brought him the instructions in Braille to the moment when Cheli Scott’s car was blocked by a truck on a deserted stretch of highway. He analyzed each move he had made, ruthlessly scrutinizing each weakness in the chain.

Duncan Maclain had been guilty of an unpardonable sin: carelessness. The price might be the life of Duncan Maclain. The enemy had moved too fast, had gone to work without wasting an hour. Never had he expected them to act with such precipitancy. Their move gave Spud no time whatever to receive his message, investigate the House of Bonnée, and get in touch with Colonel Gray.

The Captain had predicated his plans on the belief that he would be forcibly abducted some time during the following day. He intended to give his adversaries every chance, to put himself up as a bait. Saboteurs must have a base. Maclain’s taped mouth twisted into a grin. He had found the base, gotten himself unerringly into the headquarters of an airtight, organized band, only he had arrived there about twenty-four hours too soon to be of any use to the competent workers of the F. B. I.

“—And this one may end your career,” he thought bitterly, recalling the words of Colonel Gray.

He wormed himself sideways with maximum caution, trying to find a wall. His exploring feet encountered nothing. After a time, he decided he must be lying on a packing case a foot or two high. Inaction began to pall. He held his breath and listened. A water pipe dripped steadily. Not far away, some mechanism which might be a tiny motor ran with an almost inaudible purr. Maclain judged that he was close to an electric meter and that the noise he heard was the spinning of the recording wheel. Lights were on somewhere in his prison, although he felt sure that outside it was day. His entire body ached dolefully and he knew that he must have spent much time sleeping fitfully.

Taking a chance of injury, he swung his feet violently to one side and rolled off onto the floor. The drop was higher than he expected and it stunned him momentarily.

He eased his weight from off his hands and listened again. Small feet pattered flutteringly as a rodent scuttled away. Maclain was satisfied that no one had been in to look at him for some time. Otherwise a timorous rat would not have been so near.

He planned a tour of exploration. His only means of moving would be to bend his legs and shove himself along the floor. There were always identifying marks that his sagacious fingers might see, and if he ever escaped he wanted to know that place again.

By aiding himself with his elbows against the side of the packing box which had served him as a couch, he managed to sit erect. Awkwardly he rocked himself around to one end of the box. Sitting up as straight as possible, he went over the wood with his fingers, starting at the bottom each time and moving his hands upward from the floor.

The packing case was large. Nailed-down metal tape bound it at each end. The Captain had covered almost the entire surface when his fingers touched a series of small indentations. He went over them once, then sat unbelievingly with sweat staining his forehead as he traced them again more carefully. Underneath them, punched into the wood, was a tiny arrowhead.

The Captain left the box and began to inch across the floor. It was cluttered with debris. Pieces of old iron, several camshafts from automobile motors, and assorted junk of all description put hazards in his way.

He backed into a wall. It was damp and felt as though it had been whitewashed in the past. He moved along it until stopped by another packing case. It, too, was punched with the letters and the arrowhead. A trip around it brought him in contact with several more. He was certain then that, whoever his captors might be, they never intended him to leave the place alive.

The name punched into the end of the boxes was that of the great Eagle Munitions Works. The arrowhead was the stamp of the British Government. He was imprisoned in a storehouse filled with looted British supplies of war.

Behind him a bolt slid back in the door.

2

There were several people in the room. The Captain sat in a straight-back armchair with wooden arms and an upholstered seat. Adhesive tape held him motionless, binding his wrists to the arms of the chair. One man standing close beside him was breathing wheezily.

The Captain fought to divorce his mind from the asthmatic inhalations of the man beside him so that he might better judge how many men were in the room. He segregated them after a while and gave them numbers.

Number 1 was sitting down. Maclain placed him as being in charge and pictured him sitting behind a table. He had spoken once or twice in a velvety whisper which had sounded at a height approximately on a level with the Captain’s face.

Number 2 seemed to be a confrere. He was also seated, more to the right. Maclain had followed his footsteps across the room and acoustically watched him take a chair.

Number 3 had adenoids and was standing with his back to a door. Now and again he shuffled his feet uneasily, either touching the doorknob with his buttocks or moving it with his hand.

Asthma was Number 4.

Papers rustled. The Captain decided that Number 1 was reading, hence the silence. He followed the unmistakable crackle of fingered paper and the swish as each sheet was finished and laid face down on the table. Once the man with the velvet voice smothered