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the other can be had - for the pursuit.”

Mac did not reply: he was staring into the parlor. Elsa Lee was standing by a table, looking at me.

She was very nervous, and tried to explain her presence in a breath - with the result that she broke down utterly and had to stop. Mac, his jovial face rather startled, was making for the stairs; but I sternly brought him back and presented him. Whereon, being utterly confounded, he made the tactful remark that he would have to go and put out the milk-bottles: it was almost morning!

She had been waiting since ten o’clock, she said. A taxicab, with her maid, was at the door. They were going back to New York in the morning, and things were terribly wrong.

“Wrong? You need not mind Mr. McWhirter. He is as anxious as I am to be helpful.”

“There are detectives watching Marshall; we saw one to-day at the hotel. If the jury disagrees - and the lawyers think they will - they will arrest him.”

I thought it probable. There was nothing I could say. McWhirter made an effort to reassure her.

“It wouldn’t be a hanging matter, anyhow,” he said. “There’s a lot against him, but hardly a jury in the country would hang a man for something he did, if he could prove he was delirious the next day.” She paled at this dubious comfort, but it struck her sense of humor, too, for she threw me a fleeting smile.

“I was to ask you to do something,” she said. “None of us can, for we are being watched. I was probably followed here. The Ella is still in the river, with only a watchman on board. We want you to go there to-night, if you can.”

“To the Ella?”

She was feeling in her pocketbook, and now she held out to me an envelope addressed in a sprawling hand to Mr. Turner at his hotel.

“Am I to open it?”

“Please.”

I unfolded a sheet of ruled note-paper of the most ordinary variety. It had been opened and laid flat, and on it, in black ink, was a crude drawing of the deck of the Ella, as one would look down on it from aloft. Here and there were small crosses in red ink, and, overlying it all from bow to stern, a red axe. Around the border, not written, but printed in childish letters, were the words: “NOT YET. HA, HA.” In a corner was a drawing of a gallows, or what passes in the everyday mind for a gallows, and in the opposite corner an open book.

“You see,” she said, “it was mailed downtown late this afternoon. The hotel got it at seven o’clock. Marshall wanted to get a detective, but I thought of you. I knew - you knew the boat, and then - you had said -”

“Anything in all the world that I can do to help you, I will do,” I said, looking at her. And the thing that I could not keep out of my eyes made her drop hers.

“Sweet little document!” said McWhirter, looking over my shoulder. “Sent by some one with a nice disposition. What do the crosses mark?”

“The location of the bodies when found,” I explained - “these three. This looks like the place where Burns lay unconscious. That one near the rail I don’t know about, nor this by the mainmast.”

“We thought they might mark places, clues, perhaps, that had been overlooked. The whole - the whole document is a taunt, isn’t it? The scaffold, and the axe, and ‘not yet’; a piece of bravado!”

“Right you are,” said McWhirter admiringly. “A little escape of glee from somebody who’s laughing too soon. One-thirty - it will soon be the proper hour for something to happen on the Ella, won’t it? If that was sent by some member of the crew -and it looks like it; they are loose to-day - the quicker we follow it up, the better, if there’s anything to follow.”

“We thought if you would go early in the morning, before any of them make an excuse to go back on board -”

“We will go right away; but, please - don’t build too much on this. It’s a good possibility, that’s all. Will the watchman let us on board?”

“We thought of that. Here is a note to him from Marshall, and - will you do us one more kindness?”

“I will.”

“Then - if you should find anything, bring it to us; to the police; later, if you must, but to us first.”

“When?”

“In the morning. We will not leave until we hear from you.”

She held out her hand, first to McWhirter, then to me. I kept it a little longer than I should have, perhaps, and she did not take it away.

“It is such a comfort,” she said, “to have you with us and not against us! For Marshall didn’t do it, Leslie - I mean - it is hard for me to think of you as Dr. Leslie! He didn’t do it. At first, we thought he might have, and he was delirious and could not reassure us. He swears he did not. I think, just at first, he was afraid he had done it; but he did not. I believe that, and you must.”

I believed her - I believed anything she said. I think that if she had chosen to say that I had wielded the murderer’s axe on the Ella, I should have gone to the gallows rather than gainsay her. From that night, I was the devil’s advocate, if you like. I was determined to save Marshall Turner.

She wished us to take her taxicab, dropping her at her hotel; and, reckless now of everything but being with her, I would have done so. But McWhirter’s discreet cough reminded me of the street-car level of our finances, and I made the excuse of putting on more suitable clothing.

I stood in the street, bareheaded, watching her taxicab as it rattled down the street. McWhirter touched me on the arm.

“Wake up!” he said. “We have work to do, my friend.”

We went upstairs together, cautiously, not to rouse the house. At the top, Mac turned and patted me on the elbow, my shoulder being a foot or so above him.

“Good boy!” he said. “And if that shirtfront and tie didn’t knock into eternal oblivion the deck-washing on the Ella, I’ll eat them!”

CHAPTER XXIV THE THING

I deserve no credit for the solution of the Ella’s mystery. I have a certain quality of force, perhaps, and I am not lacking in physical courage; but I have no finesse of intellect. McWhirter, a foot shorter than I, round of face, jovial and stocky, has as much subtlety in his little finger as I have in my six feet and a fraction of body.

All the way to the river, therefore, he was poring over the drawing. He named the paper at once.

“Ought to know it,” he said, in reply to my surprise. “Sold enough paper at the drugstore to qualify as a stationery engineer.” He writhed as was his habit over his jokes, and then fell to work at the drawing again. “A book,” he said, “and an axe, and a gibbet or gallows. B-a-g - that makes ‘bag.’ Doesn’t go far, does it? Humorous duck, isn’t he? Any one who can write ‘ha! ha!’ under a gallows has real humor. G-a-b, b-a-g!”

The Ella still lay in the Delaware, half a mile or so from her original moorings. She carried the usual riding-lights - a white one in the bow, another at the stern, and the two vertical red lights which showed her not under command. In reply to repeated signals, we were unable to rouse the watchman. I had brought an electric flash with me, and by its aid we found a rope ladder over the side, with a small boat at its foot.

Although the boat indicated the presence of the watchman on board, we made our way to the deck without challenge. Here McWhirter suggested that the situation might be disagreeable, were the man to waken and get at us with a gun.

We stood by the top of the ladder, therefore, and made another effort to rouse him. “Hey, watchman!” I called. And McWhirter, in a deep bass, sang lustily: “Watchman, what of the night?” Neither of us made, any perceptible impression on the silence and gloom of the Ella.

McWhirter grew less gay. The deserted decks of the ship, her tragic history, her isolation, the darkness, which my small flash seemed only to intensify, all had their effect on him.

“It’s got my goat,” he admitted. “It smells like a tomb.”

“Don’t be an ass.”

“Turn the light over the side, and see if we fastened that boat. We don’t want to be left here indefinitely.”

“That’s folly, Mac,” I said, but I obeyed him. “The watchman’s boat is there, so we -”

But he caught me suddenly by the arm and shook me.

“My God!” he said. “What is that over there?”

It was a moment before my eyes, after the flashlight, could discern anything in the darkness. Mac was pointing forward. When I could see, Mac was ready to laugh at himself.

“I told you the place had my goat!” he said sheepishly. “I thought I saw something duck around the corner of that building; but I think it was a ray from a searchlight on one of those boats.”

“The watchman, probably,” I said quietly. But my heart beat a little faster. “The watchman taking a look at us and gone for his gun.”

I thought rapidly. If Mac had seen anything, I did not believe it was the watchman. But there should be a watchman on board - in the forward house, probably. I gave Mac my revolver and put the light in my pocket. I might want both hands that night. I saw better without the flash, and, guided partly by the bow light, partly by my knowledge of the yacht, I led the way across the deck. The forward house was closed and locked, and no knocking produced any indication of life. The after house we found not only locked, but barred across with strips of wood nailed into place. The forecastle was likewise closed. It was a dead ship.

No figure reappearing to alarm him, Mac took the drawing out of his pocket and focused the flashlight on it.

“This cross by the mainmast,” he said “that would be where?”

“Right behind you, there.”

He walked to the mast, and examined carefully around its base. There was nothing there, and even now I do not know to what that cross alluded, unless poor Schwartz -!

“Then this other one - forward, you call it, don’t you? Suppose we locate that.”

All expectation of the watchman having now died, we went forward on the port side to the approximate location of the cross. This being in the neighborhood where Mac had thought he saw something move, we approached with extreme caution. But nothing more ominous was discovered than the port lifeboat, nothing more ghostly heard than the occasional creak with which it rocked in its davits.

The lifeboat seemed to be indicated by the cross. It swung almost shoulder-high on McWhirter. We looked under and around it, with a growing feeling that we had misread the significance of the crosses, or that the sinister record extended to a time before the “she devil” of the Turner line was dressed in white and turned into a lady.

I was feeling underneath the boat, with a sense of absurdity that McWhirter put into words. “I only hope,” he said, “that the watchman does not wake up now and see us. He’d be

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