Part 26

... While Guisseppi sat hidden from view behind the curtains of his taxicab, ruminating upon the bitterness of his fate, Rosina emerged from her home. Trim and dainty with pink cheeks and sparkling eyes, the young beauty was subtly suggestive of flowers and fragrance as she tripped along the street in the warm sunshine.

As she came abreast of the taxicab, Guisseppi stepped out, caught her in his arms, and swung her into the car. The girl’s wild screams shrilled through the slumberous stillness of the quarter and filled the streets with excited throngs as the cab plunged madly forward, dashed around a corner and was soon lost to sight. In a distant part of the city, the car halted before a weather-stained building. Within the dingy doorway Guisseppi disappeared, bearing the kidnapped maiden in his arms.

A little later, Guisseppi appeared before the marriage license clerk in the city hall.

“I’m sorry,” said the clerk, “but I can not give you a marriage license.”

“Why not?”

“You are dead. You can not marry.”

“But I’m _going_ to marry!” shouted Guisseppi defiantly.

“Impossible. If I went through the formality of filling out a license for you, no minister or priest would perform the wedding service. The marriage altar, orange blossoms, the happiness of domestic love are not for the dead.”

“But I’m _alive_! I am only _legally_ dead.”

The clerk smiled tolerantly. With a pencil he drew a circle on a sheet of paper.

“Here,” said he, “is a cipher. It is the symbol of nothing, but, as a circular pencil mark, it is still something.”

He erased every trace of the pencil and exhibited the blank piece of paper.

“This,” he explained, “illustrates your status. In human affairs, you are a cipher with the rim rubbed out. A man legally dead is less than nothing.”

_VII._

Luigi Romano, who had succeeded Guisseppi in Rosina’s affections, was among the first to hear of the abduction.

Blazing with passion, he laid his plans with quick decision and took the trail. Without great difficulty, he traced the route of the taxicab, block by block, to its destination.

Depressed by his fruitless mission in search of a marriage license, Guisseppi was hurrying toward the building in which Rosina was imprisoned. His eyes were bent upon the ground in deep thought. His face was white and drawn.

Luigi stepped from the shelter of a doorway with a sawed-off shotgun in his hands....

* * * * *

When the police arrived, a little crowd of Italians had gathered.

They shrugged their shoulders and spread their palms. Nobody had seen anything; nobody had heard anything; nobody knew anything. But one thing was plain—the dead man, sprawled on the sidewalk, was dead this time to stay dead.

“O yes,” said Attorney Malato, who had looked after Luigi’s case, “they arrested Luigi all right. But they turned him loose. Why not? This boy Guisseppi could not be punished by the law, but neither could he claim in the slightest degree the protection of the law. Since he had no legal life, it was no crime to kill him. He was a legal problem, and Luigi solved it in about the only way it could be solved—with a sawed-off shotgun.”’

* * * * *

It is often wondered why the earth is round instead of being some other shape. This is because of the attraction of gravity, which tends to pull everything toward the center of the world. It can be seen that even if the earth was originally some other shape, in the course of a few years this influence would have pulled it into its present shape.

_A Gripping, Powerful Story by a Man Who Always Tells a Good Tale_

The Blade of Vengeance

_By_ George Warburton Lewis

The outcome was all the more regrettable because Henry Fayne had staked so much on the success of his great venture. He had renounced innumerable bachelor friendships for Leanor, only to discover within a year of the celebrated social event, which had been their wedding, that he was linked for life to a captivating adventuress.

It was a hard blow. Only by desperate efforts, long sustained, had he been able to take himself in hand and force out of his thoughts the ugly images that obsessed him.

[Illustration]

Leanor’s perfidy was a thing of which even his best friends never could have convinced him; yet now he knew it to be true—aye, knew it because she herself had boasted of it!

Fayne had striven hard to shut so hideous a specter out of his vision,

## partly because of a haunting fear that the thing which the discovery had

set throbbing in his brain would get the better of him, that he would hurt somebody, or himself.

He had been an unusually well-balanced man, but it was only after many a stern struggle with the pulsating thing that hammered in his head that he surrendered the corpse of his outraged love to the divorce court and the gossip-mongers, and went sadly back to his bachelor haunts in the hope of forgetting. But he was appalled to find that he no longer fitted in.

The friends of the free and easy days of his celibacy were sincere enough in their pity for him, though in no way disposed to put themselves out seeking reclamation. In short, they might as well have said in chorus:

“You couldn’t have expected us to forewarn you; you’d have quit us cold. You had to discover it for yourself, and the operation of finding out has simply rendered you impossible as one of the old crowd. Sorry, old man, but, after all, it’s better that you should know.”

So Henry Fayne brooded, lost his nerve, and then, all of a sudden—disappeared.

The old circle knew his set and cynical face no more. There were rumors of mental breakdown and suicide, and there was one report (little credited, however) that the unfortunate fellow had drifted down into the wilds of South America and become an eccentric and a recluse.

Leanor tired, in time, of the murderous velocity of her social chariot, dumped the winged vehicle on the trash-heap and went abroad, accompanied by a less rich and more ambitious retinue of high livers.

Like vari-colored butterflies, five years winged overhead, years by no means lacking in color and variety for Leanor. Exacting as were her tastes, she could scarcely have desired a more changeful, a more exquisitely exhilarating life.

Only once in a blue moon did she think of Henry. Thoughts of him, like all other memories of her meteoric past, had been crowded into oblivion by the inrush of the more intimate and actual.

Henry had been very good to her, she had to admit, but he had been none the less impossible. The outcome had been inevitable from the beginning. He was fifteen years her senior. She knew that she could never have held her volatile self down to a life of self-sacrifice and suffering with Henry. The idea was no less absurd than the mating of an esthetic humming-bird with some sedate old owl.

When she consented to marry Henry she had entertained no such preposterous thought as exacting of him a compliance with the ridiculously restricted code of ethics he subsequently set for her. Indeed, she would have grown old and ugly with nothing accomplished, unseeking and unsought. Too, there would have been lamentably fewer notches on her ivory fan than the half-decade last past had yielded.

As the wretched venture had turned out, however, she was still under thirty and was, to employ the homely simile of her latest masculine objective, “as pretty as a peach.”

* * * * *

At the Pacific entrance of the Grand Canal, where the town of Bandora drowses like a sprawling lizard on the sun-baked clay, word went round that the millionaire adventuress was yachting down the west coast, homeward bound.

Everybody who read the public prints knew about Leanor, so at least one element at Bandora awaited her arrival with curious interest. And the curious were to be gratified, for since pretty Leanor habitually did the unexpected, she only proved her consistency when, upon her arrival, she capriciously decided to tarry a fortnight, with the two-fold object of having a look at the great waterway and exploring historic Batoga Island, only a couple of hours distant.

Should the mighty monument to engineering skill prove uninteresting, there remained the secret caves of Batoga, among them _La Guaca de San Pedro_, by allegation the identical haunted, bat-inhabited cavern in which buccaneering old Henry Morgan had once stored all of his ill-gotten gains and maybe imprisoned the unfortunate nuns captured at Porto Bello! And then, too, there was the celebrated Devil’s Channel, which, according to widely circulated and much-believed stories, sucked small craft down into its omnivorous maw like some insatiable demon lying in wait.

Leanor devoted but little time to the prodigious engineering feat. After all, it was man-made, and what was man if not a purveyor to feminine caprices? Mere men were cheap. The adventuress knew, because she had bought and sold many of them. She had bartered the very souls of some.

She had bought them all with make-believe affection and disposed of them at a hundred per cent discount. She treated them much as one treats cast-off garments, experiencing only minor difficulties in disengaging herself from some of the more persistent.

A genuine Sybarite, Leanor’s appetite for entities masculine had at last cloyed, and she now turned impatiently to inscrutable old Nature to make up the deficiency.

She went to Batoga, a verdant, mighty mountain, greenly shaggy, as yet unshorn by advancing civilization. It might have been a little separate world, set down by nature in a sleeping sea of sapphire. Here, indeed, was something different.

She was wild with delight as soon as her dainty feet touched the shell-paved beach. Really, this wonderland was too splendidly perfect to share with her unpoetic company of paid buffoons! She sent the whole lot of them bagging back to Bandora, decided to employ a guide, a boatman, or a native maid, contingent upon her special needs, right on the ground.

It was due to this whim of Leanor’s that I myself wandered into the cast, came to know Leanor and likewise the story I am telling you here. I had just come through a notably obstinate case of dengue in the sanitarium. My thin knees, in fact, were still somewhat wobbly, and I was urging them back to normal by means of a leisurely stroll across the rolling pasture-land. On a grassy, wind-swept hillside I came all unexpectedly upon Leanor.

Evidently she had thought to refresh her jaded wits by a revel in wild flowers. She was seated on a shelf of rock that rimmed the hill-crown, culling unworthy floral specimens. A single upward glance, and then her eyes dropped back to her flowers in a world-bored manner which I somehow felt a quick impulse to resent. At least I could annoy her. That was any fool’s privilege.

“Gathering flowers?” I interrogated, just as though that fact were not as obvious as the blue sky itself.

For answer, my front-line fortifications were instantly swept by an ocular onslaught well calculated to obliterate. I smiled back engagingly at the source of the tempest.

“Some hill, this,” I suggested, emitting a windy sigh after the exertion of its ascent.

And then I saw that my second drive had broken through her first-line trench on a front of about a quarter of an inch. Disdain died slowly out of her face—a face still unaccountably fresh and girlish—and something like pity at my apparent lack of sophistication took its place.

“You really think it a high hill?” she asked, faintly smiling and gazing at me steadily as though she doubted my sanity.

I noted that her hazel eyes seemed to swim in seas of a wonderfully sparkling liquid.

“Well,” I qualified, affecting funereal gravity, “it’s higher than _some_ hills.”

Her amused smile expanded perceptibly.

“Really, now, have you ever seen very many hills?”

“N-no,” I reluctantly confessed, “not so _very_ many.”

“What induced you to measure this one?”

“Well, I was shadowing somebody,” I said quietly. At last she had given me an opening.

“Whom, pray?” she demanded, her smile brightening expectantly.

“_You_—if you don’t mind,” I announced.

“_Me!_” She laughed deliriously for a moment.

“It’s hardly a laughing matter,” I said, with forced seriousness when she was still. “I’ve been working on this case for years.”

She sobered with a suddenness that suggested ugly thoughts, perchance remembering something of her kaleidoscopic past. The hazel eyes saddened a little. It was evident that she was rummaging among happenings which it gave her small pleasure to review. I waited. Maybe I was not quite the yokel she had thought me.

“Do you mean you’re a detective?” she presently asked.

“I mean just that, madam,” I said evenly.

“By whom are you employed?” she questioned tentatively.

“By Henry Fayne,” I casually replied.

“That is the lie of an impostor,” quickly asserted the woman; “Henry Fayne is dead.”

She rose from the stone shelf and prepared to desert me. Anyhow, I had won my point. I had succeeded in annoying her.

But I concluded I could hardly let the matter so end, even as affecting a woman like Leanor. Nobody can afford to be openly rude.

“Wait,” I said; “let’s be good sportsmen. You tilted at me and I retaliated. Honors are even. Why not forget it?”

She was greatly relieved; and besides, forgetfulness, of all things, was what she sought. After a moment, deep wells of laughter again glistened in her splendid eyes. These and the smiling young mouth somehow seemed to give the lie to the fiasco she had made of life. What a pity, I thought, that she had chosen to fritter away her life in this fatuous, futile fashion.

I had thought that I should feel only contempt for such a woman as Leanor, but as we walked down the hill she told me something that penetrated a hitherto unknown weak spot in my armor. So I all but pitied the woman I had prepared to despise.

As if to take strength from them, she kept her eyes on the wild flowers she had gathered, as she pronounced the well-nigh unbelievable words I now set down.

The craze for the blinding white lights, and the delusion of equally white wines, were surfeited. The gilt and tinsel of the truly tawdry had palled. The mask of allurement had fallen from the forbidding face of the artificial and empty. Life itself had become for Leanor a vacant and meaningless thing. She had seen too much of it in too brief a space.

She concluded with a seeming contradiction, a veiled regret that her frenzied explorations had exhausted all too soon the world’s meager store of things worth while, and there was a bitterness in her voice which contrasted unpleasantly with her youth and beauty as she said plainly, though with little visible emotion, that she had reached a point where life itself often repelled and nauseated her.

We had reached the sanitarium by this time, an interruption not unwelcome in the circumstances, and I left the strange woman alone with her tardy regrets and sought my own quarters, sympathetic and depressed, yet thanking my lucky stars for the happy dispensation that had made me an adventurer instead of an “adventuress.”

That evening, Leanor and I planned a trip to Devil’s Channel, and I strolled down to the beach in search of such a shallow-draught _cayuco_ as could maneuver its way over the reefs that barred larger craft. _Boteros_ of divers nationalities abounded, and among the many my questioning gaze finally met that of a vagabondish-looking fellow countryman in a frayed sailor garb. In odd contrast to his raiment, and swinging from his belt in a sheath which his short coat for an instant did not quite conceal, I caught a single glimpse of a heavy hunting knife with an ornamented stag-horn handle.

His name was Sisson, he told me, but he spoke Spanish like a native. His uncarded beard was a thing long forgotten of razors. He was unmistakably another of those easily identified tramps of the tropics who, in an unguarded moment, unaccountably lose their grip on themselves and thenceforward go sliding unresistingly down to a not unwelcome oblivion.

Sisson did not importune me, as did all the other boatmen; he did not even offer me his services; and it was because of this evidence of some lingering vestige of pride, coupled with the fact that he had an eminently suitable _cayuco_, that I decided to employ him.

* * * * *

At the narrow gateway of Devil’s Channel the water is so shallow, and there so frequently occur tiny submerged sand-bars, that only the minutest of sea craft can skim over the gleaming rifts and gain entrance. This was confirmed for the nth time when I felt the specially made keel of our tiny _cayuco_ scrape the shiny sand in warning that we were at last entering the canyon-like waterway.

Leanor and I were both playing our splendid oarsman with well-nigh every imaginable question about the gloomy, spooky-looking channel before us.

“Aren’t we nearing _the place_ yet?” Leanor presently asked.

“Farther in,” drawled Sisson, the bearded giant of a boatman, glancing carelessly at the ascending cliffs on either side.

Twisting my body round in the wee native _cayuco_, I noted that the perpendicular walls of the shadowy strait that lay before us seemed drawing together with every pull of Sisson’s great arms. Leanor’s pretty face was radiant with expectation. Though bored of the world, there was at least one more thrill for her ahead.

Five minutes slipped by. Sisson rowed on steadily.

“There she is!” the boatman said suddenly, for the first time evincing something like a normal human interest in life. One of his huge, hairy hands was indicating an alkali spot on the face of the right-hand wall a stone’s throw ahead. “Just opposite that white spot is where _it always happens_.”

He released his oars and let them trail in the still water. It looked peculiarly lifeless. Our small shell gradually slowed.

“Seems to be all smooth sailing here today, though,” I ventured.

“Overrated, for the benefit of tourists,” opined Sisson. “The water’s eaten out a little tunnel under the west wall, but there’s no real danger if you know the chart.”

“How many did you say were drowned when that launch went down?” again asked Leanor. Her great dark eyes were sparkling again now with a keen new interest in life—or was it the nearness to potential death?

“Eleven,” drawled Sisson. “The engineer jumped for it and made a landing on that bench of slate over there, and right there”—he smiled reminiscently—“he sat for seventy-two hours, with ‘water, water everywhere, nor any drop’—”

“And is it true that none of the life-preservers they were putting on when the launch sank was ever found?” Leanor also wanted to know.

“True enough,” said Sisson, “but that’s not unnatural. Drowning men lay hold of whatever they can and never, _never_ turn loose. Why, I’ve seen the clawlike fingers of skeletons locked around sticks that wouldn’t bear up a cockroach!”

“Did you say it was a relatively calm day?” I questioned the boatman idly.

“Sure. Calm as it is right now,” he answered.

I observed casually that the oarsman was gazing fixedly at Leanor. Even on him, perhaps, beauty was not entirely lost. Doubtless, too, he had heard the gossip her arrival had set going along the wharves at Batoga. Meanwhile Leanor had made a discovery.

“Why, we’re still making headway!” she broke out suddenly. “I—I thought we had stopped.”

Sisson glanced down at the water, and his tanned brow broke up in vertical wrinkles of consternation. The look in his deepset eyes, though, did not, oddly enough, seem to match the perplexity written on his corrugated brow.

Our craft was sliding rapidly forward as though propelled by the oars. The phenomenon was due to a current; that much was certain, for we were moving with a flotsam of dead leaves and seaweed.

Again I screwed my body half round in the cramped bow and shot a glance ahead. God! we were shooting toward the dread spot on the alkali cliff as though drawn to it by an unseen magnet. I could see, too, that our speed was rapidly increasing.

Sisson snatched up the trailing oars and put his giant’s strength against the invisible something that seemed dragging us by the keel, but all he did was to plough two futile furrows in the strange whirlpool. Our _cayuco_ glided on.

The _blasé_ adventuress was never more beautiful. For the time, at least, life, warm and pulsating, had come back and clasped her in a joyous embrace. Her lips were parted in a smile of seemingly inexpressible delight. There was not the remotest suggestion of surprise or fear in her girlish face.

She put her helm over only when I shouted to her in wide-eyed alarm, but the keen, finlike keel of our specially built _cayuco_ obviously did not respond. Oblique in the channel, we slithered over, ever nearer to the west wall, the unseen agent of destruction towing us with awful certainty toward the vortex. Still the surface of the water, moving with us, looked as motionless as a mill-pond! It was uncanny, nothing less.

I peered into the bluishly transparent depths, fascinated with wonder, and then, of a sudden, I saw that which alone might prove our salvation. Apparently we were in a writhing, powerful current, racing atop the seemingly placid undersea or sub-surface waters of the channel. I could make out many small objects spinning merrily about as they flew, submerging, toward the whirlpool.

We carried six life-belts. Two of these I snatched from their fastenings, slipped one about Leanor, and with the other but partly adjusted—for there remained no time—myself plunged out of our—as it were—bewitched craft in the direction of the west wall.

To my surprise I swam easily. When I made a deep stroke, however, I could feel strange suctorial forces tugging at my finger-tips. But for the moment I was safe.

I glanced about to see if Leanor had followed my lead. She was not in the water. I turned on my back and saw, to my utter amazement, that neither she nor Sisson had left the _cayuco_.

This was unaccountable indeed. And it was now clear that it was too late for them to jump, for the light boat had already begun to spin round in a circle at a point exactly opposite the alkali spot! Faster and faster it flew, the diameter of the ring in which it raced swiftly narrowing.

As I swam, my shoulder collided with some obstruction. It was the west wall. I clambered up a couple of feet and sat dripping on a slime-covered shelf of slate, the identical slab on which the engineer of the sunken launch had thirsted.

I was powerless to help my companions. I could only sit and stare in near unbelief. Why—_Why_ had they not abandoned the tiny craft with me? I saw now that neither had even so much as got hold of a life-belt. Why—?

_My God!_ What was this I beheld? Sisson had advanced to the stern of the flying cockleshell where Leanor still sat motionless, unexcited, smiling. The charmed look of expectancy was still in her perfect face.

Sisson’s voice, suddenly risen high, chilled me to the marrow. It might have been the voice of some martyr on the scaffold. He did not reveal his identity to Leanor. It was not necessary. Something—I dare not say what—enabled her in that awful moment of tragedy to know _her divorced husband_.