Part 14

When Johnny Kent awoke blinking and yawning, Captain O’Shea was standing in front of the open port through which the morning wind gushed cool and sweet. The sun had lifted above the horizon and the sea was bathed in rosy radiance. The aspect of the sunrise seemed to fascinate Captain O’Shea, but his emotion was rather amazement than admiration. With a strong ejaculation he whirled about to shout at his comrade:

“Do ye notice it, you sleepy old grampus? Does it look wrong to you?”

O’Shea was dancing with excitement as he turned again to stare at the cloudless sun and smiling sea. Johnny Kent thought to humor him and amiably murmured:

“She always comes up in the mornin’ regular as a clock, Cap’n Mike, and I guess she always will. Ain’t she on time, or what’s the matter with her?”

“The sun is where it belongs,” cried O’Shea, “but this ship is not. Her course has been shifted during the night. Man, we are not on the great circle course to New York at all. The steamer has gone mad. We are running due south to fetch to the west’ard of the Azores.”

“You don’t say!” exclaimed the engineer. “That sounds perfectly ridiculous. I guess I’d better put on my breeches and take a promenade. I wonder do we get any breakfast in this crazy packet?”

The first passenger encountered was Jenkins P. Chase, whose morning task it was to walk briskly around the deck, by order of his physician, before the other voyagers were astir. His steward had failed to appear with the dry toast and coffee required to fortify his system for this healthful exercise, and he was in a savage temper as he sputtered at O’Shea:

“What infernal nonsense is this? I can’t find a steward or an officer. The service is rotten, it’s positively damnable. And I can’t go on deck. Every door is locked. I’ll make it hot for the captain.”

“’Tis my advice to sit tight and take it easy, Mr. Chase,” soothingly returned O’Shea. “I am afraid the captain has troubles of his own this morning.”

“What do you mean? What do you know about it? Who the devil are you? Do you think I have no influence with the management of this miserable steamship company?”

“’Tis a long, wet walk from here to the company’s offices,” said O’Shea with an amused smile. “You are a tremendous man ashore, no doubt. I have read about ye in the newspapers. But unless I guess wrong, you will take your medicine with the rest of us.”

Mr. Jenkins P. Chase bolted down the staircase into the spacious dining-saloon. For lack of anything better to do, O’Shea and Johnny Kent followed him. The tables had been set overnight, but at this hour of the morning stewards should have been wiping down paint, cleaning brasswork, or getting ready to serve breakfast. The room was silent and deserted.

Jenkins P. Chase halted abruptly and his hands went out in a nervous, puzzled gesture. O’Shea brushed past him and advanced along an aisle between the tables to the galley or kitchen doors at the farther end of the saloon. These, too, were locked, but he could hear the rattle of pans and pots and a sound of voices, as if the cooks had begun the day’s work.

“That is the first cheerful symptom,” he said to himself. “The news will put heart into Johnny Kent, though I wish there were more indications of circulatin’ the grub among the passengers.”

The dictatorial manner of Jenkins P. Chase had become oddly subdued.

“You said we must take our medicine?” he remarked to O’Shea. “For God’s sake, what is wrong with this ship?”

“I know very little, my dear man. We were locked in during the night, clapped under hatches, as the saying is. And the course of the vessel was altered to head her for the South Atlantic instead of the Newfoundland Banks.”

“But nothing of the sort could possibly happen on a steamer like the _Alsatian_,” protested Mr. Chase. “I mean to say there could be no blood-and-thunder business on an Atlantic liner.”

“A lot of things have happened at sea that were perfectly impossible,” gravely spoke Johnny Kent.

As if the mystery had communicated itself in some subtle, telepathic fashion, the passengers began to appear from their state-rooms at an earlier hour than usual. Unable to go on deck, they congregated in the halls, the library, and the parlor. Rumor spread swiftly and intense uneasiness pervaded the company. For some inscrutable reason they had been made prisoners. This much was evident. The realization inspired a feeling akin to panic. Angry denunciation, with not a solitary member of the ship’s crew discoverable, sounded rather foolish. The men loudest in airing their opinions soon subsided and eyed one another in a mood of glum bewilderment. One or two women laughed hysterically.

Captain O’Shea looked about to find that friendly scientist Professor Ernst Wilhelm Vonderholtz, who was usually ready with a cordial morning greeting. He was not among the assembled passengers. Presumably he was still in his state-room. A few minutes after this O’Shea found occasion to stroll past the professor’s door, which stood open. The room was empty.

Inexplicably, persistently, the personality of the blond scientist had linked itself with O’Shea’s strange sense of foreboding. He decided to investigate the empty state-room, for he observed at once that the bedding had not been disarranged in either berth.

“Nobody slept in here last night,” said O’Shea to himself.

The room contained no luggage, and no personal effects excepting several articles of discarded clothing. O’Shea picked up a coat and examined it curiously. The pockets were empty, but he made an interesting discovery. The label stitched inside the collar bore the name of a well-known ready-made clothing firm of Broadway, New York.

“And he told us it was his first trip to our wonderful country,” was O’Shea’s comment. “As a liar he has me beaten both ways from the jack.”

He resumed his careful investigation of the room, and was rewarded by discovering a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles on the floor beneath the lower berth, where they must have been purposely tossed aside. It was reasonable to conclude that the owner had no more use for them.

“The bird has flown,” soliloquized O’Shea, gazing hard at the spectacles and handling them rather gingerly, as if they might be bewitched. “He couldn’t fly overboard. Anyhow, he didn’t. I’ll bet me head on that. And he has not eloped with the black-eyed school-teacher, for I saw her in the library just now. And where would they elope to? He must be still in the ship.”

In a very thoughtful mood he returned to the main staircase, where Johnny Kent was hopefully peering in the direction of the dining-saloon.

“There’s something doin’ down there,” announced the engineer. “The doors were shut and bolted from the inside a few minutes ago. Maybe they’ll open again pretty soon and the bell will ring for grub.”

“Forget that awful appetite and listen to me,” exclaimed O’Shea. “The professor has vanished entirely.”

“Committed suicide, you suppose? If he really fell in love with the school-teacher, it’s not unlikely, Cap’n Mike. It takes ’em that way sometimes. I’ve felt like it myself once or twice.”

“If he jumped overboard, he took his baggage with him. And he had a couple of hand-bags when he came on board, for I saw them. ’Tis more likely the divil flew away with him. Here’s his spectacles. He left them behind. I tell ye, Johnny Kent, and you may laugh at me all ye like, for you are a much older man than me, and you ought to be wiser, which you are not--that chemical gentleman was not as mild and nice as he made out. His eye was bad. And he has brought trouble to this ship. Where is he now? Can ye answer that?”

“One of those revolver bullets may have perforated him while he was strollin’ on deck and figurin’ out some new problems in chemistry.”

“Your language is a clean waste of words,” admonished O’Shea. “’Tis me rash intention to interview the school-teacher, Miss Jenness. She knows more about the professor than the rest of us. This is no joke of a predicament we are in, ye can take my word for it.”

Miss Jenness was to be discerned, at a casual glance, as a young woman with a mind of her own. The bold O’Shea approached her timidly, his courage oozing. Her black eyes surveyed him coldly and critically and made him feel as though his feet were several sizes too large.

“I beg pardon,” he stammered, “but have ye heard that the professor is missing?”

Surprise and alarm drove the color from her face. Evidently the tidings came as a shock to her. Her perturbation failed wholly to convince O’Shea that she could furnish no clew to the mystery. One question should have leaped swiftly to her lips. It was the one question to ask. Was it supposed that Professor Vonderholtz had committed suicide by leaping overboard? Captain O’Shea waited for her to say something of the sort. She sat pale and silent. The dark, handsome, matured young woman baffled him. He felt that he was no match for her.

“’Tis not a case of suicide, Miss Jenness,” said he.

“Then what is it, may I ask?” she replied in even tones.

O’Shea sat down beside her and spoke in the caressing, blarneying way which he had used to advantage in his time.

“As the most charming girl in the ship, ’twas quite natural for the professor to be nice to you, Miss Jenness. He is a man of taste and intelligence. Now ’tis apparent that something most extraordinary has happened aboard this liner. She is being navigated to parts unknown, and we are helpless to prevent it. ’Tis a wholesale abduction, as ye might say. Professor Vonderholtz disappears at the same time, bag and baggage, leaving his gold spectacles as a souvenir. What do you know about him, if you please? Did he drop any hints to you?”

The girl bit her lip and strove to hide an agitation which made her hands tremble so that she locked them in her lap.

“What should I know about him?” she demanded with a sudden blaze of anger, as if resenting the questions as grossly impertinent. “Why do you come to me? As a travelling acquaintance, Professor Vonderholtz did not take me into his confidence. Are you sure he is not in the steamer?”

“I am quite sure he is still in the steamer, Miss Jenness. For my part, I wish he was overboard,” grimly answered O’Shea.

“Then why all this commotion about him?” she asked.

“Are you sure he gave you no impression that he was not a university professor at all, but another kind of man entirely?” stubbornly pursued O’Shea.

“I did not discuss his profession. Chemistry does not interest me,” was her icily dignified answer. “If you must know, we talked about books we had read and places we had visited. Professor Vonderholtz is delightfully cosmopolitan and knows how to make himself interesting.”

“I am not making much headway with you,” sighed O’Shea. “Never mind. It will astonish ye, no doubt, and you will be very angry if I make a guess that you and Professor Vonderholtz knew each other before you met on the deck of the _Alsatian_. And ’tis more than a casual acquaintance that exists between you. You are taken all aback to hear the news that he cannot be found this morning. I grant ye that, but you know more about him than ye will tell me. I have said me say, Miss Jenness.”

She paid no heed to him, but rose abruptly and walked in the direction of her state-room. O’Shea watched her until she vanished, and then he murmured with an air of chagrin:

“I may be a pretty fair shipmaster, but as a detective ye can mark me down as a failure. ’Twas a random shot about their knowing each other ashore, though I have a notion it landed somewhere near the bull’s-eye.”

Johnny Kent was still posted within strategic distance of the dining-saloon entrance.

“What luck, Cap’n Mike?” he asked.

“Divil a bit.”

“Women move in mysterious ways. I can’t handle ’em myself. Say, are we goin’ to stay cooped up in these cabins like a flock of sick chickens? I ain’t reconciled and I don’t intend to stand for it.”

“No more do I, Johnny. As the only two seafarin’ men among all these landlubbers, ’tis up to us to twist the tail of this situation.”

“It surely ain’t right for us to knuckle under, Cap’n Mike, without putting up an almighty stiff argument. We’ve fought our way out of some pretty tight corners.”

From the dining-room entrance came the noise of the heavy bulkhead doors sliding on their bearings. Johnny Kent shouted joyfully and lumbered down the staircase. A moment later he was bellowing to the other passengers:

“Grub’s on the table. Come along and help yourselves. The worst is over.”

The hungry company hastened down and jostled through the doorway to the tables, upon which had been set dishes of oatmeal, potatoes, ham and eggs, and pots of coffee. The galley and pantry doors were still closed. Not a steward was visible. The passengers must help themselves. They could eat this simple fare or leave it alone.

The dining-saloon seemed empty, uncanny. Except for the steady vibration of the engines, it was as though the ship had been deserted by her crew. Such talk as went on was in low tones. There was in the air a feeling that hostile influences, unseen, unheard, but very menacing, were all around them. They ate to satisfy hunger, glancing often at the empty chairs of the commander and the chief officer of the _Alsatian_. O’Shea was more interested in the vacant chair of Professor Ernst Wilhelm Vonderholtz.

A few people carried trays and plates of food to their rooms, as if to make sure of the next meal. Palpitant uncertainty and dread were the emotions common to all. And during this time the _Alsatian_ was steaming over the smooth sea, her bow pointing almost due south, her altered course veering farther and farther away from the transatlantic trade routes into a region of ocean mostly frequented by sailing-vessels and wandering tramp freighters. As Captain O’Shea and Johnny Kent returned to the upper hall the latter said with a great, resonant laugh:

“Breakfast has made a new man of me. I ain’t worried a mite about anything. My gun is in my pants pocket, and I’m pretty spry and sudden for an old codger. What’s the orders, Cap’n Mike?”

“There are some good men among the passengers, Johnny, but we will have to show them what to do. ’Tis time that the two of us held a council of war.”

They made a slow, painstaking tour of the first-cabin quarters and convinced themselves that every exit from the steel deck-houses was still securely fastened. Then they sought every window port which commanded a view of the upper decks or superstructures of the ship. They were unable to catch a glimpse, from any angle, of the canvas-screened bridge or to discover whether the captain and the navigating officers were on duty as usual. Upon the forward part of the ship they descried several seamen at work. Down below the rumble of an ash-hoist was heard. The essential business of the ship was going on without interruption.

“One trifle ye will note,” said O’Shea. “The decks were not washed down this morning.”

“The vessel looks slack, come to look at her close,” replied Johnny Kent. “A gang of sailors was paintin’ the boats and awning-stanchions yesterday, but they’ve knocked off.”

“’Tis curious how the passengers of a big steamer can be cut off from what is going on,” observed O’Shea. “I never realized how easy it was. And there’s no choppin’ a way out of these steel houses.”

“If we do get out, Cap’n Mike, what in blazes are we apt to run into?” the engineer exclaimed, rumpling his mop of gray hair with both hands “Whoever it was that done the fancy pistol-shootin’ last night ain’t likely to hesitate to do it again. And there’s only two of us with guns unless a few of the passengers happen to have ’em in their valises.”

“I will be ashamed of myself and disgusted with you if we don’t mix things up before this time to-morrow, ye fat old reprobate,” severely spake Captain Michael O’Shea, and the words were weighed with finality. “The Lord gave us brains, didn’t He? If we let ourselves be run away with aboard this floating hotel we ought to beg admittance to the nearest home for aged and decrepit seafarin’ men.”

“It’s a perfectly ridiculous situation to be ketched in, as I said before, Cap’n Mike.”

II

The passengers so mysteriously imprisoned in the first-cabin quarters were soon to meet again that vanished scientist and fellow-voyager Professor Ernst Wilhelm Vonderholtz. Shortly before noon one of the doors which had blocked exit to the promenade-deck was opened from the outside. An alert, blond man stepped upon the brass threshold and stood gazing at the huddled, wondering passengers. The expression of his keenly intelligent face reflected easy confidence and half-smiling contempt.

He wore the blue uniform cap and blouse of a ship’s officer, obviously purloined from the lawful owner, for the insignia was that of the International Line. The gold-rimmed spectacles and the precise, studious manner discarded, it was painfully apparent that he was something very different from a harmless professor of chemistry.

Behind him, and filling the doorway, stood four other men in the grimy garments of the stoke-hole. The smears of coal-dust which blackened their features gave them a forbidding, sinister appearance. They were openly armed with revolvers. Their leader motioned them to remain where they were. He moved just inside the hall and addressed the passengers in his clean-cut English with its Teutonic shades and intonations. The audience was flatteringly attentive. The sight of the four grim stokers in the background compelled absorbed attention.

“This steamer is in my control,” crisply began the singularly transformed university professor. “It is useless for you to wax indignant, to weep, to protest. The thing has been most carefully planned. I will explain a little in order that you may know why it is best for you to do as you are ordered. The strike of those firemen in Liverpool? It was fomented by my agents. They caused the strike to occur on the day of sailing. It was necessary to get rid of that crew of firemen. In their places were shipped my own--our own men. The company was surprised to find a new crew so easily. The stupid management suspected nothing. Many months, much money it had taken to select these men of mine, to have them all together in Liverpool prepared for the opportunity.”

The vanity of the man showed itself in this frank praise of his own adroit and masterly leadership. His ego could not help asserting itself. Now his easy demeanor stiffened and his face became hard and cold as he went on to say with more vehemence and an occasional gesture:

“Who are we? You wonder and you are afraid. It is the Communal Brotherhood, powerful and secret, which seizes this steamer. This is a bold skirmish in the war against capital, against privilege, against the parasitic class which must be utterly destroyed. Labor is the only wealth; but does labor own the factories, the steamships, the land? No, it is enslaved. This stroke will be talked about all over the world. Wealth is always cowardly. It will tremble and----”

From the fringe of the silent company rose the shrill, rasping accents of Jenkins P. Chase. The American multimillionaire was fragile, dyspeptic, and nervous, a mere shred of a man physically, but, given sufficient provocation, he had aggressive courage in abundance. Nor had his enemies in the world of commerce and finance ever called him a coward. This situation exasperated him beyond words.

“You’re a fuddle-headed liar, you bragging, anarchistic scoundrel!” he cried, shaking his fist at the speaker. “Cut out all that hot air and balderdash. We can read it in books. Get down to business. What do you propose to do with us? Hold me for ransom?”

The eyes of the bogus Professor Ernst Wilhelm Vonderholtz were unpleasantly malevolent as he calmly answered:

“It is an accident that you yourself are on board. You were not included in our plans. I do not intend to hold you for ransom. It will be doing a great service to mankind if I throw you into the sea.”

Quite undaunted, for his blood was up, Jenkins P. Chase flung back at him:

“You’re a lunatic. I presume you are after the two millions in gold, consigned to New York bankers, which is in the ship’s treasure-room. You have the upper hand? Why don’t you take the plunder and leave us alone?”

“We require no advice from you,” and the captor showed his teeth in a mirthless smile. “I wish to inform the passengers that they will be fed as long as they shall behave themselves. They also have permission to use a part of the promenade deck which will be roped off and guarded. Any person attempting to reach other parts of the ship will be shot. It is possible that you will suffer no harm. What to do with you has not yet been decided.”

That interested observer, Captain Michael O’Shea, swiftly whispered to Johnny Kent:

“Tuck your gun under the cushion of the settee behind us. The passengers will be searched for arms. The professor knows his business.”

The acute mind of Jenkins P. Chase had already concluded that these two men were ready-witted and unafraid. He marked their bearing, and he was impressed with the fact that O’Shea had been aware of trouble aboard the ship before the other passengers suspected it. Inviting them into his luxurious rooms, he brusquely demanded:

“What’s your opinion? Have you any suggestions?”

“I am a shipmaster by trade and me large friend here has been chief engineer of a good many steamers,” answered O’Shea. “We have knocked some holes in the laws of the high seas ourselves, but ye can set us down as amateurs alongside this rampageous chemical professor. ’Tis the biggest thing of the kind that was ever pulled off. This Vonderholtz has brains and nerve. And he is as cold-blooded as a fish. The man is bad clear through. And he is crammed full of conceit, which is his one weak point, the flaw in his system.”

“Call him all the names you please, but how does that help us?” snapped Jenkins P. Chase.

“Go easy, my dear man. ’Twill do no good to hop about like an agitated flea. What I am getting at is this. Vonderholtz is so well pleased with his plans that he thinks they cannot be upset. We may catch him off his guard.”

“But what if we do?” demanded Mr. Chase. “These villains have captured the whole crew of the steamer--officers, sailors, stewards.”

“’Twas not hard to take them by surprise in the night and lock them in their quarters under guard, sir,” explained O’Shea. “Half of them were off watch and asleep, ye must remember. Vonderholtz has near a hundred and fifty men, and no doubt every one of them came aboard with a gun in his clothes. There are enough of them to work the ship and to spare, and I suppose there are navigators and engineers amongst them.”