“That wasn’t right of them,” I sympathized. “But you can do something for me. You can stick here and keep your eye on this end of the street, so I’ll know if they leave in this direction.”
“You’re not just saying that so I’ll stay here out of the way, are you?”
“No,” I lied. “I need somebody to watch. I was going to leave the princess here, but you’ll do better.”
“Yes,” she backed me up, catching the idea. “This gentleman is a detective, and if you do what he asks you’ll be helping more than if you were up with the others.”
The machine gun was still firing, but not in our direction now.
“I’m going across the street,” I told the girl. “If you—”
“Aren’t you going to join the others?”
“No. If I can get around behind the bandits while they’re busy with the others, maybe I can turn a trick.”
“Watch sharp now!” I ordered the boy, and the princess and I made a dash for the opposite sidewalk.
We reached it without drawing lead, sidled along a building for a few yards, and turned into an alley. From the alley’s other end came the smell and wash and the dull blackness of the bay.
While we moved down this alley I composed a scheme by which I hoped to get rid of my companion, sending her off on a safe wild-goose chase. But I didn’t get a chance to try it out.
The big figure of a man loomed ahead of us.
Stepping in front of the girl, I went on toward him. Under my slicker I held my gun on the middle of him.
He stood still. He was larger than he had looked at first. A big, slope-shouldered, barrel-bodied husky. His hands were empty. I spotted the flashlight on his face for a split second. A flat-cheeked, thick-featured face, with high cheek-bones and a lot of ruggedness in it.
“Ignati!” the girl exclaimed over my shoulder.
He began to talk what I suppose was Russian to the girl. She laughed and replied. He shook his big head stubbornly, insisting on something. She stamped her foot and spoke sharply. He shook his head again and addressed me.
“General Pleshskev, he tell me bring Princess Sonya to home.”
His English was almost as hard to understand as his Russian. His tone puzzled me. It was as if he was explaining some absolutely necessary thing that he didn’t want to be blamed for, but that nevertheless he was going to do.
While the girl was speaking to him again, I guessed the answer. This big Ignati had been sent out by the general to bring the girl home, and he was going to obey his orders if he had to carry her. He was trying to avoid trouble with me by explaining the situation.
“Take her,” I said, stepping aside.
The girl scowled at me, laughed.
“Very well, Ignati,” she said in English, “I shall go home,” and she turned on her heel and went back up the alley, the big man close behind her.
Glad to be alone, I wasted no time in moving in the opposite direction until the pebbles of the beach were under my feet. The pebbles ground harshly under my heels. I moved back to more silent ground and began to work my way as swiftly as I could up the shore toward the center of action.
The machine gun barked on. Smaller guns snapped. Three concussions, close together—bombs, hand grenades, my ears and my memory told me.
The stormy sky glared pink over a roof ahead of me and to the left. The boom of the blast beat my ear-drums. Fragments I couldn’t see fell around me. That, I thought, would be the jeweler’s safe blowing apart.
I crept on up the shore line. The machine gun went silent. Lighter guns snapped, snapped, snapped. Another grenade went off. A man’s voice shrieked pure terror.
Risking the crunch of pebbles, I turned down to the water’s edge again. I had seen no dark shape on the water that could have been a boat. There had been boats moored along this beach in the afternoon. With my feet in the water of the bay I still saw no boat. The storm could have scattered them, but I didn’t think it had. The island’s western height shielded this shore. The wind was strong here, but not violent.
My feet sometimes on the edge of the pebbles, sometimes in the water, I went on up the shore line. Now I saw a boat. A gently bobbing black shape ahead. No light was on it. Nothing I could see moved on it. It was the only boat on that shore. That made it important.
Foot by foot, I approached.
A shadow moved between me and the dark rear of a building. I froze. The shadow, man-size, moved again, in the direction from which I was coming.
Waiting, I didn’t know how nearly invisible, or how plain, I might be against my background. I couldn’t risk giving myself away by trying to improve my position.
Twenty feet from me the shadow suddenly stopped.
I was seen. My gun was on the shadow.
“Come on,” I called softly. “Keep coming. Let’s see who you are.”
The shadow hesitated, left the shelter of the building, drew nearer. I couldn’t risk the flashlight. I made out dimly a handsome face, boyishly reckless, one cheek dark-stained.
“Oh, how d’you do?” the face’s owner said in a musical baritone voice. “You were at the reception this afternoon.”
“Yes.”
“Have you seen Princess Zhukovski? You know her?”
“She went home with Ignati ten minutes or so ago.”
“Excellent!” He wiped his stained cheek with a stained handkerchief, and turned to look at the boat. “That’s Hendrixson’s boat,” he whispered. “They’ve got it and they’ve cast the others off.”
“That would mean they are going to leave by water.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “unless— Shall we have a try at it?”
“You mean jump it?”
“Why not?” he asked. “There can’t be very many aboard. God knows there are enough of them ashore. You’re armed. I’ve a pistol.”
“We’ll size it up first,” I decided, “so we’ll know what we’re jumping.”
“That is wisdom,” he said, and led the way back to the shelter of the buildings.
Hugging the rear walls of the buildings, we stole toward the boat.
The boat grew clearer in the night. A craft perhaps forty-five feet long, its stern to the shore, rising and falling beside a small pier. Across the stern something protruded. Something I couldn’t quite make out. Leather soles scuffled now and then on the wooden deck. Presently a dark head and shoulders showed over the puzzling thing in the stern.
The Russian lad’s eyes were better than mine.
“Masked,” he breathed in my ear. “Something like a stocking over his head and face.”
The masked man was motionless where he stood. We were motionless where we stood.
“Could you hit him from here?” the lad asked.
“Maybe, but night and rain aren’t a good combination for sharpshooting. Our best bet is to sneak as close as we can, and start shooting when he spots us.”
“That is wisdom,” he agreed.
Discovery came with our first step forward. The man in the boat grunted. The lad at my side jumped forward. I recognized the thing in the boat’s stern just in time to throw out a leg and trip the young Russian. He tumbled down, all sprawled out on the pebbles. I dropped behind him.
The machine gun in the boat’s stern poured metal over our heads.
IV
“No good rushing that!” I said. “Roll out of it!”
I set the example by revolving toward the back of the building we had just left.
The man at the gun sprinkled the beach, but sprinkled it at random, his eyes no doubt spoiled for night-seeing by the flash of his gun.
Around the corner of the building, we sat up.
“You saved my life by tripping me,” the lad said coolly.
“Yes. I wonder if they’ve moved the machine gun from the street, or if—??
?
The answer to that came immediately. The machine gun in the street mingled its vicious voice with the drumming of the one in the boat.
“A pair of them!” I complained. “Know anything about the layout?”
“I don’t think there are more than ten or twelve of them,” he said, “although it is not easy to count in the dark. The few I have seen are completely masked—like the man in the boat. They seem to have disconnected the telephone and light lines first and then to have destroyed the bridge. We attacked them while they were looting the bank, but in front they had a machine gun mounted in an automobile, and we were not equipped to combat on equal terms.”
“Where are the islanders now?”
“Scattered, and most of them in hiding, I fancy, unless General Pleshskev has succeeded in rallying them again.”
I frowned and beat my brains together. You can’t fight machine guns and hand grenades with peaceful villagers and retired capitalists. No matter how well led and armed they are, you can’t do anything with them. For that matter, how could anybody do much against a game of that toughness?
“Suppose you stick here and keep your eye on the boat,” I suggested. “I’ll scout around and see what’s doing further up, and if I can get a few good men together, I’ll try to jump the boat again, probably from the other side. But we can’t count on that. The get-away will be by boat. We can count on that, and try to block it. If you lie down you can watch the boat around the corner of the building without making much of a target of yourself. I wouldn’t do anything to attract attention until the break for the boat comes. Then you can do all the shooting you want.”
“Excellent!” he said. “You’ll probably find most of the islanders up behind the church. You can get to it by going straight up the hill until you come to an iron fence, and then follow that to the right.”
“Right.”
I moved off in the direction he had indicated.
At the main street I stopped to look around before venturing across. Everything was quiet there. The only man I could see was spread out face-down on the sidewalk near me.
On hands and knees I crawled to his side. He was dead. I didn’t stop to examine him further, but sprang up and streaked for the other side of the street.
Nothing tried to stop me. In a doorway, flat against a wall, I peeped out. The wind had stopped. The rain was no longer a driving deluge, but a steady down-pouring of small drops. Couffignal’s main street, to my senses, was a deserted street.
I wondered if the retreat to the boat had already started. On the sidewalk, walking swiftly toward the bank, I heard the answer to that guess.
High up on the slope, almost up to the edge of the cliff, by the sound, a machine gun began to hurl out its stream of bullets.
Mixed with the racket of the machine gun were the sounds of smaller arms, and a grenade or two.
At the first crossing, I left the main street and began to run up the hill. Men were running toward me. Two of them passed, paying no attention to my shouted, “What’s up now?”
The third man stopped because I grabbed him—a fat man whose breath bubbled, and whose face was fish-belly white.
“They’ve moved the car with the machine gun on it up behind us,” he gasped when I had shouted my question into his ear again.
“What are you doing without a gun?” I asked.
“I—I dropped it.”
“Where’s General Pleshskev?”
“Back there somewhere. He’s trying to capture the car, but he’ll never do it. It’s suicide! Why don’t help come?”
Other men had passed us, running downhill, as we talked. I let the white-faced man go, and stopped four men who weren’t running so fast as the others.
“What’s happening now?” I questioned them.
“They’s going through the houses up the hill,” a sharp-featured man with a small mustache and a rifle said.
“Has anybody got word off the island yet?” I asked.
“Can’t,” another informed me. “They blew up the bridge first thing.”
“Can’t anybody swim?”
“Not in that wind. Young Catlan tried it and was lucky to get out again with a couple of broken ribs.”
“The wind’s gone down,” I pointed out.
The sharp-featured man gave his rifle to one of the others and took off his coat.
“I’ll try it,” he promised.
“Good! Wake up the whole country, and get word through to the San Francisco police boat and to the Mare Island Navy Yard. They’ll lend a hand if you tell ’em the bandits have machine guns. Tell ’em the bandits have an armed boat waiting to leave in. It’s Hendrixson’s.”
The volunteer swimmer left.
“A boat?” two of the men asked together.
“Yes. With a machine gun on it. If we’re going to do anything, it’ll have to be now, while we’re between them and their get-away. Get every man and every gun you can find down there. Tackle the boat from the roofs if you can. When the bandits’ car comes down there, pour it into it. You’ll do better from the buildings than from the street.”
The three men went on downhill. I went uphill, toward the crackling of firearms ahead. The machine gun was working irregularly. It would pour out its rat-tat-tat for a second or so, and then stop for a couple of seconds. The answering fire was thin, ragged.
I met more men, learned from them that the general, with less than a dozen men, was still fighting the car. I repeated the advice I had given the other men. My informants went down to join them. I went on up.
A hundred yards farther along, what was left of the general’s dozen broke out of the night, around and past me, flying downhill, with bullets hailing after them.
The road was no place for mortal man. I stumbled over two bodies, scratched myself in a dozen places getting over a hedge. On soft, wet sod I continued my uphill journey.
The machine gun on the hill stopped its clattering. The one in the boat was still at work.
The one ahead opened again, firing too high for anything near at hand to be its target. It was helping its fellow below, spraying the main street.
Before I could get closer it had stopped. I heard the car’s motor racing. The car moved toward me.
Rolling into the hedge, I lay there, straining my eyes through the spaces between the stems. I had six bullets in a gun that hadn’t yet been fired on this night that had seen tons of powder burned.
When I saw wheels on the lighter face of the road, I emptied my gun, holding it low.
The car went on.
I sprang out of my hiding-place.
The car was suddenly gone from the empty road.
There was a grinding sound. A crash. The noise of metal folding on itself. The tinkle of glass.
I raced toward those sounds.
V
Out of a black pile where an engine sputtered, a black figure leaped—to dash off across the soggy lawn. I cut after it, hoping that the others in the wreck were down for keeps.
I was less than fifteen feet behind the fleeing man when he cleared a hedge. I’m no sprinter, but neither was he. The wet grass made slippery going.
He stumbled while I was vaulting the hedge. When we straightened out again I was not more than ten feet behind him.
Once I clicked my gun at him, forgetting I had emptied it. Six cartridges were wrapped in a piece of paper in my vest pocket, but this was no time for loading.
I was tempted to chuck the empty gun at his head. But that was too chancy.
A building loomed ahead. My fugitive bore off to the right, to clear the corner.
To the left a heavy shotgun went off.
The running man disappeared around the house-corner.
“Sweet God!” General Pleshskev’s mellow voice complained. “That with a shotgun I should miss all of a man
at the distance!”
“Go round the other way!” I yelled, plunging around the corner after my quarry.
His feet thudded ahead. I could not see him. The general puffed around from the other side of the house.
“You have him?”
“No.”
In front of us was a stone-faced bank, on top of which ran a path. On either side of us was a high and solid hedge.
“But, my friend,” the general protested. “How could he have—?”
A pale triangle showed on the path abovea triangle that could have been a bit of shirt showing above the opening of a vest.
“Stay here and talk!” I whispered to the general, and crept forward.
“It must be that he has gone the other way,” the general carried out my instructions, rambling on as if I were standing beside him, “because if he had come my way I should have seen him, and if he had raised himself over either of the hedges or the embankment, one of us would surely have seen him against …”
He talked on and on while I gained the shelter of the bank on which the path sat, while I found places for my toes in the rough stone facing.
The man on the road, trying to make himself small with his back in a bush, was looking at the talking general. He saw me when I had my feet on the path.
He jumped, and one hand went up.
I jumped, with both hands out.
A stone, turning under my foot, threw me sidewise, twisting my ankle, but saving my head from the bullet he sent at it.
My outflung left arm caught his legs as I spilled down. He came over on top of me. I kicked him once, caught his gun-arm, and had just decided to bite it when the general puffed up over the edge of the path and prodded the man off me with the muzzle of the shotgun.
When it came my turn to stand up, I found it not so good. My twisted ankle didn’t like to support its share of my hundred-and-eighty-some pounds. Putting most of my weight on the other leg, I turned my flashlight on the prisoner.
“Hello, Flippo!” I exclaimed.
“Hello!” he said without joy in the recognition.
He was a roly-poly Italian youth of twenty-three or -four. I had helped send him to San Quentin four years ago for his part in a payroll stick-up. He had been out on parole for several months now.