The Flaming Jewel

"I tell you what I want ver' damn quick. Who was he, thees man who rides with my property on your horse away? Eh? Because it was not Nick Salzar! No! Salzar can not ride thees way. No! Alors?"

"I can't tell you who he was," replied Stormont. "That's your affair, not ours."

"No? Ah! Ver' well, then. I shall tell you, Señor Flic! He was one of yours. I understan'. It is a trap, a cheat – what you call a plant! Thees man who rode your horse he is disguise! Yes! He also is a gendarme! Yes! You think I let a gendarme rob me? I got you where I want you now. You shall write your gendarme frien' that he return to me my property, one day's time , or I send him by parcel post two nice, fresh-out right-hands – your sweetheart's and your own!"

Stormont drew Eve's head close to his:

"This man is blood mad or out of his mind! I'd better go out and take a chance at him before the others come back."

But the girl shook her head violently, caught him by the arm and drew him toward the mouth of the tile down which Clinch always emptied his hootch when the Dump was raided.

But now, it appeared that the tile which protruded from the cement floor was removable.

In silence she began to unscrew it, and he, seeing what she was trying to do, helped her.

Together they lifted the heavy tile and laid it on the floor.

"You open thees door!" shouted Quintana in a paroxysm of fury. "I give you one minute! Then, by God, I kill you both!"

Eve lifted a screen of wood through which the tile had been set. Under it a black hole yawned. It was a tunnel made of three-foot aqueduct tiles; and it led straight into Star Pond, two hundred feet away.

Now, as she straightened up and looked silently at Stormont, they heard the trample of boots in the kitchen, voices, the bang of gun-stocks.

"Does that drain lead into the lake?" whispered Stormont.

She nodded.

"Will you follow me, Eve?"

She pushed him aside, indicating that he was to follow her.

As she stripped the hunting jacket from her, a hot colour swept her face. But she dropped on both knees, crept straight into the tile and slipped out of sight.

As she disappeared, Quintana shouted something in Portuguese, and fired at the lock.

With the smash of splintering wood in his ears, Stormont slid into the smooth tunnel.

In an instant he was shooting down a polished toboggan slide, and in another moment was under the icy water of Star Pond.

Shocked, blinded, fighting his way to the surface, he felt his spurred boots dragging at him like a ton of iron. Then to him came her helping hand.

"I can make it," he gasped.

But his clothing and his boots and the icy water began to tell on him in mid-lake.

Swimming without effort beside him, watching his every stroke, presently she sank a little and glided under him and a little ahead, so that his hands fell upon her shoulders.

He let them rest, so, aware now that it was no burden to such a swimmer. Supple and silent as a swimming otter, the girl slipped lithely through the chilled water, which washed his body to the nostrils and numbed his legs till he could scarcely move them.

And now, of a sudden, his feet touched gravel. He stumbled forward in the shadow of overhanging trees and saw her wading shoreward, a dripping, silvery shape on the shoal.

Then, as he staggered up to her, breathless, where she was standing on the pebbled shore, he saw her join both hands, cup-shape, and lift them to her lips.

And out of her mouth poured diamond, sapphire, and emerald in a dazzling stream, – and, among them, one great, flashing gem blazing in the starlight, – the Flaming Jewel!

Like a naiad of the lake she stood, white, slim, silent, the heaped gems glittering in her snowy hands, her face framed by the curling masses of her wet hair.

Then, slowly she turned her head to Stormont.

"These are what Quintana came for," she said. "Could you put them into your pocket?"

Episode Eight

CUP AND LIP

I

TWO miles beyond Clinch's Dump, Hal Smith pulled Stormont's horse to a walk. He was tremendously excited.

With naïve sincerity he believed that what he had done on the spur of the moment had been the only thing to do.

By snatching the Flaming Jewel from Quintana's very fingers he had diverted that vindictive bandit's fury from Eve, from Clinch, from Stormont, and had centred it upon himself.

More than that, he had sown the seeds of suspicion among Quintana's own people. They never could discover Salzar's body. Always they must believe that it was Nicolas Salzar and no other who so treacherously robbed them, and who rode away in a rain of bullets, shaking the emblazoned morocco case above his masked head in triumph, derision and defiance.

At the recollection of what had happened, Hal Smith drew bridle, and, sitting his saddle there in the false dawn, threw back his handsome head and laughed until the fading stars overhead swam in his eyes through tears of sheerest mirth.

For he was still young enough to have had the time of his life. Nothing in the Great War had so thrilled him. For, in what had just happened, there was humour. There had been none in the Great Grim Drama.

Still, Smith began to realise that he had taken the long, long chance of the opportunist who rolls the bones with Death. He had kept his pledge to the little Grand Duchess. It was a clean job. It was even good drama —

The picturesque angle of the affair shook Hal Smith with renewed laughter. As a moving picture hero he thought himself the funniest thing on earth.

From the time he had poked a pistol against Sard's fat paunch, to this bullet-pelted ride for life, life had become one ridiculously exciting episode after another.

He had come through like the hero in a best-seller… Lacking only a heroine… If there had been any heroine it was Eve Strayer. Drama had gone wrong in that detail… So perhaps, after all, it was real life he had been living and not drama. Drama, for the masses, must have a definite beginning and ending. Real life lacks the latter. In life nothing is finished. It is always a premature curtain which is yanked by that doddering old stage-hand, Johnny Death.

Smith sat his saddle, thinking, beginning to be sobered now by the inevitable reaction which follows excitement and mirth as relentlessly as care dogs the horseman.

He had had a fine time, – save for the horror of the Rocktrail… He shuddered… Anyway, at worst he had not shirked a clean deal in that ghastly game… It was God's mercy that he was not lying where Salzar lay, ten feet – twenty – a hundred deep, perhaps – in immemorial slime —

He shook himself in his saddle as though to be rid of the creeping horror, and wiped his clammy face.

Now, in the false dawn, a blue-jay awoke somewhere among the oaks and filled the misty silence with harsh grace-notes.

Then reaction, setting in like a tide, stirred more sombre depths in the heart of this young man.

He thought of Riga; and of the Red Terror; of murder at noon-day, and outrage by night. He remembered his only encounter with a lovely child – once Grand Duchess of Esthonia – then a destitute refugee in silken rags.