Jay Waitkus

Excerpted from Jay Waitkus' Crime Chronicles: Foul Play by Charles Reade and Dion Boucicault

Chapter 11

"SHOVE off," said the captain, and they fell astern. 

But Cooper, with a boat-hook, hooked on to the other lifeboat; the dying ship towed them both. 

Five minutes more elapsed. The captain did not come down, so Wylie hailed him. 

There was no answer. Hudson had gone into the mate's cabin. Wylie waited a minute, then hailed again.

"Ahoy! On deck there!" 

"Hullo!" cried the captain, at last. 

"Why didn't you come down?" 

The captain crossed his arms and leaned over the stern. 

"Don't you know that Hiram Hudson is always the last to leave a sinking ship?" 

"Well, you are the last," said Wylie. "So now come on board this craft at once. I dare not tow in her wake much longer, to be sucked in when she goes down." 

"Come on board your craft and desert my own?" said Hudson, disdainfully. "Know my duty to m' employers better." 

These words alarmed the mate. 

"Curse it all!" he cried, "the fool has been and got some more rum. Shin up the tow-rope and throw that madman into the sea; then we can pick him up. He swims like a cork." 

A sailor instantly darted forward to the rope. But, unfortunately, Hudson heard this proposal, and it enraged him. 

He ran back inside for a moment, then emerged brandishing a long knife. The sailor drew the boat under the ship's stern, but the drunken skipper flourished the weapon furiously over his head. 

"Board me! The first that lays a finger on my bulwarks, off goes his hand at the wrist!" 

Suiting the action to the word, he hacked at the tow-rope so vigorously that it gave way, and the boats fell astern. 

Helen Rolleston uttered a shriek of dismay and pity. 

"Oh, save him!" she cried.

"Make sail!" cried Cooper, and in a few seconds they got all her canvas set upon the lifeboats.

It seemed a hopeless chase for these shells to sail after that dying monster with her cloud of canvas all drawing, alow and aloft. But it did not prove so.

The gentle breeze was an advantage to light craft, and the dying Proserpine was full of water, and could only crawl. After a few moments of great anxiety, the boats crept up.

Wylie ran forward. Hailing the captain, he at first implored him, in the friendliest tones, to give himself a chance, then tried him by his vanity.

"Come and command the boats, old fellow. How can we navigate them on the Pacific without you?" 

Hudson was now leaning over the taffrail utterly drunk. 

He made no reply to the mate, but merely waved his dagger feebly in one hand, and his bottle in the other, and gurgled out, "Duty to m' employers."

Then Cooper, without a word, told Welch to keep as close to the ship's quarter as he dare. 

Wylie instinctively did the same, and the three craft crawled on in solemn and deadly silence, for nearly twenty minutes. 

The wounded ship seemed to receive a death-blow. She stopped dead, and shook. 

The next moment she pitched gently forward, and her bows went under the water, while her after-part rose into the air, revealing two splintered holes in her run, just below the water-line. 

The next moment her stern settled down; the sea yawned horribly, the great waves of her own making rushed over her upper deck, and the lofty masts and sails, remaining erect, went down with sad majesty into the deep. 

And nothing remained but the bubbling and foaming of the voracious water, that had swallowed up the good ship, and her cargo, and her drunken master.

Chapter 15

ARTHUR Wardlaw closed all the doors, and sunk exhausted into a chair, muttering.

"Thank Heaven! I have got rid of them all for an hour or two. Now, Wylie."

Wylie seemed in no hurry to enter upon the required subject.

"Why, guv'nor," he said evasively, "it seems to me you are among the breakers here yourself."

"Nothing of the sort, if you have managed your work cleverly. Come, tell me all, before we are interrupted again."

"Tell ye all about it! Why, there's part on't I am afraid to think on, let alone talk about it."

"Spare me your scruples, and give me your facts," said Wardlaw coldly. "First of all, did you succeed in shifting the bullion as agreed?"

The sailor appeared relieved by this question.

"Oh, that is all right," he said. "I got the bullion safe aboard the Shannon, marked for lead."

"And the lead on board the Proserpine?"

"Ay, shipped as bullion."

"Without suspicion?"

"Not quite."

"Great Heaven! Who?"

"One clerk at the shipping agent's scented something strange, I think. James Seaton. That was the name he went by."

"Could he prove anything?"

"Nothing. He knew nothing for certain. And what he guessed won't never be known in England now."

And Wylie fidgeted in his chair.

Notwithstanding this assurance, Wardlaw looked grave, and took a note of that clerk's name. Then he begged Wylie to go on.

"Give me all the details," he said. "Leave me to judge their relative value. You scuttled the ship?"

"Don't say that!" cried Wylie, in a low but eager voice. "Stone walls have ears." 

Then rather more loudly than was necessary, "Ship sprung a leak that neither the captain, nor I, nor anybody could find, to stop. Me and my men, we all think her seams opened, with stress of weather."

Then, lowering his voice again, "Try and see it as we do; and don't you ever use such a word as that what come out of your lips just now. We pumped her hard; but 'twarn't no use. She filled, and we had to take to the boats."

"Stop a moment," Arthur said. "Was there any suspicion excited?"

"Not among the crew. And suppose there was? I could talk 'em all over, or buy 'em all over, what few of 'em is left. I've got 'em all with me in one house, and they are all square, don't you fear."

"Well, but you said 'among the crew!' Whom else can we have to fear?"

"Why, nobody. To be sure, one of the passengers was down on me; but what does that matter now?"

"It matters greatly — it matters terribly. Who was this passenger?"

"He called himself the Reverend John Hazel. He suspected something or other. And what with listening here, and watching there, he judged the ship was never to see England, and I always fancied he told the lady."

"What, was there a lady there?"

"Ay, worse luck, sir. And a pretty girl she was. But sickly. Coming home to England to die, so our surgeon told me."

"Well, never mind her. The clergyman! This fills me with anxiety. A clerk suspecting us at Sydney, and a passenger suspecting us in the vessel. There are two witnesses against us already."

"No, only one."

"How do you make that out?"

"Why, White's clerk and the parson, they was one man."

Wardlaw stared in utter amazement.

"Don't ye believe me?" Wylie asked. "I tell ye that the clerk boarded us under an alias. He had shaved off his beard, but I knew him directly."

"He came to verify his suspicions," suggested Wardlaw, in a faint voice.

"Not he. He came for love of the sick girl, and nothing else. And you'll never see either him or her, if that is any comfort to you."

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Excerpt from Jay Waitkus' Crime Chronicles™ e-book series. Cover image by NZ Graphics.