Already I have the order for it."
He added calmly, "The duty is high, Grant. Too bad your big New York market is protected by so large a duty. With my cost of production--these accursed Lowland workmen who demand so much for their labor, and a third of all I produce taken by Nareda--there is not much in it for me."
He had re-lighted the room. I could feel his eyes on me, but I said nothing. It was obvious to me now that he knew I was a government customs agent.
I said, "This certainly interests me, friend Sp.a.w.n. I"ll tell you why some other time."
We exchanged significant glances, both of us smiling.
"Well can I guess it, young Grant. So here is my treasure. Without the duty I would soon be wealthy. Chut! Why should I roll in a pity for myself? There is a duty and I am an honest man, so I pay it."
I said, "Aren"t you afraid to leave this stored here?" I knew that this pile of ingots--the quicksilver in its radiumized form--was worth four or five hundred thousand dollars in American gold-coin at the very least.
Sp.a.w.n shrugged. "Who would attack it? But of course I will be glad to be rid of it. It is a great responsibility--even though it carries international insurance, to protect my and the Nareda Government share."
He was sealing up the heavy barred portals of the little strong-room.
There was an alarm-detector, connected with the office of Nareda"s police commander. Sp.a.w.n set the alarm carefully.
"I have every safeguard, Grant. There is really no danger." He added, as though with sudden thought. "Except possibly one--a depth bandit named De Boer. Ever you have heard of him?"
"Yes. I have."
We climbed into Sp.a.w.n"s small automatic vehicle. The lights of the mine faded behind us as we coasted the winding road down to the village.
"De Boer," said Sp.a.w.n. "A fellow who lives by his wits in the depths.
Near here, perhaps: who knows? They say he has many followers--fifty--a hundred, perhaps--outlaws: a cut-belly band it must be."
"Didn"t he once take a hand in Nareda"s politics?" I suggested.
Sp.a.w.n guffawed. "That is so. He was once what they called a patriot here. He thought he might be made President. But Markes ran him out. Now he is a bandit. I have believe that American mail-ship which sank last year in the cauldron north of the Nares Sea--you remember how it was attacked by bandits?--I have always believe that was De Boer"s band."
We rolled back to Nareda. Sp.a.w.n"s manner had again changed. He seemed even more friendly than before. More at his ease with me. We had supper, and smoked together in his living room for half an hour afterward. But my thoughts were more on Jetta than on her father. There was still no evidence of her about the premises. Ah, if I only had known what had taken place there at Sp.a.w.n"s that afternoon while I was at the mine!
Soon after supper Sp.a.w.n yawned. "I think I shall go to bed." His glance was inquiring. "What are you going to do?"
I stood up. "I"ll go to bed, too. Markes wants to see me early in the morning. You"ll be there, Sp.a.w.n?"
"Yes. We will go together."
It was still no more than eight o"clock in the evening. Sp.a.w.n followed me to my bedroom, and left me at its door.
"Sleep well. I will call you in time."
"Thanks, Sp.a.w.n."
I wondered if there were irony in his voice as he said good night. No one could have told.
I did not go to bed. I sat listening to the silence of my room and the garden, and Sp.a.w.n"s retreating footsteps. He had said he was sleepy, but nevertheless I presently heard him across the patio. He was apparently in the kitchen, cleaning away our meal, to judge by the rattling of his pans. It was as yet not much after hour eight of the evening. The hours before my tryst with Jetta seemed an interminable time to wait. She might not come, though, I was afraid, until midnight.
At all events I felt that I had some hours yet. And it occurred to me that the evening was not yet too far advanced for me to call upon Perona. He lived not far from here, I had learned. I wanted to see this beribboned old Minister of Nareda"s Internal Affairs.
I would use as my excuse a desire to discuss further the possibility of smuggler being here in Nareda.
I put on my hat and a light jacket, verified that my dirk was readily accessible and sealed up my room. Sp.a.w.n apparently was still in the kitchen. I got out of the house, I felt sure, without him being aware of it.
The Nareda streets were quiet. There was a few pedestrians, and none of them paid much attention to me. It was no more than ten minutes walk to Perona"s home.
His house was set back from the road, surrounded by luxurious vegetation. There was a gate in front of the garden, and another, a hundred feet or to along a small alleyway which bordered the ground to my left. I was about to enter the front gate when sight of a figure pa.s.sing under the garden foliage checked me. It was a man, evidently coming from the house and headed toward the side gate. He went through a shaft of light that slanted from one of the lower windows of the house.
Perona! I was sure it was he. His slight figure, with a gay, tri-cornered hat. A short ta.s.seled cloak hanging from his shoulders. He was alone; walking fast. He evidently had not seen me. I crouched outside the high front wall, and through its lattice bars I saw him reach the side gate, open it swiftly, pa.s.s through, and close it after him. There was something furtive about his manner, for all he was undisguised. I decided to follow him.
The front street fortunately was deserted at the moment. I waited long enough for him to appear. But he did not; and when I ran to the alley corner--chancing b.u.mping squarely into him--I saw him far down its dim, narrow length where it opened into the back street which bordered his grounds to the rear. He turned to the left and shot a swift glance up the alley, which I antic.i.p.ated, provided for by drawing back. When I looked again, he was gone.
I have had some experience at playing the shadow. But it was not easy here along the almost deserted and fairly bright Nareda streets. Perona was walking swiftly down the slope toward the outskirts of the village where it bordered upon the Nares Sea. For a time I thought he was headed for the landing field, but at a cross-path he turned sharply to the right, away from the field, whose sheen of lights I could now see down the rocky defile ahead of me. There was nothing but broken, precipitous rocky country ahead of him, into which this path he had taken was winding. What could Perona, a Minister, be engaged in, wandering off alone into this black, deserted region?
It was black indeed, by now. The village was soon far behind us. A storm was in the night air; a wind off the sea; solid black clouds overhead blotted out the moon and stars. The crags and b.u.t.tes and gullies of this tumbled area loomed barely visible about me. There were times when only my feel of the path under my feet kept me from straying, to fall into a ravine or crevice.
I prowled perhaps two hundred yards behind Perona. He was using a tiny hand-flash now; it bobbed and winked in the darkness ahead, vanishing sometimes when a curve in the path hid him, or when he plunged down into a gully and up again. I had no search-beam. Nor would I have dared use one: Perona could too obviously have seen that someone was following him.
There was half a mile of this, I think, though it seemed interminable. I could hear the sea, rising with the wind, pounding against the rocks to my left. Then, a distance ahead, I saw lights moving. Perona"s--and others. Three or four of them. Their combined glow made a radiance which illumined the path and rocks. I could see the figures of several men whom Perona had joined. They stood a moment and then moved off. To the right a ragged cliff wall towered the path. The spots of light bobbed toward it. I caught the vague outline of a huge broken opening, like a cave mouth in the cliff. The lights were swallowed by it.
I crept cautiously forward.
CHAPTER VI
_Ether-wave Eavesdropping_
I had thought it was a cavern mouth into which the men had disappeared, but it was not. I reached it without any encounter. It loomed above me, a great archway in the cliff--an opening fifty feet high and equally as broad. And behind it was a roofless cave--a sort of irregularly circular bowl, five hundred feet across its broken, bowlder-strewn, caked-ooze floor.
I crouched in the blackness under the archway. The moon had risen and its light filtered with occasional shafts through the swift-flying black clouds overhead. The scene was brighter. It was dark in the archway, but a glow of moonlight in the bowl beyond showed me its tumbled floor and the precipitous, eroded walls, like a crater-rim, which encircled it.
The men whom Perona had met were across the bowl near its opposite side.
I could see the group of them, five hundred feet from me, by a little moonlight that was on them; also by the sheen from the spots of their hand-lights. Four or five men, and Perona. I thought I distinguished the aged Minister sitting on a rock, and before him a huge giant man"s figure striding up and down. Perona seemed talking vehemently: the men were listening; the giant paused occasionally in his pacing to fling a question.
All this I saw with my first swift glance. My attention was drawn from the men to an object near them. The nose of a flyer showed between two upstanding crags on the floor of the valley. Only its forward horizontal propellers and the tip of its cabin and landing gear were visible, but I could guess that it was a fair-sized ship.