That"s why he tried to get me killed. In this century, people don"t try to have others killed, just for fun. There"s got to be a powerful motive behind it. Such a motive as made a man last evening try to knife your half-brother. Such a motive as induced Hade to get me out of the way. He knows. Or he suspects. And that means the crisis must come, almost at once. The net will close. Whether or not it catches him in it."
The boat was started and had gotten slowly under way. During its long idleness it had been borne some distance to southwestward by tide and breeze. Her work done, Claire turned again to Gavin.
"Don"t try to talk," she begged--as she had begged him on the night before. "Just sit back and rest."
"Even now, you don"t get an inkling of it," he murmured.
"That shows how little they"ve taken you into their confidence.
They warned you against any one who might find the hidden path, and they even armed you for such an emergency. Yet they never told you the Law might possibly be crouching to spring on the Standish place, quite as ferociously as those other people who are in the secret and who want to rob Standish and Hade of the loot! And, by the way," he went on, pettishly, still smarting under his own renunciation, "tell Hade with my compliments that if he had lived as long in Southern Florida as I have, he"d know mocking birds don"t sing here in mid-February, and he"d devise some other signal to use when he comes ash.o.r.e by way of that path and wants to know if the coast is clear."
And now, forgetful of the shadowy course wherewith she was guiding the boat toward the distant dock--forgetful of everything--she dropped her hand from the steering wheel and turned about, in cra.s.s astonishment, to gaze at him.
"What--what do you mean?" she queried. "You know about the signal?--You--?"
"I know far too little about any of the whole crooked business!" he retorted, still enraged at his own quixotic resolve. "That"s what I was sent here to clean up, after a dozen others failed. That"s what I was put in charge of this district for. That"s what I could have found out--or seventy per cent of it--if I"d had the sense not to stop you when you started to tell me, just now."
"Mr. Brice," she said, utterly confused, "I don"t understand you at all. At first I was afraid that blow on the head, and then this afternoon"s terrible experiences, had turned your wits. But you don"t talk like a man who is delirious or sick.
And there are things you couldn"t possibly know--that signal, for instance--if you were what you seemed to be. You made me think you were a stranger in Florida,--that you were down here, penniless and out of work. Yet now you speak about some mysterious "job" that you are giving up. It"s all such a tangle! I can"t understand."
Brice tried to ignore the pitiful pleading--the childlike tremor in her sweet voice. But it cut to the soul of him.
And he replied, brusquely:
"I let you think I was a dead-broke work-hunter. I did that, because I needed to get into your brother"s house, to make certain of things which we suspected but couldn"t quite prove.
I am the ninth man, in the past two months, to try to get in there. And I"m the second to succeed. The first couldn"t find out anything of use. He could only confirm some of our ideas. That"s the sort of a man he is. A fine subordinate, but with no genius for anything else except to obey orders. I was the only one of the nine, with brains, who could win any foothold there. And now I"m throwing away all I gained, because one girl happens to be too much of a child (or of a saint) for me to lie to! I"ve reason to be proud of myself, haven"t I?"
"Who are you?" she asked, dully bewildered under his fierce tirade of self-contempt. "Who are you? What are you?"
"I"m Gavin Brice," he said. "As I told you. But I"m also a United States Secret Service official--which I didn"t tell you."
"No!" she stammered, shrinking back. "Oh, no!"
He continued, briskly:
"Your brother, and your snake-loving friend Rodney Hade, are working a pretty trick on Uncle Sam. And the Federal Government has been trying to block it for the past few months. There are plenty of us down here, just now. But, up to lately, nothing"s been accomplished. That"s why they sent me. They knew I"d had plenty of experience in this region."
"Here? In Florida? But--"
"I spent all my vacations at my grandfather"s place, below Coconut Grove, when I was in school and in college and for a while afterward, and I know this coast and the keys as well as any outsider can,--even if I was silly enough to let my scow run into a reef to-night, that wasn"t here in my day. They sent me to take charge of the job and to straighten out its mixups and to try to win where the others had bungled. I was doing it, too,--and it would have been a big feather in my cap, at Washington, when my good sense went to pieces on a reef named Claire Standish,--a reef I hadn"t counted on, any more than I counted on the reef that stove in my scow, an hour ago."
She strove to speak. The words died in her parched throat.
Brice went on:
"I"ve always bragged that I"m woman-proof. I"m not. No man is. I hadn"t met the right woman. That was all. If you"d been of the vampire type or the ordinary kind, I could have gone on with it, without turning a hair. If you"d been mixed up in any of the criminal part of it at all--as I and all of us supposed you must be--I"d have had no scruples about using any information I could get from you. But--well, tonight, out here, all at once I understood what I"d been denying to myself ever since I met you. And I couldn"t go on with it. You"ll be certain to suffer from it, in any case. But I"m strong enough at the Department to persuade them you"re innocent.
I--"
"Do you mean," she stammered, incredulously, finding hesitant words at last, "Do you mean you"re a--a spy? That you came to our house--that you ate our bread--with the idea of learning secrets that might injure us? That you--? Oh!" she burst forth in swift revulsion, "I didn"t know any one could be so--so vile! I--"
"Wait!" he commanded, sharply, wincing nevertheless under the sick scorn in her voice and words. "You have no right to say that. I am not a spy. Or if I am, then every police officer and every detective and every cross-examining lawyer is a spy!
I am an official in the United States Secret Service. I, and others like me, try to guard the welfare of our country and to expose or thwart persons who are that country"s enemies or who are working to injure its interests. If that is being a spy, then I"m content to be one. I--"
"If you are driven to such despicable work by poverty," she said, unconsciously seeking excuse for him, "if it is the only trade you know--then I suppose you can"t help--"
"No," he said, unwilling to let her gain even this false impression. "My grandfather, who brought me up--who owned the place I spoke of, near Coconut Grove--left me enough to live on in pretty fair comfort. I could have been an idler if I chose. I didn"t choose. I wanted work. And I wanted adventure. That was why I went into the Secret Service. I stayed in it till I went overseas, and I came back to it after the war. I wasn"t driven into it by poverty. It"s an honorable profession. There are hundreds of honorable men in it. You probably know some of them. They are in all walks of life, from Fifth Avenue to the slums. They are working patriotically for the welfare of the land they love, and they are working for pitifully small reward. It is not like the Secret Service of Germany or of oldtime Russia. It upholds Democracy, not Tyranny. And I"m proud to be a member of it.
At least, I was. Now, there is nothing left to me but to resign. It--"
"You haven"t even the excuse of poverty!" she exclaimed, confusedly. "And you have not even the grace to feel ashamed for--for your black ingrat.i.tude in tricking us into giving you shelter and--"
"I think I paid my bill for that, to some slight extent," was his dry rejoinder. "But for my "trickery," your half-brother would be dead, by now. As for "ingrat.i.tude," how about the trick he served me, today? Even if he didn"t know Hade had smuggled across a bagful of his pet moccasins to Roke, yet he let me be trapped into that--"
"It"s only in the Devil"s Ledger, that two wrongs make a right!" she flamed. "I grant my brother treated you abominably. But his excuse was that your presence might ruin his great ambition in life. Your only excuse for doing what you have done is the--the foul instinct of the man-hunt.
The--"
"The criminal-hunt," he corrected her, trying not to writhe under her hot contempt. "The enemy-to-man hunt, if you like.
Your half-brother--"
"My brother is not a criminal!" she cried, furiously. "You have no right to say so. He has committed no crime. He has broken no law."
Again he looked down, searchingly, into her angry little face, as it confronted him so fiercely in the starlight. And he knew she was sincere.
"Miss Standish," he said, slowly. "You believe you are telling the truth. Your half-brother understood you too well to let you know what he was really up to. He and Hade concocted some story--I don"t know what--to explain to you the odd things going on in and around your home. You are innocent. And you are ignorant. It cuts me like a knife to have to open your eyes to all this. But, in a very few days, at most, you are bound to know."
"If you think I"ll believe a word against my brother--especially from a self-confessed spy--"
"No?" said Gavin. "And you"re just as sure of Rodney Hade"s n.o.ble uprightness as of your brother"s?"
"I"m not defending Rodney Hade," said Claire. "He is nothing to me, one way or the other. He--"
"Pardon me," interposed Brice. "He is a great deal to you.
You hate him and you are in mortal fear of him."
"If you spied that out, too--"
"I did," he admitted. "I did it, in the half-minute I saw you and him together, last evening. I saw a look in your eyes--I heard a tone in your voice--as you turned to introduce me to him--that told me all I needed to know. And, incidentally, it made me want to smash him. Apart from that--well, the Department knows a good deal about Rodney Hade. And it suspects a great deal more. It knows, among minor things, that he schemed to make Milo Standish plunge so heavily on certain worthless stocks that Standish went broke and in desperation raised a check of Hade"s (and did it rather badly, as Hade had foreseen he would, when he set the trap)--in order to cover his margins. It--"
"No!" she cried, in wrathful refusal to believe. "That is not true. It can"t be true! It is a--"
"Hade holds a mortgage on everything Standish owns," resumed Brice, "and he has held that raised check over him as a prison-menace. He--"
"Stop!" demanded Claire, ablaze with righteous indignation.
"If you have such charges to make against my brother, are you too much of a coward to come to his house with me, now, and make them to his face? Are you?"
"No," he said, without a trace of unwillingness or of bravado.
"I am not. I"ll go there, with you, gladly. In the meantime--"
"In the meantime," she caught him up, "please don"t speak to me. And please sit in the other end of the boat, if you don"t mind. The air will be easier to breathe if--"
"Certainly," he a.s.sented, making his way to the far end of the launch, while she seized the neglected steering wheel again.
"And I am sorrier than I can say, that I have had to tell you all this. If it were not that you must know it, soon, anyway, I"d have bitten my tongue out, sooner than make you so unhappy. Please believe that, won"t you?"