“Come on!” he said grimly to Baxter, who had been silently awaiting the sergeant’s pleasure, meanwhile watching his every move with tight, calculating gaze.
Flaherty turned the flash light to illuminate their way out of the morass of bunks. Its beam shooting along, picked suddenly out of the darkness the figure of a soldier leaning over a bunk on which another soldier was sleeping.
Flaherty’s heart leaped into his throat. Into his mind came a vivid picture of the strangling hands reaching out to choke Baxter earlier in the night.
The soldier straightened in a flash, and whirled full into the light. Flaherty saw the face of Corporal Frank, the corporal of the guard.
“Frank!” he cried. “What are you doing?”
“S-s-sh!” cautioned the corporal, placing a finger to his lips and looking down significantly at the sleeper. “It’s Shelby. I was going around on my inspection tour of the guard when I heard the door of the wash room open softly. I saw Shelby come out and look carefully all around him. His actions seemed suspicious, so I follow him. He put something under his pillow and got into bed. I thought I had better wait until after he got asleep to see what it was. I was just about to look, sergeant, when you flashed the light on me.”
Corporal Frank rubbed his hands nervously, and stared curiously at Baxter.
Without waking the sleeper, Flaherty’s hand slid under the pillow. When it came out it brought with it a clasp knife wet with water.
Flaherty stared at it under the brilliant glare of the flash light. So that was what had been washed in the bowl in the wash room! Flaherty studied it more closely. At the edges of the knife, small drops of water still remained, and under minute inspection, these drops showed flecks of pink.
What drew Flaherty’s attention more were the traces of water on the black bone handle of the knife. They had the grained look of water on top of greasy surfaces.
Flaherty bent to smell. Again that faint, pungent, irritatingly familiar odor!
The sergeant’s heavy hand fell on the sleeping man’s shoulder, and when Shelby’s green, close-set eyes popped open, he commanded, “Come on, Shelby! Get dressed and come with us!”
VI
The little office of the Officer of the Day was crowded. Captain Freeman sat at his desk, his confused, worried gaze turning from one to the other of the redheaded recruits. They sat side by side against the far wall, Baxter was sober-faced. Much of his defiance had vanished. Shelby dribbled with fear, his ratty eyes jumping wildly about the room. Flaherty himself sat in his former seat beside the captain’s desk, while the dark-faced Corporal Frank, grave and awe-struck by the night’s developments and the present proceedings, eyed the recruits and their questioners in turn.
The officer of the day shook his gray head dismally, and muttered at the man beside him.
“Lord, Flaherty! What a terrible thing! Murder right here on board a transport! I’ll never hear the last of it! Oh,” he groaned, “why did it have to happen during my tour of guard?”
Flaherty mopped his perspiration-dotted bald head with the khaki bandanna, and replied in undertone.
“I don’t know, sir. But we’ve got the murderer here. I’m sure of that. But,” he added lugubriously, “the thing is to pin him down.”
“Yes, yes, Flaherty! Get to the bottom of the whole wretched, horrible business! It won’t look so bad to Washington if we can clear things up. We’ve got to do it!” he concluded in desperate earnestness.
Flaherty sighed. In some ways the solution seemed obvious, and in other ways it was wholly baffling. He had found Baxter with a knife clotted with old blood and a newspaper clipping describing the Davega murders. Surely those were strong evidences for the belief that Baxter was John Horning, the red-haired brother-in-law sought by the New York police. But then, the murdered Winters had had in his possession the good-luck ring of Roy Davega. And, who had attempted to choke Baxter to death in the middle of the night as he lay in his bunk, and why?
That Shelby had murdered Winters over a quarrel arising out of a gambling game seemed fairly logical, but what reason did Shelby have for removing the good-luck ring and throwing it through a porthole, evidently hoping that it would be lost?
Through everything, like the theme of a musical composition, haunting, mysterious, unsolvable, went the unknown, pungent, strangely familiar odor. With links more compelling than steel, it bound the three redheaded recruits together. It was on Winter’s ring, on Baxter’s newspaper clipping, on the haft of the knife found underneath Shelby’s pillow. A sinister, yet homely odor, it loomed in Flaherty’s mind as the motif of a crime more strange and twisted than any he had ever heard of, or read. And here he was, a plain, old, regular army sergeant trying to untwist the tangled skeins so that they made a logical pattern.
He turned on Shelby again. The action was sufficient to drive the recruit forward in his chair, his small eyes alive with fear, his lean fists clutching the chair arms until the whites of the knuckles glowed.
“I tell you I didn’t do it!” he cried. “I never saw that knife before!”
The same old story. Shelby had repeated it over and over, each time more wildly than the last, as he saw disbelief remain firm in the faces watching him.
Flaherty turned wearily to Baxter, and found the recruit licking dry lips. Sensing that Baxter was struggling with himself to say something important, the sergeant wisely kept silent.
“I am Horning!” he blurted out at last. “Yes, John Horning!”
Captain Freeman stifled an exclamation. Flaherty leaned forward, his blood racing through his veins. Corporal Frank began to rub his hands together as if with nervousness.
“Go on,” said Flaherty softly.
“I’m looking for the man who killed my sister and my brother-in-law,” he cried fiercely. “He’s in the army somewhere. And, by God, I won’t stop until I find him!” Baxter, or Horning as he named himself, clenched his fists and a gust of terrible passion contorted his face. Although his teeth were rigidly clamped together, his words pushed between them with deadly emphasis. “I’ll — kill him!”
The diamond in the good-luck ring flashed white fire as Flaherty drew it from his pocket and silently displayed it to Baxter’s gaze.
The recruit leaped to his feet, his face livid, his blue eyes glittering madly.
“Roy’s ring!” he cried hoarsely. “Then... then...”
As he hesitated, he looked as if he were about to hurl himself at the old sergeant. “Then her murderer is... on board this ship!”
The recruit’s wild eyes glared around the room. Shelby forgot his own fears to stare at him in awe. Corporal Frank rubbed his hands, one upon the other, more vigorously, as his black eyes shifted fascinatedly from the ring to Baxter’s face, and back to the ring again.
“This ring was on Winters’s body,” said Flaherty grimly.
“Winters!”
The bitter cry burst from a soul, long harrowed.
“He’s dead!” said Baxter dully, sinking dumbly into his chair. “Some one else killed him!”
The eyes he now turned toward Flaherty were flat, lusterless.
“Several years ago,” related Baxter, or Horning, in a lifeless voice, “my sister had a love affair with a man. None of us in the family knew him, or his name, Helen never told us. When we learned that this man had got into trouble in New York and had joined the army to escape from the police, we knew why Sis didn’t tell us about him. He was no good.
“Then Helen met Roy Davega and married him. This other man had been sent to Panama for service. Sis worried a lot that some day he would come back and kill her for not waiting for him. He was like that.