“About three weeks ago, I came home to find Helen crying into a newspaper. I looked, and saw an item about some soldiers being up from Panama for leaves of absence. Then, when I got home that... that night and saw the horrible, terrible thing that had happened, I knew. The soldier had come back.
“If you don’t believe me,” said the recruit earnestly to Flaherty, “look at that knife. I kept it in my trunk, even getting up nights to look at it, building up the hate and fury in my heart so that when I found the murderer, I could slash him to death as viciously as he slashed my sister.”
The longer blade of the knife opened obstinately, the sticky blood in the groove striving to hold it fast. Flaherty’s lips tightened as he read the letters etched on the steel blade: “PROPERTY U. S. SIGNAL CORP.” It was a knife that a soldier was apt to carry. The sergeant knew that thousands of such knives were stolen each year by enlisted men.
“So I changed my name and joined the army,” Baxter was saying. “I didn’t care about the police. I wanted to find the dirty murderer and kill him myself. But now,” the recruit concluded, his shoulders drooping wearily, “he is dead.”
A thought stole into Flaherty’s mind and stuck persistently, disturbing him mightily. According to Baxter, the man who had murdered his sister and brother-in-law was a soldier with several years’ army service. Winters had been a recruit, whose total army service was less than two weeks.
Flaherty was still puzzling over these disjointed facts when he looked up to see Shelby standing excitedly beside the desk.
“Look here, sergeant!” he cried, holding up the good-luck ring. “This wasn’t Winters’s ring. Only this afternoon he won it, with those crooked dice of his, in a crap game we had.”
Flaherty was on his feet, shaking Shelby like a bulldog shakes a rat.
“What?” he roared. “Don’t lie to me! Who did Winters win that ring off of?”
VII
Before the frightened Shelby could answer, Corporal Frank crossed the room swiftly and took the ring.
“He won it from me, Flaherty,” he said, his lean, dark face supporting a serious, anxious expression.
Flaherty released the whimpering Shelby and stared long and hard at the corporal of the guard.
“Why didn’t you tell me so before, corporal?”
Every man in the room waited breathlessly for Corporal Frank’s next words. Captain Freeman’s fingers drummed nervously on his desk. Shelby forgot his whimpering, and Horning, alias Baxter, gripped the arms of his chair, ready to launch himself at the corporal’s throat.
“I was not certain,” Frank answered steadily, “that it was my ring. A man must be sure in such a serious matter as this. I saw the ring in a pawnshop window near the Army Base in Brooklyn, the day before we sailed. I liked it and bought it, never dreaming it had such a horrible history.”
The corporal shuddered.
“During the dice game this afternoon, I went broke,” he confessed. “I pledged the ring to Winters, hoping to regain my losses. But I didn’t,” he smiled faintly. “So poor Winters kept the ring. That’s all I know.”
Flaherty looked deeply into the corporal’s dark eyes, but they never wavered before his keen stare.
The old sergeant turned to Captain Freeman and shrugged.
“Now, sir,” he asked hopelessly, “where are we?”
While Captain Freeman gnawed his under lip, and his finger tips beat a savage tattoo on the desk top. Flaherty’s thoughts seemed to spin around in circles. What Corporal Frank had said was plausible. The soldier murderer of the Davegas might easily have sold the ring for cash. But...
Suddenly Captain Freeman’s voice barked irritatedly.
“Corporal Frank! Stop rubbing those damned paws of yours together all the time! What the hell’s the matter with you anyway?”
“Tropical itch, sir,” said the corporal of the guard apologetically. “I had a bad case of it on my hands when I was stationed in Panama. It’s come back again since the transport hit tropical waters, sir.”
While the captain grunted surlily, a vivid flash seemed to light up Flaherty’s brain. His command rang through the room.
“Let’s see your hands, corporal!”
Frank extended them wonderingly. All in the room looked on perplexed as the sergeant suddenly bent to smell them. He straightened, and transfixed the corporal with a cold, blue stare.
“That’s all, corporal,” he said grimly. “Sit down.”
He turned to Captain Freeman and said, “I’ve got to go out for a moment, sir. I won’t be gone long. Please do not allow any one to leave this office until I return.”
“Right!” breathed the mystified Captain Freeman, staring after the broad back of his sergeant.
A few minutes later, Flaherty was back. He had brought with him two husky guards, pistols belted to their hips, and Captain Edwards, the portly, dignified, transport’s surgeon.
Flaherty nodded to the guards.
“All right, men! Take him!”
Frank, corporal of the guard, cursed, and lunged out of his chair. But the guards were upon him, relentlessly holding him between them.
The ship’s doctor took one of Frank’s dark, sinewy hands and smelled it.
“Yes, sergeant,” he said gravely, as he straightened. “That is the ointment I gave him this afternoon when he came to me with a bad case of tropical itch on his hands. He is the only man I have treated on this voyage.”
From the pocket of his shirt, Flaherty took a packet of letters, yellowed by age and tropical damp. He thrust them at Horning, alias Baxter, the recruit.
“My sister’s letters!” cried Horning, his eyes staring at the faded handwriting. “She must have written them to him when he was in Panama!”
With a mad cry, he hurled himself at Corporal Frank, who cringed back for the protection of his guards. Flaherty stepped between.
“I thought so,” said the sergeant dryly. “I found them at the bottom of Frank’s trunk locker.”
He turned to the bewildered Captain Freeman and jerked his thumb at the captive.
“There’s your murderer, sir. He is the one who killed Winters. He is also the man the New York police want.”
“But... but...” stammered the captain. “Sergeant, how...?”
Flaherty shrugged his old, thick, sloping shoulders.
“Simple, now, sir. That ointment smell was the key that unlocked the whole problem. I should have recognized it before. But I never had the tropical itch myself, so I never used any of this ointment, although I must have smelled it often on others.
“Frank gambled in the dice game and lost. He pledged the ring, which he took from Roy Davega’s body, to Winters for cash, hoping to recoup his losses and redeem the ring. But he only lost that money, too.
“He went on guard late in the afternoon. As corporal of the guard, it was his duty to carry radio messages to you. He read the one front the New York police. He realized then that he had better get the ring back.
“Meanwhile you ordered him to inspect all baggage for liquor. What a shock he must have received when he opened Baxter’s trunk and found on the tray the knife he had used to kill Baxter’s sister and brother-in-law! It was there that he left his first smear of the ointment which he was using to grease his hands in order to ease the burning torment of the itch. He left it on the newspaper clipping.
“Now he became frantic with worry and fear. He knew that Baxter was seeking vengeance. The corporal decided to strike first. It was his hands that had reached out of the night to choke Baxter. He failed because Baxter had fortunately been awake, and was too strong for him.