The woman who had fainted had revived by now and was pouring anxious questions in Russian at the lad. The princess was getting into her blue cape. The woman stopped questioning the lad and asked her something.
“It’s all over,” the princess said. “I am going to view the ruins.”
That suggestion appealed to everybody. Five minutes later all of us, including the servants, were on our way downhill. Behind us, around us, in front of us, were other people going downhill, hurrying along in the drizzle that was very gentle now, their faces tired and excited in the bleak morning light.
Halfway down, a woman ran out of a cross-path and began to tell me something. I recognized her as one of Hendrixson’s maids.
I caught some of her words.
“Presents gone... Mr. Brophy murdered... Oliver...”
“I’ll be down later,” I told the others, and set out after the maid.
She was running back to the Hendrixson house. I couldn’t run, couldn’t even walk fast. She and Hendrixson and more of his servants were standing on the front porch when I arrived.
“They killed Oliver and Brophy,” the old man said.
“How?”
“We were in the back of the house, the rear second story, watching the flashes of the shooting down in the village. Oliver was down here, just inside the front door, and Brophy in the room with the presents. We heard a shot in there, and immediately a man appeared in the doorway of our room, threatening us with two pistols, making us stay there for perhaps ten minutes. Then he shut and locked the door and went away. We broke the door down — and found Brophy and Oliver dead.”
“Let’s look at them.”
The chauffeur was just inside the front door. He lay on his back, with his brown throat cut straight across the front, almost back to the vertebrae. His rifle was under him. I pulled it out and examined it. It had not been fired.
Upstairs, the butler Brophy was huddled against a leg of one of the tables on which the presents had been spread. His gun was gone. I turned him over, straightened him out, and found a bullet-hole in his chest. Around the hole his coat was charred in a large area.
Most of the presents were still here. But the most valuable pieces were gone. The others were in disorder, lying around any which way, their covers pulled off.
“What did the one you saw look like?” I asked.
“I didn’t see him very well,” Hendrixson said. “There was no light in our room. He was simply a dark figure against the candle burning in the hall. A large man in a black rubber raincoat, with some sort of black mask that covered his whole head and face.”
As we went downstairs again I gave Hendrixson a brief account of what I had seen and heard and done since I had left him. There wasn’t enough of it to make a long tale.
“Do you think you can get information about the others from the one you caught?” he asked, as I prepared to go out.
“No. But I expect to bag them just the same.”
Couffignal’s main street was jammed with people when I limped into it again. A detachment of Marines from Mare Island was there, and men from a San Francisco police boat. Excited citizens in all degrees of partial nakedness boiled around them, A hundred voices were talking at once, recounting their personal adventures and braveries and losses and what they had seen. Such words as machine gun, bomb, bandit, car, shot, dynamite, and killed sounded again and again, in every variety of voice and tone.
The bank had been completely wrecked by the charge that had blown the vault. The jewelry store was another ruin. A grocer’s across the street was serving as a field hospital. Two doctors were toiling there, patching up damaged villagers.
I recognized a familiar face under a uniform cap — Sergeant Roche of the harbor police — and pushed through the crowd to him.
“Just get here?” he asked as we shook hands. “Or were you in on it?”
“In on it.”
“What do you know?”
“Everything.”
“Who ever heard of a private detective that didn’t,” he joshed as I led him out of the mob.
“Did you people run into an empty boat out in the bay?” I asked when we were away from audiences.
“Empty boats have been floating around the bay all night,” he said.
I hadn’t thought of that.
“Where’s your boat now?” I asked.
“Out trying to pick up the bandits. I stayed with a couple of men to lend a hand here.”
“You’re in luck,” I told him. “Now sneak a look across the street. See the stout old boy with the black whiskers? Standing in front of the druggist’s.”
General Pleshskev stood there, with the woman who had fainted, the young Russian whose bloody cheek had made her faint, and a pale, plump man of forty-something who had been with them at the reception. A little to one side stood big Ignati, the two men-servants I had seen at the house, and another who was obviously one of them. They were chatting together and watching the excited antics of a red-faced property-owner who was telling a curt lieutenant of Marines that it was his own personal private automobile that the bandits had stolen to mount their machine gun on.
“Yes,” said Roche, “I see your fellow with the whiskers.”
“Well, he’s your meat. The woman and two men with him are also your meat. And those four Russians standing to the left are some more of it. There’s another missing, but I’ll take care of that one. Pass the word to the lieutenant, and you can round up those babies without giving them a chance to fight back. They think they’re safe as angels.”
“Sure, are you?” the sergeant asked.
“Don’t be silly!” I growled, as if I had never made a mistake in my life.
I had been standing on my one good prop. When I put my weight on the other to turn away from the sergeant, it stung me all the way to the hip. I pushed my back teeth together and began to work painfully through the crowd to the other side of the street.
The princess didn’t seem to be among those present. My idea was that, next to the general, she was the most important member of the push. If she was at their house, and not yet suspicious, I figured I could get close enough to yank her in without a riot.
Walking was hell. My temperature rose. Sweat rolled out on me.
“Mister, they didn’t none of ’em come down that way.”
The one-legged newsboy was standing at my elbow. I greeted him as if he were my pay-check.
“Come on with me,” I said, taking his arm. “You did fine down there, and now I want you to do something else for me.”
Half a block from the main street I led him up on the porch of a small yellow cottage. The front door stood open, left that way when the occupants ran down to welcome police and Marines, no doubt. Just inside the door, beside a hall rack, was a wicker porch chair. I committed unlawful entry to the extent of dragging that chair out on the porch.
“Sit down, son,” I urged the boy.
He sat, looking up at me with puzzled freckled face. I took a firm grip on his crutch and pulled it out of his hand.
“Here’s five bucks for rental,” I said, “and if I lose it I’ll buy you one of ivory and gold.”
And I put the crutch under my arm and began to propel myself up the hill.
It was my first experience with a crutch. I didn’t break any records. But it was a lot better than tottering along on an unassisted bum ankle.
The hill was longer and steeper than some mountains I’ve seen, but the gravel walk to the Russians’ house was finally under my feet.
I was still some dozen feet from the porch when Princess Zhukovski opened the door.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, and then, recovering from her surprise, “your ankle is worse!”
She ran down the steps to help me climb them. As she came I noticed that something heavy was sagging and swinging in the right-hand pocket of her grey flannel jacket.