Hampers were unloaded. Chinaman opened them and brought out the two prisoners. They loaded Markham and Hungerfeld in the back of Leng Doy’s big sedan. A Chinaman took his place between the bound victims.
Leng Doy and Dave Callard pulled up the folding seats of the seven-passenger car and joined the guard who was between Hungerfeld and Markham.
Two other Chinamen took the front seat. One handled the wheel and backed the sedan from the alley.
The second sedan followed, also loaded with yellow-faced occupants. Two Chinamen remained to take away the laundry truck.
Two cars sped northward along an avenue. The setting sun was shining from across the broad North River. The big sedans were bound on a trip that would parallel the Hudson for a course of more than sixty miles. High-powered vehicles, they were due to clip the mileage in a hurry.
A race had begun; its goal a forgotten vessel in the ghost fleet below Poughkeepsie. Into that mad game had come a new contestant. David Callard, wanted for murder, was riding with a group of yellow-skinned allies to find the goal chosen by his dead uncle.
The only men who could have told of the invading yellow horde were prisoners in the hands of Leng Doy’s Chinese. Dave Callard, through his daring coup, had snatched away Justin Hungerfeld and Detective Sergeant Markham without the knowledge of the law.
Nor did The Shadow, his own goal set, have evidence of the swift invasion that had worked so silently within the walls of the old Hotel Albana.
CHAPTER XVIII. THE GHOST FLEET
IT was twilight above the Hudson River. A dim afterglow persisted over the high hills that flanked the broad surface of the stream. Placid, the river held a silver sheen between the rugged, darkened banks.
Moored below the shelter of a high cliff lay the ghost fleet. Proud vessels lingering to ruin, these ships deserved the title that they had gained. The flotilla spoke of vanished hopes. These hulks were but specters of the past.
By day, the ships of the ghost fleet displayed the marks of time. Their rusted sides; their tilted beams; such factors showed them to be useless relics that no purchaser would buy. Dusk, however, had softened the grimness of the ghost fleet. Beneath the gloaming, the forgotten vessels looked respectable once more.
The ghost fleet! Perhaps the significance of the name lay in the fact that at night alone could an observer picture these ships as active farers of the seas. A melancholy touch seemed to brood above the time-aged craft that lay anchored so close to the towering shore.
There were men about the ghost fleet. Some, perhaps, had come there like filings drawn to a magnet.
Riffraff, human derelicts who shunned respectable habitations. There were others, hired to watch these depreciating ships. Some of them were men of little caliber, for these scum-surfaced hulks did not require guards of capability. Outside of heavy fittings, rotting lifeboats and rusted anchor chains, these boats contained very little of value. Most of them had been dismantled by their owners.
A few of the ships still had skeleton crews. These were composed chiefly of old sailors who kept to themselves. They wanted no visitors aboard their boats; they received none. They knew how to deal with roustabouts. The riffraff kept away from them.
Such was the case aboard the Steamship Xerxes. Moored near the lower end of the decadent row, this squatly, old-fashioned vessel presented a better appearance than its fellows. The Xerxes was a comparatively recent comer to the ghost fleet. Its painted hulk and superstructure looked presentable even by daylight.
SEATED on the deck of the old ship was a portly, broad-faced man who puffed his pipe contentedly in the gloom. This was Captain Jund, master and reputed owner of the Xerxes.
Though his past career had carried him to many foreign ports, though he had weathered typhoons off Asiatic shores, the portly skipper did not seem burdened with unhappy recollections of the past.
A lantern was swinging along the deck of the Xerxes. It passed beyond a corner that marked the beginning of a short row of cabins. That lantern was carried by a member of the crew. For Jund’s ship, though lightly manned, had men on duty day and night.
A blaring shriek split the darkened air. Captain Jund gazed shoreward. On an embankment above, a limited was whizzing through the night, along the tracks which streaked this side of the Hudson.
Jund heard the whistle of the locomotive come to an eerie finish. He watched the clattering string of lighted cars that went speeding by. As the train faded past a bend, the old sea captain resumed his puffing at the ancient pipe.
Another whistle, its blast faint and far away. Jund looked across the river to view a slowly moving light upon the farther shore. A freight was plodding northward; the clicks of its car wheels could scarcely be heard at this distance.
Jund’s eyes narrowed suddenly as he glimpsed another light at greater height. He rose from his chair and went to the rail; from that point, he studied the twinkle as it crossed the river, a few hundred feet above the stream.
“What’re you watching, skipper?”
Jund turned at the question to see a man with a lantern. It was one of the crew, coming to make a report.
The captain pointed down the river.
“That light,” he explained. “I’d say it was an airplane in trouble. It’s down mighty low, with these cliffs on both sides of the river. Do you agree to that, Jessup?”
“Guess you’re right, captain. Only it’s kind of odd, ain’t it, a plane moving as slow as that?”
“May be an amphibian,” decided Jund. “Trying to land on the water. Well, he’s got over to this shore, anyhow.”
The plane had traveled out of sight beyond a projecting cliff that was just below the ghost fleet. Jund and Jessup watched for the light. It did not reappear.
“Might have landed on the flat,” suggested the seaman. “Just past them trees, captain. Plenty of space there, between the trees and the railroad.”
“It would be a bad landing spot, though. Maybe not with some of those new planes. After all, that was a slow mover. Might even have been an autogyro.”
CAPTAIN JUND turned back toward his chair. Jessup followed and spoke in a cautious tone, just as the portly man sat down.
“Sorry to be bothering you, skipper,” he remarked. “But the men ain’t liking it so much as they did. Kind of itching to get ashore. Guess this life is making them weary.”
“There is no cause for that, Jessup,” admonished Jund. “The work is easy aboard ship. They are well fed and well paid. Every member of the crew should have put by a tidy sock by this time.”
“That’s just it, skipper. You know what a sailor’s like when he’s got shore money. An’ your orders is to stay aboard, all the time.”
“Blow me down! Well, I guess there’s no way to keep a sailor from grumbling. But I like it aboard, Jessup. I don’t ever expect to go to sea again. Not unless it’s on a passenger boat; and a good one. They can’t make them too big for me to like them. No, sir, Jessup.”
“If the men was knowing, sir, when this is going to wind up, they’d be less troubled, I’m thinking. It’s the winter ahead that may be bothering them.”
“So that’s it, eh? Well, that’s different, Jessup. I’ve kept that secret until now; but I guess I can give them the news. We’re staying here until December fifteenth.”
“That’s different, skipper. All right for me to tell ‘em, you say?”
“Yes, Jessup, yes. Tell them that if nobody buys this old girl before December fifteenth, I’ll leave the Xerxes to rot with the rest of these tubs. Maybe I’ll do it sooner; but you had better say the fifteenth.”