Late the next afternoon they were taken into Gulfport on board a Grand Cayman schooner laden with Jamaica timber.
What had become of Rockett, or of any of the rest of the Cavite’s crew they had not the slightest idea. From the upturned boat the sea was a blur of fog. They must have been drifting with some current, for the far-away steamer seemed continually to grow more distant. Expecting her boats, they shouted with what faint voice they could muster; but nothing came of it. If she had sent boats they were invisible; and after nearly an hour they heard the starting of the steamer’s engines, and her pale glow melted into distance.
Tropical though the latitude was, it seemed bitterly cold that night. Lang wore only a coat and trousers over his sleeping suit, and he felt numbed and stiff to the bone. He might have perished, but Carroll, who was fully dressed, had a pocket flask of rum, and pulled him periodically back to life with fiery sips. The bottom of the boat was a most awkward refuge, for they were in constant danger of slipping off; and once Lang, faint and dozing, did go into the sea, to be hauled out again by his companion.
That night seemed longer to Lang than all the rest of his life. The shore seemed a remote impossibility, but he did not know that much-frequented part of the Gulf. When the sun rose there were no less than three ships in sight, all miles away, indeed, but the sight of them was enough to put heart into him, together with the warming effect of the strong sunshine. Carroll, who had expected rescue, was not surprised; and seemed only impatient at the delay before the Grand Cayman schooner came alongside, and her crew with the kindliest solicitude took them aboard, and appropriated the Cavite’s boat as salvage.
During that endless, freezing, hopeless night the two castaways had scarcely exchanged a dozen phrases, yet Lang’s mind had continually reverted in a numb way to Rockett’s last incomprehensible words. “Twelve o’clock—nine and six—the negro digger——” There was no sense in it, and yet the defaulter had evidently been trying to convey some meaning. His house—to the north of Persia—what could that have to do with Automotive Fuel? No meaning could be tortured out of it, and yet Lang’s dazed mind circled round and round the insoluble problem.
But on the schooner, warmed and fed and smoking a Jamaica cigar, he conceived more hope. Rockett had said he trusted him—Heaven knew why! He had said to go “to his house,” and Lang determined to go, if he could find out where that house was. Yes, and he would be there at noon, at nine and at six, and see what these mystic hours might bring.
He turned this over in his mind while, with his surface faculties, he idly discussed with Carroll the probable fate of their shipmates. They had no idea whether the motor boat had been successfully launched, or whether any one had escaped in it. As for Rockett, his fate was hardly even doubtful. Unless picked up at once he could never have survived the plunge and exposure.
“He did speak, you know,” said Carroll suddenly. “I heard him say something to you. What was it?”
Lang felt no call to share his knowledge, such as it was, nor his shadowy theories.
“Clean out of his head, apparently,” he replied. “He muttered about the time of day—said it was nine o’clock and six and noon at his house in the north of Persia. And something about a negro. Has he ever been in Persia?”
Carroll seemed to reflect, and observed Lang’s face with a sidelong glance.
“Persia was Rockett’s post office,” he said at last. “It’s a country store west of Gulfport and about a mile north of the coast road. He lived about two miles north of Persia. We went up the bayou in the launch on our visit; it took us within a hundred yards of his house.”
“A shack and a truck farm, you said?” remarked Lang, trying to look indifferent to this priceless information.
“A little bungalow, rather neat, painted brown with green trimmings. It had an iron fence in front and two magnolia trees at the gate, and a grove of small orange trees at one side. There was a little garage with a Ford in it, too. We left it there.”
“I suppose all that will be sold for the benefit of the creditors,” said Lang.
“I suppose so, if they ever discover that Rockett was the truck farmer. It may be a long time before it’s noticed that the house is deserted. Few people come that way, and the next house is a mile or more away.”
Lang was afraid to fish for more information lest he rouse Carroll’s suspicion. They continued to chat at random, of the Cavite, of her crew, of the failure of their whole scheme, to which Carroll now seemed entirely resigned. They sighted land about the middle of the afternoon, and it was toward sunset when the good sea Samaritans put them ashore on the lumber wharves at Gulfport, refusing any suggestion of reward.
In fact, Lang had only fifteen dollars, which happened by luck to be in his trousers pocket, and he urgently needed to buy a shirt, collar, hat and footwear, though the sailors had given him a worn-out pair of tennis shoes. He walked with Carroll from the water front up to the main street, and there they halted.
“Well, it’s all over,” said Carroll. “I’m going to New Orleans. What do you do? I suppose you’ve lots of friends who’ll be worrying about your disappearance, and medical societies and meetings waiting for you to give them speeches, Doctor Long.”
Lang softened a little to that parting smile. After all, they had been through peril together, and Carroll had almost, if not quite, saved his life after the shipwreck.
“I’m not Doctor Long,” he said with unpremeditated frankness.
Carroll’s expression hardened. He fixed Lang with a sudden, intense stare.
“Then who the devil are you?”
Lang explained briefly, almost apologetically.
“The most curious thing,” he finished, “is that I’m really one of Rockett’s creditors myself. I’ve got twelve thousand dollars of Automotive Fuel certificates in my trunk. You can imagine how interested I was, then, when you——”
Carroll listened, and then exploded into the most uncontrollable laughter.
“Double crossed, by gad!” he ejaculated, choking. “What a—a stroke of luck! You one of Rockett’s suckers? But say, it’s a good thing you didn’t let it out on board that I’d brought the wrong man. Louie’d have put a bullet into me.”
“It made no difference, after all.”
“Not a bit. Lang or Long, it’s all the same, and it’s all over now, and no harm done to anybody, except that we’re all out the money we might have got. But mind, not a word, now! Professional secrecy, you know.”
“Trust me,” said Lang. “I’m not proud of the affair.”
Carroll shook hands with him and went off, still laughing. Lang proceeded to make his few purchases, secured a room at a cheap hotel, where he made himself as presentable as he could, and had himself shaved. He thought of wiring to Eva Morrison, but reflected that he would surely see her the next day. He dined at the hotel, a much worse meal than he had been accustomed to aboard the Cavite, strolled about the street for an hour, and found himself dead weary.
He went to bed before nine o’clock, unstrung and exhausted. He would have to get up long before daylight, he knew, for he was determined to be at Rockett’s bungalow, “north of Persia,” from six to nine.
He needed sleep, but sleep would not come. By fits and starts he dozed, waking from nightmares of the wreck and horrible suggestions of incomprehensible peril, hearing again Rockett’s thick mutter in the darkness, feeling the heave of the drifting boat. Toward morning he did sleep soundly for an hour or two, awakening in terror that he had overslept, but a struck match showed him that it was hardly four o’clock by the dollar watch he had bought the evening before.
He got up wearily, feeling now that he could sleep forever. He dressed and went downstairs, and out upon the dead and deserted streets. An all-night lunch room provided him with breakfast, and, feeling a trifle refreshed, he boarded the west-bound inter-urban electric car that skirts the coast between Biloxi and New Orleans.
He was the only passenger, and he dozed again in his seat, until the conductor told him where to get off for Persia. The east was turning pale as he started up the road leading inland, a sandy road in the twilight, plunging apparently into a dense forest. It turned out merely a belt of swamp bordering a deep, narrow bayou, very likely the one which Carroll’s crew had ascended to reach Rockett’s dwelling. Beyond it the road ascended a little, and the air grew momentarily more transparent. The wayside objects came out ghostly, then solidly, trees, scattered shacks, trim bungalows at far intervals; then in the gray light Lang perceived a wayside store, shuttered and sleeping, with two or three small houses close by.
This must be Persia, and beyond it the dwellings grew more rare. There were strips of pine woods, stretches of peach orchard, fields of last fall’s cornstalks or cotton shrubs, silent and dewy in the pallid daybreak. Lang’s blood quickened and his spirits rose as he tramped on through the intense freshness of the air. Incredible possibilities rose in his mind; things that he might unearth at “six, nine and twelve o’clock,” and he glanced every few minutes at his watch to make sure that he was going to be in time.
He passed a belt of tall, long-leaf pines, stately as palms, a quarter of a mile of desolate, picked cotton bushes, and then he halted, with a sudden catch of his breath.
It must be the place. There was the iron fence, the two magnolia trees at the gate, the plantation of small orange trees, and, fifty feet back from the road, a trim brown bungalow with green doors and window casings as it had been described to him. All the blinds were drawn; it looked empty and dead. But, for that matter, so had all the houses he had passed.
Lang glanced furtively up and down the road, and stepped inside the gate. He felt uncommonly like a criminal as he skulked up the walk, and stepped on the veranda, shooting scared glances in every direction. It took all his nerve to lay hold of the door-knob. It gave; he drew a hard breath, opened the door, whipped inside, and closed it quickly after him.
He was in a small square hall, almost entirely dark, with a door dimly visible on each side. He listened; the house was dead silent. He cautiously pushed open the door at his right.
The air was heavy and rank with stale cigar smoke. All the blinds were close drawn, and the room was dim, but he knew at once that he had come to the right place.
Apparently this was the dining room, square, well furnished, but in great disorder. The round table was shoved back against a wall, and smeared with cigar ash. The rug was kicked into a heap; the sideboard’s drawers stood wide open, half their contents on the floor. A paper rack, a shelf of books, had been thrown pell-mell; and the brick open hearth held a pile of wood ashes and was littered with innumerable cigar stubs.
“This must be where they questioned him—tortured him,” Lang reflected, picturing that scene of ten days ago; and then beyond he saw the open door of the bedroom where they must have awakened him.
The bed was tumbled back, as Rockett must have been dragged out, with a flash light and a pistol in his face. A lamp stood on the small table, with a pipe, a pouch, a turned-down book—a work on geology, as he noticed with surprise. This room also had been ransacked, the bureau drawers emptied on the floor, the clothes closet turned out, with the contents of a trunk and a couple of suit cases in a huge, mixed heap of clothing and all sorts of miscellanies.
Beyond the dining room was the kitchen, into which he merely glanced. Returning to the hall, he opened the other door, which let him into a room containing little furniture beyond a tripod easel and a palette lying beside it, smeared with caked colors, a chair or two and a table littered with paint tubes, brushes and all the apparatus of an artist. On the walls were pinned a score or so of sketches, not clearly visible in the curtained room, but each of them bore a numbered paper label, as if in reference to a catalogue.
Lang was astonished to find that Rockett had dabbled in art, but the room contained nothing of significance. Beyond it was another bedroom, torn pell-mell like the first.
The crew of the Cavite had found nothing, nor did Lang, and he did not clearly know what he had expected to find. He went back through the other side of the house, into the kitchen, and let himself out the back door to have a look at the exterior.
The air was wonderfully sweet after the foulness of the close rooms. The yard was of smooth, hard sand, running over to a row of peach trees, with a long strawberry plot beyond it, and the orange grove lay beyond. A bed of brilliant cannas grew by the house, and a driveway led toward the rear, to a small garage, empty now, with wide-open doors.
There was a shed with a quantity of gardening tools. Farther back stood an unusually large wild-orange tree, with dozens of the glowing golden globes still hanging in the glossy foliage. Beyond it stood two cement posts, perhaps intended for a future gateway, each overgrown with a climbing rose vine; but the earth between them had been made into a bed of winter lettuce, just sprouting aboveground.
Lang glanced at his watch, and saw that it was five minutes to six. He darted back into the house, sat down in the dining room and waited, almost holding his breath, watch in hand.
The pointer crept slowly past the XII on the dial. Five minutes past—ten. The silence hung dead. Nothing happened. He did not see how anything could happen in this deserted house, but he sat, still waiting, though he put the watch away, till suddenly he had a revelation.
He saw the negro digger!
It hung on the wall in front of him, over the mantel, in a brown frame. It was a vigorous, if somewhat crudely painted sketch in oils of a negro laborer, barearmed and barenecked, up to his waist in a hole in the earth. An orange tree full of fruit was over his head; on either side was a pillar thick with climbing roses. He was looking upward at the sun with a pleased grin, and the title was painted on the picture frame: “Twelve o’clock.”
Time for dinner; that point was plain enough. Plain enough, too, was the scene—the cement gateposts Lang had seen behind the house. With a glimpse of the reality, he rushed into the studio room again, pulled up the curtains, and looked at the sketches numbered from six to nine. They all represented the same spot in the garden, from different angles, but without the digger.
Lang caught the hint, unmistakable now. He ran back for another look at the digger, then burst out through the kitchen into the garden. He seized a spade and pick in the tool shed, hurried to the rose-crowned posts, and began to dig between them.
The earth was soft and sandy, easy digging. He threw it out furiously, going down a couple of feet without striking anything but stones. Then he lengthened the excavation like a trench and got into it, using the pick now. He went another foot deeper, sweating and excited, and then the tool struck something hard, and slipped. He had it uncovered in another moment; it seemed black and square, and, getting the spade under it, he heaved it out.
It was a metal box, about a foot square and six inches deep, one of those sheet-steel boxes used for valuables. He heard something rattle inside it, but it was not very heavy; and it was disappointingly evident at once that it could never hold all the plunder Rockett was said to have carried away. It was locked, of course. He fumbled with it for a moment, and then, becoming conscious that he was in full view of the road, he hastened into the house to examine it.
He put it on the kitchen table, and brushed off the clinging earth. The lock did not look very elaborate, and he took out his own bunch of keys that had luckily stayed safe in his trousers pocket all through the wreck, and began to try one after another.
One of them almost fitted. He could feel the lock give, but it stuck. He was twisting it to and fro, wholly absorbed in the effort, when the front door of the house suddenly, sharply opened and shut again.
Every atom of breath seemed to leave his body. He sat benumbed with fright, as paralyzed as Rockett himself had been, unable to get up, or escape or try to conceal the box. A quick step crossed the dining room; the door opened, and Carroll stepped into the kitchen, surveying Lang smilingly and without surprise.