I WAS up early in the morning, and, as was my custom, put on trunks to take a dip before breakfast. I crossed the road and walked through the shipyard to the end of the pier and dived into the cool water. Jane Teach had not been on the deck of her ketch when I looked in that direction from the pier, but she was there as I swam past, also in her swimming suit.
"Good morning, yokel," she said.
I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to ask questions I had not asked the other night, so I turned and took hold of the ladder. She leaned over, unsmiling.
"What you smell," she said, "is coffee."
"That sounds," said I, "like an invitation."
"There can also be eggs and toast."
If I could have been sure my only desire was to ask questions, I would have had no reluctance about climbing aboard, but I was not sure that an inquisition was not a mere pretext. I was apprehensive that my real reason was a desire to be in her presence and to look at her and listen to her queer, detached way of talking. She noted my hesitation.
"Take it or leave it," she said.
I climbed aboard and dripped on the deck. Jane tossed me a towel and went below.
"How many eggs?" she called presently.
"Six," I said, for that was my usual breakfast.
"Good Lord!" she exclaimed. "I'd as soon keep a Great Dane!"
I heard shells breaking and the sizzling of grease. Jane was whistling, and it sounded pleasant. "Come and get it!" she called.
I scrounged to go down into the tiny cabin, where she stood over a little stove, and the coffee and eggs smelled good. She looked cool, and was unhurried and sure in her movements, but not at all like a chef in her brief bathing suit.
"Domestic scene," she said. "Damn the grease! It spatters I . . . Cat got your tongue?" She was staccato, nipping off her sentences and pronouncing each word crisply.
"So you can cook!" I said, thinking of nothing else to say.
"You'd be astonished at what I can do," she said. "And doubtless will be."
She shovelled eggs on a platter and put them, with a plate of toast, on the tiny table.
"I suppose you drink coffee out of a washtub," she said. "Your upkeep must be appalling. Fly at it."
She sat down opposite me and wore a quizzical look as I went to work on my eggs. When I eat I eat, so I attended strictly to business until the platter was empty and three cups of coffee had washed down toast and eggs. Then I leaned back.
She was watching me with amused eyes and a curl to her lip. "You're brisk, stimulating company," she said.
"I don't chatter," said I, "but I listen very well."
"Cosy, isn't it?" she asked, and was amused about something.
It was cosy and I liked it, but I was not going to say so.
She was beautiful, and she made you very inquisitive to know what she was thinking about, which is a quality not all women have; and she was aloof and somehow impersonal, so that you felt that she was not participating in things, but was a spectator. Her eyes made me uneasy, and she was aware of it and enjoyed it.
I was embarrassed sitting so close to her across the table, and she so scantily clad. Naturally, I wanted to look at her, but was afraid she would catch me at it. Any man would want to look at her.
"Shy," she said, "and modest."
"There could be worse defects," I told her, and then I plunged. "What were you doing in the bushes the other night?"
"Snooping," she said promptly.
"Who burgled the house?" I asked.
"Larsen," she said.
"He didn't find anything?" I asked.
"His hands were empty when he went away from here."
"If you keep on snooping," I said, "you're going to get hurt."
"You can't get dividends without making an investment," she said. "I risk my beautiful silky skin in the hope of making profits."
"Do you think about nothing but money?" I asked.
"Not during business hours," she said. "At the moment, that means twenty-four hours a day."
"How," I asked, "did you get into this fracas?"
"By the side door," she said unsmilingly.
"It's odd," I said, more to myself than to her, "to be sitting here as if we were old acquaintances, when I know absolutely nothing about you. Who you are. Where you came from. What you came from."
"Would you like to know?"
"No," I said too promptly.
"Then," she said, "it shouldn't bother you."
"Right," I said. "But it would be too bad to bust someone on the snoot for making insinuations, and then find I was wrong."
She looked at me without change of expression. "Whom," she asked, "did you bust?"
"Nobody, but it was a near thing. The Cullover twins," I told her. "I lost my temper."
"Nice of you," she said, and the way she said it made me think of a cat tiptoeing across a hot floor. "What did they insinuate?"
"About you and Count Van Breslau."
"Indeed! Of a personal or business nature?"
"Personal," I said.
I wanted her to say there was nothing to it, and to be angry, but she did neither.
"Fancy that," she said. "And you? Was it merely the righteous rage of a perfect gentleman at hearing a lady's name bandied? Or was there a touch of jealousy?"
"Nonsense!" I snapped.
"I just thought I'd ask," she said. "Any other innuendoes?"
"The count," I told her, "is of the school of thought that thinks you killed Hartman."
"If I did," she said, "you can bet I enjoyed it."
And that was that. No denials nor explanations nor counter-accusations. Just a half-amused, ironic attitude toward the thing.
She looked down at herself and perked her lovely head. "So beautiful and yet so wicked," she said.
"Miss Teach," I said.
"Six of my eggs entitle you to call me 'Jane'," she told me.
"Right. What I was going to say is that I don't know much about women."
"I'm astonished. I thought you wrote a book."
"I mean," I said fumblingly, "about potentialities. About what stirs them up. About emotions and what emotions might cause them to do."
"Quite a wholesale order," she said. "Specify."
"Well," said I, "let's take a swell girl. I mean a fine person that you would always bank on to stay in the upper brackets of decency. A girl you'd trust from soup to nuts, come hell or high water. That you would swear your Bible oath never thought a thing that wasn't out of the flower garden."
"There ain't no sich animile," said Jane.
"And who," I went on firmly, "is in love with a man."
"They do that," Jane said.
"What I'm getting at," said I, "is: Could such a girl blow up all of a sudden and—"
"Heave her bonnet over the woodshed?" Jane asked.
"Worse," I said. "Could she, loving one man and abhorring all another man was, and being afraid of him, be so affected by something in that other man that she would do something ghastly?"
Jane puckered her lips.
"Sure, pop!" she said succinctly.
"Could all this," I asked, "happen between two winks?"
"Between one wink," she said, and then, "So your Nell Ryder has collided with Count Van Breslau?"
"It frightened me," I said.
"It probably frightened her. But did the count go for her?"
"I think it rather frightened him. It was as if something swatted him between the eyes and he couldn't believe it. As if he were appalled that such a thing could happen to him."
"Who," she said bitterly, "thought himself impervious. Who mowed 'em down, high, wide and handsome, from duchesses to dancers, and left 'em where they dropped!"
She whistled between her white teeth. "And now, himself to be conked by a dairy maid."
"Nell's not a dairy maid," I said.
"She'll do till one comes along," Jane said. "So it's happened to Van Breslau!"
She half closed her eyes. "Did I tell you he is the one man in the world I'm afraid of?"
"Yes."
"Because," she said, "in addition to being pure poison, he does things to you. He's out of the jungle, and he makes you want to go back into the jungle with him. When he was a cave man he didn't have to drag them home by the hair; they crawled after him, caterwauling. But if, now, he's gone up in flames about a woman, it's time for folks to hold their hats. There'll be a high wind."
"What can I do?" I asked.
"You! Well, short of shooting him from ambush, you can do nothing but let nature take its course."
"I won't abide it," I said. "I won't let anything happen to Nell."
"Did you ever see an avalanche?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Did you feel you could cope with it?" she asked.
"I can cope with Van Breslau."
She measured me with her eyes. "I'm not so sure," she said slowly. "But, boy, wouldn't it be a sight to see!"
"The enthusiasm," I said tartly, "to see the count and me come head-on is unanimous. We could give up treasure hunting and make more money selling tickets."
She compressed her lips and shivered. "It seems to be moving that way," she said, almost in a whisper. "Things are pushing. Maybe it's one of those inevitable clashes. Maybe it is."
"I'm commencing to have a funny feeling about it myself," I admitted.
"But you like him," she said.
"And," said I, "he likes me."
"You'd better," she said, "raise your ration to eight eggs and go in training."
Then her face clouded. "Your leg!" she said.
"About as good as new," I told her.
She leaned back and lifted her pencilled brows. The eyes underneath them were beautiful and ironic and faintly amused. "Did you like having breakfast with me?" she asked.
"Yes," I told her.
"But," she said and the amusement in her eyes increased, "there's something you would like to know."
"Many things," I said.
"One in particular," she said, and it was almost a taunt. "You would like to know if a man has ever had breakfast with me before. The count particularly."
"Perhaps I don't care," I said.
"You're a great yokel," she said. "Someday I may tell you. If it seems important."
"To which of us?" I asked.
"To me, of course," she rejoined. Then her face clouded. "If harm came to Miss Ryder, it would hurt you," she said.
"I can think of nothing that would hurt me more. It is more than a friendship—the thing that is between Nell and John and myself."
"But as it is—even if nothing poisonous happens—you will be left alone if they marry, the threesome will come to an end. You will be left dangling."
"I've thought of that," I answered.
It was not pleasant to contemplate—that day when they two, because of the obligations of love and marriage and children, would draw closer to each other and move away from me. It would no longer be we three. It would be they two, with myself lonely on the outside. It would have to be that way. They would not want it so, but they would be unable to help themselves. I would be left alone.
"You do not love her yourself?" she asked, and bent a little toward me.
"Not that way. I love her, but not as she loves John and he loves her."
"Why?" she asked.
That puzzled me. Why didn't I love her? Why, when John and I came to manhood, had we not become rivals? I did not know. It was the first time I ever had considered the point. Nothing could have been more natural, coming to maturity together as we had, that I also should have desired Nell. But I never had desired her, not to have her for my wife, nor ever considered the possibility of it. Now Jane Teach made me wonder why.
"Well?" she asked, as if the point were important and she desired to know the answer.
So I gave the answer, and it surprised me, as if the answer had come out of some other mind and heart than my own, as if it had been spoken by a stranger. I listened to it as I would have listened to the words of some third person, and it astonished me as would some strange disclosure of fact.
"Why," I said, "she is not what I want. What she is would not fit what I am. The beauty that she has is a fine beauty, but it would not excite me. Her mind is a fine, quick, daring mind, but it would not satisfy me. I would understand her. I would anticipate her thoughts. I would know what she was going to do. She would never enrage me or make me doubt, and I would never be afraid of her."
And then I finished with a thing that did not seem to come out of my own mind or to express myself as I ever had thought about myself and any woman.
"With Nell," I said, "marriage would not be an adventure. I could not endure marriage with a woman that I wasn't afraid, every day of my life, might cut up a caper, or vanish, or leave me for a better man, or do some deed that would leave me gasping. An unpredictable woman."
Jane was looking at me strangely, not ironically or superciliously, but with an odd intentness and something like sympathy and understanding, and when she spoke, it was softly—softly for her.
"Yokel," she said, "she might leave you for another man. But shiver my timbers if I think it would be for a better man. On top of which I might observe that you have a soupcon of the unpredictable yourself."
I was silent and embarrassed, for I never had talked so much about what lay deep within me to any living being. Nor could I understand how it came about that I had tried to express myself to this girl.
"I've made up my mind," she said.
"About what?"
"Things you wouldn't understand," she said shortly. "I've liked having you for breakfast. For a yokel, you are quite a yokel."
She paused and stared down at the dish on the table before her. "You like Count Van Breslau," she said. "I would guess that he likes you in return. But stick this on your spindle, my man: When you like him most and he seems to like you most, that's the time to hone a cutting edge on your suspicions and be ready for hurricanes."
It was a dismissal. I got up, standing stooped, for the cabin was low, and moved toward the companionway. There I paused and turned to stare at her, not because she was a beautiful girl and worth staring at but because she puzzled me.
"I don't know a blasted thing about you," I said.
"You don't," she said, "know a blasted thing about any woman. But," she added, "you have something that may get you past without it."
"What?" I asked.
"It would disappear," she said, "if you ever came to know it existed."
And then, with an angular sort of gesture that was most attractive, she said, "Scat!"
I mounted to the deck, and her voice followed me. "Drat it," she said in her dry, brittle voice, "I suppose I've got to play on your team."
"I haven't asked you," I said.
"And lucky for you that you didn't," she answered.
Which I did not at all understand as I dived into the cool water and swam for shore. It had been a puzzling conversation.
I found John waiting for me at the house, and in a cold rage.
"Trotter," he said through his teeth, "is dead!"
Trotter was an old shepherd dog, not pedigreed, but a greater dog than any with lineage I have ever known. We loved him.
"How did he die?" I asked.
"His neck was broken," he said, "by the man who broke into the house and stole your notes on the Gillan treasure!"
His lips were white. "If I catch him I'll choke him if every jury in America calls it murder!"
"My Gillan notes!" I said.
"All of them in that envelope."
I breathed deeply.
"There's only one man I know," said I, "who could break a big dog's neck. Who would be fast enough and strong enough."
"Where do we find him?" John asked.
"No," I said. "It's not the time. There is no proof. And it isn't the right pretext. I'll need a better reason than even Trotter."
I forced him ahead of me into the house and made him stand by while I dressed.
"So now," I said, "someone knows what we are searching for, and what reason we have to believe it is somewhere to be found."