The Daughter of the Hawk Page 4

  And so the Hammerfest ran on southward into the tall seas and eternal westerly winds, turned eastward through the towering cliffs of the Straits of Magellan, and cast anchor in Punta Arenas. Here, while the ballast was discharged and the cargo shipped, Dawkins remained discreetly out of the way of casual observation—with Captain Andersen’s voiceless approval. For at Punta Arenas the news of the fearful outbreak at Birds Island, which cost the lives of a hundred soldiers and a hundred and fifty convicts, was already to hand—such news as leaked out despite President Eguia’s careful censorship. Dawkins observed that Captain Andersen was looking at him sometimes with a puzzled expression, but he was asked no further questions. Captain Andersen, at the back of his slow Swedish mind, could draw a sufficiently vivid mental picture of the blood and slaughter of the mutiny, and he did not care very much how much blood was on Dawkins’ hands; he fancied there was a great deal more than there actually was.

  For Dawkins was a somber and an impressive figure, with his huge shoulders and hands, and his mass of tawny hair and beard, and the fierce scowl on his narrow brow above his narrowed blue eyes. He said nothing for days together, while the Hammerfest came crashing home across the Atlantic, and it was not his total lack of Norwegian nor the other’s partial lack of English which held him silent. He had lost the habit of speech in the prison compound on Birds Island—and besides, his brain was busy with a manifold complexity of thoughts. He would stand by the wheel speechless for hours, with his glance shifting slowly and casually from the full-drawing canvas to the sea, pondering over what possibly lay before him in the future.

  Dawkins had the mind of a man of action, not that of a dreamer. Confronted with a sudden emergency and a desperate need to act immediately he would react brilliantly and instinctively, as he had done on Birds Island and a hundred times before that, but plotting and planning were not so much in his line. He had been outplotted before, by a thieving pawnbroker’s assistant in England, just after the war, which was why he had left England in a hurry, and ultimately why he had joined the Hawk’s insurgent army and been sent to Birds Island. Not that he was not guilty; he had been guilty all right, but he had been lacking in the finesse to avoid discovery. It was one more example of the curious way in which the world is constructed, that a man of Dawkins’ thews and sinews and heavy mentality should have been, first, a pawnbroker’s assistant, and, second, that he should have been subjected to the temptation to which he fell. But Dawkins’ family was, as has already been mentioned, a younger line of the great pawnbroking family of Dawkins, so that it is not altogether surprising.

  So that while the gray skies of the Horn were being succeeded by the blue skies of the Tropics, and then by the clear freshness of the Trades, Henry Dawkins was trying to plan his future. A man with something over a hundred thousand pounds in precious stones tied in his shirt-tail (for he continued to use that hiding-place, as the most convenient) has need to consider his next step warily.

  Money, just as money, had indeed a certain definite appeal for him. He felt a thrill of pleasure at the anticipation of being rich. But he had small notion of what he wanted his riches to give him. Women and wine of course bulked large in the faint picture. Lust he knew; it had taken him by the throat and rendered him captive many times before this, when he had been a younger man and on leave from active service in France. He supposed, philosophically, that it would do the same again as soon as he set foot on shore. And he felt a glow of warm anticipation such as he could remember of old. Drink? The freedom of being able to drink, yes, but Dawkins did not look forward to lots of drink. A year of total abstention on Birds Island had blunted that desire, just as it had sharpened the other one. All the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah had festered and smoldered in the prison compound, though; Dawkins’ nose wrinkled with distaste at the memory of things seen.

  His yearning for vague women and vaguer drinks was dulled by the need he was impressing upon himself for caution at the start. A debauch descried faintly through the turns and twists of a preliminary policy holds small appeal, and Dawkins was rigidly holding himself to the resolution that he must not relax until the plunder in his shirt-tail was properly disposed of—he could foresee how necessary it would be to be cautious, even though only the faint outline of a plan was in his mind.

  And then, above and beyond all these other considerations, there was running continually through Dawkins’ mind the memory of a promise made to the Hawk—a promise made to a dying man. “Sixty-one Field Hill, Norwood,” said Dawkins to himself, over and over again. It was an address he had carried in his mind during a whole year in the prison camp on Birds Island; it was the address of the Hawk’s stepmother in England, where the Hawk had left his daughter on setting out on his last unlucky journey to the Rainless Coast. Dawkins had promised, if ever he found his way home, to seek out this Miss Royle and tell her that her father was dead, and, if possible, to see that she wanted for nothing. The memory of this promise was small comfort to Dawkins. Although he had made it when he expected nothing more than death by torture at Eguia’s hands, and was now prepared to fulfill it as a man of wealth, the mission did not attract him at all. He had loved the Hawk even while he feared him, and the thought of telling his daughter (whom he pictured in his mind as an exceedingly able woman, sensitive and mercurial like the Hawk himself) of his death raised grim apprehension in his mind.

  So that Dawkins had ample food for thought as he paced moodily about the deck of the Hammerfest. Officers and men thought him fey, and left him severely alone—for which he was grateful. He had offered, in his sullen awkward fashion, to help in the work of the ship, but, short-handed though the Hammerfest was, in common with all Scandinavian ships, his proffered unskilled labor was declined. The favorable weather which accompanied the Hammerfest all the way from the Virgins to Ushant even excited the superstitious fears of the Finns and Norwegians; they thought that somehow this burly bearded stranger was responsible for the snorting southwesterly gales which drove them homeward on what was nearly a record passage, and they gave him a wide berth in consequence. Dawkins grew gloomier and more self-contained every day of the trip, and felt no thrill of elation even when they picked up English lights at nightfall, nor when dawn revealed the English coast on the port beam.

  Uneventfully they picked up their pilot and their tug, and at evening one autumn day they came stealing into London Docks. Dawkins and the ship’s officers bade each other unemotional good-bys, and directly afterward, baggageless and free, Dawkins made an unobtrusive landing.

  Chapter VII

  Mr. Simpson was just beginning to consider closing down his shop. His assistants had had their eyes on the clock for the last hour, and were now fidgeting restlessly as a hint to Mr. Simpson to give the word. A strange little man was Mr. Simpson, with his bald head and his dead-fish eyes, but he was a very successful man. It is the good fortune of few to combine successfully the professions of pawnbroking and receiving stolen goods, but Mr. Simpson had carried on undetected for years, even at the cost of a rumored bad name in confidential pawnbroking circles. His little East End shop served admirably as a screen for his other activities from the eyes of the police.

  Just as Mr. Simpson was about to give the word to close the shop the door opened and some one entered with a heavy tread. The assistants looked at him with annoyance, Mr. Simpson with interest. He was very tall and very powerfully built, dressed in a badly fitting suit of clothes which obviously came from a merchant ship’s slop-chest, and his features were blurred by a big tawny beard and a shock of tawny hair. Mr. Simpson was chiefly conscious of the gaze of a pair of fierce, puzzled, blue eyes beneath a scowling desperate brow. The newcomer slipped his hand in his pocket and looked round hesitatingly. He made as though to speak to an assistant, hesitated, withdrew his hand and put it back again. The facial expression, the gestures, the sequence of behavior all told Mr. Simpson the reason of his entrance; Mr. Simpson did not, of course, know that Dawkins of dire necessity was acting superbly a part w
hich he had been rehearsing all the way from Punta Arenas.

  “Do you want to speak to me, mister?” asked Mr. Simpson, and Dawkins nodded.

  “Then just come in here a moment. Brown, you see to shutting up.”

  And Mr. Simpson ushered Dawkins into his little private office, thanking his stars that this blundering sailor had come into the shop and had not entered one of the little confessional boxes round the corner where perhaps an assistant would have attended to him. Mr. Simpson switched on an additional light over the green baize table and waited, running his eyes keenly over his visitor. Those clothes, those big horny hands, that lumbering gait, indicated the sailor to Mr. Simpson as plainly as words could have done; the mistake was at least pardonable, but Mr. Simpson could not at present guess with any certainty at the nationality of his visitor.

  “Well?” asked Mr. Simpson.

  For answer Dawkins drew from his pocket a little cloth bag, hardly bigger than a glove finger, and emptied it upon the green baize table. Six perfect large pearls rolled upon the cloth, all of them rose pink, four of them round and two of them drop shape—a magnificent pair.

  “Ah,” said Mr. Simpson. “Um.”

  He stretched out a finger and rolled them over. He held them to the light. He screwed a lens into his eye and gazed at them through that. He weighed them in his palm, and then (although so delicate was his touch that such an operation was almost unnecessary) he weighed them on his jeweler’s scales.

  “What d’you want to do with these? Pawn them?” he asked.

  “Sell ’em,” was the laconic rejoinder.

  “Um,” said Mr. Simpson again. Then, suddenly, “What ship are you off?”

  “Hammerfest” answered Mr. Dawkins throatily, “from ’Frisco.”

  “Ah,” said Mr. Simpson, thinking rapidly. He knew of the extensive trade in stolen pearls carried on in San Francisco, and he saw nothing surprising in a sailor from thence having pearls in his possession. But still he could not guess at Dawkins’ nationality.

  “Why did you come here?” asked Mr. Simpson, firing his question suddenly, hoping to take Dawkins off his guard.

  “Mr. Jones told me.”

  “Where did you see him?”

  “ ‘Frisco.”

  “Um,” said Mr. Simpson again.

  He knew no Mr. Jones, and especially no Mr. Jones of ’Frisco, but that did not mean the stranger was lying. For the man who told him might (and probably did) have very good reason for using a false name. But this big stupid Swede (Mr. Simpson had almost made up his mind that Dawkins was a Swede) was not laying any trap; Mr. Simpson was sure of it.

  “These aren’t any use to me,” said Mr. Simpson. “They’re too well known.”

  “Not well known. New’uns.”

  That was perfectly true, as Mr. Simpson realized. No pearls of this class had been lately stolen, as far as Mr. Simpson’s knowledge—which was fairly extensive, he flattered himself—went.

  “What’s your name, anyway?” asked Mr. Simpson, changing the subject in an abrupt fashion, which he had frequently found useful.

  “Hansen,” replied Dawkins stolidly. “Ole Hansen.”

  “Well, all I can say, Mr. Hansen, is—take ‘em away. They’re no use to me. Take ‘em away.”

  Unmoved and immobile of feature, Dawkins began slowly to replace the pearls in the little bag.

  “Oh, blast it all,” said the exasperated Mr. Simpson. “Here, let’s have another look at ‘em.”

  He stared at them again, lingeringly, through his lens at each in turn.

  “Give you a fiver for ’em,” he said at length grudgingly.

  “Twenty-five,” said Dawkins heavily.

  “Not worth it. Five’s as far as I can go. Six perhaps.”

  “Twenty-five,” said Dawkins again.

  Mr. Simpson’s fingers itched and twittered. Twenty-five pounds was exactly the top limit of what he was prepared to pay for these pearls worth a hundred and fifty, but it cut him to the quick to have to hand over all that money to a lumbering Swede who would probably squander every penny that same night. Brown, his trusted henchman, was in the outer office, and the other clerks had gone. But Mr. Simpson, although he had an automatic pistol under his left armpit, could not contemplate violence with fifteen stone of berserk strength within two yards of him. Perhaps cunning could replace violence.

  “ ’ere, ’ave a drink,” said Mr. Simpson, opening a wall cupboard and revealing a whisky bottle with glasses and siphons all tantalizingly displayed.

  But Dawkins’ wooden expression did not change.

  “No,” he said rudely enough. “Do you want these?”

  He pointed at the pearls with a blunt horny finger, and he made a significant gesture with the little bag in his other hand.

  “Look ‘ere, I’ll give you ten for ‘em, and take a chance,” said Mr. Simpson.

  “Twenty-five,” said Dawkins.

  Mr. Simpson rebelled against this inflexible demand. He slapped the table pettishly; he gesticulated vehemently; he argued and he pleaded. But simultaneously his offers rose, a pound or so at a time. He shed a tear or two when they reached eighteen.

  “Twenty-five,” said Dawkins, inexorable as fate.

  Mr. Simpson took a drink, but again his offer of one was refused monosyllabically.

  “Well, twenty, then,” said Mr. Simpson desperately.

  “Twenty-five,” said Dawkins, and Simpson realized at last that he really meant it. Even the cunning Mr. Simpson had not guessed that Dawkins would have been seriously embarrassed if Mr. Simpson had been sincere when he told Dawkins to take the pearls away.

  Mr. Simpson produced the money. He made a moment’s play with five-pound notes, but a passionate gesture from Dawkins made him put them away again. The money was handed over in one-pound notes, which Dawkins stuffed into his breast pocket. And then Dawkins withdrew by a series of well-planned movements—so well planned that their elaboration of caution almost passed unnoticed. He opened the door behind him with his back to it and his face to Mr. Simpson, passed through backward with inconspicuous haste, wheeled to meet the faithful Brown, and strode through to the outside door, which Brown, a little unprepared, unlocked for him. In the next instant Dawkins was through into the outer darkness, before Mr. Simpson in the inner chamber had finished locking his safe. It was two seconds after Dawkins had disappeared before Mr. Simpson leaped into the outer shop.

  “ ‘ave you let ‘im go, you something fool?” demanded Simpson. “Foller ‘im then, quick. Find out ‘oo ‘e is and where ‘e’s staying. Quick, you pie-can.”

  But two seconds is all a man needs to evade pursuit when he knows he is going to be pursued. The faithful Brown could gain no sight anywhere of a tall bearded Swede. Later, a couple of days’ detective work on the part of Mr. Simpson discovered that a ship Hammerfest had undoubtedly come in that day from ‘Frisco, and that she undoubtedly had on board a seaman called Hansen.

  But when Mr. Simpson at last tracked down this Hansen he found he resembled the man with the pearls in no way whatever—a discovery which irritated and worried Mr. Simpson profoundly, so that he parted with the six pearls to an Amsterdam dealer with such precipitation as to cost him a good deal of money. And, after all, there was no danger to any one of established position about selling those pearls. Dawkins had only chosen that method to obtain a quick sale and no questions asked.

  That was the last night that the tawny beard and the mop of hair were to be seen, for Mr. Dawkins, safely back in his sailor’s lodging-house, spent a grisly half-hour with scissors and razor removing them. He had taken these simple precautions because he had over a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of precious stones on his person, and he wanted neither to risk losing them nor to have any ghosts appearing from the past when he reached that moneyed future which lay within his grasp.

  Chapter VIII

  Mr. Dawkins spent a wakeful night, and small blame to him, either. He turned backward and forward in his bed in the little ro
om beside the Mile End Road; he got up and walked about the room; he sat uncomfortably on the single wooden chair, listening to the occasional traffic outside. It was not that he was frightened or worried; he told himself that he was not even excited, although that is to be doubted. He was unsettled and on the brink of great events, and in the faint light which came in through the windows (in that economical lodging-house lights were turned off at midnight) he was conjuring up faint visions of the future.