JEWELS OF MALICE

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1032, 24 July 1930, Page 5

JEWELS OF MALICE

COPYRIGHT

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL. ARRANGEMENT

&

ELLIOT BAILEY

Author oi

“Tfc* Jutflaw Parasol." 'The Girl <• Ysllow- “The Solder.” etc- •»«,

CHAPTER XIX. It was certainly a wonderful night, soft and balmy, and Nancy Boon decided that she did not regret the change from Lady Courtney’s somewhat stuffy drawing room. The sky was clear and starry, although there was no moon, and she made no demur when presently Basil Courtney sug gested that they should stroll up to the cliff walk and lock down upon the sea. By the time they got back, she decided, she could legitimately begin to talk about going home. They crossed the lawn, therefore, on the way to the outer grounds, their route taking them close to the clump of bushes behind which Joseph Gregory stood. Holding his breath, toe latter let them pass him. Then moling with infinite care, he stepped out from his place of concealment and followed in their wake. The fact was that Sam Rugely and Courtney and his associates were not the only ones to have come beneath the emeralds’ demoralising influence. Rver since he became aware of the terms of James Baxter’s will, Gregory had made up his mind to get possession of them. Never exactly scrupulous although hitherto he had kept the right side of the law, cupidity was rapidly depriving him of such scruples as he had. Bruce and Sam had both been right in their suspicions. Taking advantage of the Mill House being empty, he had stolen the jewels the evening he had been caught in Sams trap, and had then tossed them under a marked tree just as Sam had reasoned, meaning to retrieve them later on. But "stolen” was not the harsh word he used himself. He knew he had only to contrive that the necklace was out of Nancy’s possession for a week for it automatically to revert to himself. It was an alluring prospect. , . . All through dinner the lewels had hvpnotised him, filling him with a desperate desire for their acquaintance that would not be gainsaid. As soon as he discovered that Basil and Nancy were going out in the grounds, therefore, he had pleaded illness on the spur of the moment to get there, too. Not that he had any settled plan of campaign. Some vague notion that he might contrive something in the darkness was as far as he had gone. Like Mr. Micawber, he had a hazy sort of idea that “something might turn up.” He turned over ways and means m his mind as he crept along behind them, but without devising anything very satisfactory. Had he been a younger man, he would have felt inclined to trust to the crude method of snatching the jewels and making off, but with Basil there this was obviously impossible. He would be caught at once, and then the fat would be in the fire with a vengeance. No, he must think of something better than that. In the meantime Nancy Hylton and Basil Courtney continued on their way, unaware of the lurking menace behind them, or of a far greater one—greater because more subtly conceived and engineered—that lay ahead. The grounds of Herringford Court extended right to the cliff’s edge, where a private promenade had been constructed and walled off—much to the annoyance of the townspeople and visitors of Herringford, who had to make a long detour if they wished to continue along the cliffs. It was this promenade which Sir Malcolm Courtney had indicated as a suitable spot if one’s companion happened to be a pretty girl. For a few moments they leaned over the parapet and listened to the waves

churning on the rocks below. Basil had been silent for some little time, but all at once he slipped his hand through the girl’s arm and began to speak, and Nancy realised at once that what she had all along been vaguely afraid of was going to happen. “Miss Hylton—Nancy”—he began, “I’m afraid you’ll think I haven’t known you long enough, and all that, but I do want to tell you, if you’ll listen, that —” He got no further. While the girl was already asking herself how she should stop a proposal she had no desire to hear, there came a startling and unlooked-for interruption. From the dark depths of the shrubbery fringing the path three figures rose and flung themselves upon the preoccupied pair, two tackling Basil, the third one attending to the girl. Nancy, startled almost out of her wits, Had a nebulous impression of a hand being thrust over her mouth, of her cloak being pulled back, and of a deft twist that lifted the chain of emeralds over her head. Then, as suddenly as he had attacked, her assailant released her and, plunging back into the bushes, took to flight. She had only one coherent impression then —that she had been robbed —and hardly aware that Basil, too, had been assaulted she called on the latter to follow her and set off in pursuit of the thief. But hgr companion was much coo hotly engaged to do anything of the sort. At the very outset of the attack he had received a blow on the jaw which had been intended to lay him hors de combat then and there. But he was not wanting in pluck and had much of his father’s power and toughness. Desperately shaking off the effects of the blow, he fought back valiantly, getting home more than one blow which his aggressors obviously did not relish. Presently, with a muttered oath, one of them withdrew for a moment, leaving his associate to be;V the brunt of things. But it was only to slide in later with a vicious under-cut which cracked significantly against Basil’s chin. Instantly the boy staggered and then dropped on his face as if poleaxed. Having achieved this, the two men made off in their turn, taking a different route from the one who had lifted the jewels, and as they ran one of them removed from his right hand the knuckle-duster with wfyich he had put paid to Basil Courfiey’s account. CHAPTER XX. Gregory, still turning over nebulous schemes for obtaining t*he necklace in his mind, ha 4, been an amazed witness of the fracas. Personal courage was not his strong point and he had made no attempt to intervene, but, peering through the bushes, had waited with boggling eyes for the outcome of the business. When he saw Nancy’s assailant break from her and run, however, with the girl in pursuit, it did not take him long to realise that he had been forestalled. Both the thief and Nanfiy herself almost collided with him as they tore through the bushes, though neither of them saw him in the dark ness_ and after a moment’s hesitation rage’ conquered his cowardice and he followed in their wake, loth tljo jewels disappear altogether without at any rate seeing which way the purloiner of them went. The best ‘Help” a young wife can procure is NO RUBBING LAUNDRY HELP. A Is packet does eight weekly washings perfectly.—Auckland Grocers. —10.

The chase, so far as Nancy was concerned, did not last long. Twisting and turning through the shrubberies, which in the darkness the girl found an almost impenetrable maze, the thief quickly outdistanced her. She was confused, too, by the noise of Joseph Gregory’s progress, and trying to locate it went further off the trail. Finally that, too, died away, and she stopped with a sob of anger, aware how utterly she had been outwitted. She could hear nothing now save the regular breaking of *£ie waves below, a sound which savoured, in her overwrought condition, of mockery, as if even the sea was laughing at her discomfiture. Frantically she asked herself what should be her next move. The lawyer meanwhile blundered on, until it began to dawn upon him, too, that he had been left behind. All the same he continued to push forward in the hope of obtaining some idea of the route the thief had taken. It was not long, however, before a wall barred his progress, the wall which shut off the grounds of Herrington Court from the open downs. Joseph Gregory regarded it thoughtfully. It looked too high for the man he had been following to scale —moreover, he knew that it was surmounted by a formidable barrier of glass. Which way had he gone, then —right or left! He was still debating this when a faint sound to his left indicated that the fellow might be in that direction. Very cautiously /Gregory commenced to skirt along the wall, peering Vith suspicion into the depths of every bush and tree, for he had no desire to be attacked in his turn. And as he went some remembrance of the locality came back to him and he recalled a gate about the centre of this wall which opened on to the downs. That, then, was the means of escape the man had taken, or was about to take. With the remembrance o£ this gate in his mind, he moved quicker now, for it seemed to him that the first aim of the girl’s assailant would be to get clear away. Probably, indeed, lie had already achieved this, and was making, in heaven only knew what direction, across the downs. The lawyer ground his teeth. It seemed to him unpleasantly likely that this time the necklace was gone for good. Who were the thieves, he asked himself, who had thus frustrated his own intentions in the matter? Approaching the gate in the wall, lie grew cautious again, for he distinctly heard the sound of voices—voices apparently engaged in an angry altercation, although discreetly lowered. Whoever were quarrelling were evidently on the farther side of the wall. Keeping well in the shelter of the latter, Mr. Joseph Gregory peered through the gap. At once the voices became more audible and distinct. Two men were there—one the fellow he had been following as far as he could judge from the brief glimpse he had already caught of him. He still conveyed nothing to Joseph Gregory—who had never set eyes on “Slippy” Thompson in his life —but the rasping tones of the second man had a distinctly familiar ring. “Samuel Rugely!” Gregory muttered. “So lie’s mixed up with this, is he? I might have guessed as much.” “You blinking thief!” Rugley was saying. “Caught you, haven’t I? Just you hand over what you’ve got there at once.” “I’ll see you in hell first,” came the fierce reply. “Get out of my way, I tell you, or it’ll be the worse for you." To the lawyer, what happened next was only a confused blur in the darkness. It seemed to him that Sam at tempted to grapple with the second man, only to leap back hastily when there came a dim flash of steel. “You infernal oaf,” came “Slippy" Thompson’s venemous tones. “You’ve asked for it, and now you’re going to get it. I’m not going to leave you to go babbling about the countryside.” His short, thin, figure—only half the size of the bulky Sam, it seemed to Joseph Gregory—began deliberately to stalk the other. In spite of his strictures on Sayers over the use of his pistol, “Slippy” Thompson himself was a killer —in some ways as dangerous a one as the pride of Chicago’s underworld. It was not the first time that he had used the knife in his hand, as two undiscovered murders in London would have testified had the truth

been known. He meant his tally to amount to three before he left the spot. But Rugley was no coward, and though unarmed he possessed an accomplishment that was denied to his venemous assailant. He could use his fists, and never allowed himself to be handicapped by a too scrupulous adherence to the usual rules. Moreover, when he liked he could be quicker than his thick-set figure rendered probable. He was aware that he would need all his resources and quickness now. He, too, circled round warily, wishing devoutly that he possessed some kind of cudgel with which he might hope to strike the knife from his opponent’s hand, for the latter’s rush when it came would be difficult to meet. Then the cunning which had enabled him to interpret Joseph Gregory’s actions in the wood on the night the lawyer had been caught in the trap came to his aid. He glanced over Thompson’s shoulder as if he saw someone there. “That’s right, Bill, slosh him one.” he said, quietly. It was an old trick, but it acted owing to the very quietness and mat-ter-of-factness with which it wa3 introduced. For the fraction of a second the man with the knife glanced backward, and in that fraction of a second Sam brought matters to an end. He rushed in, seized Thompson’s right hand, which held the knife, by the wrist and brought his own right fist crashing against his chin It was a vicious uppercut, and such was the power behind it that it was almost as deadly as that which had laid out Basil Courtney, although there was no iron knuckle-duster to

enhance its effects. “Slippy” Thompson sagged, the knife fell from his nerveless fingers on to the turf, and he followed It ’'an instant later in an inanimate heap. Sam wasted no time. Bending over the unconscious man, he thrust his hand into his right jacket pocket, and next moment Nancy’s glittering necklace was in his fingers. Holding it up to what light there was, he gave a hoarse murmur of satisfaction. “Got you, my beauties!” he exclaimed. “Now for the night mail for London and my old pal, Matthew, the Fence!” The glinting knife at his feet caught his eye, but he made no attempt to pick it up. “I ain’t putting no fingermarks on that!” he muttered, instead, he kicked it contemptuously into a small cluster of gorse. Then he bent once more over Thompson’s senseless figure, and with no more ■compunction than he showed when killing a rabbit, he drove his flst twice more against the prostrate man’s face. "Guess, that’ll put him to sleep a little longer,” he snarled. “Anyway, he’d have slit my gizzard if he’d got a chance!” After another long look at the emeralds, and a shorter one at Thompson, he placed the necklace in his pocket and lurched NOff down the hill. And just before tne darkness swallowed him up a figure slipped through the gateway, scuttled over to the gorse bush, and then followed like a shadow ir. his wake. It may he as well to describe how Sam Rugely happened to be on the spot at all that evening. During the afternoon he had been setting his beloved trap in the undergrowth when he heard two men approaching along the pathway through the wood. Now,

subsidiary only to his desire to lift the emeralds was Sam’s determination one day to catch the man who, as he expressed it, had “biffed him over the head” the night before he had captured Gregory. Every strange figure he saw in wood, therefore, he looked on with* suspicion, and on this occasion, hearing strailgers approach, he crouched down among the bushes, waiting to see who they might be. They were, as a matter of fact, Sir Malcolm Courtney’s two friends, Merrill and “Slippy” Thompson, and Sam was a trifle nonplussed when they sat down on a fallen tree-trunk a few yards in front of him, and began to talk. It struck him that as long as they were there he would have to remain quiet, or be accused of eavesdropping. * * * Until then neither of the precious pair had meant anything to him, and the launch had been too far away from him for him to recognise them as two of the men who had chased Nancy Hylton on the sea. But they had not been talking long before he began to prick up his ears. Believing themselves to be alone in the depths of the wood, they talked without any concealment or reserve, and the dumbfounded Sam learned how that same evening Nancy was to dine at Herringford Court, almost certainly wearing the emerald necklace; how Basil was to be the means of inveigling her into the grounds after dinner, and how Merrill, Thompson, and Bud Sayers would do the rest. They also discussed Sayers’s i anger at being told off by Courtney to be one of the two to tackle Basil ; —who was obviously to be an iuno- , cent catspaw in the matter—instead

of having Thompson's task of taking the jewels from the girl. The American’s rage at this arrangement had seemed incomprehensible to them, though they would perhaps have understood it better had they known anything of his abortive attack on Bruce and Nancy on the shore. Once “Slippy” Thompson had got the necklace, they were to scatter, Thompson making his escape by way of the side gate on to the downs. Presently they rose and strolled on. Sam waited until he was quite sure that they were far aw«ay, and then he whistled under his breath. So that was how the land lay, was it? Sir Malcolm Courtney, of all people, was a crook! Sam docketed the knowledge in his mind as likely to be of use to him later, but he gave his immediate consideration to that night's affair. The upshot of it was that he made up his mind to be at the gate in the wall when “Slippy” Thompson emerged, and if he could not manage to get the emeralds then—well, he didn’t deserve to get the tip about things he had got. Then—the night mail to London, and Matthew, the fence, would do the rest. What was likely to happen to Nancy, or what danger she might run from the three desperadoes, he didn t care a rap. Hadn’t she called him a cruel beast for catching rabbits in his gin? Very well, then; let her get caught herself, and serve her right!