When I rejoined the others I noticed that the sound of firing no longer came up the hill, and that the patter of rain was lighter, and a grey streak of coming daylight showed under a drawn blind.
I was buttoning my slicker when the knocker rang on the front door. Russian words came through, and the young Russian I had met on the beach came in.
“Aleksandr, you’re—” the stalwart older woman screamed when she saw the blood on his cheek, and fainted.
He paid no attention to her at all, as if he was used to having her faint.
“They’ve gone in the boat,” he told me while the girl and two men servants gathered up the woman and laid her on an ottoman.
“How many?” I asked.
“I counted ten, and I don’t think I missed more than one or two, if any.”
“The men I sent down there couldn’t stop them?”
He shrugged.
“What would you? It takes a strong stomach to face a machine gun. Your men had been cleared out of the buildings almost before they arrived.”
The woman who had fainted had revived by now and was pouring anxious questions in Russian at the lad. The princess was getting into her blue cape. The woman stopped questioning the lad and asked her something.
“It’s all over,” the princess said. “I am going to view the ruins.”
That suggestion appealed to everybody. Five minutes later all of us, including the servants, were on our way downhill. Behind us, around us, in front of us, were other people going downhill, hurrying along in the drizzle that was very gentle now, their faces tired and excited in the bleak morning light.
Halfway down, a woman ran out of a cross-path and began to tell me something. I recognized her as one of Hendrixson’s maids.
I caught some of her words.
“Presents gone. … Mr. Brophy murdered. … Oliver. …”
VI
“I’ll be down later,” I told the others, and set out after the maid.
She was running back to the Hendrixson house. I couldn’t run, couldn’t even walk fast. She and Hendrixson and more of his servants were standing on the front porch when I arrived.
“They killed Oliver and Brophy,” the old man said.
“How?”
“We were in the back of the house, the rear second story, watching the flashes of the shooting down in the village. Oliver was down here, just inside the front door, and Brophy in the room with the presents. We heard a shot in there, and immediately a man appeared in the doorway of our room, threatening us with two pistols, making us stay there for perhaps ten minutes. Then he shut and locked the door and went away. We broke the door down—and found Brophy and Oliver dead.”
“Let’s look at them.”
The chauffeur was just inside the front door. He lay on his back, with his brown throat cut straight across the front, almost back to the vertebrae. His rifle was under him. I pulled it out and examined it. It had not been fired.
Upstairs, the butler Brophy was huddled against a leg of one of the tables on which the presents had been spread. His gun was gone. I turned him over, straightened him out, and found a bullet-hole in his chest. Around the hole his coat was charred in a large area.
Most of the presents were still here. But the most valuable pieces were gone. The others were in disorder, lying around any which way, their covers pulled off.
“What did the one you saw look like?” I asked.
“I didn’t see him very well,” Hendrixson said. “There was no light in our room. He was simply a dark figure against the candle burning in the hall. A large man in a black rubber raincoat, with some sort of black mask that covered his whole head and face, with small eyeholes.”
“No hat?”
“No, just the mask over his entire face and head.”
As we went downstairs again I gave Hendrixson a brief account of what I had seen and heard and done since I had left him. There wasn’t enough of it to make a long tale.
“Do you think you can get information about the others from the one you caught?” he asked, as I prepared to go out.
“No. But I expect to bag them just the same.”
Couffignal’s main street was jammed with people when I limped into it again. A detachment of Marines from Mare Island was there, and men from a San Francisco police boat. Excited citizens in all degrees of partial nakedness boiled around them. A hundred voices were talking at once, recounting their personal adventures and braveries and losses and what they had seen. Such words as machine gun, bomb, bandit, car, shot, dynamite, and killed sounded again and again, in every variety of voice and tone.
The bank had been completely wrecked by the charge that had blown the vault. The jewelry store was another ruin. A grocer’s across the street was serving as a field hospital. Two doctors were toiling there, patching up damaged villagers.
I recognized a familiar face under a uniform cap—Sergeant Roche of the harbor police—and pushed through the crowd to him.
“Just get here?” he asked as we shook hands. “Or were you in on it?”
“In on it.”
“What do you know?”
“Everything.”
“Who ever heard of a private detective that didn’t,” he joshed as I led him out of the mob.
“Did you people run into an empty boat out in the bay?” I asked when we were away from audiences.
“Empty boats have been floating around the bay all night,” he said.
I hadn’t thought of that.
“Where’s your boat now?” I asked him.
“Out trying to pick up the bandits. I stayed with a couple of men to lend a hand here.”
“You’re in luck,” I told him. “Now sneak a look across the
