FullReads

It was risky work, too, at night and in the tense haste. There was a muttered exclamation–a heavy case had dropped! a man had gone down with a broken leg.

It was a common thing with the gun-runners. The crew of the Arroyo had expected it. The victim of such an accident could not be sent to a hospital ashore. He was carried, as gently as the rough hands could carry anything, to one side, where he lay silently waiting for the ship’s surgeon who had been engaged for just such an emergency. Constance bent over and made the poor fellow as comfortable as she could. There was never a whimper from him, but he looked his gratitude.

Scarcely a fraction of a minute had been lost. The last cases were now being loaded. The tug crawled up and made fast. Already the empty trucks were vanishing in the misty darkness, one by one, as muffled as they came.

Suddenly lights flashed through the fog on the river.

There was a hurried tread of feet on the land from around the corner of a bleak, forbidding black warehouse.

They were surrounded. On one side was the police boat Patrol. On the other was Drummond. With both was the Secret Service. The surprise was complete.

Constance turned to Gordon. He was gone.

Before she could move, some one seized her.

“Where’s Santos?” demanded a hoarse voice in her ear. She looked up to see Drummond.

She shut her lips tightly, secure in the secret that Ramon was at the moment or soon would be on the Gulf, out of reach.

Across in the fog she strained her eyes. Was that the familiar figure of Gordon moving in the dim light?

There he was, now,–with Drummond, the police, and the Secret Service. It was exactly as she had suspected to herself, and a smile played over her face.

All was excitement, shouts, muttered imprecations. Constance was the calmest in the crowd–deaf to even Drummond’s “third degree.”

They had begun to break open the boxes marked “salt” and “corn.”

A loud exclamation above the sharp crunching of the axes escaped Gordon. “Damn them! They’ve put one across on us!”

The boxes of “salt” and “corn” contained–salt and corn.

Not a stock of a rifle, not a barrel, not a cartridge was in any of them as the axes crashed in one case after another.

A boy with a telegram emerged indiscreetly from the misty shadows. Drummond seized it, tore it open, and read, “Buy cotton.”

It was the code: “I am off safely.”

The double cross had worked. Constance was thinking, as she smiled to herself, of the money, her share, which she had hidden. There was not a scrap of tangible evidence against her, except what Santos had carried with him in the filibustering expedition already off from New Orleans. Her word would stand against that of all of the victims combined before any jury that could be empaneled.

“You thought I needed a warning,” she cried, facing Drummond with eyes that flashed scorn at the skulking figure of Gordon behind him. “But the next time you employ a stool-pigeon to make love,” she added, “reckon in that thing you detectives scorn–a woman’s intuition.”