PAGE 11
The Smuggler
by
“Perhaps we’ll get out of this finally,” I grumbled as I understood now what was afoot, “but not in time to be of any use.”
A smothered sound as of something going over the vessel’s side followed. It was one of the boxes which we had seen outside in the storeroom. Another followed, and a third and a fourth.
Then came a subdued parley. “We have two customs detectives locked in a cabin here. We can’t stay now. You’ll have to take us and our things off, too.”
“Can’t do it,” called up another muffled voice. “Make your things into a little bundle. We’ll take that, but you’ll have to get past the night-watchman yourselves and meet us at Riverledge.”
A moment later something else went over the side, and from the sound we could infer that the engine of the motor-boat was being started.
A Voice sounded mockingly outside our door. “Bon soir, you fellows in there. We’re going up the dock. Sorry to leave you here till morning, but they’ll let you out then. Au revoir.”
Below I could hear just the faintest well-muffled chug-chug. Kennedy in the meantime had been coolly craning his neck out of our porthole under the rays of the arc light overhead. He was holding something in his hand. It seemed like a little silver-backed piece of thin glass with a flaring funnel-like thing back of it, which he held most particularly. Though he heard the parting taunt outside he paid no attention.
“You go to the deuce, whoever you are,” I cried, beating on the door, to which only a coarse laugh echoed back down the passageway.
“Be quiet, Walter,” ordered Kennedy. “We have located the smuggled goods in the storeroom of the steward, four wooden cases of them. I think the stuff must have been brought on the ship in the trunks and then transferred to the cases, perhaps after the code wireless message was received. But we have been overpowered and locked in a cabin with a port too small to crawl through. The cases have been lowered over the side of the ship to a motor-boat that was waiting below. The lights on the boat are out, but if you hurry you can get it. The accomplices who locked us in are going to disappear up the wharf. If you could only get the night watchman quickly enough you could catch them, too, before they reach the street.”
I had turned, half expecting to see Kennedy talking to a ship’s officer who might have chanced on the deck outside. There was no one. The only thing of life was the still sputtering arc light. Had the man gone crazy?
“What of it?” I growled. “Don’t you suppose I know all that? What’s the use of repeating it now? The thing to do is to get out of this hole. Come, help me at this door. Maybe we can batter it down.”
Kennedy paid no attention to me, however, but kept his eyes glued on the Cimmerian blackness outside the porthole.
He had done nothing apparently, yet a long finger of light seemed to shoot out into the sky from the pier across from us and begin waving back and forth as it was lowered to the dark waters of the river. It was a searchlight. At once I thought of the huge reflector which I had seen set up. But that had been on our side of the next pier and this light came from the far side where the Mohican lay.
“What is it?” I asked eagerly. “What has happened?”
It was as if a prayer had been answered from our dungeon on La Montaigne.
“I knew we should need some means to communicate with Herndon,” he explained simply, “and the wireless telephone wasn’t practicable. So I have used Dr. Alexander Graham Bell’s photophone. Any of the lights on this side of La Montaigne, I knew, would serve. What I did, Walter, was merely to talk into the mouthpiece back of this little silvered mirror which reflects light. The vibrations of the voice caused a diaphragm in it to vibrate and thus the beam of reflected light was made to pulsate. In other words, this little thing is just a simple apparatus to transform the air vibrations of the voice into light vibrations.