A Bid for Fortune; Or, Dr. Nikola's Vendetta. Guy Boothby

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СКАЧАТЬ me you are mine body and soul. I know you are trustworthy. I have had good proof that you are—pardon the expression—unscrupulous, and I flatter myself you are silent. What is more, I shall tell you nothing beyond what is necessary for the carrying out of my scheme, so that you could not betray me if you would. Now for my plans!"

      He sat down again and took a paper from his pocket. Having perused it, he turned to Eastover.

      "You will leave at once—that is to say, by the boat on Wednesday—for Sydney. You will book your passage to-morrow morning, first thing, and join her in Plymouth. You will meet me to-morrow evening at an address I will send you, and receive your final instructions. Good-night."

      Seeing that he was expected to go, Eastover rose, shook hands, and left the room without a word. He was too astonished to hesitate or to say anything.

      Nikola took another letter from his pocket and turned to Prendergast. "You will go down to Dover to-night, cross to Paris to-morrow morning, and leave this letter personally at the address you will find written on it. On Thursday, at half-past two precisely, you will deliver me an answer in the porch at Charing Cross. You will find sufficient money in that envelope to pay all your expenses. Now go!"

      "At half-past two you shall have your answer. Good-night."

      "Good-night."

      When Prendergast had left the room, Dr. Nikola lit another cigar and turned his attentions to Mr. Baxter.

      "Six months ago, Mr. Baxter, I found for you a situation as tutor to the young Marquis of Beckenham. You still hold it, I suppose?"

      "I do."

      "Is the father well disposed towards you?"

      "In every way. I have done my best to ingratiate myself with him. That was one of your instructions."

      "Yes, yes! But I was not certain that you would succeed. If the old man is anything like what he was when I last met him he must still be a difficult person to deal with. Does the boy like you?"

      "I hope so."

      "Have you brought me his photograph as I directed?"

      "I have. Here it is."

      Baxter took a photograph from his pocket and handed it across the table.

      "Good. You have done very well, Mr. Baxter. I am pleased with you. To-morrow morning you will go back to Yorkshire——"

      "I beg your pardon, Bournemouth. His Grace owns a house near Bournemouth, which he occupies during the summer months."

      "Very well—then to-morrow morning you will go back to Bournemouth and continue to ingratiate yourself with father and son. You will also begin to implant in the boy's mind a desire for travel. Don't let him become aware that his desire has its source in you—but do not fail to foster it all you can. I will communicate with you further in a day or two. Now go."

      Baxter in his turn left the room. The door closed. Dr. Nikola picked up the photograph and studied it.

      "The likeness is unmistakable—or it ought to be. My friend, my very dear friend, Wetherell, my toils are closing on you. My arrangements are perfecting themselves admirably. Presently, when all is complete, I shall press the lever, the machinery will be set in motion, and you will find yourself being slowly but surely ground into powder. Then you will hand over what I want, and be sorry you thought fit to baulk Dr. Nikola!"

      He rang the bell and ordered his bill. This duty discharged, he placed the cat back in its prison, shut the lid, descended with the basket to the hall, and called a hansom. The porter inquired to what address he should order the cabman to drive. Dr. Nikola did not reply for a moment, then he said, as if he had been thinking something out: "The Green Sailor public-house, East India Dock Road."

CHAPTER I

       Table of Contents

I DETERMINE TO TAKE A HOLIDAY.—SYDNEY, AND WHAT BEFEL ME THERE

       Table of Contents

      First and foremost, my name, age, description, and occupation, as they say in the Police Gazette. Richard Hatteras, at your service, commonly called Dick, of Thursday Island, North Queensland, pearler, copra merchant, bêche-de-mer and tortoiseshell dealer, and South Sea trader generally. Eight-and-twenty years of age, neither particularly good-looking nor, if some people are to be believed, particularly amiable, six feet two in my stockings, and forty-six inches round the chest; strong as a Hakodate wrestler, and perfectly willing at any moment to pay ten pounds sterling to the man who can put me on my back.

      And big shame to me if I were not so strong, considering the free, open-air, devil-may-care life I've led. Why, I was doing man's work at an age when most boys are wondering when they're going to be taken out of knickerbockers. I'd been half round the world before I was fifteen, and had been wrecked twice and marooned once before my beard showed signs of sprouting. My father was an Englishman, not very much profit to himself, so he used to say, but of a kindly disposition, and the best husband to my mother, during their short married life, that any woman could possibly have desired. She, poor soul, died of fever in the Philippines the year I was born, and he went to the bottom in the schooner Helen of Troy, a degree west of the Line Islands, within six months of her decease; struck the tail end of a cyclone, it was thought, and went down, lock, stock, and barrel, leaving only one man to tell the tale. So I lost father and mother in the same twelve months, and that being so, when I put my cabbage-tree on my head it covered, as far as I knew, all my family in the world.

      Any way you look at it, it's calculated to give you a turn; at fifteen years of age, to know that there's not a living soul on the face of God's globe that you can take by the hand and call relation. That old saying about "blood being thicker than water" is a pretty true one, I reckon: friends may be kind—they were so to me—but after all they're not the same thing, nor can they be, as your own kith and kin.

      However, I had to look my trouble in the face, and stand up to it as a man should, and I suppose this kept me from brooding over my loss as much as I should otherwise have done. At any rate, ten days after the news reached me, I had shipped aboard the Little Emily, trading schooner, for Papeete, booked for five years among the islands, where I was to learn to water copra, to cook my balances, and to lay the foundation of the strange adventures that I am going to tell you about.

      After my time expired and I had served my Trading Company on half the mudbanks of the Pacific, I returned to Australia and went up inside the Great Barrier Reef to Somerset—the pearling station that had just come into existence on Cape York. They were good days there then, before all the new-fangled laws that now regulate the pearling trade had come into force; days when a man could do almost as he liked among the islands in those seas. I don't know how other folk liked it, but the life just suited me—so much so that when Somerset proved inconvenient and the settlement shifted across to Thursday, I went with it, and, what was more to the point, with money enough at my back to fit myself out with a brand-new lugger and full crew, so that I could go pearling on my own account.

      For many years I went at it head down, and this brings me up to four years ago, when I was a grown man, the owner of a house, two luggers, and as good a diving plant СКАЧАТЬ