Читать книгу Special Detective (Ashton-Kirk) онлайн

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There was a short silence; the smoke from the cigar mingled with that of the pipe; eddying in the draught from the window they wove in and out intricately, finally mingled and drifted out into the big world.

“Suppose you go carefully over the affair as you know it,” suggested Ashton-Kirk. “I got very little of it over the telephone.”

Scanlon drew at the cigar and gazed at the opposite wall where there hung that Maxfield Parrish print of the wonder-stricken brown sailors, peering into the unknown from the bow of their ship.

“If this was my own matter,” said he, “I could take every individual happening by the neck and shake the information right out of it. But as it stands, I’ve only got a good straight look at one thing that’s at all plain to me.”

“What’s that?” asked Ashton-Kirk.

“Fear,” replied Scanlon, in a low-pitched voice, his mouth twisting wrily as he shaped the word. “Stark, white-faced fear; the kind that turns a man sick just at the sight of it.”

The big man frowned for a moment at the brown sailors peering out over their mystic sea. Then he resumed.