99 Classic Mystery Short Stories: Volume 1 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub

49. A Question of Brains

H. Bedford-Jones

I

You can get away with anything,” said Carnahan, laughing his obscene laugh, “if you have brains enough.”

The boat sidled in under the huge mangrove roots with a lunging thrust of the sluggish current. Carnahan was in the bow; now he leaned outward over the gunwale and took up a little slack in the bowline which was made fast to the roots there.

The movement brought him under a shaft of the radiant sunlight which pierced down only at rare intervals through the tangled jungle foliage above. The man squirmed beneath the touch. It burned him as a concentration of light burns beneath a sunglass. It made his profile stand out sharply against the shadowed gloom—a white cameo of bronzed skin, tangled black hair, unshaven jowl, hard and reckless linings.

“You’re right,” purred the silky tones of Winters from the stern. “You and I have the brains, old boy; no doubt of that! The slickest thing ever pulled off south of Singapore, yes, sir! And now it’s all done. Nothing left but drift down to the sea and let the wind take us across the strait, and pick up the schooner under the Peak of Lingga to-morrow, or whenever we get there. Pretty smooth, Carnahan! We have the brains.”

“Take up that slack aft,” rejoined the other man. “Must ha’ worked loose while we were sleeping.”

Winters bestirred himself from his somnolent posture and uprose. A vagrant shaft of sunlight struck upon him, too; one could almost imagine a thin volute of steam spiraling up from where the white-hot ray touched his skin. The man cursed purringly, and Carnahan echoed the curse from forward, with his obscene laugh.

“Tasting hell already, Winters? Bit o’ blood on your cheek, lad; but leave it be. Don’t wash it off. Must have come from the girl and she’s in the river. Wash it in the boat if you want, but not in the river.”

Winters lifted a hand to his sleep-pink features. Yes, there was blood there, as though a jet of the crimson fluid had spurted across his cheek. Not his own blood.

“What do you mean about not washing it?” he demanded silkily.

Winters was of a finer stripe than his companion; a nervous, lithe, terrible man, very intelligent, and much less coarse than Carnahan, so that the latter assumed a paternal air. Carnahan was intelligent, also, of course, but lacked the fine piercing quality of Winters.

“Any fool knows that it’s bad business to send blood back to blood, in a river like this,” said Carnahan easily. “That’s what the Dyaks say, and those beggars know!”

“You’re a fool yourself,” and Winters laughed. He leaned over the side and caught up a flirt of water in his fist.

Carnahan cursed and attempted to interfere, then fell back with a gloomy scowl.

“All right, my bucko!” he glowered. “Now you’ve done it, you have!”

Winters wiped his cheek on his sleeve and flung a sneer at Carnahan; if the laugh of Carnahan was obscene, the sneer of Winters was a terrific thing deadly and venomous.

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