"Well," he mused sniffing in no approval at all at the musty air of the place and peering up at the single eight-inch barred window that served more for ventilation than for light.

"Well, here we are. And here, presumably, we stay till Standish and Hade go back to the mainland. Then I'm to be let out by Roke, with many apologies for Davy's mistake. There'll be no way of getting back. The boats will be hidden or padlocked. And here I'll stay, with Roke for a chum, till whatever is going on at Standish's house is safely finished with. It's a pretty program. If I can get away to-night without Roke's finding it out till morning--"

His eyes were beginning to accustom themselves to the room.

Its corners and farther reaches and most of its floor were still invisible. But, by straining his gaze, he could just make out the shapes of a crate or two and several packing boxes close to the wall. The central s.p.a.ce was clear. In spite of the stuffiness, there was a damp chill to the gloomy place, by contrast to the vivid sunlight and the sweep of the trade-winds, outside.

Gavin stretched himself out at full length on the long box, and prepared to take a nap. First he reached toward the next box--the one under which Davy had told him the key was hidden--and moved it an inch or so to make certain it was not full enough to cause him any especial effort in case he should not be released until next day and should have need of the key.

Then he shut his eyes, and let himself drift toward slumber.

It was perhaps two hours later when he was roused from a light doze by hearing something strike the concrete floor of his prison, not six feet from his head. The thing had fallen with a slithering, uneven sound, such as might be made by the dropping of a short length of rope.

Brice sat up. He noted that the room was no longer light enough to see across. And he glanced in the direction of the window. Its narrow s.p.a.ce was blocked by something. And as he looked he heard a second object slither to the floor.

"Some one's dropping things down here through that ventilator," he conjectured.

And at the same moment a third fall sounded, followed almost at once by a fourth. Then, for a second, the window s.p.a.ce was clear, only to be blocked again as the person outside returned to his post. And in quick succession three more objects were sent slithering down to the floor. After which the window was cleared once more, and Brice could hear receding steps.

But he gave no heed to the steps. For as the last of the unseen things had been slid through the aperture, another sound had focused all his attention, and had sent queer little quivers up his spine.

The sound had been a long-drawn hiss.

And Gavin Brice understood. Now he knew why the softly falling bodies had slithered so oddly down the short distance between window and floor. And he read aright the slippery crawling little noises that had been a.s.sailing his ears.

The unseen man outside had thrust through the ventilator not less than seven or eight snakes, carried thither, presumably, in bags.

Crouching on his long box Gavin peered about him. Faintly against the dense gray of the shadowy floor, he could see thick ropelike forms twisting sinuously to and fro, as if exploring their new quarters or seeking exit. More than once, as these chanced to cross one another's path, that same long-drawn hiss quavered out into the dark silences.

And now Brice's nostrils were a.s.sailed by a sickening smell as of crushed cuc.u.mbers. And at the odor his fists tightened in new fear. For no serpents give off that peculiar odor, except members of the pit-viper family.

"They're not rattlesnakes," he told himself. "For a scared or angry rattler would have this room vibrating with his whirr.

We're too far south for copperheads. The--the only other pit-viper I ever heard of in Florida is the--cotton-mouth moccasin!"

At the realization he was aware of a wave of physical terror that swept him like a breath of ice.

Without restoratives at hand the moccasin's bite is certain death. The plan had been well thought out. At the very first step the frantic prisoner might reasonably be relied on to encounter one or more of the crawling horrors. The box on which he crouched was barely eighteen inches high. The next box--under which rested the key--was several feet away. The door was still farther off.

Truly Standish and Hade appeared to have hit on an excellent plan for getting rid of the man they wanted out of the way!

It would be so easy for Roke to explain to possible inquirers that Brice had chanced to tread on a poisonous snake in his wanderings about the key!

The slightest motion might well be enough to stir to active hostility the swarm of serpents already angered by their sudden dumping into this clammy den.

Weaponless, helpless, the trapped man crouched there and waited.

CHAPTER VI

IN THE DAY OF BATTLE

As Gavin Brice sat with feet drawn up under him, listening to the gruesome slither of the moccasins along the concrete floor just below he was gripped for a minute by irresistible terror. It was all so simple--so complete! And he had been calmly self-confident of his ability to command the situation, to play these people's own game and to beat them at it.

Grinning and open-eyed he had marched into the trap. He had been glad to let Hade and Standish think him safely out of their way, and had planned so confidently to return by stealth to the mainland that night and to Milo's house!

And now they had had absolutely no difficulty in caging him, and in arranging that he should be put forever out of their way. The most stringent inquiry--should any such be made--could only show that he had been bitten once or more by a deadly snake. Any post-mortem would bear out the statement.

It was known to every one that many of the keys--even several miles from the mainland--are infested by rattlesnakes and by other serpents, though how such snakes ever got to the islands is as much of a mystery to the naturalist world as is the presence of racc.o.o.ns and squirrels on the same keys. It is simply one of the hundred unsolvable mysteries and puzzles of the subtropic region.

In his jiu-jutsu instructions Brice had learned a rule which he had carried into good effect in other walks of life.

Namely to seem to play one's opponent's game and to be fooled by it, and then, taking the conquering adversary by surprise, to strike. Thus he had fallen in with Standish's suggestion that he come to the island, though he had thought himself fairly sure as to the reason for the request. Thus, too, he had let himself be lured into this storeroom, still smugly confident that he held the whip hand of the situation.

And as a result he was looking into the ghastly eyes of death.

Like an engine that "races," his fertile brain was unduly active in this moment of stark horror, and it ran uselessly.

Into his over-excited mind flashed pictures of a thousand bits of the past--one of them, by reason of recent a.s.sociation far more vivid than the rest.

He saw himself with four other A.E.F. officers, standing in a dim corner of a high-ceiled old room in a ruined chateau in Flanders. In the room's center was a table. Around this were grouped a double line of uniformed Americans--a court-martial. In came two provosts' men leading between them a prisoner, a man in uniform and wearing the insignia of a United States army major--the cleverest spy it was said in all the Wilhelmstra.s.se's pay, a genius who had grown rich at his filthy trade of selling out his country's secrets, and who had been caught at last by merest chance.

The prisoner had glanced smilingly about the half-lit room as he came in. For the barest fraction of a second his gaze had flickered over Gavin Brice and the three other officers who stood there in the shadow. Then, with that same easy, confident smile on his masklike, pallid face, the spy had turned his glittering black eyes on the officers at the courtmartial table.

"Gentlemen," he had said amusedly, "you need not go through the farce of trying me. I am guilty. I say this with no bravado and with no fear. Because the bullet has never been molded and the rope has never been plaited that can kill me.

And the cell is not yet made that can hold me."

He had said it smilingly, and in a velvet suave voice. Yes, and he had made good his boast. For--condemned to die at daylight--he had escaped from his ill-constructed prison room in the chateau a little before dawn and had gotten clean away after killing one of his guards.

"He never set eyes on me except for that instant, there in the shadows," Brice found himself reflecting for the hundredth time. "And there were all the others with me. Yet last night he recalled my face. It's lucky he didn't recall where he'd seen it. Or--perhaps he did."

With a start, he came out of his half-hypnotic daze--a daze which had endured but a few seconds. And once more his rallying will-power and senses made him acutely alive to the hideous peril in which he crouched.

Then--in one of the odd revulsions which flash across men at unnaturally high tension--his daze and his terror merged all at once into a blaze of wholesome rage. Nor was his rage directed against Rodney Hade, but against Milo Standish, the man whose life he had saved not twenty hours earlier, and who had repaid that mighty service now by helping to arrange his murder.

At the thought Brice grew hot with fury. He longed to stand face to face with the blackguard who had rewarded a life-gift in such vile fashion. He yearned to tell Standish in fiery words how unspeakable had been the action, and then foot to foot, fist to fist, to take out of the giant's hide some t.i.the of the revenge due for such black ingrat.i.tude.

The ferocious impulse set steady his quivering nerves. No longer did his brain race uselessly. Again it was alert, resourceful, keen.

Standish! Yes, and no doubt Standish's sister too! The girl whose eyes had made him feel as if he were on holy ground--the girl whom he had been so irritatingly unable to get out of his mind!

With an angry shake of the head Gavin dismissed Claire from his thoughts. And his newborn hate concentrated on her brother who had betrayed to death his rescuer. Obsessed with the fierce craving to stand face to face with the blonde-bearded giant he banished his lethargy of hopelessness and cast about for means of escape out of this seemingly inescapable snare.

First, the key must be found. Then the door must be reached and opened. In the way of both enterprises writhed a half dozen or more deadly snakes. And to the problem of winning past them alive and getting to his enemy. Gavin Brice bent his trained faculties.

The box whereon he sat was covered with loose boards nailed down only at one end, a long strip of thin iron or copper binding the one unopened edge. So much his groping fingers told him. Moving to one corner of the box top he pushed aside a board and plunged his hand into the interior. It was as he had hoped. According to custom when the box had been emptied the jute and shredded paper stuffing of its contents had been thrust back into it for future use.

Feverishly, Gavin began to pull forth great handfuls of paper and of excelsior. These he piled onto the box top. Then, exerting all his skilled strength, he tugged at the narrow iron strip which bound, lengthwise, one side of the box.

This task was by no means easy, for the nails were long. And the iron's sharp edges cut cruelly into the tugging fingers.

But, inch by inch, he tore it free. And at the end of three minutes he was strengthening and testing a willowy five-foot strip of metal. Laying this across his knees and fishing up another double handful of the packing paper and jute he groped in his pockets with bleeding fingertips for a match.

He found but one. Holding it tenderly he sc.r.a.ped its surface against his nail--a trick he had picked up in the army. The sulphur snapped and ignited, the wooden sliver burning freely in that windless air.