1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Old Offenders And A Few Old Scores," E. W. Hornung crafts a captivating anthology that explores the complex interplay of crime and morality through a series of interconnected stories. Set against the backdrop of late Victorian England, the collection reflects Hornung's mastery of the short story form, marked by his flair for suspense and dark humor. The narrative converges on themes of retribution, guilt, and the nature of justice, employing a distinctive literary style that blends wit with introspective character studies. His work provides a vivid tableau of the criminals, both hardened and naive, who inhabit a world where societal norms often blur, revealing the dichotomy between law and personal ethics. E. W. Hornung, best known for his creation of Raffles, the gentleman thief, had a deeply nuanced understanding of the criminal psyche, which he channels into these narratives. His personal experiences and network of literary contemporaries, including Arthur Conan Doyle, profoundly influenced his storytelling approach. Hornung's exploration of the "old offenders" resonates with his desire to probe beneath the surface, revealing the intricate motivations driving each character's actions and decisions. This collection is a recommended read for anyone fascinated by crime literature and the moral dilemmas it encapsulates. Hornung's incisive observations and richly drawn characters will engage readers who appreciate nuanced storytelling and are intrigued by the imperfect nature of justice. "Old Offenders And A Few Old Scores" is not merely a collection of tales; it is an exploration of the darker corners of humanity and the complexities of reparation. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Ähnliche
Old Offenders And A Few Old Scores
Table of Contents
Introduction
When yesterday’s misdeeds refuse to stay buried and reputations hang in the balance, Old Offenders And A Few Old Scores turns the notion of justice into a contest between what the law can prove and what memory will not forget, tracing how old crimes ripple forward through lives, institutions, and communities until the difference between righting a wrong and settling a score grows perilously thin and the reader is invited to weigh the costs of certainty, the seductions of revenge, and the uneasy grace of forgiveness in a world where character is tested as severely as evidence.
Written by E. W. Hornung, the British author best known for his crime fiction, Old Offenders And A Few Old Scores is a collection of stories that belong to the classic tradition of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mystery and crime writing. The book’s settings align with the social and urban backdrops familiar from Hornung’s era, where drawing rooms and street corners alike could conceal a transgression. Published in the early twentieth century, it reflects the period’s appetite for brisk, morally nuanced tales and showcases Hornung’s mastery of the short form at a time when crime fiction was crystallizing into a distinct, popular genre.
As a reading experience, the collection offers tightly constructed episodes that revolve around the aftermath of wrongdoing—how a person’s past resurfaces and how different actors respond when forced to confront it. Hornung’s prose is economical and urbane, favoring deft characterization and swift turns over elaborate puzzle-making. The mood balances tension with irony, producing narratives that feel both intimate and coolly observant. Readers can expect a focus on motive and consequence rather than mere mechanics, with voices that are confident, quietly witty, and attuned to the social performances that surround guilt, suspicion, and the desire to set matters straight.
Thematically, the stories probe moral ambiguity: the gap between legal guilt and moral responsibility, the pull of loyalty against the demands of truth, and the uneasy space where restitution shades into reprisal. The phrase “old scores” signals reckonings long deferred—debts of honor, breaches of trust, and the ways time distorts both grievance and remorse. Hornung often turns attention to reputation and the fragile currencies of respectability, showing how class, convention, and private conscience collide. The result is a series of ethical cross-examinations that ask what, if anything, can genuinely make an injury whole and what it costs to insist on closure.
Old Offenders And A Few Old Scores also speaks to Hornung’s place in the wider landscape of classic crime fiction. While he is widely recognized for creating the gentleman-thief archetype in other work, this collection underscores his broader interest in the human contours of transgression—how offenders are made, remembered, or misunderstood. In dialogue with the crime-writing of his time, Hornung adopts a perspective that is less about spectacular detection and more about character, consequence, and the social theater around a case. The emphasis on aftermath rather than novelty gives the book a reflective, almost diagnostic tone without sacrificing narrative drive.
For contemporary readers, the collection’s questions remain strikingly relevant. It considers how societies balance punishment and rehabilitation, what it means to owe a reckoning to others or to oneself, and why the past exerts such stubborn pressure on the present. In an age preoccupied with accountability and restitution, Hornung’s stories offer a clear-eyed look at competing claims of justice and mercy. Their compact form suits modern reading habits while inviting sustained reflection; each narrative stands alone yet resonates with the others, creating a cumulative meditation on responsibility that is as intellectually engaging as it is emotionally pointed.
Approached as a sequence of variations on a theme, Old Offenders And A Few Old Scores rewards attentive reading and a taste for subtle moral contour. Fans of classic crime and literary short fiction will find the craft satisfying: crisp pacing, understated wit, and characters drawn with enough depth to invite sympathy without excusing harm. The collection can be read straight through or savored one story at a time, each piece sharpening the meanings of the title. Without relying on grand reveals, it builds a quiet, persistent tension—less about who did what than about what should be done now, and by whom.
Synopsis (Selection)
Old Offenders and A Few Old Scores is a collection of crime stories by E. W. Hornung that presents a sequence of incidents involving aging criminals and long-deferred reckonings. The volume groups tales that study the aftermath of wrongdoing rather than the spectacle of crime itself, following encounters in clubs, streets, trains, and quiet houses. Each piece stands alone, yet together they trace how time alters motives, methods, and responses to transgression. Without relying on a single hero or fixed cast, the collection moves from portraits of seasoned offenders to episodes in which past injuries resurface, emphasizing restraint, suggestion, and understated resolution.
The opening stories establish the template: a figure from earlier, livelier days resurfaces under new pressures, and a chance meeting draws scrutiny to an old habit or half-buried case. Observers—occasionally officials, often informed civilians—register small discrepancies and social cues rather than blatant clues. London’s familiar settings provide the backdrop, from clubland to modest lodgings, anchoring incidents that hinge on reputation and memory. The tension arises less from pursuit than from recognition, as characters weigh exposure against leniency. These first pieces signal the book’s interest in the gray spaces between legal guilt and lived experience, and in outcomes that avoid sensational closure.
Subsequent tales turn to specialists in deception—retired swindlers, practiced burglars, adroit confidence men—whose techniques show the wear of years. Hornung depicts careful preparations around forged identities, discreet jewel-handling, and well-timed misdirection, yet also notes how postwar shifts and stricter scrutiny complicate old routines. The encounters often involve wary respect between watcher and watched, with the threat of scandal as potent as formal arrest. Turning points arrive through an overheard remark, a misjudged acquaintance, or an unexpected display of conscience. Resolutions preserve dignity where possible, framing justice as a negotiated outcome rather than a decisive blow.
An early highlight places an opportunistic theft against the rhythms of travel and polite society, where a seemingly casual exchange conceals delicate stakes. The plot pivots on who knows what, and when, as a seasoned hand tests the limits of discretion. War service, altered fortunes, and shifting class boundaries inform choices, complicating any simple tally of right and wrong. The story steers toward a restrained settlement, avoiding public ruin while acknowledging harm done. Its measured close exemplifies the collection’s preference for quiet reckonings that consider character and circumstance alongside culpability, setting a tone for the pieces that follow.
Transitional stories broaden perspective, sometimes letting a junior official or watchful victim narrate the anxieties of being on the edge of a crime. Devices include anonymous correspondence, cryptic newspaper notices, and subtle bait to draw out the careful offender. Betrayal within small circles—the partner who falters, the intimate who knows too much—creates moral knots as pressing as any legal threat. Several episodes approach confession without quite embracing it, testing the possibility of rehabilitation or retreat. Across these entries, the collection assembles a gallery of types and techniques, while maintaining continuity through mood: dry, observant, and sparing in its judgments.
The latter portion, signaled by the subtitle A Few Old Scores, turns explicitly to reckonings with the past. Here, protagonists revisit scenes of earlier injuries, seeking redress, repayment, or simple acknowledgment. Settings widen to provincial towns, seaside retreats, and quiet corners far from metropolitan notice. Plots hinge on retrieving misappropriated property, exposing long-running frauds, or settling moral debts that outlast the statutes. The emphasis shifts from evading capture to testing whether time has blunted or sharpened grievance. Outcomes favor proportion over spectacle, suggesting that closure arises as much from recognition of truth as from formal penalties.
Mid-collection climaxes align around public occasions and private thresholds—sporting events, music-hall evenings, charitable gatherings, and secluded estates—where chance encounters force decisions. Old allies reappear in altered roles; former adversaries find themselves bound by mutual interest. The turning points rely on timing and temperament rather than elaborate puzzles. Without detailing final twists, these stories bring simmering tensions to head-on meetings, often deciding matters through a quiet word, a returned item, or a tactful retreat. The focus remains on the costs and limits of retribution, and on how reputations are unmade or restored in the presence of witnesses.
Penultimate pieces examine the burden of keeping score. Individuals who cannot release a slight risk becoming what they opposed, while those who err toward mercy accept lasting ambiguity. Hornung traces the psychological toll of long pursuits and long concealments, showing how fatigue, pride, and habit shape crucial choices. Intermediaries—solicitors, correspondents, discreet friends—broker settlements that save face without denying fact. Irony shades the endings: the law sometimes arrives late, yet truth emerges in forms that satisfy the living more than the ledger. The mood is reflective without being sentimental, attentive to consequence without declaring moral victory.
The closing story gathers the book’s motifs—age, memory, reputation, and measured justice—into a final instance of equilibrium found rather than imposed. The resolution aligns with the title’s promise: old offenders confronted without grand spectacle, and old scores addressed to a bearable conclusion. The collection’s central message is that crime and response are shaped by time as much as by statute, and that society’s practical ethics often precede formal judgment. By arranging independent cases to suggest a cumulative argument, Hornung presents a restrained panorama of wrongdoing and redress, illuminating the fragile accommodations by which lives continue after the act.
Historical Context
Old Offenders And A Few Old Scores unfolds against the late Victorian and early Edwardian city, with London as its dominant stage. The period from the 1880s to the early 1900s was marked by sharp contrasts between West End privilege and East End precarity, a divide that crime fiction exploited to explore mobility, secrecy, and surveillance. Clubs, chambers, and respectable drawing rooms coexist with alleys, docks, and lodging houses, all connected by rail and tram. Hornung’s own familiarity with both genteel and rougher milieus lends the settings a social precision, while occasional colonial and provincial echoes reflect the British Empire’s networks that enabled fugitives, fortunes, and reputations to circulate.
The collection is steeped in the professionalization of British policing and the state’s tightening grip on repeat offenders. The Metropolitan Police were founded by the 1829 Act; a Detective Branch followed in 1842. After the 1877 Turf Fraud Scandal discredited detectives, the Criminal Investigation Department was created in 1878 under Howard Vincent to centralize intelligence and improve methods. The Prevention of Crimes Act 1871 built on the Habitual Criminals Act 1869, formalizing registers and police supervision of those officially classed as habitual criminals. Prison administration was nationalized by the Prison Act 1877, while the Probation of Offenders Act 1907 began to temper automatic incarceration with supervised release. Identification practices advanced from rogues’ galleries to scientific systems: Francis Galton’s work on fingerprints (1892) informed Edward Henry’s classification, developed in India in 1896–97 and adopted by Scotland Yard in 1901. Britain’s first fingerprint-based conviction came in 1902 for burglary; the first murder conviction secured by fingerprints was the Stratton brothers case in Deptford in 1905. These milestones reshaped both criminal tactics and investigative narratives. Hornung’s recurrent focus on recidivists and on intricate cat-and-mouse stratagems mirrors an era when files, surveillance, and forensics turned the “old offender” into a documented public menace, and when score-settling between criminals and lawmen unfolded under an increasingly empirical gaze. The title’s emphasis on old offenders and old scores resonates with the official category of habitual criminal and with the period’s belief that past conduct, recorded and indexed, forecast future crime.
The Whitechapel murders of 1888, attributed to Jack the Ripper, created a lasting template of urban fear. Between 31 August and 9 November 1888, five canonical victims were killed in or near Whitechapel, prompting the formation of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee under George Lusk and saturating newspapers such as the Illustrated Police News with sensational coverage. The murders exposed the limits of policing before modern forensics and dramatized the chasm between East End poverty and West End complacency. Hornung’s stories mirror this climate: labyrinthine streets, anonymous lodgings, and the press’s appetite for scandal structure plots in which visibility, rumor, and panic can be as decisive as evidence.
Imperial circuits supplied backstories, alibis, and opportunities for reinvention. Hornung spent formative years in New South Wales in the mid-1880s, and the collection’s sensibility reflects colonies where law and identity were often fluid. Transportation of convicts to Australia ended in 1868 with the Hougoumont’s arrival in Western Australia, but the legacy of penal settlement lingered in local memory and British attitudes. Bushranging reached its symbolic climax with the capture and execution of Ned Kelly in Melbourne on 11 November 1880, while the Victorian gold rush of 1851 had earlier churned populations and wealth. The book’s old scores gesture toward debts and grudges sustained across oceans, forged in migration and return.
Late Victorian class codes and the cult of the gentleman form a crucial backdrop. The Marylebone Cricket Club, founded in 1787 at Lord’s, presided over a culture of amateur honor that contrasted with professional necessity, dramatized annually in Gentlemen v Players fixtures. W. G. Grace, active from the 1860s to the 1890s, personified public adulation of sporting masculinity. Yet the Long Depression (c. 1873–1896) eroded some genteel incomes, and the performance of respectability often masked precarious finances. Hornung’s infamous gentleman-criminal type, developed elsewhere and echoed in this milieu, exploits these contradictions: polite society’s passwords, blazers, and clubs become both camouflage and commentary on how status can obscure illegality.
Urban technology and infrastructure reshaped both criminal method and policing reach. The Metropolitan Railway opened in 1863, and deep-level electric lines such as the City and South London Railway began in 1890, enabling swift movement and alibi construction. Electric street lighting spread from the late 1870s, complicating nocturnal concealment while aiding surveillance. Telegraphy knit police communications; the telephone expanded rapidly under the National Telephone Company in the 1890s. Security responded in kind: safe makers like Chubb (founded 1818) and Milner contended with nitroglycerin and gelignite, the latter stabilized in 1875, which safe-blowers deployed by the 1890s. Hornung’s plots echo this arms race, staging crimes that hinge on timetables, devices, and the vulnerabilities of modern systems.
Poverty studies and labor militancy reframed crime as a social question. Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London (1889–1903) mapped deprivation street by street, while Seebohm Rowntree’s 1901 York survey quantified primary poverty. The Matchgirls’ Strike at Bryant and May in 1888 confronted phosphorus poisoning and factory discipline; the London Dock Strike of 1889, led by Ben Tillett and John Burns, won the docker’s tanner and signaled new union strength. These movements aligned with growing critiques of the 1834 Poor Law and municipal reforms after 1888. Against this backdrop, Hornung’s narratives often register the fine line between necessity and felony, and the way structural want can turn petty vice into persistent offending.
The book functions as a social and political critique by dramatizing how respectability distorts justice and how the machinery of law bears unevenly on different classes. Its criminals are seldom faceless: they are repeaters tracked by registries, servants who know the houses they rob, or gentlemen whose privilege shields them from suspicion. By staging contests between cunning and authority, it questions a property-centered policing ethos and exposes the moral ambiguity of surveillance and coercion. The recurring settlement of old scores challenges complacent narratives of reform, suggesting that beneath Edwardian confidence lay unresolved inequities in wealth, opportunity, and the state’s claim to define and remember transgression.
Old Offenders And A Few Old Scores
Preface
By the premature death of my brother-in-law, Mr. E. W. Hornung, British literature sustained a notable loss. He was but fifty-four when he passed over, and as his powers had steadily expanded with every year of his life, it is probable that they had not yet reached their full maturity. But even as it was, his output was considerable, for from the day that his “Bride from the Bush” attracted attention in the early ’nineties down to the period of the war he was always at work in his thorough conscientious way, and there was none of that work which could be called conventional, for he always brought to it a literary conscience, a fine artistic sense, and a remarkable power of vivid narrative. At his best there is no modern author who, by the sudden use of the right adjective and the right phrase, could make a scene spring more vividly to the eyes of the reader.
The Raffles stories are, of course, conspicuous examples of this, and one could not find any better example of clever plot and terse admirable narrative. But in a way they harmed Hornung, for they got between the public and his better work. Some of that work is ambitious, and fell little short of achieving the high mark at which it was aimed. “Peccavi,” for example, is a very outstanding novel, deep and serious, while “Fathers of Men” is one of the very best school tales in the language, taking the masters in as well as the boys, and thereby perhaps marring the book for the latter. But it was a remarkable achievement, and might well be so, for on the one hand the whole subject of public-school education, and on the other the national game of cricket, were two of Hornung’s chief hobbies. He was the best read man in cricket lore that I have ever met, and would I am sure have excelled in the game himself if he had not been hampered by short sight and a villainous asthma. To see him stand up behind the sticks with his big pebble glasses to a fast bowler was an object lesson in pluck if not in wicket-keeping.
His sympathies were intense, and his point of view clear, and when he focussed his powers upon anything which really appealed to him the effect was remarkable. He played the part of a man during the war, and after the death of his only son he went out to serve the troops in France as best he might. His little book, “Notes of a Camp-follower,” gives some of his impressions, and there are parts of it which are brilliant in their vivid portrayal. I am tempted to take a single passage lest the reader thinks I am too generous in diffuse commendation. It is the march of the Australians to mend the broken line at Amiens.
“They were marching in their own way—no strut or swing about it, but a more subtle jauntiness, a kind of mincing strut, perhaps not unconsciously sinister and unconventional, an aggressive part of themselves. But what men! What beetling chests, what muscle-swollen sleeves, what dark pugnacious clean-shaven faces! Here and there a pendulous moustache mourned the beard of some bushman of the old school, but no such adventitious aids could have improved upon the naked truculence of most of those mouths and chins. In their supercilious confidence they reminded me of the early Australian cricketers, taking the field to mow down the flower of English cricket in the days when those were our serious wars.” The part which the public schools played in the war was also a great joy to Hornung. “Only our public schools could have furnished off-hand an army of natural officers, trained to lead, old in responsibility, and afraid of nothing in the world but fear itself.”
It was a hard fate that when Hornung had come through it all, when he had seen peace dawn, and recovered from the first shock of his loss, with all his work lying in front of him and the prospect of quiet literary days before him, he should have met a sudden end while taking a short holiday in the South of France. It was aggravated influenza which carried him off, but he had always been delicate, and it was only his quiet courage which prevented his friends from constantly knowing it. He was loved by many, and as I dropped flowers upon his newly turned grave at St. Jean de Luz, where he lies with only a gravel path between him and George Gissing, I felt that the tribute was from many hearts besides my own.Arthur Conan Doyle
The Saloon Passenger
As the cable was hauled in, and the usual cheering passed between tug and ship, Skrimshire unclenched his teeth and gave tongue with a gusto as cynical as it was sincere. It had just come home to him that this was the last link with land, and he beheld it broken with ineffable relief. Tuskar Rock was already a little thing astern; the Australian coast lay the width of the world away; the captain did not expect even to sight any other, and had assured Skrimshire that the average passage was not less than ninety days. So, whatever was to happen in the end, he had three months more of life, and of such liberty as a sailing-ship affords.
He descended to his cabin, locked himself in, and lay down to read what the newspapers had to say about the murder. It seemed strange to Skrimshire that this was the first opportunity he had had of reading up his own crime; but the peculiar circumstances of his departure had forbidden him many a last pleasure ashore, and he was only too glad to have the papers to read now and a state-room to himself in which to read them. There was a heavy sea running, and Skrimshire was no sailor; but he would not have been without the motion, or even its effects upon himself. Both were an incessant reminder that his cabin was not a prison cell, and could not turn into one for three months at all events. Besides, he was not the man to surrender to a malady which is largely nervous. So he lay occupied in his berth; medium-sized, dark-skinned, neither young nor middle-aged; only respectably dressed, and with salient jaw unshaven since the thing of which he read without a flicker of the heavy eyelids or a tremor of the hairy hands.
He had five papers of that morning’s date; the crime was worthily reported in them all; one or two had leaders on its peculiar atrocity. Skrimshire sighed when he came to the end: it was hard that he could see no more papers for three months. The egotism of the criminal was excited within him. It was lucky he was no longer on land: he would have run any risk for the evening papers. His very anonymity as author of the tragedy—the thing to which he owed his temporary security—was a certain irritation to him. He was not ashamed of what he had done. It read wonderfully, and was already admitted to have shown that diabolical cleverness and audacity for which Skrimshire alone deserved the credit; yet it looked as though he would never get it. Thus far, at least, it was plain that there was not a shred of evidence against him, or against any person upon earth. He sighed again; smiled at himself for sighing; and, closing his eyes for the first time since the murder, slept like a baby for several hours.
Skrimshire was the only passenger in the saloon, of which he presently became the life and soul. At the first meal he yielded to the temptation of a casual allusion to the murder on the Caledonian Railway; but though they had heard of it, neither captain nor officers showed much interest in the subject, which Skrimshire dropped with a show of equal indifference. And this was his last weakness of the kind. He threw his newspapers overboard, and conquered the morbid vanity they had inspired by a superb effort of the will. Remorse he had none, and for three months certain he was absolutely safe. So he determined to enjoy himself meanwhile;[1q] and, in doing so, being a dominant personality, he managed to diffuse considerable enjoyment throughout the ship.
This man was not a gentleman in either the widest or the narrowest sense of that invidious term. He wore cheap jewellery, cheap tweeds as yellow as his boots, paper collars, and shirts of a brilliant blue. He spoke with a Cockney intonation which, in a Scottish vessel, grated more or less upon every ear. But he had funds of information and of anecdote as inexhaustible as his energy, and as entertaining as his rough good-humour. He took a lively interest in every incident of the voyage, and was as ready to go aloft in a gale of wind as to make up a rubber in any part of the ship. Within a month he was equally popular in the forecastle, the steerage, and the captain’s cabin. Then one morning Skrimshire awoke with a sense that something unusual was happening, followed by an instantaneous premonition of impending peril to himself.
There were too many boots and voices over his head; the ship was bowling sedately before the north-east trades, and otherwise as still as a ship could be. Skrimshire sat up and looked through his port-hole. A liner was passing them, also outward-bound, and some three or four miles to port. There was nothing alarming in that. Yet Skrimshire went straight on deck in his pyjamas; and, on the top rung of the poop-ladder, paused an instant, his now bearded jaw more salient than it had been for weeks.
Four little flags fluttered one above the other from the peak halliards, and at the weather-rail stood the captain, a powerful figure of a man, with his long legs planted well apart, and a marine binocular glued to his eyes. Near him was the second mate, a simple young fellow, who greeted Skrimshire with a nod.
“What’s up, McKendrick? What is she?”
“A Castle liner; one o’ Donal’ Currie’s Cape boats.”
“Why did you signal her?” whispered Skrimshire.
“ ‘Twas she signalled us.”
“Do you know what it’s all about?”
“No, but the captain does.”
The captain turned round as they were speaking, and Skrimshire read his secret at a glance. It was his own, discovered since his flight and flashed across the sea by the liner’s pennons. Meanwhile the captain was looking him up and down, his hitherto friendly face convulsed with hatred and horror; and Skrimshire realized the instant necessity of appearing absolutely unsuspicious of suspicion.
“Mornin’, captain,” said he, with all the cheerful familiarity which already existed between them; “and what’s all this bloomin’ signallin’ about?”
“Want to know?” thundered the captain, now looking him through and through.
“You bet I do.”
And Skrimshire held his breath upon an insinuating grin, parrying plain abhorrence with seeming unconcern, until the other merely stared.
“Then you can mind your own business,” roared the captain, at last, “and get off my poop—and speak to my officer of the watch again at your peril!”
“Well—I’m—hanged!” drawled Skrimshire, and turned on his heel with the raised eyebrows of bewildered innocence; but the drops stood thick upon his forehead when he saw himself next minute in his state-room mirror.
So he was found out; and the captain had been informed he had a murderer aboard; and detectives would meet the ship in Hobson’s Bay, and the murderer would be escorted back through the Suez Canal and duly hanged after nothing better than a run round the world for his money! The thing had happened before: it had been the fate of the first train murderer; but he had taken the wrong hat in his panic. What on earth had Skrimshire left behind him that was going to hang him after all?
He could not think, nor was that the thing to think about. The immediate necessity he had seen at once, with extraordinary quickness of perception, and he had already acted upon it with a nerve more extraordinary still. He must preserve such a front as should betray not the shadow of a dream that he could by any possibility be suspected, by any soul on board; absolute ease must be his watchword, absolute security his pose; then they might like to save themselves the inconvenience of keeping him in irons, knowing that detectives would be waiting to do all the dirty work at the other end. And in two months’ thinking a man should hit upon something, or he deserved to swing.
The opening day was not the worst. The captain’s rudeness was enough to account for a change in any man’s manner; and Skrimshire did both well and naturally to sulk for the remainder of that day. His unusual silence gave him unusual opportunities for secret observation, and he was thankful indeed that for the time being there was no necessity to live up to his popular reputation. The scene of the morning was all over the ship; yet, so far as the saloon passenger could see, the captain had not told anybody as yet. The chief mate invited him into his cabin for a smoke, spread the usual newspaper for a spittoon, and spun the inevitable yarns; but then the chief was a hard-bitten old dog with nerves of iron and a face of brass; he might know everything, or nothing at all; it was for Skrimshire to adapt his manner to the first hypothesis, and to impress the mate with the exuberance of his spirits and the utter lightness of his heart. Later in the morning he had some conversation with the second officer. It was but a word, and yet it confirmed the culprit in his conviction about the signals.
“What have I done,” he asked McKendrick, “to make the old man jump down my throat like that?”
“It wasna you,” replied the second; “it was the signals. But ye might have known not to bother him wi’ questions just then.”
“But what the deuce were the signals about?”
“That’s more than I ken, Bennett.”
This was Skrimshire’s alias on board.
“Can’t you find out?”
“Mebbee I might—after a bit.”
“Why not now?”
“The old man’s got the book in his cabin—the deectionary-book about the signalling, ye ken. It’s my place to keep you, but the old man’s carried it off, and there’s no’ another in the ship.”
“Aha!”
“Ou, ay, it was somethin’ for hissel’, nae doot; but none of us kens what; an’ noo we never wull, for he’s as close as tar, is the old man.”
The “old man” was in point of fact no older than Skrimshire, but he had worked his way aft from ship’s boy, and a cruel boyhood followed by an early command had aged and hardened him.
A fine seaman, and a firm, though fiery, commander, Captain Neilson had also as kind a heart as one could wish to win, and a mind as simple as it was fair. It was on these qualities that Skrimshire determined to play, as he sulked in his deck-chair on the poop of the four-masted barque Lochwinnoch, while the captain thumped up and down in his rubber soles, his face black with thought, and a baleful eye upon the picture of offended oblivion behind the novel in the chair.
