But we weren’t done yet; I could see that too. Why hadn’t we ridden out of there with Hasbro? Because St. Ives was in a sweat to see what else lay in that icehouse. Narbondo himself was in there somewhere, and St. Ives meant to find him. We bellied straightaway under the weighted door, back into the ice room, St. Ives first and me following, and stood up to peer into the grinning face of the jolly Captain Bowker, who stood two yards distant, staring at us down the sights of his rifle.
He wouldn’t miss this time. I was determined to play the part of the cooperative man, the man who doesn’t want to be shot. The door slammed up and open behind us, and there stood Higgins, dressed in a lab coat, his head bandaged and him winded and puffing. Tufts of hair poked through the bandage. He smelled awful, like a dead fish in a sack.
“Leopold Higgins, I presume,” said St. Ives, bowing. “I am Langdon St. Ives.”
“I know who you bloody well are,” he said, and then he looked at me for a cold moment, smiled, and said, “How did you like the fruit?”
Clearly he didn’t know it was me who had beaned him at The Hoisted Pint when he was sneaking into the Pules’ room. That was good; he wouldn’t have been making jokes otherwise. Despite the gloom of the icehouse I could see that his face was bruised pretty badly. That must have been the work of the wonderful Pules.
“Catch it?” asked the captain, still training the rifle on us.
“Got away right enough,” said Higgins. “What sort of watch was that you were keeping? Napping is what I call it. Sleeping like a baby while these two…”
The captain swiveled the rifle around and — blam! — fired a round past Higgins’s ear. I leaped straight off my feet, but not nearly so far off them as Higgins did. He threw himself facedown into the straw on the floor, mewling like a wet cat. Captain Bowker chuckled until his eyes watered as Higgins, pale and shaken, struggled back up, fear and fury playing in his eyes.
“Who cares?” said the captain.
Higgins worked his mouth, priming his throat. “But the diving bell…”
“Who cares about the filthy bell? It ain’t worth a nickel to me. You ain’t worth a nickel to me. I’d just as leave kill the three of you and have done with it. You’ll get your diving bell back when the tall one finds out we’ve got his friends.”
This last added an optimistic flavor to the discussion. “The tall one” was clearly Hasbro, who, of course, would happily trade a dozen diving bells for the lives of dear old Jack and the professor. I didn’t at all mind being held for ransom; it was being dead that bothered me.
“Or one of his friends, anyway.” The captain shifted his gaze from one to the other of us, as if coming to a decision. There went the optimism. I was surely the most expendable of the two of us, since I knew the least. Captain Bowker sniffed the air and wrinkled up his face. “Gimme the ‘lixir,” he said to Higgins.
“He needs it,” said Higgins, shaking his head. It was a brave act, considering, for the captain trained the rifle on Higgins again, dead between the eyes now, and started straight in to chuckle. Without an instant’s hesitation, Higgins’s hand went into the pocket of his lab coat and hauled out a corked bottle, which he reached across toward the captain.
The captain grabbed for it, and St. Ives jumped — just when the rifle was midway between Higgins and us. It was the little pleasure in baiting Higgins that tripped the captain up.
“Run, Jack!” shouted St. Ives when he threw himself at the captain. In a storm of arms and legs he was flying forward, into the air, sideways into Captain Bowker’s expansive stomach. The captain smashed over backward, his head banging against the floorboards and the bottle of elixir sailing away toward the stacked ice with Higgins diving after it. I was out both doors and into the night, running again toward the two houses before St. Ives’s admonition had faded in my ears. He had commanded me to run, and I ran, like a spooked sheep. Live to fight another day, I told myself.
And while I ran I waited for the sound of a shot. What would I do if I heard it? Turn around? Turning around wasn’t on my mind. I pounded down the little boardwalk and angled toward the seawall, leaping along like an idiot instead of slowing down to think things out. No one was after me, and I was out of sight of the icehouse, so there was no longer any chance of being shot. It was cold fear that drove me on. And it was regret at having run in the first place, at having left St. Ives alone, that finally slowed me down.
I was walking when I got to the water, breathing like an engine. Fog was blowing past in billows, and the moon was lost beyond it. In moments I couldn’t see at all, except for the seawall, which I followed along up toward the Apple, moving slowly now and listening to the dripping of water off eaves and to what sounded like the slow dip of oars out on the bay. Suddenly it was the heavy silence that terrified me, an empty counterpoint, maybe, to the now-faded sound of gunfire and the moment of shouting chaos that had followed it.
Where was I bound? Back to the Apple to hide? To lie up until I learned that my friends were dead and the villains gone away? Or to confront the Pules, maybe, who were awaiting me in my room, honing their instruments? It was time for thinking all of a sudden, not for running. St. Ives had got me out of the icehouse. I couldn’t believe that his heroics were meant simply to save my miserable life — they were, without a doubt, but I couldn’t admit to it — and so what I needed was a plan, any plan, to justify my being out of danger.
I just then noticed that a lantern glowed out to sea, corning along through the fog, maybe twenty yards offshore; you couldn’t really tell. The light bobbed like a will-o’-the-wisp, hanging from a pole affixed to the bow of a rowboat sculling through the mist. I stopped to finish catching my breath and to wait out my hammering heart, and I watched the foggy lantern float toward me. A sudden gust of salty wind blew the mists to tatters, and the dark ocean and its rowboat appeared on the instant, the boat driving toward shore when the man at the oars out got a clear view of the seawall. The hull scrunched up onto the shingle, the stern slewing around and the oarsman clambering into shallow water. It was Hasbro. His pant legs were rolled and his shoes tied around his neck.
He looped the painter through a rusted iron ring in the wall and shook my hand as if he hadn’t seen me in a month. Without a second’s hesitation I told him about St. Ives held prisoner in the icehouse, about how I was just then formulating a plan to go back after him, working out the fine points so that I didn’t just wade in and muck things up. Captain Bowker was a dangerous man, I said. Like old explosives, any little quiver might detonate him.
“Very good, Mr. Owlesby,” Hasbro said in that stony butler’s voice of his. Wild coincidence didn’t perturb him. Nothing perturbed him. He listened and nodded as he sat there on the wet seawall and put on his shoes. His lean face was stoic, and he might just as well have been studying the racing form or laying out a shirt and trousers for his master to wear in the morning. Suddenly there appeared in my mind a picture of a strangely complicated and efficient clockwork mechanism — meant to be his brain, I suppose — and my spirits rose a sizable fraction. As dangerous as Captain Bowker was, I told myself, here was a man more dangerous yet. I had seen evidence of it countless times, but I had forgot it nearly as often because of the damned cool air that Hasbro has about him, the quiet efficiency.
Here he was, after all, out on the ocean rowing a boat. A half hour ago he was tearing away in a wagon, hauling a diving bell to heaven knows what destination. That was it — the difference between us. He was a man with destinations; it was that which confounded me. I rarely had one, unless it was some trivial momentary destination — the pub, say. Did Dorothy know that about me? Was it clear to the world as it was to me? Why on earth did she humor me day to day? Maybe because I reminded her of her father. But this was no time for getting morose and enumerating regrets. Where had Hasbro been? He didn’t tell me; it was later that I found out.