"You, at least, will not laugh much longer," said Bittle, and put the muzzle of one of his revolvers in the Saint's face.
"Half a sec.!" Simon's voice ripped out like a gunshot, and Bittle hesitated with his finger tightening on the trigger. "While I'm being so communicative, you might as well hear the rest of the yarn it may help you, though I doubt it. Let me tell you your second mistake. I've got another stiff one ready to shoot at you! This is mostly Orace's story, but he won't mind my cribbing it. Orace, you know, hasn't been wasting his time. Orace went below and laid out your engineer and put on his clothes. You spoke to him yourself, and never guessed I'll bet that makes you hop! Then I arrived, and also mistook Orace for the genuine article, and I'd nearly killed him before I found out my error. Orace and I knew enough about motors to obey the telegraph, and we were the ones took this bateau out for you. After we'd finished I made Orace take off the overalls, so that you wouldn't suspect anything; but the real engineer is still locked up below, and he must be pretty cramped and peevish by this time! But that's not the whole yarn not by a mile!"
Bittle had lowered his gun as the Saint talked on, for it was dawning upon Bittle that the Saint had an even bigger trump card yet to play. Prince of bluffers though the Saint might be, Bittle could not believe that he could bluff for his life in such a casual manner. The Saint smiled all the time, and he was smiling in such a way as almost to invite the others to doubt his word, yet every now and then he handed them out one perfect gem of verifiable fact to shatter their illusions and force them back as to credulity. He used his facts as pegs on which to hang the decorations with which his egotism compelled him to embellish the tale, but for all that those facts stuck out as stark and uncontrovertible as a forest of spears. And all the time Bittle could sense that the Saint, in his mild and lingering way, was working up to an even more devastating bombshell. What that bombshell was going to be Bittle could not divine, but the conviction was borne in upon him that a mine of some sort was going to be exploded somewhere in his vicinity. And therefore he waited for the Saint to have his say, for he was hoping to minimize his danger by letting the Saint forearm him against it.
Simon was gazing through a porthole at the dark horizon, and something that he saw there seemed to please him. His smile trembled on the verge of laughter, as at some secret jest, and when he went on there was a trace of excitement creeping into his voice.
"Orace and I," said the Saint, "have brains, and Orace used to be a Sergeant of Marines, so he was able to provide the raw material for our ingenuity to work on. Before we started the picnic, we put your bilge pump out of action and opened up one of the scuttles in the keel. My nautical knowledge is very scanty, and I'm not sure if that's the way a sailor would describe the gadgets, but I expect Maggie will tell you what I mean. Anyway, a lot of water started pouring in, and we legged it out of the way without waiting to see what happened next. Still, I notice that we seem to have lost a lot of speed, and unless my eyes are failing I should say that we had developed what I understand is called a list to starboard, so I suppose the old tub really is going down. Check me up if I'm wrong.
Maggs started up, and the others looked wildly about them. The Saint had spoken the truth. The list had developed very slowly at first, so that no one had noticed it in their absorption in more tempestuous things, but now that the Saint had called their attention to it the fact was indisputable.
Suddenly there was a stampede for the door.
Bittle leaped forward, raving like a maniac, and quelled the panic. He fought in between the ter-. rified mob and the door, and held them off at revolver point. Then he himself opened the door and looked out.
The ship had lost way considerably, and was now heeling over so much that it was difficult to walk on the sloping decks.
Bloem was swaying drunkenly toward the door.
"The gold!" he blubbered. "The gold! ... It'll sink! ... Bittle, make them get the gold into the boats!"
"You're a fool!"
Bittle pushed the man back he was easily the calmest of them all. His rage had simmered down, now, out of visibility, but it gleamed behind his small pale blue eyes like the molten lava which oozes down the sides of a volcano when the eruption has died down. Both his guns went up.
"You beat me in the end. Templar!" he shouted. "But I can see that you never enjoy it." Like one possessed, he kicked aside a man who stood in his line of fire. "Laugh now, Templar!" he babbled. "It's your last laugh!"?
And the Saint chuckled, throwing back his head joyously, for he had seen the final shock which he had allowed for dovetail in according to schedule.
"Put up your hands, Bittle!"
The voice cracked into the room like a bared sabre.
Bittle turned and saw the man who had appeared in the doorway, and his revolvers thudded to the carpet from his nerveless fingers.
He shrank away into the farthest corner, and his face had gone gray and horrible.
Algy took a step into the room, a heavy automatic in each hand, and the men retreated before him. He swept them with hard, merciless eyes.
"I think you all know me," said Mr. Lomas-Coper, in the same metallic voice,
He looked at the girl, and read bewilderment in her face.
"I am the Tiger," said Algy.
Chapter XX
THE LAST LAUGH
"Things have gone very badly," said the Tiger. "As Bittle said, Mr. Templar, you have beaten us. I bear you no malice. Perhaps it was ordained that it should end like this. You need not be afraid that I shall kill you, as that man would have done that would be profitless. I might still have won, if I had had a fair chance, but the men I trusted double-crossed me. Now the ship is going down, and all my work is lost. I can fight no more. Fate has been against me from the beginning, and I am very tired.
He passed a hand across his eyes. The fatuous pose which went with the character of Algy Lomas-Coper had fallen from his shoulders like a discarded cloak, and it was an ordinary man who spoke. More than that, it was a broken man. There was something which filled the Saint with a sneaking sense of tragedy about this sudden transition from the effervescent Algy to the grim, weary figure of the Tiger facing the end.
"But you
The Tiger's burning gaze raked over Bitfle and Bloem and Maggs like a searing iron. Once again the Tiger's voice took on that biting tang of steel, and the men cringed from the lash of it.
"But you you treacherous dogs, you perfidious scum, you abject rats, you shabby, contemptible, paltry vermin against you I do bear malice. I came down to meet you on the quay do you remember? and you shot me down without a word. It was only a graze, but it stunned me, and to make sure you shot me again in the body as I lay there. I found the bullet afterward, and there was the bruise on my chest under my heart to prove it, But I always wear a bullet-proof waistcoat you couldn't know that. I lived, and swam out here with that girl to win back what was mine. I might have done it, but I am not such a good swimmer as I thought I was, and it took me a long time to recover after I got on board. So I only arrived in time to hear your speeches, Bittle, and hear Templar tell you how he had beaten you."