THE WAY OF DANGER

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21878, 14 August 1934, Page 15

THE WAY OF DANGER

(COPYMGHT)

By DAVID WHITELAW Author of "The Little Hour of Peter Wells," "The Mystery of Furze Acre," "No. 15," etc., etc.

A THRILLING SERIAL

SYNOPSIS An atmosphero of mystery surrounds the opening of the story, when tho reader is given a brief introduction to Juke and Dan, whose somewhat peculiar behaviour seems to indicate n sinister purpose. The scene shifts suddenly to the offices of the firm of t'otsford and Sons, where Brenda Freyne, secretary to the junior partner, Nod Cotsford, is distressed to find among the hitter's papers a fragment of a letter warning him to "... keep the police out of this." Scenting danger, she takes it to his flat herself and is given another letter to deliver for him. Ronald Slade, a younir clerk in Cotsford's office who is in love with Brenda, soon observes that there is something 011 her mind and at length she takes him into he% confidence. Finding that the private detective to whom the letter is addressed is out of town, they decide to open the letter and discover that Mr. Cotsford lias gone to a village in Cornwall. CHAPTER ll.—(Continued) Ronnie Slade handed back the letter. " Hum go," ho said. " I'd take it to Scotland Yard at onco if I were you." Brenda's lip curled. " But you're not me—that's just the difference. You're Ronnie Slade, and I'm Brenda Freyne. If I went to Scotland Yard, there'd be all sorts of red tape and conferences, and all the time there might bo blue murder going on down in this Zerran ■ place. I'm going to go one better than that. I was thinking of Brighton for my little holiday . . guess I'm going down to Cornwall instead."

" You mean you're going down into this God-forsaken hole, somewhere off the map? What on earth for?" " Duty, Ronnie, my boy. Duty with a big, big ' D ' —and a thirst for adventure. Mr. Noel trusted me with this, and I'm all for ' the boy stood on the burning deck ' stuff. I'm not going to let Mr. Noel down. If I have to call in the police, I suppose there are cops down in Cornwall." She looked across the table at her companion. "Care to come along, Ronnie?" " Me? Never fancied myself as a Sherlock Holmes. And murder, blue or any" other colour, isn't exactly in mj line." "But think of the excitement. Slade did not answer. He was fingering that Old Baronian tie of his, and toying with a table knife. Brenda leant back and looked at him through the blue haze of her cigarette smoke. "Mind if I say something, Ronnie?" "Fire away." "Then listen. I like you, Ronnie, but I sometimes think that the war should have come just a few years later. \ou missed its hardening influences. You play a ripping game of tennis, and I suppose you knocked a cricket ball about at that school you're always spouting about. It's your imagination that's flabby, not your muscles. You just live in a pretty garden where you keep to the paths and cling on to nurse's hand. Don't you ever feel that you want to break away and have a scamper on the grass?" "Here, hold hard, Brenda. ..."

"I won't hold hard. That's what you're doing—holding hard on nurse's hand. I wouldn't bo telling you this if I didn't like you. I do like you, Ronnie, quite a lot. There are better things in life than patting a ball across a net. You like to sit back in an armchair seat with a cigarette, and look at the 'big picture.' I like being in the picture, not watching it. See what I mean, Ronnie?" "But mixing oneself up with murders, Brenda. Police courts and all that. Besides, I can't get away from the office. Old Hughes lias been giving me hell all day." "Oh, damn old Hughes and the office too. But I was only joking, Ronnie." "I'll think it over, Brenda." The girl rose and took up her gloves. "That's just like you. Thinking things over while other men are getting down to them. Be a good boy and pay my bill with yours, will you? . . . glass of milk and one scone." She led the way between the tables toward the door. Rather sheepishly Ronald Slade followed. But when he had paid the bills and counted his change—Ronald Slade always counted change—and had reached the pavement, there was no Brenda waiting for him. Then he saw a white-gloved hand waving from a taxi that was disappearing in the stream of traffic. "Damn!" he said. It was one of the very rare occasions upon which the carefully brought up Old Baronian had allowed himself the relief of an expletive. Something was stirring within him, something was struggling for expression. Beneath the waistcoat of his "natty gents' suiting" the heart of Ronald Slade was beating as bravely as ever the heart of any of Arthur's knights beneath their shining armour. He paused 011 his way across London Bridge, and looked down, as he had so often looked down, on to the life of the river.

Boats and barges were huddled together at the landing stages. One of them, a tramp with dirty yellow smoke-stack and grimy decks, was sidling cautiously out into mid-stream. Ronnie found himself watching her. Here was something cutting adrift from safety, going adventuring. In a little while she would be makiijg her way down Channel, or breasting the waves of the grey North Sea. Then storm and calm, fair breezes and foul weather . . . and some palm-fringed southern shore .. . sun-kissed harbours. The eternal song of London River. Adventure calling. The lilt of that song caught at Ronnie's heart, fitting itself to the words ho had heard from the lips of Brenda Freyne . . .

it was with him all the way to his bed-sitting room in Clapliam . . . remained with him throughout the long hours of a sleepless night. Old Hughes looked up from his desk as the young shipping clerk entered the office the following morning. He peered up short-sightedly at the clock. Then ho peered at Ronnie Slade. "I thought, Slade, that ten o'clock was the rule of this oflice. I seo it's nearly eleven." Ronnie took his seat on his high stool and drew toward him a sheaf of invoices and bills of lading. Scenting a thoroughly cowed victim, the manager went on: "I suppose you think that because Mr. Noel is away you can do as you like. You've, lost an hour and ..."

"I'm afraid I am a bit late, Mr. Hughes. I didn't sleep very well last night."

"That's hardly the business of Cotsford and Son. I'm afraid that if you cannot fall in with the accepted rules of the office ..." Ho broke ofF and leant across the brass rail that separated the two desks. "What's that you're mumbling to yourself, Slade?" At that moment the barbs that Brenda Freyne had the evening before implanted in the soul of Ronald Slade, and that had tortured him throughout the night hours, turned again in their wounds.

"1 was just saying that I was sorry. Mr. Hughes . . . but now I find that. I'm not a bit sorry." His voice lifted an octave. "Set that, Mr. Hughes, not a bit sorry." For a moment outraged dignity held Henry Hughes silent. Then:

"Of coursq tin's will be reported to Mr. Noel on his return. We will not pursue tho subject further. Look out that invoice for tho consignment of poplins from Belfast, and compare prices with Hertzog's . . . I've said all 1 have to say." For just three minutes Ronnie Slado sat with his eyes fixed upon tho pile of invoices. His handsome face was white and red by turns. Clearly some battle was being fought out in the young man's mind. Then he slipped from his stool and reached for tho hat that lie had hung on tho peg behind him when lie came in. "Air. Shade . . . ."

"Oh, go to hell! You say you've had your last word. Well, I haven't — not. by a long chalk. I'm quitting, Mr. Hughes. D'you hear? I'm quitting. Fed up to the teeth. No, I've not been drinking—they're not open yet. You ought to know that —but I'm sick and tired of you and Cotsfords. I hate the sight of brocades and poplins and bills of lading and invoices. I've always hated 'em ..." "But, Mr. Slade, you're mad." "1 was mad, you mean. I got all that nonsense knocked out of me last night. A girl knocked it out." Slade was halfway across the office toward the door, but iie turned back and faced his superior. At the back of his mind he had dreamed of the time when h ; e would throw off the shackles and now that the great day had come he wasn't going to miss the opportunity of speaking what had been long*in his mind. "The trouble with you, Hughes, is that you just go doddering on in your own silly little way. Eight-fifteen in the morning and tho seven-five homo at night. And a footling game of chess in the evenings. And then some day you'll die and wonder what you were ever born for."

Old Hughes was on his feet. His shaking hand was reaching out for tho bell connecting with the warehouse. But Slade had reached the door. With the handle in his fingers he delivered his parting shot. "You're not a bad sort, Hughes . . . but don't you ever want to break away and have a scamper on the grass?" Those were his last words. If Air. Hughes replied, Bonnie didn't wait to hear him. Tho revolution, bred of a girl's jibes, had been bloodless but swift. The boy was a little excited, a little frightened perhaps, but he had no regrets. He smiled a little to himself at the mental picture of a spectacled Henry Hughes capering on imaginary grass like an elderly lamb; then he crossed Cheapside to the tea shop whore he had the evening before learnt his lesson. There he ordered colfee. Also he asked tho waitress to bring him an A.B.C. railway guide and a telegraph form. **** * » ♦ Brenda had decided to take the midnight sleeper, but second thoughts had dissuaded her. She had slept hardly at all the night belore and she wanted, above everything, to be fit for whatever might lie before her.

Sho would wait for the morning train, which would land her in Penzance about five o'clock where, as she learnt from her guide book, a bus would be waiting to tako her to Porthmedda, the nearest'village to Zerran. The latter was, of course, out of the question. Whatever the business that had taken Jlr. Noel to Cornwall he would hardly thank her for butting into it unasked. But from Porthmedda she woidd be able to take her bearings for future actions.

Brenda spent the evening quietly in lior little lint with guide hooks and a large scale map, and at ten the next morning, rested both physically and mentally, she slid gently out of Paddington on the first stage of her adventure. .Leaning back on the cushions of the third-class carriage and placing two very shapely little brogues on the seat before her, the girl gave herself up to dreams. She watched the flying hedges and meadows —in a little while these flat fields and pastures would give place to the villages and woodlands of Somerset. Then would come the wide sweep of Devon valleys, shadow-stained hillsides and great tors raising their crested heads like fabled castles of ■Romance to the clouds.

If only Ronnie had not been so lacking in imagination. But why think of Ronnie? If the boy wanted to huddle himself across a desk adding up interminable rows of figures and scribbling bills of lading instead of going adventuring he must do so. . . . and yet, Brenda's heart was crying out for companionship. But she was happy. She was leaving behind her the dull routine, the old beaten paths of life, and was entering into a new and wonderful world where anything and everything night happen. t But as she stood that evening at the rain-blurred window of the bar parlour of the Tinner's Arms at Porthmedda, looking out over the grey Atlantic, the first doubts as to her wisdom in taking her employer's affairs on to her own shoulders assailed her. Perhaps, in spite of what Mr. Noel had said, she should, having failed to get into toueh with Mr. Bristow, have taken Ronnie's advice and gone to the police. What if she had allowed her own burning desire for excitement to sway her, to beat down her discretion? She was tired now and not a little depressed. The long journey to Penzance had, after the first hc;ir or two, palled upon her, and the wait in the grey, old Cornish town for the motor bus to bump her in a driving rain over the interminable miles of moorland roads to Porthmedda had been deAnd, 011 arriving she had learned that any thought of reaching Zerran that night was out of the question.

Zerran was seven miles out by the road, or three by the coastguard path over the cliffs, a path that in the darkness and storm it would bo sheer madness to attempt. And the meal served in the damp-smelling bar parlour, a fire that would not burn, a bedroom tucked away under tho eaves with the rain lashing tho panes of the rattling windows and the moan of tho Atlantic in her ears had done littlo to raise her spirits.

But Brenda was dog-tired and it 'Would have taken twenty moaning Atlantics* to keep her awake. She was asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow, slept. dreamlessly for seven hours and awakened —to Paradise, to a blue expanse of sea and moorland, the purple smudge of distant hills and gulls wheeling high in a cloudless sky. And in the air the tang of the sea ,and the fragrance of gorse and heather.

Brenda breakfasted in the bar parlour and at a little after ten took the path leading across the cliff. A delightful path it was that ziz-zagged in and out among grey boulders and golden gorsc, rising to the crest of one headland, dipping and lifting again to another, showing at each turn some new and more wonderful vista of sea and moor.

One jarring note, and one only, was there to mar the harmony of that walk —the house on the rock. Sho came upon it suddenly as she turned one of the headlands that jutted out, great gnarled masses of rock apd herbage, into the blue of the Atlantic. A grey, forbidding structure perched on a plinth of granite that dropped sheer some hundred feet to the small sandy cove at its base. (To be continued daily)