The door had closed upon the two men who carried up the boxes, and a demand that it should be reopened met with no response. Therefore a long iron bar was procured from somewhere, and two policemen working with it soon prised the door from its hinges.
The lights within had all been suddenly extinguished, but finding myself in the little bar-parlour with two others of the party, I struck a vesta and relit the gas.
Two of the mysterious wooden cases brought from the ship were standing there.
We heard loud shouts in German, and a scuffle upon the stairs in the darkness, followed by a shot. Then a woman's scream mingled with the shouts and curses of my companions, and I found myself in the midst of a wild mêlée, in which furniture and bottles were being smashed about me. My friends were trying to secure Bramberger and Freeman, while both were fighting desperately for their lives.
Ray made a sudden spring upon the young man who had been so attracted by Vera Vallance, but for his pains received a savage cut in the arm from a knife.
The man stood at bay in the corner of the smoke-room with half a dozen of us before him. The fellow had set his jaws fiercely, and there was murder in his black eyes. Bramberger, however, had already been secured, and handcuffs had been slipped upon him by the police.
"Now," cried Ray Raymond, "tell your story, Richardson. These two blackguards must hear it before we hand them over." And I noticed that near me were two policemen, who had covered Freeman with their revolvers.
From among us a rough man in a shabby pea-jacket, whom I had seen once or twice in that inn, came forward, and without a word of preliminary exclaimed:
"Jim Pavely, the poor fellow whom these accursed foreigners murdered, was my brother-in-law. The night before he was killed he slept at my house. He was drunk, but he told me something that at first I didn't believe. He told me that on the previous day, spending so much time about this place, he had stumbled on the fact that a certain German timber-ship was in the habit of bringing up among its cargo a quantity of saccharine which was smuggled ashore at night and stored in the cellars below here. He had had words with the landlord Bramberger, but the latter had made him promise to keep his secret till next morning, when he would pay him a certain sum to say nothing to the Customs officers. Next afternoon at four o'clock he went to the 'Goat and Binnacle' to receive the money, and I entered after him, intending to assist him in getting all he could out of the German. But that fellow Freeman, yonder--whom I know to be also a German--was with his compatriot, and the three had consultation together in the back room. Half an hour later Jim Pavely came back to my house and showed me fifty pounds, and a written agreement signed by Bramberger to pay one hundred and fifty pounds more in gold in Calais, on condition that he remained abroad and held his tongue."