19 : Blackbeard has the Last Word
FOR A LONG TIME, as they rode, the boys were silent. Fin-
ally Jupiter said, “At least the fog will keep Mr. Huga-
nay from following us.”
“Why should he follow us?” Pete demanded. “We
haven’t got the picture.”
“He may think we have.” Jupiter was pinching his
lower lip. “That was a surprising development, finding the
box with nothing in it but that note from John Silver.”
“If they come after us now,” Pete said, “we’ll have
Konrad and Hans around to help handle them.” He
swung the piece of pipe which he had gripped firmly ever
since he picked it up. “I might get a chance to use this
again,” he said. “That Adams won’t forget the crack I
gave him.”
“You acted as I knew you would,” Jupiter said. “With
bravery and perfect timing.” Pete didn’t answer, though
he glowed a little inside. Praise from Jupe was rare, and
when it came, it meant a lot. Jupiter, however, was al-
ready thinking of something else.
“We solved the message,” he said. “The presence of the
box proves it. Yet the picture wasn’t in the box.”
“Part of the message was, ‘I never give a sucker an even
break.’” Pete reminded him. “That proves Mr. Silver was
up to some more funny business.”
“Maybe,” Jupiter agreed. He spent the entire remain-
der of the trip thinking and Pete did not attempt to inter-
rupt him.
Before they reached Rocky Beach, they had to pass
through fog again, but it was not as thick as it had been
farther south. They reached The Jones Salvage Yard with-
out incident.
“Let’s get into Headquarters,” Jupiter suggested, after
Konrad drove off to put the truck away. “We should give
Bob a full report.”
They used Easy Three to get into Headquarters this
time, since no one was watching. Easy Three was a big
oak door in its frame which seemed to be leaning against
a pile of junk. But when unlocked with a rusty iron key
taken from a pot of rusty metal where it would never be
noticed, the door led into a huge old boiler which in turn
led to a small door into Headquarters.
Bob Andrews was sitting, restlessly reading, as they
crawled in.
“Did you find it?” he shouted.
But immediately he knew the answer. Their dishevelled
and weary appearance, and the fact that they carried
nothing except the length of pipe Pete had retained for a
weapon, told him something had gone wrong.
“Mr. Huganay caught us,” Jupiter said, slumping into
his chair.
“But he didn’t get the picture either,” Pete added,
taking his seat. “He found the box but there was just a
note in it saying that he hadn’t studied the clues well
enough.”
“Whiskers!” Bob said. “That’s curious. You mean Mr.
Silver was playing a sort of double joke? Pretending he’d
hidden the picture when he hadn’t?”
“I wish I knew,” Jupiter said glumly. “I don’t think so.
The note in the box said, ‘Sorry, old man, but you didn’t
read your clues well enough.’ That means there’s some-
thing in the clues that we missed and Mr. Huganay missed,
too.”
“I told you——” Bob began. Then he forgot what he
was going to say because at that moment the phone rang.
They looked at it. They weren’t expecting any phone
calls.
“It might be from Mrs. Claudius,” Jupiter said, after
the telephone had rung five times. “I suppose I had better
answer it.”
He picked up the receiver and held it near the speaker
that allowed them all to listen.
“Hello,” he said. “The Three Investigators, Jupiter
Jones speaking.”
“Congratulations, young Jones,” said a man’s voice
with a small, ironic chuckle, and all the boys looked at
each other. It was definitely a voice with a French accent.
Mr. Huganay!
“Who is this?” Jupiter asked. He knew perfectly well
who it was, but he wanted a little more time to get pre-
pared for whatever threat the art thief might be prepared
to utter.
“This is the gentleman you met a little while ago in the
fog in a picturesque spot in Merita Valley,” said Mr.
Huganay’s voice. “I just wanted to tell you I have finally
figured how John Silver fooled me. It was very smart of
you to see what I missed. So—I am abandoning my chase.
I know when I am beaten.
“I am at the airport. I will be catching a plane for a
foreign country when I hang up. So you cannot catch me.
This is just a last-minute salutation from one sportsman to
another. Tell Claude I wish him luck with the shep-
herdess.”
“Thank you,” Jupiter said, though he had not the
faintest idea what the Frenchman was talking about.
“You outmanoeuvred me,” said Mr. Huganay. “Few
people have done that. If you boys ever come to Europe,
look me up. I will show you the French underworld and
perhaps you may have a chance to try your wits on some
mystery there. No hard feelings on my part, if there are
none on yours. Agreed?”
“Well—yes,” Jupiter said, blinking at his partners.
“Agreed.”
“Oh—one last thing,” Mr. Huganay told him. “I have
the parrots in a garage at 89958 Ocean Street, in Santa
Monica. You will want to rescue them, I am sure. I have
no time to return to see them, so this task I leave to you.
Au revoir, then, and again my congratulations.”
He hung up. Jupiter hung up, too, and the three part-
ners stared at each other.
“Did you get that address, Bob?” Jupiter asked at last.
“Yes,” Bob said. “So we can get back Billy and Bo-
Peep and the rest it looks like. But whiskers, what did he
mean by saying we outmanoeuvred him?”
“All I did was slug Adams, grab you, Jupe, and run for
it,” Pete said. “If that’s outmanoeuvring him, why——”
He broke off. “What is it?” he asked. “Why are you star-
ing at me like that?”
“What,” Jupiter asked, sounding slightly breathless,
“what was Part 6 of the message?”
It was Bob who answered. “‘Look under the stones
beyond the bones for the box that has no locks,’” he said.
“Sure,” Pete agreed. “And that’s where that bruiser
Lester found Mr. Silver’s metal box, all right.”
“But he found a box with a lock on it!” Jupiter ex-
claimed. “Mr. Huganay had to cut the lock off. And the
message distinctly said to look for the box that has no
locks.”
“That’s right!” Pete exclaimed. “There must have been
another box——No,” he added, “that couldn’t be. That
was a big box, even if it was flat If there had been an-
other box, Lester would have spotted it.”
“But suppose it was a little box?” Jupiter said. “A
small box that didn’t even look like a box. What was Part
7 of the message?”
“‘I never give a sucker an even break,’” Pete an-
swered. “We heard Scarface say it himself, didn’t we,
Bob?”
“That’s right,” Bob said. “But Blackbeard added, ‘And
that’s a lead-pipe cinch.’ I have all of that in my notes,
remember? The second half of the message is an old slang
expression meaning something is positively certain.”
“Is it?” Jupiter asked. “Or is the first part of the mes-
sage really intended to distract our attention, while the
last part of the message is there to focus our attention on
some very insignificant object, if we are smart enough to
read the clues well enough?”
“What,” he finished, “is that thing on the desk in front
of you, Pete?”
Pete looked at it. Bob looked at it. Even the drowsy
Blackbeard stuck his beak through the wires of the cage
and looked at it.
“It’s a piece of pipe,” Pete said.
“Where did you get it?”
“I picked it up in the graveyard and whammed Adams
with it,” Pete said.
“And it was there because Lester found it under the
rocks and tossed it out, right?” Jupiter demanded.
Pete swallowed and nodded.
“Right,” he said. “And—it’s lead pipe.”
“Lead pipe is rather uncommon these days,” Jupiter
said. “But look at it. The ends of the pipe have caps
tightly screwed down, so nothing can get in—no damp-
ness, for instance.”
“That piece of pipe,” Bob said in a low voice, “with the
caps closing it that way, might even be called a box.”
“Without,” Pete finished for him, “any locks.”
“A box without any locks,” Jupiter said. “A box that
won’t rust won’t let in moisture or water or dirt or in-
sects, a box that will last without damage for a hundred
years, if necessary. A perfect place to hide something
valuable. And we brought it with us!”
Pete was already trying to unscrew the caps on the end
of the piece of pipe, which was about fourteen inches long.
“They’re on too tight,” he said. “I’ll get some pliers
from the lab.”
He went into the tiny lab, which was part of Headquar-
ters, and back so swiftly he hardly seemed to have
moved.
“You open it,” Jupiter said. “You picked it up.”
The boys hardly breathed as Pete applied the pliers to
the metal caps on each end of the pipe. They came off
after a few turns. Pete pushed his finger into the pipe. As
he pulled it out something emerged and fell on to the desk.
It was a length of canvas, rolled up tightly.
“Canvas,” Jupiter said in a choked voice, “can be
rolled up without damaging it, thus a large piece can be
kept in a small cylinder. Unroll it, Pete.”
Pete unrolled it. He held it out flat on the desk and they
all stared at it.
It was about fourteen inches wide by about twenty-four
inches long. On the canvas was a painting that even they,
untrained in art, knew was rare and beautiful. It showed a
young girl, in the costume of a shepherdess, tending a tiny
lamb that had injured its leg. The colours were undimmed,
glowing with brilliant life.
They had recovered the lost masterpiece.
“A piece off the end of the rainbow,” Jupiter said.
“That’s how John Silver described the painting. Now I
know what he meant.”
At the words “John Silver” and “painting” the sleepy
mynah bird stirred. They seemed to wake some recollec-
tion in his mind. He flapped his wings twice and spoke.
“John Silver,” he said. “Good work, good work.”
Then the unusual mynah bird tucked his head under his
wing and went to sleep. But with the painting on the desk
in front of them, the boys could not help feeling that
they had just heard a dead man speak to them, and a
ghostly chuckle seemed to fill the small space for a long
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