Blood On Castle Reef

By Avram B. Cross

A tropical island makes one think of green palms and scented breezes and sunshine like warm gold—and Castle Reef was all of that; but, amid the beauty of it, a perilous drama of real life was going on, with five white people, one a woman, as the actors.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mystery & Thriller Publishing
• Release date: Sep 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223336860

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The storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

A tropical island makes one think of green palms and scented breezes and sunshine like warm gold—and Castle Reef was all of that; but, amid the beauty of it, a perilous drama of real life was going on, with five white people, one a woman, as the actors.

CHAPTER I

A STOLEN GUN

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THE queer, black, hunched figure in the vague starlight of the palm grove moved slowly from tree to tree, advancing toward the yard of the plantation house. It was not until it passed through a bare space that the figure was revealed for a second as a man.

He stopped to listen, pressed against the gigantic bole of a coconut-palm tree, leaning forward and peering into darkness ahead, mottled with the pale brilliance of the trickle of starlight through the mop heads of the palms.

To the left, the sea was visible as a dark plain with a clear-cut horizon against the light-speckled sky. To the northward there was a long streak of luminosity which was the phosphorescent surf on the coral reef. The dull boom of the breakers came down the shore of the island in a soothing undertone.

The man strained his eyes into the great pits of velvety blackness where the edge of the jungle, which rose on the hills, marked the end of the sand flats extending to the beach. Here and there a palm tree that had been whitewashed against insect pests, stood out of the gloom with greater clearness than the untreated trees. These white trees gave the man his bearings to the plantation house. He had fixed their positions in his mind by daylight, preparing for his journey under cover of darkness.

Satisfied that there were no lurkers along his path, the man moved forward. The blade of a knife in his hand caught the glint of starlight as he dodged out of one shadow into another. He made rapid progress until he had reached a point which he knew to be within a hundred yards of the veranda of the big plantation house.

He dropped to his hands and knees and crawled past the house. Then he moved at right angles and approachéd the building from a side veranda. He waited a few minutes when he had reached the vines which grew over the railing dog barked somewhere in the hills.

Suddenly a light flamed behind thé house. The man lay still, waiting to see what the brightness that spilled out upon the grass could mean. It came from the screened opening in the side of the bamboo cookhouse. He saw the vague figure of the old Chinese cook filling a long-stemmed iron pipe as he sat up in his cot. The dog had woken the old man, and he was having a smoke.

Without noise, the man near the veranda stood to his feet and, feeling for the stanchion of the railing, drew himself up slowly. He swung his legs inward in the heavy blackness of the wide veranda and lowered his feet until they were upon the matting. He tested his weight on the veranda flooring before each step, and gained the attap wall of the house.

He felt for the rough edge of the kajang, or awning of split bamboo which shuttered the big window. He found it. but a few feet from the spot where he had pressed against the wall, and thrust his hand gently under the overlapping fibers. He felt softly with the tips of his fingers until they encountered the edge of a web belt hanging down inside.

There was a slight sound inside the house, as if a sleeper had stirred. But the sound proved. to be the subdued grunt of a lizard under the house. Five times it coughed, and then there was a faint rattle as the lizard scampered over dried leaves.

The hand inside the house followed the belt downward until the fingers reached the soft surface of polished leather. It was a loose flap. The man drew it toward him, holding it out from the surface of the kajang, and pressed his other hand in carefully until he could feel cold metal. He extracted the revolver from the holster and let the belt sway back into position. He slipped the long-barreled weapon into the front of his unbuttoned shirt and thrust the muzzle down under his belt so the pressure of his body would keep it in place.

Slowly the man moved across the veranda. He stopped for a few minutes at the railing and drew the revolver out, dropped the cylinder into the palm of his left hand, and ran his thumb nail. over the flanges of the cartridges. There were five of them, one chamber being empty for the hammer when the weapon was closed. He put the revolver under his belt and cautiously lowered himself to the ground.

The light was still burning dimly in the cookhouse. The man swung away for the beach, making a wide detour in front of the house, and, passing up through the palm grove again, found the bottom of a path which ran up a hill under cover of a heavy undergrowth.

It took half an hour for him to feel his way to the top of the hill, where he emerged into ferns and heavy grass. There was an inkling of morning light on the sea horizon. He was now on a level with the tops of the gigantic palm trees of the flats below. He stood for a minute and gazed out to seaward, then turned and pushed across the clearing toward the dark spot which was a small, square bungalow without any verandas. It stood up from the ground like an ungainly haystack, its low-hanging eaves of thatch clearly marked in the starlight.

Moving straight to the black pit which marked the open doorway of the bungalow, the man climbed the crude steps, and walked into the single room of the building.

Who's that? called a voice, and then the creak of somebody sitting up swiftly on a rattan cot.

Keep your shirt on, said the man with the revolver.

Well, you give me a jolt when you come pounding in like that, complained the man in the bed. What time is it, baron?

Near daylight. And say—you lay off that name around here. How do you know somebody ain’t listeninG in on what’s said around this dump ?

I forgot—I was only coming awake. There was the flash of a match from a mosquito-netted bed, and a thin-faced man lit a cigarette.

The man addressed as baron struck a match himself and lit the rag wick of a coconut-oil lamp. The heavy, wavering flame showed that kajangs on each of the four sides of the new bungalow were drawn inward and secured with pieces of undried rattan.

Turning his back to the door, he drew out the revolver he had stolen. He was a man with a dark and squarish face, his heavy jaws covered with the bluish tinge of a stubble of beard. His cotton trousers had been hacked off below the knees to make shorts, and his feet were in slippers. About his lower legs he had wrapped strips of an old khaki shirt to protect his: skin against the thorns of creeping vines. His heavy neck, revealed by the loose collar