Captain Shannon

The striking of that fusee was a critical moment in my life, for before the thing had hissed itself into a black and crackling cinder I had decided to follow up the clue which had been so strangely thrown in my way. My principal reason for so deciding was that I wanted a rest—the rest of a change of occupation, not the rest of inaction. I am by profession what George Borrow would have called “one of the writing fellows.” But, much as I love my craft, and generous and large-hearted as I have always found literary men—at all events, large-brained literary men—to be, I cannot profess much admiration for the fussy folk who seem to imagine that God made our world and the infinite worlds around it, life and death, and the human heart, with its joys and sorrows and hope of immortality, for no other reason than that they should have something to write about.

Instead of recognising that it is only life and the unintelligible mystery of life which make literature of any consequence, they seem to fancy that literature is the chief concern and end of man’s being. As a matter of fact, literature is to life what a dog’s tail is to his body—a very valuable appendage; but the dog must wag the tail, not the tail the dog, as some of these gentry would have us to believe. The dog could, at a pinch, make shift to do without the tail, but the tail could under no circumstances do without the dog.

You may screw a pencil into one end of a pair of compasses and draw as many circles of different sizes as you please, but it is from the other end that you must take your centres, and what the pivot end is to the pencil, life must be to literature.

Hence it is my habit every now and then to put away from me all that is connected with books and the making of books, and to seek only to live my life, and to possess my own soul and this wonderful world about us.

At the particular date of which I am writing, the restlessness which is so often associated with the literary temperament was upon me. I craved change, excitement, and adventures, and these the following up of the clue which I held to the identity of Captain Shannon promised in abundance.

As everything depended upon the assumption that James Mullen was, as was stated, Captain Shannon, the first question which I felt it necessary seriously to consider was whether the informer’s evidence was to be credited; and I did not lose sight of the fact that his confessions, so far from being entitled to be regarded as bona fide evidence, were to be received with very grave suspicion. At the best they might be nothing more than the invention of one who had no information to give, but who hoped by means of them either to prevent, or at least to stave off for a time, the otherwise inevitable death sentence which was hanging over his head.

At the worst it was possible that the pretended Queen’s evidence had been carefully prepared beforehand by Captain Shannon, and communicated by him to his agents, to be used in the event of any of them falling into the hands of the police. In that case the statements which might thus be put forward, so far from being of assistance to the authorities, would be deliberately constructed with a view to confuse and mislead.

The one thing which I found it utterly impossible to reconcile with the theories I had previously formed about Captain Shannon was that the informer should have in his possession a portrait of his chief.

Was it likely, I asked myself, that so cunning a criminal would, by allowing his portrait to get into the possession of his agents, place himself at the mercy of any scoundrel who, for the sake of an offered reward, would be ready to betray his leader, or of some coward who, on falling into the hands of the police, might offer to turn Queen’s evidence? Was it not far more likely, on the contrary, that the explanation of Captain Shannon’s having so successfully eluded the police and kept the authorities in ignorance of his very identity was that he had carefully concealed that identity even from his own colleagues?

The more I thought about it the more assured I became that so crafty a man—a man who was not only an artist but a genius in crime—would trust absolutely no one with a secret that concerned his own safety. On the few occasions when he would have to come into personal relation with his confederates, it seemed more than probable to me that he would assume some definite and consistent disguise which would mislead even them in regard to his appearance and individuality.

On being asked how the portrait got into his possession, and whether it was a good likeness, the informer had replied that he had only seen Captain Shannon on a single occasion, when he met him one night by appointment at Euston Station. The portrait had been sent home to him beforehand, so that he might have no difficulty in recognizing the person to whom he was to deliver a certain package, and he added that, so far as he could see, it was an excellent likeness.

Some such explanation as this was just what I had expected, for if the portrait were intended, as I supposed, to mislead the police, I was sure that Captain Shannon would invent some plausible story to account for its being in the possession of one of his colleagues. Otherwise the fact of a man, for whose arrest a large reward had been offered, having, for no apparent reason, presented his photograph to a fellow-conspirator, might arouse suspicion of the portrait’s genuineness.

That the portrait represented not the real but the disguised Captain Shannon, I was equally confident. I thought it more than possible that the man I had to find would be the exact opposite of the man who was there portrayed, and of the informer’s description. For instance, as the pictured Captain Shannon was evidently dark, and was said to be dark by the informer, the real Captain Shannon would probably be fair, as the more dissimilar was the real Captain Shannon from the Captain Shannon for whom the police were searching, the less likely would they be to find him.

Then, again, it had been particularly stated by the informer that James Mullen was slightly lame, and to this the police attached the greatest importance. The fact that the man they wanted had an infirmity so easily recognised and so difficult to conceal was considered to narrow down the field of their investigations to the smallest compass and to render the fugitive’s ultimate capture nothing less than a certainty.

For myself, I was not at all sure that this supposed lameness was not part and parcel of Captain Shannon’s disguise. A sound man could easily simulate lameness, but a lame man could not so simulate soundness of limb, and I could not help thinking that if Captain Shannon were, as had been asserted, lame, he would have taken care to conceal the fact from his confederates.

If the police could be induced to believe that the man they wanted was lame, they would not, in all probability, be inconveniently suspicious about the movements of a stranger evidently of sound and equal limb, who might otherwise be called on to give an account of himself.

Being curious to know what course they were pursuing, I made it my business within the next few days to scrape an acquaintance with one of the ticket-collectors at Euston. After propitiating him in the usual way by a judicious application of “palm-oil,” I ventured to put the question whether he had at any time noticed a short, dark, lame man on the platform where the Irish mail started.

A broad grin came over the fellow’s face in reply.

“What, are they on that lay still!” he said, derisively. “I knew you was after something, but I shouldn’t have took you for a detective.”

I assured him that I was not a detective, and asked him to explain, whereupon he told me that immediately after the publication of the portrait of Captain Shannon, instructions had been sent to all railway stations that a keen look-out was to be kept for a short, dark, lame man, whether clean-shaven or bearded, and that if a person in any way resembling James Mullen (whose portrait was placed in the hands of every ticket-collector), was noticed, the police should instantly be communicated with.

“Why, if you was to know, sir,” said the collector, “’ow many short, dark, respectable gents, what ’appens to be lame, have been took up lately on suspicion, you’d larf, you would. It’s bad enough to be lame at hany time, but when you’re going to be harrested for a hanarchist as well, it makes your life a perfect misery, it do.”