rosier aspect of the noble art, as presently practised on the right
side of the Atlantic. Among other offerings, we were permitted to
handle the jewelled belt presented to the pugilist by the State of
Nevada, a gold brick from the citizens of Sacramento, and a model of
himself in solid silver from the Fisticuff Club in New York. I still
remember waiting with bated breath for Raffles to ask Maguire if he
were not afraid of burglars, and Maguire replying that he had a trap
to catch the cleverest cracksman alive, but flatly refusing to tell us
what it was. I could not at the moment conceive a more terrible trap
than the heavy-weight himself behind a curtain. Yet it was easy to see
that Raffles had accepted the braggart's boast as a challenge. Nor did
he deny it later when I taxed him with his mad resolve; he merely
refused to allow me to implicate myself in its execution. Well, there
was a spice of savage satisfaction in the thought that Raffles had
been obliged to turn to me in the end. And, but for the dreadful thud
which I had heard over the telephone, I might have extracted some
genuine comfort from the unerring sagacity with which he had chosen
his night.
Within the last twenty-four hours Barney Maguire had fought his first
great battle on British soil. Obviously, he would no longer be the man
that he had been in the strict training before the fight; never, as I
gathered, was such a ruffian more off his guard, or less capable of
protecting himself and his possessions, than in these first hours of
relaxation and inevitable debauchery for which Raffles had waited with
characteristic foresight. Nor was the terrible Barney likely to be
more abstemious for signal punishment sustained in a far from
bloodless victory. Then what could be the meaning of that sickening
and most suggestive thud? Could it be the champion himself who had
received the _coup de grace_ in his cups? Raffles was the very man to
administer it--but he had not talked like that man through the
telephone.
And yet--and yet--what else could have happened? I must have asked
myself the question between each and all of the above reflections,
made partly as I dressed and partly in the hansom on the way to
Half-moon Street. It was as yet the only question in my mind. You must
know what your emergency is before you can decide how to cope with
it; and to this day I sometimes tremble to think of the rashly direct
method by which I set about obtaining the requisite information. I
drove every yard of the way to the pugilist's very door. You will
remember that I had been dining with Swigger Morrison at his club.
Yet at the last I had a rough idea of what I meant to say when the
door was opened. It seemed almost probable that the tragic end of our
talk over the telephone had been caused by the sudden arrival and as
sudden violence of Barney Maguire. In that case I was resolved to tell
him that Raffles and I had made a bet about his burglar trap, and that
I had come to see who had won. I might or might not confess that
Raffles had rung me out of bed to this end. If, however, I was wrong
about Maguire, and he had not come home at all, then my action would
depend upon the menial who answered my reckless ring. But it should
result in the rescue of Raffles by hook or crook.
I had the more time to come to some decision, since I rang and rang in
vain. The hall, indeed, was in darkness; but when I peeped through the
letter-box I could see a faint beam of light from the back room. That
was the room in which Maguire kept his trophies and set his trap. All
was quiet in the house: could they have haled the intruder to Vine
Street in the short twenty minutes which it had taken me to dress and
to drive to the spot? That was an awful thought; but even as I hoped
against hope, and rang once more, speculation and suspense were cut
short in the last fashion to be foreseen.
A brougham was coming sedately down the street from Piccadilly; to my
horror, it stopped behind me as I peered once more through the
letter-box, and out tumbled the dishevelled prize-fighter and two
companions. I was nicely caught in my turn. There was a lamp-post
right opposite the door, and I can still see the three of them
regarding me in its light. The pugilist had been at least a fine
figure of a bully and a braggart when I saw him before his fight; now
he had a black eye and a bloated lip, hat on the back of his head, and
made-up tie under one ear. His companions were his sallow little
Yankee secretary, whose name I really forget, but whom I met with
Maguire at the Boxing Club, and a very grand person in a second skin
of shimmering sequins.
I can neither forget nor report the terms in which Barney Maguire
asked me who I was and what I was doing there. Thanks, however, to
Swigger Morrison's hospitality, I readily reminded him of our former
meeting, and of more that I only recalled as the words were in my
mouth.
"You'll remember Raffles," said I, "if you don't remember me. You
showed us your trophies the other night, and asked us both to look you
up at any hour of the day or night after the fight."
I was going on to add that I had expected to find Raffles there before
me, to settle a wager that we had made about the man-trap. But the
indiscretion was interrupted by Maguire himself, whose dreadful fist
became a hand that gripped mine with brute fervor, while with the
other he clouted me on the back.
"You don't say!" he cried. "I took you for some darned crook, but now
I remember you perfectly. If you hadn't 've spoke up slick I'd have
bu'st your face in, sonny. I would, sure! Come right in, and have a
drink to show there's--Jeehoshaphat!"
The secretary had turned the latch-key in the door, only to be hauled
back by the collar as the door stood open, and the light from the
inner room was seen streaming upon the banisters at the foot of the
narrow stairs.
"A light in my den," said Maguire in a mighty whisper, "and the
blamed door open, though the key's in my pocket and we left it locked!
Talk about crooks, eh? Holy smoke, how I hope we've landed one alive!
You ladies and gentlemen, lay round where you are, while I see."
And the hulking figure advanced on tiptoe, like a performing elephant,
until just at the open door, when for a second we saw his left
revolving like a piston and his head thrown back at its fighting
angle. But in another second his fists were hands again, and Maguire
was rubbing them together as he stood shaking with laughter in the
light of the open door.
"Walk up!" he cried, as he beckoned to us three. "Walk up and see one
o' their blamed British crooks laid as low as the blamed carpet, and
nailed as tight!"
Imagine my feelings on the mat! The sallow secretary went first; the
sequins glittered at his heels, and I must own that for one base
moment I was on the brink of bolting through the street door. It had
never been shut behind us. I shut it myself in the end. Yet it was
small credit to me that I actually remained on the same side of the
door as Raffles.
"Reel home-grown, low-down, unwashed White-chapel!" I had heard
Maguire remark within. "Blamed if our Bowery boys ain't cock-angels
to scum like this. Ah, you biter, I wouldn't soil my knuckles on your
ugly face; but if I had my thick boots on I'd dance the soul out of
your carcass for two cents!"
After this it required less courage to join the others in the inner
room; and for some moments even I failed to identify the truly
repulsive object about which I found them grouped. There was no false
hair upon the face, but it was as black as any sweep's. The clothes,
on the other hand, were new to me, though older and more pestiferous
in themselves than most worn by Raffles for professional purposes. And
at first, as I say, I was far from sure whether it was Raffles at all;
but I remembered the crash that cut short our talk over the telephone;
and this inanimate heap of rags was lying directly underneath a wall
instrument, with the receiver dangling over him.
"Think you know him?" asked the sallow secretary, as I stooped and
peered with my heart in my boots.
"Good Lord, no! I only wanted to see if he was dead," I explained,
having satisfied myself that it was really Raffles, and that Raffles
was really insensible. "But what on earth has happened?" I asked in my
turn.
"That's what I want to know," whined the person in sequins, who had
contributed various ejaculations unworthy of report, and finally
subsided behind an ostentatious fan.
"I should judge," observed the secretary, "that it's for Mr. Maguire
to say, or not to say, just as he darn pleases."
But the celebrated Barney stood upon a Persian hearth-rug, beaming
upon us all in a triumph too delicious for immediate translation into
words. The room was furnished as a study, and most artistically
furnished, if you consider outlandish shapes in fumed oak artistic.
There was nothing of the traditional prize-fighter about Barney
Maguire, except his vocabulary and his lower jaw. I had seen over his
house already, and it was fitted and decorated throughout by a
high-art firm which exhibits just such a room as that which was the
scene of our tragedietta. The person in the sequins lay glistening
like a landed salmon in a quaint chair of enormous nails and tapestry
compact. The secretary leaned against an escritoire with huge hinges
of beaten metal. The pugilist's own background presented an elaborate
scheme of oak and tiles, with inglenooks green from the joiner, and a
china cupboard with leaded panes behind his bullet head. And his
bloodshot eyes rolled with rich delight from the decanter and glasses
on the octagonal table to another decanter in the quaintest and
craftiest of revolving spirit tables.
"Isn't it bully?" asked the prize-fighter, smiling on us each in turn,
with his black and bloodshot eyes and his bloated lip. "To think that
I've only to invent a trap to catch a crook, for a blamed crook to
walk right into! You, Mr. Man," and he nodded his great head at me,
"you'll recollect me telling you that I'd gotten one when you come in
that night with the other sport? Say, pity he's not with you now; he
was a good boy, and I liked him a lot; but he wanted to know too much,
and I guess he'd got to want. But I'm liable to tell you now, or else
bu'st. See that decanter on the table?"
"I was just looking at it," said the person in sequins. "You don't
know what a turn I've had, or you'd offer me a little something."
"You shall have a little something in a minute," rejoined Maguire.
"But if you take a little anything out of that decanter, you'll
collapse like our friend upon the floor."
"Good heavens!" I cried out, with involuntary indignation, and his
fell scheme broke upon me in a clap.
"Yes, _sir_!" said Maguire, fixing me with his bloodshot orbs. "My
trap for crooks and cracksmen is a bottle of hocussed whiskey, and I
guess that's it on the table, with the silver label around its neck.
Now look at this other decanter, without any label at all; but for
that they're the dead spit of each other. I'll put them side by side,
so you can see. It isn't only the decanters, but the liquor looks the
same in both, and tastes so you wouldn't know the difference till you
woke up in your tracks. I got the poison from a blamed Indian away
west, and it's ruther ticklish stuff. So I keep the label around the
trap-bottle, and only leave it out nights. That's the idea, and that's
all there is to it," added Maguire, putting the labelled decanter back
in the stand. "But I figure it's enough for ninety-nine crooks out of
a hundred, and nineteen out of twenty 'll have their liquor before
they go to work."
"I wouldn't figure on that," observed the secretary, with a downward
glance as though at the prostrate Raffles. "Have you looked to see if
the trophies are all safe?"
"Not yet," said Maguire, with a glance at the pseudo-antique cabinet
in which he kept them.
"Then you can save yourself the trouble," rejoined the secretary, as
he dived under the octagonal table, and came up with a small black
bag that I knew at a glance. It was the one that Raffles had used for
heavy plunder ever since I had known him.
The bag was so heavy now that the secretary used both hands to get it
on the table. In another moment he had taken out the jewelled belt
presented to Maguire by the State of Nevada, the solid silver
statuette of himself, and the gold brick from the citizens of
Sacramento.
Either the sight of his treasures, so nearly lost, or the feeling that
the thief had dared to tamper with them after all, suddenly infuriated
Maguire to such an extent that he had bestowed a couple of brutal
kicks upon the senseless form of Raffles before the secretary and I
could interfere.
"Play light, Mr. Maguire!" cried the sallow secretary. "The man's
drugged, as well as down."
"He'll be lucky if he ever gets up, blight and blister him!"
"I should judge it about time to telephone for the police."
"Not till I've done with him. Wait till he comes to! I guess I'll
punch his face into a jam pudding! He shall wash down his teeth with
his blood before the coppers come in for what's left!"
"You make me feel quite ill," complained the grand lady in the chair.
"I wish you'd give me a little something, and not be more vulgar than
you can 'elp."
"Help yourself," said Maguire, ungallantly, "and don't talk through
your hat. Say, what's the matter with the 'phone?"
The secretary had picked up the dangling receiver.
"It looks to me," said he, "as though the crook had rung up somebody
before he went off."
I turned and assisted the grand lady to the refreshment that she
craved.
"Like his cheek!" Maguire thundered. "But who in blazes should _he_
ring up?"
"It'll all come out," said the secretary. "They'll tell us at the
central, and we shall find out fast enough."
"It don't matter now," said Maguire. "Let's have a drink and then
rouse the devil up."
But now I was shaking in my shoes. I saw quite clearly what this
meant. Even if I rescued Raffles for the time being, the police would
promptly ascertain that it was I who had been rung up by the burglar,
and the fact of my not having said a word about it would be directly
damning to me, if in the end it did not incriminate us both. It made
me quite faint to feel that we might escape the Scylla of our present
peril and yet split on the Charybdis of circumstantial evidence. Yet I
could see no middle course of conceivable safety, if I held my tongue
another moment. So I spoke up desperately, with the rash resolution
which was the novel feature of my whole conduct on this occasion. But
any sheep would be resolute and rash after dining with Swigger
Morrison at his club.
"I wonder if he rang _me_ up?" I exclaimed, as if inspired.
"You, sonny?" echoed Maguire, decanter in hand. "What in hell could he
know about you?"
"Or what could you know about him?" amended the secretary, fixing me
with eyes like drills.
"Nothing," I admitted, regretting my temerity with all my heart. "But
some one did ring me up about an hour ago. I thought it was Raffles. I
told you I expected to find him here, if you remember."
"But I don't see what that's got to do with the crook," pursued the
secretary, with his relentless eyes boring deeper and deeper into
mine.
"No more do I," was my miserable reply. But there was a certain
comfort in his words, and some simultaneous promise in the quantity
of spirit which Maguire splashed into his glass.
"Were you cut off sudden?" asked the secretary, reaching for the
decanter, as the three of us sat round the octagonal table.
"So suddenly," I replied, "that I never knew who it was who rang me
up. No, thank you--not any for me."
"What!" cried Maguire, raising a depressed head suddenly. "You won't
have a drink in my house? Take care, young man. That's not being a
good boy!"
"But I've been dining out," I expostulated, "and had my whack. I
really have."
Barney Maguire smote the table with terrific fist.
"Say, sonny, I like you a lot," said he. "But I shan't like you any if
you're not a good boy!"
"Very well, very well," I said hurriedly. "One finger, if I must."
And the secretary helped me to not more than two.
"Why should it have been your friend Raffles?" he inquired, returning
remorselessly to the charge, while Maguire roared "Drink up!" and then
drooped once more.
"I was half asleep," I answered, "and he was the first person who
occurred to me. We are both on the telephone, you see. And we had made
a bet----"
The glass was at my lips, but I was able to set it down untouched.
Maguire's huge jaw had dropped upon his spreading shirt-front, and
beyond him I saw the person in sequins fast asleep in the artistic
armchair.
"What bet?" asked a voice with a sudden start in it. The secretary was
blinking as he drained his glass.
"About the very thing we've just had explained to us," said I,
watching my man intently as I spoke. "I made sure it was a man-trap.
Raffles thought it must be something else. We had a tremendous
argument about it. Raffles said it wasn't a man-trap. I said it was.
We had a bet about it in the end. I put my money on the man-trap.
Raffles put his upon the other thing. And Raffles was right--it wasn't
a man-trap. But it's every bit as good--every little bit--and the
whole boiling of you are caught in it except me!"
I sank my voice with the last sentence, but I might just as well have
raised it instead. I had said the same thing over and over again to
see whether the wilful tautology would cause the secretary to open his
eyes. It seemed to have had the very opposite effect. His head fell
forward on the table, with never a quiver at the blow, never a twitch
when I pillowed it upon one of his own sprawling arms. And there sat
Maguire bolt upright, but for the jowl upon his shirt-front, while the
sequins twinkled in a regular rise and fall upon the reclining form of
the lady in the fanciful chair. All three were sound asleep, by what
accident or by whose design I did not pause to inquire; it was enough
to ascertain the fact beyond all chance of error.
I turned my attention to Raffles last of all. There was the other side
of the medal. Raffles was still sleeping as sound as the enemy--or so
I feared at first. I shook him gently: he made no sign. I introduced
vigor into the process: he muttered incoherently. I caught and twisted
an unresisting wrist--and at that he yelped profanely. But it was many
and many an anxious moment before his blinking eyes knew mine.
"Bunny!" he yawned, and nothing more until his position came back to
him. "So you came to me," he went on, in a tone that thrilled me with,
its affectionate appreciation, "as I knew you would! Have they turned
up yet? They will any minute, you know; there's not one to lose."
"No, they won't, old man!" I whispered. And he sat up and saw the
comatose trio for himself.
Raffles seemed less amazed at the result than I had been as a puzzled
witness of the process; on the other hand, I had never seen anything
quite so exultant as the smile that broke through his blackened
countenance like a light. It was all obviously no great surprise, and
no puzzle at all, to Raffles.
"How much did they have, Bunny?" were his first whispered words.
"Maguire a good three fingers, and the others at least two."
"Then we needn't lower our voices, and we needn't walk on our toes.
Eheu! I dreamed somebody was kicking me in the ribs, and I believe it
must have been true."
He had risen with a hand to his side and a wry look on his sweep's
face.
"You can guess which of them it was," said I. "The beast is jolly well
served!"
And I shook my fist in the paralytic face of the most brutal bruiser
of his time.
"He is safe till the forenoon, unless they bring a doctor to him,"
said Raffles. "I don't suppose we could rouse him now if we tried. How
much of the fearsome stuff do you suppose _I_ took? About a
tablespoonful! I guessed what it was, and couldn't resist making
sure; the minute I was satisfied, I changed the label and the position
of the two decanters, little thinking I should stay to see the fun;
but in another minute I could hardly keep my eyes open. I realized
then that I was fairly poisoned with some subtle drug. If I left the
house at all in that state, I must leave the spoil behind, or be found
drunk in the gutter with my head on the swag itself. In any case I
should have been picked up and run in, and that might have led to
anything."
"So you rang me up!"
"It was my last brilliant inspiration--a sort of flash in the
brain-pan before the end--and I remember very little about it. I was
more asleep than awake at the time."
"You sounded like it, Raffles, now that one has the clue."
"I can't remember a word I said, or what was the end of it, Bunny."
"You fell in a heap before you came to the end."
"You didn't hear that through the telephone?"
"As though we had been in the same room: only I thought it was Maguire
who had stolen a march on you and knocked you out."
I had never seen Raffles more interested and impressed; but at this
point his smile altered, his eyes softened, and I found my hand in
his.
"You thought that, and yet you came like a shot to do battle for my
body with Barney Maguire! Jack-the-Giant-killer wasn't in it with you,
Bunny!"
"It was no credit to me--it was rather the other thing," said I,
remembering my rashness and my luck, and confessing both in a breath.
"You know old Swigger Morrison?" I added in final explanation. "I had
been dining with him at his club!"
Raffles shook his long old head. And the kindly light in his eyes was
still my infinite reward.
"I don't care," said he, "how deeply you had been dining: _in vino
veritas_, Bunny, and your pluck would always out! I have never doubted
it, and I never shall. In fact, I rely on nothing else to get us out
of this mess."
My face must have fallen, as my heart sank at these words. I had said
to myself that we were out of the mess already--that we had merely to
make a clean escape from the house--now the easiest thing in the
world. But as I looked at Raffles, and as Raffles looked at me, on the
threshold of the room where the three sleepers slept on without sound
or movement, I grasped the real problem that lay before us. It was
twofold; and the funny thing was that I had seen both horns of the
dilemma for myself, before Raffles came to his senses. But with
Raffles in his right mind, I had ceased to apply my own, or to carry
my share of our common burden another inch. It had been an unconscious
withdrawal on my part, an instinctive tribute to my leader; but I was
sufficiently ashamed of it as we stood and faced the problem in each
other's eyes.
"If we simply cleared out," continued Raffles, "you would be
incriminated in the first place as my accomplice, and once they had
you they would have a compass with the needle pointing straight to me.
They mustn't have either of us, Bunny, or they will get us both. And
for my part they may as well!"
I echoed a sentiment that was generosity itself in Raffles, but in my
case a mere truism.
"It's easy enough for me," he went on. "I am a common house-breaker,
and I escape. They don't know me from Noah. But they do know you; and
how do you come to let me escape? What has happened to you, Bunny?
That's the crux. What could have happened after they all dropped off?"
And for a minute Raffles frowned and smiled like a sensation novelist
working out a plot; then the light broke, and transfigured him through
his burnt cork. "I've got it, Bunny!" he exclaimed. "You took some of
the stuff yourself, though of course not nearly so much as they did."
"Splendid!" I cried. "They really were pressing it upon me at the end,
and I did say it must be very little."
"You dozed off in your turn, but you were naturally the first to come
to yourself. I had flown; so had the gold brick, the jewelled belt,
and the silver statuette. You tried to rouse the others. You couldn't
succeed; nor would you if you did try. So what did you do? What's the
only really innocent thing you could do in the circumstances?"
"Go for the police," I suggested dubiously, little relishing the
prospect.
"There's a telephone installed for the purpose," said Raffles. "I
should ring them up, if I were you. Try not to look blue about it,
Bunny. They're quite the nicest fellows in the world, and what you
have to tell them is a mere microbe to the camels I've made them
swallow without a grain of salt. It's really the most convincing story
one could conceive; but unfortunately there's another point which
will take more explaining away."
And even Raffles looked grave enough as I nodded.
"You mean that they'll find out you rang me up?"
"They may," said Raffles. "I see that I managed to replace the
receiver all right. But still--they may."