It lacked but a minute of the stroke of twelve, and the revels at "The
Twisted Arm"--wild at all times, but wilder to-night than ever--were at
their noisiest and most exciting pitch. And why not? It was not often
that Margot could spend a whole night with her rapscallion crew, and she
had been here since early evening--was to remain here until the dawn
broke grey over the house-tops and the murmurs of the workaday world
awoke anew in the streets of the populous city. It was not often that
each man and each abandoned woman present knew to a certainty that he or
she would go home through the mists of the grey morning with a fistful
of gold that had been won without labour or the taking of any personal
risk; and to-night the half of four hundred thousand francs was to be
divided among them.
No wonder they had made a carnival of it, and tricked themselves out in
gala attire; no wonder they had brought a paste tiara and crowned
Margot--Margot, who was in flaming red to-night, and looked a devil's
daughter indeed, with her fire-like sequins and her red ankles twinkling
as she threw herself into the thick of the dance and kicked, and
whirled, and flung her bare arms about to the lilt of the music and the
fluting of her own happy laughter.
"Per Bacco! The devil's in her to-night!" grinned old Marise, the
innkeeper, from her place behind the bar, where the lid of the
sewer-trap opened. "She has not been like it since the cracksman broke
with her, Toinette. But that was before your time, _ma fille_. Mother of
the heavens! but there was a man for you! There was a king that was
worthy of such a queen. Name of disaster! that she could not hold him,
that the curse of virtue sapped such a splendid tree, and that she could
take up with another after him!"
"Why not?" cried Toinette, as she tossed down the last half of her
absinthe and twitched her flower-crowned head. "A kingdom must have a
king, _ma mère_; and Dieu: but he is handsome, this Monsieur Gaston
Merode! And if he carries out his part of the work to-night he will be
worthy of the homage of all."
"'If' he carries it out--'if'!" exclaimed Marise, with a lurch of the
shoulders and a flirt of her pudgy hand. "Soul of me! that's where the
difference lies. Had it been the cracksman, there would have been no
'if'--it were done as surely as he attempted it. Name of misfortune! I
had gone into a nunnery had I lost such a man. But she--"
The voice of Margot shrilled out and cut into her words. "Absinthe,
Marise, absinthe for them all--and set the score down to me!" she cried.
"Drink up, my bonny boys; drink up, my loyal maids. Drink--drink till
your skins will hold no more. No one pays to-night but me!"
They broke into a cheer, and bearing down in a body upon Marise, threw
her into a fever of haste to serve them.
"To Margot!" they shouted, catching up the glasses and lifting them
high. "_Vive la Reine des Apaches! Vive la compagnie!_ To Margot! To
Margot!"
She swept them a merry bow, threw them a laughing salute, and drank the
toast with them.
"Messieurs, my love--mesdames et mademoiselles, my admiration," she
cried, with a ripple of joy-mad laughter. "To the success of the
Apaches, to the glory of four hundred thousand francs, and to the quick
arrival of Serpice and Gaston!" Then, her upward glance catching sight
of the musicians sipping their absinthe in the little gallery above, she
flung her empty glass against the wall behind them, and shook with
laughter as they started in alarm and spilled the green poison when they
dodged aside. "Another dance, you dawdlers!" she cried. "Does Marise pay
you to sit there like mourners? Strike up, you mummies, or you pay
yourselves for what you drink to-night. Soul of desires!"--as the
musicians grabbed up their instruments, and a leaping, lilting,
quick-beating air went rollicking out over the hubbub--"a quadrille, you
angels of inspiration! Partners, gentlemen! Partners, ladies! A
quadrille! A quadrille!"
They set up a many-throated cheer and flocked out with her upon the
floor; and in one instant feet were flying, skirts were whirling,
laughter and jest mingling with waving arms and kicking toes, and the
whole place was in one mad riot of delirious joy.
And in the midst of this there rolled up suddenly a voice crying, as
from the bowels of the earth, "Hola! Hola! La la! loi!" the cry of the
Apache to his kind.
"Mother of delights! It is one of us, and it comes from the sewer
passage--from the sewer!" shrilled out Marise, as the dancers halted and
Margot ran, with fleet steps, towards the bar. "Listen! listen! They
come to you, Margot--Serpice and Gaston. The work is done."
"And before even Clodoche or von Hetzler have arrived!" she replied
excitedly. "Give them light, give them welcome. Be quick!"
Marise ducked down, loosened the fastenings of the trap-door, flung it
back, and, leaning over the gap with a light in her hand, called down
into the darkness, "Hola! Hola! La! la! loi! Come on, comrades, come
on!"
The caller obeyed instantly. A hand reached up and gripped the edge of
the flooring, and out of the darkness into the light emerged the figure
of a man in a leather cap and the blue blouse of a mechanic--a pale,
fox-faced, fox-eyed fellow, with lank, fair hair, a brush of ragged,
yellow beard, and with the look and air of the sneak and spy indelibly
branded upon him.
It was Cleek.
"Clodoche!" exclaimed Marise, falling back in surprise.
"Clodoche!" echoed Margot. "Clodoche--and from the sewers?"
"Yes--why not?" he answered, his tongue thick-burred with the accent of
Alsace, his shifting eyes flashing toward the huge window behind the
bar, where, in the moonlight, the narrow passage leading down to the
door of "The Twisted Arm" gaped evilly between double rows of scowling,
thief-sheltering houses. "Name of the fiend! Is this the welcome you
give the bringer of fortune, Margot?"
"But from the sewer?" she repeated. "It is incomprehensible, _cher ami_.
You were to pilot von Hetzler over from the Café Dupin to the square
beyond there"--pointing to the window--"to leave him waiting a moment
while you came on to see if it were safe for him to enter; and now you
come from the sewer--from the opposite direction entirely!"
"Mother of misfortunes! You had done the same yourself--you, Lantier;
you, Clopin; you, Cadarousse; any of you--had you been in my boots," he
made answer. "I stole a leaf from your own book, earlier in the evening.
Garotted a fellow with jewels on him--in the Rue Noir, near the Market
Place--and nearly got into 'the stone bottle' for doing it. He was a
decoy, set there by the police for some of you fellows, and there was a
sergeant de ville after me like a whirlwind. I was not fool enough to
turn the chase in this direction, so I doubled and twisted until it was
safe to dive into the tavern of Fouchard, and lay in hiding there.
Fouchard let his son carry a message to the count for me, and will guide
him to the square. When it grew near the time to come, Fouchard let me
down into the sewer passage from there. Get on with your dance--silence
is always suspicious. An absinthe, Marise! Have Gaston and Serpice
arrived yet with the rest of the document, Margot la reine?"
"Not yet," she answered. "But one may expect them at any minute."
"Where is the fragment we already possess?"
"Here," tapping her bodice and laughing, "tenderly shielded, _mon ami_,
and why not? Who would not mother a thing that is to bring one four
hundred thousand francs?"
"Let me see it. It must be shown to the count, remember. He will take no
risks, come not one step beyond the square, until he is certain that it
is the paper his Government requires. Let me have it--let me take it to
him--quick!"
She waved aside airily the hand he stretched toward her, and danced into
the thick of the resumed quadrille.
"Ah, non! non! non!" she laughed, as he came after her. "The conditions
were of your own making, _cher ami_; we break no rules even among
ourselves."
"Soul of a fool! But if the count comes to the square--he is due there
now, mignonne--and I am not there to show him the thing--Margot, for the
love of God, let me have the paper!"
"Let me have the sign, the password!"
Cleek snapped at a desperate chance because there was nothing else to
do, because he knew that at any moment now the end might come.
"'When the purse will not open, slit it!'" he hazarded,
desperately--choosing, on the off-chance of its correctness, the
password of the Apache.
"It is not the right one! It is by no means the right one!" she made
reply, backing away from him suddenly, her absinthe-brightened eyes
deriding him, her absinthe-sharpened laughter mocking him. "Your
thoughts are in the Bois, _cher ami_. What is the password of the
brotherhood to the cause of Germany, stupid? It is not right, non! non!
It is not right!"
The cause of Germany! At the words the truth rushed like a flash of
inspiration across Cleek's mind. The cause of Germany! What a dolt he
was not to have thought of that before! There was but one phrase ever
used for that among the Kaiser's people, and that phrase--
"'To the day!'" he said, with a burst of sudden laughter. "My wits are
in the moon to-night, _la reine_. 'To the day,' of course--'To the
day!'" And even before she replied to him, he knew that he had guessed
aright.
"Bravo!" she said, with a little hiccough--for the absinthe, of which
she had imbibed so freely to-night, was beginning to take hold of her.
"A pretty conspirator to forget how to open the door he himself locked!
It is well I know thee--it is well it was the word of les Apaches in the
beginning, or I had been suspicious, silly! Wait but a moment!"--putting
her hand to her breast and beginning to unfasten her bodice--"wait but a
moment, Monsieur Twitching-Fingers, and the thing shall be in your
hand."
The strain, the relief, were all too great for even such nerves as
Cleek's, and if he had not laughed aloud, he knew that he must have
cheered.
"Oho! you grin because one's fingers blunder with eagerness," hiccoughed
Margot, thinking his laughter was for the trouble she had in getting the
fastenings of her bodice undone. "Peste, monsieur! may not a lady well
be modestly careful, when--Name of the devil! what's that?"
It was the note of a whistle shrilling down the narrow passage
without--the passage where Dollops, in Apache garb, had been set on
watch; and, hearing it, Cleek clamped his jaws together and breathed
hard. A single whistle--short and sharp, such as this one was--was the
signal agreed upon that the real Clodoche was coming, and that he and
Count von Hetzler had already appeared in the square beyond.
"Soul of a sloth! Will not that hurry you, _la reine_?" he said
excitedly, in reply to Margot's startled question. "It is the signal
Fouchard's son was to give when he and von Hetzler arrived at the place
where I am to meet them. Give me the paper--quick! quick! Tear the
fastenings, if they will not come undone else. One cannot keep a von
Hetzler waiting like a lackey for a scrap of ribbon and a bit of lace."
"Pardieu! they have kept better men than he waiting many an hour before
this," she made reply. "But you shall have the thing in a twinkling now.
There! but one more knot, and then it is in your hands."
And, had the fates not decreed otherwise, so, indeed, it would have
been. But then, just then, when another second would have brought the
paper into view, another moment seen it shut tight in the grip of his
itching fingers, disaster came and blotted out his hopes!
Without hint or warning, without sign or sound to lessen the shock of
it, the trap-door behind the bar flew up and backward with a crash that
sent Marise and her assistants darting away from it in shrieking alarm;
a babel of excited voices sounded, a scurry of rushing feet scuffled and
flashed along the shaking floor, and Merode and his followers tumbled
helter-skelter into the room.
Cleek, counting on the bolt which kept them from entering the passage
from the corridor of the Château Larouge--forcing them to take a long,
roundabout journey to "The Twisted Arm"--had not counted on their
shortening that journey by entering the passage from Fouchard's tavern,
doing, in fact, the very thing which he had declared to Margot he
himself had done. And lo! here they were, howling and crowding about
him--dirks in their hands and devils in their eyes and hearts--and the
paper not his yet!
A clamour rose as they poured in; the dancers ceased to dance; the music
ceased to play; and Margot, shutting a tight clutch on the loosened part
of her half-unfastened bodice, swung away from Cleek's side, and flew in
a panic to Merode.
"Gaston!" she cried, knowing from his wild look and the string of oaths
and curses his followers were blurting out that something had gone
amiss. "Gaston, _mon coeur_! Name of disaster! what is wrong?"
"Everything is wrong!" he flung back excitedly. "That devil--that
renegade--that fury, Cleek, the cracksman, is here. He came to the
rescue--came out of the very skies--and all but killed Serpice!"
"Cleek!" Fifty shrill voices joined Margot's in that screaming cry;
fifty more dirks flashed into view. "Cleek in France? Cleek? Where is
he? Which way did he go? Where's the narker--where--where?"
"Here, if anywhere!"
"Here?"
"Yes--unless you've been fooled, and let him get away. He knows about
the paper, and is after it, Margot; and if anyone has come up from the
sewers within the past twenty minutes--"
They knew--they grasped the situation instantly--and a roar of excited
voices yelled out: "Clodoche! Clodoche! Clodoche!" as, snarling and
howling like a pack of wolves, they bore down with a rush on the
blue-bloused figure that was creeping towards the door.
But as they sprang it sprang also! It was neck or nothing now. Cleek
realised it, and, throwing himself headlong over the bar, clutched
frantically at the lever which he knew controlled the flow of gas,
jammed it down with all his strength, shut off the light, and, grabbing
up a chair, sent it crashing through the window.
The crowd surged on towards the wrecked bar with a yell, surged from all
directions, and then abruptly stopped and huddled together in one. For
the sudden flashing down of the darkness within, had made more
prominent, the moon-lighted passage without; and there, scuttling away
in alarm from this sudden uproar, and the outward flying of that hurled
chair, a figure which but a moment before had come skulking to the
window, could now be seen.
"There he goes--there! there!" shrilled out a chorus of excited voices,
as the yellow-bearded, blue-bloused figure came into view. "After him!
Catch him! Knife him!"
In an instant they were at the door, tumbling out into the darkness,
pouring up the passage in hot pursuit. And it was at that moment the
balance changed again. Those who were in the front rank of the pursuers
were in time to see a lithe, thin figure--dressed as one of their own
kind--spring up in the path of that other figure, jump on it, grip it,
clap a huge square of sticky brown paper over the howling mouth of it,
and bear it, struggling and kicking, to the ground.
In another second they, too, were upon it--swarming over it like rats,
and digging and hacking at it with their dirks. And so they were still
hacking at it--although it had long since ceased to move, or to make any
sound--when Merode came up and called them to a halt.
"Drag it inside; let Margot have a thrust at it--it is her right. Pull
off the dog's disguise, and bring me the plucky one that captured him.
He shall have absinthe enough to swim in, the little king! Off with it
all, Lanchere. First, the plaster--that's right. Now, the wig and beard,
and after that--What's that you say? The beard is real? The hair is
real? They will not come off? Name of the devil! what are you saying?"
"The truth, _mon roi_, the truth! Mother of disasters! It is not the
cracksman--it is the real Clodoche we have killed!"
For one moment a sort of panic held them, swayed them, befogged the
brains of them; then, of a sudden, Merode howled out, "Get back! Get
back! The fellow's in there still!" and led a blind race down the
passage to the bar, where they had seen Cleek last. It was still in
darkness; but an eager hand gripping the lever, turned on the gas again,
and matches everywhere were lifted to the jets.
And when the light flamed out and the room was again ablaze they knew
that they might as well hope to call back yesterday as dream of finding
Cleek again. For there on the floor, her limp hands turned palms upward,
a chloroformed cloth folded over her mouth and nose, lay, in a deep
stupor, the figure of Margot, her bodice torn wide open and the paper
forever gone!
* * * * *
It was five minutes later when the Count von Hetzler, crouching back in
the shadow of the square and waiting for the return of Clodoche, heard a
dull, whirring sound that was unmistakably the purr of a motor throb
through the stillness; and, leaning forward, saw an automobile whirl up
out of the darkness, cut across the square, and dash off westward like a
flash. Yet in the brief instant it took to go past the place where he
waited there was time for him to catch the sharp click of a lowered
window, see the clear outlines of a man's face looking out, and to hear
a voice from within the vehicle speak.
"Herr Count," it said in clear, incisive tones. "A positively infallible
recipe for the invasion of England: Wait until the Channel freezes and
then skate over. Good night!"
"One for his nob that, Gov'nor--my hat, yuss!" said Dollops, with a
shrill laugh, as he stuck a red head and a face all shiny with cocoa
butter and half-removed grease-paint out of the window, and, despite the
fact that the swift pace of the automobile had already carried it far
past the place where the count had been in hiding, made a fan of his
five fingers and his snub nose. "Oh, Mother 'Ubbard! Did you see him,
sir? Bunked back in his 'ole like somebody had 'give him the hook,' and
cleared the blessed stage before the eggs began to fly. I don't think
them Germans 'ull be sittin' on the steps of St. Paul's this year,
sir--not them!"
Cleek laughed; and, ordering the boy to shut down the window and get on
with the work of changing his clothes, set about doing the same thing
himself.
"I suppose you know, you clever little monkey, that I should have been
floating down the Seine with a slit throat and enough lead in me to sink
a barrel by this time, if it hadn't been for you," he said, as he pushed
the outward semblance of Clodoche into the kit-bag, and began to get
into ordinary civilian's dress as expeditiously as possible. "If you had
slipped up--if you had been one-half minute late--or if that fellow had
had a chance to make one cry before you covered his mouth--"
"Please, sir--_don't_!" interposed Dollops, with a sort of shiver. "If
anythink had've happened to you, Gov'nor ..." Then stopped short and
made a sound as if he were swallowing something, and then grew very,
very still.
Cleek looked at him out of the corner of his eye--moved in spite of
himself--hesitated a moment and then, obeying an impulse, leaned over
and gently tapped him on the shoulder.
"Dollops, shake hands," he said.
"Sir!"
"Shake hands."
"Gawd, Gov'nor! You don't never _mean_ that, sir?"
"Shake hands," said Cleek for the third time. "Do you know, you little
monkey, that you're the only soul in all God's world that could ever
muster up a tear for me? Thank you, my lad--you're a brick!"--then
gripped the grimy hand that was reached out with a sort of awe, wrung it
heartily, patted the astonished boy on the shoulder; and fell to
whistling merrily as he went on with his dressing.
"Sir, you do lick me, you fair do," said Dollops, laughing unsteadily,
and drawing his sleeve across his eyes. "Arfter wot you've been and went
through, a-sittin' there and whistlin' as merry as can be--like as if
life was all beer and skittles, and you hadn't a care in the world."
"I haven't--for the minute, my lad," said Cleek with a laugh of utter
happiness. "Beer and skittles? Lord, it's all roses my boy, roses! I've
had the good luck to accomplish a thing that's going to give me--well,
at least one moment in Paradise--and when a man has a prospect like that
in view ..." His voice trailed off; he laughed again; then fell to
whistling once more--noisily, joyously, as if some schoolboy sort of
madness was in his blood to-night--and was still whistling when the
automobile pulled up sharply in front of the Hôtel du Louvre.