The time was nearly ripe. The clue of those newspaper items; the canceled
check; the somewhat repellant evidence of the battered piece of goldwork
picked up in the corridor of the Mansion House—Annister had been able to
put two and two together, to find a sum as strange, as odd, say, as five,
or seven, or even one.
But that name that had trembled on the lips of Rook’s secretary remained
a secret; with it, Annister was convinced, he would be able to pull those
threads together with a single jerk, to find them—one.
He had had news from Mojave: the dentist had identified the insane man as
his patient by means of his chart, but, with that face, the man could not
be Banker Axworthy—it simply could not be. And yet he was!
It was something of a riddle, and more, even, than that, for the thing
savored of the supernatural, of necromancy, of a black art that might,
say, have had for its practitioner a certain personage with the eyes of a
damned soul and a black, forking beard, curled, like Mephisto’s; Annister
thought that it might.
Further, the conductor of that train had been able to describe, somewhat
in detail, the man who had jostled the derelict and his companion; the
man had been a stranger to the conductor; he had been tall and thin, with
a small, sandy moustache, and a high-arched, broken nose, and he had been
wearing the conventional Stetson. The fellow might have been disguised,
of course, but if Annister could find the black-bearded man, discover his
identity, he was reasonably certain that he would not draw blank.
It was no certainty, of course, but it was worth the risk, he told
himself. It would be a desperate hazard that he was about to face, he
knew. Thinking of his father, together with the remembrance of that
unholy and unspeakable horror that he had witnessed, born of the stinking
shadows of that dark street in a city foul and old, its people furtive
worshipers of strange gods, Annister felt again that crawling chill which
had assailed him with the passing of the tall man with the eyes of death.
With Annister, to decide was to act. Dispatching a brief telegram in code
to a certain office in a certain building in Washington, he went now to
keep his rendezvous with Rook and the rest. It was yet early, scarce
eight in the evening, and the street was full of life and movement,
before him, and behind.
And before him and behind, as he went onward, he was conscious that those
who walked there walked with him, stride for stride; they kept their
distance, moving without speech, as he turned the corner of the dusty
street.
If he had had any doubt about it, the doubt became certainty as, wheeling
sharply to the left, they kept him company now, still with that grim,
daunting silence: a bodyguard, indeed, but a bodyguard that held him
prisoner as certainly as if the manacles were on his wrists.
It was not yet dark, but with a rising wind there had come a sky overcast
and lowering; low down, upon the horizon’s rim to the eastward, the
violet blaze of the lightning came and went, with, after a little, the
heavy salvos of the thunder, like the marching of an armed host.
But Annister, his gaze set straight ahead, turned inward at the entrance
of the saddler’s shop, mounting the stairs, as, behind him he heard the
heavy door slam shut.
Perhaps it had been the wind, but as Annister went upward he heard, just
beyond that door, the murmur of voices; they reached him in a sing-song
mutter against the rising of the wind, in a quick, growling chorus.
There had been something in that snarling speech to daunt a man less
brave than the man on that narrow stair, but Annister went upward,
lightly now, to meet whatever waited behind the door set with its
narrow panel that he could see merely as a dark smudge of shadow in the
encircling gloom.
He rapped, twice, and the door fell open silently, disclosing the long
room in which, as he remembered, he had sat, but a few nights in the
past, to listen as the lawyer and his crowd had waited for the man called
“Bull.”
The room was brightly lighted. At a long table, midway between door and
windows, five men were seated: Lunn, his fat face gray with a sort of
eager pallor, was chewing nervously at an unlighted cigar; he glanced up
now at Annister’s entrance, turning to a big man on his right. At the
head of the table, his veiled glance like the stare of a falcon, sat
Rook, but it was upon the big man next to Lunn that Annister’s glance
rested with an abrupt interest as the lawyer spoke:
“Welcome to our city, Mr. Annister!” he said, in a voice that reminded
Annister of molasses dripping from a barrel. “I want you to meet—Mr. Bull
Ellison; he’s been right anxious to meet you, haven’t you, Bull?”
Annister, in the passage of an eye-flash, understood. This was the man
whom he had encountered in the vestibule of the smoker, and, of a sudden,
memory rose up out of the past, and, with it, a picture: a padded ring
under twin, blazing arcs; the thud and shuffle of sliding feet; a man,
huge, brutish, broad, fists like stone mauls, yet, for all his bulk, a
very cat for quickness.
“Bruiser” Ellison, they had called him then; a heavyweight whose very
brute strength had kept him from the championship; that, and a certain
easy good nature which was not apparent now in the bleak staring of the
eyes turned now upon Annister, remorseless, under lowered brows.
Now, as if at a signal, the men about the table rose; the table was
hauled backward to the wall, leaving a wide, sanded space under the
lights.
And then, even as Rook spoke, Annister abruptly understood: this gang of
thieves, as he knew now—“Plunder, Limited,” as Cleo Ridgley had called
them—Annister knew them now, under the leadership of Rook, for an outfit
which would stop short of nothing to attain its ends. His eyes, roving
the long room up and down, searched now for that dark face, with its
black, forking beard, but he was not really expecting to see it, but
that, if Rook was the actual leader, Black Beard was “the man higher up,”
Annister was, somehow, convinced.
They had failed with Westervelt and his _segundo_; now, as the man called
“Bull” came forward across the floor, Rook spoke:
“Ellison hasn’t forgotten his meeting with you, Annister; he says you
played him a dirty trick; hit him when he wasn’t looking; that right,
Bull?” he asked, with a certain sly malice directed at the giant with the
cauliflower ear.
“And now,” Rook’s purring tones continued, “he wants satisfaction; he’ll
get it, won’t he, Mister Annister?”
For a moment, as Annister’s eyes bored into his, the lawyer’s face
showed, like an animal’s, in a Rembrandtesque shading of high light and
shadow beneath the lights. Stripped of its mask, it was like the face
of a devil; now the mouth grinned, but without mirth, the lips drawn
backward from the teeth in a soundless snarl. He laughed suddenly, and
there was nothing human in it, as Annister, his back to the wall, smiled
grimly now in answer.
He had been somewhat less than discreet, he reflected; Rook’s purpose
had shown in his eyes; he, Annister, had walked into a trap from which,
this time, there could be no escape. He had meant to beard them to their
faces, wring from Rook an admission as to his father, perhaps more; then
shoot his way out, if need be.
But now—he would have to fight this giant, a ring veteran of a hundred
battles, with bare fists, surrounded by an encircling, hostile cordon,
who, if by any chance he might prove the victor, would see to it that he
paid for that victory with his life.
Annister knew that it was on the cards that Rook, for instance, would
shoot him down as remorselessly as a man would squeeze a mosquito, say,
out of life between thumb and finger. But it was the lawyer’s humor,
doubtless, to see him manhandled, perhaps killed beneath the drumming
impact of those iron fists.
Calmly, he removed his coat, bestowing his automatic in the pocket of his
trousers. He did it openly, turning to face Ellison, who, stripped to
an athletic undershirt and trousers, regarded Annister with a grinning
assurance.
He was big; perhaps twenty pounds heavier than Annister, with wide
shoulders and a deep arching chest; with his forward-thrusting jaw and
bullet head, with its stiff fell of pig’s-bristles, the long arms like
a gorilla’s, he towered over his antagonist like a cave bear, a grizzly
waiting for the kill, and like a cave bear, at Rook’s snarling call of
“Time!” he was upon the lesser man like a thunderbolt, fists going like
flails.
Annister, in his day and generation, had absorbed the science of hit,
stop, and getaway under masters of the art who pronounced him, as an
amateur, the equal of many a professional performer of the squared
circle; he was lean and hard, whereas Ellison’s waistline showed, under
the thin shirt, in folds of fat.
If the onlookers expected to see Annister annihilated by that first,
furious rush, they were mistaken. Crouching, lightly, on the balls of
his feet, he drove forward a lightning straight left, full on the point.
Ellison, coming in, took it, grunting; the blow had traveled a scant six
inches, but there had been power in it.
It set him back upon his heels, from which, as he rose, raging, he dove
in with a ripping one-two punch, which, partly blocked by his antagonist,
yet crashing through the latter’s guard, landed high upon his cheek-bone
with a spanking thud.
It had been a grazing blow; otherwise, the fight might have ended then
and there. Annister, backing nimbly before the giant’s rush, realized
that he must avoid a clinch; at in-fighting the giant would have the
edge: those mast-like arms and massive shoulders, the huge bulk—they
would, at close quarters, with the drumming impact of the great fists,
have spelled a quick ending with the sheer, slugging power of the attack.
He heard Rook snarl as, side-stepping like a sliding ghost, he countered
with a long, curving left.
So far, he had been holding his own. If he could keep the giant at his
distance, he might wear him out. For this was not a fight by rounds; a
professional pugilist, fighting in the pink, would have had bellows to
mend at the end, say, of five minutes of a give-and-take encounter moving
at high speed.
Circling, feinting, ducking, Annister kept that long left in his
adversary’s face, forcing the pace, yet keeping out of harm’s way save
for an overhand swing, which, landing high up upon his cheek-bone, turned
him half round with the impact, throwing him off balance to a slumping
fall.
Up like a flash, however, he ducked, dodged, evading those mighty arms
that strove desperately to reach him through that impenetrable guard.
A fight with four-ounce gloves can be a bloody affair enough, but with
nature’s weapons, under London Prize Ring rules, it can be a shambles.
Armed with the cestus or the mailed fist, Ellison might have wreaked
havoc as a gladiator of old Rome punished his adversary to the death. As
it was, Annister, his face a bloody mask, where that socking punch had
landed, gave Rook and his supporters heart of grace.
“Take him, Bull!”
The screaming advice was in the high voice of Lunn; the others echoed it.
But if Annister was in desperate case, the giant, sobbing now with the
fury of his spent strength, was weaving on his feet.
Legs like iron columns upbore that mighty strength, but a pile-driving
right, behind it the full weight of Annister’s two hundred pounds of
iron-hard muscle, sinking with an audible “_plop!_” in his adversary’s
midriff, brought from the giant a quick, gasping grunt.
Ellison’s endurance was almost done. He could “take it,” but, hog-fat
from a protracted period of easy living, professional fighter as he had
been, this amateur, with the arching chest of a greyhound and the stamina
of a lucivee of the long trail, was wearing him down.
Trading punch for punch now, Annister abruptly cut loose with
pile-driving right and lefts; they volleyed in from every angle; there
was a cold grin on his lips now as he went round the giant like a cooper
round a barrel, bombarding him with a bewildering crossfire of hooks and
swings, jabs and uppercuts.
Annister, at the beginning of the fight, had expected the usual tricks of
the professional: holding in the clinches; butting; the elbow; the heel
of the hand against the face; but Ellison had fought fair.
Now, as the giant, boring in against that relentless attack, faltered,
mouth open, labored breath sucked inward through clenched teeth, Annister
stepped backward, hands dropping at his sides.
Ellison, almost out, stood, weaving on his feet, fronting his adversary,
a queer look of surprise in his face, and a something more. Annister,
strangely enough, as has been mentioned, had, in spite of his encounter
with Ellison in the smoker, conceived something for the man that had
been close to liking. Somehow, rough as the man was; crooked, by all the
signs; the tool of Rook and of his minions, he had the blue eye of a
fighter—the straight, level look of a man who, though an enemy, would yet
fight fair.
Annister, breathing heavily, thrust out his hand.
“A draw, ha?” he said. “Well—suppose we let it go at that.”
For a moment Ellison appeared to hesitate; there came again the queer
look in his eyes, as of surprise, wonder, and a something more. There
came a grating curse from Lunn; a sudden movement from the onlookers
roundabout.
Ellison’s great paw closed on the extended hand with a grip of iron, as
Rook’s voice rose, strident, under the lights:
“Bull—are you crazy? This man—he’s just—a dam’ _dick_!”
_CHAPTER TEN_
“IN THE NAME OF THE LAW!”
It was out. Rook, his hand in a lightning stab for Annister’s coat,
turned over the lapel, holding it forward for all to see.
On it was a small gold badge—the symbol of the Secret Service. The secret
was a secret no longer.
How long Rook had known of it Annister could not be certain, but now, at
the growling chorus of swift hate, he whirled. His pistol came up and
out, as there came a startling interruption, or rather, two.
He heard Ellison’s voice, roaring in the narrow room:
“Hell’s bells, young fellow, I’m with you, and you can lay to that! For
this once, anyway! You sure can handle yourself!”
He turned to Rook and the rest. “Now—you bums, get goin’! Dick or no
dick, I’ll play this hand as she lays. Get goin’!”
The great hand, holding a heavy Colt, swung upward on a line with
Annister’s as the door burst inward with a crash; and, framed in the
opening, there showed on a sudden the flaming thatch of the bartender,
Del Kane.
His cowboy yell echoed throughout the room, eyes blazing upon the hotel
man where he sat.
In two strides, he had joined Annister and Bull; guns on a line, the
three fronted the five who faced them, silent, tense. Kane’s voice came
clear:
“I followed you, Mr. Annister; thought they’d try t’ run a whizzer on
yuh; I’m pullin’ m’ freight after today, anyway; Mister Lunn can have his
job, an’ welcome! Now—I ben keepin’ cases on Mister Rook, he’s a curly
wolf, ain’t you, Rook? A real bad hombre, an’ you can lay to that! But he
ain’t goin’ northwest of nothin’, he ain’t.... Now, you dam’ short-horns,
show some speed!”
But there was no fight in Rook, Lunn and Company. Glowering, their hands
in plain sight, weaponless, they sat in a sullen silence, as Annister,
backing to the doorway, was followed by Ellison and Kane. Outside, under
pale stars, the giant spoke:
“I don’t aim to be too all-fired honest, Mister Annister,” he said. “I
throwed in with Mister Rook, that’s so, but he’s played it both ends
against the middle with me, I guess.... I reckon I’ll be movin’ out o’
Dry Bone in two—three hours.”
He grinned, wryly, out of the corner of his mouth.
“You sure pack a hefty wallop, young fellow! I wish I could tell you
somethin’, but that man Rook, he’s as close-mouthed as an Indian, and
that’s whatever! His game—nobody knows what it is—Lunn, maybe—but they
sure got a strangle-hold on th’ county; it won’t be healthy for me here
after tonight.”
The three men separated at the hotel, Annister entering the lobby with
a curious depression that abruptly deepened to a sudden, crawling fear
as a call-boy brought him a note. The fear was not for himself, but for
another, for, although he had never seen the handwriting before, he knew
it upon the instant.
Ripping open the envelope with fingers that trembled, he read, and at
what he saw his face paled slowly to a mottled, unhealthy gray:
“_Partner_:
“_If you get this in time, please hurry. I’m in the toils, at
Dr. Elphinstone’s—it’s the stone house at the right of the road
leading north from Dry Bone—twenty miles, I think. I’ve bribed
a man to take this to you, and if he fails me, God help me!—God
help us all! If you fail me, you’ll never see me again—as Mary
Allerton, because the Devil’s in charge here, and they call him
the Jailer of Souls. I’ll be watching for you, at the south
window—you’ll know it by the red ribbon on the bars. And now—be
careful. If you get here at night beware of the guards—there
are three. And if it’s night there’ll be a rope hanging from
the window—you can feel for it in the dark. Now hurry._
“_MARY ALLERTON (No. 33)._”
“_You’ll never see me again—as Mary Allerton._” Annister was aware again
of that crawling fear. “_The red ribbon on the bars._” The place was in
effect a prison, then.
But—“_No. 33_”! Annister’s heart leaped up. He knew the meaning of those
numerals well enough; he had been blind not to have suspected it. But
“_Dr. Elphinstone_,” and “_The Jailer of Souls_!”
Who could be the jailer of souls but the Devil? And Annister fancied that
he had seen the Devil at the corner of that street under the moon, with
his black, forking beard, and the cold eyes of death.
The trail was warm now, as he thought, but—if he were too late? He put
the thought from him, turning to the perusal of a telegram in code which
he had found waiting for him at the desk; translated, it read:
“With you Thursday with four, six, twenty-one, and the others.
Look for thirty-three.
“CHILDERS.”
But there was no time to be lost. Thursday was tomorrow. He would have to
take his chance of their finding him, for there was nobody whom he could
trust. Ellison had gone, even if he might have chanced the giant in so
delicate a matter; Del Kane, likewise. He must take his chance. Striding
to the door, he stiffened abruptly at a drumming rap, and a hoarse voice
in the corridor without:
“Open up in there; open up!”
Annister, a pulse in his temple beating to his hard-held breath, jerked
back the door, to face—
Bristow, behind him three men whom he recognized as hangers-on at the
hotel bar. They had something of the look of long-riders, villainous,
hard-bitten; as one man, they grinned now, but without mirth, as the
sheriff spoke:
“Annister—I arrest you for the murder of Tucson Charlie Westervelt and
Bartley Pattison. In th’ name of th’ Law!”
Annister knew that if he resisted they would shoot him down; in fact, he
knew, too, that was what they wanted; it would be the easiest way. Under
the menace of the guns, he spread his hands, palms downward, preceding
the four men down the stairs outward to the jail.
But as the heavy door clanged shut behind him, Annister, his gaze in a
sightless staring into the north, groaned, in bitterness of spirit.
Mary was needing him: she was in peril, the greater because it was
unknown—and—he would not be there.
_CHAPTER ELEVEN_