THE MURDERER ESCAPES.
It lacked but a few moments of the time when the train that was to
convey Rogers to Sing Sing would pull out of the Grand Central Station.
A closed carriage was driven hurriedly under the glass canopy which
stretches between the station proper and the annex. There were two men
on the box--the driver and a special officer in citizen’s clothes; and
there were two men inside the hack.
One of these latter was also an officer; the other, Paul Rogers, who was
to meet the fate that had been allotted to him, by passing through the
“little door” into the room where that terrible chair is located, in
which so many persons are compelled to seat themselves never to rise
again.
But fate, and the careful plotting and planning of numerous friends of
Rogers, had already determined that he was not, on this particular
occasion, to arrive at the selected destination. Fate, assisted and
directed somewhat by the aforesaid friends, had arranged a most
dramatic rescue, which, by reason of its boldness and originality, was
destined to succeed.
And this is how it happened:
When the hack drew up against the curb inside the station, the officer
on the box leaped down and opened the door.
As he did so, he made a signal which, although almost imperceptible to
many who were spectators of the scene, was yet visible to the police
officers who were near, and they gathered closely around the hack.
In the meantime, the spectators, many of them ignorant of the identity
of the passenger in the hack, but, nevertheless, attracted by an
indefinable feeling that was in the air, suggestive of the presence of a
convicted criminal, and many of whom--as it appeared later--who were
thoroughly posted regarding that trifling circumstance, gathered closely
around the hack, and the two men who presently descended from it.
It was somewhat remarkable how quickly that crowd gathered, seemingly
from nowhere, but which, almost in a moment, became absolutely dense.
To the three policemen in uniform and the two officers who were not in
uniform, in the center of the crowd, it never occurred that the throng
of men who were crushing slowly but surely forward were acting in
concert, and upon a perfectly defined schedule.
There was no noise--no violence--no disturbance of any sort--nothing, in
fact, to give the officers in charge on the occasion the idea that a
rescue was in progress.
Each one of those officers had had experience with rescues before that;
each one of them would have known how to meet an emergency of that sort
with a front that would have disabled its intentions then and there, had
they or any one of them realized that an emergency existed.
And that was the point of the whole rescue.
That was the very thing which rendered it a success.
The very unostentatiousness of it! The utter and entire absence of noise
or excitement! The steady and unrelenting pressure which the officers
strove so quietly and so vainly to thrust back again! The quiet which
the officers themselves maintained, fearing that any noise might reveal
the identity of their prisoner!
Remember, it never once occurred to them that a rescue was in progress!
Had one of them suspected that, revolvers would have been drawn, clubs
would have been in evidence, an alarm would have been sounded and the
attempt at rescue would have been defeated almost as soon as it began.
But there was nothing in the action of that crowd which so steadily
pressed forward to indicate even that they knew who the prisoner was.
There was nothing about the personnel of the crowd to suggest that it
was not the ordinary miscellaneous collection of humanity which gathers
at and departs from the Grand Central Station a hundred times every day
of the year.
There was, in fact, nothing about the incident which was observable to
the officers, which was at all out of the ordinary, save that the crowd
was more dense than usual, and that the men who composed it seemed to be
more than ordinarily determined to see for themselves what was going on.
Later, when explanations were demanded, there was really not one that
was worthy of the name of explanation that could be offered.
There was the crowd, steadily and relentlessly pressing forward. There
were big men--well-dressed men--business men, from their appearance, in
the van of the crowd; and in the center of it all there were the two
officers with their prisoner, who was handcuffed to one of them, and the
three policemen in uniform.
Five officers of the law, surrounded by two hundred and fifty determined
rescuers.
Just at the instant when the officers became convinced that assistance
was necessary--just at the moment, in fact, when one of them was on the
point of calling for it, somebody in the distance, and from a point
higher up, as if its owner was so situated that he could overlook the
conditions, whistled shrilly and peculiarly.
It was evident that the crowd was awaiting that signal, for with almost
the mechanical precision of machinery, it acted.
The five officers were seized as one man might have been--and they were
seized by many pairs of hands at once.
It was the same with each of the five, so we need only know the
experience of one of them, as he afterward described it at the
investigation that was ordered.
“Two hands, bigger than my own, went across my mouth, and the fingers
locked together so that I couldn’t have opened my jaws to utter a word
if my life had depended upon it. My head was pulled back with a jerk by
those same two hands, for their owner was directly behind me, and I am
willing to swear that he was a giant, although I did not see him. Then,
at the same second, two more hands grabbed me by the throat and
squeezed, not hard enough to choke me exactly, but near enough to that
to keep my attention fixed for the moment on the desire to get my
breath. Then, and also at the same instant, each one of my legs was
seized by more hands, and I was lifted off my feet, and laid, face down,
on the pavement. Then, a moment later there wasn’t a hand touching me,
and I leaped to my feet ready for fight, only to find myself facing a
crowd of a hundred or more innocent-looking men who were vieing with
each other in asking what had happened and offering their assistance.
“Sure, I couldn’t arrest the whole crowd of them for attacking me, for I
was not certain that a single one of them had been concerned in the
attack.”
That finished his testimony, and that was, in fact, all that he or any
one of the officers of the law knew about the occurrence--save, perhaps,
one other--the officer to whom the prisoner was handcuffed.
His story given at the investigation was almost the same.
“I had two hands over my mouth, two more at my throat, and I don’t know
how many more at my legs,” he said. “I could not call out, and I
couldn’t do a thing to defend myself. When I got on my feet again the
chain between the two nippers had been cut and my prisoner was gone.
That’s all I know about it. I didn’t hear a word said--not one. There
wasn’t a blow struck. Nobody was hurt that I have heard about. They
didn’t even choke me hard enough to hurt.”
And the fact, so far as Paul Rogers was concerned, was this:
When the crowd became dense around him and the officer to whom he was
handcuffed was dragged down beside him, a pair of steel nippers quickly
severed the chain between the manacles, and then the manacle itself,
that surrounded his own wrist.
He was a free man, and before him there was a niche in the crowd into
which he stepped; and as he pressed forward the niche proceeded in front
of him and as rapidly closed up behind him, something after the manner
in which a ripple will travel across a stretch of smooth water when a
pebble has disturbed it.
It is all smooth and clear in front of the ripple, and all smooth and
clear behind it, but the ripple goes on continuously and regularly,
until it strikes against the shore and disappears.
And so, Paul Rogers went ahead, slowly, continuously and regularly,
until he struck against the pavement of Forty-second Street, when he,
too, disappeared--was swallowed up in the ebbing and flowing of that sea
of humanity which sucks through Forty-second Street, between the hours
of four and six o’clock, almost every week-day in the year.
He had disappeared from Forty-second Street before it was known inside
the station that a prisoner had escaped. He was gone before it was known
on the outskirts of the crowd that had surrounded him that he was there
at all.
The death chair at Sing Sing was cheated of its prey--or, at least, the
journey to Sing Sing was indefinitely postponed.
Paul Rogers, conspirator, murderer, but more than all, a mystery, had
made good his escape and was again at large--and he was at large for a
well-defined and dastardly purpose.