instant, as he crouched again swaying with the lurch of the train, then
the skeleton keys were returned to the pocket in the back lining of his
coat—and the Hawk was in action. In a flash he had opened and closed
the door behind him, and, with his back against it, his automatic flung
significantly forward in his hand, he stood staring down the length of
the car.
There was a hoarse, startled yell, that was lost in the roar of the
flying train, and the baggageman, from his chair at one side of the car
and in front of a shelf-like desk topped with a rack of pigeonholes,
leaped to his feet.
“Sit down!” invited the Hawk coldly.
The man hesitated, but the next instant dropped back into his chair, as
the Hawk moved suddenly forward to his side.
“What do you want?” he demanded sullenly.
“This—to begin with!” The Hawk's voice was an insolent drawl
now, as his deft fingers, like a streak of lightning, were into the
other's pocket and out again with the man's revolver. “How long
since they've been arming the baggagemen on this road? You needn't
answer—I'm only talking to myself. Those are the cases up there
by the forward door, aren't they? And the big one's got the green
boys—eh?” He was backing away from the man now. “Don't move, my
bucko—understand? That chair you're sitting in is the only health
resort in this car!”
The man's hands clenched, as his eyes narrowed on the Hawk.
“You damned thief!” he rasped out. “I—I'd like to——”
“Quite so!” said the Hawk softly. “I know how you feel about it,
and if it helps any to get it off your chest, go to it! Nobody'll hear
you but me, and I'll try and make the best of it!”
Piled along the side of the car from the doorway were a number of
solidly made, heavy-looking cases that obviously contained the gold
shipment. In front of these, between them and where the baggageman sat,
and acting too perhaps as a screen when the rear sliding door was
open, as, for instance, it had been at Selkirk, was a large,
innocent-appearing, flimsily-constructed packing case. The Hawk, beside
this now, moved it slightly. It was very light, so light as to warrant
the presumption that it might even be empty.
The baggageman had relapsed into a scowling silence, his eyes still on
the Hawk. The Hawk took his steel jimmy from his pocket, shifted his
automatic to his left hand, and inserted the jimmy under the cover of
the case. There was a rip and tear of rending wood; the operation was
twice repeated—and the Hawk threw the shattered cover on the floor.
He glanced inside. At the bottom of the case lay a large paper package,
strongly tied, and heavily sealed with red wax.
Under his mask, the Hawk's lips parted in a smile, as, his eyes on
the baggageman again, he noted that the other was watching his every
movement now with a sort of intense expectancy. The Hawk, however, made
no effort to reach down into the four-foot depth of the packing case;
he canted the box over, and picked up the package from the floor of
the car. With the point of his jimmy he tore a rent in the paper
wrapper—and his smile broadened.
“I apologise,” said the Hawk, with an engaging nod to the sullen
figure in the chair. “They're not green boys—they're yellow
backs!”
“You damned thief!” said the man, in a choked voice.
The roar and sway of the train seemed suddenly to increase, as the
wheel trucks, jolting and beating at a siding switch, set up a sort
of infernal tattoo. They were passing the first station after the
Junction—Conmore.
The smile left the Hawk's face. A little further along, and they would
stop the train. There came a sort of dare-devil set to the Hawk's
clamped jaws.
He was taking chances, but he had already weighed those chances well.
The Wire Devils, the Butcher and his crowd, would be on the alert; but
equally so would be MacVightie—and the posse that must far outnumber
the gang. And there was that promise to the Butcher! With their
plans awry, and taken by surprise, instead of profiting by surprise
themselves, their chances, rather than of securing a half million in
gold, were most excellent of securing quite as generous a reward, though
of another nature—at the hands of MacVightie!
“I'm going to get off here,” said the Hawk coolly to the figure in
the chair. “And the only way to get off without cracking my bean is to
let that guy there in the engine know that he's infringing the speed
laws! You remember what I told you—the only healthy place in this car
for you is where you're sitting now. Something may crack loose around
here—keep out of the wet!”
The Hawk reached above his head for the bell cord, and pulled it
sharply. The engine crew, too, were evidently on the alert! The shrill
blast of the whistle answered the signal instantly. There was a sudden
jerk that almost threw the Hawk from his feet, the pound and slam
of buffer plates, and the vicious shriek of the “air.” The Hawk
recovered himself, and, cool and quick in every movement now, thrust his
jimmy into his pocket to free his hands, flung the package of banknotes
up the aisle made by trunks and boxes behind him, and began to retreat
toward the forward door, pulling the empty case along as a shield
between himself and the other end of the car.
The rear door of the car smashed inward. The Hawk caught a blurred
glimpse of faces and forms surging through the doorway, and streaming
across the platform from the smoker behind—and, in the lead, the
Butcher's crafty face, with its little black, restless, ferret eyes
fixed down the trunk-made aisle of the car on him!
“The Hawk!”—it came in a scream of abandoned fury from the
Butcher—then a headlong rush—a flash, the roar of the report, as the
Butcher fired—another, as the Hawk's automatic answered—and the
spat of a bullet splitting the panel of the forward door.
The Hawk, stooped low behind the packing case now, still edged backward
toward the door, still dragging the case after him. A smile that was
deadly grim and far removed from mirth curved his lips downward in hard,
merciless lines. He had, at least, attained his object! There was no
doubt concerning their recognition of him as the Hawk! Well, he had
weighed the chances. They would be on him now, but only one at a
time; there was not room for more, with the packing case blocking the
way—and it would be the Butcher first. After that—well, after that,
he counted on MacVightie creating a diversion from the rear, and——
The Butcher had flung himself against the packing case. It toppled to
one side, and the Hawk, like a crouched tiger, sprang and closed, making
of the Butcher's body, as a substitute for the packing case now,
a shield from the onrush behind. There was a furious oath from the
Butcher; a lurch, a stagger, as the train jerked and jerked again—and
both men, gripped and locked together, went to the floor.
For an instant they rolled over and over, the Butcher snarling like
a mad beast, wrenching and twisting for an opening at the Hawk's
throat—and then suddenly the car was in an inferno. A voice,
MacVightie's, rang out sternly from the rear door. It was echoed by
a yell from one of the Hawk's companions, then a shot, another, a
fusillade of them—and then a voice above the uproar:
“It's MacVightie, an' de bulls!”
There was a scurrying of feet, a stampede for cover behind trunks and
boxes by the Butcher's men—and the Butcher's grip was tense upon
the Hawk.
“Cut it out!” he whispered hoarsely. “My God, we're
trapped—the lot of us! Make a break for the door—get me?
Crawl—that's the only chance!” Blue eddies of smoke hung in queer,
wavering, hesitant suspension up and down the length of the car; the air
was full of the acrid smell of powder. The firing broke out again. The
Hawk released his hold.
“All right!” he panted. “I'm with you!”
The Butcher was right, it was the only chance—and a chance that was
theirs alone, for, as they lay on the floor, the packing case hid them,
and it was barely two yards to the door. The train was almost at a
standstill now. MacVightie's men had gained an entrance and a position
for themselves behind the trunks at the lower end, firing as they crept
forward, while back on the smoker's platform, through the baggage
car's open door, others commanded the sweep down the center of the
car.
The Hawk snatched at the package of banknotes, snuggled it under his
coat, and, with the Butcher beside him, began to wriggle toward the
door.
MacVightie's voice rang out again from the rear of the car:
“Marston, take ten men, and surround the car! And——” His voice
rose suddenly in a bull-like roar. “The forward door, there—two of
them! Watch which way they jump—not a man of them gets away to-night!
Quick!”
The Hawk had wrenched the door open, and, with the Butcher behind him,
flung himself out, and leaped to the ground. With the Hawk leading,
running like hares, the two men dashed down the embankment, and hurled
themselves over the barbed-wire fence that enclosed the right of way.
Shouts, the crackle of shots, echoed from behind them—the short,
vicious tongue-flames of the revolvers, a myriad of them, it seemed,
stabbed yellow through the blackness.
The Hawk glanced back over his shoulder. He could just make out perhaps
a half dozen dark forms in pursuit—and perhaps fifty yards away. The
darkness and the distance made the shooting at best uncertain. It was
only a chance shot that would get either the Butcher or himself, and
ahead, unless he was mistaken, for the train must have come to a stop at
just about that distance from Conmore, must be the wooded tract of
land that surrounded the old farmhouse. Yes—there it was! The
old dare-devil set clamped his jaws again. Yes, and so was the
Ladybird—there! Well, it was obvious enough that there was no other
cover! He glanced at the Butcher's face that he could just discern
in the darkness. The Butcher might decide against it, but the Butcher
evidently had not recognised his surroundings. The man's lips were
working, and he was cursing in abandon as he ran.
The Hawk spoke in short, gasping breaths: “There's some trees over
there—to the right—a little—make for them—cover!”
The Butcher swerved automatically in the direction indicated.
“Curse you!” he wheezed out. “This is all your infernal, nosey
work! What did you want to butt in for to-night—you fool—you
couldn't have got that gold, anyway!”
“You close your face!” snapped back the Hawk. “I'm running my
own show! There was a little cash—forty thousand bucks along with
that gold, that maybe you didn't know about. That's what I was
after—see? And that's what I got—see?”
“Yes”—the Butcher's voice broke in infuriated passion—“yes,
and you got them all pinched, every last one of them—blast you!
I——”
“You save your breath, and put it into running,” retorted the Hawk
savagely, “or else maybe you'll get pinched yourself! It's their
lookout! I don't owe any of you any candy, do I!”
MacVightie himself was evidently one of those in pursuit behind, for
again the Hawk recognised the other's voice:
“Spread out there to the right! And try and shoot a little
straighter—before they get into that belt of trees!”
A renewed outburst of firing came in response—and the Hawk measured
grimly the few yards that still separated him from the trees, as a
bullet, drumming the air venomously, seemed to miss his cheek by but
the fraction of an inch. MacVightie's presence was evidence that the
detective was so well satisfied that the gang penned up in the car could
not escape, that he obviously counted his temporary absence from the
scene well warranted if thereby the clean-up were made complete in the
capture of——-The Hawk's mental soliloquy came to an abrupt end.
There was a low cry from the Butcher, and the man, as they ran shoulder
to shoulder, lurched against him.
“What's wrong?” flung out the Hawk sharply.
“They got me!” gasped the Butcher—and lurched again. “They got
me—in the leg.”
The Hawk glanced backward again. They were still those fifty yards
behind, those dark, flitting, oncoming forms, those vicious yellow stabs
of flame in the blackness—it had been a dead heat so far, here to the
fringe of the trees.
The Butcher stumbled. The Hawk swung his free arm around the other's
waist, and plunged in amongst the trees. It was slower work now,
desperately slow. He clutched at the package of banknotes beneath his
coat, and with his other hand tightened his grip upon the Butcher. The
man was evidently badly hit, and was beginning to sag limply. Came the
thrashing and branches, and the rush of feet behind them. The fifty
yards was ten now—the Hawk, with his burden, struggled on—and then
there came a cry again from the Butcher—they had gained the edge
of the clearing, and the old farmhouse and its outbuildings loomed up
before them.
“It's—it's——” the Butcher's voice choked weakly.
“I—I know where we are—my God, quick! They'll search the house!
I got to warn him now—quick!” The man, as though under a stimulant,
with new strength, had sprung forward alone into the clear, making
for the farmhouse door. It was only a few yards, but halfway there he
stumbled again—and again the Hawk pulled him to his feet.
A yell went up behind them. MacVightie and his men, too, were now in the
clearing, and the ten yards' lead was cut to five, to three—and then
the door before them was flung suddenly open, and a voice challenged
hoarsely from within:
“Who's there? What's——”
The Butcher pitched across the threshold, dragging the Hawk down with
him in his fall.
“The door, Jim—quick—slam it!” screamed the Butcher. “We're
done—the cellar!”
The Hawk had leaped to his feet. The room was dark, unlighted, but from
across it came, as there had come that other night, the faint glow from
the open door of the cellarway. The Butcher had staggered up again, and
was making in that direction—and then the Hawk, too, was across the
room—but the next instant, turning to meet the rush from without, as
the front door, evidently before the man whom the Butcher had addressed
as Jim could fasten it, burst inward and crashed against the wall, he
was borne backward, and, losing his balance, half pitched, half rolled
down the cellar stairs.
The fall must have stunned him for a moment. He realised that as he
struggled to his feet—to find himself staring into the muzzle of
MacVightie's revolver, and to find that the bulging package of
banknotes was gone from under his coat, as, too, were his automatic, his
jimmy and the baggageman's revolver that had been in the side
pockets of his coat. He raised his hand dazedly toward his eyes—and
MacVightie, reaching out, knocked his hand away.
“I'll do that for you—we were just getting around to it!” said
MacVightie roughly—and jerked the Hawk's mask from his face. And
then MacVightie leaned sharply forward. “O-ho!” he exclaimed grimly.
“So it's you—is it? I guess you put it over me the night that ten
thousand was lifted at the station—but I've got you now!”
The Hawk made no answer. He was staring, still in an apparently dazed
way, about him. The cellar was a veritable maze of work benches and
elaborate equipment—for counterfeiting work. A printing press stood
over in one corner; on the benches, plates and engravers' tools of all
descriptions were scattered about; and, near the wall by the stairway,
he made out a telegraph set. But the Hawk's glance did not linger on
any of these things—it fastened on a bent and twisted form that craned
its neck forward from a rubber-tired wheel chair; on a livid face, out
of which the coal-black eyes, narrowed to slits, smouldered in deadly
menace, and from whose thin lips, that scarcely moved, there poured
forth now a torrent of hideous blasphemy in that soft, silken voice
that had earned the Ladybird his name; on the hand, crooked into a claw,
that, pushing away the man who stood guard over him, reached out toward
where the Butcher lay upon the floor.
“You ape, you gnat, you brainless pig! And you led them
here—here—here!”
“I didn't know where I was until I was right on the house,”
mumbled the Butcher miserably. “I——”
“Shut up—both of you!” ordered MacVightie gruffly. “What do you
say, Lanson? Is this the Hawk?”
The Hawk had not seen the superintendent, and he turned now quickly.
Lanson's steel-grey eyes were boring into him coldly.
“Yes,” said Lanson evenly, “I think I could swear he was the man
who held us up in the private car the other night—but it's easily
proved. If he is the Hawk, he has got a wound in his right side. I
saw him clap his hand there when the pistol went off in his fight with
Meridan.”
“Well, we'll soon see!” snapped MacVightie.
The Hawk licked his lips.
“You needn't look,” he said morosely. “It's there.”
“So you admit it, do you?” MacVightie's smile was unpleasant.
“Well, then, since you seem to be so thick with that pack of curs
back there in the train, perhaps you'll admit to a hand in this little
counterfeiting plant as well?”
“No; I won't!” said the Hawk shortly. “I never had anything to
do with this! I don't admit anything of the kind! Ask him!”—the
Hawk jerked his hand toward the Ladybird.
“Oh, all right!” MacVightie smiled unpleasantly again. “Let it
go at that for now, if you like it that way. It doesn't much matter.
You're birds of a feather, anyway, and there's enough on all of you
to go around!” He reached behind him, and picked up the package of
banknotes from where he had evidently laid it on the nearest bench.
“How did you know this was on the train, and how did you know where it
was in the car—and tell the truth about it!”
“I heard you and Mr. Lanson talking about it tonight,” said the
Hawk.
“Where?”
“In the roundhouse. I was outside the window. And”—the Hawk's
voice thinned in a sudden snarl—“you go to the devil with your
questions!”
The Ladybird was craned forward again in the wheel chair listening
intently, he sank back now and scowled murderously at the Hawk.
MacVightie shrugged his shoulders, handed the package to one of his
three men who were with him in the cellar, and drew a pair of handcuffs
from his pocket.
“Get that cash down to the train, and put it back with the gold where
it will be under guard, MacGregor!” he ordered brusquely. “And you
two carry this fellow”—he rattled his handcuffs in the Butcher's
direction—“down there, too. Tell Marston to let you have three or
four more men. The chap that Williams has got upstairs there will have
to be carried, too, I guess; and our friend here, in the invalid buggy,
with the thanksgiving expression on his face, will have to have somebody
to push him along over the ruts. Yes, and I'll want a couple to put in
the night here—tell Marston to make it four. And now, beat it! You run
ahead, MacGregor, and get back as soon as you can—we don't want to
tie up the traffic all night!”
The two men picked up the Butcher, and, preceded by their companion
with the package of banknotes, went up the stairs. MacVightie caught
the Hawk's arm roughly, snapped one link of the steel cuffs over the
Hawk's right wrist, and yanked the Hawk ungently over to a position
beside the wheel chair.
He snapped the other link over the Ladybird's left wrist, and smiled
menacingly.
“I guess there's dead weight enough there to anchor you for a few
minutes while I take a look around here!” he said curtly—and turned
to Lan-son.
The Hawk was licking at his lips again. Upstairs, the tramp of feet was
dying away: There would be no one there now but the other member of the
gang who, it seemed, had been hurt when the house was rushed, and the
one man who was guarding the prisoner. The Ladybird's cultured voice
at the Hawk's side poured out an uninterrupted stream of abandoned
oaths that were like a shudder in the nonchalant, conversational tones
in which they fell from the twitching lips. MacVightie and Lanson were
moving here and there about the place. Snatches of their conversation
reached the Hawk:
...Well, I reckon I called the turn, all right, when I said it was
the same crowd that was turning out the phony stuff, eh?... Yes, the
telegraph set.
... Can't trace the wires until daylight, of course.
... Sure, a clean-up....”
The Hawk's eyes travelled furtively around the cellar. They rested
hungrily on a spot in front of him, where, in the centre of the floor,
but partially hidden by one of the workbenches, was the bolted trapdoor
of the underground passage that led out to the wagon shed. He circled
his lips with his tongue again, and furtively again, his glance
travelled on—to the door at the head of the cellar stairs that had a
massive bolt, and that, evidently swinging back of its own accord after
the men had passed through, now hung just ajar—to a long, narrow
window, most tantalising of all because it was wide open, that was
shoulder high, just above the stonework of the cellar and evidently on a
level with the ground outside.
And then suddenly the Hawk's lids drooped—to hide a quick flash and
gleam that lighted the dark eyes. MacVightie had stooped, and throwing
back the bolt, had lifted up the trapdoor.
“Hello!” he ejaculated. “What's this? Here, Lanson! It looks
like a passage of some sort.” He was leaning down into the opening.
“Yes, so help me, that's what it is!” He lowered himself hurriedly
through the trapdoor, and his voice came back muffled into the cellar.
“Come down here a minute, Lanson; they certainly had things worked out
to a fine point!”
Lanson's back, as, following MacVightie, he lowered himself through
the opening, was turned to the Hawk—and in a flash the Hawk's free
hand had swept behind him under his coat to the concealed pocket in the
back lining, and his eyes were thrust within an inch of the Ladybird's
as he lowered his head.
“You understand?”—the Hawk's lips did not move, he was breathing
his words, while a skeleton key worked swiftly at the handcuff on his
wrist—“you understand? It's you or me! You make a sound to queer
me, and I'll get you—first!”
The livid face was contorted, working with impotent fury, but, perhaps
for the first time that it had ever been there, there was fear In the
Ladybird's burning eyes. The Hawk's hand was free now. Lanson's
shoulders were just disappearing through the opening, and with a
lightning spring the Hawk reached the trapdoor, swung it down, bolted
it, and, running without a sound, gained the head of the cellar stairs,
pulled the door gently shut, slid the bolt silently into place—and the
next moment the Hawk, returning, darted to the window, swung himself up
to the ledge, and vanished.
XX—“CONFIDENTIAL” CORRESPONDENCE
TWO days later MacVightie received a letter that had been posted the day
before from a city quite a number of miles nearer the East than
Selkirk was. In the left-hand, lower corner of the envelope, heavily
underscored, was the word: “Confidential.” What MacVightie read,
when he opened the letter, was this:
“Dear Mr. MacVightie:—
“I feel that you are entitled to an explanation—I will not call it
an apology, for I am sure you will recognise with me the unavoidable
nature of the circumstances existing at the time—of my somewhat
informal leave-taking of you two evenings ago; and I am afraid that my
actions on that occasion have not enhanced your opinion of—the Hawk. I
shall try and redeem myself. You have, I make no doubt, already
searched that room where I first had the pleasure of making your
acquaintance—and have found nothing. Let me begin, then, by saying
that the diamond necklace belonging to His Excellency the Governor's
wife, a certain well-known shipment of unset stones, and cash in varying
amounts derived from sources with which you are acquainted, are in
a black valise which you will find in the parcel room of the Selkirk
station—and for which I enclose herewith the parcel-room check.