THE TOCSIN'S STORY
LaSalle! The old French name! That old French inscription on the ring:
“SONNEZ LE TOCSIN!” Yes; he began to understand now. She was Marie
LaSalle! He began to remember more clearly.
Marie LaSalle! They had said she was one of the most beautiful girls
who had ever made her entree into New York society. But he had never met
her--as Marie LaSalle; never met her--until now, as the Tocsin, in this
bare, destitute, squalid hovel, here at bay, both of them, for their
lives.
He had been away when she had come with her father to New York; and
on his return there had only been the father's brother in the father's
place--and she was gone. He remembered the furor her disappearance had
caused; the enormous rewards her uncle had offered in an effort to trace
her; the thousand and one speculations as to what had become of her;
and that then, gradually, as even the most startling and mystifying of
events and happenings always do, the affair had dropped into oblivion
and had been forgotten by the public at least. He began to count back.
Yes, it must have been nearly five years ago; two years before she,
as the Tocsin, and he, as the Gray Seal, had formed their amazing and
singular partnership, that--he started suddenly, as she spoke.
“I want to tell you in as few words as I can,” she said abruptly,
breaking the silence. “Listen, then, Jimmie. My mother died ten years
ago. I was little more than a child then. Shortly after her death,
father made a business trip to New York, and, on the advice of some
supposed friends, he had a new will drawn up by a lawyer whom they
recommended, and to whom they introduced him. I do not know who those
men were. The lawyer's name was Travers, Hilton Travers.” She glanced
curiously at Jimmie Dale, and added quickly: “He was the chauffeur--the
man who was killed last night.”
“You mean,” Jimmie Dale burst out, “you mean that he was--but, first,
the will! What was in the will?”
“It was a very simple will,” she answered. “And from the nature of it,
it was not at all strange that my father should have been willing to
have had it drawn by a comparative stranger, if that is what you are
thinking. Summarised in a few words, the will left everything to me,
and appointed my Uncle Henry as my guardian and the sole executor of the
estate until I should have reached my twenty-fifth birthday. It provided
for a certain sum each year to be paid to my uncle for his services as
executor; and at the expiration of the trust period--that is, when I was
twenty-five--bequeathed to him the sum of one hundred thousand dollars.”
Jimmie Dale nodded. “Go on!” he prompted.
“It is hard to tell it in logical sequence,” she said, hesitating a
moment. “So many things seem to overlap each other. You must understand
a little more about Hilton Travers. During the five years following the
signing of the will father came frequently to New York, and became,
not only intimate with Travers, but so much impressed with the other's
cleverness and ability that he kept putting more and more of his
business into Travers' hands. At the end of that five years, we moved
to New York, and father, who was then quite an old man, retired from all
active business, and turned over a great many of his personal affairs
to Travers to look after for him, giving Travers power of attorney in a
number of instances. So much for Travers. Now about my uncle. He was my
father's only brother; in fact, they were the only surviving members of
their family, apart from very distant connections in France, from where,
generations back, the family originally came.” Her hand touched
Jimmie Dale's for an instant. “That ring, Jimmie, with its crest and
inscription, is the old family coat of arms.”
“Yes,” he said briefly; “I surmised as much.”
“Strange as it may seem, in view of the fact that they had not seen each
other for twenty years,” she went on hurriedly “my father and my
uncle were more than ordinarily attached to each other. Letters passed
regularly between them, and there was constant talk of one paying the
other a visit--but the visit never materialised. My uncle was somewhere
in Australia, my father was here, and consequently I never saw my uncle.
He was quite a different type of man from father--more restless, less
settled, more rough and ready, preferring the outdoor life of the
Australian bush to the restrictions of any so-called civilisation, I
imagine. Financially, I do not think he ever succeeded very well, for
twice, in one way or another, he lost every sheep on his ranch and
father set him up again; and I do not think he could ever have had much
of a ranch, for I remember once, in one of the letters he wrote, that he
said he had not seen a white man in weeks, so he must have lived a very
lonely life. Indeed, at about the time father drew the new will, my
uncle wrote, saying that he had decided to give up sheep running on his
own account as it did not pay, and to accept a very favourable offer
that had been made to him to manage a ranch in New Zealand; and his next
letter was from the latter country, stating that he had carried out
his intentions, and was well satisfied with the change he had made. The
long-proposed visit still continued to occupy my father's thoughts, and
on his retirement from business he definitely made up his mind to go
out to New Zealand, taking me with him. In fact, the plans were all
arranged, my uncle expressed unbounded delight in his letters, and we
were practically on the eve of sailing, when a cable came from my uncle,
telling us to postpone the visit for a few months, as he was obliged to
make a buying trip for his new employer that would keep him away that
length of time--and then”--her fingers, that had been abstractedly
picking out the lines formed by the grain of the wood in the table top,
closed suddenly into tight-clenched fists--“and then--my father died.”
Jimmie Dale turned away his head. There were tears in her eyes. The old
sense of unreality was strong upon him again. He was listening to the
Tocsin's story. It was strange that he should be doing that--that
it could be really so! It seemed as though magically he had been
transported out of the world where for years past he had lived with
danger lurking at every turn, where men set watch about his house to
trap him, where the denizens of the underworld yowled like starving
beasts to sink their fangs in him, where the police were ceaselessly
upon his trail to wreak an insensate vengeance upon him; it seemed as
though he had been transported away from all that to something that he
had dreamed might, perhaps, sometime happen, that he had hoped might
happen, that he had longed for always, but now that it was his, that it
also was full of the sense of the unreal. And yet as his mind followed
the thread of her story, and leaped ahead and vaguely glimpsed what was
to come, he was conscious in a sort of premonitory way of a vaster peril
than any he had ever known, as though forces, for the moment masked,
were arrayed against him whose strength and whose malignity were beyond
human parallel. In what a strange, almost incoherent way his brain was
working! He roused himself a little and looked around him--and, with a
shock, the starkness of the room, the abject, pitiful air of destitution
brought home to him with terrific, startling force the significance of
the scene in which he was playing a part. His face set suddenly in
hard lines. That she should have been brought to assume such a life as
this--forced out of her environment of wealth and refinement, forced
in her purity to rub shoulders with the vile, the dissolute, forced to
exist as such a creature amid the crime and vice, the wretched horror
of the underworld that swirled around her! There was anger now upon him,
burning, hot--a merciless craving that was a savage, hungry lust for
vengeance.
And then she was speaking again:
“Father's death occurred very shortly after my uncle's message advising
us to postpone our trip was received. On his death, Travers, very
naturally, as father's lawyer, cabled my uncle to come to New York
at once; and my uncle replied, saying that he was coming by the first
steamer.”
She paused again--but only for an instant, as though to frame her
thoughts in words.
“I have told you that I had never seen my uncle, that even my father had
not seen him for twenty years; and I have told you that the man you know
as Henry LaSalle is an impostor--I am using the word 'uncle' now when I
refer to him simply to avoid confusion. You are, perhaps, expecting
me to say that I took a distinctive dislike to him from the moment he
arrived? On the contrary, I had every reason to be predisposed toward
him; and, indeed, was rather agreeably surprised than otherwise--he was
not nearly so uncouth and unpolished as, somehow, I had pictured his
life would have made him. Do you understand, Jimmie? He was kind,
sympathetic; and, in an apathetic way, I liked him. I say 'apathetic'
because I think that best describes my own attitude toward every one and
everything following father's death until--THAT NIGHT.”
She rose abruptly from her chair, as though a passive position of any
kind had suddenly become intolerable.
“Why tell you what my father and I were to each other!” she cried out
in a low, passionate voice. “It seemed as though everything that meant
anything had gone out of my life. I became worn out, nervous; and though
the days were bad enough, the nights were a source of dread. I began
to suffer from insomnia--I could not sleep. This was even before my
supposed uncle came. I used to read for hours and hours in my room
after I had gone to bed. But”--she flung out her hand with an impatient
gesture--“there is no need to dwell on that. One night, about a week
after that man had arrived, and a little over a month after father had
died, I was in my room and had finished a book I was reading. I remember
that it was well after midnight. I had not the slightest inclination
to sleep. I picked up another book--and after that another. There were
plenty in my room; but, irrationally, of course, none pleased me. I
decided to go down to the library--not that I think I really expected
to find anything that I actually wanted, but more because it was an
impulse, and furnished me for the moment with some definite objective,
something to do. I got up, slipped on a dressing gown, and went
downstairs. The lights were all out. I was just on the point of
switching on those in the reception hall, when suddenly it seemed as
though I had not strength to lift my hand, and I remember that for an
instant I grew terribly cold with dread and fear. From the room on my
right a voice had reached me. The door was closed, but the voice was
raised in an outburst of profanity. I--I could hear every word.
“'If she's out of the way, there's no come-back,' the voice snarled. 'I
won't listen to anything else! Do you hear! Why, you fool, what are you
trying to do--hand me one! Turn everything into cash, and divvy, and
beat it--eh? And I'm the goat, and I get caught and get twenty years
for stealing trust funds--and the rest of you get the coin!' He swore
terribly again. 'Who's taken the risk in this for the last five years!
There'll be no smart Aleck lawyer tricks--there'll be no halfway
measures! And who are you to dictate! She goes out--that's safe--I
inherit as next of kin, with no one to dispute it, and that's all there
is to it!'
“I stood there and could not move. It was the voice of the man I knew
as my uncle! My heart seemed to have stopped beating. I tried to tell
myself that I was dreaming, that it was too horrible, too incredible to
be real; that they could not really mean to--to MURDER me. And then I
recognised Hilton Travers' voice.
“'I am not dictating, and you are not serious, of course,' he said,
with what seemed an uneasy laugh. 'I am only warning you that you are
forgetting to take the real Henry LaSalle into account. He is bound to
hear of this eventually, and then--'
“Another voice broke in--one I did not recognise.
“'You're talking too loud, both of you! Travers doesn't understand, but
he's to be wised up to-night, according to orders, and--'
“The voice became inaudible, muffled--I could not hear any more. I
suppose I remained there another three or four minutes, too stunned to
know what to do; and then I ran softly along the hall to the library
door. The library, you understand, was at the rear of the room they
were in, and the two rooms were really one; that is, there was only an
archway between them. I cannot tell you what my emotions were--I do not
know. I only know that I kept repeating to myself, 'they are going to
kill me, they are going to kill me!' and that it seemed I must try and
find out everything, everything I could.”
She turned away from the table, and began to pace nervously up and down
the miserable room.
Jimmie Dale rose impulsively from his chair--but she waved him back
again.
“No; wait!” she said. “Let me finish. I crept into the library. It took
me a long time, because I had to be so careful not to make the slightest
noise. I suppose it was fully six or seven minutes from the time I
had first heard my supposed uncle's voice until I had crept far enough
forward to be able to see into the room beyond. There were three men
there. The man I knew as my uncle was sitting at one end of the
table; another had his back toward me; and Travers was facing in my
direction--and I think I never saw so ghastly a face as was Hilton
Travers' then. He was standing up, sort of swaying, as he leaned with
both hands on the table.
“'Now then, Travers,' the man whose back was turned to me was saying
threateningly, 'you've got the story now--sign those papers!'
“It seemed as though Travers could not speak for a moment. He kept
looking wildly from one to the other. He was white to the lips.
“'You've let me in for--THIS!' he said hoarsely, at last, 'You
devils--you devils--you devils! You've let me in for--murder! Both of
them! Both Peter and his brother--MURDERED!'”
She stopped abruptly before Jimmie Dale, and clutched his arm tightly.
“Jimmie, I don't know why I did not scream out. Everything went black
for a moment before my eyes. It was the first suspicion I had had that
my father had met with foul play, and I--”
But now Jimmie Dale swayed up from his chair.
“Murdered!” he exclaimed tensely. “Your father! But--but I remember
perfectly, there was no hint of any such thing at the time, and never
has been since. He died from quite natural causes.”
She looked at him strangely.
“He died from--inoculation,” she said. “Did--did you not see something
of that laboratory in the Crime Club yourself the night before
last--enough to understand?”
“Good God!” muttered Jimmie Dale, in a startled way then: “Go on! Go on!
What happened then?”
She passed her hand a little wearily across her eyes--and sank down into
her chair again.
“Travers,” she continued, picking up the thread of her story, “had
raised his voice, and the third man at the table leaned suddenly,
aggressively toward him.
“'Hold your tongue!' he growled furiously. 'All you're asked to do is
sign the papers--not talk!'
“Travers shook his head.
“'I won't!' he cried out. 'I won't have any hand in another murder--in
hers! My God, I won't--I won't, I tell you! It's horrible!'
“'Look here, you fool!' the man who was posing as my uncle broke in
then. 'You're in this too deep to get out now. If you know what's good
for you, you'll do as you're told!'
“Jimmie, I shall never forget Travers' face. It seemed to have changed
from white to gray, and there was horror in his eyes: and then he
seemed to lose all control of himself, shaking his fists in their faces,
cursing them in utter abandon.
“'I'm bad!' he cried. 'I've gone everything, everything but the
limit--everything but murder. I stop there! I'll have no more to do
with this. I'm through! You--you pulled me into this, and--and I didn't
know!'
“'Well, you know now!' the third man sneered. 'What are you going to do
about it?'
“'I'm going to see that no harm comes to Marie LaSalle,' Travers
answered in a dull way.
“The other man now was on his feet--and, I do not know quite how to
express it, Jimmie, he seemed ominously quiet in both his voice and his
movements.
“'You'd better think that over again, Travers!' he said. 'Do you mean
it?'
“'I mean it,' Travers said. 'I mean it--God help me!'
“'You may well add that!' returned the other, with an ugly laugh. He
reached out his hand toward the telephone on the table. 'Do you know
what will happen to you if I telephone a certain number and say that you
have turned--traitor?'
“'I'll have to take my chances,' Travers replied doggedly. 'I'm
through!'
“'Take them, then!' flung out the other. 'You'll have little time given
you to do us any harm!'
“Travers did not answer. I think he almost expected an attack upon him
then from the two men. He hesitated a moment, then backed slowly toward
the door. What happened in the next few moments in that room, I do not
know. I stole out of the library. I was obsessed with the thought that
I must see Travers, see him at all costs, before he got away from the
house. I reached the end of the hall as the room door opened, and he
came out. It was dark, as I said, and I could not see distinctly, but
I could make out his form. He closed the door behind him--and then
I called his name in a whisper. He took a quick step toward me, then
turned and hurried toward the front door, and I thought he was going
away--but the next instant I understood his ruse. He opened the front
door, shut it again quite loudly, and crept back to me.
“'Take me somewhere where we will be safe--quick!' he whispered.
“There was only one place where I was sure we would be safe. I led
him to the rear of the house and up the servants' stairs, and to my
boudoir.”
She broke off abruptly, and once more rose from her chair, and once
more began to pace the room. Back in his chair, Jimmie Dale, tense and
motionless now, watched her without a word.
“It would take too long to tell you all that passed between us,” she
went on hurriedly. “The man was frankly a criminal--but not to the
extent of murder. And in that respect, at least, he was honest with
himself. Almost the first words he said to me were: 'Miss LaSalle, I am
as good as a dead man if I am caught by the devils behind those two men
downstairs.' And then he began to plead with me to make my own escape.
He did not know who the man was that was posing as my uncle, had never
seen him before until he presented himself as Henry LaSalle; the other
man he knew as Clarke, but knew also that 'Clarke' was merely an assumed
name. He had fallen in with Clarke almost from the time that he had
begun to practise his profession, and at Clarke's instigation had gone
from one crooked deal to another, and had made a great deal of money. He
knew that behind Clarke was a powerful, daring, and unscrupulous band of
criminals, organised on a gigantic scale, of which he himself was, in
a sense--a probationary sense, as he put it--a member; but he had never
come into direct contact with them--he had received all his orders and
instructions through Clarke. He had been told by Clarke that he was to
cultivate father following the introduction, to win father's confidence,
to get as many of father's affairs into his hands as possible, to reach
the position, in fact, of becoming father's recognised attorney--and
all this with the object, as he supposed of embezzling from father on
a large scale. Then father died, and Travers was instructed to cable my
uncle. He knew that the man who answered that summons was an impostor;
but he did not know, until they had admitted it to him that night, that
both my father and my uncle had been murdered, and that I, too, was to
be made away with.”
She looked at Jimmie Dale, and suddenly laughed out bitterly.
“No; you don't understand, even yet, the patient, ingenious deviltry
of those fiends. It was they, at the time the new will was drawn, who
offered to buy out my real uncle's sheep ranch in that lonely, unsettled
district in Australia, and offered him that new position in New Zealand.
My uncle never reached New Zealand. He was murdered on his way there.
And in his place, assuming his name, appeared the man who has been
posing as my uncle ever since. Do you begin to see! For five years
they were patiently working out their plans, for five years before
my father's death that man lived and became known and accepted, and
ESTABLISHED himself as Henry LaSalle. Do you see now why he cabled us to
postpone our visit? He ran very little risk. The chances were one in a
thousand that any of his few acquaintances in Australia would ever run
across him in New Zealand; and besides, he was chosen because it
seems there was a slight resemblance between him and the real Henry
LaSalle--enough, with his changed mode of living and more elaborate and
pretentious surroundings, to have enabled him to carry through a bluff
had it become necessary. He had all of my uncle's papers; and the Crime
Club furnished him with every detail of our lives here. I forgot to
say, too, that from the moment my uncle was supposed to have reached New
Zealand all his letters were typewritten--an evidence in father's eyes
that his brother had secured a position of some importance; as, indeed,
from apparently unprejudiced sources, they took pains to assure father
was a fact. This left them with only my uncle's signature to forge to
the letters--not a difficult matter for them!
“Believing that they had Travers so deeply implicated that he could do
nothing, even if he had the inclination, which they had not for a moment
imagined, and arrogant in the belief in their own power to put him out
of the way in any case if he proved refractory, they admitted all this
to him that night when he brought up the issue of the real Henry LaSalle
putting in an appearance sooner or later, and when they wanted him to
smooth their path by releasing all documents where his power of attorney
was involved. Do you see now the part they gave Travers to play? It was
to put the stamp of genuineness upon the false Henry LaSalle. Not but
that they were prepared with what would appear to be overwhelmingly
convincing evidence to prove it if it were necessary; but if the man
were accepted by the estate's lawyer there was little chance of any one
else questioning his identity.”
She halted again by the table--and forced a smile, as her eyes met
Jimmie Dale's.
“I am almost through, Jimmie. That night was a terrible one for both
of us. Travers' life was not worth a moment's purchase once they found
him--and mine was only under reprieve until sufficient time to obviate
suspicion should have elapsed after father's death. We had no proof that
would stand in any court--even if we should have been given the chance
to adopt that course. And without absolute, irrefutable proof, it was
all so cleverly woven, stretched over so many years, that our charge
must have been held to be too visionary and fantastic to have any basis
in fact.
“All Travers would have been able to advance was the statement that the
supposed Henry LaSalle had admitted being an impostor and a murderer
to him! Who would believe it! On the face of it, it appeared to be an
absurdity. And even granted that we were given an opportunity to bring
the charge, they would be able to prove by a hundred influential
and well-known men in New Zealand that the impostor was really Henry
LaSalle; and were we able to find any of my uncle's old acquaintances in
Australia, it would be necessary to get them here--and not one of them
would have reached America alive.
“But there was not a chance, not a chance, Jimmie, of doing that--they
would have killed Travers the moment he showed himself in the open. The
only thing we could do that night was to try and save our own lives; the
only thing we could look forward to was acquiring in some way, unknown
to them, the proof, fully established, with which we could crush them in
a single stroke, and before they would have time to strike back.
“The vital thing was proof of my uncle's death. That, if it could
be obtained at all, could only be obtained in Australia. Travers was
obliged to go somewhere, to disappear from that moment if he wanted to
save his life, and he volunteered to go out there. He left the house
that night by the back entrance in an old servant's suit, which I found
for him--and I never heard from him again until a month ago in the
'personal' column of the MORNING NEWS-ARGUS, through which we had agreed
to communicate.
“As for myself, I left the house the next morning, telling my pseudo
uncle that I was going to spend a few days with a friend. And this
I actually did; but in those few days I managed to turn all my own
securities, that had been left me by my mother and which amounted to a
considerable sum, into cash. And then, Jimmie, I came to--this, I have
lived like this and in different disguises, as a settlement worker, as a
widow of means in a fashionable uptown apartment, but mostly as you see
me now--for five years. For five years I have watched my supposed
uncle, hoping, praying that through him I could get to know the others
associated with him; hoping, praying that Travers would succeed; hoping,
praying that we would get them all--and watching day after day, and year
after year the 'personal' column of the paper, until at last I began
to be afraid that it was all useless. And there was nothing, Jimmie,
nothing anywhere, and I had no success”--her voice choked a little.
“Nothing! Even Clarke never went again to the house. You can understand
now how I came to know the strange things that I wrote to the Gray Seal,
how the life that I have led, how this life here in the underworld, how
the constant search for some clew on my own account brought them to my
knowledge; and you can understand now, too, why I never dared to let
you meet me, for I knew well enough that, while I worked to undermine my
father's and my uncle's murderers, they were moving heaven and earth to
find me.
“That is all, Jimmie. The day before yesterday, a month after Travers'
first message to let me know that he was coming, there was another
'personal' giving me an hour and a telephone number. He was back! He
had everything--everything! We dared not meet; he was afraid, suspicious
that they had got track of him again. You know the rest. That package
contained the proof that, with Travers' death, can probably never be
obtained again. Do you understand why THEY want it--why it is life
and death to me? Do you understand why my supposed uncle offered huge
rewards for me, why secretly every resource of that hideous organisation
has been employed to find me--that it is only by my DEATH the estate can
pass into their hands, and now--”
She flung out her hands suddenly toward Jimmie Dale. “Oh, Jimmie,
Jimmie, I've--I've fought so long alone! Jimmie, what are we to do?”
He came slowly to his feet. She had fought so long--alone. But now--now
it was his turn to fight--for her. But how? She had not told him
all--surely she had not told him all, for everything depended upon that
package. There had been so much to tell that she had not thought of all,
and she had not told him the details about that.
“That box--No. 428!” he cried quickly. “What is that? What does it
mean?”
She shook her head.
“I do not know,” she answered.
“Then who is this John Johansson?”
“I do not know,” she said again.
“Nor where the Crime Club is?”
“No”--dully.
He stared at her for a moment in a dazed way.
“My God!” Jimmie Dale murmured.
And then she turned away her head.
“It's--it's pretty bad, isn't it, Jimmie? I--I told you that we did not
hold many trumps.”