Billy Kane smiled with grim irony, as he walked rapidly down the block.
She was not here to-night with her cool, contemptuous voice bidding him
to do this thing. It was evident, therefore, that she was not quite as
infallible as she apparently believed herself to be! For once, she was
not acquainted beforehand with the Crime Trust’s movements, it seemed!
Perhaps it was because, for once, the Rat might not have had anything to
do with originating the plan that was afoot to-night, for she had
certainly always appeared to be thoroughly informed where the Rat was
concerned!
He shrugged his shoulders suddenly, dismissing her from his thoughts. He
would better concentrate his mind on the work in hand! The secret lay in
the manila envelope. That the envelope contained something of great
value, or was of great value to someone, was obvious; to Dayler,
probably, since it was in Dayler’s carefully guarded possession. He
shrugged his shoulders again. He could tell better about that in the
course of another hour—when the envelope was in his pocket instead of
Dayler’s safe! To balk this organized gang of super-criminals was
sufficient for the moment! Once more his shoulders lifted. He perhaps
was not even entitled to any great credit to-night in fulfilling his
“moral obligations!” For once, there appeared to be neither any great
danger, nor any great difficulty. The house was empty; it was not very
far away; he had an hour in which to work undisturbed; and at the
expiration of that time he should be back in his room, and ready to set
out with the Cadger and Gannet to rob an _empty_ safe. If he with the
two men then entered the house, and, for their pains, found the manila
envelope already gone, certainly there could be no suspicion to rest
upon him!
Billy Kane had reached the Bowery now. He went in through the side
entrance of a corner saloon. Here, a minute’s search in the telephone
directory supplied him with the number of Dayler’s house on Ninth
Street. After that, he made his way over to Washington Square, crossed
the Square, gained the lower end of Fifth Avenue, practically deserted
now at this hour, and, a moment later, turning into Ninth Street, headed
down the block in the direction of Sixth Avenue.
It was one of the old aristocratic neighborhoods of New York, but
changed now a great deal with the changing years. What had once been
classed as mansions had in many cases been metamorphosed into lodging
and boarding houses; but the “mansions” were still here, big,
substantial, commodious stone dwellings. Nor had the boarding houses
entirely ousted a certain unobtrusive type of wealth and means from
their midst, and it argued not at all that this Dayler, for instance,
because he had his residence here, was not well to do, even exceedingly
well to do.
The street was quiet. Billy Kane located the house he sought. He passed
by it, noting that it had a basement entrance, a flight of stone steps
to the front door, that it was entirely in darkness, and, returning, he
mounted the steps quietly and without any attempt at concealment, found
the outer vestibule door unlocked, opened it—after making pretense of
ringing the doorbell for the benefit of anyone on the street who might
have paid him any notice—stepped inside, and closed the door behind him.
The inner door was locked. His skeleton keys came into play. Still far
from an adept in their use, he was several minutes at this work. Then he
stepped forward into the hall of the house itself.
His flashlight stabbed a lane of light through the darkness. The stairs
leading to the upper floors of the house were ahead of him and on his
right; on his left, opening off the hall, which seemed to run almost the
depth of the house, were several doors, all of which were closed. The
house was empty, the cipher message had assured him of that, but
nevertheless he moved now with extreme caution to the first door on his
left. He knew nothing of the plan of the house, but it was at least
logical to assume that the library was on this floor, and the library
was the objective of his search.
He opened the door slightly, quietly, then drew sharply back, and stood
tense and motionless, listening. There was a dull, faint glow of light
in there, not as though the room itself were illuminated, but as though
the light came from, perhaps, another room beyond. But there was no
sound. A minute passed, and still he stood there, alert, his ears
strained to catch the slightest noise. And then, reassured, he pushed
the door wider open, and stepped over the threshold. That a light might
have been left burning, either intentionally or inadvertently, presented
in itself nothing of the unusual, or——
He was drawing his hand across his eyes like a man dazed from a blow.
The light had gone in the winking of an eye. It was pitch black. He was
still involuntarily staring, through darkness now, toward the front end
of the room. The light had not come from that direction, it had come
through a portièred archway in quite the opposite direction, but for the
moment his mind was chaotic, out of control. The room was a
drawing-room, a large, stately sort of a drawing-room, and there had
been a huge pier glass, gilt-framed, between the heavily curtained front
windows. What he had seen could not have been a fantasy, nor due to
disordered imagination. His eyes, the instant he had entered the room,
had gone straight to that glass because it reflected the light from the
other room. The surface of the glass had been blank as his eyes had
first fallen upon it, and then, like a flash, enduring for but the
minutest fraction of a second, the reflection of a figure, a man’s
figure, a man’s figure _with a crutch_, had swept across it—and the
light in the other room had gone out.
And now Billy Kane acted quickly. The time that he had stood there,
inert, mentally stunned, had been but a matter of seconds exaggerated
into seemingly interminable, measureless hours. Swiftly, silently, he
reached the archway, and, sheltering himself behind the folds of the
portières, but in a position to command the other room with his
automatic, which he had whipped from his pocket, he stood still and
listened. There was only the quick, fierce pounding in his own eardrums,
in tempo with the mad race of blood through his veins. The Man with the
Crutch!
How or why the man came to be here, or what the other had to do with
what was afoot to-night, scarcely entered his mind. It did not matter!
Nothing mattered—save to get the Man with the Crutch. Everything else
paled into insignificance. It was the _same_ man that had murdered
Peters; there would not be _two_ men with crutches who prowled
stealthily at night in other people’s houses! But that it was Peters’
murderer was significant now only because it identified the man as one
who held the secret of David Ellsworth’s murder; the man who, if he,
Billy Kane, could but get to grips with him, would tell what he knew to
the last word, or one or the other of them would never leave this house
alive. It was the man who could end this hideous masquerade that he,
Billy Kane, was forced to assume; the man who could clear his name of
the foul blot that had cost him friends, the companionship of honest
men, and that was like at any instant to cost him his life.
There was no sound.
And then Billy Kane’s voice rang suddenly, imperatively through the
silence:
“Hands up!”
His flashlight bored through the darkness, circling the room in front of
him. The room—it was the library beyond doubt—was empty. His jaws
locked. He had taken a chance. It had failed. But now his glance fell
upon the door, diagonally across the library from him, that, from its
position, obviously opened on the hall. He could have sworn that the
doors opening on the hall were all closed when he had entered the house.
This one was ajar now!
He crossed the library with a bound, swung the door wide, and peered out
into the hall. He could see nothing; but now, from somewhere below, he
caught a sound as of a boot heel thudding on a bare floor—or, perhaps,
the tap of a crutch!
Along at the rear of the hall his flashlight focused on the head of a
basement stairway. He ran for this now; and then, with more caution,
wary of offering himself as a target for a shot that would put an end to
any hope of getting within reach of the other, his flashlight out, he
began to pick his way downstairs. Halfway down, he caught another sound.
From the front of the house, softly and cautiously though it was done,
there came the unmistakable opening and closing of the basement door.
Billy Kane took the remaining stairs in a leap, and, his flashlight
pointing the way, dashed along the hallway below. He reached the door,
and pulled at it. Then, with an angry, muttered exclamation, he stood
there for an instant hesitant. The man had managed to lock the door
behind him! Mechanically his hand went toward his pocket for his
skeleton keys, but stopped halfway as, turning suddenly, he raced back
upstairs. It would take too long to try out key after key. There was a
better way. There was the front door. He had left that unlocked when he
came in. He gained this now, jerked it open, lunged through the little
vestibule, snatched at the knob of the outer door—and wrenched at it
viciously like a madman in mingled rage and chagrin. It was locked! It
had not been locked even when he had come in!
Calmer in an instant, he took his keys from his pocket and worked with
feverish haste at the lock. It would possibly take less time to run into
the drawing-room, get a window open, and jump to the ground, but he did
not dare do that. He had to come back here with the Cadger and Gannet in
a little while, and he dared not risk anything that would imperil his
rôle in the eyes of the underworld. Even a number of people coming and
going from the house, if they acted naturally, entering by the door as
though they had a right to enter, would never attract the slightest
notice from either neighbors or passers-by. That was what doors were
for! But a man leaping out through one of the front windows would invite
certain attention, suspicion, and instant investigation.
Another key! Would he never get one that would fit! This wasn’t the door
he had opened before. A minute, perhaps two, perhaps even three, must
have gone by! God, how clumsy his fingers were! The man must have had
amazing agility for a cripple, and the craft and cunning of a devil to
come up here instantly on leaving the basement and lock this door! Would
he never get the—yes, he had it now! He swung the door open, and from
the top step his glance swept the street in both directions. And then
there came a sort of bitter philosophical acceptance of a situation that
he had already more than half expected. The Man with the Crutch had had
too much time. There was no sign of him now.
But there was still a chance! Billy Kane closed the door behind him,
went quietly down the steps to the pavement—there was still the
inviolability of the house to be preserved—walked along without undue
haste until far enough away to preclude the chance of any connection
being established between himself and the house he had just left, and
then broke into a run. There was still a chance. But it was a slim one.
He knew that. The man must have gone toward either Sixth Avenue or Fifth
Avenue. It was more likely Sixth Avenue; there would be more people
there, more traffic, more opportunity to “lose himself.” It was the
logical thing to do. Lower Fifth Avenue at night was almost as deserted
as a tomb; the man could have been seen there blocks away.
Perhaps fifteen minutes passed. At the expiration of that period Billy
Kane returned to the Dayler residence, and for the second time that
night coolly and quite casually mounted the steps, and again entered the
house. His search had been futile. He had circuited the blocks in the
neighborhood, and hunted up and down the adjacent section of Sixth
Avenue; and the more he had hunted the more he had realized the futility
of what he was doing, though, at that, he had even, as a last hope,
returned by Fifth Avenue. And now he was back in the house again, and
quite conscious that this, too, was likely now to prove as barren of
results as his search had been. The man had got away, and with the man
in all likelihood had gone, too, the manila envelope from the wall safe
in the library! What else had the other been in the library for?
Billy Kane shrugged his shoulders, as, using his flashlight again, he
stepped from the hall into the drawing-room, and from there through the
archway into the library. There was the one possibility that he had come
upon the Man with the Crutch and interrupted the other in his work
_before_ the envelope had been secured. That was the one possibility
that remained, and that was the one possibility that had prompted him to
come back.
He stood for a moment now beside the table that occupied the center of
the room, his flashlight creeping in a slow, inquisitive circle around
the walls. And now the round white ray, arrested, held on the mantel
opposite the archway. On either side of the mantel, shoulder high, and
projecting out a little from the wall, were what appeared to be
bric-a-brac, or, perhaps, liqueur cupboards, with leaded glass doors.
“Wall safe, left of mantel,” the message had said. He smiled a little
grimly in appreciation and understanding, as he moved over and halted
before the left-hand cupboard. It was a rather neat ambush for a wall
safe, this idea of Dayler’s—whoever Dayler might be!
The leaded glass door opened readily. The ray of the flashlight flooded
the interior. Billy Kane’s smile was gone. He was quite sure now that he
was too late. The cupboard was used for liqueurs, but the liqueurs in
turn were evidently used for the purpose of veiling the little nickel
dial of a safe that protruded from the wall at the rear of the cupboard,
for the bottles were all pushed now to one side, and the dial, with a
sort of diabolical mockery, it seemed, winked back reflected rays from
the glare of the flashlight. It was blatantly apparent now that this had
been the object of the other’s visit to the house, and it was almost as
equally apparent that the man had got what he had come for. And yet——
“Two right, eighteen; one left”—almost perfunctorily, muttering the
combination, Billy Kane had reached in and was twirling the knob of the
dial—“eight; one right, twenty-eight.”
The little steel door swung noiselessly open. Billy Kane stared into the
miniature safe, bewildered. And then he laughed a little. A minute
before and he would not have given a penny for his chances! The other
had got only so far as to move the bottles to one side. He had beaten
the Man with the Crutch by the very narrow margin of time it would have
taken to manipulate the combination! Perhaps, though, the other hadn’t
known the combination, and was just about to set to work to force the
safe! Well, it didn’t matter! The manila envelope lay there, sealed,
intact.
He took the envelope from the safe, closed the door, and locked it—and
whirled suddenly around from his position in front of the mantel. His
flashlight, jerked upward, played full upon the archway. A cool,
disdainful laugh rippled low through the room—a woman’s laugh. Billy
Kane did not move. The chill that had clutched at his heart, the fear of
discovery, was gone almost as quickly as it had come. He had nothing to
dread on that score from—the Woman in Black! And it was not the first
time she had come upon him unexpectedly! And it was she who stood there
now; and she still stood full in the glare of his flashlight, a
bewitching, entrancing, mysterious little figure, whose great dark eyes
were fixed on him, half in a deliberate, speculative way, and half in a
sort of contemptuous mockery.
It was she who broke the silence.
“I wonder if it’s true, Bundy?” she said softly.
He felt the blood surge hot into his cheeks. He knew a sudden bitter
rebellion at the contempt in those steady eyes, the same bitter
rebellion he had known last night in her presence, a rebellion against
the fate that caused him, through reason of being the counterpart of
some incarnate fiend, to stand in her eyes as that actual fiend himself,
as the one who in some way had done her, or hers, irreparable wrong, as
the embodiment of all that was loathsome and hideous to her. He was the
Rat to her, as to everybody else. The envelope crackled in his fingers,
as he clenched his hand. Would he always have to play the Rat—to her!
What would that perfect oval face, beautiful even now in its fearless
contempt, look like in softer mood?
“Is what true?” he demanded gruffly.
She came toward him across the room.
“That you are really playing the game,” she said slowly. “It’s not much
credit to you, of course, since you are doing it through fear, but
still——” She shrugged her shoulders daintily, as she stood beside him.
“Do you know, Bundy, that lately you seem to have changed somehow. I do
not know just how, and I cannot account for it. It puzzles me.”
“Forget it!” growled Billy Kane, alias the Rat. “And I don’t know what
game you’re talking about, either!”
“Oh, yes, you do!” she answered. “I told you that I would hold you
responsible for any crime committed by your accomplices that it lay
within your power to circumvent. That was the chance I gave you, and you
seem to be taking it. I thought I would test you out to-night when you
might imagine that I was ignorant of what was going on, and that you
might, therefore, count on escaping the consequences as far as I was
concerned. You were to come here with the Cadger and Gannet at nine
o’clock to rob that safe. You are here alone long before that hour, and
you have robbed the safe. I presume, at least I am going to give you
credit for it, that it is because you are playing the game I referred
to, and are checkmating your partners, and preventing the crime from
being carried any further.”
There was silence for a moment.
“I think you had better put out that flashlight,” she said.
He must play the Rat. His soul jeered at him ironically. He snapped off
the light.
“How did you get wise to this?” he flung out.
“About to-night? Why, it was one of your own pet schemes, wasn’t it,
Bundy—all worked out quite a while ago? That’s how I knew! Well, am I
right about the reason for you being here alone? And, if so, how did you
propose to square yourself with your cronies of the underworld?”
“By coming back here with the Cadger and Gannet, of course,” he replied
curtly, “and letting them fall for the idea that someone had beaten us
all to it.”
“Yes,” she said calmly. “Well, I quite approve, Bundy. And I’ll take
that envelope now, please! You won’t have any further use for it, and
I’ll attend to the rest of this affair.”
He handed her the envelope. He asked nothing better than that she should
assume any further responsibility that might be connected with its
contents. As far as he was concerned there were matters of far greater
moment now. There was the Man with the Crutch! And that was a matter in
which he had very cogent reasons for desiring to play a lone hand. His
lips tightened. It was fairly evident that she had not been in the house
the first time he had entered but he wanted to be sure.
“When did you get in here?” he snapped. “Followed me, I suppose!”
“About five minutes ago,” she said quietly. “And you left the door
unlocked—though I had a key. No, I didn’t follow you! Why should I? I
knew that you would be here at nine o’clock anyway, and I simply came a
little ahead of time. I really hoped, you see, that you would do the
same—and for more reasons than the one I have just mentioned.”
“What do you mean?” he grunted.
“I haven’t seen you since last night, you know,” she said deliberately.
“What about the diamonds that were stolen from Vetter?”
“I’ve got them,” he answered shortly.
“_Vetter_ hasn’t!” There was a cold, unpleasant inflection in her voice.
“Well, what do you expect!” He forced a raucous note into his voice. He
was not sure that it sounded genuine. It was not easy to play the Rat
with her! “Think it over! It’s not so soft a job to get them back to him
without leaving a trail behind that might trip me up! See?”
She appeared to consider this for a moment.
“That is true,” she said at last. “Well, have you got them here?”
“Yes.” He reached into his pocket and took out the chamois pocketbook.
He laughed brusquely, as he held it out to her. “If you can handle that
envelope, maybe you can handle the sparklers, too!”
“I can—and I will,” she said simply, as she took the pocketbook from
him. “That’s only fair. I told you once that I would put no difficulties
in the way of your keeping yourself solid—if you could!—with your fellow
yeggs. And that applies equally to to-night. You may bring the Cadger
back here. You will find the house empty.”
“Thanks!” he said grimly. “I’ll move along then; I’ve got just about
enough time left. And would you mind _locking_ the front door when you
go out? I’d like the Cadger to get all the run that’s coming to him for
his money.”
He stepped forward to pass her, but she laid a detaining hand on his
arm.
“Wait!” she said tersely. “I agreed to look after this envelope, but
even so you are not through yet to-night, Bundy. I know where Mr. Dayler
is this evening, and I am going to bring him back here to his own house
myself. But I will give you time first to play out your little farce
with your two thugs, and send them about their business. Say, ten
o’clock. Mr. Dayler and myself will be here at that time—and so will
you.”
“Will I?” inquired Billy Kane insolently. “Whats the lay? A trap?”
“No—an experiment,” she said evenly. “I would like to find out if there
is really anything _human_, if there is a shred of decency left in you.
I want you to see your crime for once from your victim’s standpoint. It
may help you, if you _are_ human, to keep on ‘playing the game’; and
that will help you, if you can keep out of the clutches of the
underworld, to keep out of the electric chair at Sing Sing. You quite
understand, Bundy? At ten o’clock! And I should not even mind if you are
found here in this room—in the dark—when Mr. Dayler and myself enter the
house—at ten o’clock. And now I think you had better hurry, Bundy.”
There was a twisted smile on Billy Kane’s lips. He was the Rat, and the
Rat would be here, or anywhere else at ten o’clock—if she said so. There
was no comment to make. The Rat had no choice.
“All right!” he said gruffly, and moved past her to the door, and out to
the hall; and a moment later, reaching the street, he swung into a
hurried stride, heading back for the Rat’s den.