It was quite dark here in Dayler’s library, yet he had sat so long in
this chair that his eyes seemed to have accommodated themselves to the
darkness, and it seemed as though he could distinguish every object in
the room. Surely, interminably as the minutes dragged themselves out,
the quarter-hour that had stood between ten o’clock and the time he had
sent the Cadger and Gannet away was up now! His flashlight winked
through the blackness, played on the dial of his watch, and the
blackness fell again. It still lacked five minutes of the hour.
Strange how his mind worked! There was no speculation as to precisely
why she had demanded his presence here, there was only intolerant, angry
impatience because she had done so. If it had not been for her, he could
have been making vital use of every one of these minutes! There was
nothing else to have hindered him! It had been almost childishly easy to
pull the wool over Gannet’s and the Cadger’s eyes. He had let the Cadger
and Gannet take all the initiative—apparently. The two men had forced
the basement door, and then, going upstairs, had opened the front door
for him, which he, strolling down the street a few minutes later, had
entered as casually as he had already done before on two occasions that
night. After that, the three of them, clustered around the mantel, the
Cadger manipulating the dial of the safe while Gannet held the
flashlight, had made the discovery in _common_ that the safe had been
already looted. He had joined in the dismay, chagrin and fury of his
companions; he had joined in the frantic search of desks and drawers,
which he had inaugurated, and which he had permitted to endure for a
full half hour. At the expiration of that time he had coded a terse
cipher report, and had handed it to the Cadger and Gannet for delivery.
They were to leave the house, himself last, a few minutes apart in order
to avoid arousing any attention; and the Cadger and Gannet, obediently
and unsuspiciously, had gone. And he had remained!
It had been very simple. And there remained no trace of the search that
had been made. His eyes now, so strangely accustomed to the darkness,
reassured him on that score. He had warned the men not to leave any
traces behind them!
He stirred uneasily in his chair. All this had been essential,
necessary, vital, in order to preserve his rôle of the Rat from
suspicion, and himself from subsequent and quick disaster at the hands
of the underworld; but the minutes that were slipping away from him now,
as he sat here impotent, were priceless. Red Vallon and the Pippin at
any moment might run the Man with the Crutch to earth, and his hands
were tied. He had no concern with the effect that the loss of the
envelope might have had on this Dayler; he was utterly indifferent to
either the contents of that envelope, or Dayler’s connection with it. It
seemed to plumb the very depths of irony that she appeared to labor
under the impression she might somehow, in this way, arouse his better
nature and touch some softer human chord within him! He was concerned
more with the connection between that envelope and the Man with the
Crutch; and very much more with the contents of that handbag the Man
with the Crutch had carried away from Peters’ flat the night before; and
still more again with the Man with the Crutch himself! The man had
tricked him here tonight, slipped through his fingers this time, but——
The front door was being opened. Billy Kane stood up, shrugging his
shoulders. He was in a truculent mood now, impatient to be gone,
prompted even now to go, restrained only by the cooler counsel of common
sense. She had the whip-hand over him. A word from her, and he would be
in exactly the same case as if he had failed in the play he had just
made with the Cadger and Gannet. Voices reached him; hers, quiet and
controlled; a man’s, gruff, irritated, sharply antagonistic.
And then the door from the hall opened, and the lights in the library
went on. Billy Kane’s eyes, passing swiftly over the trim little figure
in black across the room, met and held those of a man who, startled now,
stepped hastily back, only to discover that his companion had quietly
and swiftly closed the door behind them.
The man’s lips were suddenly compressed and hard, though the color had
ebbed a little from his face.
“Please sit down over there at the table, Mr. Dayler,” she requested
softly.
“No!” exclaimed the man angrily. “I’ll do nothing of the kind! What’s
the meaning of this? You inveigled me back here by hinting at some kind
of story, and you run me, in my own house, into the presence of a thug!”
She shook her head.
“It is true that I asked this—gentleman”—she hesitated over the choice
of the word, while her eyes in a sort of mocking humor inventoried Billy
Kane’s none too reputable appearance and attire—“to come here; but it is
equally true that I have ‘some kind of a story’ that I think will
interest you. Bundy, you might try and _persuade_ Mr. Dayler to sit
down!”
A grim smile came to Billy Kane’s lips. He was a pawn too, like this
Dayler; a pawn to be moved about at will by this outrageously
courageous, imperturbable, and, yes, in spite of his own irritation,
adorable little personage. He turned his attention now to Dayler. The
other could have been no more than forty-five, yet his hair was not
merely prematurely gray, it was white, as a very old man’s is white; his
face, clean shaven, was kindly, though drawn now in tense lines about
the lips and forehead.
“Sit down!” Billy Kane ordered curtly. He was fingering his automatic,
playing up to the cue she had given him.
Dayler hesitated; and then abruptly stepped forward and flung himself
into a chair at the table, his back to the mantel.
“Well?” he challenged. “You got me out of my club on the pretext of
having something to say about a man named Keats whom I once knew; but
from the look of things it appears to be much more likely that, with my
own house affording you protection, I am to be coolly robbed of my
watch, money, and such other valuables as you may be able to lay your
hands on!”
The slim little figure had slipped gracefully into a chair, facing
Dayler on the opposite side of the table. She smiled curiously.
“But, at least, I will keep my promise first, and tell you about this
Keats,” she said. “Buck Keats, wasn’t it, Mr. Dayler? And, as your
servants may be back in another half hour or so, we won’t waste any time
in getting to the story. It goes back about twenty years. At that time
you were in the Yukon, and pretty well away from civilization, and you
had been prospecting all summer with your partner, a man quite a little
older than you were, a man named Laynton, Joe Laynton—Square Joe, they
called him in that country, and you ought to know why. He was a big
man—in his body and in his soul—a God’s nobleman, wasn’t he, Mr.
Dayler?”
Dayler was leaning forward, staring at her in a strange, puzzled way.
“How do you know all this?” he demanded sharply.
She shook her head again.
“I may not be quite accurate in the little details,” she went on. “You
will overlook that. You and Laynton delayed your return to Dawson too
long that fall. You were caught in bad weather. Your provisions ran low.
Laynton met with a nasty accident with an axe. In reaching up above his
head to cut some branches for fuel, the axe in some way glanced off and
inflicted a very serious and a very ugly wound in his shoulder and
chest. Things went from bad to worse. For days Laynton could do nothing
but lie in his blood-soaked bunk. Provisions ran still lower. The winter
was settling down hard. You had already delayed too long, and now
Laynton couldn’t go. And yet you woke up one morning to find his bunk
empty.”
She paused. Billy Kane’s eyes, as he stood beside the table, passed from
one to the other. Her small gloved hand, resting on the arm of her
chair, had closed tightly; and into Dayler’s face, grown haggard now,
had come the look of a dumb beast in hurt.
“On a sheet of paper on the table”—her voice was lower now—“Laynton had
left a message for you, the kind a brave man would leave, explaining it
all, and bidding you take the one chance you had and go without him. And
piled on the table beside the sheet of paper was his money, quite a few
hundred dollars. You went to the door of the shack, and you followed the
tracks in the snow. And you found him, and you found his revolver beside
him. You were already weak and half delirious yourself for lack of food,
and I think this crazed you and unhinged your mind. You buried him in
the snow, and picked up the revolver and put it in your pocket. You took
the paper and the money and what food there was, and you ran, like the
madman you then were, away from the shack. I do not know how long you
wandered, nor how you existed, nor the number of miles you put between
yourself and the man who had given his life for you; but eventually you
were found by a trapper, and the trapper’s name was Keats, Buck Keats, a
man with a very unsavory record. You spent some time with Keats. You
recovered your physical health, but your mind remained affected. What
had taken place was temporarily a blank to you. Keats robbed you of
Laynton’s money and most of your own, and he stole that paper which
later on was to mean so much to you. He preferred, if anything were ever
known, that you, and not he, should be credited with having stolen
Laynton’s money, and he further helped out that suggestion by getting
you, after some months, out of the country, by having you, in a word,
disappear. I imagine you were like a child in his hands. I am sure you
do not even know how you got there, but the spring found you, quite
normal in all respects save a broken memory, working at anything you
could get to do in Mexico, and living there under the name of Dayler.
Your proper name is Forbes, John Forbes, isn’t it?”
Dayler’s head was forward on the table, and buried in his hands. And
Billy Kane, meeting her glance, read through a sudden mist in the brown
eyes, a bitter condemnation of himself that he did not quite fully
understand. He was not the Rat, was he? He was only playing the Rat in a
fight for his life, and to win back a name of his own! How should he
understand!
“I am taking too long,” she said hurriedly. “Your awakening came then.
You read in a paper of the discovery of a brutal and revolting crime in
the Yukon—the murder of Joe Laynton. The snow had melted, and a trooper
of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police had found the body. If ever there
was a _prima facie_ case of murder it was there: The axe wound,
presupposing a quarrel, the blood-soaked bunk, the final wound from a
revolver shot, the absence of any weapon left in the possession of the
dead man, the fact that he had apparently been stripped of his money,
and, most damning of all, that _you_ had disappeared. It all came back
to you in a flash then; and, like the last straw, adding to this array
of evidence already against you, you realized that you were now living
under an _assumed_ name. The letter, written and signed by Laynton, that
would have saved you, was gone. You naturally did not know that it had
been stolen from you; you believed that you had lost it. It would take a
very brave man, and a man that was very sure of himself indeed, to judge
you for what you did then. Without that paper, you, an innocent man,
were already as good as hanged if you gave yourself up. You continued to
live on as Dayler. Twenty years went by. You prospered. You lived in all
quarters of the globe. No breath of suspicion ever associated John
Dayler with John Forbes. But you knew, because you knew the record of
the Royal Northwest Mounted, that the Men Who Never Sleep had not
forgotten the case, nor given over the search—and that they never would.
But at last, with the long lapse of years, you felt yourself secure; and
finally, a few years ago, you came here and settled in New York.”
Dayler’s head came up. He passed his hand across his eyes.
“How do you know all these things?” he asked again.
“Does it matter?” she answered. “They are true, aren’t they?”
“Yes, they are true.” His voice was scarcely audible.
“It was Keats who found you, not the Royal Northwest Mounted,” she
continued. “Keats had long ago left the Yukon, and had settled in
Chicago—a drunkard. He was an old man now, and down and out, living from
hand to mouth. I do not know how he found you; I only know that after
all these years he decided to make restitution, though counting no doubt
on you giving him some money in return for the letter. However, be that
as it may, two days ago a man brought you a sealed envelope, which he
said a man named Keats, who had just died in Chicago, had confessed, as
he was dying, to have stolen from you, and that Keats, as a last
request, had asked that it be given back to you. You opened the
envelope, and found that it contained Laynton’s letter. With this in
your possession at last you were absolutely secure, even in the very
improbable event of anything ever being done by the police. Why then,
after twenty years, should you voluntarily open the case and disrupt the
associations you had formed, and your life as you had molded it in all
that time? In any event, you would consider long and carefully before
taking so vital and momentous a step. I do not know what your final
decision was, or even if you have come to one yet; but, pending such a
decision, you—” She motioned suddenly across the table. “But first, will
you please open the table drawer in front of you, Mr. Dayler.”
He obeyed her, a sort of slow wonder in his movements. The drawer, open,
disclosed, among other supplies of stationery, a pile of long, manila
envelopes.
She motioned again—this time to the envelopes.
“You sealed the letter up again, in one of those envelopes and put it
away. And that brings us to to-night. I would like to have you show that
letter to”—she indicated Billy Kane with a curt nod of her head—“this
man here.”
For an instant Dayler did not move, then he stiffened back in his chair,
his eyes narrowed.
“I begin to see!” His jaws snapped hard together. “So that’s what you
are after! You propose to steal that paper from me, and then blackmail
me with it afterwards. It is the letter that you want!”
“And perhaps you will get it for us?” she suggested softly.
There was a grim sort of finality in Dayler’s short, unpleasant laugh.
“_No!_” he said.
“Well then”—she still spoke softly—“suppose I were to tell you that the
Men Who Never Sleep have been advised that Dayler and John Forbes are
one, and that they are travelling down from the Canadian West now, and
that to-morrow you will be arrested—_and that the letter is already
gone._”
“Gone!” It came in a startled cry. Dayler half rose from his chair, but
dropped back again quite coolly, a sarcastic smile suddenly on his lips.
“Clever!” he said ironically. “Quite a pretty little ruse to get me to
indicate the whereabouts of that paper! Perhaps you will try something
else now!”
“Bundy”—she turned calmly to Billy Kane—“open the door of that little
cupboard on the left of the mantel.”
Billy Kane stepped across the room in a sort of mechanical obedience,
and opened the leaded glass door—just as Dayler, his self-assurance
shaken now, jumped from his chair, and rushed to the mantel.
“Perhaps”—her voice came calmly again from the table—“Mr. Dayler prefers
to look for himself, after all, Bundy!”
The man seemed to be fighting desperately for a grip upon himself, and
again his jaws snapped hard together.
“No!” he cried. “It’s another trick to get the combination of that safe,
to get me to open it! Do you think I’m a fool to let that paper go now,
even at the cost of my life, after you have so kindly warned me that I
am to be arrested to-morrow? You would have done better not to have
talked quite so much!”
“Open the safe, Bundy!” she instructed evenly. “Watch him, Mr. Dayler,
and satisfy yourself.”
The dial whirled deftly, swiftly, under Billy Kane’s fingers. The steel
door swung open.
“_Gone!_ My God, it is gone!” Dayler’s cry now was broken, almost
inarticulate. His head half buried in the cupboard, he was staring into
the empty safe. And then he reeled back to the table, and stood there
clawing at its edge, gray to the lips, looking from one to the other.
“I have not quite finished my story,” she said quietly. “It is quite
true that Keats is dead; but he did not die two or three days ago, he
has been dead well over a month. Nor did he die from natural causes. He
was murdered. There is a gigantic Crime Ring in this country, whose
headquarters are here in New York, that is as implacable and heinous as
it is far-spread and powerful. Keats, far under the influence of liquor
in a low dive one night and in maudlin self-admiration at the idea of
making restitution to you, became drunkenly confidential, and his
‘confidant,’ as it happened, was an old broken-down yegg of about his
own age, too old for active work at his sordid trade, a pensioner, a
hanger-on, as it were, of this Crime Ring, who made himself as valuable
as he could in any way that he could. He reported the story. Keats was
promptly murdered—not so much for the sake of the paper, for that could
easily have been taken from him without resorting to murder, but that
there should be no Keats, with his change of heart, ready to take the
witness stand in your behalf, and therefore render the paper of no value
to them at all. The Crime Ring did not, however, act with the same haste
as far as you were concerned. That is not their way! They watched you,
they became thoroughly conversant, intimately acquainted with you, and
your house, and your mode of living. It was necessary that they should
do so before the next move could be decided upon. It was essential that
you should know that the document was still in existence, and it was
equally essential that you should know Keats was dead and would
therefore never be able to help you with his testimony. The actual
delivery of the document into your hands was the really clever and
finished play to make, for it not only accomplished those ends
naturally, simply, and without possibility of alarming you, but your
temporary possession of the letter would also psychologically enhance
its value in your eyes and make the shock of its subsequent loss all the
greater—and you all the more _generous_! But unless they could be sure
of recovering it—if for instance you had a safe-deposit vault where you
would likely place it—that plan would not do at all, and some other must
be devised. They satisfied themselves on that score, however; and the
discovery of that wall safe, and, incidentally, its combination, made it
as certain as anything is humanly certain that they would know where to
find the letter again when they wanted it. And, finally, there was the
police, the men of the Royal Northwest Mounted, to be put upon your
trail. It was only when you stood facing arrest for murder, and only
when that paper was all that stood between you and the hangman’s noose,
that it was worth—well, perhaps you will say what it is worth? That is
the situation to-night, Mr. Dayler.”
The man was rocking on his feet, still clawing at the edge of the table
for support. He seemed to have lost all self-control.
“Blackmail!” he said, through dry, twitching lips.
“And without any come-back!” She shrugged her shoulders. “You are rated
at a quarter of a million. What will you give for that paper?”
Dayler did not answer at once. He reached out behind him, felt for the
arm of his chair, and sat down heavily. He spoke at last, brushing his
hand nervously across his forehead.
“I—I’ll give—ten thousand dollars,” he said hoarsely.
“You do not place a very complimentary value on your life,” she said
evenly.
“Twenty.” His hand still nervously brushed at his forehead.
“Twenty-five.”
Her laugh rippled through the room. It was low and coolly disdainful,
but it seemed to Billy Kane, standing by the mantel, tight-lipped,
watching the scene, that it held, too, a queer, underlying, tremulous
note.
Dayler wet his lips.
“Thirty-five.”
“That paper is the only thing that will save you,” she explained
monotonously. “Is money any good to you—unless you live?”
It was Dayler who laughed now, but it was hysterically. His hands would
not remain still. He had let his head alone now, and, instead, kept
laying his hands on the table in front of him, by turns opening and
clenching them, and they left damp prints on the top of the table.
“Fifty—I—I’ll make it fifty thousand dollars,” he whispered.
She shook her head.
“My God!” It was a helpless cry. Dayler stretched out his arms
imploringly. “You don’t understand! It’s not easy for me to get even
that amount. I’m not worth what you think I am. I—I’ve gone the limit.”
Her voice was still monotonous.
“Are you _sure_?” she asked.
“Give me—give me time, and—and I might make it a little more.” There was
no doubt of the agonized sincerity in the man’s voice. “Perhaps—sixty.”
“No!” she said. She was on her feet now, her voice breaking a little. “I
want more than that—what it will perhaps be harder for you to give than
sixty thousand dollars. I want your forgiveness for what I have just
made you suffer—for this scene here. I had reasons, reasons that I
believed justified me.” She glanced at Billy Kane. “I do not think you
would understand, and I am afraid you would not see the justification in
them even if I tried to explain, and so”—she had drawn the manila
envelope from the bodice of her dress, and was holding it out to him—“I
can only ask you to forgive me.”
He took the envelope wonderingly, rising slowly to his feet. He was like
a man dazed. Stupefaction, incredulity, a mighty relief, mingled their
expressions in his face. He turned the envelope over and over; and then,
opening it, extracted a folded piece of paper from within. And then for
the second time his laugh rang through the room, but now it was a laugh
like the laugh of a man that was insane, high-pitched, sustained.
“Go on!” he cried wildly. “Go on with your hellish tricks! What’s next?”
Billy Kane had involuntarily stepped closer to the table. He drew in his
breath sharply now, in an amazed, startled way. Dayler was holding a
_blank_ piece of paper in his hands!
And she, too, was leaning tensely forward. He glanced at her. She turned
her head toward him; and out of a face that was as white as death, her
dark eyes burned full of fury and bitter condemnation, as they fixed
upon him.
“I see it now!” Her lips were quivering with passion. She steadied her
voice with an obvious effort. “I gave you credit for too much! I caught
you at your work just a second too late. I thought you were taking an
envelope out of the safe, whereas you were attempting to put one _in_!
The one you took out was already in your pocket. You were checkmating
your miserable accomplices unquestionably—but it was for your own ends!
You were playing the traitor to them and to me at the same time. You
meant, with your cold-blooded cunning, to use that paper against Mr.
Dayler for your own private gain. You lied to me! It wasn’t an empty
safe to which you meant to introduce the Cadger and Gannet; there was a
little more finesse, it clouded the issue a little more to put a dummy
envelope there. And it was so easy! Just one of those envelopes taken
from the drawer there, and a piece of paper slipped inside!” She paused
an instant, surveying him with merciless eyes. “I hardly suppose that
you would be fool enough not to have already put it in a safer place
than your pocket, but if you still have it there—_hand it over!_”
Billy Kane did not move. Somehow he was not paying undivided attention
to her. It was the Man with the Crutch who seemed to be standing there
in her place, grinning at him—only he could not see the man’s face. And
then, with a mental jerk, he pulled himself together. He could not tell
her that he had almost caught someone else in the act of stealing the
paper, but that the “some one else” had got away. It would sound
ridiculous! She would laugh in his face! He could not tell her that,
like a thunderbolt falling upon him, there had just come the realization
that the Man with the Crutch had stolen the paper after all. He could
not explain the Man with the Crutch, Peters’ murder, a hundred other
things, so that she would believe him, without telling her that he was
Billy Kane. And he could not tell her that he was Billy Kane! The old,
hard, ironical, mirthless smile came to his lips. He was—the Rat!
“Maybe you’d like to search me!” he snarled insolently.
She turned to Dayler. The man had sunk into his chair again and was
smiling now, but in a horribly apathetic sort of way.
“Mr. Dayler,” she said quietly, “it does not matter in the least if he
has got rid of it for the moment. I promise you that paper will be in
your possession again by to-morrow morning.” She swung on Billy Kane,
and pointed to the door. “I think you heard what I said, Bundy”—her
voice was ominously low now, strained with menace—“I will give you until
to-morrow morning to produce that paper. The alternative is the electric
chair.”
She was still pointing to the door.
He shrugged his shoulders. What was the use! The net was closing tighter
about him, tighter than ever before, and the strands now were like some
devil’s tentacles that would not let go. He swung on his heel abruptly,
and without a word left the room.