Billy Kane went on to the intersecting street at the other end of the
alleyway, removed his mask, and stepped out on the sidewalk. He looked
at his watch under a street lamp, and smiled whimsically in surprise. It
was still only half-past eight. All told, he could not have been in Wong
Yen’s more than fifteen minutes, hardly that, in fact, and it seemed as
though he had been there half the night!
Well, it was Barloff’s now! Barloff’s was a little farther uptown, a
little deeper over in the East Side. Billy Kane’s smile, from whimsical,
became tinged a little with weariness, became a little wan, as he walked
along. He was the victim of a plot himself, that was aimed at his life,
that sought to throw the guilt of a crime upon his shoulders, just as
the Wop was. And circumstances not only permitted, but seemed to force
him constantly into these byways to save others, while he himself stood
condemned in the eyes of the public as a murderer and a thief; and there
was bitter irony in the thought that he could not clear his own name,
that he seemed powerless to help himself, while the mantle of one of the
underworld’s archcriminals, which temporarily afforded him sanctuary
from the police, supplied him with almost unlimited information and the
means of helping others!
His brows knitted suddenly into a puzzled frown. Was that altogether
true?
There seemed to be a most strange coincidence in these excursions,
forced or voluntary, of his into the byways of criminal things, a
coincidence that always seemed in some way to link up his own plight
with these other criminal schemes in which he became involved. There was
the night that Peters had been murdered, for instance, which had led him
to the knowledge that the Man With The Crutch was at least a co-murderer
of David Ellsworth. And then the attempt at blackmail of two nights ago
had again disclosed the hand of the Man With The Crutch, and, more
significant still, had enabled him, Billy Kane, to recover the cash
stolen from the library vault on the night of the Ellsworth murder. Who
was this Man With The Crutch—this man with a crutch whose shaft was
stained to resemble grained wood and so disguise the murderous iron of
which it actually consisted, and which, he was sure now, was the weapon
that had brought both David Ellsworth and Peters to their deaths?
Billy Kane shook his head. It was a curious chain of coincidence, but it
could be only coincidence. And there was a limit to that. To-night, for
instance, it would put a pretty severe strain upon the imagination to
conceive of any connection between the Wop and the Man With The Crutch!
And yet——
He shrugged his shoulders. He would have said the same thing two nights
ago, wouldn’t he? It was very strange! It was all strange! He seemed to
be existing in a sphere of unreality. There was the Man With The Crutch,
whom neither police nor underworld could find since that raid on the
man’s room; there was the constant, ominous swirl and eddy of hidden and
unseen things on every hand; there was the Rat—and there was the Woman
in Black!
His face softened suddenly. He had not seen _her_ since yesterday
morning when she had entered the Rat’s den through the secret door, and
he had returned to her Dayler’s letter. She had not been in a pleasant
mood at what she believed had been his trickery; and, failing to have
restored that letter to her, she would have turned him, whom she, like
every one else, believed to be the Rat, incontinently over to the
police. What was the hold she had upon the Rat? Where was she to-night?
How was it that her hand had not already showed in this attempt upon the
Wop, since she seemed to have always in her possession the details of
the Rat’s schemes?
He shrugged his shoulders again. What was the use! To-night, at least,
she could harbor no delusion that he was acting under any spur of hers!
No, that wasn’t it—that wasn’t what was troubling him. What troubled him
was that she should think him what he was, or, rather, all that he was
not! Strange that her opinion of him, even when his back was against the
wall and his life was literally in jeopardy at every turn, should make
any difference! Strange that the loathing and contempt in those brown
eyes, that were fearless and deep and steady, should haunt him, and add
to his own abhorrence of the rôle he played because he must let her
think him the Rat! Well, what did it matter? What was she to him? What
was she becoming to him? He laughed a little uncertainly. There was no
need to answer that question, was there—even if he could? What did
anything matter unless he could clear his own name, which was now mired
deeper than the Rat’s!
He turned a corner, walked on the length of a block, and on the next
corner, drawing back into a doorway out of the radius of the street
lamp, paused a moment to get his bearings. He smiled a little grimly. If
the affair ever came to her knowledge, would she give the Rat credit
this time for a spontaneous change of heart in saving the Wop’s life,
and saving Ivan Barloff’s cash? He scowled suddenly. The latter
proposition did not altogether please him. Barloff was not far removed
in guilt from those who proposed to victimize Barloff! There would be a
certain ironical justice in robbing from Barloff the cash that Barloff
had all too patiently, a great portion of it at least, robbed from
others! But Red Vallon and his pack were not to get it, were they? It
was the lesser evil to warn Barloff, that was all. In the main,
therefore, the night’s work was over, since the Wop was safe, for five
minutes’ conversation with Barloff would end the whole affair now, so
far as he, Billy Kane, was concerned.
He glanced down the street. Just a little ahead, on the opposite side,
huddled in between two six-story tenements, was Barloff’s squat, dingy,
little house. There was a faint glow of light, as though it came from
somewhere far in the interior, showing through the single front window
on the ground floor. Billy Kane considered this thoughtfully for a few
seconds. Barloff was at home evidently, but the probability was that
one, at least, of Red Vallon’s men was on watch in front of the house.
In fact, it wasn’t probability; it was a certainty. Barloff, according
to Red Vallon, was to receive a fake telephone message that would lure
him out of the house, and someone undoubtedly would be waiting to report
the old Russian’s exit. It therefore, to say the least of it, would
be—Billy Kane’s smile was mirthless—unwise for the Rat to walk up to
Barloff’s front door under the existing conditions!
He might have telephoned. He shook his head, as he crossed the road,
and, keeping in the shadows, stepped into the cross street. He preferred
to interview Barloff via Barloff’s back yard. He was still obsessed with
the desire to take personal toll from all concerned in the miserable
night’s work, but he realized that impulse and sane action did not
always go hand in glove. He could not afford to play fast and loose with
this rôle of the Rat, or take any unnecessary risks, but he could
satisfy himself to the extent, at least, of a personal interview with
Barloff, who was perhaps after all the most despicable of the lot, and
put into the puny, shrivelled soul of the man a fear that would make for
some degree of future righteousness!
A lane, as he had expected, ran in the rear of the tenements and
Barloff’s house. Billy Kane slipped into this, located Barloff’s house,
low-lying against the sky line between the taller buildings, swung
himself over the fence, dropped noiselessly to the ground, and for a
moment stood there motionless.
The yard was very small, and, but a few feet in front of him, a light
from the open and uncurtained window of Barloff’s rear room streamed out
across the intervening space. Voices reached him, but he could not
distinguish the words; neither, from where he stood, could he see anyone
in the room, though the window was quite low, little more than breast
high from the ground.
And then a form inside the room passed across the window space, a
woman’s form; and again a voice reached him, a woman’s voice, and Billy
Kane drew in his breath sharply. He still could not distinguish the
words, but he had recognized the voice.
Once again he had jumped too hastily to conclusions in so far as she was
concerned—it was the Woman in Black. There was no question as to why she
was there; it was obvious that she had simply forestalled him in warning
the old Russian; but—a perplexed frown furrowed Billy Kane’s
forehead—her hand would have showed a little late in the game to have
saved the Wop!
He stole forward, keeping in the shadows of the side fence, reached the
rear wall of the house, edged across to the side of the window where he
could both see and hear, and crouched there. His eyes swept the interior
in a swift, comprehensive survey. It was a sordid, ill-furnished,
bare-floored room, and very dirty. A seedy old morris chair in the
center of the room supplied the only suggestion of comfort or luxury,
and that an incongruous one, that the place possessed. Apart from that,
there was a huge and aged safe, a relic of the days when such things
were locked with keys, which was backed up against one wall; and near an
open door, which apparently led into the front room, there was a
battered desk with an equally battered swivel chair—and that was all,
unless the telephone that stood upon the desk might be included in the
furnishings. There was, however, another door, also open, which faced
the safe, and which apparently gave on a passageway that in turn opened
on the back yard. Billy Kane glanced around him. Yes, there was a rear
door here, just a little to his right.
His eyes reverted to the interior of the room. _She_ was still pacing up
and down its length from the desk to the window and back again. Perhaps
it was the effect of the green-shaded incandescent bulb that dangled
over the desk, but, as she turned facing the window, he saw that her
face, drawn in sharp, pinched lines, was very white, and that in the
dark brown eyes, all softness gone from them now, there was a hard and
bitter light. And at the desk, the old Russian, a gray-bearded and
threadbare figure in dirty and grease-spotted clothes, huddled deep down
in his chair, and wrung his hands together, and with little, black,
shifty eyes, that peered over the rims of steel-bowed spectacles,
followed her about in a fascinated sort of way, and the while he kept
circling his lips with his tongue.
“The Wop! The Wop!” he shrilled out suddenly, and seemed to cower lower
in his chair. “Yes, yes, I am afraid! My God, I am afraid! He is strong.
He would have no pity on an old man. He has sworn it. I know! I have
been afraid of this day. Why did they let him out? They know, too! And I
was only honest—everybody knows that. He was a thief. What else could an
honest man do except what I did? He—he will kill me, and——”
“The Wop is dead.” Her voice was low, bitter, hard, and yet, too, it
seemed to hold impatience and irritation directed against the Russian.
“I have told you that. It is not the Wop you have to fear now. The Wop
is dead.”
“But you are not sure, not positive, not absolutely positive of it!”
Barloff was wringing his hands the harder; and his tones, rather than
being assertive, seemed to be pleading for a denial.
“I am positive enough of it,” she answered evenly, “to see that the one
who is responsible pays for it to-night! It is my fault”—her voice
caught a little, but hardened instantly—“I trusted where I was a fool to
trust, and I have paid for it with another’s life. But that has nothing
to do with you. You know now that the telephone message you received a
little while ago was simply to lure you out of the house at half past
nine in order that they might have a clear field in which, without
contradiction, to make it appear that the robbery they are planning was
the Wop’s work. It is scarcely nine o’clock yet. You have plenty of time
in which to act. You can appeal to the police, or——”
Billy Kane was no longer paying any attention to her words. Tense,
strained, he stood there. He seemed to be trying to lash his brain into
virility, into activity. He seemed to be groping out in an ineffectual
mental way for some means to avert a disaster that he realized was
closing down upon him. She believed the Wop was dead. She naturally held
the Rat responsible—and he was the Rat, so far as she was concerned. She
had warned him, without mincing words, that if any crime in which the
Rat was involved was carried through to its fulfilment she would hold
him responsible and hand him over to the police. She had reason to
believe that he had already tried to double cross her once; she now
believed that to-night he had tried to do it again. She would leave
here, and go straight to the police. The police, then, would not only be
looking for Billy Kane, they would be looking for the Rat—and they would
get Billy Kane! And that would be the end of it all!
The end of it—when he already knew who the murderer of David Ellsworth
was; when, apart from the collection of rubies, he had already recovered
the proceeds of the Ellsworth vault robbery; when, if he could only
cling for a few days more to this rôle he played, he might hope to clear
his own name, to stand foursquare with the world again, and to bring to
justice those who had taken old David Ellsworth’s life. Somehow, in some
way, he must prevent her from carrying out what was now her obvious
intention of unmasking the Rat. But he dared not show himself in front
of the house to intercept her when she went out—he dared not show
himself as the Rat out there. To bring the underworld down upon him was
only to invite a swifter destruction from another source.
He gnawed in perplexity at his lips, staring into the room. She kept
pacing up and down. Barloff had risen from his seat, and in a curious,
cringing way, standing now by the rickety old safe, was fondling it and
patting it with his hands.
“Yes, yes!” Barloff was crooning. “I thank you—I thank you! I do not
know who you are, but I thank you! I have not much, very little, very,
very little, but I am an old man, and what would become of me if I lost
my little? The police, yes, the police——”
The old Russian, his back now to the window, was still talking, more to
himself than to her. She came close to the window this time and Billy
Kane suddenly showed himself. She was very clever, very self-centered,
very sure of herself. If she was startled, she gave no sign of it. She
came still closer until she leaned for a moment against the sill.
“Out here—the lane—when you leave!” he whispered quickly.
She nodded her head, but her lips had tightened in a forbidding little
smile as she turned away again,
Billy Kane drew back from the window. There was a sense of relief upon
him; but also a vague, disquieting, and very much stronger sense of
something else that he could not quite define; only that between them
there always seemed to stand that barrier of a forbidding smile, and
that cool, contemptuous light in the brown eyes that very often changed
from contempt to loathing and abhorrence. He shrugged his shoulders
suddenly. He was a fool—that was all!
Her voice drifted out to him, dying away as he neared the fence:
“I am going now, Mr. Barloff, and I should advise you not to waste any
time in taking whatever precautions you intend to take. You had better
communicate at once with the police, and——”
Billy Kane swung himself over the fence, and stood there waiting in the
lane. A minute, two, three passed, and then he caught the sound of a
light step, and she stood before him in the darkness.
“Well?” she said curtly. “I am here, Bundy. What do you want?”
He was the Rat, alias Bundy Morgan, in her eyes, and it was the Rat who
spoke.
“I heard you in there,” he said gruffly. “You’re going to beat it for
the police, and wise them up about me. Well, you want to can that stunt,
because I’ve got a little explanation to make. See?”
“You do not need to make any explanation,” she answered evenly. “My
stupidity is at an end! That enigmatic little memo of yours was a better
safeguard in itself than the hiding place in which you had secreted it,
for I did not understand it until I saw a few lines in the paper this
evening giving a short résumé of the Wop’s somewhat unedifying career,
and stating that he had been released from prison. I was too late to
save the Wop himself, but was not too late to prevent you from climbing
in through that window, and carrying out the rest of your abominable
scheme.”
“I went there to warn Barloff myself,” said Billy Kane.
She laughed icily.
“Do you expect me to believe that, after you have murdered a man so that
you could put the onus of another crime upon him! This is the end
to-night! I was mad to trust you at all. I was madder still to give you
another chance, when I caught you playing a double game both with your
own criminal associates and with me when you stole that letter from
Dayler two nights ago!” She came a little closer to him. Both hands were
tightly clenched. Her lips quivered a little; her voice choked. “I did
not know what it was like to feel guilty of murder, to feel that one had
taken another’s life. I know now. My folly in giving you a moment’s
freedom has made me as guilty as you. But the end has come. Do you
understand? You might put me out of the road, too, here in this lane,
but that would not change the result any. You know that. You know in
that case that the police would be after you anyway—that I have taken
care of that. On the other hand, you may run for it now, and you may
make it a question of hours, or a question of days, but as soon as the
police lay hands on you your career is finished.”
There was a strange stirring within Billy Kane’s soul. She was very
close to him, so close that he could see the pinched, haggard look in
her face, and see the lips quiver again, and see the clenched hands rise
to her eyes as though to shut out the abhorrent sight of him from her,
and to shut out perhaps, too, the pictured sight of a man murdered, and
for whose life she not illogically held herself accountable.
His hands gripped hard—hard as the mental grip in which he held himself.
A sudden yearning, an almost uncontrollable impulse was upon him to
reach out and sweep this lithe, fearless little figure that had become
so mysteriously a part of his life, a greater part than he had ever
realized before, into his arms. She would struggle like a wild cat, and
fight with every ounce of strength, yes, and hatred, that was in her,
but he could hold her because he was the stronger, and tell her that he
was not the Rat, and—— He swallowed hard. And then what? Tell her that
he was Billy Kane? A wan smile came to his lips. She would perhaps
prefer the Rat! The Rat, publicly at least, was known as the less
infamous of the two! He laughed a little harshly.
“Forget it!” he said roughly. “I’ve played straight with you, and before
you go spilling any beans to the police you’d better get onto yourself.
You don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“I know that the Wop was murdered to-night in Wong Yen’s by you, or your
orders,” she said passionately. “I know that the Wop is dead—that is
enough!”
“Nix!” said Billy Kane, alias Bundy Morgan, alias the Rat. “The Wop
isn’t dead, and he isn’t in Wong Yen’s either. I pulled him out of
there.”
She stared at him, coming still closer in the darkness until he could
feel her breath upon his face. It was a long minute before she spoke.
“I do not believe you!” she said in a dead voice.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“I did not expect you to!” The Rat’s tones were insolent now. “But you
can prove it, can’t you? The Wop’s safe. He’s at a minister’s house. The
minister’s name is Claflin. I don’t know the address, but you can easily
find it. It wouldn’t do me any good to lie to you, would it? You can’t
drag me to the police by force, and whether you squealed to them in the
next ten minutes, or half an hour later after finding out I was lying,
I’d be just as bad off, wouldn’t I?”
She drew back—but her eyes were still fixed steadily upon him.
“Yes,” she said.
“Well?” demanded Billy Kane.
“I can find this minister’s house in that half hour, I think,” she said
in a low voice. “And the Wop—if he is there.” Her voice hardened. “You
are quite right, Bundy, it will have done you no good to have lied. I
promise you that! If I do not find the Wop, the police will find—_you_!”
She was gone.