Billy Kane’s eyes were apparently blinking in the abrupt transition from
darkness to the glare of light; but with the knowledge that it might
literally mean the difference between life and death to him—and her—no
single detail of his surroundings was escaping him. The door ahead of
him, a heavy, cumbersome affair, opened inwards toward him, and was now
swung full back against the wall, but if the evidence of that iron loop
on the door jamb could be trusted, the door was equipped with a massive
bolt. Gypsy Joe was still to a large extent blocking the doorway, but he
could see that the huge, lighted space beyond was a sort of storage
warehouse, windowless, of course, or else he would have seen a light
from outside. And the switches, the electric-light switches—the one for
the bulb over his head in this passage here, and the one for the light
in that room ahead of him! They were vital too! He could not see any in
the position where he might naturally expect to find them—by the door
where Gypsy Joe stood. He glanced back over his shoulder. Yes, there was
one there at the side of the front door, a switch for the passage light
undoubtedly; but Gypsy Joe had certainly not used that one, so there
must be another then, as well, inside the storage room.
He had been perhaps the matter of a bare few seconds in traversing the
length of the passage, and now as he stepped across the threshold into
the warehouse itself, the Cherub and Clarkie Munn had joined Gypsy Joe,
and were staring at him with scowling, startled, uncertain faces—but
Billy Kane’s eyes were not on the three men. The blood seemed to leap
through his veins in a great surging tide, and upon him was the sense of
a mighty uplift. It was not too late! It was not too late! His brain
seemed to seize upon those words and reiterate them in a sing-song way.
A woman’s form lay upon the floor, and she was bound and gagged; but
dark eyes met his, and in the eyes was a softer light than he had ever
seen there before when they had been fixed on him. “For once,” they
seemed to say, “you have not failed. I told you to watch Gypsy Joe and
Clarkie Munn, and you are just in time.”
The Cherub laughed suddenly and a little noisily, as from unstrung
nerves.
“Say, youse gave us a jolt!” he said. “Wot’s de idea? I suppose youse
came along to make sure dat we earned yer money, eh, an’ dat dere
wouldn’t be no fluke about her bein’ bumped off fer keeps? Well, if
youse had been about a minute an’ a half later youse’d have missed de
trap-door scene, ’cause it’d have been all over.”
Billy Kane’s eyes had met the girl’s again. The soft light in them had
gone, and in its place had come a horror, and sudden accusation, and a
bitter misery; and her face, already deathly white as she lay there,
seemed now to tinge with gray.
Billy Kane shook his head in response to the Cherub, as he turned and
faced the three men. They were edging a little closer to him. He caught
a surreptitious nudge that passed between Gypsy Joe and Clarkie Munn. He
moved back a step—but it was a step that brought him nearer to the girl.
If he could hold them in a state of puzzled suspense with its consequent
indecision for a moment, that was all he asked. And he was counting on a
sort of frank audaciousness for that.
“Well?” prompted the Cherub, a sudden, curious silkiness in his tones.
“Did I call de turn?”
“Maybe he’s come down to pay us off,” suggested Gypsy Joe smoothly.
“Dere’s nothin’ slow about de Rat.”
“I’ll tell you,” said Billy Kane quietly. He took his knife from his
pocket, and coolly opened it; then nonchalantly, but with a swift, lithe
movement, stooped and cut the cords that bound the girl’s wrists. He
pressed the knife into her hand—she needed no further hint that she
could free her own ankles—and, as he straightened up again, his eyes
swept the wall by the door. Yes, they were there—two electric-light
switches. He faced the trio again.
“Well, wot do youse know about dat!” observed Clarkie Munn, with an
unpleasant grin.
“I’ll tell you, Clarkie,” Billy Kane lied calmly. “I’m leery that
somebody’s split, and I’m afraid the police know too much. Understand?
I’m not taking any chances, and the game’s off—that’s all.”
The Cherub’s bland, blue eyes seemed to shade a darker hue.
“Dat’s all right, den,” said the Cherub sweetly. “But wot about us?
Mabbe youse can call de game off if youse likes, ’cause it’s yer game,
but where does we come in? ’Tain’t our fault de job’s crimped—dat’s up
to youse. Does we get paid or not?”
“Dat’s de talk, Cherub!” applauded Clarkie Munn, an undisguised snarl in
his voice.
Billy Kane shrugged his shoulders.
“Who said you wouldn’t get paid?” he demanded roughly. “We’ll attend to
that when we get out of here. Do you want to hang around and get
pinched?”
“No,” said the Cherub, and smiled. “No, we don’t want to get pinched—an’
we ain’t worryin’ none about it either, not about gettin’ pinched down
here. It’s a cinch youse wouldn’t have risked comin’ here if de bulls
had been followin’ a yard behind. We knows youse too well fer dat,
Bundy! Get me? An’ youse ain’t comin’ across when youse gets out of
here, youse are comin’ across right now! An’ youse”—he whirled suddenly
on the girl, who had risen to her feet and was backing toward the
door—“youse stand where youse are! I ain’t sure we are through wid youse
yet, no matter wot Bundy says—see?” He jerked his head at his two
companions, though his eyes never for an instant left Billy Kane’s face.
“Wot about it, fellers? If she gets out of here she knows too much, an’
we got to fade away outer New York anyway, whether de bulls are on now
or not. An’ dat takes de coin—all de coin we can get. Well, de Rat
always carries a wad, but if we pinches it an’ lets de Rat loose
afterwards he’s got a bunch behind him dat’ll nose us out where de bulls
couldn’t, an’ we’ll get ours. Dat’s de size of it. Do we play fer table
stakes, or hedge de bets?”
It was coming now, as Billy Kane had known inevitably that it would
come. There was no answer needed from either Clarkie Munn or Gypsy Joe.
It was written in the ugly menace in their faces, and had been from the
moment they had recovered their startled surprise at his entry into the
place.
Billy Kane flung a quick glance around him. The girl was a little behind
him, close to those electric-light switches, her way clear to the front
door, save for the peril of that lighted passage down which she must
run. In front of him, just out of arm’s reach, the Cherub’s bland eyes
smiled into his with a sort of hideous serenity; while over the Cherub’s
shoulders, one on each side, showed the vicious faces of the other
two—and, under cover of the Cherub’s body, Clarkie Munn’s hand seemed to
be stealing in the direction of his hip pocket.
Billy Kane seemed suddenly to go to pieces and to lose his nerve. His
tongue circled his lips with nervous repetition. He put out his hands in
an imploring attitude, and stumbled a step forward toward the Cherub,
and caught a glint of light on a revolver barrel in Clarkie Munn’s hand,
as it came stealing now from the latter’s pocket.
“Wait—wait a minute, Cherub!” Billy Kane whispered thickly, and licked
at his lips again, and stumbled forward another step. “Wait!” he
whispered—and then, swift as the winking of an eye, Billy Kane flung his
body forward with all his weight upon the Cherub, hurling the Cherub
back upon Clarkie Munn, and whirling, whipped a lightning left full into
Gypsy Joe’s face on the other side. There was a flash, the deafening
roar of a report, as the Cherub reeled into Clarkie Munn’s revolver;
then a scream of agony, and the Cherub, grasping at his leg with both
hands, went to the floor.
“The switches there—beside you!” Billy Kane shouted at the girl. “Put
out the lights—both switches! Quick! Run for it!”
Gypsy Joe, recovering his balance, and with a bellow like a maddened
bull was charging forward; Clarkie Munn’s hand had swung upward
again—and then the place was in darkness. A second late, Clarkie Munn’s
revolver cut a vicious flame-tongue through the black, but Billy Kane
had flattened himself out on the floor, and was wriggling rapidly
backward toward the door and the now dark passageway.
There was a moan, then a shrill scream in the Cherub’s voice, and
coincidentally a torrent of blasphemy from Gypsy Joe, as the latter,
quite obviously, in his rush and in the blackness now, had stumbled none
too gently into the wounded man.
“Youse fool! Curse youse, youse fool!” shrieked the Cherub. “Ain’t youse
got a pocket torch? Ain’t either of youse got a torch? Flash a torch on
him, an’——”
Billy Kane was across the threshold now; and now, rising to his knees,
he groped out for the edge of the door, found it, and, as he slammed it
shut, it seemed to cut in two, as a knife might cut it, the sudden,
white, piercing ray of a flashlight that leaped out from the interior of
the warehouse. And then in another second he had shot the bolt home in
its grooves, and, in the darkness, leaning heavily for an instant
against the door to recover himself, he stared down the black passage
for the girl, and could see nothing.
There came an abortive rush against the door; snarls and oaths came
muffled from within. He moved a step forward along the passage. They
were a negligible quantity in there now. The door would hold, and when
they succeeded in getting out and making their way along the side of the
dock perhaps, they would be more concerned in getting to cover
themselves than anything else; and besides they would have a wounded man
to hamper their movements. It was she now, the Woman in Black, that
concerned him.
“Where are you?” he called quickly. “Where are you?”
A draft of air touched his face. The front door at the farther end of
the passage was being opened.
“I am here, Bundy.”
It was her voice, but there was something of cold, merciless forbidding
in it. He halted instinctively. He did not quite understand.
“Bundy, are you listening?” came the level tones again. “This is the
end, absolutely and finally the end to-night. You have saved my life,
but I owe you no thanks for that. You saved it, after hiring thugs to
take it, you thing of loathing, because you dared do nothing else, since
you say you believe the police got wind enough of this thing tonight to
scare you off. Very well, Bundy—but there is more, isn’t there, that the
police do not know? Well, they will know it, and certain secrets in that
den of yours, the moment I can reach them. I have warned you often
enough. I am through, Bundy, this is the end of the Rat to-night,
nothing shall stop that—but I am still a fool. I am still giving you
warning of what I mean to do now. I am still giving you a chance to save
yourself if you can; the rather slim chance that the police will not be
able to run the man who was known as the Rat to earth! And I am giving
you that chance because—well because, even in spite of yourself, I am
still alive.”
“No!” he cried. “You do not understand. Wait!” He was groping down the
black passage, as he heard the front door shut quickly, and heard a
footstep running, receding, outside. “Wait!” he cried again. “For God’s
sake, wait!”
There was no answer. He knew there would be none. He had heard her
running away out there, hadn’t he? He reached the door, and looked
out—and hung there hesitant—and called again—and there was no answer. He
listened. He could not hear her footsteps any more. There was no sound
from anywhere, not even from that warehouse door behind him. They
weren’t hammering on that any more.
And then Billy Kane laughed in a short, bitter, mirthless way, and
started, running at top speed, in the direction in which he had left his
purloined and dilapidated car. The end! The end of the Rat! He laughed
again in the same bitter mirth, as he ran. It was the end of more than
that! It was the end of hope—of her—of that love that had come to him
upon the thresholds of these strange doors of the night. It was the end
of Billy Kane! And whether as the Rat now, or as Billy Kane, the police
would be equally hard upon his trail. He stood in far worse case now
than on the night of David Ellsworth’s murder, for now the underworld,
that would be combed for the Rat, and where the Rat was too well known
to have it offer the slightest hope of escaping detection, was closed to
him as a refuge. He knew what she meant to do—to tell her story to the
police, to expose all the criminal acts and affiliations of the bona
fide Rat, and to lead them to the Rat’s den, and expose the secrets that
she had so often hinted were hidden there.
He clenched his hands as he ran. The end! No! Not yet! Not until they
had him, and they had not got him yet! He did not know which way to
turn; but while he still had his freedom there was still the hope of
running down the murderer of David Ellsworth—and there were the proceeds
of that robbery now, most of them, in the Rat’s den. That was what
seemed to stand out as immediately vital now—to get those things—that
money and those rubies. He had staked everything on the hope that some
day he could hand over to justice both the proceeds of that crime and
the murderer as well—hand them over _together_, as a complete
vindication of his own name—and even now, in this hour that seemed
blackest of all, he still dared to cling to that hope. He knew who the
murderer was, and he had already recovered a large share of what had
been stolen. He still hoped to find the murderer, and he still hoped to
find the remainder of those rubies, and so carry out his original plan.
His jaws locked. His mind was made up. He would go! And, yes, he had far
better than an even chance of getting there in time. She would take
longer to reach the police and lead them to the den than it would take
him to reach it—thanks to the car that, grim irony! he had stolen on her
account. Afterward his position would be desperate enough; but now,
without an instant’s loss of time, he had to gain the den and get away
again before they trapped him there.
He reached the car. The old night watchman had evidently retired inside
the building again, for there was no sign of the man. He experienced a
certain sense of relief at this, as he cranked the obsolete machine; and
then he was in the driver’s seat again, and the car was roaring along
the road. He drove fast, with mad haste, with reckless disregard for the
ill-lighted road. There could be no accident comparable in disaster to
his failure to put the miles behind him swiftly enough to insure him the
few minutes leeway he asked for in the den.
He bent over the wheel, tense, rigid, strained. The minutes sped away. A
glimmer of hope came to him for that “afterward.” He could use the car
again; get out of the city again before the chase got too hot. He could
certainly hide in that way during the night, and that would give him the
night in which to think. He had not time to think now—only that as he
drew in toward the centre of the city he must keep as much as possible
to the unfrequented streets, both because he must ignore such a thing as
speed laws, and because he was driving a stolen car.