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THE GRAY PHANTOM'S RETURN
by
HERMAN LANDON
Author of "The Gray Phantom"
A. L. Burt Company
Publishers New York
Published by arrangement with W. J. Watt & Company
Printed in U. S. A.
Copyright, 1922, by
W. J. Watt & Company
Printed in the United States of America
To Pal
THE GRAY PHANTOM'S RETURN
CHAPTER I--FROM DYING LIPS
Patrolman Joshua Pinto, walking his beat at two o'clock in the morning,
hummed a joyless tune as he turned off the Bowery and swung into East
Houston Street. It was a wet night, with a raw wind sweeping around the
street corners, and Pinto walked along with an air of dogged
persistence, as if trying to make the best of a disagreeable duty. His
heavy and somewhat florid features were expressionless. For all that his
face indicated, he might have been thinking that it was a fine night for
a murder, or wishing that he was in plain clothes instead of uniform, or
picturing himself in his cozy home playing with his baby, whose lusty
"da-da's" and "goo-goo's" he was pleased to interpret as wonderful
linguistic achievements.
Perhaps it was nothing but instinct that caused him to slow down his
pace as he passed a squatty and rather dilapidated building in the
middle of the block. So far as appearances went, it did not differ
greatly from its drab and unprepossessing neighbors, yet Pinto cast a
sharp glance at the ground-floor window, which bore a lettered sign
proclaiming that the premises were occupied by Sylvanus Gage, dealer in
pipes, tobacco, and cigars. As if the building had cast a spell of gloom
upon him, the patrolman ceased his humming, and his lips were set in a
tight line as he proceeded down the block.
Being an ambitious and hard-working officer, Pinto made it a practice to
cultivate the acquaintance of as many as possible of the people living
along his beat. He knew Sylvanus Gage, a thin, stoop-shouldered man with
a flowing beard, a black cap adorning his bald skull, and mild blue eyes
that had a habit of gazing lugubriously at the world through thick
lenses rimmed with tarnished gold. Despite his patriarchal appearance,
he was reputed to be using his tobacco business as a cloak for a
flourishing traffic in stolen goods. So deftly did the old man manage
his illicit enterprises that the police, though morally certain of their
facts, had never been able to produce any evidence against him. Little
was known of his housekeeper, a sour and sharp-tongued slattern of
uncertain age, but there were those who suspected that she was not
entirely innocent of complicity in her employer's clandestine
activities.
It may have been of this Pinto was thinking as he plodded along with the
measured gait of the seasoned patrolman. The soggy sidewalks glistened
in the light from the street-corner lamps, and here and there along the
pavement water was forming in little pools. Most of the windows were
dark and, save for an occasional shifty-eyed and furtively slinking
pedestrian, the streets were deserted. Pinto halted for a moment to look
at his watch, then quickened his steps, "pulled" the buff-colored box on
the corner, and trudged on again.
Once more he was humming a tune. Each of the scattered prowlers he met
was subjected to a critical scrutiny out of the corner of his eye. Now
and then he dodged into a dark doorway and tried a lock. From time to
time he glanced through the window of a store or shop. It was all a
matter of habit with Joshua Pinto. For seven years he had pursued the
same dull routine, varied only by an occasional transfer to another part
of the city, or by a change from night to day duty, or vice versa. He
had broken up a few nocturnal street brawls, now and then he had foiled
the designs of a second-story artisan, and on two or three occasions he
had caught a safe-blower red-handed, but nothing very exciting had ever
happened to him.
On this particular night, however, an acute observer might have noticed
an air of disquietude about Officer Pinto. There was the merest hint of
uneasiness in the way he twirled his nightstick as he walked along, in
the intensified alertness with which he inspected the occasional
passers-by, in the quick and somewhat nervous glances he cast up and
down the shabby streets. Likely as not the rain and the wind, together
with the gloom pervading the district, were responsible for his state of
mind, and possibly his physical discomfort was aggravated by a
premonition--though Pinto himself would have called it a "hunch"--that a
tragic event was soon to enliven the tedium of his existence.
Again his footsteps dragged as once more he strolled past the
establishment of Sylvanus Gage. The building was dark and still, like
most of the others in the block, yet something prompted Pinto to cast a
suspicious glance at the door and windows, as if he sensed an omen in
the shadows clinging to the wall.
He stopped abruptly as a door slammed and a shrill feminine voice called
his name. A woman, scantily dressed and with loosened hair fluttering in
the wind, was hurrying toward him with excited gestures.
"Officer!" She clutched his sleeve and pointed toward the tobacco shop.
"There--hurry!"
The patrolman's eyes followed her pointing finger. A second-story window
opened above their heads and a frowsy person, disturbed by the woman's
harsh voice, looked down into the street. Pinto regarded the speaker
with apparent unconcern, recognizing the housekeeper of Sylvanus Gage.
Another window opened across the street, and a second face looked down
on them.
Officer Pinto, schooled by previous experiences with overexcited
females, casually inquired what might be the matter.
"Matter!" retorted the woman. "Murder--that's what's the matter. Why
don't you get a move on?"
Pinto permitted himself to be led along. The driver of a milk wagon
halted his nag to watch the commotion. The woman, jabbering and
shivering, opened the door of the tobacco store, pushed the officer
inside and switched on the light above the counter.
"There!" She pointed at a door in the rear of the dingy shop. "He--Mr.
Gage--sleeps back there."
"Well, what of it?" An impatient look cloaked Pinto's real feelings.
"He's got to sleep some place, ain't he?"
The woman's eyes blazed. "You stand there handing out sass while he--he
may be dying back there." Trying to steady herself, she gathered up the
folds of the tattered robe she wore. "My room's right above his," she
explained. "A few moments ago I jumped out of bed, thinking I'd heard a
sound."
"A sound, eh? This town is chockfull of them things." Pinto leveled an
uneasy glance at the door in the rear. "What kind of sound was it you
thought you heard?"
"What kind of sound! You ain't paid for asking fool questions, Officer
Pinto. All day long I felt in my bones that something awful was going to
happen, and when that noise woke me up I was scared stiff. I grabbed a
few clothes and ran down here, but the door to Mr. Gage's room was
bolted on the inside. He always shoots the bolt before he goes to bed. I
knocked, but not a sound came from the inside. Then I shouted loud
enough to raise the dead, but----"
"Your boss is hard of hearing, ain't he?"
"A little. Say, why don't you do something?"
Pinto walked to the outer door, shooed away a knot of curious
spectators, then sauntered back to where the woman stood. There was a
supercilious grin on his lips, but deep in his eyes lurked an uneasy
gleam.
"So you've been feeling in your bones that something awful was going to
happen," he gibingly observed. "Then you hear a noise, and right away
you yell murder. You've got _some_ imagination, you have. I ain't going
to break in on a sleeping man just because your bones feel funny. Mine
do, too, once in a while, but I don't make any fuss about it. No,
sir-ee! You might as well trot back to bed."
The woman pulled at the folds of her robe. "I haven't told you all yet."
She spoke fast and low, gazing fixedly at the door in the rear.
"Yesterday afternoon Mr. Gage got a letter from--from a party he's got
good reason to be scared of. He hadn't heard from him in years, and he'd
been hoping he was rid of him for good. Well, I was watching him while
he read the letter, and I saw him turn white as a sheet. Later, while he
was out to lunch, I went to his desk and read the letter. I was just
that curious. It told Mr. Gage that the writer would call on him inside
forty-eight hours."
"Was that all?"
"All but the name at the bottom--and the name was the main thing."
"Eh?"
"It was the name of the man Mr. Gage has been afraid of all these years.
When I saw that name at the bottom of the note I felt a chill all over.
Say," raising her voice, "why don't you break in that door?"
Pinto stroked his chin, as if strongly impressed by what the woman had
told him. Another group of spectators had gathered at the entrance, and
he gruffly ordered them to disperse. Then he faced the inner door,
turned the knob, pushed. The door did not yield, and he looked back over
his shoulder.
"Whose name was signed to the note?" he demanded.
A look of awe crossed the housekeeper's face. She raised a bony arm and
steadied herself against the counter. A grayish pallor had suffused her
shriveled features.
"I--I can't tell you," she whispered. "I mustn't. Hurry--for Heaven's
sake!"
Something of her excitement seemed to have been communicated to Pinto,
but even now he appeared loath to attack the door.
"If your boss was so all-fired scared of the guy that sent him the note,
why didn't he call up the police?" he queried suspiciously. Then a look
of comprehension dawned in his face. "I guess, though, that he wasn't
very anxious to have the department butt into his affairs, and maybe he
thought the other fellow's bite was worse'n his bark. Well, here goes."
He stepped back a few paces, squared his shoulders for action, then
hurled his massive figure against the door. The woman stood rigid,
straining forward a little, yet holding her hands before her face as if
dreading the sight that might meet her eyes. Again and again Pinto flung
his body against the door, and finally, with a crash and a long
splintering sound, it flew open, precipitating him headlong into the
inner room.
A queer sound rose in the woman's throat and she lowered her hands. She
made as if to follow the policeman, but something held her back. From
where she stood, staring through the doorway, she could see that the
inner room was dark, and she heard the policeman's grunts and mutterings
as he struggled to regain his feet. Then came an interval of silence,
broken only by groping footfalls, and presently a light appeared in the
rear. Pinto had found the electric switch.
The housekeeper shuddered as an exclamation issued from the other room.
Evidently the officer had discovered something. Crouching in front of
the counter, she strained her ears, listening. Pinto was speaking in
low, quick accents, but she could not make out the words, and she heard
no answering voice.
Finally, Pinto came out. His face was a little white and his lips were
set in a tight line.
"He's dead," he declared.
The woman shrank back against the counter. "Murdered?"
The officer bawled a command to the neck-craning group at the entrance
to stand back. Without answering the housekeeper's question, he looked
quickly about the store till he spied a telephone on a shelf behind the
counter. The woman listened abstractedly as he called a number and spoke
a few words into the transmitter. Then he stepped out from behind the
counter and faced her.
"Your boss is lying on the floor in there," he announced, jerking his
huge head toward the inner room, "with a knife wound in his chest. He
was breathing his last just as I got to him."
The housekeeper jerked herself up, a look of sullen passion in her
blanched face. "Breathing his last, was he?" Her voice was loud and
shrill. "Then he wasn't dead yet! If you'd hurried, as I told you to, we
might have saved his life. I'll report you for this, Officer Pinto."
"Cut that stuff! Nothing could have saved him. He was too far gone.
Say," and Pinto bored his sharp eyes into her twitching face, "what name
was signed to that letter?"
Twice she opened her lips to speak, but no words came.
"Out with it! You've got to tell me now."
The woman swallowed. "Why do you want to know?" she asked faintly.
"I've got a reason. Just as Gage was drawing his last breath, I got down
beside him and asked him if he could tell me who stabbed him. I guess he
read my lips; anyhow, he was able to whisper a name. I want to know if
it jibes with the name signed to the letter Gage got yesterday."
"Well, then"--she pressed her hands against her breast--"the name on the
letter was the Gray Phantom's."
Pinto ejaculated hoarsely.
"It jibes, all right!" he declared.