THE FIGHT IN THE STUDY
Eaton dismissed the man who had been waiting in his rooms for him; he
locked the door and carefully drew down all the window-shades. Then he
put his overcoat, folded as he had been carrying it under his arm, on
the writing table in the center of the room, and from its folds and
pockets took a "breast-drill" such as iron workers use in drilling
steel, an automatic pistol with three clips of cartridges, an electric
flashlight and a little bottle of nitroglycerine. He loaded the pistol
and put it in his pocket; then he carefully inspected the other things.
The room he was in, the largest of his suite, resembled Santoine's
study on the floor below in the arrangement of its windows, though it
was smaller than the study. The writing-desk in its center occupied
much the position of Santoine's large desk; he moved it slightly to
make the relative positions coincide. The couch against the end wall
represented the position of the study's double doors. Eaton switched
out the lights, and starting at the windows, he crossed the room in the
darkness, avoiding the desk, and stopping a few feet to the right of
the couch; here he flashed his light upon the wall at the height of the
little wall-safe to the right of the doors in the study below. A dozen
times he did this, passing from the windows to the position of the
wall-safe and only momentarily flashing his light.
He assured himself thus of being able to pass in the dark from the
windows of Santoine's study to the wall-safe. As the study was larger
than this room, he computed that he must add two steps to what he took
here in each direction. He paid no attention to the position of the
safe to the left of the doors, for he had kept watch of the vase on the
table in the lower hall, and the only sign he had found there had told
him that what he wanted was in the safe to the right.
He raised a shade and window, then, and sat in the dark. The night was
cloudy and very dark; and the lake was smooth with barely a ripple.
Near at hand a steamer passed, blazing with lights, and further out he
saw the mast-head light of some other steamer. The lake was still
ice-locked at its northern end, and so the farther of these steamers,
he knew, was bound to some southern Michigan port; the nearer was one
of the Chicago-Milwaukee boats. For some moments after it had passed,
the waves of its wake washed in and sounded on the shore at the foot of
the bluff. Next Eaton made out the hum of a motor-car approaching the
house. It was Avery, who evidently had been out and was now returning;
the chauffeur spoke the name in his reply to some question as the car
swung away to the garage. Eaton still sat in the dark. By degrees all
noises ceased in the house, even in the servants' quarters. Twice
Eaton leaned forward looking out of the window and found all quiet; but
both times he settled back in his chair and waited.
The wash of waves, as from a passing boat, sounded again on the shore.
Eaton leaned nearer the window and stared out. There was no light in
sight showing any boat; but the waves on the shore were distinct;
indeed, they had been more distinct than those from the steamer. They
must have been made by a large vessel or from a small ship close in and
moving fast. The waves came in first on the north and swept south;
Eaton strained his eyes and now saw a vague blur off to the south and
within half a mile of shore--a boat without lights. If it had passed
at high speed, it had stopped now. He watched this for some time; but
he could make out no more, and soon he could not be sure even that the
blur was there.
He gazed at the south wing of the house; it was absolutely dark and
quiet; the windows of the first floor were closed and the curtains
drawn; but to-night there was no light in the room. The windows of the
room on the second floor were open; Basil Santoine was undoubtedly
asleep. Eaton gazed again at the lower room. Then in the dark he
moved to the table where he had left his overcoat, and distributed in
his pockets and within his clothing the articles he had brought; and
now he felt again in the overcoat and brought out a short, strong bar
of steel curved and flattened at one end--a "jimmy" for forcing the
windows.
Eaton slipped off his shoes and went to his room door; he opened the
door and found the hall dark and quiet. He stepped out, closing his
door carefully behind him, and with great caution he descended the
stairs. Below, all was quiet; the red embers and glowing charcoal of
wood fires which had blazed on the hearths gave the only light. Eaton
crept to the doors of the blind man's study and softly tried them.
They were, as he had expected, locked. He went to a window in the
drawing-room which was set in a recess and so placed that it was not
visible from other windows in the house. He opened this window and let
himself down upon the lawn.
There he stood still for a moment, listening. There was no alarm of
any sort. He crept along beside the house till he came to the first
windows of the south wing. He tried these carefully and then went on.
He gained the south corner of the wing, unobserved or at least without
sign that he had been seen, and went on around it.
He stopped at the first high French window on the south. It was partly
hidden from view from south and west by a column of the portico, and
was the one he had selected for his operations; as he tried to slip his
jimmy under the bottom of the sash, the window, to his amazement,
opened silently upon its hinges; it had not been locked. The heavy
curtains within hung just in front of him; he put out his hand and
parted them. Then he started back in astonishment and crouched close
to the ground; inside the room was a man moving about, flashing an
electric torch before him and then exploring an instant in darkness and
flashing his torch again.
The unexpectedness of this sight took for an instant Eaton's breath and
power of moving; he had not been at all prepared for this; now he knew
suddenly that he ought to have been prepared for it. If the man within
the room was not the one who had attacked him with the motor, he was
closely allied with that man, and what he was after now was the same
thing Eaton was after. Eaton looked about behind him; no one
apparently had been left on watch outside. He drew his pistol, and
loosing the safety, he made it ready to fire; with his left hand, he
clung to the short, heavy jimmy. He stepped into the great room
through the curtains, taking care they did not jingle the rings from
which they hung; he carefully let the curtains fall together behind
him, and treading noiselessly in his stocking feet, he advanced upon
the man, moving forward in each period of darkness between the flashes
of the electric torch.
The man, continuing to flash his light about, plainly had heard
nothing, and the curtains had prevented him from being warned by the
chill of the night air that the window was open; but now, at the
further side of the room, another electric torch flashed out. Another
man had been in the room; he neither alarmed nor was alarmed by the man
flashing the first light; each had known the other's presence before.
There were at least two men in the room, working together--or rather,
one was working, the other supervising; for Eaton heard now a steady,
almost inaudible grinding noise as the second man worked. Eaton halted
again and waited; if there were two, there might be others.
The discovery of the second man had not made Eaton afraid; his pulses
were beating faster and hotter, and he felt the blood rushing to his
head and his hands growing cold with his excitement; but he was
conscious of no fear. He crouched and crept forward noiselessly again.
No other light appeared in the room, and there was no sound elsewhere
from the darkness; but the man who supervised had moved closer to the
other. The grinding noise had stopped; it was followed by a sharp
click; the men, side by side, were bending over something; and the
light of the man who had been working, for a fraction of a second shot
into the face of the other. It did not delay at all; it was a purely
accidental flash and could not have been said to show the features at
all--only a posture, an expression, a personality of a strong and cruel
man. He muttered some short, hoarse imprecation at the other; but
before Eaton heard the voice, he had stopped as if struck, and his
breath had gone from him.
His instant's glimpse of that face astounded, stunned, stupefied him.
He could not have seen that man! The fact was impossible! He must
have been mad; his mind must have become unreliable to let him even
imagine it. Then came the sound of the voice--the voice of the man
whose face he had seen! It was he! And, in place of the paralysis of
the first instant, now a wild, savage throe of passion seized Eaton;
his pulses leaped so it seemed they must burst his veins, and he gulped
and choked. He had not filled in with insane fancy the features of the
man whom he had seen; the voice witnessed too that the man in the dark
by the wall was he whom Eaton--if he could have dreamed such a fact as
now had been disclosed--would have circled the world to catch and
destroy; yet now with the destruction of that man in his power--for he
had but to aim and empty his automatic pistol at five paces--such
destruction at this moment could not suffice; mere shooting that man
would be petty, ineffectual. Eaton's fingers tightened on the handle
of his pistol, but he held it now not as a weapon to fire but as a dull
weight with which to strike. The grip of his left hand clamped onto
the short steel bar, and with lips parted--breathing once, it seemed,
for each heartbeat and yet choking, suffocating--he leaped forward.
At the same instant--so that he could not have been alarmed by Eaton's
leap--the man who had been working moved his torch, and the light fell
upon Eaton.
"Look out!" the man cried in alarm to his companion; with the word the
light of the torch vanished.
The man toward whom Eaton rushed did not have time to switch off his
light; he dropped it instead; and as Eaton sprang for him, he crouched.
Eaton, as he struck forward, found nothing; but below his knees, Eaton
felt a man's powerful arms tackling him; as he struggled to free
himself, a swift, savage lunge lifted him from his feet; he was thrown
and hurled backwards.
Eaton ducked his head forward and struggled to turn, as he went down,
so that a shoulder and not his head or back would strike the floor
first. He succeeded in this, though in his effort he dropped the
jimmy. He clung with his right hand to the pistol, and as he struck
the floor, the pistol shot off; the flash of flame spurted toward the
ceiling. Instantly the grip below his knees was loosed; the man who
had tackled him and hurled him back had recoiled in the darkness.
Eaton got to his feet but crouched and crept about behind a table,
aiming his pistol over it in the direction in which he supposed the
other men must be. The sound of the shot had ceased to roar through
the room; the gases from the powder only made the air heavier. The
other two men in the room also waited, invisible and silent. The only
light, in the great curtained room, came from the single electric torch
lying on the floor. This lighted the legs of a chair, a corner of a
desk and a circle of books in the cases on the wall. As Eaton's eyes
became more accustomed to the darkness, he could see vague shapes of
furniture. If a man moved, he might be made out; but if he stayed
still, probably he would remain indistinguishable.
The other men seemed also to have recognized this; no one moved in the
room, and there was complete silence.
Eaton knelt on one knee behind his table; now he was wildly, exultantly
excited; his blood leaped hotly to his hand pointing his pistol; he
panted, almost audibly, for breath, but though his pulse throbbed
through his head too, his mind was clear and cool as he reckoned his
situation and his chances. He had crossed the Pacific, the Continent,
he had schemed and risked everything with the mere hope of getting into
this room to discover evidence with which to demand from the world
righting of the wrong which had driven him as a fugitive for five
years; and here he found the man who was the cause of it all, before
him in the same room a few paces away in the dark!
For it was impossible that this was not that man; and Eaton knew now
that this was he who must have been behind and arranging and directing
the attacks upon him, Eaton had not only seen him and heard his voice,
but he had felt his grasp; that sudden, instinctive crouch before a
charge, and the savage lunge and tackle were the instant, natural acts
of an old linesman on a championship team in the game of football as it
was played twenty years before. That lift of the opponent off his feet
and the heavy lunge hurling him back to fall on his head was what one
man--in the rougher, more cruel days of the college game--had been
famous for. On the football field that throw sufficed to knock a
helmeted opponent unconscious; here it was meant, beyond doubt, to do
more.
Upon so much, at least, Eaton's mind at once was clear; here was his
enemy whom he must destroy if he himself were not first destroyed.
Other thoughts, recasting of other relations altered or overturned in
their bearing by the discovery of this man here--everything else could
and must wait upon the mighty demand of that moment upon Eaton to
destroy this enemy now or be himself destroyed.
Eaton shook in his passion; yet coolly he now realized that his left
shoulder, which had taken the shock of his fall, was numb. He shifted
his pistol to cover a vague form which had seemed to move; but, if it
had stirred, it was still again now. Eaton strained to listen.
It seemed certain that the noise of the shot, if not the sound of the
struggle which preceded it, must have raised an alarm, though the room
was in a wing and shut off by double doors from the main part of the
house; it was possible that the noise had not gone far; but it must
have been heard in the room directly above and connected with the study
by a staircase at the head of which was a door. Basil Santoine, as
Eaton knew, slept above; a nurse must be waiting on duty somewhere
near. Eaton had seen the row of buttons which the blind man had within
arm's-length with which he must be able to summon every servant in the
house. So it could not last much longer now--this deadlock in the
dark--the two facing one, and none of them daring to move. And one of
the two, at least, seemed to have recognized that.
Eaton had moved, warily and carefully, but he had moved; a revolver
flashed before him. Instantly and without consciousness that his
finger pulled the trigger, Eaton's pistol flashed back. In front of
him, the flame flashed again, and another spurt of fire spat at one
side.
Eaton fired back at this--he was prostrate on the floor now, and
whether he had been hit or not he did not yet know, or whether the
blood flowing down his face was only from a splinter sprayed from the
table behind which he had hid. He fired again, holding his pistol far
out to one side to confuse the aim of the others; he thought that they
too were doing the same and allowed for it in his aim. He pulled his
trigger a ninth time--he had not counted his shots, but he knew he had
had seven cartridges in the magazine and one in the barrel--and the
pistol clicked without discharging. He rolled over further away from
the spot where he had last fired and pulled an extra clip of cartridges
from his pocket.
The blood was flowing hot over his face. He made no effort to staunch
it or even to feel with his fingers to find exactly where or how badly
he had been hit. He jerked the empty cartridge clip from his pistol
butt and snapped in the other. He swept his sleeve over his face to
clear the blood from his brows and eyes and stared through the dark
with pistol at arm's-length loaded and ready. Blood spurted over his
face again; another sweep of his sleeve cleared it; and he moved his
pistol-point back and forth in the dark. The flash of the firing from
the other two revolvers had stopped; the roar of the shots had ceased
to deafen. Eaton had not counted the shots at him any better than he
had kept track of his own firing; but he knew now that the other two
must have emptied their magazines as well as he. It was possible, of
course, that he had killed one of them or wounded one mortally; but he
had no way to know that. He could hear the click as one of the men
snapped his revolver shut again after reloading; then another click
came. Both the others had reloaded.
"All right?" the voice which Eaton knew questioned the other.
"All right," came the reply.
But, if they were all right, they made no offer to fire first again.
Nor yet did they dare to move. Eaton knew they lay on the floor like
himself. They lay with fingers on trigger, as he also lay, waiting
again for him to move so they could shoot at him. But surely now the
sound of the firing in that room must have reached the man in the room
above; surely he must be summoning his servants!
Eaton listened; there was still no sound from the rest of the house.
But overhead now, he heard an almost imperceptible pattering--the sound
of a bare-footed man crossing the floor; and he knew that the blind man
in the bedroom above was getting up.