chance. I've told you what it is. You're lucky to have it. We'd sooner
have you out of the way for keeps. I'd rather drop you in your tracks
than let you live. Where is the White Moll?”
The Adventurer was side face to the doorway again, and Rhoda Gray saw
him smile contemptuously at Danglar now.
“Really,” he said blandly, “I haven't the slightest idea in the world.”
Danglar laughed ironically.
“You lie!” he flung out hoarsely. “Do you think you can get away with
that? Well, think again! Sooner or later, it will be all the same
whether you talk or not. We caught you to-night in a trap; we'll catch
her in another. Our hand doesn't show here. She'll think that Nicky
Viner was a little too much for you, that's all. Come on, now--quick!
Are you fool enough to misunderstand? The 'don't know' stuff won't get
you by!”
“The misunderstanding seems to be on your side.” There was a cold,
irritating deliberation in the Adventurer's voice. “I repeat that I do
not know where the young lady you refer to could be found; but I did not
make that statement with any idea that you would believe it. To a cur,
I suppose it is necessary to add that, even if I did know, I should take
pleasure in seeing you damned before I told you.”
Danglar's face was like a devil's. His revolver held a steady bead on
the Adventurer's head.
“I'll give you a last chance.” He spoke through closed teeth. “I'll fire
when I count three. One!”
A horrible fascination held Rhoda Gray. If she cried out, it was more
likely than not to cause Danglar to fire on the instant. It would not
save the Adventurer in any case. It would be but the signal, too, for
those two men in the next room to rush in here.
“Two!”
It seemed as though, not in the hope that it would do any good, but
because she was going mad with horror, that she would scream out until
the place rang and rang again with her outcries. Even her soul was in
frantic panic. Quick! Quick! She must act! She must! But how? Was there
only one way? She was conscious that she had drawn her revolver as
though by instinct. Danglar's life, or the Adventurer's! But she shrank
from taking life. Her lips were breathing a prayer. They had called her
a crack shot back there in South America, when she had hunted and ridden
with her father. It was easy enough to hit Danglar, but that might mean
Danglar's life; it was not so easy to hit Danglar's arm, or Danglar's
hand, or the revolver Danglar held, and if she risked that and missed,
she...
“Thr--”
There was the roar of a report that went racketing through the silence
like a cannon shot, and the short, vicious tongue-flame from Rhoda
Gray's revolver muzzle stabbed through the black. There was a scream of
mingled surprise and fury, and the revolver in Danglar's hand clattered
to the floor. She saw the Adventurer spring, quick as a panther, at the
other, and saw him whip blow after blow with terrific force full into
Danglar's face; she heard a rush of feet coming from the corridor behind
her; and she flung herself forward into the inner room, and, panting,
snatched at the door and slammed it shut, and groping for the bolt,
found it, and shot it home in its grooves.
And she stood there, weak for the moment, and drew her hand across her
eyes--and behind her they pounded on the door, and there came a burst
of oaths; and in front of her the Adventurer was smiling gravely as
he covered Danglar with Danglar's own revolver; and Danglar, as though
dazed and half stunned from the blows he had received, rocked unsteadily
upon his feet. And then her eyes widened a little. The pounding on the
door, the shouts, the noise, was beginning to arouse what inmates there
were in the tenement, and there wasn't an instant to lose--but the
Adventurer now was calmly gathering up, to the last one, and pocketing
them, the banknotes with which Danglar had baited his trap. And as he
crammed the money into his pockets, he spoke to her, with a curious
softness, a great, strange gentleness in his voice:
“I owe you my life, Miss Gray. That was a wonderful shot. You knocked
the revolver from his hand without even grazing his fingers. A very
wonderful shot, and--will you let me say it?--you are a very wonderful
woman.”
“Oh, quick!” she whispered wildly. “I am afraid this door will not
hold.”
“There is the window, and the fire escape, so our friend here was good
enough to inform me,” said the Adventurer, as he composedly pocketed the
last dollar. “Will you open the window, Miss Gray, if you please? I am
afraid I hit Mr. Danglar a little ungently, and as he is still somewhat
groggy, I fancy he will need a little assistance. I imagine”--he caught
Danglar suddenly by the collar of his coat as Rhoda Gray ran to the
window and flung it up, and rushed the man unceremoniously across the
room--“I imagine it would be a mistake to leave him behind. He might
open the door, or even be unpleasant enough to throw something down on
us from above; also he should serve us very well as a hostage. Will you
go first, please, Miss Gray?”
She climbed quickly over the sill to the iron platform. Danglar was
dragged through by the Adventurer, mumbling, and evidently still in a
half-dazed condition. Windows were opening here and there. From back
inside the room, the blows rained more heavily upon the door--and now
there came the rip and rend of wood, as though a panel had crashed in.
“Hurry, please, Miss Gray!” prompted the Adventurer.
It was dark, almost too dark to see her footing. She felt her way down.
It was only one story above the ground, and it did not take long; but it
seemed hours since she had fired that shot, though she knew the time
had been measured by scarcely more than a minute. And now, on the lower
platform, waiting for that queer, double, twisting shadow of the two men
to join her, she heard the Adventurers s voice ring out sharply:
“This is your chance, Danglar! I didn't waste the time to bring you
along because it afforded me any amusement. They've found their heads at
last, and gone to the next window, instead of wasting time on that
door. They can't reach the fire escape there, but if they fire a single
shot--you go out! You'd better tell them so--and tell them quick!”
And then Danglar's voice shrieked out in sudden, “for God's sake, don't
fire!”
They were all on the lower platform together now. The Adventurer was
pressing the muzzle of his revolver into the small of Danglar's back,
and was still supporting the man by the collar of his coat.
“I think,” said the Adventurer abruptly, “that we can now dispense with
Mr. Danglar's services, and I am sure a little cool night air out here
on the fire escape will do him good. Miss Gray--would you mind?--there's
a pair of handcuffs in my left-hand coat pocket.”
Handcuffs! She could have laughed out idiotically. Handcuffs! They
seemed the most incongruous things in the world for the Adventurer to
have, and--She felt mechanically in his pocket, and handed them to him.
There was a click as a cuff was snapped over Danglar's wrist, another as
the other cuff was snapped shut around the iron hand-railing of the fire
escape. The act seemed to arouse Danglar, both mentally and physically.
He tore and wrenched at the steel links now, and burst suddenly, raving,
into oaths.
“Hold your tongue, Danglar!” ordered the Adventurer in cold menace;
and as the other, cowed, obeyed, the Adventurer swung himself over the
platform and dropped to the ground. “Come, Miss Gray. Drop! I'll catch
you!” he called in a low voice. “One step takes us around the corner of
the tenement into the lane, and Mr. Danglar won't let them fire at us
before we can make that--when we could still fire at him!”
She obeyed him, swinging at arm's-length. She felt his hands fold about
her in a firm grasp as she let go her hold, and she caught her breath
suddenly, she did not know why, and felt the hot blood sweep her
face--and then she was standing on the ground.
“Now!” he whispered. “Together!”
They sped around the corner of the tenement. A yell from Danglar
followed them. An echoing yell from above answered--and then a fusillade
of abortive shots, and the sound as of boot heels clattering on the iron
rungs of the fire escape; and then, more faintly, for they were putting
distance behind them as fast as they could run, an excited outburst of
profanity and exclamations.
“They won't follow!” panted the Adventurer. “Those shots of theirs
outdoors will have alarmed the police, and they'll try and get Danglar
free first. It's lucky your shot inside wasn't heard by the patrolman
on the beat. I was afraid of that. But we're safe now--from Danglar's
crowd, at least.”
But still they ran. They crossed an intersecting street, and continued
on along the lane; then swerving into the next intersecting street,
moderated their pace to a rapid walk--and stopped finally only as Rhoda
Gray drew suddenly into the shadows of another alley-way, and held out
her hand. They were both safe now, as he had said. And there were so
many reasons why, though her resolution faltered a little, she should
go the rest of the way alone. She was not sure that she trusted this
strange “gentleman,” who was a thief with his pockets crammed even now
with the money that had lured him almost to his death; but, too, she was
not altogether sure that she distrusted him. But all that was secondary.
She must, as soon as she could, get back to Gypsy Nan's garret. Like
that other night, she dared not take the risk that Danglar, by any
chance, might return there--and find her gone after what had just
happened. The man would be beside himself with fury, suspicious of
everything-and suspicion would be fatal in its consequences for her.
And so she must go. And she could not become Gypsy Nan again with the
Adventurer looking on!
“We part here,” she said a little unsteadily. “Good-night!”
“Oh, I say, Miss Gray!” he protested quickly. “You don't mean that! Why,
look here, I haven't had a chance to tell you what I think, or what I
feel, about what you've done to-night--for me.”
She shook her head.
“There is nothing you need say,” she answered quietly. “We are only
quits. You have done quite as much for me.”
“But, see here, Miss Gray!” he pleaded. “Can't we come to some
understanding? We seem to have a jolly lot in common. Is it
quite necessary, really necessary, that you should keep me off at
arm's-length? Couldn't you let down the bars just a little? Couldn't
you tell me, for instance, where I could find you in case of--real
necessity?”
She shook her head again.
“No,” she said. “It is impossible.”
He drew a little closer. A sudden earnestness deepened his voice, made
it rasp a little, as though it were not wholly within control.
“And suppose, Miss Gray, that I refuse to leave you, or to let you go,
now that I have you here, unless you give me more of your confidence?
What then?”
“The other night,” she said slowly, “you informed me, among other
things, that you were a gentleman. I believed the other things.”
He did not answer for a moment--and then he smiled whimsically.
“You score, Miss Gray,” he murmured.
“Good night, then!” she said again. “I will go by the alley here; you by
the street.”
“No! Wait!” he said gravely. “If nothing will change your mind--and I
shall not be importunate, for, as we have met three times now through
the same peculiar chain of circumstances, I know we shall meet again--I
have something to tell you, before you go. As you already know, I went
to Gypsy Nan's the night after I first saw you, because I felt you
needed help. I went there in the hope that she would know where to find
you, and, failing in that, I left a message for you in the hope that,
since she had tricked Rorke in your behalf, you would find means of
communicating with her again. But all that is entirely changed now. Your
participation in that Hayden-Bond affair the other night makes Gypsy
Nan's place the last in all New York to which you should go.”
Rhoda Gray stared through the semi-darkness, suddenly startled,
searching the Adventurer's face.
“What do you mean?” she demanded quickly.
“Just this,” he answered. “That where before I hoped you would go there,
I have spent nearly all the time since then in haunting the vicinity of
Gypsy Nan's house to warn you away in case you should try to reach her.”
“I--I don't understand,” she said a little uncertainly.
“It is simple enough,” he said. “Gypsy Nan is now one of those you have
most to fear. Gypsy Nan is merely a disguise. She is no more Gypsy Nan
than you are.”
Rhoda Gray caught her breath.
“Not Gypsy Nan!” she repeated--and fought to keep her voice in control.
“Who is she, then?”
The Adventurer laughed shortly.
“She is quite closely connected with that gentleman we left airing
himself on the fire escape,” he said grimly. “Gypsy Nan is Danglar's
wife.”
It was very strange, very curious--the alleyway seemed suddenly to be
revolving around and around, and it seemed to bring her a giddiness and
a faintness. The Adventurer was standing there before her, but she did
not see him any more; she could only see, as from a brink upon which she
tottered, a gulf, abysmal in its horror, that yawned before her.
“Thank you--thank you for the warning.” Was that her voice speaking
so calmly and dispassionately? “I will remember it. But I must go now.
Good-night again!”
He said something. She did not know what. She only knew that she was
hurrying along the alleyway now, and that he had made no effort to stop
her, and that she was grateful to him for that, and that her composure,
strained to the breaking point, would have given away if she had
remained with him another instant. Danglar's wife! It was dark here in
the alley-way, and she did not know where it led to. But did it
matter? And she stumbled as she went along. But it was not the physical
inability to see that made her stumble--it was a brain-blindness that
fogged her soul itself. His wife! Gypsy Nan was Danglar's wife.
XI. SOME OF THE LESSER BREED
Danglar's wife! It had been a night of horror; a night without sleep;
a night, after the guttering candle had gone out, when the blackness of
the garret possessed added terrors created by an imagination which ran
riot, and which she could not control. She could have fled from it,
screaming in panic-stricken hysteria--but there had been no other place
as safe as that was. Safe! The word seemed to reach the uttermost depths
of irony. Safe! Well, it was true, wasn't it?
She had not wanted to return there; her soul itself had revolted against
it; but she had dared to do nothing else. And all through that night,
huddled on the edge of the cot bed, her fingers clinging tenaciously to
her revolver as though afraid for even an instant to relinquish it from
her grasp, listening, listening, always listening for a footstep that
might come up from that dark hall below, the footstep that would
climax all the terrors that had surged upon her, her mind had kept on
reiterating, always reiterating those words of the Adventurer--“Gypsy
Nan is Danglar's wife.”
And they were still with her, those words. Daylight had come again, and
passed again, and it was evening once more; but those words remained,
insensible to change, immutable in their foreboding. And Rhoda Gray, as
Gypsy Nan, shuddered now as she scuffled along a shabby street deep in
the heart of the East Side. She was Danglar's wife--by proxy. At dawn
that morning when the gray had come creeping into the miserable attic
through the small and dirty window panes, she had fallen on her knees
and thanked God she had been spared that footstep. It was strange! She
had poured out her soul in passionate thankfulness then that Danglar
had not come--and now she was deliberately on her way to seek Danglar
himself! But the daylight had done more than disperse the actual,
physical darkness of the past night; it had brought, if not a measure of
relief, at least a sense of guidance, and the final decision, perilous
though it was, which she meant now to put into execution.
There was no other way--unless she were willing to admit defeat, to give
up everything, her own good name, her father's name, to run from it all
and live henceforth in hiding in some obscure place far away, branded
in the life she would have left behind her as a despicable criminal and
thief. And she could not, would not, do this while her intuition, at
least, inspired her with the faith to believe that there was still a
chance of clearing herself. It was the throw of the dice, perhaps--but
there was no other way. Danglar, and those with him, were at the bottom
of the crime of which she was held guilty. She could not go on as she
had been doing, merely in the hope of stumbling upon some clew that
would serve to exonerate her. There was not time enough for that.
Danglar's trap set for herself and the Adventurer last night in old
Nicky Viner's room proved that. And the fact that the woman who
had originally masqueraded as Gypsy Nan--as she, Rhoda Gray, was
masquerading now--was Danglar's wife, proved it a thousandfold more. She
could no longer remain passive, arguing with herself that it took all
her wits and all her efforts to maintain herself in the role of Gypsy
Nan, which temporarily was all that stood between her and prison bars.
To do so meant the certainty of disaster sooner or later, and if it
meant that, the need for immediate action of an offensive sort was
imperative.
And so her mind was made up. Her only chance was to find her way into
the full intimacy of the criminal band of which Danglar was apparently
the head; to search out its lair and its personnel; to reach to the
heart of it; to know Danglar's private movements, and to discover where
he lived so that she might watch him. It surely was not such a hopeless
task! True, she knew by name and sight scarcely more than three of this
crime clique, but at least she had a starting point from which to work.
There was Shluker's junk shop where she had turned the tables on Danglar
and Skeeny on the night they had planned to make the Sparrow their pawn.
It was obvious, therefore, that Shluker himself, the proprietor of the
junk shop, was one of the organization. She was going to Shluker's now.
Rhoda Gray halted suddenly, and stared wonderingly a little way up the
block ahead of her. As though by magic a crowd was collecting around
the doorway of a poverty-stricken, tumble-down frame house that made
the corner of an alleyway. And where but an instant before the street's
jostling humanity had been immersed in its wrangling with the push-cart
men who lined the curb, the carts were now deserted by every one save
their owners, whose caution exceeded their curiosity--and the crowd grew
momentarily larger in front of the house.
She drew Gypsy Nan's black, greasy shawl a little more closely around
her shoulders, and moved forward again. And now, on the outskirts of the
crowd, she could see quite plainly. There were two or three low steps
that led up to the doorway, and a man and woman were standing there. The
woman was wretchedly dressed, but with most strange incongruity she held
in her hand, obviously subconsciously, obviously quite oblivious of it,
a huge basket full to overflowing with, as nearly as Rhoda Gray could
judge, all sorts of purchases, as though out of the midst of abject
poverty a golden shower had suddenly descended upon her. And she was
gray, and well beyond middle age, and crying bitterly; and her free
hand, whether to support herself or with the instinctive idea of
supporting her companion, was clutched tightly around the man's
shoulders. And the man rocked unsteadily upon his feet. He was tall
and angular, and older than the woman, and cadaverous of feature, and
miserably thin of shoulder, and blood trickled over his forehead and
down one ashen, hollow cheek--and above the excited exclamations of the
crowd Rhoda Gray heard him cough.
Rhoda Gray glanced around her. Where scarcely a second before she had
been on the outer fringe of the crowd, she now appeared to be in the
very center of it. Women were pushing up behind her, women who wore
shawls as she did, only the shawls were mostly of gaudy colors; and
men pushed up behind her, mostly men of swarthy countenance, who wore
circlets of gold in their ears; and, brushing her skirts, seeking
vantage points, ragged, ill-clad children wriggled and wormed their way
deeper into the press. It was a crowd composed almost entirely of the
foreign element which inhabited that quarter--and the crowd chattered
and gesticulated with ever-increasing violence. She did not understand.
And she could not see so well now. That pitiful tableau in the doorway
was being shut out from her by a man, directly in front of her, who had
hoisted a half-naked tot of three or four to a reserved seat upon his
head.
And then a young man, one whom, from her years in the Bad Lands as the
White Moll, she recognized as a hanger-on at a gambling hell in the
Chatham Square district, came toward her, plowing his way, contemptuous
of obstructions, out of the crowd.
Rhoda Gray, as Gypsy Nan, hailed him out of the corner of her mouth.
“Say, wot's de row?” she demanded.
The young man grinned.
“Somebody pinched a million from de old guy!” He shifted his cigarette
with a deft movement of his tongue from one side of his mouth to the
other, and grinned again. “Can youse beat it! Accordin' to him, he had
enough coin to annex de whole of Noo Yoik! De moll's his wife. He went
out to hell-an'-gone somewhere for a few years huntin' gold while de
old girl starved. Den back he comes an' blows in to-day wid his pockets
full, an' de old girl grabs a handful, an' goes out to buy up all de
grub in sight 'cause she ain't had none for so long. An' w'en she comes
back she finds de old geezer gagged an' tied in a chair, an' some guy's
hit him a crack on de bean an' flown de coop wid de mazuma. But youse
had better get out of here before youse gets run over! Dis ain't no
place for an old skirt like youse. De bulls'll be down here on de hop in
a minute, an' w'en dis mob starts sprinklin' de street wid deir fleetin'
footsteps, youse are likely to get hurt. See?” The young man started
to force his way through the crowd again. “Youse had better cut loose,
mother!” he warned over his shoulder.
It was good advice. Rhoda Gray took it. She had scarcely reached the
next block when the crowd behind her was being scattered pell-mell and
without ceremony in all directions by the police, as the young man had
predicted. She went on. There was nothing that she could do. The man's
face and the woman's face haunted her. They had seemed stamped with such
abject misery and despair. But there was nothing that she could do. It
was one of those sore and grievous cross-sections out of the lives
of the swarming thousands down here in this quarter which she knew
so intimately and so well. And there were so many, many of those
cross-sections! Once, in a small, pitifully meager and restricted way,
she had been able to help some of these hurt lives, but now--Her lips
tightened a little. She was going to Shluker's junk shop.
Her forehead gathered in little furrows as she walked along. She had
weighed the pros and cons of this visit a hundred times already during
the day; but even so, instinctively to reassure herself lest some
apparently minor, but nevertheless fatally vital, point might have been
overlooked, her mind reverted to it again. From Shluker's viewpoint,
whether Gypsy Nan was in the habit of mingling with or visiting the
other members of the gang or not--a matter upon which she could not even
hazard a guess--her visit to-night must appear entirely logical. There
was last night--and, a natural corollary, her equally natural anxiety on
her supposed husband's account, providing, of course, that Shluker was
aware that Gypsy Nan was Danglar's wife. But even if Shluker did not
know that, he knew at least that Gypsy Nan was one of the gang, and, as
such, he must equally accept it as natural that she should be anxious
and disturbed over what had happened. She would be on safe ground either
way. She would pretend to know only what had appeared in the papers;
in other words, that the police, attracted to the spot by the sound of
revolver shots, had found Danglar handcuffed to the fire escape of a
well-known thieves' resort in an all too well-known and questionable
locality.