IN THE NIGHT
The night was moonless, dark, warm with the inviting softness of late
spring that holds out promises of romance. Stars wavered and wimpled
in the black waters of the Hudson as a launch put out in silence from
the foot of Twenty-seventh Street.
This launch contained four men. They carried but little baggage; no
more than could be stowed in a rucksack apiece. All were in their old
service uniforms, with long coats over the uniforms to mask them. All
carried vacuum-flashlights in their overcoat pockets, and lethal-gas
pistols, in addition to ordinary revolvers or automatics. And all were
keyed to the top notch of energy, efficiency, eagerness. The Great
Adventure had begun.
In the stern of the swift, twenty-four cylinder launch--a racing
model--sat Captain Alden and Rrisa. The captain wore his aviator's
helmet and his goggles, despite the warmth of the night. To appear in
only his celluloid mask, even at a time like this when darkness would
have hidden him, seemed distasteful to the man. He seemed to want to
hide his misfortune as fully as possible; and, since this did no harm,
the Master let him have his way.
The bow was occupied by the Master and by Major Bohannan, with the
Master at the wheel. He seemed cool, collected, impassive; but
the major, of hotter Celtic blood, could not suppress his fidgety
nervousness.
Intermittently he gnawed at his reddish mustache. A cigar, he felt,
would soothe and quiet him. Cigars, however, were now forbidden. So
were pipes and cigarettes. The Master did not intend to have even
their slight distraction coming between the minds of his men and the
careful, intricate plan before them.
As the racer veered north, up the broad darkness of the Hudson--the
Hudson sparkling with city illumination on either hand, with still or
moving ships' lights on the breast of the waters--Bohannan murmured:
"Even now, as your partner in this enterprise--"
"My lieutenant," corrected the Master.
"As second in command," amended Bohannan, irritably, "I'm not wholly
convinced this is the correct procedure." He spoke in low tones,
covered by the purring exhaust of the launch and by the hiss of
swiftly cloven waters. "It looks like unnecessary complication, to me,
and avoidable danger."
"It is neither," answered the man at the wheel. "What would you have
done? What better plan could you have proposed?"
"You could have built your own flyer, couldn't you? Since money's no
object to you, and you don't even know, accurately, how much you've
got--nobody can keep track of figures like those--why risk legal
interference and international complications at the start, by--"
"To build the kind of flyer we need would have taken six or seven
months. Not all my money could have produced it, sooner. And absolute
ennui can't wait half a year. I'd have gone wholly stale, and so would
you, and all of them. We'd have lost them.
"Again, news of any such operations would have got out. My plans would
possibly have been checkmated. In the third place, what you propose
would have been tame sport, indeed, as a beginning! Three excellent
reasons, my dear Major, why this is positively the only way."
"Perhaps. But there's always the chance of failure, now. The guards--"
"After your own experience, when that capsule burst in the laboratory,
you talk to me about guards?"
"Suppose one escapes?"
The Master only smiled grimly, and sighted his course up the dark
river.
"And the alarm is sure to be given, in no time. Why didn't you just
buy the thing outright?"
"It's not for sale, at any price."
"Still--men can't run off with three and a half million dollars' worth
of property and with provisions and equipment like that, all ready for
a trial trip, without raising Hell. There'll be pursuit--"
"What with, my dear Bohannan?"
"That's a foolish statement of mine, the last one, I admit," answered
the major, as his companion swung the launch a little toward the
Jersey shore. "Of course nothing can overhaul us, once we're away.
But you know my type of mind weighs every possibility, pro and con.
Wireless can fling out a fan of swift aerial police ahead of us from
Europe."
"How near can anything get to us?"
"I know it all looks quite simple and obvious, in theory.
Nevertheless--"
"Men of your character are useful, in places," said the Master,
incisively. "You are good in a charge, in sudden daring, in swift
attack. But in the approach to great decisions, you vacillate. That's
your racial character.
"I'm beginning to doubt my own wisdom in having chosen you as next in
command. There's a bit of doubting Thomas in your ego. It's not
too late, yet, for you to turn back. I'll let you, as a special
concession. Brodeur will jump at the chance to be your successor."
His hand swung the wheel, sweeping the racer in a curve toward the
Manhattan shore. Bohannan angrily pushed the spokes over again the
other way.
"I stick!" he growled. "I've said the last word of this sort you'll
ever hear me utter. Full speed ahead--to Paradise--or Hell!"
They said no more. The launch split her way swiftly toward the north.
By the vague, ghostly shimmer of light upon the waters, a tense smile
appeared on the steersman's lips. In his dark eyes gleamed the joy
which to some men ranks supreme above all other joys--that of bending
others to his will, of dominating them, of making them the puppets of
his fancy.
Some quarter hour the racer hummed upriver. Keenly the Master kept
his lookout, picking up landmarks. Finally he spoke a word to
Captain Alden, who came forward to the engines. The Master's
cross-questionings of this man had convinced him his credentials were
genuine and that he was loyal, devoted, animated by nothing but the
same thirst for adventure that formed the driving power behind them
all. Now he was trusting him with much, already.
"Three quarters speed," ordered the Master. The skilled hand of the
captain, well-versed in the operation of gas engines, obeyed the
command. The whipping breeze of their swift course, the hiss at the
bows as foam and water crumbled out and over, somewhat diminished. The
goal lay not far off.
To starboard, thinning lights told the Master they were breasting
Spuyten Duyvil. To port, only a few scattered gleams along the base of
the cliff or atop it, showed that the sparsely settled Palisades were
drawing abeam. The ceaseless, swarming activities of the metropolis
were being left behind. Silence was closing in, broken only by vagrant
steamer-whistles from astern.
A crawling string of lights, on the New York shore, told that an
express was hurling itself cityward. Its muffled roar began to echo
out over the star-flecked waters. The Master threw a scornful glance
at it. He turned in his seat, and peered at the shimmer of the city's
lights, strung like a luminous rosary along the river's edge. Then
he looked up at the roseate flush on the sky, flung there by the
metropolis as from the mouth of a crucible.
"Child's play!" he murmured. "All this coming and going in
crowded streets, all this fighting for bread, and scheming over
pennies--child's play. Less than that--the blind swarming of ants!
Tomorrow, where will all this be, for us?"
He turned back and thrust over the spokes. The launch drew in toward
the Jersey shore.
"Let the engines run at half-speed," he directed, "and control her now
with the clutch."
"Yes, sir!"
The aviator's voice was sharp, precise, determined. The Master nodded
to himself with satisfaction. This man, he felt, would surely be a
valued member of the crew. He might prove more than that. There might
be stuff in him that could be molded to executive ability, in case
that should be necessary.
The launch, now at half-speed, nosed her way directly toward the
cliff. Sounds from shore began to grow audible Afar, an auto siren
shrieked. A dog barked, irritatingly. A human voice came vaguely
hallooing.
Off to the right, over the cliff brow, a faint aura of light was
visible. The eyes of the Master rested on this a moment, brightening.
He smiled again; and his hand tightened a little on the wheel. But all
he said was:
"Dead slow, now, Captain Alden!"
As the cliff drew near, its black brows ate across the sky, devouring
stars. The Master spoke in Arabic to Rrisa, who seized a boat hook
and came forward. Out of the gloom small wharf advanced to meet the
launch. The boat-hook caught; the launch, easing to a stop, cradled
against the stringpiece.
Rrisa held with the hook, while Bohannan and Alden clambered out.
Before the Master left, he bent and seemed to be manipulating
something in the bottom of the launch. Then he stepped to the engine.
"Out, Rrisa," he commanded, "and hold hard with the hook, now!"
The Arab obeyed. All at once the propeller churned water, reversed.
The Master leaped to the wharf.
"Let go--and throw the hook into the boat!" he ordered.
While the three others stood wondering on the dark wharf, the launch
began to draw slowly back into the stream. Already it was riding a bit
low, going down gradually by the bows.
"What now?" questioned the major, astonished.
"She will sink a hundred or two yards from shore, in deep water,"
answered the Master, calmly. "The sea-cock is wide open."
"A fifteen thousand dollar launch--!"
"Is none the less, a clue. No man of this party, reaching the shore
tonight, is leaving any more trace than we are. Come, now, all this is
trivial. Forward!"
In silence, they followed him along the dark wharf, reached a narrow,
rocky path that serpented up the face of the densely wooded cliff,
and began to ascend. A lathering climb it was, laden as they were with
heavy rucksacks, in the moonless obscurity.
Now and then the Master's little searchlight--his own wonderful
invention, a heatless light like an artificial firefly, using no
batteries nor any power save universal, etheric rays in an absolute
vacuum--glowed with pale virescence over some particularly rough bit
of going. For the most part, however, not even this tiny gleam
was allowed to show. Silence, darkness, precision, speed were now
all-requisite.
Twenty-four minutes from leaving the wharf, they stood among a
confused, gigantic chaos of boulders flung, dicelike, amid heavy
timbers on the brow of the Palisades. Off to the north, the faint,
ghostly aura dimly silhouetted the trees. Far below, the jetty river
trembled here, there, with starlight.
They paused a moment to breathe, to shift straps that bound shoulders
not now hardened to such burdens. The Master glanced at the luminous
dial of his wrist-watch.
"Almost to the dot," he whispered. "Seventeen minutes to midnight. At
midnight, sharp, we take possession. Come!"
They trailed through a hard, rocky path among thick oak, pine,
and silver-birch. Now and then the little greenish-white light
will-o'-the-wisped ahead, flickering hither, yon. No one spoke a word.
Every footstep had to be laid down with care. After three minutes'
progress, the Master stopped, turned, held up his hand.
"Absolute silence, now," he breathed. "The outer guards are now within
an eighth of a mile."
They moved forward again. The light was no longer shown, but the
Master confidently knew the way. Bohannan felt a certain familiarity
with the terrain, which he had carefully studied on the large-scale
map he and the Master had used in planning the attack; but the
Master's intimate knowledge was not his. After two and one-half
minutes, the leader stopped again, and gestured at heavy fern-brakes
that could just be distinguished as black blotches in the dark of the
woods.
"The exact spot," he whispered. "Take cover, and follow your memorized
orders!"
He settled down noiselessly into the brakes. The others did likewise.
Utter silence fell, save for the far, vague roar of the city. A
vagrant little breeze was stirring the new foliage, through which a
few stars curiously peeped. The four men seemed far, very far from any
others. And yet--
_Were_ there any others near them? the major wondered. No sign, no
sound of them existed. Off to northward, where the dim glow ghosted up
against the sky, an occasional noise drifted to the night. A distant
laugh diffused itself through the dark. A dog yapped; perhaps the
same that they had heard barking, a few minutes before. Then came the
faint, sharp tapping of a hammer smiting metal.
"They're knocking out the holding-pins," thought the major. "In a few
minutes it'll be too late, _if_ we don't strike now!" He felt a great
temptation to urge haste, on the Master. But, aware of the futility of
any suggestion, the risk of being demoted for any other _faux pas_, he
bridled his impatience and held still.
Realizing that they were now lying at the exact distance of 440 yards
from the stockade that protected the thing they had come to steal--if
you can call "stealing" the forced sale the Master now planned
consummating, by having his bankers put into unwilling hands every
ultimate penny of the more than $3,500,000 involved, once the _coup_
should be put through--realizing this fact, Bohannan felt the tug of a
profound excitement.
His pulses quickened; the tension of his Celtic nerves keyed itself up
like a banjo-string about to snap. Steeled in the grim usages of
war though he was, and more than once having felt the heart-breaking
stress of the zero hour, this final moment of waiting, of suspense
before the attack that was so profoundly to affect his life and the
lives of all these other hardy men, pulled heavily at his nerves. He
desperately wanted a smoke, again, but that was out of the question.
It seemed to him, there in the dark and stillness, one of the fateful
moments of time, pregnant with possibilities unlimited.
The Master, Alden, Rrisa, mere vague blurs among the ferns, remained
motionless. If their nerves were a-tingle, they gave no hint or sign
of it. Where might the others of the Legion be? No indication of
them could be made out. No other living thing seemed in the woods
encircling the stockade. Was each man really there and ready for the
predetermined role he was to play?
It seemed incredible, fantastic, to suppose that all these
adventurers, each separate and alone, each having no contact, with
any other, should all have taken their assigned posts. That each, with
luminous watch on wrist, was even now timing himself, to the second,
before striking the single note calculated to produce, in harmony with
all the rest, the finished composition. Such an assumption partook
more of the stuff of an Arabian Nights tale than of stern reality in
this Twentieth Century and on the outskirts of the world's greatest
city.
The Master, crouching, whispered:
"Two minutes more! Keep your eyes on your watches, now. Get your
lethal guns ready! In 120 seconds, you will hear the first capsule
burst. Ten seconds after that, Alden, fire yours. Ten later, yours,
Bohannan. Ten later, yours, Rrisa. Listen hard! Hold steady!"
The silence drew at them like a pain. Rrisa breathed something in
which the words: "_La Illaha ilia Allah_" transpired in a wraith of
sound. Alden nestled closer into the ferns. Bohannan could hardly hold
his poise.
All three now had their capsule pistols ready. The self-luminous
compass and level attached to each gun gave them their exact direction
and elevation. Glimmering watches marked the time, the dragging of the
last few seconds.
The Master drew no weapon. His mind, directing all, observing all, was
not to be distracted by even so small a detail as any personal hand in
the discharge of the lethal gas.
If he felt the strain of the final moment, on which hung vaster
issues than mere life or death, he gave no indication of it. His eyes
remained fixed on the watch-dial at his wrist. They were confident,
those eyes. The vague shimmer of the watch-glow showed them dark and
grave; his face, faintly revealed, was impassive, emotionless.
It seemed the face of a scientist, a chemist who--having worked out
his formula to its ultimate minutiae--now felt utter trust in its
reactions, now was only waiting to observe what he well knew must
inevitably happen.
"Thirty seconds more," he whispered, and fell silent. Presently, after
what seemed half an hour: "Fifteen!"
Another long wait. The Master breathed:
"In just five seconds the first capsule will burst there!" He pointed
with assurance. "In two--in one--"