TAKING CHANCES
Late as he went to sleep, Billy B. Hill was up in good season that Sunday morning. The need for cautioning Fritzi Baroff haunted him, and he was not satisfied until he had had breakfast with that lively young lady and laid down the law to her upon the situation.
She was very loath not to talk about herself at first. She wanted to tell her tale to the papers and see if one of them would be hardy enough to publish the story of the outrageous incarceration; she wanted to cable the Viennese theater where she had played of her sensational detention—in short, she wanted to get all the possible publicity out of her durance vile and to advertise her small person from Cairo to the Continent.
But Billy was urgent. "You just bide a wee on this publicity stunt," he demanded. "Cable your manager and press agent all you want to—but don't talk around the hotel here—and whatever you do and whatever you say, keep Miss Beecher's name and mine out of it."
He was very decided about that, and because she was very grateful to him and because she liked him and because she lacked other friends and other pocketbooks, the little Viennese held her tongue as directed. And she borrowed as much money as Billy would lend her, and drove off to the small shops which were open that day, and found a frock or two and a hat which she declared passable, and returned transfigured to the hotel and rendered the table where she lunched with Billy, with the air of possessing him, quite the most conspicuous in the room. The ladies gazed past them with chill eyes; the men stared covertly, with the surreptitious envy with which even the most virtuous of men surveys a lucky devil. And Billy sadly perceived that he was acquiring a reputation.
He did not blame Miss Falconer for turning haughtily aside as he and his vivid companion went past them in the veranda. But he did think her disdainful lack of memory a little overdone.
His cheeks were still red as he looked away from her and encountered the direct eyes of the girl who followed her.
"Oh, how do you do, Mr. Hill?" said Lady Claire, as clear as a bell. "It's such a nice day, isn't it?" she added, a little breathlessly, as she went by.
"It's much better than it was," said Billy, and he turned back to open the door for her.
"Claire!" said Miss Falconer from within.
"Coming, dear," said Lady Claire, and with a little smile of defiant friendliness at the young American she was gone.
But the memory of that plucky little smile stayed right with Billy. The girl liked him, she liked him in spite of his unknown antecedents, his preposterous picture, his conspicuous companion. She had a mind of her own, that tall English girl with the lovely eyes and the proud mouth. In a warm surge of friendliness his thoughts went out to her, and he wished vaguely that he could let her know how fine he thought she was.
Within an hour that vague wish came true. He had packed Fritzi off, with a newly acquired maid, for a drive up and down the safe public streets and he had re-interviewed the one-eyed man and the native chauffeur that the one-eyed man introduced for the evening's work, and he was at one of the public desks in the writing room, inditing a letter to his aunt, which, he whimsically appreciated, might be his last mortal composition, and reflecting thankfully that it was highly unnecessary to make a will, when Lady Claire strolled into the room and over to a desk.
She tried a pen frowningly, and Billy jumped to offer another. "Oh, thank you," she said. She seemed not to have seen him before.
"That was rather nice of you, you know," he said gravely.
She looked up at him.
"I'm not really a wolf," he continued, the gravity surrendering to his likable, warm smile, "and I'm glad you recognized it."
Her reply took him unawares. "I think you're splendid," said Lady Claire. "I thought so in the bazaars when you came to my help and stood up to that beastly German."
"Oh, he wasn't such a beastly German, after all," Billy deprecated. "And here I've had a message to you from him and never remembered to give it. The fellow called on me the next morning in gala attire and offered every apology and satisfaction in his power—even the satisfaction of the duel, if I desired it. I didn't. But I promised to express his deep apologies to you. He was horribly shocked at himself. He'd been drinking, he said, to forget a 'sadness' which possessed him. His lady love had failed to keep her tryst and life was very dark."
"I don't wonder at her," said Lady Claire unforgivingly. "I'm sure he must have been horrid to her!"
"I rather think she was horrid to him," Billy reflected, "although she was a very sprightly looking lady love. He showed me her picture in the back of his watch.... By George!" he uttered violently.
"What is it?"
"Oh—an idea, that's all. Something I must really attend to before I—this afternoon, I mean. But there's no hurry about it," he added cheerily.
Oh, Billy, Billy! Not even with his blood hot with thoughts of the evening's work, not even with his memory ridden with Arlee's gay witchery, could he keep his restless young eyes from laughing down at her. But there wasn't a notion in the back of his honest head as to the picture he was making in Lady Claire's eyes as he leaned, long-limbed, broad-shouldered, lazily at ease against the desk, his gray eyes very bright between their dark lashes, his dark hair sweeping back from his wide forehead.
"Are you sure?" she asked of him, with the smile that he drew from her. "Is it the inspiration for another picture?"
"No, no—that was my first and my last. That was the one purple bloom of my art. I have laid my brushes by.... But I'm keeping you from that letter you were going to write."
"It's just a few lines for Miss Falconer," Lady Claire unnecessarily explained. "We are going to drive out to the Gezireh Palace Hotel for tea, and she thought her brother might like to go out with us if he came in in time."
She did not add why Miss Falconer was unable to write her own notes, but slanted her blue-hatted head over the desk and then hastily blotted her brief lines and tucked the sheet into an envelope. Hesitantly she looked up at Billy.
"Have you been out to the Gezireh Palace?" she very innocently inquired.
"Alone," said Billy.
"It's very jolly there," said she. "It's so gay—and the music is quite good."
"H'm," meditated Billy. "The condemned man ate a hearty tea of Orange Pekoe and cress sandwiches," he reflected silently. He also reflected that Miss Falconer would be furious—and that invited him—and that time was interminable and that this expedition was as good a way of getting through the afternoon as any other. Thereupon he turned to the English girl, with a humorous challenge in his gaze. "I wonder if you and Miss Falconer would let this be my tea party?" he suggested.
"Miss Falconer will be delighted," said Lady Claire mendaciously.
The traces of that delight, however, lay beneath so well schooled an exterior that they were decidedly non-apparent. Nor did Robert Falconer's mien reveal any hint of joy when he returned to the hotel and found the two ladies starting with Billy. He joined them with rather the air of a watch dog, but that air soon wore away during the long drive under the spell of young Hill's frank friendliness and gay good humor. For Billy was extravagantly in spirits. Excitement stirred in him like wine; his blood was on fire with thoughts of the evening.
"It's the fool lark of the thing," he said, half apologetically, to Falconer's wonder when the two young men were alone for a minute on the Gezireh verandas. "Didn't you ever want to be a pirate?"
The red-headed young man nodded. "Yes, but this business doesn't make me feel like a pirate—more like a second-story man!"
"I've left letters with Fritzi Baroff," said Hill, "and if we're not back by morning, she's to go to the authorities with them."
"That won't do us any good," said the Englishman grimly.
But after the ladies returned it was a very merry-seeming tea party. Even Miss Falconer unbent to the artist, as she persisted in calling Billy, though he had dutifully enlightened her that engineering was his true and proper life work, and art but a random diversion, and she promised to show him the sketches which she had been making, and piled him with questions about his mysterious America.
And Lady Claire was very prettily animated, and rallied Falconer upon his absent-mindedness and told Billy tales of her English home and how her father had threatened to change the name of the Hall to Mädchenheim because there were five daughters of them. "Five girls near an age, Mr. Hill, and all poor as church mice!" she had blithely asserted.
But from what Billy heard of balls and hunters and "seasons," he gleaned that being poor as church mice, for these five titled girls, meant merely an effort in keeping up with the things they felt should be theirs by right divine. And as Billy listened, feeling the force of the girl's attraction, the charm of her serene confidence and the pleasant air of security and well-being that hedged her in, he stole a covert glance at Falconer's unrevealing countenance and reflected that it was rather a stormy day for that young man when he became entangled with the fortunes of little Miss Beecher. It was also a stormy day for himself, but he felt that storms belonged more naturally to his adventurous lot.
But it was characteristic of Falconer when once committed to a plan not to open his mind to the objections which besieged it. So that night, at the fall of dark, as the two young men motored forth together, he maintained a stolid resolution which refused to look back. The approach of the danger was tuning up his nerves, and whatever his common sense might think about it, his youth and pluck greeted the adventure with a quickening heart and a rash warmth of blood.
Both young men were resolute and confident. Either would have been more than human if he had not looked a trifle askance upon the other and wished to thunder that he had been able to go into it alone and to have tasted the intoxication of delivering the girl single-handed out of the den of thieves. But the success of the plan was paramount, as Billy reminded himself.
He found himself hoping wildly that she would see him as well as Falconer.
"She has probably forgotten all about me," he thought ruefully. "She won't remember that dance with me, nor that chat next morning. I'm just an Also Met. She won't even perceive me. She'll see that sandy-haired deliverer—and she'll tell him how right he was and how good to come after her——"
Thus jealousy darkly painted his undoing. "But, darn it, I had to ask him!" Thus he downed his ungenerous thoughts. "It needed two men at least—and besides, I don't want any handicap of gratitude in this."
They left the automobile in the Mohammedan graveyard with exact and impressive instructions. And then they stole back among the gloomy trees and ghostly tombs to where the canal washed the foot of the little terraces, and there the one-eyed man sat waiting in the canoe, a figure of profound misanthropy.
Silently he lifted a stricken but set countenance, and they climbed in and the three paddled off, approaching the back of the palace with wary eyes, for they were afraid that a guard might now be set upon the walls. But Billy had argued that Kerissen was unaware of Fritzi's knowledge of Arlee's identity; in fact she had at first supposed her a willing supplanter like herself, and so he would not be apprehensive of any of her revelations. And he did not dream that Fritzi's rescuers were interested in Arlee.
At the strip of path the canoe made softly to shore and the two young men climbed out, while the Arab remained in the canoe, his single eye peering into the darkness. This time Billy had provided three stout, but narrow, ladders, constructed of two poles nailed together with occasional cross pieces that gave narrow room for a foot. He set one of these in place against the wall now, grounding its ends deep in the soft earth, so that it would remain in readiness for any sudden descent. Then from the top of the wall they reconnoitered the scene before them.
It was very dark. The garden was full of blotting shadows, and the long wing of the harem lay almost in darkness, with only a faint beam from two adjacent windows to reveal a sign of life. Those windows were on the third story, next the angle made by the union of the banquet hall and the harem, and Billy's heart quickened as he recognized the location of the rose room.
"That's it—that's her room," he whispered excitedly to Falconer.
Falconer stared and nodded. "I wish that beastly hall wasn't in the way ahead of us. I'd like to see what lights are in the windows in that court beyond."
"We might both go and take a look," said Billy doubtfully, "but I guess you had better make, straight for your roofs. It wouldn't do to have us both nabbed. Do you hear anything?"
They listened, crouching flat upon the wall, straining their eyes toward the palace. There was a high wind blowing and above them the leaves of the palm trees were slapping against each other, and below the shrubs and flowers were stirring restlessly. But the noise of the wind, they felt, was helpful to cover the sounds of their approach.
"Why can't I make my way around on top of this wall and climb on the roofs from the start?" Falconer questioned, and Billy answered, "I asked her that. She said it couldn't be done. You'd have to climb through some unsafe rubbish. The best way is down and up again in that angle that she showed me. Shall we start?"
The same impulse made both men examine their revolvers, then drop them in readiness into their right-hand coat pockets. They moved along the top of the wall till they reached the angle with the wall on their right, and then they lowered the same knotted rope which Billy had used the night before, but now another rope added to it made it into a rope ladder. Suspending that over the top of the wall by iron hooks, they slipped down it, each with a pole ladder in his arms, and with another hook of iron they drove the ends down into the earth, so that the rope would not wave out in the wind and either betray them or become displaced.
It was insecure enough, anyway, but they felt it ought to be left in readiness for a flight that might have no second to waste. Now, with eyes sharply challenging the shadows, they stole along the edge of the palace.
Staring up at the building, Billy stopped. "Here's a place a story and a half high—you could almost climb up by those carvings without any ladder. And there's the next higher roof back of it—and then you must go there to the left."
"I can make it," said Falconer, surely. "Now how much time shall I allow you for your sawing—fifteen minutes?"
"Guess you'd better," Billy reflected, and they compared watches.
It was tremendously difficult to arrive at any sort of concerted action on this bewildering expedition, but they were hoping to achieve it. Their plan had the simplicity of all desperate measures. One from below and one from above they were to make their way to that rose room and fight the way out with the girl. They considered it wiser to come from two directions, for if one were discovered and the alarm raised, the other had still a chance of getting off with Arlee, and if one were trying to escape, the other could cover his flight. They had drawn straws for their positions, and Billy had been slightly relieved that the entrance from below, which he considered a trifle more difficult, had fallen to him. He felt responsible, as well as he might, for Falconer's neck.
Now he steadied one narrow ladder of poles while Falconer crept up it and then drew it up after him; and after a few moments of waiting, crouched in the shadow, Billy saw the Englishman's figure reappear against the sky on top of a higher roof. The route over the old buildings had been found, so Billy turned and crept forward along the wall, carrying the last long ladder of poles in his hand. It was an unwieldy thing to carry and it distracted his attention harassingly.
"My job," said he to himself, "is evidently to make a racket and draw their fire from below while that red-headed chap carries Arlee off from above. Well, I hope to the Lord he does. When I think of her here——"
But it was unnerving to think of her here, so he didn't. He kept his mind steadily on the plan. He had reached the stone steps that led from the garden to the harem now, and laying down his pole-like ladder he slipped up them and turned the handle.
But the door was locked. Fearful lest the grating of the knob should have roused some watcher, he ran down the steps and hurried into the shadow of the banquet hall, where he stood close beside a pillar until he satisfied himself of the objects in the court beyond. He saw an edge of light along the crack of a closed door to the left on the ground floor of the selamlik, and in the higher stories above that a couple of windows showed a pale illumination. On the right, in the harem, only one window betrayed a ray of light. Altogether the old pile was as gloomy and gruesome as a tomb.
Billy stared across the court to where the columned vestibule, uniting the two Ls, indicated the door. He had been told a watchman slept there, but he could see nothing now but vague outlines of the arches of the vestibule. To the left was the open passage left for the entry of the automobile and horses, but this, too, was roofed so that a black shadow lay over it. But for that watchman Billy would have made his way to those doors to draw back the bars in readiness, but fearful of raising an alarm, he judged it was better to leave escape to chance and turn his attention to his entry.
He went back now for his ladder, and on the right side of the banquet hall, up under the arched roof, he discovered the wooden grating where Fritzi had described it. Against this wall he placed his ladder and climbed to the top, from which he could reach up and clasp the spindles of the grating above him.
He drew himself swiftly up to this, and the end of his pole was dislodged by his departure and fell to the inlaid pavement with a bang that seemed to him to carry to the farthest echoes of the sounding court. Instantly there was an answering clatter of steps.
Like a monkey Billy clung to the grating, thrusting his toes desperately into the first openings they could find, hanging on with his hands for dear life, holding himself as close up in the darkness as he could, and nearly twisting his neck off in the effort to watch what was going on below him.
The steps sounded nearer and nearer, and a huge Nubian in baggy bloomers and a short jacket was outlined in the court. His bare feet were thrust into clattering English shoes. He peered about him for a time, with one hand pointing the muzzle of a revolver. Billy caught the unpleasant gleam of it; then the man stepped in underneath the arches of the hall and made a slow way across it.
Directly in his path lay that fatal pole. It lay along the shadow of a column, but its end protruded beyond that shadow and would surely catch his eye. Billy tried to free his right hand to get at a gun of his own. To be caught ridiculously like this, clutching like a monkey on a stick——!
Another man, shorter and bent, in a long robe and carrying a lantern, now emerged from that door along whose closed edge Billy had noticed the crack of light, and the Nubian diverged toward him. The pole was unnoticed and the two joined forces and made a slow circle in the garden. Billy remembered that dangling rope, and with a thumping heart he hoped that it would hang unregarded in that shadowed angle, overrun with vines.
Apparently it did, for he heard the footsteps passing on without a stop as he clung there to his grating, his muscles cramped, his sockets strained. Slowly the two recrossed the hall, talking together in low gutturals and not apparently of unpleasant things, for a note of laughter sounded. They lingered in parley in the court, but by the time that he thought that he could not hang on a minute longer and would drop like a peach from the wall, they separated and each moved slowly away. The man with the lantern shut the door after him and all was darkness there and the great Nubian was blotted out beneath the arches of the vestibule.
The fear that Falconer was in the palace alone made Billy desperate. Clinging with his feet and his left hand, he drew out a clasp knife with a razor edge and hacked furiously at the delicate spindles and frail carved work of the screen till he could thrust one arm through the opening. The work was easier then, but he had to resist the temptation to seize the brittle stuff and break it in pieces, for fear the splintering sound would be too sharp.
Torn between caution and impatience he worked on, and as soon as the hole was large enough he pulled himself cautiously up and dropped over the edge into the cage-like balcony on the other side. The panel which separated it from the rest of the old room was half open, and he stepped through it into what appeared utter darkness.
He stood listening keenly, for he knew that he was standing below the rose room; the very spot where he was must be almost exactly beneath that secret passage outside the panel in the rose room's wall. Not a sound came down to him and he dared not wait longer, but turned to the left and passed through the arched doorway into the next great salon.
As his eyes grew accustomed to the dark he saw that it was not utter blackness, but that some wan light from the paler night without faintly penetrated through those jealously guarded windows—windows not so heavily screened, he had been told, as those upon the front of the palace, for these were upon the court. He found time for a flash of horror at this stifling barricade as he made his hurried way through the room and stepped out into the little anteroom beyond.
Here he paused, for he knew that to the left, ahead of him, was the curtained opening into the long salon upon the street, and within that, Fritzi had warned him, a eunuch sometimes slept or Seniha occasionally came from her small salon to play on the piano there and lingered apparently in wait. But no one seemed stirring, and Billy stole to the door on his right, opening on the encased stairs, and found it locked. Hurriedly he pried at it with a burglarious tool, and then a sudden outburst sounded overhead.
There was a racket of hurrying feet and then a muffled explosion of a shot. A hoarse voice yelled. Another shot, and then a thud of something falling.
Desperately Billy fired his gun into the lock. The noise did not matter now and might serve to divert the fight from Falconer. Throwing his weight against the shattered lock, he bounded up the narrow stairs and raced down the long hall to the door that was brightly gilded. From beyond, but fainter now, came the sounds of conflict. With a heart beating to suffocation he flung open the door and rushed into that room.