The Chain
I.
TROUBLE.
QUARRIER entered the taxi with an uneasy sense of crisis.
He was not imaginative; his digestion was excellent; even at forty, an age when most men nowadays have begun to feel the strain of fierce business competition, Quarrier was almost the man that he had been ten years in the past.
Nerves and Quarrier were strangers; he smoked his after-dinner cigar in a rigorous self-denial that made it his sole dissipation; he was in bed and asleep when other men were comfortably faring forth in search of such diversion as the metropolis had to offer.
But the face of that taxi-driver—he had seen it somewhere before. It was a dark, Italian face, with high cheekbones, and a straight, cruel mouth, like a wedge, between lean cheeks scarred and scabbed with late-healed cicatrices and pocked blue with powder burns.
Not an inviting face. And the taxi was old. Glancing at the cushions, as they had roared past an arc-light at the street corner, Quarrier had thought to see the dingy leather sown thick with stains, broad patches, as if—as if....
But pshaw! As he told himself, he was getting fanciful; perhaps his liver, at last, had played him false. A migraine, doubtless—he’d have a look in on old Peterby in the morning. Peterby was a good, plain old-fashioned practitioner—no nonsense about him....
He had gone to the offices of the Intervale Steel Company on a mission, an important one. As a matter of fact, it was vital—almost a matter of life and death. But he smiled grimly now in the dark recesses of the cab as he reflected that, as it chanced, his last-minute decision had left those documents where they would be beyond the reach of—Hubert Marston, for instance.
He had nothing on his person of any special value; he would be poor picking, indeed, if, as it chanced, that taxi-driver with the face of a bravo might, behind the sinister mask that was his face, be the thug he seemed, hired, perhaps, by the Panther of Peacock Alley.
An extravagant appellation, doubtless, but that was Marston: Suave, sinister, debonair—the social roturier equally with the manipulator. He had acquired the name naturally enough, for most of his operations were carried on in the hotels and clubs.
He had an office hard by the “Alley” and it was from its ornate splendor that he issued, on occasion, gardenia in buttonhole, cane hooked over his arm, dark face with its inscrutable smile flashing upon the habitués with what meaning only he could say. And he did not choose to tell.
And Marston had wanted those documents; they spelled the difference to him between durance and liberty—aye, between life and death....
For Hubert Marston had made the one slip that, soon or late, the most careful criminal makes: He had, yielding on a sudden to his one rare impulse of hate, commissioned the murder of a man who stood in his way, and—he had paid for it, as he had thought, in good crisp treasury notes, honest as the day, certainly! But the payment had been made at second—or third-hand—that was Marston’s way. And for once it had betrayed him.
For those documents—as he had found out, too late—were counterfeit treasury notes. The go-between had seen to that, paying the hired killer with them, and pocketing the genuine. And Quarrier, himself the watch-dog of those interests that Marston would have despoiled, (he had been retained by them for some time now as their private investigator) had found, first, the disgruntled bravo himself, obtained the spurious notes, together with the man’s confession, traced them backward to the go-between—and now, hard upon the arch-criminal’s heels, he waited only for the morning, and that which would follow.
Quarrier had given the driver a number in the West Eighties, but now, glancing from the window, his eyes narrowed with a sudden, swift concern.
“The devil!” he ejaculated, under his breath. “Now, if I thought—”
But the sentence was never completed. They were in a narrow, unfamiliar street; a street silent, tenantless, as it seemed, save for dark doorways, and here and there a furtive, drifting shadow-shape—the tall fronts of warehouses, with blind eyes to the night, silent, grim.
The echoing roar of the engine beat in a swift clamor against those iron walls—and suddenly, with a sort of click, he remembered where it was he had seen that lupine countenance—the dark face of the driver separated from him by the width of a single pane of glass.
It had been behind glass that he had seen it. A month or so previous, at the invitation of his friend, Gregory Vinson, captain of detectives (with whom he had formerly been associated, prior to his present connection), he had visited headquarters; and it had been there, in the gallery which is given over to rogues, that he had marked that face, its features, even among the many crooks, thugs, strong-arm men, yeggs, hoisters, pennyweighters, housemen, and scratchers. And now he remembered it when it was too late!
His right hand falling upon the butt of a blunt-nosed automatic, with which he was never without, with his left he jerked strongly at the handle of the door. But the door was locked; he could not open it.
Quarrier had been in a tight place more than once; danger he was not unacquainted with; it had been with him in broad daylight, in darkness, grinning at his elbow with dirk or pistol in the highways and byways of Criminopolis. He was a fighter—or he would not have won to the possession of those documents—the documents so greatly desired by Hubert Marston—the evidence of the one false step made by the Master of Chicane, the one slip that was to put him, ere the setting of another sun, where he would be safe.
Now Quarrier, his mouth a grim line, was reaching with the butt of his automatic to break that glass when, with a grinding of brakes the taxi whirled suddenly to a groaning halt.
The door swung open—to the windy night without, and the glimmer of a dark face at the curb.
“Here you are, sir,” Quarrier heard the voice, with, he was certain, a mocking quality in the quasi-deferential cadence. But he could see merely the face, behind it a black well of darkness, velvet black, save for the dim loom of a lofty building just across.
Quarrier did not know how many there might be, lurking there in the blackness, nor did he greatly care. The locked door; the face of the man at the wheel; the unfamiliar street—shanghaied by a land pirate, at the very least! There could be no doubt of it.
But it was no time for hesitation. If he were in the wrong, and it was all a mistake—well, he could afford to pay. But—the face of Marston arose before him, suave, sinister, smiling.... What was it the man had said, on the occasion of their last meeting at the Intervale offices:
“Possession, my dear Quarrier—possession is ten points of the lawless. Remember that!”
Quarrier remembered, and with the remembrance came a swift, sudden anger. But it was an anger that was controlled, as a flame is controlled—though it was none the less deadly.
“Here you are, sir,” repeated the voice, and now there was in it a something more than mockery. There was an edge, a rasp; almost it sounded like a command, an order.
Quarrier grinned then—a mere facial contraction of the lips. Then, muscle and mind and body, in one furious projectile, he launched himself outward through the doorway in a diving tackle.
The white face with its sneering grin was blotted out; there came the spank of a clean-cut blow; a turgid oath. Quarrier, rising from his knees, surveyed the limp figure on the cobbles with a twisted smile; then he turned, peering under his hand down a long tunnel of gloom, where, at the far end, a light showed, like a will-o-the-wisp beckoning him on.
He could not tell where he was. Somewhere in the Forties, he judged—Hell’s Kitchen, probably—although there was a curious lack of the life and movement boiling to full tide in that grim neighborhood of battle, murder, and sudden death.
But as his eyes became accustomed to the stifling dark he found the reason. It was a street of warehouses, public stores; and further on, as he looked, like a ribbon of pale flame against the violet sky, he saw the river.
He bent his steps away from it, walking carefully, picking his way on the uneven flagging. Twice, as he went forward, it seemed to him that he was watched—that eyes gazed at him out of the blackness; and twice he turned his head, swiftly to face the silence and the emptiness of the long, lonely way.
And it seemed, too, that as he went, the whispering echo of his hasty steps went on before him, and behind; he fell to counting them—and suddenly he knew. They were before him—and behind. He was in a trap.
There came a leaping, thunderous rush at his back, and a voice, screaming between the high walls:
“There he is! Now—go get ’im!”
And it was then that Quarrier, reaching for his pistol, discovered that it was gone; lost, doubtless, in that encounter with the taxi-driver. But he braced, spreading his arms wide as a grizzly meets the onslaught of wolves. But the wolves were many, and they came on now, a ravening pack; one, before the rest, looming as a black blot against the starshine, lunged forward with a growling oath.
The rest were yet some little distance away. Quarrier saw the man, or, rather, he sensed the nearness of that leaning shadow, spread-eagled like a bat against the dimness.... Then there came the sudden impact of fist on flesh—a straining heave—and Quarrier, diving under the hurtling figure, straightened, and hurled him outward and away.
The flying figure struck among the rest, head on, to a growling chorus of oaths, imprecations. But still they came on, thrusting, lunging; a gun crashed almost in Quarrier’s face.... There came a voice:
“No shooting, you fool! Th’ Big Gun says—”
The rest was lost as the pistol clattered to the cobbles. The center of a whirling tangle of fist and foot, to Quarrier it seemed that he fought in a nightmare that would have no end. He had gone to one knee under the impact of a swinging blow, when, from the far distance, there sounded the rolling rattle of a night-stick, with the clangor of the patrol.
Something gripped his ankle—something at once soft and hard. He lunged, full length, as a football player at the last desperate urge of his spent strength. Then he was on his feet, running, side-stepping, circling with the skill and desperate effort of a plunging half-back, stiff-arming the opposition to right and left.
Just ahead, the black maw of an alley, a deeper blot of blackness, loomed. In its heart, like a witch-fire, there swam upward a nebulous, faint glow as from the pit; out of the tail of his eye he saw it: The dim loom of a house, and an open door.
He reached the turn—and a figure uprose before him, even in that darkness brutish, broad, thewed like a grizzly. The great arm rose, once; it fell, like the hammer of Thor.
Quarrier lurched, stiffened, buckling inward at the knees in a loose-jointed, slumping fall.
II.
Hangman’s Hold.
QUARRIER came to himself, all his faculties at full tide.
It was smothering dark—a darkness not merely of the night but of a prison-house, silent, musty with the stale odor of decay and death. Near at hand, after a moment, he heard a slow, ceaseless dripping, like the beating of a heart, or the slow drip-drip of a life that was running out, drop by single drop.
The fancy seemed logical enough; there seemed nothing of the fantastic in it; Quarrier waited, there in the smothering dark, for the quick knife-thrust that would mean the end—or the deadening impact of the slung-shot.
But, unimaginative as he was, like a man who has but lately undergone the surgeon’s scalpel he feared to move, to feel, even while he assured himself that he was unhurt save for the throbbing in his temples, and the very bruises that he felt upon him, but would not touch.
But there was something else. After a little his hesitant, exploring fingers found it. The length of line bent in a sort of running bowline about his shoulders and arms. And behind him, from a staple in the wall, it hung, sliding like a snake in the thick darkness.
He moved his head, slowly, carefully, like a man testing himself for an invisible hurt. And then—
“Ha!” he breathed, deep in his throat, the shadow of a cry. For, moving an inch further to the right, it would have been a noose, tightening as he moved, strangling him there, choking him out of sound and sense.
Brave as he was, Quarrier shivered, his shoulders twitching with the thought. And it was not cold. Moving with an infinite caution, he ran his exploring fingers along the hempen strands.
Whoever had devised that noose had been a sailor. And only a sailor could undo it.
And there in the dark, trussed as he was, at the mercy of what other peril he knew not. Quarrier permitted himself the ghost of a grin. His hand went up, slowly, carefully, the fingers busy with the rope; there came a tug, and, coiling at his feet like a snake, the noose slid slithering along the stones.
Quarrier was not a praying man, in the ordinary sense, but now he sent heavenward a silent aspiration of gratitude for the impulse which, years previous, had prompted his signing on as a foremast hand in the China seas. And the long hours in the doldrums, below the line, had, as it proved, been anything but wasted.
Now, easing his cramped muscles in a preliminary stretching, he rose gingerly to his feet, moving with the stealth and caution of an Indian. He was free of that constricting rope, but as he moved forward, groping, just ahead there came to him a sudden murmur of voices, low, like the growling of savage beasts. There was that sort of note in it: A fierce, avid mutter, and presently, as he advanced, he made out here and there a word.
“Th’ Big Gun.... You better watch your step.... Mar—”
Quarrier found himself in a sort of corridor, at the far end of which proceeded the voices. It had all been done in the dark, so to speak. The taxi, that driver with the face familiar and yet unfamiliar, the attack, and now this. But time pressed. Why they had not murdered him out of hand he did not pause to consider; he knew only that Marston—and he was certain that it was Marston’s hand that had been in it—would, with a clear field, be at the hiding-place of those documents. Even now, doubtless, he was there.
Quarrier felt mechanically for his pistol; and then his hand dropped hopelessly as he remembered that he was weaponless.
He listened tensely, holding his breath, as the voices receded—or, rather, one of them; he could hear the other following the departing man with his complaints.
Evidently they had left a guard of two. One of them was going; the other left behind, and not especially delighted with his job.
An abrupt turn of the long hallway brought this man suddenly into plain view.
Quarrier blinked in the glare from the single incandescent, flattening himself against the wall; then, with a pantherish pace, he had covered the intervening space in three lunging strides.
The man, a broad fellow with a seamed, lead-colored countenance, turned his head; his mouth opened, his hand going to his pocket with a lightning stab of the blunt, hairy fingers.
But Quarrier had wasted no time. Even as the giant reached for his gun Quarrier’s fist swung in a short arc, and there was power in it. The blow, traveling a scant six inches, crashed full on the point; the thick-set man, his eyes glazing, swayed, slipped, fell in an aimless huddle.
“Well—a knockout!” panted Quarrier, reaching for the pistol.
Marston was the “Big Gun”, of course. Quarrier had never doubted it; but hitherto the President of Intervale Steel had conducted his brokerage business, on the surface at any rate, without resort to open violence. And Intervale Steel—You knew really nothing about it until you took a flyer in it; then, as it might chance, you knew enough and more than enough.
Quarrier, glancing at the unconscious man and pocketing the pistol, departed without more ado; proceeding along the hall, he found, with no further adventure, a narrow door, and the pale stars, winking at him from, he judged, a midnight horizon.
But a glance at his watch told him that it was but nine-thirty; there was yet time to get to the hiding-place of those documents ahead of Marston, if, as he was now convinced, it had been Marston’s thugs who had ambushed him.
Plunging along the shadowy alley, after five minutes’ walk, made at a racing gait, he found a main-traveled avenue and an owl taxi, whose driver, leaning outward, crooked a finger in invitation to this obvious fare, appearing out of the dark.
Quarrier did not hesitate. The fellow might be a gunman or worse; he must take his chance of that.
“Twenty-three Jones!” he called crisply, with the words diving into the cab’s interior; then, his head out of the window, as the taxi turned outward from the curb:
“And drive as if all hell were after you!”
III.
The Shape Invisible.
QUARRIER reached his destination without incident, but as he went up the winding stairway of the office building to his private sanctum he was oppressed by an uneasy sense that all was not as it should be. Those elevators—they were seldom out of order. Perhaps....
But, panting a little from his climb, he found his floor, and the door of his private office.
For just a split second he hesitated; then, unlocking the door, he flung it wide and went in.
And then, for the third time that evening, he had another shock: for, almost from the moment of his entry into that sound-proof chamber, he knew that he was not alone.
For a moment, there in the blaze from the electrolier, lighted by the opening of the door, he stood rigid, listening, holding his breath; crouched, bent forward like a sprinter upon his mark.
Quarrier was a big man, and well muscled; in his day he had been an amateur boxer of repute. For a big man, he was quick, well-poised, supple and controlled.
A brain of ice and nerves of steel—that was Quarrier. And at that moment he stood in need of them.
He had heard nothing, felt nothing, seen nobody—and yet he knew, beyond any possibility of doubt, that someone or something was with him there in that sound-proof chamber, thirty stories above the street. And the knowledge—as certain as the fact that he, Quarrier, as yet lived and breathed—the knowledge that he was not alone was not reassuring. It was fantastic, it was incredible—but it was true!
Everything in that private office was in plain sight; shelter there was none for any possible intruder; and yet, by the very positive evidence of his eyes he knew, and his pulses quickened at the thought, that he was not alone.
It had been Quarrier’s fancy to rent the small suite on the top floor of the out-of-the-way office building. He liked the view; the rooms were remote; they suited his purpose; they were private. Anything could happen here, and no one be the wiser: the crash of a heavy .45, for instance, would not penetrate an inch outward beyond those sound-proof walls. And a cry, a shout would be lost there just as a stone is lost, dropped downward into a deep well of silence—and of oblivion.
Now, if Quarrier’s man, Harrison, a soft-footed, super-efficient body-servant, had not kept on his hat; or if, say, he had not had a particularly abundant shock of hair, added to the fact that although an excellent servant, he was somewhat deaf; and if, too, he had not, for once, walked and worked in deviousness—this chronicle would have had a very different ending—for Quarrier, at any rate.
His hand in the pocket of his coat, the fingers curled about the butt of the automatic that he had taken from the guard back there in the cellar, Quarrier, frowning, surveyed the room in a slow, searching appraisal. Those documents—he had to make certain of them.
From left to right, as his gaze went round the chamber, he saw a book-case, a full-length canvas, done in oils, the double windows, a door, locked with a huge, old-fashioned key, leading into a lumber-room just beyond, a small wall safe, his desk—which completed the circle.
The room was in itself a safe. It was like a fort: The windows were protected by sheet-steel aprons similar to the burglar-guards used by bank tellers; the main entrance door, through which Quarrier had entered, and which opened upon the corridor and the elevators, was of steel, with a patent spring combination lock; the other door, leading to the lumber-room, was also of steel, locked, however, with a huge, old-fashioned key, but this latter door had never been in use since Quarrier’s occupancy.
Nothing short of an acetylene blowpipe could have penetrated the walls, the ceiling, the floor, but they were smooth, unmarred by scratch or tell-tale stain.
Now, to understand events as they occurred:
Quarrier was in his private sanctum, his office; it adjoined the lumber-room at the right. And a simple diagram may serve perhaps better than a page of explanation:
The electrolier, blazing from its four nitro lamps, illumined every nook and cranny of that office; shed its blazing effulgence upon Quarrier, standing like a graven image before that wall safe. And as he stood there, for the first time in his well-ordered existence a prey to fear, a face rose out of his consciousness; he heard again the voice of Marston, President of Intervale Steel:
“You have them, my dear Quarrier; keep them—safe.”
Quarrier had never liked Marston; the man was elusive, like an eel; you never saw his hand: it was impossible to guess what moved behind the mask-like marble of his face, expressionless always, cold, contained.
But Quarrier had the “documents,” or, rather, they were there, in that wall safe, in itself a small fort of chrome-nickel steel and manganese against which no mere “can-opener” could have prevailed—no torch, even.
Now, as he operated the combination, he was abruptly sensible of a curious sensation of strain; a shock; the short hairs at the back of his neck prickled suddenly as if at the touch of an invisible, icy finger. And for a moment he could have sworn to a Presence just behind him—a something in ambush grinning at his back—a danger, a real and daunting peril, the greater that it was unmeasured and unknown.
But with his fingers upon that dial, Quarrier half turned as if to depart. He was getting jumpy, his nerves out of hand—too much coffee and too many strong cigars, perhaps. That was it. That kidnapping; it might, after all, have had nothing to do with Marston. The documents were safe—they simply had to be. Unless Marston had been there, and gone; but he would scarcely have had time.
Perhaps, too, Quarrier might have obeyed the impulsion of that turning movement, and in that case, also, this story would never have been written. Quarrier might have done this, but for the moment, practical and sanely balanced as he was, for a split second he had the fancy that if he turned his head he would see—something that was not good, that was not—well—normal.
It was instinctive, elemental, rather than rational, and, getting himself in hand, he would, doubtless, have turned abruptly, leaving the room, if, at that moment, out of the tail of his eye, he had not seen the inescapable evidence of a presence other than his own.
IV.
The Silent Witness.
QUARRIER was a large man, and hard-muscled, a dangerous adversary in a rough-and-tumble, a “good man with his hands,” as we have seen; young, and a quick thinker.
In the half of a second it came to him that Marston might have delegated his authority (at second- or third-hand, certainly) to some peterman, some yegg, say, to obtain possession of those documents. But the fellow would have to be a boxman par excellence; that strong-box was the last word in safes, and, Quarrier was certain, the final one.
No ordinary houseman could hope to break into it, and the marauder would have to depend upon a finger sandpapered to the quick, hearing microscopically sensitive, to catch, through that barrier of steel and bronze, the whispering fall of those super-tumblers.
And abruptly following this suggestion, a second and a more daunting thought obtruded: Suppose—just suppose, that their design held no intention of an assault upon the safe; suppose that their plan, the purpose of that nameless, invisible Presence, had included, in the first place, him—Quarrier? In case, after all, he had managed to escape the trap back there in the cellar? Why—they would use him; that was it! They would force him to open the safe. The thing was simple; there was about it, even, a suggestion of sardonic humor, but it was a humor that did not appeal to Quarrier.
Upon the instant he swung round, crouching, his hand reaching for his pocket in a lightning stab, and coming up, level, holding the short-barrelled automatic.
Then his mouth twisted in a mirthless grin as his straining gaze beheld the square room empty under the lights.
A moment he stood, his keen, strong, thoughtful face etched deep with new lines of worry, ears strained against the singing silence, eyes turning from door to door, and from wall to window, a pulse in his temple throbbing jerkily to his hard-held breath. He began the circuit of the room. Walking on tiptoe, he approached the door by which he had entered, thrust into its socket the great bolt. The bolt seemed really unnecessary; the lock in itself, a spring-latch affair, was devised so that it held the stronger for pressure from without.
The snick of steel against steel rang startlingly loud in the speaking stillness; for a moment Quarrier had a curious fancy, a premonition almost, that it was a wasted precaution—that, in effect, he was locking and double locking that door upon an empty room—an empty strong-box. Pistol in hand, however, and starting from the door, he began his round.
The book-case he passed with a cursory examination; nothing there. Next the painting; a portrait of his great-uncle; it held him for a moment; those eyes had always held him; they were “following” eyes; and now for a moment it seemed to Quarrier that they held a warning, a message, a command. But he passed on....
A heavy leather settle was next in order. With a sheepish grimace he stooped, peering under it, straightened, going on to the double windows. That settle had been innocent of guile, but as to the windows—he paused an interval while he thumbed the patent steel catches. These were shut tight, the windows black, glimmering squares against the windy night without.
Throwing off the locks, one after the other, he pushed up the first window, released the steel outer apron, and then, in the very act of leaning outward into the black well beneath, he drew back, with a quick, darting glance over his shoulder as his spine prickled at a sudden, daunting thought.
What was that?
For a heartbeat at his back he thought to hear a rustle, a movement, like the shuffle of a swift, stealthy footfall, on the heavy pile of the Kermanshah rug.
But once more there was nothing—no one.
It was thirty stories to the street beneath, and as he leaned there in the window his imagination upon the instant had swayed out down to the dreadful peril of the sheer, sickening fall.
How simple it would have been for someone behind him—how easy....
He shivered, the sweat beading his forehead in a fine mist of fear. A hand on his ankle—a quick heave—and then a formless blur against the night—the plunge—into nothingness....
Turning to the right, he surveyed the heavy door leading to the lumber-room. He tried the great key, rattling the knob. The door was locked; it was heavy, solid, substantial. A quick frown wrinkled his forehead.
“Absurd!” he muttered, but there was an odd lack of conviction in the word. “Impossible!” he said again. “There’s nobody in the room except myself; there couldn’t be.”
But even as he spoke he knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that someone or something had occupied that room but a matter of seconds prior to his entry, and if he, or whatever it was, was not there now, where was this invisible presence?
The presence in the room of another than himself was a physical impossibility unless, indeed, there was, after all, a fourth dimension, into which as a man passes from sunlight into shadow, the intruder had stepped, perhaps now regarding him sardonically from that invisible plane: A living ghost!
Absurd! And yet, there was that other fact—he had seen it: the silent, the voiceless, yet moving witness—the positive and irrefutable proof of a presence other than his own.
THERE, in a locked, bolted, impregnable chamber, unmarked by the least sign of entry—a main door which did not have a key, responding only to a combination known only to himself—a secondary door most obviously locked, and from the inside; windows of thick glass, triple locked with the latest in patent catches—someone or something had entered, passing, as it seemed, through bolts and bars, through walls, through steel and stone and concrete, like a djinn, or a wraith—through the keyhole?
Matter-of-fact as he was, hard-headed and practical, Quarrier was aware for an instant of a flicker of almost superstitious fear. But—rot! In all the space confined by those four walls and ceiling and floor there was not room for concealment even for a—cat, for instance—for nothing human, at any rate. It was beyond him, even as the Thing that had entered was beyond him, though at hand.
Quarrier did not believe in the supernatural with his mind; but, brave as he was by nature and training, in that moment he knew fear. But he preferred, with his intelligence, to credit Marston with it; Marston, so far as morals were considered, might have been almost anything: you saw it in his curious eyes, with their pale irises, the flat, dead color of his skin, like the belly of a snake; in the grim, traplike mouth. Quarrier had never deceived himself as to the President of Intervale Steel. The thing was fantastic, unreal—and yet. It might easily be a trap, and worse. Peril, the more subtile because unknown, was all about him; he felt it, like an emanation. What was it that the psychological sharps would call it? An aura, as of some invisible and deadly presence, seeing, although unseen.
V.
Through The Keyhole.
THE ROOM, or office, as has been written, was impregnable to any but an assault in force, the doors invincible save by the shattering crash of high explosive, the windows almost equally so.
Quarrier’s man, Harrison, even, would be unable to enter the room in his employer’s absence; so that, knowing the combination of the safe, he could take nothing from it, or bring anything into it. He left, in the rare intervals that Quarrier suffered his ministrations, always with his master, returning likewise, if he returned at all, in Quarrier’s company.
The recluse had hedged himself about with care. Marston, with his keen, devising brain, would face a pretty problem in the recovery of those documents.
But it was when, on an abrupt inspiration, Quarrier removed the telephone receiver from its hook, that he became certain that it was a trap.
“Give me Schuyler 9000,” he had whispered, his voice hoarse in the blanketing silence. But even with the words he knew that the line was dead, yet it was characteristic of Quarrier that, once satisfied that this was so, he resumed his inventory of the office where he had left off.
He had completed the circuit of the chamber with the exception of the wall safe and the small, flat-topped writing-desk by the door. From his position he could see the desk quite easily; there was nothing and nobody either on or under it. And now, before he twirled the combination, he laid his hand upon the doors, pulling at the handles in a perfunctory testing. And then—
He recoiled, stumbling backward, as the doors swung wide with a jarring clang. Fingers trembling, he jerked forward a drawer—put in his hand. He withdrew it—empty. Confronted with the incredible truth—the thing which he had feared and yet had not believed—he stood, stunned. For the documents had vanished!
Even in the midst of his excitement and dismay, Quarrier permitted himself the ghost of a faint, wintry grin. But a few hours before he had himself bestowed those papers in their particular resting-place, and, observing a precaution to make assurance doubly sure, he had stationed a guard at the street level, men whom he could trust. For, in the morning he had meant to transfer those documents to that repository in the West Eighties from which Marston would never be able to retrieve them, for with their receipt would come the final quietus of the President of Intervale Steel. And that was why Quarrier had called that number, which had not answered.
Now the documents were gone and Marston was safe. But there remained a final thin thread of hope, and it was this:
The building, a new one, stood alone; Quarrier owned it; his enemies had in some obscure fashion obtained that which they sought. And—this being so—they were in the building.
Quarrier’s orders to that guard had not included the stoppage or detention of any seeking ingress. On entering, he had been informed merely that perhaps half a dozen, all told, had possibly preceded him. They had trapped him—perhaps they might even succeed in expunging him from the record together with the evidence, but they—Marston and the rest—some or all of them were in the building; they had to be.
He grinned again, a swift, tigerish grin, as he considered the trifling clue which had betrayed them. But for that he would never have discovered the looting of the safe.
And it was then, as he stood, turned a little from the safe and facing the heavy door giving on the lumber-room, that he straightened, tense, bending to the keyhole.
The door was sound-proof, as were the walls, but abruptly, as a sound heard in dreams, he had heard it: At the keyhole, a sound, or the shadow of a sound, faint and thin, but unmistakable, like the beating of a heart.
And that sound had gone on, faint and thin, as though muffled through layers of cotton wool, persistent, regular—the faint, scarce-audible ticking of a watch.
For a moment, even while he considered and dismissed the thought that they might have planted a time-bomb against that door, Quarrier hesitated. And then, abruptly, he knew: They were in the lumber-room; he had surprised them; doubtless they waited, hidden, for his exit. He had been too quick for them; they had not counted on his escape from that cellar, and if that were so, he, Quarrier, would have something to say as to their getaway.
Silent, his automatic ready, he had opened the door into the corridor with a slow, stealthy caution. Then he was in the corridor, searching the thick-piled shadows, where, at the far end, a light hung between floor and ceiling like a star. A silence held, thick, heavy, mournful, daunting, as he began his advance—a silence burdened with a tide of threat, sinister, whispering, alive.
Just ahead of him was the first of the great batteries of elevators. A pressure upon the call-bell, and in a moment he would have with him men upon whom he could rely, men who would execute his least order without question. And then, remembering, he desisted.
For he found it easy to believe that the same agency which had silenced his telephone might have cut him off here also from communication, but his finger, reaching for the signal, jerked backward, as, out of the corner of his eye, he beheld a lance of light spring suddenly from the crusted transom of the lumber-room door.
Were they coming out?
“Ha!” he breathed, deep in his throat.
He did not pause to consider how many of them there might be, or that his faithful guardians of the gate, thirty stories below, were probably silenced by the same sinister hand.
Silently, his gun held rigid as a rock, he approached the lumber-room door; then, a step away, he paused, with a sharp intake of his breath.
Here, six paces at his left, a narrow corridor led to a fire-alarm box and a window directly overlooking the main entrance and the street. Quarrier, back to the wall, thrust up a groping hand to where, just above his head, a light cluster hung. Three of the bulbs he unscrewed; then, going to the window, opened it, leaned outward, and, with intervals between, dropped them downward into the dark.
Then, pistol in hand, his feet silent upon the concrete flooring of the corridor, he approached the lumber-room door.
On hands and knees, he listened a moment at the keyhole; then, still on his knees, his fingers, reaching, turned the knob, slowly, with an infinite caution, in his face new creases, grim lines. His face bitter, bleak, mouth hard, he straightened, got to his feet, thrust inward the heavy door with one lightning movement; stepped into the lumber-room, his gun, swung in a short arc, covering the two who faced him across the intervening space.
“Those documents, Marston,” he commanded bruskly, “I can—use them.”
His gaze, for a fleeting instant, turned to the other man, who, hands clenched at his sides, his eyes wide with sudden terror and unbelief, stared dumbly at the apparition in the doorway.
But Marston, his face gray, his hand hidden in his pocket, shrugged, sneered wryly, his hand thrust out and upward with the speed of light.
But, for the difference between time and eternity, he was not quick enough. There came a double report, roaring almost as one: Marston’s sneer blurred to a stiff, frozen grimace; he swayed, leaning forward, his face abruptly blank; then, in a slumping fall, he crashed downward to the floor.
Quarrier stooped, swept up the papers where they had fallen from the dead man’s pocket; then he turned curtly upon his body-servant.
“You may go, Harrison,” he said, as if dismissing the man casually at the end of his day’s service.
But if Harrison felt any gratitude for the implied reprieve, he turned now to Quarrier with an eager gesture, his speech broken, agonized:
“He—you must listen, sir—Mr. Quarrier,” he begged. “He—Mr. Marston—he knew me when—he knew about....”
His voice broke, faltered.
“Well—?” asked Quarrier, coldly, his face expressionless.
“Mr. Marston,” continued the man—“he knew—my record—I was afraid to tell you, sir. He—he found out, somehow, that I’d—been—done time, sir.... He scared me, I’ll admit—he threatened me—threatened to tell you.... You didn’t know, of course....”
“Yes—I knew,” explained Quarrier, simply, and at the expression in his master’s face the valet’s own glowed suddenly as if lighted from within.
“You—knew—” he murmured.
VI.
Chain of Circumstance.
“BUT there is one thing you can tell me,” Quarrier was saying. “You had the combination of the safe, of course; we’ll say nothing more about that—but—how did you get in?”
Harrison bent his head.
“Well, sir,” he explained, after a moment, “it was simple, but I’d never have thought of it but for—him.” He pointed to the silent figure on the floor.
“Well—there are just three doors, sir, as you know,” he resumed. “The entrance door of your office, with the combination lock; the entrance door of the lumber-room here, both giving on the corridor; and the inside door between the lumber-room and your office. We couldn’t get into the office by the entrance door from the hall on account of the combination lock, but we could and did get into the lumber-room easily enough from the corridor—the door’s not even locked, as you know, sir. And that’s how we got into the private office—from the lumber-room, here, through the door between.”
“But how—?” began Quarrier. “That door is a steel one; it was locked—I’ll swear to that. You didn’t jimmy it; you didn’t have a Fourth Dimension handy, did you, Harrison? But—go on; it’s beyond me, I’ll confess.”
Harrison permitted himself the ghost of a grin.
“Why—just a newspaper, and a bit of wire, sir—that was how it was done. I didn’t dare unlock the connecting door—beforehand, sir—from the office side; I never had the chance. I was never alone in the office, sir, even for a second, as you know; but there’s a clearance of nearly half an inch, sir, beneath that connecting door—just enough for the newspaper. From the lumber-room here I pushed the paper under the door, into the office, and then, with the wire, it wasn’t so difficult to push the key out of the lock; the door was locked from the office side, of course.
“The key fell on the paper; we pulled the paper with the key on it back under the door, sir, into the lumber-room here, and—we just unlocked the connecting door there, and walked into the office. Afterwards I locked the door again, from the office side, and I just did make it out the front door of the office, when I heard your step on the stair. He was waiting for me in the lumber-room; he said it was safer. Anyway, I just did make it along the hall and into the lumber-room by the hall entrance before you came.”
He paused, a queer expression in his face.
“But I don’t understand how you knew, if you’ll excuse me, sir—how you suspected. Afterward, from the corridor, you saw our light when we were ready to come out; we thought you’d gone for good, of course.... But nothing was touched, sir, except—that is—of course—” He stumbled.
Quarrier silenced him with upraised hand.
“I didn’t suspect, Harrison—I knew,” he said. “And I heard, through the keyhole of that connecting door, the ticking of that watch of yours; it’s big enough. That helped, of course. But that was afterward. There was one little thing you overlooked, and, for the matter of that, so did I—nearly.”
There came the sound of heavy footsteps on the concrete flooring of the corridor, voices: His guards, summoned by Quarrier’s “light-bombs.”
Quarrier continued, as if he had not heard:
“Well—it was right under my eyes, but I almost missed it, at that. I saw it moving, and I knew that something must have made it move.”
He paused, with a faint grimace of recollection.
“You see—you had your hat on in the office, didn’t you?... Yes, I thought so. You’re a bit deaf, too.... Well, you should have been—to Marston. But that’s past. And you have a good, thick crop of hair—so far.”
Quarrier smiled frostily. “Well, you struck against it and set it moving—that was all. You never noticed it. Because it was—the chain from the electrolier, Harrison, and that was how—”
“You caught us, sir! I—I’m glad. You might call it a—”
“—Chain of circumstance,” finished Quarrier, his eyes outward, gazing into the new dawn.
The
Place of Madness
By Merlin Moore Taylor
“NONSENSE. A penitentiary is not intended to be a place for coddling and pampering those who have broken the law.”
Stevenson, chairman of the Prison Commission, waved a fat hand in the direction of the convict standing at the foot of the table.
“This man,” he went on, “has learned in some way that the newspapers are ‘gunning’ for the warden and he is seizing the opportunity to make a play for sympathy in his own behalf. I’ll admit that these tales he tells of brutality toward the prisoners are well told, but I believe that he is stretching the facts. They can’t be true. Discipline must be maintained in a place like this even if it requires harsh measures to do it at times.”
“There is no call for brutality, however,” exclaimed the convict, breaking the rule that prisoners must not speak unless they are spoken to.
Then, ignoring the chairman’s upraised hand, he went on: “We are treated like beasts here! If a man so much as opens his mouth to ask a civil and necessary question, the reply is a blow. Dropping a knife or a fork or a spoon at the table is punished by going without the next meal. Men too ill to work are driven to the shops with the butts of guns. Petty infractions of the most trivial rules mean the dark cell and a diet of bread and water.
“Do you know what the dark cell is? ‘Solitary’ they call it here. ‘Hell’ would be a better name. Steel all around you, steel walls, steel door, steel ceiling, steel floor. Not a cot to lie upon, not even a stool to sit upon. Nothing but the bare floor. And darkness! Not a ray of light ever penetrates the dark cell once the door is closed upon you. No air comes to you except through a small ventilator in the roof. And even that has an elbow to keep the light away from you.
“Is it any wonder that even the most refractory prisoner comes out of there broken—broken in mind, in body, in spirit? And some of them go insane—stark, staring mad—after only a few hours of it. And for what? I spent two days in ‘solitary’ because I collapsed from weakness at my bench in the shoe factory.
“See this scar?” He pointed to a livid mark over one eye. “A guard did that with the barrel of his rifle because I was unable to get up and go back to work when he told me. He knocked me senseless, and when I came to I was in ‘solitary.’ Insubordination, they called it. Two days they kept me in there when I ought to have been in a hospital. Two days of hell and torture because I was ill. People prate of reforming men in prison. It’s the other way around. It makes confirmed criminals of them—if they don’t go mad first.”
The chairman wriggled in his seat and cleared his throat impatiently.
“We have listened to you for quite a while, my man,” he said pompously, “but I, for one, have enough. A dozen or more prisoners have testified here today, and none of them has made a statement to back up the charges you have made.”
“And why?” demanded the prisoner. “Because they are afraid to tell the truth. They know that they would be beaten and starved and deprived of their ‘good time’ on one excuse or another if they even hinted at what they know. You wouldn’t believe them, anyhow. You don’t believe me, yet I probably shall suffer for what I have said here. But that doesn’t matter. They can’t take any ‘good time’ away from me. I’m in for life.”
His voice grew bitter.
“And that is one reason I have gone into this thing in detail—for my sake and the sake of others who cannot look forward to ever leaving this place. The law has decreed that we shall live and die here, but the law said nothing about torturing us.”
“This board guaranteed its protection to all who were called upon to testify here,” answered the chairman. “It has no desire to whitewash any person in connection with the investigation which is being made, and in order that there might be no reflection upon the manner in which this hearing is conducted neither the warden, his deputies nor guards have been permitted to attend. Unless you have tangible evidence to offer us and can give the names of those who can back up your charges, you may go.”
“Just a minute.” It was the board member nearest the prisoner who interrupted. Then, to the convict, “You said, I believe, that only a few hours in the dark cell often will drive a man insane. Yet you spent two days there. You are not insane, are you?”
“No, sir.” The convict spoke respectfully. “My conscience was clear and I was able to serve my time there without breaking. But another day or so would have finished me. You testified against me at my trial, didn’t you? I hold no grudge against you for that, sir. I give you credit for doing only what you thought was your duty. Your testimony clinched the case against me. Yet I am innocent—”
The chairman rapped sharply upon the table.
“I utterly fail to see what all this has to do with the matter under investigation,” he protested irritably. “We are not trying this man’s case. The courts have passed upon that. He is just like all the rest. Any one of them is ready to swear on a stack of Bibles that he is innocent. Let’s get on with this investigation.”
The convict bowed silently and turned toward the door beyond which the guards were waiting to conduct him back to his cell. A hand upon his arm detained him.
“Mr. Chairman,” said Blalock, the member who had questioned the prisoner, “I request that this man be permitted to go on with what he was saying. I shall have no more questions to ask. You were saying”—he prompted the man beside him.
“I was saying that I was innocent,” resumed the convict. “I was about to add that not even a man who is guiltless of wrongdoing would be able to withstand the terrors of solitary for any length of time. You, for instance, are a physician, a man of sterling reputation against whom no one ever has breathed a word. Yet I doubt that you could endure several hours in the dark cell. If you would only try it, you would know for yourself that I have spoken the truth. Gentlemen, I beg of you to do all in your power to abolish the dark cell. Men can stand just so much without cracking, and if you will dig into the facts you will find that nine times out of ten it is men broken in ‘solitary’ who are responsible for the outbreaks in prison. That is all.”
He bowed respectfully and was gone.
“CLEVER TALKER, that fellow,” commented the secretary of the commission, breaking the silence. “He almost had me believing him. Who is he, Blalock? You had him summoned, I believe.”
The physician nodded.
“I confess it was as much from personal interest in the man as from any hope that he might give valuable evidence here,” he said. “He surprised me with his outburst. He is a clever talker. Ellis is his name—Martin Ellis—and he comes of a splendid and well-to-do family. University graduate and quite capable of having carved out a wonderful career. But he was idolized at home and given more money than was good for him. It made him an idler and a young ne’er-do-well. But whatever he did he did openly, and I never heard of anything seriously wrong until he was convicted of the crime which brought him here.”
“Murder, I suppose?” Stevenson, the chairman, was interested in spite of himself. “He spoke of being in for life.”
“Yes; killing a girl. Agnes Keller was her name. Poor, but well thought of. Church worker, member of the choir and so on. It was brought out at the trial—in fact, Ellis told it himself—that he was infatuated with her and they were together a great deal. Not openly, of course, because old man Ellis, his father, would have pawed up the earth. The affair ended like all these clandestine affairs, specially if the girl is young and pretty and poor. It was the theory of the prosecution that when she discovered her condition she became frantic and demanded that Ellis marry her, the alternative being that she would go to his father with the story. It was charged that he killed her to avoid making a choice. The evidence against him was purely circumstantial, but the jury held it was conclusive.
“Ellis admitted on the stand that they often went riding in his motor-car at night. One damning fact against him was that he was seen driving, alone and rapidly, along the country lane near where her body was found. He had nothing to back up his claim that he felt ill and went for a drive in an effort to relieve a sick headache. Of course he denied absolutely that he was responsible for her condition, or that he even knew of it, but the jury was out less than an hour. The only hitch, I learned later, was whether to affix the death penalty or not.”
“He said you were a witness against him. What part did you play?” asked Stevenson.
“An unwilling one,” answered Blalock, quickly. “I did not believe that Ellis was guilty then. I am not convinced of it now. But as the girl’s physician, and presumably one of those to whom she would go in her trouble, I was questioned as soon as the coroner had held an autopsy. I admitted that she had confided in me and that I had agreed that the man responsible should marry her. She did not tell me his name, but my evidence added weight to the theory that Ellis killed her to avoid marrying her.”
The door to the room swung open and the warden stood on the threshold.
“May I come in?” he asked. “Dinner is almost ready and I thought I had better give you warning.”
He crossed to an empty chair and sat down.
“We concluded the taking of evidence quite a little while ago,” said the chairman. “Since then Dr. Blalock has been entertaining us with the story of the crime of that fellow Martin Ellis who was one of the witnesses. Quite unusual.”
“Yes, the sheriff who brought him here told me all about it,” answered the warden. “He’s hard to handle. Had trouble with one of the guards a while back and we had to discipline him.”
“Two days in the solitary cell on bread and water, wasn’t it?” asked Blalock. “He didn’t have any good words for it.”
The warden flushed.
“Few of those who taste of it do,” he admitted. “Too much a matter of being left alone with your thoughts and your conscience. They’ll punish you as much as anything can do. Well, suppose you take an adjournment and come on to dinner? Will you want to make the regular inspection tour of the prison?”
“Oh, sure,” yawned the chairman. “Undoubtedly, everything is all right, as usual, but if we omitted it the newspapers would have something to howl about.”
He rose, and, with the rest of the commission trailing them, followed the warden to the dining-room.
“Well, let’s make the inspection and have it over with,” Stevenson suggested, when the meal was finished. “Where do we go first, warden?”
“Through the shops and smaller buildings first, then the cells. That way you’ll end up closest to the administration building and you can go back into conference with the least delay.”
Uniformed guards stood smartly at attention as the warden piloted the commission through. “Trusties” ingratiatingly hovered about the party, eager to be of service. Great steel-barred doors swung open at the approach of the commission and clanged to noisily behind it. The afternoon sunlight, slanting through the bars, relieved the somberness of the cell blocks and revealed them in their spick-and-spanness, made ready for the occasion.
“Well, everything seems to be O. K.,” said the chairman, as the party again drew near to the offices. “Anyone else got any suggestions?”
“Yes, I’d like to see the dark cell,” answered the secretary. “I don’t recall ever visiting it, and that fellow Ellis interested me. He said it was a pocket edition of Hades. Where is it, warden?”
The warden assumed a jocular air.
“You’ll be disappointed,” he warned. “It’s down in the basement, where prisoners who want to do so can yell and scream to their hearts’ content without disturbing anyone. A trifle dark, of course, but if to some it is hell it is because they choose to make it so. If you really want to see it, come ahead. It’s not occupied, however.”
He did not mention that he had seen to that. With all this uproar about the management of the prison, it wasn’t safe to take chances. The commission, he had foreseen, might decide to make a real investigation, and you never could tell in just what condition a man would be after several hours in “solitary.”
“THERE you are gentlemen?” he said, with a flourish of the hand when a “trusty” had switched on the lights in the basement. “Not one dark cell, but half a dozen.”
He stood back as the members of the commission crowded forward and peered into the dark recesses. Over each doorway a single electric bulb shone weakly, far too weakly for the rays to penetrate into the corners. The solid, bolt-studded doors stood open, formidable and forbidding.
“Any of you want to try it?” asked the warden from the background.
“Sure, let Blalock take a whirl at one of them,” suggested the secretary. “His conscience ought to be clear enough not to trouble him. Go on, doctor; try it and let us know how it feels. I’d do it myself, but I don’t dare risk my conscience.”
Blalock, standing just inside the doorway of one of the cells, turned and for a moment surveyed them in silence.
“Your suggestion, of course, was made in jest,” he said. “But,” a sudden ring came into his voice, “I am going to take you up on it! No,” as a chorus of exclamations came from the others, “my mind is quite made up. Warden, I want this as realistic as possible. You will please provide me with a suit of the regulation convict clothing.”
“Well, of all the blamed fools,” ejaculated the chairman. Then he gave his shoulders a shrug. “Go on and get a zebra suit, warden. I only hope this doesn’t get into the papers.”
A “trusty” was dispatched for the striped suit. When it had been brought Blalock already had removed his outer garments, amid the bantering of the others. He did not deign to answer them until he had buttoned about him the prison jacket and jammed upon his head the little striped cap.
“I guess I’m ready,” he said then. “You gentlemen have seen fit to ridicule the experiment I am about to make. But I say to you that I am doing this in all seriousness. I do not believe that ‘solitary’ is as bad as Ellis pictured it to us. I am going to find out. Warden, you will please see that conditions here are made exactly like those which surround a prisoner in this place.”
He whirled upon his heel and strode into a cell.
“How long do you want to be left in there?” asked the warden. “Fifteen minutes or so?”
“Ellis declared his belief that I could not stand it for an hour or two,” came the reply from the depths of the cell. “Suppose that we make it two hours. At the end of that time you may return and release me. But not a minute before.”
“Very well, Number 9982,” replied the warden. “You now are alone with your conscience.”
The heavy door clanged shut, and a faint click told Blalock that the light above the door had been snapped off. Then the sound of footsteps, growing fainter and fainter, the clang of the door leading to the basement—then silence. Blalock was alone.
Feeling with his hands, he made his way to a corner of the cell and sat down upon the bare, hard floor.
HE SHUT his eyes and set about concentrating his mind upon some subject other than the fact that he was a prisoner, of his own free will to be sure, but a prisoner nevertheless.
He always had prided himself upon the fact that he had the ability to drive from his thoughts at will all topics but the one which he desired. Now, he chose, at random, to begin preparing an outline of a lecture which he was scheduled to deliver within two weeks before a convention of medical men.
Back home in his study, Blalock was accustomed to stretching out at length in an easy chair, his feet upon a stool, a pillow beneath his head. Here his legs were stretched out upon the floor at night angles to his body, held bolt upright by the steel wall at his back. He sought to relieve the strain by keeping his knees in the air, but the floor offered no firm foothold and his heels slipped.
Irritated, Blalock slid away from the corner and tried lying upon his back, his eyes staring up into the darkness above him. Immediately that position, too, grew irksome and he turned over upon first one side, then the other, and finally he got upon his feet and leaned against the wall. Thus another fifteen or twenty minutes passed, he judged. He found that it was impossible to concentrate his thoughts, so he resolved to let them wander.
Leaning against the wall speedily proved uncomfortable, and Blalock began to pace around and around the narrow confines of the cell. Four paces one way, two at right angles, then four, then two. It reminded him of a big bear he once had watched in a zoo, striding back and forth behind the bars, but never very far from the door which shut him off from the outside world and freedom.
Suddenly Blalock discovered that he had made the circuit so many times in the darkness that he was turned around, that he did not know at which end lay the door to the cell. He began to hunt for it, feeling with his sensitive surgeon’s fingers for the place where the door fitted into the wall of the cell.
It annoyed him, after making two trips around, that he had failed to locate the door. He could tell by counting the corners as he came to them. The door fitted into its casing so well that he could not distinguish it from the grooves where the plates of the cell were joined together.
Immediately it became to him the most important thing in the world to know where lay that door. He thought of sounding the walls to see if at some point they would not give back a different sound and thus tell him what he felt he must know.
It was becoming a mania with him now. So, gently, he began rapping with his knuckles against the steel, here, there, in one place, then in another. Then he tried it all over with his ear, trained to detect, even without the aid of a stethoscope, the variations in the beating of a human heart, pressed close against the walls.
But again he was foiled. Every spot gave forth the same hollow sound.
Angered, Blalock kicked viciously against the insensate steel. Shooting pains in his maltreated toes rewarded him and, with a growl of anguish, he dropped to the floor to nurse the injured members.
Then he became aware that his hands were stickily saturated, and he knew, when he discovered that his knuckles were skinned and raw, that it was his own blood. Desperately he fought to regain his self-control in an effort to force himself to be bland and unruffled when the warden should come to release him, as Blalock felt sure would be the case in only a few minutes at most.
He caught himself listening intently for the footsteps of the warden, or some “trusty” or guard sent to release him. He strained his ears to catch the far-away clang which would indicate that someone was coming into the basement.
But only the hissing sound of his own breath broke the tense silence. Funny he thought, how very still things could be. It required no very big stretch of the imagination to picture himself as really a recalcitrant prisoner, slapped in ‘solitary’ to ponder upon his misdeeds.
Going further, he recalled a story, which he had read long ago, of a man who found himself to be the only living human being, the others having been wiped out in the flicker of an eyelash by some mysterious force.
Why didn’t the warden come on and let him out of here? Surely the two hours were up, and he was getting tired of it!
It would never do, however, to be caught in this frame of mind when he was released. He must emerge smiling and ready to give the lie to that clever talker, Ellis.
Once more he got up and began his circuit of the walls. He felt that he was master of himself again, and it would do no harm to try to solve the puzzle of the door that would not be found.
Perhaps the warden had been delayed by some unexpected happening. Oh, well, a few minutes longer wouldn’t make any difference. Suppose that he were in Ellis’ place! In for life! He didn’t want to think of Ellis. But somehow the face of the “lifer” kept obtruding itself—his face and his words.
What was it that Ellis had said? “You, for instance, are a physician, a man of sterling reputation, against whom no one ever breathed a word. Yet I doubt if you could endure several hours in the dark cell.”
And the warden had added that in the dark cell a man was alone with his conscience. Damn that warden! Where was he, anyhow? Blalock began to dislike him. Perhaps there was something in those stories of brutality which the newspapers had printed, after all.
Dislike for the warden began to give way to hate. Blalock wondered if the warden and that fat, pompous little Stevenson, chairman of the commission, hadn’t got their heads together and decided it would be a good joke to let him stay in there a great deal longer than he had ordered. He would show them, once he got out, that he didn’t relish that kind of a joke, that he wasn’t a man to be trifled with.
Thus another hour passed, as he reckoned it, and his anger and passion got the best of him. He kicked the walls and hammered upon them with his clenched fists, insensible to the fact that he was injuring himself.
Then came fear—fear that he had been forgotten!
Suppose that there had been an outbreak in the prison, that the convicts were in control! Would they release him? Might they not wreak their vengeance upon him in the absence of another victim?
HE BEGAN to call, moderately at first and pausing often to listen for some response; then louder and louder, until he was screaming without cessation.
He cursed and swore, pleaded and cajoled, threatened and sought to bribe by turns, demanding only that he be taken from this terrible place. He was dead to the fact that it was impossible for anyone to hear him, that only the reverberation of his own voice, thunderous in that narrow place, answered him. Beating down from the ceiling, thrown up from the floor, cast back into his teeth by the walls, the noise of his own making overwhelmed him, crushed him.
Stark terror held him in its icy grip now. His thoughts pounded through his brain like water in a mill race. The perspiration fell from him in rivulets as he hammered and smashed at the walls. His brain was afire. He began to realize that what Ellis had said very easily could be true. Men did go mad in this place! Why, he was going mad himself—mad from the torture his body was undergoing, mad from being alone with his own thoughts.
There were more lucid moments when reason desperately sought to assert itself. Blalock’s cries became less violent and, moaning and sobbing softly, he began all over again that endless circuit of the cell in search of the door. Failing, he raved again and staggered from wall to wall or leaped madly toward the ceiling as if, by some miracle, escape might lie in that direction.
Exhausted at last, he sank to the floor, poignantly conscious that interminable nights and days were passing over his head and that thirst and hunger, keen and excruciating, held him in their grasp.
At intervals, strength would come back to him, strength, backed by indomitable will power that sent him lunging to his feet to renew his battering at the walls, his frenzied shouts and screeches, in just one more effort to make himself heard.
His knuckles were broken and bleeding, his lips cracked and swollen; his voice came out shrilly from his dry and wracked throat, his body and legs were succumbing to a great weariness that would not be denied.
Came the time at last when his own voice no longer dinned into his ears, when his legs refused to obey the will that commanded them to hoist him upon his feet, when he no longer could lift his hands. His spirit was broken at last, and he gave up the struggle and sank back upon the floor. And all around him the darkness shut down—the darkness and the silence.
Then the door was thrown open, and, framed in silhouette against the light beyond, stood the warden.
“Got enough, doctor?” he called out cheerily. “Your two hours are up.... Why don’t you answer me? Dr. Blalock! What’s wrong, man?”
He peered into the cell in a vain endeavor to force his eyes to penetrate the darkness. Failing, he fumbled in his clothes for a match and, with hands that shook, scratched it against the door.
Then his face went white as a sheet, he staggered where he stood and the match burned down to the flesh of his hands and scorched it. For in the far corner he had perceived, flat upon its back, a haggard, bloodstained, white-haired thing that winked and blinked at him with vacant eyes and muttered and gibbered incoherently.
REASON came back to Blalock one day many weeks later.
He opened his eyes with the light of understanding in them, and they told him from his surrounding that he was in a hospital. Outside, the sun was shining brightly, and in a little park, just beyond, birds were singing and the breeze brought him the sound of children at play.
“Awake at last, are you?” asked the white-capped nurse who came into the room just then.
“Yes,” said Blalock, in a rasping whisper. He did not know it then, but the calm, soothing voice he once had boasted was his best asset in a sick room, was gone forever. The terrific strain to which he had put his vocal cords in his paroxysms in the dark cell had shattered them.
“You are doing splendidly,” the nurse assured him brightly. “You have been seriously ill, but you are recovering rapidly now.”
“No,” said Blalock positively, as one who knows. “I shall never get well. Give me a mirror, please.”
“I don’t believe there is one handy,” she evaded, loath to let him see the havoc in his face.
But he insisted.
“Please,” he begged, “I am prepared and I do not think I will be overcome. I will be brave.”
Reluctantly, then, she started to place the silvered glass in his hand. As he reached out to take it, he stopped, his hand half-way. The hand he was accustomed to see, with its tapering fingers and well-kept nails, the hand that so deftly had performed delicate operations, was gone. Instead was a slim, clawlike thing, with distorted knuckles and joints.
Blalock finally extended it, took the mirror and, slowly but steadily, brought it into line with his eyes. He had expected some changes, but not the sight that greeted him. The black, wavy hair had given place to locks of snowy white. His face was drawn and wrinkled, and lack-luster eyes stared back at him from cavernous sockets. Long he gazed at this apparition, then silently he let the mirror fall upon the cover and closed his eyes.
“Don’t take it so hard, doctor,” begged the nurse. “You have been through a harrowing experience and your face shows it now. But in a short time—” The lie did not come easily, and her tongue faltered.
“Never mind that,” whispered Blalock. “It doesn’t matter now. Send for Stevenson, please.”
The chairman of the Prison Commission came without delay. Compelling himself to conceal the repulsion he felt at sight of the broken man upon the bed, he bustled in with forced pleasantries.
“Stevenson,” said Blalock when finally the other had taken a chair and the nurse had withdrawn. “I have something to tell you. That day I went into the dark cell—”
“Now, now, old man,” soothed Stevenson, laying a restraining hand upon the other’s arm. “Don’t let’s talk about that. We abolished it that very day. Why bring up that awful experience of yours? No one knows about it but the commission, the warden and your doctor and nurse here. We all are pledged not to talk about it, and the newspapers didn’t have a line except that you were taken ill. Let the past take care of itself, Blalock, old man, and let us talk of other things.”
A flash of the old will power shone in the sick man’s eyes.
“No,” he said firmly. “No, Stevenson, the past cannot take care of itself. Bend closer, Stevenson, I must tell you something, and it seems I’m not strong enough yet to talk out loud.
“That day I so boastfully demanded that I be locked up in ‘solitary.’ I thought I knew myself and my will power. I believed that I had such control over my mind and my body that I could defy any torture man might devise, without quailing—despite the knowledge that my conscience was not the lily-white thing I had led others to believe it was. For, Stevenson, my conscience was black—as black as hell! It held the knowledge of a great sin on my part, a huge wrong that had been done another.
“But I had stifled it by my will power until I believed it a thing that was dead, that could never throw off the bondage to which I had doomed it, and arise and accuse me. It was to prove that I was superior to it that I deliberately chose to be locked up with it where, alone with my thoughts, I could prove myself the master, once for all.
“For Martin Ellis had shaken my confidence. Where before I had been certain I was doubtful, I wanted to prove him a liar and at the same time satisfy myself that I was a free man and not the galley slave of that thing which we call a guilty conscience.
“In that cell, that conscience which I believed I had killed rose up to show me it had been but sleeping. Under other conditions it might have slept on indefinitely. In there it overwhelmed me with a sense of its power and made me feel that I was about to meet my God without even so much as a veil behind which to hide my guilty thoughts. No matter which way I turned I saw an accusing finger pointing at me out of the darkness and the solitude was shattered by a voice which cried out that those who sin must pay and pay and pay until the slate is wiped clean. And I had sinned, but I had not paid.
“Conscience is a terrible thing once it is aroused, Stevenson. It is living, vibrant, and it lashes and scourges until it has exacted its toll. That was what it did to me there in the darkness, alone and at its mercy, and with no chance to escape. And in my agony and fear I cursed the God who had created me and saddled me with this thing. I learned my lesson, though, before I was through. I who had presumed to place my own puny will above the Great Eternal Will; I who had dared to believe that the great order of things, the plan by which we all must live and die, must make an exception of me, learned that I was wrong.
“Martin Ellis is innocent, Stevenson, and I trust to you to see that justice is done. He did not kill Agnes Keller and I knew it. And I stood by and let him be convicted. More, I took the stand against him and helped to make that conviction certain. I told only the truth in my testimony, but I did not tell all I knew and what I omitted would have saved Ellis. I did not want to testify at all, but the prosecution refused to let me take advantage of the confidential relation which is supposed to exist between physician and patient.
“The state was right in its theory that the man who strangled Agnes Keller did so because he was responsible for her condition and did not wish to marry her. She came to me in my study on the night she met her death and told me she had discovered she was about to become a mother.
“She refused to take any steps I suggested and she said that her child, when it was born, must have the legal right to bear the name of its father. And that very night she was lured into an automobile with the promise that the man who was to blame would take her to a nearby town and make her his wife. But on that lonely country road he turned upon her and killed her with his bare hands.
“And how do I know these things? Because, Stevenson, I was the man responsible for her condition, and it was I who killed her!”
The Closing Hand
A Powerful Short Story
by Farnsworth Wright
SOLITARY and forbidding, the house stared specterlike through scraggly trees that seemed to shrink from its touch.
The green moss of decay lay on its dank roofs, and the windows, set in deep cavities, peered blindly at the world as if through eyeless sockets. So forbidding was its aspect that boys, on approaching its cheerless gables, stopped their whistling and passed on the opposite side of the street.
Across the fields, a few huddled cottages gazed through the falling rain, as if wondering what family could be so bold as to take up its abode within the gloomy walls of that old mansion, whose carpetless floors for two years had not felt the tread of human feet.
In an attic room of the house two sisters lay in bed, but not asleep. The younger sister cringed under the dread inspired by the bleak place. The elder laughed at her childish fears, but the younger felt the spell of the old building and was afraid.
“I suppose there is really nothing to frighten me in this dreary old house,” she admitted, without conviction in her voice, “but the very feel of the place is horrible. Mother shouldn’t have left us alone in this gruesome place.”
“Stupid,” her sister scolded, “with all the silverware downstairs, somebody has to be here, for fear of burglars.”
“Oh, don’t talk about burglars!” pleaded the younger girl. “I am afraid. I keep imagining I hear ghostly footsteps.”
Her sister laughed.
“Go to sleep, Goosie,” she said.
“‘Haunted’ houses are nothing but superstition. They exist only in imagination.”
“Why has nobody lived here for two years, then? They tell me that for five years every family moved out after being here just a short time. The whole atmosphere of the house is ghastly. And I can’t forget how the older Berkheim girl was found stabbed to death in her bed, and nobody ever knew how it happened. Why, she may have been murdered in this very room!”
“Go to sleep and don’t scare yourself with such silly talk. Mother will be with us tomorrow night, and Dad will be back next day. Now go to sleep.”
The elder sister soon dropped into slumber, but the younger lay open-eyed, staring into the black room and shuddering at every stifled scream of the wind or distant growl of thunder. She began to count, hoping to hypnotize herself into drowsiness, but at every slight noise she started, and lost her count.
Suddenly she turned and shook her sister by the shoulder.
“Edith, somebody is prowling around downstairs!” she whispered. “Listen! Oh, what shall we do?”
The elder sister struck a match and lit the candle. Then she slipped on her dressing-gown, and drew on her slippers.
“You’re not going down there? Edith, tell me you’re not going downstairs! It might be that murdered Berkheim girl! Edith, don’t—”
Edith shot a glance of withering scorn at her sister, who lay on the bed with blanched face and wide, terrified eyes.
“There is something moving around downstairs, and I’m going to find out what it is,” she said.
Taking the candle, she left the room. Her younger sister lay in the darkness, listening to the pattering of rain on the roof and straining her ears to catch the slightest sound. The noise downstairs ceased, but the wind rose and the rain beat upon the roof in sudden furious blasts that made her heart jump wildly....
Ten minutes passed—twenty minutes—and Edith had not returned.
A door slammed, and the younger sister thought she heard something moving again, but the wind began to sob and drowned out all other noises. Between gusts, she heard the portentous sound, and each time it seemed nearer.
Then—she started as she realized that something was coming up the stairs. Once she thought she heard a cry, to which the wind joined its plaintive voice in a weird duet.
Nearer and nearer the strange noise came. It mounted the stairs, step by step, heard only when the wind and rain softened their voices. It passed the first landing, and moved slowly up the second flight, while the girl fearfully awaited its coming.
The wind howled until the house quaked; it shrilled past the eaves and fled across the fields like a hunted ghost.
And now the girl’s pounding pulses drowned out the screaming of the wind, for the presence had invaded her bedroom!
She cowered under the covers, a cold perspiration chilling her body until her teeth chattered. Her imagination conjured up frightful things—a disembodied spirit come to destroy her—a corpse from the grave, gibbering in terror because it could not tear the cerements from its face—the murdered Berkheim girl, with the knife still sheathed in her heart—or some escaped beast, licking its lips in greedy anticipation of the feast her tremulous body would provide. Or was it a murderer, who, having killed her sister, was now bent on completing his bloody work?
A flash of lightning split the sky, and the thunder bellowed its terrifying warning. The girl threw back the bedclothes and shrank to the wall, her eyes starting from their sockets, fearful lest another flash reveal some sight too ghastly to contemplate.
Slowly the being dragged itself across the floor, lifted itself onto the bed, and uttered a choking sound of agony.
The girl sat petrified. Then, timorously, she extended a shaky hand, but quickly withdrew it in dread of some hideous contact.
Again she thrust her trembling hand into the gloom, farther, farther, until it touched something shaggy and wet.
A clammy hand closed over hers, and she started to her feet, with a horrified scream.
The icy hand tightened with a sickening tremor, and dragged her down. Then her tortured senses gave way, and she fell back unconscious upon the bed....
WHEN she awoke, it was day. Beside her, on the bed, lay the bleeding body of her sister, Edith, stabbed in the breast by the burglar she had tried to frighten away.
The younger girl was clutching the clotted wisps of hair that had fallen across the breast of her sister, whose cold hand had closed over hers in the last convulsive shudder of death.
Howard Ellis Davis Relates
Some Extraordinary
Adventures With
The UNKNOWN
BEAST
AT THE EDGE of the little settlement of Bayou le Tor lapped the slack waters from which the village had been named. A mile to the south, they lost themselves in the Mississippi Sound. Northward, they wound among somber swamps, to disappear at last into the marshes above.
Giant cypress trees crowded down to the very edge of the settlement, as if jealous of the small space of cleared land it occupied beside the bayou, and to one not accustomed to the place it seemed that an evil boding lurked forever within the depths of those overhanging, gloomy swamps.
But until the unknown Beast first made its mysterious presence felt, no harm for the people of Bayou le Tor ever had come out of those swamps, except the deadly malaria, which clutched its victims in shaking agues and burning fevers that consumed life as a woods fire might consume a strip of dried sedge grass.
Before this strange death that had come to haunt the night swamps, they shrank in helpless terror. Cows were driven in from their pastures while the sun was yet high. Mothers called in their sallow-faced children from play as soon as the shadows began to lengthen.
The first victim had been Swan Davis, an old fisherman who lived by himself on the edge of the bayou above the settlement. He had been found in the swamp, dead. At first it was thought that he had been beaten to death, he was so broken about the body.
Finally, however, it was decided he had been crushed by some mysterious, unknown force. Something had caught him and squeezed him until his bones had cracked like dry reeds.
Then the three Buntly boys, driving in a bunch of steers from the marshes, were overtaken by night on the swamp road. The cattle had been going peacefully enough, when suddenly they had become frightened and lumbered off ahead, bellowing madly. Themselves frightened at the queer behavior of the animals, the boys followed, as fast as they could on foot.
That is, two of them did; for when Jard and Peter Buntly emerged from the shadows of the swamp road, they found that their brother, Sims, was not with them.
Terror-stricken though they were, they had returned into the swamp, calling his name. When they saw nothing of him, and he did not answer their calls, they went quickly home and reported what had happened. All night long, bearing flaming torches, the men of the settlement beat up and down the swamp. Toward morning, they found the young man’s body, bruised and broken, but no trace of what had killed him.
When the people of Bayou le Tor gathered to discuss the circumstances surrounding these two mysterious deaths, the negroes, and some others, declared that an evil spirit haunted the gloomy fastness to the north of the settlement, while the more conservative agreed that some creature strange to those parts, some unknown beast, was ranging the night swamps, a creature that killed for the love of killing.
Armed with shotgun and rifle, they hunted him. They set bear-traps, baited with an entire quarter of beef hung above. But no one ventured into the swamps after dark, until, one night, ten of the best men in the settlement formed a party and rode out on horseback through the swamp road.
Armed with pistol and sheath-knife, they rode, two by two, knee to knee, their horses following each other nose to tail, so that if any one of the party were attacked they all could turn and fight in a body.
Nothing happened until they were on their way back; then Walter Brandon—who, because he was one of their bravest, brought up the rear—grew careless and lagged behind. Suddenly, his horse came charging in among the others, riderless.
They could find no trace of Walter, and the other nine could only ride in and break the news to his young wife, who carried a baby at her breast.
The next day, the girl’s father, old Arner Horn, secured the services of a small, battered automobile and crossed two counties to see Ed Hardin and beg that he come and deliver them from this unknown beast that, one by one, was killing the men-folk of Bayou le Tor.
IN HIS own county Ed Hardin was a deputy sheriff, and the reputation of his prowess had traveled far. Each summer, when the fishing was best on the Sound, he came to Bayou le Tor. Each winter, he came to hunt wild turkeys in the swamps that surrounded the settlement. The people had grown to know him well, and they knew that he feared neither man, beast, nor the devil.
He returned in the automobile with Arner, bringing with him his young friend, Alex Rowe. When they reached Bayou le Tor, the news awaited them that Walter’s body, which bore on it the same marks as those others who had been killed, had been found floating on the waters of the bayou, and that it was being held at the water’s edge so that Ed Hardin might see for himself the nature of death which this creature inflicted upon its victims.
After he had seen, Ed Hardin came away alone, grim-mouthed. When he entered Arner’s yard, it already was growing dark, the night breeze rustling in the liveoaks overhead. He went to the barn and saddled Arner’s bay mare. Having led her to the front fence, he tied her there and went into the house.
In the hallway, which divided the house through the middle, he paused as he heard in the room beside him the low sobbing of a woman. Then he passed on to the room that had been assigned to him and Alex Rowe. A small kerosene lamp had been lighted and set upon the dresser, and in the light of this he was buckling on a belt holding a broad hunting-knife and a pistol when Alex burst in upon him.
“Ed Hardin,” cried the young man, “what is that mare doin’ at the front fence? Where be you goin’?”
“I’m goin’ ter hunt that beast, Alex.”
“Yer ain’t goin’ ter do that thing, Ed! Yer don’t know what hit is. How—”
“I’m goin’, Alex.”
“But, Ed, hit’s night. Wait till daylight. The last two times folks went out on the swamp road at night they was er man killed.”
Broad-shouldered, sparely-made, the big deputy drew himself up to his full height and turned to gaze for a moment at his young friend.
“I’m goin’ now,” he said calmly.
“But, Ed, you heerd what they said ’bout the schooner up in the bayou. Hit’s been layin’ there fer two weeks, ’thout dealin’s with nobody. You heerd what Rensie Bucker, the ole nigger what uster be er sailor, said. He said he paddled up in his dugout by that schooner an’ them folks on board is India folks. He says that in their lan’ they’s strange beasts an’ reptiles, an’ that mebbe they’ve sot one of ’em loose in the swamp, mebbe put hit ter watch the swamp road.”
“Ef hit’s been sot ter watch the swamp road at night,” said Ed, “that’s jes wher I want ter go. I want ter meet it.”
“Wait, Ed. Wait till I git holt of er hoss. I’m goin’ with yer.”
A soft smile played for a moment about Ed Hardin’s grim mouth.
“No, Alex,” he said: “I reckon I’ll go by myse’f.”
As he was untying the mare, those who had returned to the house gathered about him and, as Alex had done, tried to prevent his going off alone into the swamp at night.
But he swung lightly to the saddle and galloped out through the settlement, into the shadows of the giant cypress trees.
THE MARE was a spirited and nervous animal, and she leaped and shied as she danced among the stagnant pools that lay black in the swamp road.
In thus going out deliberately to use himself as a bait for the Unknown Beast, Ed felt that he could depend largely upon her agility and quickness to prevent being taken unawares by a sudden rush from the darkness. He drew from its holster his heavy Colt’s revolver and thrust it through his belt in front, within convenient reach.
So dark was the black tunnel of the road that he could see no space in front of him, and he let the reins lie slack on the mare’s neck, so that she might be undisturbed in picking her footing. And as he plunged deeper into the swamp, he experienced a lonely boding that was new to him.
Time and again, he had gone fearlessly out alone in the pursuit and capture of desperate men. Now, however, he did not know what nature of creature it was he sought, and he had to invite an attack from the darkness in order to get in touch with it.
The night was murky, almost sticky in its heaviness, and the swamp seemed strangely silent. Only the occasional call of some night bird pierced the stillness. He was familiar with the road, having traveled it frequently, and the places where violence had occurred had been described to him in detail.
A few hundred yards to the left of the road, where he now was riding, the fisherman had met his death. He passed the place where Brandon last had been seen, and, soon after, entered the deeper recess of the swamp where the herder had been snatched into the darkness of death. Plainly, this neighborhood of violence was the creature’s lurking-place.
Suddenly, the mare shied, snorted, and stood quivering, her head turned as though she saw or smelled something at the side of the road. He raised his pistol, which he now held ready cocked in his hand, and fired quickly into the darkness. As he had only one hand on the reins, it was some moments after the report before he could calm the startled animal sufficiently to proceed on his way.
Twice more, at indications of terror from his horse, guided by her forward-pointed ears, Ed Hardin fired into the black shadows at the side of the road, the discharges making lurid flashes in the darkness.
The Unknown Beast evidently was near, following him through the brush—or over the treetops. If it were on the ground, he hoped for the slender chance of killing or wounding it before it had an opportunity to attack.
After each shot, as well as he could for the plunging of the mare, he listened intently for some cry of pain, some movement of the bushes; but the silence of the shadows was unbroken. The strain was nervewracking, and he had a wild desire to whirl the mare about and speed away in mad flight. He could not urge her out of a slow, hesitating walk, and she frequently shied from one side of the road to the other, with those periodic halts of trembling fear.
Then the road ran from beneath the arches of the swamp and passed over a corduroy crossing, bordered on each side by a dense growth of titi. The mare went more quietly now, and Ed began to hope that some of his shots had taken effect. He breathed more freely, now that the branches no longer drooped overhead.
Presently, however, he found himself beneath spreading liveoaks. These, flanking the road on either side, sent their giant limbs horizontally across. He peered from side to side, his eyes straining to penetrate the gloom, each indistinct tree trunk assuming a sinister outline.
Overhead, the trees towered in cavernous depths, and suddenly, with a swish of leaves and branches, out of them dropped a great, dark object!
THE frightened mare leaped forward; but the nameless creature alighted behind the saddle.
Hardin snatched out his pistol, only to find that he was unable to use it. For he had been caught in a giant embrace that pinioned his arms to his sides, an embrace against which his own great strength was powerless.
The mare ran desperately, her supple body close to the ground, her graceful neck outstretched. Out from the swamp she sped, crossing a reach of flat country, once heavily covered with pines. The timber long since had been cut, only the stumps remaining, charred by forest fires—hordes of black ghosts crowding down to the edge of the road on both sides.
It was a wild ride for the man, with death perched there behind. The great arms, wound about him, were slowly squeezing the breath from his body, and beneath that embrace he felt his ribs bend inward to the point of cracking. Desperately, he maintained his grip on the saddle with his knees.
Then, just before consciousness would have left him, he raised his legs and flung himself sideways. The saddle slipped under the mare’s belly. Carried by the momentum, but with that crushing grip never relaxing, the man and the terrible creature which held him hurtled through the air.
They struck with a thud against a shattered stump at the side of the road, while the frightened mare sped on. The murderous creature was next the stump and at the impact its hold on Ed Hardin loosened. Having slipped from the great arms, Ed flung himself over and rolled for several feet to one side.
The pistol long since had dropped from his nerveless fingers; but he now quickly drew his hunting-knife. Expecting an immediate attack with fang and claw, he lay on his back, his feet drawn up, very much in the position a cat assumes when defending itself. He knew it would be useless to pit his strength against that of the enormous creature, and the best he could hope for was to ward off an attack with his feet and watch for an opportunity to reach and drive home the knife.
And suddenly it was looming there above him. For an instant it seemed to hesitate, then it backed slowly away. With a quick, halting motion, walking upright like a man, it began to circle about him. Its long arms swung below its knees. A round head was set on a neck so thick and short that it seemed to spring from the shoulders themselves. As it circled about him, Ed turned also, keeping his feet always presented.
Again the creature backed off, up the road. Then it turned and walked slowly away.
For a moment Ed Hardin lay watching it, unwilling to change his position. Then, tentatively, he raised himself to a sitting position.
Suddenly, as if, without looking, the creature divined his movement, it turned about, at a distance of perhaps fifty feet.
And then, with a strangely human shriek of rage, it rushed toward him.
AS IT came through the gloom, this maddened creature, with its uncouth, hopping run, swinging its long arms from side to side.
The man dropped back into his former position, feet raised, arm held ready to strike with the knife.
Before it reached him, it dropped forward, without in the least pausing, and, propelled by both arms and legs, shot in a great, froglike leap through the air.
The shock, as it landed upon him, drove Ed Hardin’s knees back against his chest. His right arm, held ready to strike with the knife, was pinned and twisted painfully.
The knife slipped from his hand. A long arm shot forward and talon-like fingers clutched his hair. With his legs doubled back as they were, once more he was seized in that giant embrace, and he felt that his knees were being pressed into his chest until it soon must crush in like a shattered eggshell.
Then consciousness left him.
... When his senses slowly returned, he became aware of lights flashing and horses stamping, and the sound of men’s voices.
Jonas Keil was speaking, and Ed had the rare experience of hearing himself discussed after he was thought to be dead.
“—’Most on my bended knees ter git ’im not ter do it. But he said he wouldn’t feel right ter let Death run loose unhindered, long as he was livin’ an’ with strength ter fight. An’ when he rid out single-handed an’ alone, the bravest man what ever drawed breath was kilt.”
From his position, he judged that he had been placed on the grass at the side of the road. Near him was someone who, from an occasional quivering intake of breath, seemed to have been sobbing.
He tried to turn and see who it was, and he found that he could not so much as twitch a finger.
He heard three new arrivals come up the road, a man on horseback and two runners, the two evidently holding by the rider’s stirrup leathers. The rider, as soon as he drew up, said:
“We come soon’s we heerd you-all was gone ter foller Ed. Arn’s bringin’ the waggin. Hit’ll be here terreckly; we passed hit er piece back. But Arn didn’ git the straights from Cy when he come atter the waggin what hit was kilt Ed. Po’ ole Ed!”
Old Rensie Bucker, the negro who once had been a sailor, speaking with the patois of foreign birth, replied to him:
“Hit ees Jonas, de chile-minded neegar who was shanghaed from his mammy’s shack down on de point ten year back. He had de mind of er chile an’ de strength ob five men, wid his beeg wide shoulders an’ short neck; wid de hump on his back an’ his arms hangin’ mos’ ter his ankles. He was gentle in dem days; but de East Indee folks tuck heem off an’ dey brought heem back er beast. He’s frum de schooner, by his clothes, an’ dey must have sot heem on de swamp road at night ter watch an’ keel.
“Dere he lies, dead. De stump ’gin which he struck when he pull Meester Ed Hardin frum his hoss had er sliver which stuck mos’ through heem. Den when he fit wid Meester Ed de hurt must have killed heem, because there is no other wound.”
The man beside Ed Hardin spoke, and Ed recognized him.
“Alex,” he said huskily.
There was a cry of amazement. Alex called for a light. Someone else, evidently startled by the voice coming from what all had thought to be a dead man, started to run, kicked over a lantern, and was cursed roundly by the others, who were crowding up.
When the wagon arrived, he was so far recovered that, with the assistance of the others, he was able to clamber painfully in and sink to the blankets on the bottom, every joint in his body aching.
The two Buntlys had called the younger men to one side and they were whispering excitedly together. Presently the riding-horses all were tied at the side of the road, and when the wagon creaked its way homeward, Ed was accompanied only by Alex, who had refused to leave him, and by old Arner. Rensie had gone with the others.
Two days later, he was able to creep out to the front porch of Arner’s little home and sit in the cool of a breeze that swept up from the bayou. After a space of silence, he asked:
“Arn, what’d them fellers do the yuther night? I can’t git er peep outen ’em.”
“They foun’ right smart of stuff in boxes, what Rensie said was some sorter dope, bein’ unloaded from the schooner. But they th’owed hit in the water.”
“I ain’t intrusted in no dope, Arn. I say what’d they do?”
“The leader of the gang confessed, after he’d been questioned by Rensie, an’ when he saw the jig was up, anyhow. They had sot Jonas ter keep folks skeerd off the swamp road at night, by killin’ whosomever come there. They was goin’ ter git er truck an’ haul that stuff off somewheres.”
“Well, what’d the boys do?”
Reflectively, Arner stroked his short, heavy beard. He spat into the yard. Then he turned to the deputy:
“Ed,” he said slowly, “yo’ comin’ down here, an’, single-handed an’ alone, huntin’ out the critter what was killin’ us off will be remembered an’ talked about in generations ter come—when these here swamps is cleared off an’ drained an’ producin’ corn an’ taters. But sich er little matter as er schooner lyin’ at the bottom of the bayou gatherin’ barnacles is soon forgot, an’ let’s you an’ me fergit that part of hit, too.”
