Leslie never carried but one gun, and this he now rested in the hollow of his left arm. He towered above and behind us as we noiselessly wedged against the old-fashioned, flimsy door. My heart was beating like a trip hammer. I never seem to be able to get over that thumping just before the opening engagement when I am elected to make a target of myself. I confess freely that I always went into those thrillers with Lanagan in the full expectation of getting my own name and picture in the papers, and the complimentary designation usually accorded a man of my profession by the paper he serves when mishap befalls him: “A reporter who was killed.”
The chief breathed a soft command, the wedge crashed, the bolts burst, and we were in—an empty room.
There was an awkward pause, it seemed to me for an hour; it may have been but a minute, while Leslie slipped back into his holster that ugly gun of his. Lanagan was turning slowly, examining every corner of the room. His eyes were living, snapping fire.
“I guess, chief,” he drawled, “I won’t make the reservations to-day for that little trip of mine.”
The bed was unmade, but the room showed no traces of recent occupation save several empty medicine bottles from which the labels had been washed, and on a closet shelf a paper sack half full of almonds. There were almond shells on the floor. For the rest the room held but the ordinary appurtenances of a room of its kind; washstand, bowl, towels and rack, and cheap dresser.
The landlady was summoned. She was more surprised than Lanagan or the chief. She had not seen the girl return; had not seen the pair depart; had believed that the man was too sick to leave his bed.
Galvanic Leslie, within an hour, had men at the ferry building, at the Third and Townsend Street Depot, covering every boathouse that had launches or tugs for hire; the suburban electric lines were covered and the country roads leading south. The great mantrap that so easily can be thrown around the peninsula of San Francisco, the trap that time and again has caught the thieves of the world when they have fled for haven to the Western Coast metropolis, was set. And yet so quietly was the work done, so implicitly had Leslie impressed upon every district captain, every detective, every patrolman concerned with the story, the necessity for absolute secrecy that not one of the other great papers of San Francisco knew that the jaws of that trap were gaping hungrily. Probably there was no reporter save Lanagan who could have broken into that story once Leslie had commanded his men to secrecy. They knew what disloyalty to that disciplinarian meant too well to trifle with him.
Within the city proper, plain-clothes men by shoals flooded every hotel and lodging house that might by any possibility harbour the pair. The hospitals were watched; half a dozen doctors known to Leslie worked among their professional brothers, but no one was attending such a man as Turner.
And the wonder grew to Lanagan that the story, scattered now well over the city, was even yet escaping the innumerable sources of news of the Times and the braggart Herald, to say nothing of the evening papers, the Record and the Tribune. In such fashion, though, by grace of newspaper luck, are the greatest successes scored after they have knocked around under the very feet of half the newspaper men of a city.
Of that army of plain-clothes men none worked harder than Lanagan. For days I did not see him. Sometimes I would locate him in the foulest sinks of the Barbary Coast or Chinatown. Here, with products brewed in some witch’s caldron, he would be in fraternity, trying ceaselessly to tap that underground wire by which the convict bayed in a great city sends word to his kind. But always he failed. “Kid” Monahan laboured in vain; “Red” Murphy, credited with knowing more thieves than all the coast saloon men put together, could secure no trace; Turner, or Short, had found no refuge in the hutches of the drug or the opium fiends. Lanagan met men who should have been in San Quentin; one night he crossed “Slivers” Martin, who had broken from a deputy sheriff and escaped a ten-year sentence.