A light went on somewhere over Billy Kane’s head. He was in a short passage that was flanked on either side by what were evidently the business offices of the concern, and at the end of this passage now a door was suddenly swung open. Gypsy Joe was standing in the doorway.
“De Rat!” he exclaimed in heavy amazement, and mechanically fell back as Billy Kane advanced.
[XXV—THE OLD WAREHOUSE]
Billy Kane’s eyes were apparently blinking in the abrupt transition from darkness to the glare of light; but with the knowledge that it might literally mean the difference between life and death to him—and her—no single detail of his surroundings was escaping him. The door ahead of him, a heavy, cumbersome affair, opened inwards toward him, and was now swung full back against the wall, but if the evidence of that iron loop on the door jamb could be trusted, the door was equipped with a massive bolt. Gypsy Joe was still to a large extent blocking the doorway, but he could see that the huge, lighted space beyond was a sort of storage warehouse, windowless, of course, or else he would have seen a light from outside. And the switches, the electric-light switches—the one for the bulb over his head in this passage here, and the one for the light in that room ahead of him! They were vital too! He could not see any in the position where he might naturally expect to find them—by the door where Gypsy Joe stood. He glanced back over his shoulder. Yes, there was one there at the side of the front door, a switch for the passage light undoubtedly; but Gypsy Joe had certainly not used that one, so there must be another then, as well, inside the storage room.
He had been perhaps the matter of a bare few seconds in traversing the length of the passage, and now as he stepped across the threshold into the warehouse itself, the Cherub and Clarkie Munn had joined Gypsy Joe, and were staring at him with scowling, startled, uncertain faces—but Billy Kane’s eyes were not on the three men. The blood seemed to leap through his veins in a great surging tide, and upon him was the sense of a mighty uplift. It was not too late! It was not too late! His brain seemed to seize upon those words and reiterate them in a sing-song way. A woman’s form lay upon the floor, and she was bound and gagged; but dark eyes met his, and in the eyes was a softer light than he had ever seen there before when they had been fixed on him. “For once,” they seemed to say, “you have not failed. I told you to watch Gypsy Joe and Clarkie Munn, and you are just in time.”
The Cherub laughed suddenly and a little noisily, as from unstrung nerves.
“Say, youse gave us a jolt!” he said. “Wot’s de idea? I suppose youse came along to make sure dat we earned yer money, eh, an’ dat dere wouldn’t be no fluke about her bein’ bumped off fer keeps? Well, if youse had been about a minute an’ a half later youse’d have missed de trap-door scene, ’cause it’d have been all over.”
Billy Kane’s eyes had met the girl’s again. The soft light in them had gone, and in its place had come a horror, and sudden accusation, and a bitter misery; and her face, already deathly white as she lay there, seemed now to tinge with gray.
Billy Kane shook his head in response to the Cherub, as he turned and faced the three men. They were edging a little closer to him. He caught a surreptitious nudge that passed between Gypsy Joe and Clarkie Munn. He moved back a step—but it was a step that brought him nearer to the girl. If he could hold them in a state of puzzled suspense with its consequent indecision for a moment, that was all he asked. And he was counting on a sort of frank audaciousness for that.
“Well?” prompted the Cherub, a sudden, curious silkiness in his tones. “Did I call de turn?”