“I can!” she said, and her short laugh was not a pleasant one. “And I can shoot if I have to, and, faith, there’d be joy in the doin’ of it; but you”—her voice broke suddenly—“I don’t know who you are, and I owe you——”
Billy Kane was backing toward the rear door.
“You’ll pay it all, and more, Mrs. Clancy, when you hand him over to the police,” he said quickly—and, stepping out into the passageway, he ran down its length, whipping the mask from his face as he went; and in another instant, from the lane, had gained the cross street.
[VI—A MIDNIGHT VISITOR]
Keeping in the shadows and avoiding the passers-by as on his way to Marco’s, Billy Kane hurried even more now on his return to the Rat’s. In a moment or so, when Mrs. Clancy reached the front street with her prisoner, there was likely to be an uproar, and he wanted to be housed and under cover if possible before that broke loose. Mrs. Clancy’s story could hardly omit reference to the man in the mask, and the police, to say nothing of the on-lookers, might evince a most unpleasant degree of practical curiosity—and he, Billy Kane, was in no condition, either mental, or, above all, physical, to play hare to the hounds of the law again that night. He was conscious now, as he made his way swiftly along, that his shoulder was paining him intensely again, and that, though through nerve force, his feet moved quickly enough under him, his knees were wobbly and weak.
He turned a corner, and still another—and drew a deep breath of relief. He was out of range of the second-hand shop now, and the Rat’s den was just ahead up the street, and there was no one in sight.
Billy Kane swept his hand heavily across his eyes. It was strange! There was not far from being a very close analogy between himself and Mrs. Clancy’s son to-night. Mrs. Clancy’s son had been selected as the victim of a “plant” much like himself—only there had been no murder, and the “plant” had failed. It was curious, very curious, that the two should have been so much alike, and that though he had been able to save the other, he himself was being searched for at that moment in every corner of New York, and that the human drag-net was spread for him, and that the wires all over the country were hot with his description, and that into every newspaper office in every state was pouring the story that would make of him an abominable and an abandoned thing!
His head was singing. He stumbled a little, as he made his way down the stairs, and fumbled with Whitie Jack’s key in the lock of the Rat’s door. Well, if the Rat, who was away, did not return too soon, and if—he shook his head, as he opened the door, and stepped inside, and locked it behind him—no, he was too tired, and too near the breaking point to think any more. He had a chance to rest now until morning. Whitie Jack had said that no one would dare disturb the Rat, and that was enough—he did not want to think any more—until morning.
He groped his way forward to the electric light, reached up to turn it on—and, with his arm poised in mid-air, stood suddenly tense and rigid. He listened. It came again—as though some one were knocking cautiously on the wall—and it seemed to come from the far end of the room near the bureau.
Billy Kane’s hand shot into his pocket and closed on his revolver; and, quick and silent in every movement now, he tiptoed across the room in the darkness, slipped in behind the cretonne hanging and waited, peering through a corner of the hanging.