The white bushy eyebrows went up.
“So!” ejaculated the old Italian. “Well, then, what is the use!”
“A whole lot!” returned Dave Henderson grimly. “To get the fellow if I can! And I can't do that with the police, and a gang of crooks besides, at my heels, can I?”
Nicolo Capriano shook his head meditatively.
“I have my daughter to think of,” he said. “Listen, young man, it has not been easy to stand square with the police during these years as it is, and that without any initiative act on my part that would stir them up against me again. Old associations and old records are not so easily got rid of. I will give you an example. There was a man here to-night—when you came. His name is Ignace Ferroni. He was one of us in the old days—do you understand? When the trouble came for which Tony Lomazzi suffered, Ignace managed to get away. I had not seen him from that day to this. He came back here to-night for help—for a very strange kind of help. He was one of us, I have said, and he had not forgotten his old ways. He had a bomb, a small bomb in his pocket, whose mechanism had gone wrong. He had already planted it once to-night, and finding it did not explode, he picked it up again, and brought it to me, and asked me to fix it for him. It was an old feud he had with some one, he would not tell me who, that he had been nursing all this time. I think his passion for vengeance had perhaps turned his head a little. I refused to have anything to do with his bomb, of course, and he left here in a rage, and in his condition he is as likely to turn on me as he is to carry out his original intention. But, that apart, what am I to do now? He was one of us, I cannot expose him to the police—he would be sentenced to a long term. And yet, if his bomb explodes, to whom will the police come first? To me!” Nicolo Capriano suddenly raised his hands, and they were clenched—and as suddenly caught his breath, and choked, and a spasm of pain crossed his face. The next instant he was smiling mirthlessly with twitching lips. “Yes, to me—to me, whom some fool amongst them once called the Dago Bomb King, which they will never forget! It is always to me they come! Any crime that seems to have the slightest Italian tinge—and they come to Nicolo Capriano!” He shrugged his shoulders. “You see, young man, it is not easy for me to steer my way unmolested even when I am wholly innocent. But I, too, do not forget! I do not forget Tony Lomazzi! Tell me exactly what you want me to do. You think you can find the man and the money if you can throw the police and the others off your trail?”
“Yes!” said Dave Henderson, with ominous quiet. “That's my job in life now! If I could disappear for three or four days, I guess that's all the start I'd need.” There was a tolerant smile now on the old bomb king's lips.
“Three or four days would be a very easy matter,” he answered. “But after that—what? It might do very well in respect to this gang of crooks; but it would be of very little avail where the police are concerned, for they would simply do what the crooks could not do—see that every plain-clothesman and officer on this continent was on the watch for you. Do you imagine that, believing you know where the money is, the police will forget all about you in three or four days?”
“No,” admitted Dave Henderson, with the same ominous quiet; “but all I ask is a fighting chance.” Nicolo Capriano stared in speculative silence for a moment.
“You have courage, my young friend!” he said softly. “I like that—also I do not like the police. But three or four days!” He shook his head. “You do not know the police as I know them! And this man you trusted, and who, as I understand, got away with the money, do you know where to find him?”
“I think he is in New York,” Dave Henderson answered.