The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale

by Frank L. Packard

“Forget it!” observed the second voice contemptuously. “Cut out the jumps—we’ve got to get through here before Sonnino gets back. You’d make a wooden Indian nervous!”

There was silence for an instant, then a curious gnawing sound punctuated with quick, low, metallic rasps as of a ratchet at work—and upon Jimmie Dale for a moment came stunned dismay. Time, the one factor upon which he had depended, was lost to him; Clarie Archman and Gentleman Laroque were already at work in there in that room beyond. He stood motionless, his brain whirling; and then slowly, without a sound, an inch at a time, he began to close the door behind him. He could see nothing; but the door connecting the two rooms was obviously open—the distinctness with which the whispering voices had reached him was proof of that. They were working, too, without light, or he would have got a warning gleam when he had looked through the window. And now—what now? The picklock was shifted to his left hand, as he drew his automatic from his pocket. There was only one answer to the question—to play the game out to the end, whatever that end might be!

Beneath the mask his face drew into chiselled lines, as the picklock silently locked the door. There was one exit from that inner room, and only one—through the room in which he stood. The Tocsin had drawn an accurate word-plan of the crude, shack-like place, and now in his mind he reconstructed it here in the darkness. The doorway into a small hall that led to the stairs adjoined the doorway of that inner room where the two were now at work—and in that room were no windows, it was a sort of blind cubby-hole where Niccolo Sonnino transacted his most private business.

Jimmie Dale crept forward up the room. There was no answering creak of board or flooring, no sound save that gnawing sound, and the rasping click of the ratchet. His place of vantage was against the wall between the two doors—there, he could both command the exit from, and see into, the inner room, while the doorway into the hall provided him with a means of retreat should the necessity arise. And then, suddenly, halfway up the room, he dropped down behind what was evidently a jeweller’s workbench. A whisper, obviously Laroque’s this time, came once more from the inner room.

“Shoot the flash again!” And then, savagely: “Curse it, not on the ceiling! Can’t you hold it steady! What the devil is the matter with you!”

There was no answer. A dull glimmer of light filtered through the doorway, but from the position in which he lay Jimmie Dale could distinguish nothing in the inner room itself.

“All right! That’ll do!” Laroque growled presently.

The light went out. Jimmie Dale crept forward again. And now he gained the rear wall of the room, and crouched down close against it between the two doorways.

Came the sound of breathing now, heavy, as from sustained exertion, making almost an undertone of the steady click-click-click of the ratchet, and the sullen gnaw of the bit. The minutes passed. The flashlight went on again—and Jimmie Dale strained forward. Two dark forms, backs to him, were outlined against the face of the safe which was at the far side of the room, a nickel dial glistened in the white ray—he could make out nothing else.

Then darkness again. And again, after a time, the flashlight. Ten, fifteen, perhaps twenty minutes dragged by. Jimmie Dale might have been a shadow moving against the wall for all the sound he made as he changed his cramped position; but, just below the mask, his lips were pressed fiercely together. Would Gentleman Laroque never get through! Sonnino was not only likely to return in a very few minutes now, but was almost certain to do so. Under his breath Jimmie Dale cursed the gangster’s bungling methods—and not for their crudity alone. His first impulse had been to surprise the two, hold them up at the revolver point, but the result of such an act would have been abortive, for the disfigured safe would stand a mute, incontrovertible witness to the fact that an attempt to force it had been made—and, whether it was actual robbery or attempted robbery that was proved against the son, it in no way deflected the blow aimed at David Archman. And, besides, there was the letter! If he, Jimmie Dale, had been in time even to have prevented Gentleman Laroque from sinking a bit into the safe, the letter would have counted not at all—but now it counted to the extent that it literally meant life and death. Who had it? Not Clarie Archman—that was certain. And the Tocsin had not said—obviously because she, too, had been in the dark in that respect. Therefore he could only wait, watch and follow every move of the game throughout the rest of the night, if necessary! It was the only course open to him; the letter, not the robbery, was paramount now.