“... Twenty-five thousand dollars... Traders' National Bank... superintendent's car... dummy package... counterfeit seals... that's all right, but MacVightie says the Secret Service is sending a man by the name of Birks out here....”
And then a voice at which the Hawk involuntarily held his breath, and to which, at the door now, he listened in a sort of stunned incredulity, as though he were indeed the sport of his own ears. It was a very quiet voice, very soft, a velvet voice, a voice whose tones were cultured tones—and whose language was the language of a pirate of the Spanish Main.
“Time enough to attend to this Birks personage—what I want is the Hawk!” came in limpid tones. “And if I were not tied down here in this damned and double-damned wheel chair, I would have twisted his throat for him long ago. I furnish brains—and I am cursed with a miserable, crawling mob of gnats upon whom they are wasted! That's it—gnats! Gnats—insects—moths—anything that, if shown the light, knows nothing but to singe its own wings!” The voice was not raised; it was like a mother's, like a woman's voice, talking plaintively to a spoiled child—but there was something absolutely deadly in its inflection.
“The Ladybird!” The Hawk's lips framed the words without sound, and in a sort of numbed hesitant way. “I—I thought he was dead.”
The telegraph sounder kept on spluttering at intervals, but it was only stray stuff, routine railroad business, going over the wires. The Hawk, flat on the floor and at one side of the jamb now, stared through the doorway. It was the doorway leading to the cellar. The stairs, halfway down, turned abruptly at right angles. The Hawk was rewarded with a view of the stone foundation wall of the house, nothing more. But for the moment the Hawk was lost to his immediate surroundings. The Hawk's criminal acquaintanceship was wide, varied and intimate, and his mind was still not entirely recovered from the startled amazement which the recognition of that voice had brought him. He was quite fully conversant with the Ladybird's record—only he had thought the Ladybird dead!
The Ladybird was not an ordinary criminal; instead of having spent twenty years in Sing Sing, as was very justly his due, the police had spent those twenty years in trying to put him there—and the Ladybird was still to know the restrictions of a cage! Clever, fearless, cunning, Napoleonic in the scope and breadth of his operations, the biggest scoops on the blotters of the New York police, and, higher up, on the Federal records, were laid to the Ladybird's door; but always, somewhere, the thread of evidence broke—sometimes not till the door itself was reached—but always it broke; the thread had never crossed the threshold. The man himself was highly educated, a man now well on toward fifty. In the underworld there were a thousand different stories of his early life—that he had been a professor of science in a great university; that he came of a rich family high up in the social scale; that he had been, in fact, everything that the spice of imagination could supply to enhance the glamour that surrounded him in the sordid empire of Crimeland, where so many were his followers and worshippers. But here, too, the thread was broken. None knew who he had been; none knew where he had come from. They knew him only as one who was invulnerable against the attacks and efforts of the police, as a peer of their own unholy realm, as one whose name was a name to conjure with—for in the name, the “moniker” they themselves had given the Ladybird on account of his effeminate voice and manner, derision was neither intended nor implied. There were limits and bounds to even the underworld's temerity, and none knew better than the underworld the sinister incongruity of those effeminate characteristics. Where another might bellow and roar his rage, and threaten, the Ladybird lisped his words—and struck.
But he, the Hawk, had thought the Ladybird dead! The man had been badly hurt a year ago in a railroad accident somewhere in the East, and the report had spread, and had been credited even in the inner circles of the underworld, that he was dead. The Hawk's lips twisted grimly. The Ladybird had seen to it evidently that the report was not denied! And so, instead, the man was a cripple now, weaving his plots, and scheming with that black, cunning brain of his from a wheel chair! Well, he——
The Hawk reached quickly into his pocket for pencil and paper—there would be just light enough to enable him to see. The sounder was rattling a brisk, tattoo, but it was no longer stray stuff. The message, in quick, sure “sending,” was coming in the Wire Devils' secret code. Letter by letter the Hawk jotted it down:
“pikxtfbmez byqetbqfsl kgqmbokufec srfijojeremb sthfgsbk bnfebvwq jduuvsfpq xwfsnlipb ouflmnfsbg jeborr ettjupuj ohllsppn.”
The sounder ceased abruptly. There was silence. The Hawk replaced pencil and paper in his pocket. The minutes passed—the message was evidently being decoded. Then the Ladybird's voice: