The Butcher pitched across the threshold, dragging the Hawk down with him in his fall.
“The door, Jim—quick—slam it!” screamed the Butcher. “We're done—the cellar!”
The Hawk had leaped to his feet. The room was dark, unlighted, but from across it came, as there had come that other night, the faint glow from the open door of the cellarway. The Butcher had staggered up again, and was making in that direction—and then the Hawk, too, was across the room—but the next instant, turning to meet the rush from without, as the front door, evidently before the man whom the Butcher had addressed as Jim could fasten it, burst inward and crashed against the wall, he was borne backward, and, losing his balance, half pitched, half rolled down the cellar stairs.
The fall must have stunned him for a moment. He realised that as he struggled to his feet—to find himself staring into the muzzle of MacVightie's revolver, and to find that the bulging package of banknotes was gone from under his coat, as, too, were his automatic, his jimmy and the baggageman's revolver that had been in the side pockets of his coat. He raised his hand dazedly toward his eyes—and MacVightie, reaching out, knocked his hand away.
“I'll do that for you—we were just getting around to it!” said MacVightie roughly—and jerked the Hawk's mask from his face. And then MacVightie leaned sharply forward. “O-ho!” he exclaimed grimly. “So it's you—is it? I guess you put it over me the night that ten thousand was lifted at the station—but I've got you now!”
The Hawk made no answer. He was staring, still in an apparently dazed way, about him. The cellar was a veritable maze of work benches and elaborate equipment—for counterfeiting work. A printing press stood over in one corner; on the benches, plates and engravers' tools of all descriptions were scattered about; and, near the wall by the stairway, he made out a telegraph set. But the Hawk's glance did not linger on any of these things—it fastened on a bent and twisted form that craned its neck forward from a rubber-tired wheel chair; on a livid face, out of which the coal-black eyes, narrowed to slits, smouldered in deadly menace, and from whose thin lips, that scarcely moved, there poured forth now a torrent of hideous blasphemy in that soft, silken voice that had earned the Ladybird his name; on the hand, crooked into a claw, that, pushing away the man who stood guard over him, reached out toward where the Butcher lay upon the floor.
“You ape, you gnat, you brainless pig! And you led them here—here—here!”
“I didn't know where I was until I was right on the house,” mumbled the Butcher miserably.
“I——”
“Shut up—both of you!” ordered MacVightie gruffly. “What do you say, Lanson? Is this the Hawk?”