Quicker than thought a man behind me shoved us aside. He raised an iron mallet; it struck the door with a splintering crash—another and another—the door burst inwards, torn from its lock, torn from its hinges, and we all rushed forward. I heard a shot, then another; the group in front of me parted and an extraordinary scene was revealed, one I can never forget. A huge broad-shouldered man was crumpled upon the floor. There had fallen from his hand a thick, long soldering iron; it had been red or white hot; fallen on the floor it was burning into the boards, and little swinging flames encircled it. Near at hand was the large form of a plumber’s furnace with the blue whistling flame still shooting from it. Huddled in a corner, cowering behind a menacing man—quickly subdued, however, by a pointed revolver—was the beautiful woman, a half dishevelled creature in a deep yellow wrap, fastened a little distance below her peerless throat by a big turquoise brooch. Her abundant hair had become loosened, and it poured over her shoulders in a raven tide.
The man in front of her was Riddles’ Mephistopheles. He was pale, and the pallor hardly became him. Although strikingly handsome it gave a peculiar expression to his face, of craven hate and sinister fear, if that can be understood. In both his and the woman’s eyes shone a horrible surprise. But the overpowering object in the room was the half-naked figure of a man with extended arms and divergent legs, strapped to a narrow table by iron bands. These latter passed over his wrists and ankles, and were actually screwed to the table. His face was not readily deciphered; whiskers covered his chin, a high forehead beneath overhanging light hair and a large mouth formed together the suggestion of a very dignified and intelligent face. His condition was heart-rending; bruises covered his body, one eye seemed swollen and shut, and scars—I shuddered at the thought of their having been caused by the iron in the hands of the prostrate fiend—marked the white but defaced skin of his shoulders and arms.
There was little furniture in the room—the tortured man had probably been kept on the table at night—a few chairs, a second table, and towards the front of the room a long table covered with a confusion of physical apparatus. It was the work of a minute to search the criminals, and to handcuff them; though the woman cried bitterly at the degradation Captain B. was taking no chances, and then the liberation of the pitiable victim of these inhuman miscreants was effected. The stiffness of his limbs almost forbade movement, and he cried with pain—and for that matter I am sure with joy too—as we tenderly raised him, lifted him into a chair, and tried to relax the rigid muscles. His agony, crucified so on his back, must have been incalculable; evidently his resolute refusal had driven his tormentors furious, and made them incarnate demons. But what was it—the SECRET? Reader, you are not to know, except as you find it out yourself, by reading this almost incredible story.
With our prisoners—the Hercules was carried out; his femur had been split by the Captain’s bullet and he was in desperate pain—we made our way down through the house. There seemed to be only two rooms showing any signs of habitation, two rooms on the second floor used as bedrooms, and their furnishment was a droll mixture of bareness and luxury. Shreddy and hanging wallpaper, a superb rug or so, a sumptuous easy chair, and then wooden kitchen chairs, plain bedsteads, but a bureau or toilet table covered with jewel boxes, and in a corner odds and ends of silver utensils, heaped up into quite a noticeable hillock. Was it these that the men had been seen carrying so constantly into the house? Our prying about uncovered some decanters of wine incongruously stowed away in a pantry below a washbasin. Their contents helped Erickson, and some of the rest helped themselves.
Riddles had been gloating over the capture of his game; his eyes never left the sullen, downcast face of Mephistopheles, distorted too at moments with angry scowls, nor the disturbed shadowed splendor of the woman’s countenance. At an unguarded instant Mephistopheles sprang out of the hold of his captors, and brought his clenched, handcuffed wrists down on the head of Jack, who promptly dropped.
“You dirty little fox, you did this. I know now. I’ve seen you hanging about here. I’ll mark you! I’ll mark you! I’ll tear your liver and heart out yet. Oh, I don’t forget. Diaz never forgets.”
He was jerked back into decorum and silence, and somewhat injuriously rebuked as well, but a little scar, bare of hair, was to remain as a memento of his regard for Jack Riddles for many a long year afterwards.
I bargained successfully with Captain B. for the possession of Erickson, and I took him home in a taxi, greatly to my journalistic bliss. He was pretty dangerously ill for days; the nervous breakdown was dreadful. He raved and shouted and was almost maniacal in his outbreaks. It was the natural reaction of a powerful mind and nature against the circumstances of his degradation and insult. But he finally came round all right, the glow of health covered his cheeks, and his earnest eyes welcomed me with sanity and gratitude. Then he told me his story, in two parts. The first part explained the predicament in which we found him here in New York, the second— Well, the reader has it before him in this volume, exactly as it appeared in the daily issue of the New York Truth Getter.
A few words more to explain Mr. Erickson’s equivocal, abject position in New York, as we found him, and this Editorial Note will no longer restrain the puzzled and vexed subscriber. These words will be very few indeed, and may indeed prove very unsatisfactory. Yet they will conveniently make a skeleton framework or outline for deductions, with which the reader may fill its expressionless and yawning blanks, after the gift of his imagination or the bias of his temperament, upon reading the ensuing narrative.
Alfred Erickson reached San Francisco from the Arctic Exploration, herein circumstantially described. In San Francisco he formed, rather rapidly, the acquaintance of Angelica Sigurda Tabasco, and Diaz Ilario Aguadiente. There were mutual prepossessions. Mr. Erickson also fascinated his new friends by certain wonderful claims, which were however partially supported by ocular demonstration. They all came to New York. In New York Mr. Erickson came to grief. He had come too far from the base of his operations, and he suffered from a complicated treatment. We rescued him from its worst effects. I think that is all. I will not trust myself to say more for fear of my own remorse over misleading statements. Angelica and Diaz were never prosecuted. Erickson was afraid to tell his story before he wrote his book (this book), and we all agreed he acted wisely from a commercial standpoint, and the police so impressed Angelica and Diaz with their—the police’s—contiguity under any and all circumstances, in this country anywhere, anyhow, that they left it. And Jack’s “Husky” turned out to be a hardened photographed and historic criminal, who had played the heavy villain in the little mystery under the same impelling motive that animated the minds and tongues of Angelica and Diaz. He had also captivated this captivating pair by blandishments less peculiar than beauty, and he had wound up Alfred Erickson into the tightest kind of a knot of physical embarrassments, from whose Gordian embrace Erickson had been delivered through the intervention of the very humble instrument of Fate, Jack Riddles.