CHAPTER XXIII.
THE MURDERER ESCAPES.
It lacked but a few moments of the time when the train that was to convey Rogers to Sing Sing would pull out of the Grand Central Station.
A closed carriage was driven hurriedly under the glass canopy which stretches between the station proper and the annex. There were two men on the box—the driver and a special officer in citizen’s clothes; and there were two men inside the hack.
One of these latter was also an officer; the other, Paul Rogers, who was to meet the fate that had been allotted to him, by passing through the “little door” into the room where that terrible chair is located, in which so many persons are compelled to seat themselves never to rise again.
But fate, and the careful plotting and planning of numerous friends of Rogers, had already determined that he was not, on this particular occasion, to arrive at the selected destination. Fate, assisted and directed somewhat by the aforesaid friends, had arranged a most dramatic rescue, which, by reason of its boldness and originality, was destined to succeed.
And this is how it happened:
When the hack drew up against the curb inside the station, the officer on the box leaped down and opened the door.
As he did so, he made a signal which, although almost imperceptible to many who were spectators of the scene, was yet visible to the police officers who were near, and they gathered closely around the hack.
In the meantime, the spectators, many of them ignorant of the identity of the passenger in the hack, but, nevertheless, attracted by an indefinable feeling that was in the air, suggestive of the presence of a convicted criminal, and many of whom—as it appeared later—who were thoroughly posted regarding that trifling circumstance, gathered closely around the hack, and the two men who presently descended from it.
It was somewhat remarkable how quickly that crowd gathered, seemingly from nowhere, but which, almost in a moment, became absolutely dense.