“I had two hands over my mouth, two more at my throat, and I don’t know how many more at my legs,” he said. “I could not call out, and I couldn’t do a thing to defend myself. When I got on my feet again the chain between the two nippers had been cut and my prisoner was gone. That’s all I know about it. I didn’t hear a word said—not one. There wasn’t a blow struck. Nobody was hurt that I have heard about. They didn’t even choke me hard enough to hurt.”
And the fact, so far as Paul Rogers was concerned, was this:
When the crowd became dense around him and the officer to whom he was handcuffed was dragged down beside him, a pair of steel nippers quickly severed the chain between the manacles, and then the manacle itself, that surrounded his own wrist.
He was a free man, and before him there was a niche in the crowd into which he stepped; and as he pressed forward the niche proceeded in front of him and as rapidly closed up behind him, something after the manner in which a ripple will travel across a stretch of smooth water when a pebble has disturbed it.
It is all smooth and clear in front of the ripple, and all smooth and clear behind it, but the ripple goes on continuously and regularly, until it strikes against the shore and disappears.
And so, Paul Rogers went ahead, slowly, continuously and regularly, until he struck against the pavement of Forty-second Street, when he, too, disappeared—was swallowed up in the ebbing and flowing of that sea of humanity which sucks through Forty-second Street, between the hours of four and six o’clock, almost every week-day in the year.
He had disappeared from Forty-second Street before it was known inside the station that a prisoner had escaped. He was gone before it was known on the outskirts of the crowd that had surrounded him that he was there at all.
The death chair at Sing Sing was cheated of its prey—or, at least, the journey to Sing Sing was indefinitely postponed.
Paul Rogers, conspirator, murderer, but more than all, a mystery, had made good his escape and was again at large—and he was at large for a well-defined and dastardly purpose.