He, too, waited.
Twenty minutes later, in the darkness, the loft was quite still. Two bodies, horribly contorted, lay straining on their straps. The rigor of death was already settling upon those convulsive heaps. The faint squares of the windows made a kind of glimmer by which it was possible to discern a pale face, a slight figure; this leaned against the table, which it clutched with hands of steel. He who had trusted to the leaden scales had trusted well.
In that darkness, in that silence, through that horror of squalid death which had not been silent, he had shed the rags of his hysteria and had caught again the concentration, the keenness, the readiness of that moment when Mrs. Pascoe had called on him to be a man. But what did he see in those empty shadows, and for what did he nerve himself? The figure there at the table was desperate, but it was very slight, and at the end of no road—valor nor cowardice nor vengeance—could he see escape. They were all blocked, those roads, the program too close built and every knot too tightly tied. Whatever he might wish, there was but one thing he could do. A knife was to be put into his hand and he had no choice except to strike. After all that had passed it was perhaps even with eagerness that silently, alone among those shadows, he embraced his fate.
A stir began to rise from below; the men down in the garage were coming to pack the barrel. He heard the mounting footstep of his guard, ready to convey him to the secret meeting-place of the Arm of Justice; along that road where it should deal with him, when he had dealt with Nancy Cornish.
CHAPTER XV
ONE WITNESS SPEAKS
It was fully dark under the sail-cloth of the table d'hôte. A strong smell of rancid wicks disturbed nobody and in the charged, suspensive air the cheap lamps burned with a still flame. This may in part have been due to Herrick's tensely strung imagination, which Christina's message of the night before still mercilessly played upon. From that source no drop of further information had fallen through Tantalus on to the parched tongue of Herrick's nor of Wheeler's nor of the Law's desire.
That afternoon Herrick had seen Stanley off from the station where not six weeks ago they had met as strangers. And so little was Fate's veil lifted for him, even now, that he had no forewarning of when next, nor why, he should be there again!—Stanley had, however, told him Ten Euyck's latest news—how it was to the table d'hôte the Italians had conveyed their liberated prisoner from the Tombs!
The boy looked at his friend a little suspiciously even while he repeated Ten Euyck's chagrin: "That's a hideously shameful thing to happen to me! It's the annoyance of a blind, stupid, brutal reproof—when I've worked so hard and suffered so much! Here, in my own district—Under my own hand—!" There are no unalloyed elations in this world! Nor did there seem any doubt in Ten Euyck's mind that this was the long-sought-for secret place, where they should find a printing-press. But he forebore to raid it until evening, when all possible birds should have returned to the nest, and contented himself with the sending of his disguised operatives peacefully to fetch from it Will Denny, before whose coming Stanley had fled the police station. That young gentleman had also gathered from Wheeler's thunderstorm of oaths that Christina's manager considered himself under surveillance. And this had made Herrick wonder if the same were not true of himself.