Joe looked at the big mountain of a Mr. Neuburg with a wide-eyed gaze. “I see, you want him to come out and be killed. You’re a wonder of a devil, Adolf,” he said.
“Take his head, Joe, Louis will probably drop him before we get to that room at the top. Louis, his legs.”
II
When Clement came to himself he was conscious of extreme darkness, an agonizing pain in his head where that sandbag had landed, and also considerable pain where his bonds bit into wrist and leg.
He also felt from the sounds drifting up to him that he was in a room at the top of the gluemaker’s house, and probably a lumber room from the musty smell of it.
It must be confessed that his first responsible emotion was not thankfulness for an escape from what should have been death, but a very hearty disgust at the way he had allowed himself to be captured. In fact, when he realized how he had thrown away his chance and maybe delivered Heloise into the hands of Mr. Neuburg and his gang, he lost his nerve, and with a terrific output of strength tried to free himself from his bonds.
He had seen heroes in the “movies” and Mr. Houdini free themselves from their shackles often enough, and it had seemed a simple matter. The men who had fixed his bonds, however, would have spoiled any movie hero’s business. Not only could he not throw them off, but the struggle to do so, so increased the pain of them and that of his head, that in the end he fainted.
He was forced back to consciousness by the frightful sensation of blood recirculating in his limbs. He writhed and moaned. An oath sounded at his side, something was flung over his head, and handcuffs were snapped on to his wrists. Clement struggled with the thing about his head, while shuffling footsteps hurried across the boards but he only got the rug—that is what it proved to be—away from his eyes in time to see the legs and back of a tall, thin man flash out of the door. A strong lock snapped home. Louis, the gluemaker, was not risking identification.
When he had recovered sufficiently, Clement sat up and took stock of the situation. He was, as he had thought in the roof room of the gluemaker’s. It was a big room, crowded with old junk. The room was lit by a narrow window of the kind known to architects as a “lie-on-your-stomach,” that is, it rose from the floor boards to end at the slant of the roof about two feet above. By the light coming in through the dirty panes the morning was well on, but whether it was past his hour to see Heloise—9:30—he could not say.
He was sitting in the center of this room, with some fresh food and water beside him. The gang then did not want him to starve. He also saw that the gang had thought of him in other ways. The thin man who had just bolted through the door, had been with him for no other reason than to remove the tight ropes, and substitute manacles of an easier kind.