by Jack Boyle
Lavalle pressed the button that started the motor as Boston Blackie stepped back from his side.
“I’ve just one word I want to say to you, Wilmerding,” Lavalle began, his foot on the clutch. “It’s this: You have only yourself to blame. Don’t accuse Marian. You forced her into the situation you discovered this evening, by your neglect of the finest little woman I ever met. I was forced into it by a love I admit frankly. Don’t blame Marian for what you yourself have caused. I won’t ever see or communicate with her again.”
“That’s the most decent speech I’ve heard from your lips to-night,” said the man beside the car, dropping his gun back into an outside pocket. “I don’t blame her. I’ve learned many important facts to-night—one of which is that the right place for a man is in his own home with his own wife. I’m going to remember that; and the wedding-ring that was dropped into the ashes to-night is going back on the finger it fits. Good night.”
Lavalle without a word threw in the clutch, and his car sped away and was enveloped and hidden by the fog.
Halfway down the block, Boston Blackie came to another car standing at the curb with a well-muffled chauffeur sitting behind the wheel. As he climbed in, the driver, Mary, uttered a low, thankful cry.
“No trouble. I have the jewels here—feel the packages; and a whole lot happened,” said Blackie with deep satisfaction. “I’ve a new story to tell you when we get home, Mary. It’s the story of a big burglar named Blackie and a little boy named Martin Wilmerding and a still littler woolly dog named Rex, and a woman who guessed wrong. I think it will interest you. Let’s go. I have several things to do before we go home.”
When they reached the downtown district, Blackie had Mary drive him to the Palace Hotel. There he sought out the night stenographer.
“Will you take a telegram for me, please,” he said. Then he dictated:
“To Martin Wilmerding, Del Monte Hotel, Monterey:
“The boy needs you. I do too. Please come.
“MARIAN.”
Though there was a telegraph-office in the hotel, he summoned a messenger-boy from a saloon and sent the message.
Then he went to another hotel and found a second stenographer, to whom he dictated a second message. “Mrs. Marian Wilmerding, 3420 Broadway, San Francisco:
“The packages you gave me were what I really wanted. Thank you and good-by.
“D. L.”
Summoning another boy, he sent the second message from a different telegraph office.
“Those telegrams, and how they came to be sent, will be a mystery in the Wilmerding home to the end of time,” he thought, deeply contented.
“Let’s go home, Mary,” he said then, returning to his car and climbing in. “I think I’ve finished my night’s work, and I don’t believe I’ve done such a bad job either.”
He was silent for a moment.
“I’ve given a wife to a husband,” he said half to himself. “I’ve given a father to a child; I’ve given a mother the right to look her son in the face without shame; and I’ve played square with the gamest little pal I ever want to know, Martin Wilmerding, Jr., and his dog, Rex. And for my pay I’ve taken the Wilmerding jewel-collection. I wonder who’s the debtor.”
CHAPTER IV
THE CUSHIONS KID
Boston Blackie dropped the paper he had been reading, a satisfied smile lighting his face. Two months had elapsed since the evening, still treasured in his memory, on which he had met and comforted his “little pal” at the Wilmerding home. And now in the daily column of society notes he read “Mr. and Mrs. Martin Wilmerding, accompanied by their son are leaving the city for a month at their country home in Monterey County.”
“It succeeded,” he cried joyously to himself. “It couldn’t help it—not with a boy like that drawing them together. I wish Mary were back. This news will make her even happier than it has me.”
Impatiently he began to pace the floor, visions of a tiny youngster in nightclothes and with a woolly dog, filling his mind as he waited for his wife. A step sounded in the corridor.
“Mary at last!” exclaimed Blackie in tones caressingly tender.
Then his ear caught the sound of a second light step on the stairway. He listened with every faculty strained and abnormally alert. His hand, which instinctively, at the sound of the strange footfall, had sought the revolver which lay nearby, let the gun slip back to its place.
“A woman with her,” he added. “Strange! But she comes for a good reason, if she comes with Mary.”
He rose and unbarred the door at the light, distinctive rap of the elect among crooks. Mary threw herself into his arms and clung to him, sobbing. Behind her entered a second woman, with the face and figure of a young girl, but with eyes old and tired and world-weary from heartache and suffering. She too was weeping, but quietly, hopelessly, as women who love do for their dead. Blackie recognized her at once.
“Why, it’s little Miss Happy!” he exclaimed, using the name with which crookdom had rechristened her when she was first introduced to its circles by the Cushions Kid, youthful pal of Blackie in bygone days. “What’s wrong, little girl? What’s happened to the Kid?”
The girl covered her face with tiny hands, frail and thin and almost transparent, and sobbed silently. Mary released one arm from Blackie and encircled the thin shoulders that seemed so pitifully childish for the burden of grief they bore. The girl’s head fell on Mary’s shoulder.
“Oh, Blackie,” cried Mary, “the Cushions Kid is in Folsom Prison, and he’s sentenced to—to—” Her lips failed as she strove to speak the dreaded words.
The other girl raised her head and laid her hand on Boston Blackie’s arm.
“The Kid’s sentenced to be hanged, Blackie,” she said, forcing out the words slowly, one by one, as though each tore her heart. “Only fourteen days left, Blackie. Only fourteen little days! Oh!” Her voice rose as self-restraint snapped. “Day and night I see him standing on the trap, bound and helpless. I see the black cap sliding down over his dear face. I see—the—the” She covered her eyes as though thus she could shut out the picture imagination seared on her brain.
“I love him so, Blackie. I love him so,” she moaned. “You won’t let them kill him. You’ll save him for me, won’t you, Blackie?”
Her blind confidence in the power of a hunted crook to wrest her lover from the hand of the law was as a little child’s belief in the omnipotence of a father.
“Make her some coffee, Mary,” he said, “and you’re going to lie here and tell me all about it. You look terribly sick, child.”
“I’ve been starving myself. I needed every dollar I could make for the Kid’s mouthpieces” (lawyers). “Every day they wanted more jack, more jack, more jack” (money), “and there was no one but me to make it. The Kid’s pal turned out a rat, you see.”
Boston Blackie raised himself and stared at the girl, his eyes aglow with admiration. He had felt the agonizing torture she had chosen to endure for the sake of a love that knew no higher law than sacrifice and service.
“Game little girl!” he muttered. “The worst of us see the day when we thank God for our women. Tell me about the Kid’s fall, Happy,” he added aloud. “Why wasn’t it in the papers?”
“It was. They were full of it, but he called himself Jimmy Grimes, and the coppers never made him. They don’t know who he is yet. It was the express car robbery on the overland rattler at Sacramento. The messenger was killed. But Blackie, the Kid didn’t do it. He wasn’t even in the car, though he was in on the job. Whispering Malone bumped the messenger and tossed the package and jack and jewels to the Kid, who was waiting for them at the river bridge. They got the Kid at the hop-joint that night with the stuff still on him. Malone blew, after the pinch—the yellow-hearted rat! And now the kid’s up at the Big House with a death-sentence that isn’t coming to him because he’s too right to snitch even on a rat.”
The girl lifted herself on her elbow and rais
ed one frail hand as though taking an oath.
“So help me God,” she cried, “I’d go straight to the coppers and tell them who killed that messenger, I’d tell them how the job was pulled, I’d tell them everything,—enough to put Whispering Malone where my poor boy is now,—but if I did, the Kid would quit me. You know he would, Blackie. That’s all that stops me. You may say I’m a copper at heart, but I can’t help it. I would! I would!” The girl’s voice rose as emotion mastered her.
“But I can’t,” she added with a hopeless gesture and dropped back on the couch, whimpering like an animal wounded by the jaws of a trap. Blackie laid a comforting hand on her thin arm.
“You haven’t a wrong drop of blood in you, child,” he said gently. “You wouldn’t snitch to the coppers, no matter whose life depended on it. We men who play the crooked game must pay some day, and while we pay behind bars, our women suffer, like you, outside them. It doesn’t seem right, but it’s true. It’s part of the price of loving men like us—like me or the Kid—who—”
“Stop,” interrupted the girl. “Don’t say that. The only happiness I ever had was with the Kid. The only happiness I ever want is his love. Do you think that if I could, I’d forget what we’ve been to each other? I suffer, because I’m afraid for him. It’s thinking what these terrible days and nights must be to him that—that drives me wild.
“You can imagine what it is to count the days, the hours, the minutes, of life that are left you—to face them alone and helpless like a trapped rat. I see him led from the death-cell young, strong and full of life, and then in just one little minute, lying white and cold and—and—”
The girl sprang suddenly to her feet, wringing her hands.
“They must not; they shall not,” she cried. She dropped on her knees and held out two fragile arms, imploring Divine mercy.
“Merciful God, help us now,” she prayed, “Don’t let him die. He is so young, and you know he didn’t kill the messenger. He was so good to me. He never never betrayed a friend. O God, it isn’t right that he should die for Whispering Malone. The time left is so very, very short. Please, please, O God, help Boston Blackie to save him. Amen!”
Mary was on her knees as little Miss Happy finished. Boston Blackie’s head was bowed. The girl, still kneeling with arms imploringly outstretched and tears streaming down her face, strained her eyes upward as though to speed her prayer to its destination. The intense, unmistakable sincerity in the plea that came from the overburdened heart of the child-woman—a wife in fact but not in name—seemed to chasten and sanctify the air of the room and the hearts of the trio within it.
Vividly Blackie pictured the Cushions Kid, still a boy in the first days they had been together. Chicago, Denver—a dozen places flashed to his mind where they had pulled off jobs—Blackie, the master, and the Kid his protégée—and then that night in K. C. where the Kid had risked everything for him.
What he was Blackie had made him. Every trick and stall was Blackie’s own. Love akin to a father’s was in his heart for him. The Kid was “right.”
Boston Blackie, husky under the stress of the feeling Happy had fanned into a flame of determination, broke the silence.
“What have the lawyers done?” he asked. “Have they been to the Governor for a commutation?”
“The appeal was denied long ago. They have just come back from the capitol. It took my last two hundred dollars to send them. The Governor refused to interfere unless we show the Kid is innocent and turn up the right man. Boss Tom Creedon turned us down, too. You’re the last hope, Blackie. The mouthpiece is through.”
The girl searched the man’s face for some sign that would stimulate into new life the hope that her love would not let die.
“I suppose you had to raise the money for the trial, too,” Blackie said. “How did you do it, Happy?”
The girl looked into his questioning eyes frankly.
“I’m working at the Spider’s dance-hall,” she said without embarrassment, though no place bore a more unsavory reputation. “I dress like a school-kid and sell more drinks than any two of the girls. No,”—in answer to the query in his eyes,—“I’m not like the rest of the girls. I promised the Kid I wouldn’t be. I went to the Spider’s joint as a last resort when the lawyers said they’d quit the appeal if I didn’t raise money. I’d been filling in as a stall for Red-Eye, Costigan’s gun-mob, but they’re a cheap, worthless lot—not our kind, Blackie—and my bit wasn’t enough to keep the lawyers going. So I went to the dancehall. There was nothing else to do. I had to have money to fight the Kid’s case.”
“Poor, brave little woman !” said Mary, putting an arm protectingly around the girl and kissing her gently. “I know what you have gone through, dear.”
“I stood it better at first, when I knew that every time I sold a drink or begged luck-money after a dance I was earning a dollar that might save the Kid,” she said. “Lately, since the mouthpieces told me they don’t see any hope, it has been worse than hell itself. Mary, Blackie, I’ve sat there pretending to drink with strangers while the picture of my boy in the death-house blinded me. I’ve laughed and joked while I counted how many hours, how many minutes, even, are left him. I’ve danced with men, knowing each step was cutting my poor boy’s life another second shorter. Ugh!” she shuddered, “how I hated the touch of their hands, the look in their eyes, the words on their lips. I hated the music; I hated the crowds; I hated the lights and the laughter, for always I could see the Kid lying alone in the dark, waiting, waiting, waiting! But I laughed with the rest, for the lawyers wanted dough, and it takes a laughing face to get the money at Spider’s.”
Boston Blackie, without a word, rose from the pallet and switched on the lights.
“How much money have we, Mary?” he asked.
Mary, whose face was white and drawn, delved into a trunk and handed him a big roll of bills. It was the money which meant escape from all the dangers that threatened them. Blackie counted it; then he divided it into two piles.
“That’s for you, Mary, in case anything happens to me—in case I don’t come back,” he said indicating the smaller package of bills. He stuffed the larger roll inside the breast of his soft shirt. “This I’ll take with me. Money is the right kind of ammunition for a job like this, and there’s eight thousand dollars here. It’s enough.”
He slipped the revolver on the table inside the waistband of his trousers. He took a second gun in a holster from a desk drawer and slung it under his left armpit. Then he turned to little Miss Happy and with gentle hands laid on her shoulders stilled the convulsive shudders that shook her body.
“You stay here with Mary,” he commanded. “You’ve done your bit for the Kid, little woman. No more of the Spider’s for you. Everything a man can do for him is going to be done—providing the coppers don’t get me first. Don’t despair, and don’t hope—too much. Just pray as you did a moment ago. I’ll be at Folsom by noon to-morrow.”
Mary slipped to his side and clung to him. He looked into her face and kissed her gently, as though in renunciation.
“I’m sorry, dear one,” he whispered. “Happiness seemed our very own this morning. Now—who knows? But you know I must go. You know I must try even if I fail.”
“Yes, yes, go. I want you to, dear. I knew you would, when I brought her here. There is no other way. But oh, my dearest, why is life so very, very cruel and hard? Blackie, I am only a woman.” There was no break in Mary’s voice, no tears in her eyes. Instead, in them Blackie saw and recognized the same spirit of willing sacrifice with which women sent their men to the trenches “somewhere in France” and watched them go with smiling lips, brave eyes—and breaking hearts.
Blackie stooped and kissed her.
“You see now, dear,” he said with deep conviction, “why I felt held here. Now we understand why.” Once more he kissed her; then with a cheery word to Happy he was gone.
Mary covered her face and choked back a sob as the door cl
osed. Happy knelt beside her, and the two women clung together, united by misery, for each knew the life of the man she loved was at stake now.
“If all men were like Blackie, there wouldn’t be any like him,” Happy cried; and paradoxical as it sounds, that was precisely what she meant.
CHAPTER V
ONE WEEK TO LIVE
Folsom Prison is tucked away in an isolated nook in the lower foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. The prison is built on a small, level plain, barren, brown and treeless, that lies in the shelter of a semi-circle of hills. The gray, squatty buildings are a bleak and unlovely blot on the scenic grandeur that surrounds them.
Behind the prison flows the American River between low, sandy banks. On the other three sides, dotted every hundred yards by watchtowers manned by gun-guards, stretches a broad, glaring white line. It is the dead-line of the prison, for Folsom has no walls and needs none. Within that line men in stripes pray or curse as they choose, while they work out the stunted measure of life that the law has left them. To step beyond the line—even one step beyond it—is death, for the guards in the towers are ordered to ask no questions, to wait for no explanations, to shoot to kill. Many times, on turbulent prison-days, they have obeyed that order with unerring aim. Convicts call the dead-line the River Styx.
From the second-story window of one of the buildings in the prison inclosure a man looked out through barred windows toward the far-away mountains whose snowy peaks glistened and gleamed in the rays of a setting sun. His face was young and boyish, but his eyes were hard, desperate and aged, for he was counting the sunsets that still remained to him—just six. Early in the gray dawn of the seventh day before the sun peeped over the mountains now before his eyes, his life was to be blotted out.
Through the partitions in the death-house the sound of hammering reached his ears. He shuddered and gripped the window-bars more tightly in spite of the years of training that had taught him that there is no dishonor for such as he but weakness and a babbling tongue. He knew the hammers were building the scaffold on which he would stand for a few brief seconds before a sea of morbid, curious enemy faces, until the world ended in sudden blackness. He hoped they would be quick, mercifully quick, when the final moment came, for he wished to die with a smile and a jest on his lips, according to the tradition of his kind.
