by Jack Boyle
After you left me at the train I ’phoned him, and he came rushing to me as I knew he would. I told him what I wanted. He objected, denied he could handle the Governor and tried to stall. But in the end he gave in, as men like him always do to a woman.
And so, dearest, I have given you what you said you wanted more than anything on earth—the life of your pal.
Creedon is waiting. I have slipped away for a moment to write this. I am glad and happy, Blackie dear. Are you?
Could Mary do more for you than I am doing? Your answer is my reward—my only one now. Adieu, my dearest.
Yours always,
Rita.
“What a woman!” exclaimed Blackie with a husky catch in his voice. He looked up at Mary, still staring down at him with a twisty little smile on her lips “But why did she address this letter to you? I don’t understand that.”
“I know. Any woman would know.” Mary sat on his knee and drew his head toward her. “Because she wanted to be quite sure I would see it. And having seen it, if I were foolish and jealous and distrustful like some women, I might quarrel and fuss with you and give her in the end the man she wants—you.
“But I do trust you, and I’m not foolish; and so”—a long pause—“she won’t get you.”
She kissed him with the wry little smile still on her pretty lips.
CHAPTER IX
FRED THE COUNT
The day toward which all imprisoned creatures measure time—the day of freedom—had come to Fred the Count. Prison doors opened, and he passed out, jubilant in the intoxicating consciousness of liberty.
A vain attempt to keep on good terms with two wives and the law at the same time had cost him five years in stripes—five years that would have been seven had he not shortened his time at the expense of fellow-convicts. Like everything within the realm of human desire, the Count’s shortcut to liberty had a price-tag attached. Ostracism and hatred, bitter and revengeful beyond the conception of the outside world, were the cost of his officially reduced sentence, but as he stepped through the double gates of Folsom Penitentiary and found the world of free men with all its beckoning allurements once more open to him, he felt he had bought cheaply.
He had not always been so certain of this. There had been many months during which the Count, with fear in his heart, had been forced to compute his chances of living to enjoy the liberty for which others had paid with their lives. Two over trustful convicts with whom he had planned a feasible scheme of escape had slipped from their cells at midnight to be shot to death on the threshold by hidden gun-guards. When a second “break” in which the Count was the leading spirit ended in swift disaster for all but himself, his comrades in stripes began to suspect and watch him. But for a time the bigamist’s suave, plausible tongue lulled suspicion.
Then came the betrayal of Blackie’s plan to free the Cushions Kid from the death-cell on the eve of his execution. The Kid, as the whole convict world knew, was facing death for the sake of the code that prohibited him from naming the pal for whose act he had been sentenced. The condemned boy was seized in his cell with the means of escape in his hands. The next day the convict colony knew that within it was one willing to barter a comrade’s life for his own petty gain.
The elimination, one by one, of those in the betrayed secret definitely fastened responsibility on the Count. From that moment he was a man condemned to death by the prison world in which he lived. With timely intuition he sensed the verdict against him and induced the warden to assign him to duties that kept him well out of reach of the knives which day after day patiently awaited their opportunity beneath a dozen striped shirts.
Though the Count lived for months in an endless nightmare of dread, the hidden knives never found the target of flesh that feared them so.
And now he was free!
His transient regret at the treachery that had endangered his own life slipped from his shoulders as easily as the convict suit he joyously changed for civilian clothes. Remorse he had never felt. Being safe now, he rejoiced whole-heartedly in the unfair bargain by which he profited. Unalloyed contentment was in his heart as he strode down the hill toward the town and the railway.
At the foot of the grade a sharp turn revealed the prison cemetery, weed-grown, unkempt and dotted with wooden headboards. The names on two close to the fence caught his eye. There, side by side, lay the trustful pair he had betrayed to their death, with the grass growing green and strong above their graves. No tremor of fear or regret lessened the Count’s buoyant spirit as he noted this. No man need fear the dead, he thought; and as for conscience, that, to him, was a superfluous something which bothers only women and fools—fools like those left behind in stripes, fools like those past whose moldering bodies he was hurrying back to life and gayety and all the joys of freedom.
If there is some good in even the worst of men, as sociologists assert, the Count as a boy must have been kind to his mother.
At the railway station the Count’s wary and experienced eye noted with quick gratification that no one who might have a star beneath his coat was waiting for him, as there might have been, for there were many incidents in the bigamist’s long career that were not purged by his sentence for victimizing two trustful women who had had more money and credulity than discernment. Time, however, which mollifies, and ameliorates everything, even the law, had served him well, and he found no one on the station platform but a young girl.
Admiringly, appraisingly, he noted the trim, childish figure and pretty face clouded by something difficult to interpret. He always eyed women. They interested him to the same extent and in precisely the same way the stock-ticker interests Wall Street speculators—as the obviously easy and only natural avenue to wealth. Their weaknesses, their foibles and follies,—even their virtues,—were as water turning a millwheel that poured the grist of luxury into his ruthless and covetous hands. As he noted the unpretentious dress and unadorned fingers of the girl, his interest died.
“A pretty little Cinderella without any Fairy Godmother,” he thought, and straightway he forgot her. Other things being equal, the Count preferred youth and beauty, but always beauty backed by a checkbook.
When the train came, the Count settled himself and forgot even his newborn liberty in the joy of planning the quick turn he intended to make in the crooked money-market. Behind him rode the girl of the station platform—a girl whose childish face, now that she was safe from his observation, was marred by resolute, immutable hatred—hatred consciously righteous and of the sort that never lessens or dies.
Could the Count have known the girl was on that train only because he was, and that the sight and thought of him alone had so altered her sweetly girlish beauty, he would have realized that the hatreds and dangers he thought so safely shackled in the prison behind him had followed him out into the world and were dogging him now, step by step, with implacable, ominous resolution.
That night Fred the Count, ex-convict, landed at the San Francisco ferry and dived, like a rabbit to its warren, into the sheltering purlieus of the city. A week later at a fashionable hotel there appeared in his stead Sir Harry Westwood Cameron, English gentleman, apparently of unlimited leisure and wealth, but whose wardrobe seemed surprisingly new for a man whose luggage indicated an extensive tour.
Sir Harry—it is only fair to accord him the privilege of the name he chose after a careful study of “Burke’s Peerage”—lay in his suite reading and rereading a trivial item in the morning’s paper. It announced the arrival in San Francisco of Sir Arthur Caveness of London on a secret mission supposed to involve the purchase of vast quantities of war-supplies for the British Government. He had been the guest of honor at a banquet given by the British consul.
Beside this item Sir Harry laid another clipped from the same paper. It related the fact that Miss Bettina Girard, daughter of Sherwood Girard, pioneer Mendocino lumberman, had celebrated her eighteenth birthday with a dance at which the countryside fox-trotted and on
e-stepped on the waxed stump of a single giant redwood tree. The paragraph added that Miss Girard was the sole heiress of her father, owner of the largest tract of uncut redwood in the State.
For a full hour Sir Harry, with mind keyed to its highest pitch of concentration, conned the possibilities for him contained in the two bits of news. Then he rose, bowed to his reflection in the mirror, and went down to dinner, satisfied with himself and the world.
During the next three days Sir Harry made a number of preparations with business-like dispatch. First he wrote a letter to the British consul—omitting the “Sir” from his signature, stating he was an Englishman desiring to enlist and asking instructions. He got them, of course, by return mail on consulate stationery and over the consul’s signature. Then, after nightfall, he visited a dirty, dilapidated little print-shop located in a single room in an alley near Chinatown. The sole occupant of the place was a misshapen little man lying on a couch in a frowsy dressing-gown. To him—evidently an old acquaintance from their greeting—Sir Harry showed the consulate letter and asked for duplicate stationery and a sheaf of checks bearing the same identifying insignia.
“They’ll be ready to-morrow night, Fred,” the little old man wheezed after examining the sample with a microscope, “and the charge to you will be twenty dollars—which I’ll take now.”
“Twenty dollars! That’s robbery,” remonstrated Sir Harry angrily.
“No, no, Fred, no robbery about it,” chuckled the hunchback. “I charge one dollar for doing the work and nineteen for forgetting I did it. Cheap enough, when you think it over, ain’t it?”
Sir Harry handed him a twenty-dollar bill.
When he received the papers ordered from the print-shop, he bought a plate of glass cut to fit inside one of his suit-cases, and an electric-light extension cord; then he locked himself in his room and drew down the curtains. On the bottom of the glass he carefully pasted the genuine letter received from the British consul. Next he laid the glass across the top of his open suit-case with a lighted incandescent beneath it. On the top of the glass he laid, one after another, a series of letters he had personally typed on the stationery provided by the printer, and traced on each, with a deftness and accuracy that proved long experience at the task, the exact duplicate of the consul’s signature—the light beneath the glass outlining the genuine signature on the blank papers as clearly as though it were written there. These letters, addressed to himself, he mailed and received back again properly stamped by the postal service.
That night Sir Harry Westwood Cameron packed his luggage, paid his hotel-bill, ordered a taxi in time for an early morning train and fell asleep contentedly, in blissful anticipation of an approaching golden harvest.
While Sir Harry slept, an underworld jury of six—four men and two women, grouped round a table in a secluded flat—discussed him with the same consciousness of solemn responsibility with which a court jury debates a death-verdict against a man already adjudged guilty. From the hour of his release from Folsom one or more of the six had been at his heels—following, watching, waiting with silent, purposeful doggedness. Each of Sir Harry’s preparations for an approaching flier in high finance had been observed and reported to Boston Blackie, the “mob” chief, who sat at the head of the group, grave and taciturn. K. Y. Lewes, whose hotel-room adjoined the Englishman’s, had brought the news that Sir Harry had paid his bill and was ready to leave town. That the time to strike had come was the evident sentiment of the majority. Jimmy the Joke was speaking.
“If he’s going to blow town in the morning, to-night’s the time to ring down his curtain, and here’s the way to do it! There’s an eight-inch ledge between K. Y.’s room window and his. Out one window and in the other; a clout over the head with a sap, and a poke with a shiv” (knife), “and he’ll be hard to wake when they call him for his train in the morning.” Jimmy illustrated with gestures more vivid than words. “Say the word, Blackie, and it’ll be all over by daylight.”
One of the two women—Boston Blackie’s Mary, who sat beside him—shivered slightly. The other, a girl with the face of a child and eyes old with worldliness, stared unseeingly before her as though trying to visualize the scene just described—a sleeping man, a dark shadow slipping through a window, a quick blow, a knife-stab, a groan—and silence. There was no trace of mercy in the set lines of her face, for the man this child-woman loved as only such as she can love was he whom Fred the Count had sought to betray to the hangman and who because of that treachery was still behind prison bars instead of at her side.
They all turned toward Boston Blackie and waited. In all things he was the final arbiter.
“I don’t want him bumped off.”
A sigh of relief from Mary, and a low gasp of surprise from the rest followed Boston Blackie’s words.
“Why, Blackie? Oh, why, why?” cried the girl, asking the question in every mind.
“Because, little Miss Happy, it’s too easy, too quick, too inadequate,” Blackie answered. “Unless the future holds something worse than death for Fred the Count, he has escaped us. Only years of suffering filled with the gnawing knowledge of why he suffers can square the debt this man has taken on himself. Death wont do. We must wait and take him when—” Boston Blackie paused. “Jimmy,” he continued after a moment’s thought, “pick him up at the hotel in the morning and trail him wherever he goes. It won’t be far. He’s ready to pull one of his regular capers. He’ll take you up to some out-of-the-way place and begin work. The moment he does, wire me. And Jimmy, don’t risk one chance—not even one—of losing him.”
As the group disbanded mutteringly, little Miss Happy crossed the room and took hold of Boston Blackie’s arm.
“You won’t let him get away, will you Blackie?” she pleaded. “If I thought there was even a chance he might, I’d—” She stopped short.
“Don’t worry, little girl,” Blackie answered, laying his hand on her head. “He’ll not escape this time—I promise it.”
The following afternoon a puffing little logging train left Sir Harry Westwood Cameron at Sherwood, a mountain village in the heart of California’s great redwood forest. Before night he was talking lumber with old Sherwood Girard the pioneer, to whom he had displayed credentials revealing a mission that made him the most honored guest ever received into the lumberman’s home, where, in the simple, open-hearted fashion of the mountains, all travelers were welcome.
While Sir Harry talked to her father, Betty Girard, who some day soon would own the vast, unbroken stretches of virgin forest that rolled away ridge below ridge to the horizon, changed the gingham apron in which the visitor had found her, for her most becoming “party-dress” and nervously piled the golden braids of hair that had hung about her shoulders, high on her head in the most womanly coiffure she knew. Sir Harry was the first “real” baronet she had ever seen; and at supper that night, as he noted the flushed face and eager eyes with which the motherless little heiress listened to his stories of an ancestral (and visionary) home in England, Sir Harry exultingly blessed the happy chance that had sent him to Sherwood, for it was plain the aged master of the house, already bound by feebleness to his wheelchair, could measure in months or even weeks the life that remained to him.
In his room that night Sir Harry summed up his prospects with keen elation. Simple-minded, guileless Betty, who judged him by her mountain standards and listened to his stories of London with the fresh zest and perfect belief of a child, would be, he foresaw, easy prey for a man like himself, skilled in the deception of women far more sophisticated than she. When he married Betty,—already an accepted fact to him,—nothing would stand between him and the sole possession of the vast forests on every side but the life of an old man slipping palpably and inexorably toward an early grave. He was thankful there was no mother to combat and convince. Mothers, he had found, were strangely intuitive sometimes.
“It’ll be the best job of my life,” Sir Harry assured himself delightedly.
CHAPTER X
THE PRICE OF SUCCESS
During the weeks that followed, Sir Harry had no reason to doubt the truth of his boast. Detail after detail of his plan of campaign worked like smooth-running machinery. His first step was a call at the Sherwood offices of President Muir of the milling company which turned endless trainloads of Girard logs into sawed timber. To Muir, a Scotchman with all the shrewdness of his race, Sir Harry presented papers, seemingly unimpeachable, accrediting him as a representative of the British Government instructed to purchase vast supplies of lumber. He showed a specification-list detailing sizes and quantities and asked for a bid on the largest order ever placed in California lumber annals. He made but one stipulation—for Government reasons, the entire transaction must remain an absolute and inviolate secret.
Muir considered his visitor with innate caution. “It’s mighty big business ye speak of, Sir Harry,” he said. “Who’s to pay, and how?”
“A perfectly proper question,” Sir Harry answered. “I will pay, and”—he leaned over and tapped the desk to emphasize his words—“in lieu of the usual investigation you, as a business man, naturally would make of my finances, I make this suggestion: If we agree on prices, I will make an advance payment of ten thousand dollars on the day we sign the contract. As the lumber is delivered at the seaboard each month, I will pay spot cash for the shipments before they are moved from the wharves. You get my money before I get your lumber. Is that satisfactory?”
“Ah! It sounds fair and business-like,” admitted the Scotchman, and he plunged into a discussion of costs. In this phase of the negotiations Sir Harry further lulled Muir’s really groundless doubts of himself by displaying an intimate knowledge of lumber-values and a marked disposition to haggle over every penny. They parted with the lumberman convinced that good fortune had sent him a customer who would keep his mill running night and day for months.
