Boston Blackie

by Jack Boyle

  “She’s open,” he said. “Take a look.”

  Both doors of the safe were swung back, and a round, gaping hole in each showed where the irresistible heat of the oxyacetylene torch had carved its way through the solid steel as a knife slices cheese.

  Boston Blackie drew out a dozen or more unbroken packages of currency and a canvas sack full of silver, and scattered them on the floor.

  “It’s the pay-roll, Lewes,” he reported in a whisper. “I am glad it happened to be here to-night. It would be a nifty little haul, eh?”

  So far, Boston Blackie had conducted the business of the evening with skill, dispatch and in all ways as a man of his reputation might be expected to do. Nothing remained to be done to complete a neat job but to bundle the money into the empty suit-case and slip out the rear door. Instead, the safe-cracker began a series of preparations which would have puzzled and amazed others of his hazardous profession.

  First he put on his mask. Then he unlocked the front door of the office with a master key he took from his pocket. He opened it and left it slightly ajar. Returning to the safe, he studied carefully the arrangement of the desks and counters, finally indicating one with a jerk of his thumb.

  “Get behind there, Lewes, and whatever happens, keep out of sight till I give you the office. Here is your blanket; and be sure you get him on the first throw, for we can’t have any noise.”

  Blackie tossed a blanket to his pal, who obeyed him in silence.

  “He isn’t due for twenty minutes, but he might be ahead of time, and we mustn’t have any kind of a rumble to-night,” he commanded as he drew a chair behind the safe and seated himself. He rolled a cigarette and lolled back, waiting, with the unruffled nerves of a man enjoying a quiet evening smoke in his own home.

  The lighted incandescent left the dismantled safe and scattered packages of money in plain sight from the half-open door, while the minutes dragged slowly away in absolute silence.

  As the clock showed the passing of the hour, a step sounded on the board sidewalk down the street.

  “He’s coming,” whispered Blackie, slipping out of his chair and crouching behind the safe as he readjusted his mask.

  The footsteps approached slowly and suddenly stopped before the open door. There was a quick ejaculation of alarm as the watchman saw the wrecked safe and scattered money. He hesitated, fumbling for the revolver he never before had needed, and his eye roamed the room in sudden fear of a bullet from its shadows—a bullet either of the two men hidden within could have sent into his body a dozen times as he stood silhouetted against the window.

  But no shot came. Instead Blackie, who had been watching from behind the safe in grim amusement, slowly rose into view with his hands held high above his head.

  “Don’t shoot,” he cried. “You’ve got me. I quit.”

  The watchman succeeded at last in dragging out his gun and covered the safe-cracker.

  “Keep your hands up,” he commanded nervously, advancing on his prisoner. “No monkey business, or I’ll pop you sure.”

  “I don’t want to commit suicide,” growled Blackie. “You’ve got me with the goods, and I surrender.”

  The watchman felt for his handcuffs with his left

  hand.

  “That settles it,” ejaculated Blackie disgustedly as the bracelets came into sight. “I thought I might get a chance to beat it when we got outside in the dark, but now, I suppose, you’re going to cuff me to yourself. I’m done for keeps.”

  “That’s just what I’m going to do!” the watchman exclaimed, adopting the suggestion and showing rising excitement as he thought of the reward his night’s work would bring him from the lumber company. “Then I’m going to march you over to Mr. Muir’s house and keep you safe till he gets the sheriff. You thought you could come up here from the city and blow a safe and get away with it, did you? I guess you know now you can’t.”

  He locked one handcuff over Blackie’s extended wrist and snapped the other on his own arm.

  “Come on, now. March,” he commanded.

  “You’re some copper.” As he snapped out the word “copper,” Blackie 3rew slightly away from his captor. It was the signal for which Lewes was waiting.

  The thick folds of a blanket dropped suddenly over the watchman’s unsuspecting head. A blow on the wrist knocked his revolver from his hand, and he was thrown to the floor, struggling fiercely but in vain to free himself. With his free hand Boston Blackie snatched a bottle from his pocket and emptied it over the blanket. The captive’s struggles grew fiercer, then gradually ceased as the sickly sweet fumes of chloroform tainted the air. At last he lay quiet and inert.

  Blackie drew out a bunch of keys, unlocked the handcuff that still bound him to the unconscious man and rose to his feet.

  “Neatly done, Lewes,” he said smilingly. “He’s out. I’ll attend to him now. You get the boys and the auto. Be quick, and remember—not a sound from the engine.”

  Lewes slipped out the rear door and disappeared.

  Blackie lifted the blanket and examined the drugged watchman—then dropped it lightly back over his face.

  “Not even scratched, and he’ll have a story to tell after this night that’ll last him the rest of his life,” he mused.

  A moment later Blackie’s quick ear caught the sound of an auto being rolled quietly by hand into the alley behind the building. Three masked men appeared at the rear door. Between them, bound and gagged, was a prisoner at the sight of whose white, rage-contorted face Boston Blackie’s lips parted in a singular smile.

  The prisoner was Sir Harry Westwood Cameron.

  Sir Harry’s bloodshot eyes roved in terrified amazement over the strange scene before him—the wrecked safe, the packages of money scattered over the floor, the body hidden by the blanket, and the four masked men who guarded it. When his auto had been stopped at the bridge a half-mile out of town and he himself seized and bound, he had thought himself the victim of a hold-up. But what sort of hold-up men were these, who carried him back to the office of the Muir Lumber Company—the last place on earth he must be at dawn—and held him there now amidst the ruins of a cracked safe?

  “I’m going to take the gag out of his mouth. I want to talk to him. If he speaks above a whisper, crack him over the head,” said Blackie to his helper.

  “What does this mean? What do you want?” gasped Sir Harry as the loosened gag released his lips.

  “You!” Boston Blackie’s eyes hardened into points of steel.

  “Me! Who are you?”

  Boston Blackie thrust his masked face close to Sir Harry’s. Through the slits in the mask, the bigamist felt rather than saw two cold eyes that seemed to bore him through and through with a message of hate and menace.

  “Who am I? In spirit I am the Cushions Kid—the same Cushions Kid round whose neck you tried to put a rope to buy your worthless self a few extra months of freedom—the Cushions Kid, who has left his cell at Folsom Prison to-night to teach you, in the hour when you thought you had beaten the world, that a man who plays always pays—and in the same coin.”

  Sir Harry shrank away in a frenzy of uncontrollable fear from the voice that spoke from behind Boston Blackie’s mask, and stared up at him with wide, terror-stricken eyes, scarcely able to believe what they saw.

  “And these,”—with a gesture Blackie indicated the other masked men,—“can you guess now who they are? There stands the Kokomo Kid, whom you induced to join you in a break and then deliberately betrayed to his death. Do you remember? You thought he was safely underground in the prison cemetery, didn’t you? He isn’t. He’s here to-night too, in spirit, to watch you pay your debts. Now do you begin to understand why you are here and what is before you—Fred the Count?”

  As he heard his prison name flung at him with unutterable hatred by the mysterious man before him, Sir Harry sank on his knees with the fear of death in his heart. Whoever these men were,—whatever they were,—they knew him and
all his prison treacheries. He thought he knew what to expect from them. With chattering teeth he pleaded piteously for his life.

  “You don’t realize even yet what is before you, or you wouldn’t beg for life,” snarled Blackie in disgust. “You will live to beg for death. Listen carefully, Fred the Count. From the day you left your cell, you have been watched and followed step by step in preparation for this hour. We’re not going to kill you. That’s too quick and easy. Instead we’re sending you back to a cell to stay until they carry you to that cemetery to which you once thought it clever to send other men.

  “I let the watchman on the floor there take me in the act of cracking this safe. I let him handcuff me to his wrist. Then we chloroformed him, and now I’m going to handcuff you to him and touch off the burglar-alarm. When Muir and the rest come running down, they’ll find you cuffed to the watchman, who will tell them how he caught you. You see the end now, don’t you? Safe-cracking to an ex-convict means life, and to make quite sure no mistake will be made, I’m going to put this envelope with your prison photo in one of your suit-cases. The boys up at Folsom will welcome you back, won’t they? Ah, you begin to get it now, don’t you, Count?”

  Sir Harry groaned and groveled on the floor. “You’ll learn your lesson well in the years ahead of you.”

  Boston Blackie stooped and snapped on Sir Harry the handcuff dangling from the still unconscious watchman’s wrist. Then he unbound him and turning to one of his silently waiting trio said:

  “Bring her in. I promised she should see him.”

  From the darkness outside the door, a slight, girlish figure with face masked like the rest slipped into the room and stopped before the man on the floor. Suddenly she stooped and looked straight into his face—the face of the now pitiful wreck of a man who but an hour before had boastingly called himself Sir Harry Westwood Cameron, as he hurried toward a bride and a stolen fortune.

  “All my life I shall thank God for this moment,” the girl—little Miss Happy—cried softly to the cowering man. “All my life I shall remember your face as I see it now. Until I die,—if I must go on till then without the Kid,—the years will be less lonely, less hard, because of the picture of you as you are to-night which I shall always have with me, Fred the Count, you traitor. God, I know now, is just.”

  She was gone as silently as she had come.

  Boston Blackie pressed the burglar alarm.

  “We’re done, Count,” he said. “You’re the first man I ever helped send to prison—the first man I ever knew whom I think belongs there. Courts don’t do the kind of justice we’ve done to-night. Don’t ask mercy of me. Ask it of the men who are in their graves because of you, if you dare.”

  “It’s a job! It’s a frame-up! I’ll tell the truth about it,” Sir Harry screamed, raving and struggling with the desperation of utter despair.

  “Tell it all to the judge. I believe you, but he won’t,” Blackie flung back at him as he slipped out the rear door behind his pals and disappeared.

  When the townspeople, routed from their beds by the alarm from the Muir home, came running to the Company offices, they found Sir Harry Westwood Cameron, English lumber buyer, raging like a wild beast and screaming curses from foam-covered lips as he tried to drag the helpless watchman toward the door by a handcuff that cut them both to the bone.

  Sir Harry’s trial was a short one. A jury of sunburned woodsmen heard the watchman’s story, examined the accused man’s prison photo, inspected the indorsed Muir check found in his pocket and then, after listening with smiles and covert winks to the prisoner’s wild tale of four masked conspirators who had dragged him against his will to the scene of the crime, brought in a verdict of guilty.

  Fred the Count—no longer dapper, well-dressed Sir Harry Westwood Cameron—was on the last stage of his journey back to Folsom Penitentiary. Handcuffed to a sheriff, he crouched dejectedly in the prison van as it slowly climbed the hill that shut the prison from view. As the van turned the crest of the grade, the driver stopped to rest his horses.

  Fred the Count looked up. Below him, exactly as he had left it on that morning only a few short weeks before when he went out with the swaggering, self-sufficient ruthlessness of one who thinks himself master of his own fate, was the prison he had never expected to see again. The quarry gang—a group of pygmy figures in stripes—was working among the rocks. One looked up, recognized the Count and called to his fellows.

  Tools were thrown to the ground; a score of striped caps were flung high in the air, and cheer after cheer of savage satisfaction floated faintly up from the convicts to the man who was going back among them to do “all of it.” It was his own world’s welcome “home” to Fred the Count.

  Abject and utterly broken in spirit, the Count dropped his head on his manacled hands and sobbed aloud.

  “If God is good,” he cried, “He will let the knives, that are waiting for me down there get me soon. If He is merciful, He will let me die to-night.”

  Boston Blackie’s prophecy was fulfilled. Fred the Count was praying for death.

  CHAPTER XII

  A PROBLEM IN GRAND LARCENY

  “Life is like a lake on a summer day, Mary,” said Blackie dropping his tenth consecutive cigarette and twisting restlessly in the easy chair which he had drawn before the glowing grate in their San Francisco apartment. “If you don’t drop a pebble now and then, there’s never a ripple to break the monotony.”

  “Fred the Count was a ripple, wasn’t he, Blackie?” asked Mary.

  “For a moment, yes. But he’s safely behind the bars of grim old Folsom and is no longer of any interest to anyone but himself. My mind’s getting rusty. I need something to occupy it.”

  Mary sighed faintly. She loved the quiet and peace of their home but she knew that when the restless spirit of adventure lured him, the man she loved, inevitably must answer the call.

  “Diamond Frank is in town,” she suggested after a moment’s thought.

  “Good,” cried Blackie. “That’s an ideal Frank always has the latest gossip from the north. I’ll ’phone him to come up and have a talk.”

  An hour later the two, from the center of a pall of cigarette smoke, were exchanging news of the hidden world in which each was a recognized leader.

  “Two million dollars in gold—a truckload—is waiting for anyone smart enough to get it.”

  Diamond Frank, an ace in the world of crime, paused and shook his head sadly as might an art connoisseur who contemplates a priceless treasure doomed to lie hidden forever from human eyes.

  “But it can’t be done,” he added with regretful resignation. “Not a chance in the world! It’s awful, Blackie, but it’s true. I know, for I’ve tried. Think of it, pal! Enough good yellow gold to make any of us rich enough to be worth robbing, and yet a man can’t lay hands on it.”

  “Why?” asked Boston Blackie.

  Diamond Frank, lolling back in his chair, summed up the situation with the succinct directness of one who had given his subject painstaking study.

  “On the beach at Nome it’s in iron-bound, sealed and padlocked chests guarded night and day by gunmen. Not a chance so far. Then it goes into the strong-room of that old floating tub, the Humboldt. No guards there, Blackie, but there isn’t a stateroom that gives a man a possible chance to cut through to the treasure from top, bottom or sides. The padlock on the strong-room is a double combination that unlocks with two keys, one kept by the captain and one by the purser. It is never unfastened, from Nome to Seattle. A charge of ‘soup’ would blow it off; but that, of course, is out of the question on shipboard, with the strong-room almost opposite the purser’s stateroom. At Seattle it is unloaded to a truck guarded by more gunmen. Then it goes into the First National vaults to stay. There you are! Three tons of gold unwatched on a steamer for from five to eight days—and I traveled all the way to Nome and back on the old Humboldt last fall without finding a thousand-to-one chance of laying a finger on it. It broke my h
eart, but I had to give it up.”

  Boston Blackie lay back in his chair, thoughtfully silent.

  “I should say offhand it would be far easier to lay hands on the gold than to get it past the Custom House men and safely away, after I had it,” he remarked at last.

  “Jump to it if you see a chance. I’m done,” said Diamond Frank.

  “Maybe I will,” said Blackie. And though he dropped the subject as if no longer interested, he sat alone till dawn, after his friend departed, mentally visualizing the treasure room of a tubby, plunging steamer plowing her way southward from the Nome beaches with a king’s ransom locked in her steel-bound vault.

  “It could be done,” he said softly to himself. “And inasmuch as James J. Clancy is president of the company that owns the Humboldt, there is the best reason in the world why Mary and I should do it. All the gold the Humboldt ever carried would not even the score we owe old ‘Eye-for-an-eye’ Jim Clancy, who identified Mary’s father as the hold-up man who robbed him years ago in Spokane—Jim found his identification had been a blunder and justified it as ‘a regrettable incident but not really a miscarriage of justice,’ for the wrongly convicted man, now dead, was,’ he said, ‘one who from his manner of life could have been no benefit to himself, his family or the world that is well rid of him.’”

  Blackie’s fingers were clenched, and his eyes were cold and steely with determination as he quoted the words that had been Clancy’s epitaph to the memory of the man he had wronged.

  “Yes,” he added to himself grimly, “the man who could say that of big, open-handed, kindly old Dayton Tom, is a man whom it will be a pleasant privilege to rob. We’ll do it.”

  Three weeks later the Humboldt lay off the shore whose golden sands made a thriving city of the once-deserted Nome beach. At intervals, above the monotonous surf-roar, the sound of high-pitched laughter and broken bars of dance music floated faintly out across the water. The last homeward-bound steamer of the season was ready to sail, and all Nome was celebrating.