The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  “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 protegee—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 dance-hall. 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 tomorrow.”

  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 closed. 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 Priso
n 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.

  He looked at his hands and moved them. He touched his eyes, his lips and pressed a hand over his heart to feel it beat. Hands, eyes, lips were all a part of him now, and responsive to his will. In six days, they would all be dead clay responsive to nothing. And what of the will that controlled them now, that consciousness of self, that awing individuality called “I” that has its home in the innermost recesses of the brain? Would it too be merely a thing dead and done? Or—

  The snap of bolts turning in heavy locks and the clang of a door in the corridor dragged the mind of the prisoner back to the present. The door of the cell was unlocked, and a guard stepped in, followed by a convict carrying a tray covered with a newspaper. The Cushions Kid swept a pile of magazines from the one small table, and the convict set the food down. The latter looked toward the condemned man, caught his eye and then, with his back toward the guard, who stood within three feet of them, spoke rapidly in the prison language that makes no sound.

  “Stiff” (letter) “in orange,” he said. “Key in newspaper, page four, column four.” The man laid his hand on the paper that covered the dishes and raised it as if to see whether he had slopped the food about in carrying it. “Page four, column four,” he repeated. Then he turned and went out. The guard followed him and shot the lock in the cell door.

  The instant the clanging corridor door informed him he was alone, the Cushions Kid picked up the orange that lay on the dinner-tray and examined it with eager eyes. It was not until he had gone over the entire surface inch by inch that he discovered a circle in the skin outlined by an all but imperceptible knife-mark. He pried out the inside of the circle and found inside the orange a pellet of paper protected by tinfoil. In case of unexpected interruption, he cut up the orange to destroy any evidence it had been tampered with, and smoothed out the paper, his heart beating high with hope of he knew not what.

  The writing was not Happy’s, as he had hoped; it was Boston Blackie’s. He recognized the well-remembered chirography at once. This was what he read:

  Cigarettes have often saved men’s lives, though physicians declare the ash from the burned paper is injurious to the health, as it forms a black deposit on lung-tissue or anything else it touches. This easily can be proved.

  That was all. There was no signature to the cryptic message, but it needed none.

  “Boston Blackie is framing something for me,” the Kid thought, trembling like a child in the wild joy of new-born hope. “With the old chief outside, there’s a chance, even for me.”

  He scraped the dinner into his slop-bucket. He couldn’t eat, but to avoid possible suspicion, it was necessary to get rid of it.

  “Now we’ll see what’s what,” he said.

  Once more assuring himself that he was alone in the death-house, he picked up the newspaper that had covered the food. He turned to the fourth column of the fourth page. It was a column of society notes. Peeling off several of a packet of cigarette papers, the Cushions Kid touched them with a match and watched them burn to curling crisps of charred ash. He spread the note on the table before him and poured the ashes of the paper on it.

  “We’ll see what cigarette-papers do to the lungs, Blackie, old pal,” he said, rubbing the ash lightly into the paper. Nothing appeared but a gray smudge.

  Smiling like a schoolboy bent on mischief, the Kid turned the note over.

  “Maybe it’s the back of the lungs and letter that are affected by burned cigarette-papers,” he said to himself as he repeated the operation.

  His guess was right. As his finger-tips gently spread the black ash over the paper, characters outlined in black began to appear.

  “Perfectly scandalous what cigarette-papers do to a man’s lungs, ain’t it, Blackie?” he whispered as he worked the ash evenly over the page until its entire surface was a dirty gray on which, outlined in pure black, were long rows of figures. They had been written with oxalic acid mixed with milk, and were absolutely invisible until the fine ash of the paper adhered and turned them black. When the Kid’s work was done, the first line of Blackie’s message looked like this:

  2-6, 8-4, 6-1, 6-1, 10-1—9-4, 2-1, 3-5, 5-3, 4-2—

  11-1, 7-3, 20-8, 2-1.

  Burning with impatience, the boy turned to the designated column of the paper. The first of Blackie’s line of figures was “2-6.” The sixth letter of the second word in the column of type was h. The Kid jotted it down beneath the figures. Next was “8-4.” That proved to be an a. The “6-1” repeated proved a double p. Then came y.

  “Happy,” repeated the Kid, working in an agony of fear. The next word was “sends.”

  “Thank God, she’s all right,” he breathed with quick relief. “Ah—‘love!’ ‘Happy sends love.’ Dear, dear little girl! Right and true always! And good, thoughtful old Blackie, to guess that even now that’s what I’d want to know first.”

  He worked on, slowly turning the tiny lines of figures into letters and words. As the words became sentences, his breath came in quick, strained gasps, for Blackie’s message outlined a plan of escape that could scarcely fail, barring mishaps.

  The Cushions Kid was told that on the following night he would find a ball of black thread in the banana that would be served with his dinner. He was to weight the end of the thread and lower it from the window of the death-cell after dark. At midnight the convict runner who delivered hot coffee to the watch-tower guards would tie a cord to the slender invisible thread, and at the end of the cord there would be a package containing a revolver, a gimlet, a fuse and caps and a bottle of nitroglycerin. Raising the cord with his thread, the Kid could pull up this precious package and find himself armed and provided with enough explosive to blow out the window-casement of the death-cell.

  With this avenue to freedom open, the drop to the ground would be simple and safe, for in the midnight coffee served the guards on the night set for the escape, there would be enough chloral hydrate to leave them safely unconsci
ous for many hours. The Kid was not to try to cross the quarter-mile of open ground between the death-house and the river, for there was no way of disposing of the night captain and the extra guards in the executive offices. Instead, he was to dodge to the end of the death-house, where a steel grating usually padlocked covered an airhole into the prison sewer, which led direct to the river and was sufficiently large to permit a man to crawl through it. In place of the iron padlock he would find a painted wooden one. Through that sewer the Kid was to go to its mouth on the river, where Boston Blackie would be waiting, with the huge steel bars that guarded the exit already open for him.

  The rest should be easy. They had then only to let the current of the river carry them down as far as the railway bridge, where a track velocipede commandeered from the Folsom section-house would be hidden to carry them over the twenty miles of rails to Brighton, the railway junction, from which there was a freight before daylight that, if all went well, they would ride to the city of Stockton and safety.

  The plan was flawless. As he comprehended in its entirety the road to freedom that was opened to him, the Cushions Kid realized what fearful risks had been undertaken in his behalf. He wondered how Blackie had managed to smuggle the gun and liquid dynamite and chloral into the prison. He wondered how he had dared even to visit the prison, for it was apparent he had visited it and secured co-operation from the inside.

  If he had known that as Blackie in a miner’s garb sat in the prison visiting-room three days before, he had looked straight at a glaring poster which contained his likeness and an offer of a thousand dollars reward for his arrest, the Cushions Kid would have had some idea of the peril which Blackie had faced. If he had seen Blackie in the presence of a guard talking commonplaces to a convict, interspersed by inaudible instructions in the lip language—the Kid would have had an even clearer idea of what the risks had been. Louisiana had undertaken the task of arranging all details inside the prison—undertaken it without a second’s hesitation, though he knew well he was risking a frightful punishment and additional years of servitude for a man he had never seen. That he was Blackie’s friend, however, was enough.