The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  Smuggling the arms and explosive into the prison had been a delicate and dangerous task. Waiting until the guards present at this interview with Louisiana were off watch, Blackie had re-entered the prison with a crowd of sight-seers. There had been a crucial moment of danger when the guard, before admitting the party, made a perfunctory search of the men for weapons. Had he found the package slung under Blackie’s left arm the adventure would have culminated then and there in swift disaster. But the guard didn’t find the package.

  A half-hour later, as the party passed through the great, noisy, dusty rock-quarry of the prison, Blackie lagged behind, picking up and examining pieces of rock as the miner he seemed to be might be expected to do. One boulder was marked, not by chance, with a drilling hammer standing upright. Blackie, stooping behind that rock, in one swift motion transferred the package from beneath his arm to an excavation beneath the boulder and kicked a stone—not there by chance either—into the opening to conceal the contraband. That night in the comparative safety of Louisiana Slim’s cell were hidden the gun and nitroglycerine (“soup,” the safe-blowers term it) that was to free the condemned man—also chloral for the guards’ coffee and a bunch of skeleton keys to release the padlock that barred the sewer-entrance.

  Louisiana and his partner, who had carried the package in from the quarry at a risk of which they were well aware, fondled the weapons that opened the way to possible escape with a longing inconceivable to any but men with many long years of imprisonment before them. The gun, the explosive, the keys, the “keeler” for the guards in the tower, were in their hands and pointed the way to escape for themselves. Freedom beckoned and was within easy reach.

  Louisiana Slim and his cell-partner stared at each other with glittering eyes that revealed souls tempted almost beyond resistance.

  At last Louisiana Slim spoke.

  “It jes naturally can’t be did, Buddy,’ he said. “The Kid’s facing the rope. If we use these tools fer our own selves, he’ll swing sure. Any time we stepped into a joint on the outside, the gang would spit on the floor an’ holler ‘Coppers in the house!’ an’ walk out. An’ they’d be right. Nix, it can’t be did; but God a’mighty, it’s hard—tumble, turrible hard.”

  “Tack the junk up, Slim,” whispered his partner, wiping a wet, clammy brow. “Separate it an’ pack it up. I dassent touch the stuff. I’ve played the game square for twenty years, but I’m afraid to lay hands near this.”

  During the day Slim arranged the delivery of Blackie’s note to the cell of the condemned man. Then he intercepted Fred the Count, the convict who carried the guard’s midnight coffee and was indispensable to Blackie’s plan. The Count was a sleek, suave bigamist and forger whose specialty had been making love to trusting women whom he deserted when he had stripped them of their wealth. He was a constant plotter of revolt and was stamped “right” among his fellows.

  Slim asked him to attach the package to the end of the Cushions Kid’s dangling black thread on the following night and to drop the chloral into the guard’s coffee. As the entire night’s supply of coffee was to be drugged, suspicion after the escape could not center on the Count, though it was obvious he and a dozen others would be subjected to third-degree methods. Slim made no mention of the sewer’s part in the plan; nor did he tell from whom the weapons of escape had come.

  “I’m with you, Slim,” the Count assured him. “I’d go to hell and back and hang in the sack a week if necessary to save a man from being topped. Count on me for my part.”

  The preparations for the rescue were now complete. With his dinner that night the Cushions Kid received the silent message “Tonight at one.”

  CHAPTER VI

  NOT TO SNITCH ON A PAL

  Darkness settled over the penitentiary, and lights winked out from the cell-houses. At eight o’clock one of them—the one that showed in the cell of Louisiana Slim—suddenly went out, then on again, then out and on once more.

  “Thank God, things have gone as I planned!” cried Blackie, creeping from a hiding-place on the crest of the hill behind the prison as the welcome signal caught his eager-eyes.

  In the death-cell the Kid lay on his bunk simulating slumber while his pulses throbbed with excitement and impatience so intense it was a physical pain. A day-and-night death-watch had not been set over him yet, and he was alone. The lights-out bell sounded, and the incandescents died out in blackness. The prison settled into slumber. To the boy lying alone in the darkness with everything staked on a single roll of Fate’s fickle dice, the dragging minutes of inaction were almost unendurable. The half-hours between the tolling of the prison bell each seemed a lifetime of suspense. But with eleven o’clock at last came the time for action.

  The condemned boy sprang from his couch at the stroke of the bell and groped in his breast for the ball of thread. He tied a stubby piece of pencil to the end of it and lowered it from his window until it rested on the ground. Then he knotted it to one of the bars and crouched in the darkness, waiting.

  It was nearly an hour—it seemed centuries to the waiting Kid—before a quick, furtive step sounded on the gravel beneath the window. The step paused; and the prisoner’s finger, laid on the thread where it was fastened to the bar, felt a gentle tug that proved the man below had found its dangling end. There was a second of silence; then the gravel crunched under footsteps that died away around the corner of the death-house. The bell tolled midnight, breaking the stillness with a sudden shock that was like a blow. The Cushions Kid crept to the window and looked out into the prison yard, lighted by a dozen flaring arc-lights. It was deserted, as he knew it would be while the guards were eating. He raised the thread slowly and began to pull it in with infinite caution.

  Before the cord to which the thread had been tied reached his trembling fingers, the added weight on the tiny string told him the package below was swinging clear of the ground. Meanwhile he was forced to pull the thread over the rough stone of the window-ledge—stone that, because of the weight below, threatened to sever it. Would the thread hold? A life—his life—hung swaying in the balance on the end of the inadequate strand of linen.

  Inch by inch the thread came up. At last the end of the knotted cord appeared over the angle of stone. With that in his hands, the danger was over. The Kid rapidly dragged up the package, squeezed it through the bars and clutched it to his breast.

  Sudden relief from the mastering strain of the past minutes left him suddenly weak, sick, faint. He dropped down on his bunk, caressing the package with eager fingers as though to convince himself that hope was now reality.

  From the farther end of the corridor a sound reached his ear. He sprang to his feet as stagnation of mind and body fell from him like a discarded cloak. Bolts were thrown in the locks that guarded the death-house. Some one was entering.

  To be found dressed and awake at that hour of the night would be fatal. The Cushions Kid tossed his package between his blankets, drew them over him and closed his eyes with a heart heavy with dread.

  The last door was thrown open noisily, proving that no effort was being made to steal upon him secretly. The prisoner took heart. It was scarcely possible that his package had been seen as he dragged it to the window, and yet a visit at that particular hour was a strange and threatening coincidence. Two men were approaching the cell, talking as they came.

  “The leak’s up here somewhere,” the Kid heard one say. “Everything’s flooded down below, and getting worse every minute.”

  The condemned man felt rather than spoke a prayer of thankfulness. They weren’t after him or the bundle that nestled in the crook of his knees.

  He heard the footsteps outside the door of his cell.

  A flashlight roamed its four corners and came to rest upon his face. This was the crucial instant, the Kid felt. He kept his eyes closed and breathed with the deep, even respiration of a sleeper.


  “I don’t see any loose water round here, but we better make sure,” said a voice that the prisoner recognized as the night captain’s. A key turned in the lock, and the door creaked on its hinges. “It’s a shame to wake the Kid, poor devil, but we’ve got to find that broken pipe before—”

  The Cushions Kid’s arms were suddenly seized and pinioned to his sides beneath the blankets. Burly hands caught him by the throat and jerked him from the bunk to the middle of the floor. He tried to fight, to struggle, but it was useless. The blankets were torn from about him; his hands were twisted behind his back; and in an instant, handcuffed and helpless, he looked up in the glare of suddenly lighted electrics and found himself staring with eyes of hate and hopelessness into the grimly smiling faces of the night captain and a guard.

  “Come on, boys! We got him trussed up tight as a drum,” the captain called, and there was a shuffle of padded feet in the corridor as a half-dozen men, some with revolvers, and some with short-barreled shotguns, poured into the cell. The captain lifted the blankets, and the package that Boston Blackie and the others had risked so much to put into his hands rolled to the floor.

  The sight of that precious package in the hands of his enemies stung the Cushions Kid to furious desperation. Life and liberty were no longer possible, but liberty in a death of his own choosing lay on the floor before him, notwithstanding his manacled hands and watchful captors. In the package on the floor he knew was a bottle of “soup”—nitroglycerin—so refined that any quick jar would explode it. One quick kick, and he would die with the knowledge that the grinning enemies about him had died with him in the sudden overturning of their short-lived triumph.

  He sprang forward and aimed a savage blow at the bundle, even as one of the men stooped to pick it up.

  Myriads of colored lights flashed through his brain. Then came blackness.

  The Cushions Kid slowly won his way back to consciousness with a growing surprise that he was not in another world. Peering down at him were the hated faces of the night captain and the warden of the prison. His hands were still manacled; he was still in his cell.

  “What happened?” he asked feebly.

  “Your intentions were all right, Kid,” the captain remarked, “but my smash to your jaw made your aim bad—which explains why any of us are here.”

  The Cushions Kid sat up, sullen and silent and inexpressibly hopeless. He had failed again. Nothing awaited him now but the death decreed by law. With difficulty he choked back a cry of despair.

  That strangled cry encouraged the warden to begin the work for which he had come.

  “Well, boy,” he began with an obvious attempt at kind intimacy, “you took a long chance and lost. I can’t blame you. But you never really had a chance. You might have blown your way out of this place, yes. But after you were in the yard, what then? You would have been shot down before you had gone a dozen steps. You owe us something for saving your life, even if it is only for a few days.”

  The Kid eyed him narrowly. Evidently he didn’t know of the part the sewer leading to the river played in Boston Blackie’s plans—nor of Boston Blackie, either, though it was perfectly evident that there had been treachery by some one Blackie had been forced to trust. The thought that Blackie even now was waiting at the other end of that sewer forced upon him the necessity of diverting any suspicion in that direction.

  “If I had made it to the yard, I’d have shown your gun-screws some fancy shooting,” he said with apparent frankness. “Once on the ground I’d have walked out from under their rifles.”

  “Of course your friend on the outside is waiting somewhere just over the deadline for you now,” the warden said interrogatively. “But you never would have lived to reach him.”

  “I haven’t anyone on the outside,” said the boy shortly.

  “I suppose you want me to think that gun and dynamite just grew on the end of that black thread you had out your window.”

  The warden unwittingly had given proof of the treachery that the Cushions Kid suspected. It was conceivable but not probable that some guard might have seen the package being pulled to the window, but it was absolutely impossible that in the dark anyone could have seen the black thread. Knowledge of that proved definite information.

  “It doesn’t make any difference now, but I’m curious to know how that gun got hooked on to the end of your line,” the warden continued ingratiatingly. “It wasn’t there before dark.”

  “I’m curious to know the name of the yellow-hearted snitch that tipped you it was there.”

  “No one snitched. A guard just happened to see you pulling it in,” the warden hastened to assure him.

  “Well, then, no one put it there. It just grew out of the gravel,” gravely asserted the condemned boy. The warden saw he was accomplishing nothing and changed his tactics. He crossed to the bunk, sat down and laid his hand on the Kid’s knee.

  “Boy,” he said, “I’m going to quit beating around the bush and talk straight. I want to know how that stuff got into this prison. I want to know who handled it after it got into the prison. You can tell me.”

  “Nothing doing, Warden.”

  “Wait. I hadn’t finished. You’re going to hang in just four days. Just four days, boy. It isn’t pleasant to dangle at the end of six feet of rope. It isn’t pleasant to lie in a cell for four days knowing that you’re going to dangle. Nothing and no one can save you, boy.”

  And then after a long pause:

  “Unless I do! I’m going to Sacramento tomorrow. I’m going to see the Governor. If I were able to tell him that you aided me in uncovering the men who seem to mistake this place for an arsenal, he might decide to give you a commutation. Do you get me?”

  “Nothing doing!”

  “Suppose I were to call the Governor up and he were to tell me he would grant a commutation under the conditions I have suggested—what then?”

  “Listen, Warden.” The Cushions Kid turned and looked the official squarely in the eye. “If you were going to hang me in five minutes, and the Governor stood where you are now with a full pardon in his hand and offered it to me to snitch on the men who have taken a chance to help me, I’d hang—hang with my mouth shut. That’s final. Let’s cut the foolish chatter.”

  The boy’s eyes were as convincing as his words.

  “You’ll hang, all right, you fool,” the warden cried, jumping to his feet. “Set a death-watch over him now,” he added, turning to the night captain. “Keep his cell lighted and a man sitting in front of his door watching him day and night. Four days isn’t long. He won’t be so cocky when the time comes to stand on the trap.”

  When they were out of hearing, the warden turned to the captain, fuming and fussing because of the narrow escape from a break that would have been hard to explain with credit to the discipline of his prison.

  “Will that young fool weaken and talk when his time comes?” he asked.

  “No,” replied the officer. “I knew from the first he wouldn’t squeal. Men able to have and hold friends who will take the desperate chances that were taken for him never squeal. They haven’t got it in ’em.”

  “Has the Count told all he knows, do you think?”

  “He has told all he’s going to—all it’s safe for him to know. I think he handled that package himself, but if he admitted that, he’d have to tell us from whom he got it. And if he did,”—the captain motioned as though his throat were being cut—“he’d do his time quicker than the Kid up there in the death-cell with four days to live.”

  Back in that death-cell a boy, alone for a few brief minutes before the arrival of the death-watch, flung himself on his face and let an overburdened heart find the natural, human outlet for hopeless grief. The cynical bravado with which he had calmly refused the gift of life was gone. But now for a brief moment he could be just himself—a sobbing,
frightened boy facing a certain and terrible death without a kind word or a friendly face to strengthen his shrinking spirit for the greatest of all ordeals.

  CHAPTER VII

  THE WOMAN CALLED RITA

  Spanish Micky, proprietor of a poker-game that enabled him to live in easy affluence on the earnings of the ill-paid guards at the penitentiary, lolled on a couch in his specially furnished room in Folsom Town’s one hotel, indolently tinting and polishing the nails of slender fingers, soft and white as a woman’s.

  Across the room, before a dressing-table that had cost much more than any of Micky’s patrons earned from the State in a month, sat Rita the Queen, present partner of the good fortunes that had given Spanish Micky the one gambling-game within reach of an institution with a ten-thousand-dollar monthly payroll. Rita was using a lip-stick and an eyebrow pencil with experienced fingers.

  A first glimpse at the pair indicated that Spanish Micky and Rita the Queen were eminently suited to make each other deliriously happy and maddeningly miserable in an endless and delightful succession of emotional tides. Once it had been so. Once love, passionate jealousy and furious anger had alternated in making their life a daily drama worth living—a drama the swift changes of which left no time for ennui. Gradually, however, Micky became secure and satisfied in undisputed possession, and their life had become one of humdrum monotony.

  Rita watched Mickey for a second in her mirror, made a grimace of impatient disdain and returned to her eyebrow pencil with a sigh of utter soul-weariness. She was tired of Folsom, tired of the once-loved man who kept her there, tired of idle, purposeless days without adventure or excitement.