The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  “I’ve solved the secret of the mystery-man, Rita.” Spanish Micky’s voice was vibrant with satisfaction as it broke the woman’s reverie.

  “Yes?” There was interest and curiosity in the inflection.

  “He’s the fellow who framed the get-away night before last for the guy they’re going to hang up at the prison Friday. It would have gone through, you know, if a con hadn’t tipped the game off. But that ain’t all. This fellow who framed the break wasn’t done when his first play went wrong. He’s been sitting late into the poker-game every night and taking pains to make friends with the prison guards.

  “Larry Donovan, who is on duty in the death-house after midnight, was in the game and blew his pay-check as usual. He tried to touch me for a twenty. Nothing doing, of course. He sure has the card-fever bad. He tried to borrow all round the table and was turned down, nobody but me having checks to spare. Well, he was runnin’ around crazy mad to play again, when some one says, after he tries to peddle his watch: ‘Gwan out, Larry, and peddle the prison, why don’t you? You’ll be able to sit in for a whole hour then.’

  “‘I’d peddle the prison and everything in it for enough checks to keep me in the game till my luck changes,’ he says; and he meant it. I caught the stranger looking at him watchful-like, and right then I had my suspicions. Larry finally goes out to try and make a touch from ‘Dutch,’ the saloon-man. He’s no sooner out the door than the mystery-man says he’s tired and cashes in.”

  Spanish Micky stopped, rolled a cigarette with one hand and struck a match with the other.

  “Go on—go on. What happened then?” cried Rita, her black eyes flashing with excitement and deep interest.

  “The stranger goes out,” Micky continued languidly. “Half an hour later Larry Donovan comes back with money. He’s still playing when it comes time for him to leave to go on watch outside the death-cell. Do you get me, Rita? On watch in the death-house, with the stranger’s dough in his jeans.”

  Micky stopped as though his tale were ended. Rita’s cheeks were flushed with a tint that isn’t bought in boxes, and her eyes were dark, seething pools of emotion. Here at last was what her nature craved—excitement, danger, a last-hour and desperate attempt to save a man already within the shadow of the scaffold.

  “And there’ll be an escape tonight?” she questioned, lowering her voice.

  “No, there won’t be any escape tonight,” Micky answered between puffs of smoke. “I don’t know where the stranger is, but I know where he will be. Behind bars! Inside, looking out, for him!”

  He hesitated in momentary indecision as to the advisability of further revelations; then he continued:

  “Listen, Rita: You stick around here tonight and keep your eyes open, and you’ll see a real rumpus. Your old man Micky has pulled some wise inside stuff, kid. After Larry left last night, I called up the warden and told him what I’d seen. I’ve been looking for a chance to do him a good turnover since the town knockers began to howl about my game’s keeping the boys from the stir from paying their bills. I told him to call Larry Donovan into his office and throw a scare into him and he’d find out something he wants to know. The warden did it, and Larry spit up everything.

  “He was to get five thousand dollars in cash to let this fellow Grimes—that’s the one they’re going to hang Friday—tie him up in the death-house tonight and cop his keys. The stranger showed him the real money, and Larry—thinkin’ how many poker-checks he could buy with it—agreed to stand for the getaway. But there won’t be any get-away for Jimmy Grimes or his friend either, for when Mr. Man shows up here tonight, the warden’s going to grab him and his five thousand dollars. Planning a jail-break calls for from five to forty years, in this State. Smart Stranger might as well pick out a cell up at the big house right now. And meantime Spanish Micky and the warden are pals. Fine time the knockers will have getting him to bar the boys from my game now, eh, kid? If this mystery-guy carries a gun, and I’ve got a hunch he does, there’s liable to be lead flying tonight, for he’s nervy.”

  If Spanish Micky had been as experienced in reading a woman’s mind as he was in reading a deck of cards, he wouldn’t have finished his revelation with the smile of satisfaction with which he now turned to receive Rita’s commendation. He failed utterly to interpret aright what he saw in the girl’s face. He thought it was frightened concern for his safety. Really it was disgust, hatred born of a dead passion, and adventurous resolve.

  “Don’t worry, kid. I won’t get hurt,” he said, putting on his coat and hat. “You’ll have to eat alone tonight unless the doings are over before dinnertime, for I’m going to stay down in the poker-rooms where the warden’s six gun-men are hiding till this bird shows up. So long, babe.”

  “And I took that thing for my man!” the woman exclaimed with a vicious look at the door through which Micky had vanished. “A copper-hearted rat who ought to be wearing a star and a blue uniform. What a fool I’ve been to waste six months with him!”

  Rita wrinkled her brow into a sudden frown.

  “Who knows?” she said, answering the unspoken question in her mind. “Stranger things have happened, and he’s class, that’s sure, or he wouldn’t be taking this kind of a chance for a pal in the death-cell.”

  Rita dressed for a tramp, picked up a fishing-rod and slung a creel over her shoulder. At the door she turned back and took a revolver and a box of cartridges from Spanish Micky’s trunk. Then she went downstairs and sent the clerk to the hotel kitchen for a box of sandwiches—the Folsom House hadn’t discovered bellboys yet. All prepared now for the project in her mind, she swung down the dusty road that led to the river and, incidentally, the prison.

  Rita reached neither the river nor the penitentiary. At the fork of the roads a mile from town she selected a grassy slope behind a boulder and sat down to wait for the coming of the man who monopolized her thoughts—though she didn’t know his name and had spoken to him but once. But Micky’s tale had placed this man as one of the lawless legion who were the heroes of the life she craved. And Rita, being Rita, had no conventions to stay her pretty hand from reaching forth to grasp what it coveted.

  At last he came, a dark shadow slipping quietly along the road well after sunset. She rose from the grassy slope almost at his feet—to find a gun against her breast before she could speak.

  “It’s Rita. Put up your gun,” she cried.

  An electric flashlight flared in her face. Then it carefully sought out with its beam of light every place of concealment about them.

  “I’m alone. You’ve nothing to fear from me. „ I’ve been waiting here all afternoon for you to come.”

  She thrilled with the joy of that moment.

  “Well, what do you want?” Blackie snapped out with scant courtesy.

  “I don’t want anything,” Rita said with careful inflection. “But you do. You want to know, for instance, that in the room behind Spanish Micky’s joint there are six gun-men from the prison waiting for you right now. You—”

  “What!” cried Blackie. “Are you sure?”

  “I am. Micky was suspicious last night when Larry Donovan, the death-house guard, came back into the poker-game with money after you followed him out. He—”

  “I told the lying fool he mustn’t go back, and he swore he wouldn’t. That’s a square shooter for you! Go on.”

  “Micky phoned the warden and told him what he suspected. The warden called Larry in today and sweated him. You know the answer to that.”

  Blackie swore viciously.

  “Come over here, and we’ll sit down while I think this business out,” he said, taking her by the arm and helping her down the bank to her former position by the roadside. “I’m thankful for this service, Rita, very thankful. But I don’t quite understand yet why you’re here. You’re Spanish Micky’s girl, aren’t you?”

 
“I was, but I’m done. No man can do what he did last night, and say that Rita belongs to him. I’ve been taught to hate coppers. If I can’t have a man, a real man, I’ll live alone the rest of my life.”

  Blackie suddenly turned his flashlight full into her face and studied her in silence. She flushed like a young girl.

  “You believe me, don’t you? You trust me? You can. Every drop of blood in me is right.”

  The girl leaned toward him and clasped his arm with both her hands.

  “Yes, I trust you,” Blackie answered unhesitatingly. “I’ll not forget what you have done for me tonight, either.”

  “It is because I knew you won’t that I did it.” A slight pressure on his arm gave added meaning to her words. “You can’t go back into the town. What are you going to do?” she asked after a pause.

  “Are you absolutely sure Donovan won’t be on duty in the death-house tonight?” Blackie demanded.

  “Absolutely.”

  “And the Kid has only one more night to live I Well, I’ll stick and keep trying to the end. While he still lives, there’s a chance.”

  “You’re going to stay even now when you know you are discovered, know they are looking for you?” Hero-worship intoned every word.

  “Sure I Something may happen. You can never tell till you try. Well, Rita, I’ve got to lie out in the hills tonight, and you’ve got to get back to town or you’ll be missed, if you haven’t been already. Good-by. When this business is over, I’ll send you our address, and if you’re ever in a tight place and need help, you’ll get it if you call on me.”

  The girl noted the plural “our” with a quick tightening of the lips but no surprise.

  “That ‘our’ means his girl,” she thought as Blackie rose and helped her to her feet. “I expected that. Such a man as this doesn’t travel alone. But she’ll have to be some girl to be more attractive and useful to him than I’m going to be—especially more useful.”

  “I knew you’d be hungry, so I brought you something to eat,” she said. “Also a gun and an extra box of cartridges,” she added as she handed the articles over. “You may need them before you’re safely out of this. Do you know where the little log cabin is in the clump of woods just below the railroad-bridge over the river?”

  “Yes.”

  “It belongs to Micky, and here’s the key. You’ll find an oil-stove, coffee and blankets inside. Micky is homesteading the land and has to sleep there once in a while. It will be safe and comfortable for you. You couldn’t risk making a fire in the open, for they’ll be combing the country for you before morning. I’ll come at three tomorrow with a basket of food and all the news there is; then you can plan your get-away. You’ll meet me?”

  “I certainly will, little girl,” Blackie assured her with more warmth in his voice. He was astonished at the complete efficiency of her forethought. “I don’t understand why you’ve done all this for me, a stranger, but I want you to know that I’m grateful from the bottom of my heart—and I never forget a friend or a favor.”

  “Maybe you’ll understand better after you think it over,” Rita answered. “Good night, and do be careful,”—after a second’s hesitation—“dear.”

  “Good night!” Blackie slipped away in the darkness, refusing to recognize the revelation in the girl’s final word.

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE MIRACLE

  Boston Blackie drank Spanish Micky’s coffee and ate Rita’s sandwiches in pitch darkness. He did not think it prudent to light the lantern he found in the cabin. Then he rolled a cigarette and concentrated his acute brain upon the Herculean problem before him. For only thirty-six hours of life remained now to the Cushions Kid!

  The more deeply Blackie studied and analyzed the situation, the more hopeless it appeared. His first plan of escape had offered every chance of success, but a traitor had wrecked it. Spanish Micky had frustrated his second effort—a desperate expedient born of desperate necessity—and roused the prison authorities to double precaution both by day and by night.

  And now—what?

  An hour later, Boston Blackie slipped out of the cabin and picked his way silently through the brush and boulders to a point that jutted out into the river above the mouth of the prison sewer—which from the first had been the key of his plans. He was thankful that the unknown traitor within the prison had not been able to reveal that too.

  He swam the river noiselessly and landed safely in the shadow of the underground causeway that led to the very foundations of the death-house. Two bars of the great iron grating that protected its mouth were sawed. He had attended to that on the night of the first attempt, when he had lain until dawn beside the sewer, waiting for the boy who never came. Blackie pushed the bars aside, entered the sewer and crawled forward on hands and knees into Stygian blackness.

  On and on he went through air that was foul and gas-laden. He lost all sense of time and distance. His hands and knees were bruised and bleeding. The darkness seemed like a blanket that wrapped itself about him and hindered his progress; and the moldy damp underground odor made him think, instinctively, of a grave. He kept on interminably, and at last a faintly diffused glow broke through the wall of blackness. The air grew fresher, and his reeling senses cleared. He was under the manhole beside the death-house.

  Kneeling under the grating that covered the manhole, Blackie felt for his guns and the bottle of nitro he carried in his breast pocket. Then he pressed upward on the grating. It creaked but held fast. He pressed harder and still harder without result. Finally he threw his whole strength again and again against the crisscrossed steel covering that held him in. It did not budge.

  Once again Chance had intervened to balk him. Not two hours before, a convict employed in the night kitchen had slipped from his post and put back the iron padlock for which Louisiana Slim had substituted a painted wooden one. Believing Blackie must have abandoned all hope of effecting a rescue, Louisiana had ordered this done. It was a final, crushing blow. Fate played too strong a hand for the man crouching below the immovable grating and almost sobbing in an agony of despair.

  He scarcely remembered how he made his weary way back through the tunnel, how he swam the river, how he stumbled back to the cabin and threw himself weakly on a bunk, where he lay through the long night haunted by the vision of a boy standing on a scaffold with a black cap being drawn slowly down ever his frightened face.

  It was scarcely noon the next day when Blackie, gaunt and haggard from exhaustion and seventy-two sleepless hours, heard a motorcar come to a stop on the little-used woodland road that ran along the top of the ridge above the cabin. He slipped out of the log house and into the concealment of a thicket, and unslung his guns. He even hoped the motor contained a posse come to attack his refuge. Anything was better than the maddening ordeal of lying idle and impotent while his watch ticked away the few remaining hours of life left to the boy he had failed to rescue.

  A twig snapped on the trail above the cabin, and he saw Rita hurrying toward him with the lithe, swift, graceful movements of a forest animal—a leopard, beautiful but dangerous to any but those she might choose to call her own. She was dressed for city motoring rather than woods tramping, and she carried a suitcase.

  He called to her, and she rushed to him with a half-stifled cry of welcome and gladness.

  “Oh, Blackie,” she cried, dropping on her knees beside him, “I’m so thankful you’re here now. I was deathly afraid you’d be off somewhere and I’d have to wait. We’ve got to get away from here quick. They know who you are up at the prison, and that there’s a thousand-dollar reward for your capture. Micky recognized your picture this morning on one of the posters in the warden’s office. They’ve found the sawed bars at the entrance of the sewer. As soon as they can gather the men, the whole county will be out to hunt you down.”

  Blackie leaped to his fe
et, and Rita threw open the suit-case.

  “I’ve brought you clothes, a hat, auto-goggles—all Micky’s,” she continued. “Dress quickly, dear!” The term fell from her lips quite naturally this time. “I’m going to carry you away from under their noses. And, Mr. Boston Blackie,”—she stepped close to him and looked straight into his face to judge the effect of her words—“whether Mary likes it or not, you’re going to take a nice long auto-drive with another girl—with me.”

  “How did you know about Mary?” he asked.

  “Read about her and you in the paper when the coppers wanted you, stupid!” she answered. “The second I knew you were Boston Blackie, I knew all about you. I have friends in Frisco who know you and have often told me what a wonder you are. I’m glad I didn’t know at first, though. If I had, you might think I fell for you because you are Boston Blackie. Now you will always know that wasn’t the reason. It is just because you—are—you.”

  For once Blackie’s ready tongue was bereft of words. He stood looking down at her dumbly while a premonition of impending difficulty shaped itself in his mind. Her laugh broke the silence.

  “Dress, Blackie,” she cried. “Don’t stand there staring at me like that. Wait till we are in the car and speeding toward Sacramento and safety. Then you’re welcome to stare as long as you like.”

  “Will you drive or shall I?” she asked when they stood beside a high-powered roadster ten minutes later.

  “You drive. I want to think.”

  “Of me? If so, I’ll drive you round the world and back.”

  “No, Rita—of the boy we’re leaving behind us in the death-cell at the stir—a boy who won’t be a boy this time tomorrow unless a miracle happens. I came up here to save him, and I’ve failed—failed where I would give everything I have or ever will have to succeed.”