The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  “You’ve done everything a right pal could do, and more, Blackie,” Rita answered, dropping her bantering spirit for one of deep, comforting sympathy. “You’ve risked your life again and again, and you would have had him out now if it had not been for a couple of human rats. When your pal dies, Blackie, it won’t be because you failed him.”

  “He mustn’t die, girl,” Blackie’s teeth snapped with undying resolution. “He isn’t even guilty. He’s hanging because he’s too right to squeal on a yellow-hearted pal. And unless a miracle saves him, he’ll die in the morning. The one last chance is the Governor, and that’s not even a chance, for he’s already turned down a commutation.”

  Blackie was silent as Rita guided the car out of the twisting hill road onto the broad highway that leads to the State capital.

  “I’m going to Abe Ritter, the lawyer,” he continued after a long pause. “He’s a politician and he likes money. He’s close to old Tom Creedon, political boss of Frisco. Creedon elected this governor. I’m going to offer Ritter five thousand dollars—more if he asks it—to get Creedon to go to the Governor for the Kid. Creedon could save him if he would, but—well, he’s cold-blooded as a fish, and he doesn’t need money. I can only pay Ritter to try, and if he fails it’s the end.”

  Blackie’s face was anguish itself as Rita turned her eyes to his.

  “You care very, very much to save this boy, don’t you, dear? You’d give anything in the world to do it, wouldn’t you?”

  “Anything and everything, Rita. He’s almost like a son to me.”

  Many minutes passed, and the glistening dome of the capitol was in sight above the intervening woodland before either spoke.

  “What kind of girl is Mary?” asked Rita suddenly.

  “The best in the world—faithful, true, right in every drop of her blood.”

  A sudden contraction as of pain passed over the girl’s face.

  “I saw her picture in the paper,” she said slowly. “She’s pretty, but not prettier than I am when I wish to be for a man I care for. She can’t be more loyal than I—if I care. Mary couldn’t have served you better than I have when you needed me, could she, Blackie?”

  “You did everything any woman could have done, Rita. They would have got me if it hadn’t been for you.”

  “Well, then,”—she turned to him with eyes from which the hardness had vanished—“is there a chance for me or not?”

  Her eyes held his unswervingly as she waited for her answer. Blackie did not dodge the issue or pretend to misunderstand.

  “I have Mary,” he said. “We’ve been together in good times and bad, and she has never failed in love or loyalty. I’d hate to be what I would be if I gave her less than that.”

  “Ah! So it’s like that with you.” The girl turned from him quickly, and the car shot forward as her loot pressed the accelerator.

  “I wonder if Mary knows what a lucky, lucky girl she is,” Rita said after a long pause. She sat beside him in silence until the car glided into the city and he directed her to the lawyer’s office.

  “I’ll wait for you. We’ll have dinner together?” she questioned as he climbed out of the car.

  Blackie nodded acquiescence and disappeared. He returned to find a Rita who had cast off the somber mood in which he had left her.

  “What luck and where to?” she queried as he climbed in beside her.

  “To Cary’s. Ritter is going to ’phone me there. There isn’t much hope. Creedon’s our only chance. Ritter is going to see him at once, but he doesn’t expect good news. I’m afraid the end has come, Rita.”

  Halfway through the dinner, she suddenly dropped the jesting mood with which she had tried to help him escape the agonizing anxiety that weighted his mind, and leaned across the table toward him.

  “Blackie,” she said, “I’m done at Folsom. I’m never going back. All my life I have wanted a man like you. Can’t you find one little vacant corner in your heart for me? Very little will make me very happy. I don’t ask much. I don’t ask Mary’s place. I just want to be near enough to you to see you sometimes. Will you let me?”

  Blackie shook his head. He could not lie to her.

  “It’s no use,” he said. “It can’t be.”

  Rita stood up, walked round the table to Blackie and laid her arm on his shoulder.

  “I never knew before there were men like you,” she said softly with a quickly choked sob. “I wish I had—sooner.”

  The waiter’s discreet rap on the door summoned Blackie to the ’phone. His face, when he returned, told his news before he spoke.

  “Nothing doing,” he said. “The last hope is gone.”

  “Oh, my dearest, I’m so sorry,” she cried, “—sorrier than you know.”

  “Will you drive me to the train?” he asked. “I must get back to Frisco before this happens at the prison and try to break it somehow to a little woman I left on her knees praying for the Kid’s life. I don’t know how to tell her. It would be easier to go along with the Kid.”

  They rode in silence to the station, and Blackie climbed from the car too distrait for words of any kind.

  “Aren’t you going to give me your address?” Rita asked. “You promised to in case I should need you some time.”

  He penciled it on a slip of paper and handed it to her. As the girl took it, she caught his hand between both hers with a pressure that made delicate knuckles show white beneath her skin.

  “Anyway,” she whispered, “there’s one comfort that she can’t take from me. I’ve served you as well as she could. I always will serve you, no matter what it costs me. You’ll see. And besides,”—her voice was hard and ruthless again—“if I had known you first, not Mary or a thousand Marys could take you from me. She’s luckier than I—that’s all. Good-by, Blackie.”

  It was early morning—the morning of the execution—when Boston Blackie left the owl-car that had carried him from the ferry, and came to the flat where Mary and Happy had their refuge.

  It took all his resolution to force himself to enter and softly climb the stairs. There was no rush from within as he knocked, no door flung frantically open, no faces within, frenzied with grief, to read the death-verdict in his face even before he spoke. He rapped again, and then, a new fear spurring him on, unlocked the door and entered, though he realized he might be walking into a police trap. He half hoped he was.

  A swift turn of his flashlight showed him the room was empty. He sat down wearily to wait.

  The door below opened and closed, and light, running steps came flying up the stairway: Blackie rose to his feet and switched on the lights. It had come—the moment when he must kill a woman’s heart as surely as they were killing the Cushions Kid even now.

  The door flew open, and two women came rushing in. As they saw him, both flung themselves into his arms, showering him impartially with kisses and incoherent cries and sobs of wild rapture.

  “Oh, Blackie, Blackie, how did you do it? How did you do it?” cried Happy when at last the power of articulation returned. “My boy is going to live, live, live!” In a wildly trembling hand she waved the newspaper she held. “It’s a miracle—it’s the miracle I’ve prayed for.”

  Blackie snatched the paper from her hand as she sank on her knees vainly trying to put into words the prayer of thankfulness that came straight from her heart. He could scarcely believe his eyes as Mary’s shaking finger directed them to a telegraph dispatch tucked away in an obscure corner. He read:

  Folsom Prison, Oct. 13.—At midnight a telephone-message from Governor Nelson announced the commutation to life imprisonment of the sentence of death against James Grimes, youthful train-robber, who was to have been executed at dawn this morning. It is understood newly discovered evidence convinced the Governor there is some doubt of the prisoner’s actual guilt of the murder
of which he was convicted. All preparations for the execution were complete when the reprieve reached the prison, no previous intimation that it was to be expected having reached Warden Hodgkins. Grimes was at once taken from the death-cell and lodged with the other prisoners.

  “It is a miracle,” cried Blackie as he comprehended the meaning of the lines. “Mary, Happy, I didn’t do this. I didn’t even know of it. When I left Sacramento at nightfall the last hope was gone.”

  “What!” cried Happy and Mary together.

  “It’s true,” Blackie continued. “I was waiting here to tell you everything was over. Three times I framed an escape for him, and each time a last-minute freak of fate stopped it. I tried to reach the Governor through Boss Creedon, and that failed. I came back beaten—and find this.” He pointed tremblingly at the few printed lines that had created a new world for four human beings.

  “Mary, it is a God-sent miracle,” he concluded in an awed voice.

  He dropped into a chair with the two women crouching at his knees and told them all that had happened at Folsom. When he had finished, they were staring at him with awed eyes and blank, wondering faces.

  “It doesn’t matter how it happened!” Happy exclaimed at last. “My boy is safe. That is all I want to know. Every night as long as I live I shall thank the good God on my knees for this. And tonight I’m going back to the Spider’s to begin to earn the money to get my boy a full pardon—some day.”

  The child-woman was radiantly happy. That there could be any incongruity in kneeling nightly in a prayer of thankfulness after selling drinks at the Spider’s for the sake of the man so marvelously restored to her—that never entered her mind. Perhaps is wasn’t incongruous. Who shall say?

  Blackie was asleep that afternoon when the woman from whom they rented their flat climbed the stairs to hand Mary a letter addressed to her in a feminine hand. She opened it and read; then she awakened her husband.

  “This letter was addressed to me, Blackie dear,” she said. “But after reading it I am convinced it is meant for you.”

  Blackie roused himself and took it from her. Mary stood beside him looking up into his face with a slyly quizzical smile. This is what he read:

  Thursday Night.

  My dearest:

  Mary won’t mind my calling you that, I hope. For it’s true. You know by now your friend is saved. As I write, the reprieve has been ’phoned to the prison. I hope you are happy as you read this, dearest. I am as I write it.

  Do you remember what I said in the restaurant this afternoon? I said I would do more to serve you, risk more to serve you, sacrifice more to serve you, than you know. I’m going to prove that, Blackie dear, tonight.

  You said this afternoon that Tom Creedon was your pal’s last hope. Your lawyer failed with him. Well, Blackie, I know Tom Creedon too. I met him in Frisco before I went to Folsom, and he fell for me. He’s past fifty, but he tries to turn the clock back thirty years when he’s with a woman—a pretty one like me. I laughed at him in Frisco.

  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 smile on her lips. “but why didn’t 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 overtrustful 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-guard’s. 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 me
n, 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.