The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  The guards rushing toward Blackie with clubs aloft, were seized and disarmed in a second by squads of five convicts each who acted with military precision and understanding. Ropes appeared suddenly from beneath striped blouses, and the blue-coated captives were bound, hands behind their backs. Two squads of ten ran through the mill armed with heavy wooden shuttles seized from the looms, and herded to the rear scores of their fellows who, because of doubtful loyalty, had not been intrusted with the secret.

  The guards’ phones connecting with the executive offices of the prison were jerked from the walls, though there was none left free to use them. The great steel doors of the mill were flung shut and bars dropped into place on the inside, making them impregnable to anything less than artillery.

  In three minutes the convicts were in complete control of the mill, barred in from outside assault by steel doors and brick walls.

  The gun-guards on the walls surrounding the mill-yard turned their rifles toward its walls, but they held their fire, for there was no living thing at which to shoot.

  Calmly, with arms folded, Boston Blackie still stood on his loom watching the quick, complete fruition of the plans that had cost him many sleepless hours on his hard cellhouse bunk.

  Of all the officers in San Gregorio prison, Captain Denison, head of the mill-guards, was hated most. He was hated for his favoritism to pet “snitches”—informers who bought trivial privileges at usurer’s cost to their fellows. He was despised for his cowardice, for he was a coward and the convicts instinctively recognized it. When he was found hiding behind a pile of rubbish in a dark corner of the mill and dragged, none too gently, into the circle of captive guards, a growl of satisfaction, wolfish in its hoarse, inarticulate menace, swelled through the throng that confronted him. What Captain Denison saw as he turned his ashen face toward them would have cowed a far braver man than he—and he fell on his knees and begged piteously for his life.

  Boldness might have saved him; cowardice doomed him. As he sank to his knees mumbling inarticulate pleas, a convict with a wooden bludgeon in his hand leaped to his side and seized him by the throat.

  “We’ve got you now, damn you,” cried the volunteer executioner, called “Turkey” Burch, because of the vivid-hued neck beneath his evil face. “Denison, if you’ve got a God, which I doubt, talk to Him now or you never will till you meet Him face to face. Pray, you dog, pray! Do you remember the night you sent me to the straight-jacket to please one of your rotten snitches? I told you when you laughed at my groans that some day I’d get you. Well, that day has come.”

  Burch stooped toward his victim, his lips curling back over his teeth hideously.

  “In just sixty seconds,” he snarled, “this club is going to put you where you’ve put many a one of us—underground.”

  The prostrate mill-captain tried to speak, but fear choked back his words. The convict’s grip on his throat tightened like a vise. A roar of approval came from the stripe-clad mob. Someone leaped forward and kicked the kneeling form. Burch raised his club, swinging it about his head for the deathblow.

  “Stop!”

  The sharp command was spoken with authority. Involuntarily Burch hesitated and turned.

  Boston Blackie sprang from his vantage-point on the loom and snatched the club from Burch’s hand. He flung it on the floor and roughly shouldered his fellow-convict from the man he had saved.

  “I said no blood, and that goes as it lays, Turkey,” he said quietly but with finality.

  The convicts, being human—erringly human but still human—screamed their protest as Blackie’s intervention saved the man all hated with the deep hatred of real justification. Turkey Burch, encouraged by the savage protest from his mates, caught up his club.

  “Get out of my way, Blackie,” he cried. “That skunk on the floor has to die, and not even you are going to save him.”

  “Listen,” said Blackie, when the howl of approbation that followed this threat died down: “He’s not going to die. He’s going out of this mill without a scratch. I planned and started this revolt, and I’m going to finish it my own way.”

  Burch was a leader among the men scarcely second in influence to Blackie himself. He sensed the approval of the men behind him. The blow Blackie had intercepted would have been compensation, to his inflamed mind, for years of grievances and many long hours of physical torture. He swung his club.

  Boston Blackie seized an iron bar from a man beside him.

  “All right,” he said, standing aside from the kneeling Captain Denison. “Croak him whenever you’re ready, Turkey, but when you kill him, I kill you.”

  The two convicts faced each other, Blackie alert and determined, Burch sullen and in doubt. For the first time the crowd behind was stilled. Thirty tense seconds passed, in which life and death hung on balanced scales.

  “Why don’t you do something?” Blackie said to Burch with a smile. Then he threw his iron bar to the floor. “Boys,” he continued, turning to the crowd, “I hate that thing on the floor there wearing a captain’s uniform more than any of you. I didn’t stop Burch from croaking him because he doesn’t deserve it. I stopped him because if there is one drop of guards’ blood shed here today we convicts must lose this strike. If we keep our heads, we win. Now it’s up to you. If you want to pay for that coward’s blood with your own, Denison dies. But if he does, I quit you here and now. If you say so, he goes unharmed and we’ll finish this business as we began it—right.”

  He turned unarmed to Burch, standing irresolute with his club.

  “You’re the first to vote, Turkey. What’s the verdict?” he asked.

  Burch hesitated in sudden uncertainty. Denison cowered on the floor with chattering teeth. Then the convict tossed aside his club and stepped away from the prisoner.

  “You’ve run this business so far, Blackie,” he said slowly, “and I guess it’s up to us to let you finish it in your own way. If you say the dog must go free, free he goes, says I.”

  There was a chorus of approval from the convict mob.

  “Fine!” said Blackie. “I knew you boys had sense if I only gave you a chance to use it. Now, we’ve work to do. The first thing is to boot our dear Captain out those doors, and I nominate Turkey Burch to do it.”

  Action always pleases a mob. Joyous approval greeted the suggestion. Denison was dragged to the doors. They were unbarred, and then, propelled by Turkey Burch’s square-toed brogan, Captain Denison shot through and into the yard, where he was under the protecting rifles of the guards on the walls. One after another the captives were treated similarly.

  “Take this message to Deputy Warden Sherwood,” said Blackie as the last of the bound blue-coats stood ready to be kicked past the doors. “Tell him we control this mill. Tell him all his gun-guards and Gatling guns can’t touch us in here. Tell him that unless within one hour he releases from Punishment Hall the ten men he sent there yesterday for protesting against the rotten food, we’re going to tear down his five-million dollar mill. We’re going to wait just one hour, tell him, for his answer. Now go.”

  The man shot out. The doors were banged shut and barred behind him, while the mill resounded with the joyous shouts and songs of the convicts, hugging each other in the unrestrained abandonment that followed the first victory any of them had ever known over discipline.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  FIRST BLOOD

  Deputy Warden Martin Sherwood, disciplinarian and real head of the prison management, sat in his office gripping an unlighted cigar between his lips. The screaming siren had warned him of trouble in the mill. Wall-guards reporting over a dozen ’phones had told him all they knew—that the men had seized the mill and barred its doors against attack and were ejecting the guards one by one.

  “Any of them hurt?” Sherwood inquired.

  “Apparently not, sir,” the subordinate answered.
“Their hands are tied, but they don’t seem to be harmed. Captain Denison is out and on his way up to you.”

  “If Denison is out unharmed, nobody needs a doctor,” Sherwood said with a glint in his eyes that just missed being disappointment. “If they had spilled any blood, his would have been first. Strange! Twenty men at the mercy of a thousand uncaged wolves, and nobody dead, eh? I wouldn’t have believed it possible, and I thought I knew cons.”

  He turned and saw a nervous assistant buckling on a revolver.

  “Take off that gun and get it outside the gates, quick,” he commanded. “Don’t leave even a bean-shooter inside these walls. This is no ordinary riot. There’s headwork behind this. It looks as if we might have real trouble.”

  Deputy Sherwood reached into his desk, struck a match and lighted his cigar. When Martin Sherwood lighted tobacco, he was pleased. The whole prison knew this habit. Among the convicts the sight of the deputy smoking invariably sent a silently spoken warning from lip to lip.

  “The old man’s smoking. Be careful. Someone’s going to hang in the sack” (straightjacket) “tonight,” they would say, and the prediction seldom was unfulfilled.

  It was true that Martin Sherwood took grim, silent delight in inflicting punishment. He hated and despised convicts and took pleasure in making them cringe and beg under the iron rod of his discipline. Somewhere well back in his ancestry there was a cross of Indian blood—a cross that revealed itself in coarse, coal-black hair, in teeth so white and strong and perfect they were all but repulsive, and lastly in the cruelties of Punishment Hall—cruelties that made San Gregorio known as “the toughest stir in the country.”

  There was a reason for this strange twist in the character of a man absolutely fearless and otherwise fair. Years before, he had brought a bride to his home just outside the prison walls. She was pretty and young and weak—just the sort of girl the attraction of opposites would send to a man like Martin Sherwood. There were a few months of happiness during which Sherwood sometimes was seen to smile even among the convicts.

  Then came the crash. A convict employed as a servant in the deputy’s home completed his sentence and was released. With him went the Deputy’s wife, leaving behind a note that none but the deserted husband ever saw. He never revealed by word or look the wound that festered in his heart, but from that day he was a man unfeeling as iron—a man who hated convicts and rejoiced in their hatred of him. Punishment Hall, when he could use its tortures with justice, became his instrument of revenge.

  This perhaps explains why Martin Sherwood sat in his office calmly smoking a cigar when Captain Denison, white and shaken, rushed in and tumbled into a chair. His superior read in a glance the story of the scene in the mill.

  “They might as well have killed you in the mill as to send you up here to die of fright in my office,” the Deputy said with such biting sarcasm that Denison, terror-stricken as he was, flushed.

  A few quick, incisive questions brought out the facts about the revolt. “Deputy, there is serious trouble ahead,” Denison warned in conclusion. “Those cons have a leader they obey like a regiment of soldiers. He is—”

  “Boston Blackie, of course,” interrupted Sherwood. “There isn’t a man down there who could have planned and executed a plot like this but Blackie. I should have known better than to put him where he could come in contact with the men.”

  The guard who had been given the convict leader’s ultimatum to the deputy warden rushed in.

  “He says he wants the men out of Punishment Hall and your promise of better food from now on, or he’ll tear the mill down in an hour,” the man reported.

  The Deputy Warden tossed away his cigar and stepped out into the courtyard, bright with a thousand blossoms of the California spring.

  “Sends an ultimatum to me, does he?” he repeated softly to himself. “He’s a man with real nerve and real brains. There is no way for me to reach the men while they’re inside the mill. I must get them out and up here in this yard where the Gatlings and rifle-guards will have a chance. And then I’ll break Mr. Boston Blackie and the rest of them in the jacket—one by one.”

  His eyes gleamed at the thought. He turned to the men in the office.

  “I’m going down to the mill,” he said. “Have a Gatling gun ready in each of the four towers that cover this yard—ready but out of sight, do you understand?”

  “Down to the mill?” cried Denison in amazement. “Deputy, you don’t realize the spirit of that mob. You won’t live five minutes. They will murder you as surely as you put yourself in their power. Don’t go.”

  “If I am not back in half an hour, your prediction will have been fulfilled,” Sherwood said. He took his pocket-knife and a roll of bills from his pocket and locked them in his desk. “If I am not back in half an hour, Denison, call the Warden at his club in San Francisco, tell him what has happened and that they got me. Say my last word was for him to call on the Governor for a regiment of militia. But for the next half-hour do nothing except get your nerve back—if you can.”

  Sherwood pulled a straw from a whiskbroom on his desk, stuck it between his teeth, from which his lips curled back until the abnormally long incisors were revealed, and started for the mill-yard as calmly as though he were going to luncheon.

  White-faced guards at the last gate tried to stay him. The uproar from within the mill was deafening. Songs, curses and cries of frenzied exultation came from behind the steel-barred doors.

  “Open the gates,” commanded Sherwood. “Lock them behind me and don’t reopen them again, even if you think it’s to save my life.”

  Still holding the straw clenched between his teeth, the Deputy crossed the yard, neither hurrying nor hesitating. Nothing in his face or demeanor gave the slightest indication that he knew he was delivering himself, unarmed, into the power of a thousand crazed men, every one of whom had reason to hate him with that sort of undying hatred that grows from wrongs unrevenged and long-suppressed.

  Sherwood hammered on the door with his fist. The clamor inside suddenly died.

  “Open the door,” he commanded. “I’m coming in to talk to you. I’m alone and unarmed.”

  The man on guard at the door raised the iron wicket and looked out.

  “It’s the Deputy,” he whispered. “He’s alone, too. Once we get him inside!” The man sank his teeth into his lip until the blood streamed across his chin. Primeval savagery, hidden only skin-deep in any man, reverts to the surface hideously among such men in such an hour.

  With hands trembling with eagerness, the convict unbarred the door, and Martin Sherwood stepped quickly in and faced the mob.

  For five seconds that seemed an hour there was dead silence. It was broken by an inarticulate, un-human, menacing roar of rage that rose to a scream as the men realized the completeness of their power over the man who to them was the living embodiment of the law which denied them everything that makes life livable.

  A man in the rear of the mob thrust aside his fellows, rushed at the Deputy and spat in his face. As calmly as though he were in his own office, Sherwood drew out his handkerchief and wiped his cheek, but never for an instant did his eyes waver from the men he faced. His teeth, whiter and more animallike than ever, it seemed, gleamed like a wolf’s fangs as he chewed at the straw between them.

  “I’ll remember that, Kelly, when I get you in the jacket,” he said slowly to the man who had spat upon him. The convict laughed, but pressed backward, cowed against his will by the fearless assurance of his antagonist.

  Boston Blackie was in the rear of the mill when the sudden silence warned him of new developments at the front door. Forcing his way through the crowd, he was within ten feet of the Deputy Warden before he saw him. The striped leader’s face paled as he recognized Sherwood—paled with fear, not of him but for him. If the official were killed, as there was every probabili
ty he would be, he knew it meant the gallows for himself and a score of the men behind him. He had risked everything on his ability to prevent bloodshed. The lives of all of them depended on the safety of the hated autocrat who stood before him calmly chewing a broom straw in the midst of hundreds of men hungering for his life.

  Blackie caught the Deputy Warden by the shoulder and turned him toward the door.

  “Go,” he said. “Get out before they kill you.”

  Sherwood threw off his hand.

  “You may be able to command this convict rabble, Blackie,” he said in a voice perfectly audible in the new silence which had fallen on the mob, “but you can’t command me. I came to talk to these men, and I’m going to do it.”

  From somewhere in the rear came a metal weight which missed Sherwood’s head by inches and crashed against the door behind him. The screaming blood-cry rose again. One struck at the Deputy’s head with a shuttle, but Blackie, quicker in eye and hand, hit first and laid the man senseless at his feet. Then he jumped to the top of a loom.

  “Men, if you want to hang,” he cried, his voice rising even above the bedlam about him, “I’ll go along with you, if you’ll listen to me first.”

  The outcry died down for a moment, and Blackie talked to them. He made no pleas, asked no favors. He told them their situation and his plan to attain the ends for which they had revolted—the release of the prisoners in Punishment Hall and better food for themselves. He pointed the futility of the hope of escape, ringed about as they were by Gatling guns and rifles in a score of watch-towers, even if they could force the walls as one suggested. Gradually, by sheer force of mind, he dominated the crowd; and when at last he called on them to follow him to the end, their cheer was that of soldiers to a recognized leader.