The Capture

by James Hay

  Table of Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  THE CAPTURE

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Originally published in The Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 10, 1914.

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

  THE CAPTURE

  Vinal sat in a plain deal chair near the cold fireplace, his body leaning slightly forward, his hands resting lightly upon his knees. With the exception of two brief interruptions he had been in that position for more than twelve hours, but there was in the lines of his still figure that which suggested desperate expectancy, incessant alertness.

  At eleven o’clock that morning he had risen from the chair by inches and tiptoed to the window and, gently pulling aside the thick, dirty curtain, had looked out through a chink in the closed shutters to glance at the two policemen patrolling the pavement outside. In that journey he had not made a sound. Not a board had creaked. There had not been even so much as the scraping of one part of his clothing against another. And again at five o’clock in the afternoon, creeping, a master of silence, he had repeated the pilgrimage and had seen the same patrol. At the back of the house, he knew, was a third blue-coated man.

  On the far side of the room was a door and beyond that door were Pole and Dowell, two of the men who had murdered old Sothoron and old Sothoron’s wife. He knew they were there. How he knew it he could not have explained. So far as his trained senses had been able to discover, there had come from the next room during his long wait the sound of neither voice nor motion. He simply felt that they were on the other side of the wall.

  He had acted on the supposition that they would do what thousands of others of their kind had done, double on their tracks and return, if possible, to their old refuge. He had figured that if they could enter the house in spite of the one policeman at the rear and the two at the front, he in his pursuit of them could accomplish the same feat.

  As he thought of this deduction on his part, and its impending result, he experienced the greatest excitement he ever allowed himself to feel. It was only a question of minutes, at most not more than an hour, before he would have the laugh on the police commissioner. He would make Finkman and his men look like fools; and the famous Bloomer agency, with its cocksure chief, would find itself cheated of its prize at the very time when the city and the entire country expected it to turn its best trick. He liked neither the commissioner nor Finkman nor the Bloomers. They had never given him a fair chance, and he had a nice sense of revenge. Single-handed he would deliver two of the three murderers to justice that evening.

  If he had waited a lifetime he could not have had a better setting for the drama he was about to enact. The newspapers the next morning would grip the imagination of the whole country and lead it irresistibly into the dark room of that miserable house in which he now sat. Because the public mind had been inflamed by the recitals of the outrage, it would read eagerly, even delightedly, the details of the capture of the criminals.

  For three days the search for the murderers had spread out, spun itself into a mighty web. The furor had been created because of the prominence of the victims, not because of any particular brutality in the commission of the crime. While one man had watched outside the other two had crept into the bedroom, chloroformed the husband and the wife and ransacked the house. To all intents and purposes, so far as the burglars were concerned, the double murder had been an accident. Instead of stupefying, as they had intended, they had killed.

  But immediately the authorities and the newspapers had come forward with the cry: “The chloroform gang!” They recognized in the tragedy the work of the Chloroform Colonel and his two associates, Dowell and Pole. And because the owners of millions had been done to death, he, Vinal, sat there in the cold, dark room and calculated to a nicety the details of every move he must make to accomplish this triumph unaided, to achieve it in such a way that he—he alone—would stand head and shoulders above the mass of men who made the pursuit of crime their profession.

  He had entered the house before daylight that morning, coming up like a specter out of the wet blackness of the back alley, slipping past the sleepy policeman and disappearing into the areaway in perfect silence. His progress on stockinged feet from the basement to the fourth story of the rickety house had been as quiet as death and laborious enough to wring the sweat from his body.

  And yet he should have had no real fear of interruption. The police, having searched the place from top to bottom two days before, had contented themselves with placing the three pickets on the outside—in case the murderers should seize on the perilous chance of doubling back. And if his marvelous intuition had served him right and any of the three had returned to wait for a last play for freedom, they would have made no outcry if he had stumbled against them. They would have realized the futility of further resistance. The average crook, dislodged from his last ditch, makes no fight. In view of these things his care, his fear of outside interference and his incredible patience were sure signs of the eagerness with which he looked forward to the capture.

  The time had come for him to act, to put into execution the plan which he had elaborated. On the other side of the flimsy door there were only two men. He knew this. In the first place the Colonel, their leader, would never have beaten back aimlessly to an old haunt. Rather than pen himself up in a place in which either starvation or a second search would end his career, he would make a daring try for more open ground. Realizing that all the machinery of the law was combing clean the retreats of the city, he would strive in every way to get beyond the scope of such a chase. Only the lower intelligence of Pole and Dowell would hold out to them the promise of ultimate escape by such a ruse.

  The room was very cold. Vinal wanted to shiver, but checked the impulse. In all the time he had been there he had not moved a muscle unnecessarily. The darkness was in the shuttered, curtained house like a tangible, palpable object. It seemed a solid, oblong formation against which the glare of the street lights beat in vain. And the silence inside was almost as bad. In that vast, crashing, shrieking city it was a separate thing, unchanged and unmoved by the ordinary uproar humanity makes at night. It began to get on his nerves, until he mentally took hold of himself and assured himself that there was nothing uncanny in the affair. It was simply a matter of one man sitting moveless and soundless in one room and two other men equally moveless, equally silent, in the other.

  He got to his feet—and it took him two full minutes to reach an upright position—his hands held slightly away from his sides. He moved his fingers, crooking them and straightening them out methodically time and again to get out of them the stiffness that had been caused by the cold. He raised his right foot and put it forward through the darkness in one long step, but when he placed it on the bricks of the hearth nearby it was with a motion as soft as the falling of down. Once on the hearth and away from the danger of creaking boards, he began to rise slowly and repeatedly on the balls of his feet in such a way that the exertion called into play all the muscles of his legs. He did this fifty times, more rapidly toward the last, and always continuing the movements of his fingers.

  He went through with it scientifically, utilizing the knowledge he had gained in the gymnasium. He had begun to roll his head from side to side when he noticed that his neck, unshaven for thirty-six hours, rasped against his collar. With slow deftness and short, tedious movement he took off his cravat and, leaning over, placed it carefully on the bricks to one side. He did not drop it. The collar was more difficult. He moistened his fingers with saliva and applied them many times to the buttonholes. When he slipped the first flap from its holding the buttonhole was as soft and wet as if it had been dipped in a river.

  His straining ears, read
y to receive every sound, could not hear his own work. Outside there was the constant chorus of the city, punctuated now and then by the shrill horn of an automobile or the wail of wheels against the cold steel rails on the Elevated, and continuously there came up from the pavement directly underneath the monotonous pit-pat of the brogans of the slowly promenading policemen. Several times he heard voices guying the officers.

  “Watch the Sherlock Holmeses doing a marathon!” one of the street gamins called out.

  And another:

  “Why don’t you go down to the station and wait for ’em to walk in?”

  But there was no sound from the next room. He had taken off the collar and laid it down beside the cravat when the thought came to him: “Suppose they’re not there!” He paused, still bowed over, and listened as if to reassure himself. He heard nothing. And yet the old intuition came back to him. They were there. That was the only explanation of why the newsboys at that very moment were crying the extras telling of their remarkable escape. They must be there. They would have thought of no other place when the chase behind them had grown too hot.

  He did not falter once in his infinite precaution, his far-reaching calculation of just what each muscle would do, of how he must place each hand and each foot to avoid even the chance of noise. The slightest thing, he knew, would split that block of silence like the thundering blow of a trip-hammer. The blackness pressed upon him and stung him as if he had been made up of the ends of live wires, wires which, in his unnatural imagination, he thought would carry straight to the ears of the two in the other room the ghost of any sound. But he forced himself to calmness. He could not afford nervousness.

  As plainly as if it had been in the room he suddenly heard the rattle of the knob of the door of the house. One of the policemen, varying the monotony of his vigil, had rattled it aimlessly. In an instant he became one degree more alert. The eager desire of his mind sharpened still more his hearing. There had come from the other room a sound. He listened—listened—listened hungrily, painfully. The noise was not repeated. It had not been enough, in the first place, to make a scratch on the hard block of the silence which hemmed him in. And yet he was sure, certain.

  He leaned over again and, resting his left hand on the bricks, thrust his right slowly into the fireplace and up the chimney the fraction of an inch. He wanted some of the soot, but none of it must be dislodged and fall into the fireplace. He put the soot with well-considered smears upon his cheeks and nose and forehead. Then, regaining his upright posture, he slowly turned up the soft collar of his coat and buttoned the garment tightly about his slender figure.

  He stood hesitant once more, cataloguing in his mind all the things he had done, the limbering and softening of the muscles and ligaments of his body, the removal of his collar and tie, the disfiguring of his face—this being done for two reasons: The blackness of the soot would remove the possibility of his face looming up like a white blur before the men he intended to capture; also, if they discovered him too soon, he would stand a chance to fraternize with them as being, like them, a fugitive. That idea struck him as grimly ludicrous. What would they, the murderers, think if they became convinced that he, fleeing because of some minor offense, was closeted with them in their last house of refuge?

  With soft touches he felt that the revolver in the right-hand outer pocket of his coat was as it should be and that the one on the other side was convenient to his immediate reach. He was ready, he told himself. Finkman and the Bloomers, he reflected, could not have prepared themselves one-half so well for what he was about to do.

  Vinal was not a coward. No man with fear in his heart ever could have gone through with that day’s watching. But as he put out his right foot and started on that long, apparently interminable journey across the short expanse of flooring between him and the door, the slightest noise of his own making would have thrown him into a panic. Keyed up to an abnormal pitch, his nerves raw from their tension, he was emotionally wide open to any impression, any idea, any happening foreign to his definite undertaking.

  It was as if he carried in the balls of his feet premonition of noise. In his trip to the door he traveled at right angles to the boarding of the floor, and he knew that in order to avoid the creaking of the planks he must follow the line of one of the crosspieces underneath the boarding. He found this by instinct and he kept to it unswervingly in his progress.

  His sense of direction was extraordinary, weird; the more so because every step he made was almost a half-circle, since he did not dare to tip forward in the ordinary manner. In each groping stride his foot went out to one side from him and forward at the same time, so as to avoid the danger of one trousers leg brushing against the other. And he was guided entirely by the mental picture of what he had seen greyly when the daylight had been sifting through the chinks of the shutters—by that and by the instinctive accuracy with which his light, catlike feet followed the safe part of the flooring.

  Within a yard of the door, he stopped midway in the act of letting his weight swing with wearisome slowness from his right foot to his left. He had had neither food nor drink for twenty-four hours, and in the anguished nervousness of his progress he had allowed his mouth to slacken, half-open. It was like that of a runner who, nearing the close of a race, gasps for breath. And all of a sudden he realized that the inhalations went into his lungs with what threatened to be the sound of a low whistle. He closed his lips and hung motionless, balanced halfway in his stride. He listened. There was nothing except the roar of the city—that and the pit-pat of the policemen’s feet.

  He put out his hand and moved it forward slowly, slowly as the ages.

  The tips of his fingers thrilled and pulsated as if the nerves were not covered by the epidermis. And when they touched the doorjamb he had to hold himself together to keep from starting suddenly, so hard and abrupt seemed the touch when they struck against the woodwork.

  Very slowly, almost imperceptibly, his long, lean figure crouched forward more and more until his ear was on a level with the keyhole. He waited five minutes—eight minutes—ten minutes. His hearing was reinforced by his hope of discovering them and his fear of their discovering him. All his senses reached forward into that other room. So great was his concentration that the noises of the city and the echoes of the footsteps down below were at last a million miles away.

  He could see the two men exactly as they had been pictured in the newspapers—Pole, little, round-shouldered, pusillanimous; and Dowell, heavy-set, broad-shouldered, bull-necked. Now, more than ever, he knew that they were there—Pole bunched up, terror-stricken, white-lipped, and Dowell a big, immovable lump. But he could not understand why he did not hear their breathing. It was natural that they should not move about. Their consuming fear of discovery would account for this. And yet the fact that they made no sounds whatever was beyond him. If they were breathing, he felt, the sound of it must come to him in that virgin silence.

  Then he heard. It was a whisper, low, guarded, but to him it sounded like the crack of a gun, so much so that instinctively and in silent swiftness he put his hands to his revolver pockets.

  He listened.

  “If they get the Colonel we’ve got a chance.”

  He knew that the voice was Pole’s. It was a whisper, but to his ears, incredibly trained, it had in it all the characteristics of a voice. It sounded like the talk of a little, shrill-toned man.

  “They won’t get him.” Dowell’s whisper in reply was like Dowell, slow and heavy.

  The silence closed in again.

  “For God’s sake, we’ve got to do something! We’ll starve to death here.” Pole’s whisper, so low that it seemed scarcely to make a ripple on the ocean of stillness, was freighted nevertheless with a coward’s despair.

  Vinal, exerting himself as if he wrestled with ten men, had heard every syllable of what had been said. He found himself balanced on his toes, his right arm straightened out behind him, his left pointed forward and downward, as if he were poi
sed agilely and perfectly for instant movement. He hung, light as a feather, in the silence, and yet his muscles were so tense that he looked, too, like a man supporting tremendous weight.

  “Don’t talk.” Dowell ended the whispering.

  Vinal put his hand on the doorknob. His fingers touched it as lightly as grains of dust, and, while all his consciousness was centered on the gigantic task of turning it without noise, somewhere in the back of his mentality he was cursing the necessity of fooling with a thing so pregnant in its possibilities for the ruin of his plan.

  It seemed to him afterward that he used up a year of his life in turning the knob. At every fraction of the turn he paused, knowing that, if he went the thousandth of a second faster, the inevitable grating of the latch would follow. He was seized by an insane desire to wrench the door open and charge in with thunderous noise, discharging his guns and shouting at the top of his voice. The silence—silence which was necessary to him—was growing too big, too mysterious for him. It was a torture that multiplied itself every moment.

  When he had the latch free of the hasp, there came a repetition of the careful tactics he had already followed. Just as there had been a certainty that the lock would creak, there was the dead-sure thing that the hinges would cry out if urged by more than snail-like motion. As the door opened he began to calculate through his sense of touch just when to bring it to a stop, and to go through again the crucifying process of letting the latch creep back to the point from which he had started it. While he did this he could hear the breathing of the two men, and gradually, by painful degrees, he began to sense their positions in the room. They were nearer to the window than he had thought and they faced the window. That was the first piece of good fortune he had had. He could work on them from behind.

  He took his hand from the knob and the door was still. He took one slow step into the room. It was a motion that required minutes. Three times the ball of his foot touched the flooring and drew back. Each time he knew that, if he had put the weight of ten pounds on that step, the flimsy flooring would have cried out. At the fourth attempt he felt safe—and he could not have explained the feeling to save his soul.