Nick had the upper hand temporarily, however, and proceeded to wrench himself loose. He had been busily engaged in this when Willard had rushed to Grantley’s assistance.
That put still another face on the situation at once.
XI
The newcomer saw his opportunity and snatched up a chair as he rushed toward the tangled combatants.
Nick heard him coming, but did not have time to extricate himself from Grantley’s dogged grasp.
He raised his weapon, though, and was about to fire at Willard, when he saw that the latter was directly between him and Helga Lund. Under the circumstances, the detective did not dare to fire for fear of hitting the actress.
He kept Grantley down as best he could with his left hand, and waited for Willard with his right hand still extended, holding the automatic.
He might have an opportunity to fire but, if not, he could at least partially ward off the expected blow from the chair.
Just as Willard paused and swung the chair aloft, Grantley managed partially to dislodge the detective, with the result that Nick was obliged to lower his right arm quickly. Otherwise he would undoubtedly have lost his balance completely, and the surgeon-convict would have had the upper hand in another second or two.
This involuntary lowering of Nick’s guard served the purpose that Grantley had intended. Willard’s cumbersome weapon descended with uninterrupted force on the detective’s shoulders and the back of his head.
Nick lowered the latter instinctively, and thus saved himself the worst of the blow. Nevertheless, the impact of the chair was stunning in its force.
The detective felt his senses reeling, but he somehow managed to retain them and to grasp the chair, which he blindly wrenched from Willard’s grasp.
As he did so, however, Grantley succeeded in throwing him off and scrambling to his feet. Nick followed his example almost simultaneously, dropped his revolver into his pocket – for fear it would fall into the hands of one of his enemies – and, grasping the heavy chair with both hands, whirled it about his head.
His two antagonists dodged it hurriedly, thus clearing a space about him. Their blood was up, however – especially Grantley’s – and they felt sure that the detective had by no means recovered from the blow.
‘Catch the chair, Willard!’ cried Grantley.
The younger physician obeyed instantly, grasping the round of the chair with both hands, and thus preventing Nick from using it to any advantage.
The detective shoved it forward into the pit of Willard’s stomach, but the newcomer managed to retain his hold.
He guessed that Grantley merely meant him to keep Nick busy in front, in order to allow of a rear attack; and such was the case.
While the detective was occupied with Willard, Grantley stole behind him and plunged his hand into Nick’s pocket, in search of the automatic.
The detective was obliged to let go of the chair and clamp his hand on Grantley’s wrist. He was still feeling very groggy as a result of the punishment he had recently received, and a thrill of apprehension went through him.
Grantley’s hand was already deep in his pocket, grasping the butt of the weapon; and there was nothing about the wrist hold to prevent the criminal from turning the muzzle of the automatic toward his side and pulling the trigger.
Incidentally, Nick foresaw that he could not hope to hold the chair with one hand. Willard would twist it away and turn it upon him.
He was right. That was precisely what Willard did. Nick let go just in time to escape a sprained, if not broken wrist, and dodged back.
In order to keep his hand in Nick’s pocket, Grantley was then obliged to circle about, between the detective and Willard. That saved Nick from the latter for the moment, and, simultaneously, the detective shifted his hold from Grantley’s wrist to his hand, pressing his thumb in under the latter in such a way that it prevented the hammer of the automatic from descending.
He was just in time, for Grantley pulled the trigger almost at the same moment. Thanks to Nick’s foresight, however, the weapon did not go off.
Grantley cursed under his breath, but he had not emptied his bag of tricks. He suddenly drove his head and shoulders in between Nick’s right arm and side, and threw his own left arm around, with a back-hand movement, in front of the detective’s body.
The move threw the detective backward, over Grantley’s knee, which was ready for him. At the same time, the criminal, whose right hand had remained on the weapon in Nick’s pocket, began to draw the automatic out and to the rear.
In other words, he was forcing the detective in one direction with the left arm and working the revolver in the other with his right. It was manifestly impossible for Nick to stand the two opposing pressures for long.
Either he must break the hold of Grantley’s left arm, which pressed across his chest like an iron band, or else he must let go of the weapon.
The former seemed out of the question in that position; and to relinquish his hold on the revolver meant a shot in the side, which, with Grantley’s knowledge of anatomy, would almost certainly prove fatal.
Backward went Nick’s straining right arm, inward turned the hard muzzle of the weapon. Grantley was twisting the automatic now, hoping to loosen the detective’s grasp all the quicker.
Something was due in a few moments, and it promised to be a tragedy for the detective.
Then, to cap the climax, Willard circled about the two combatants, like a hawk ready to swoop down on its prey, and, seeing Nick’s head protruding from under Grantley’s left arm, hauled off and let drive with the chair.
The surgeon received part of the blow, but Nick’s head stopped enough of it to end the strange tussle.
The detective crumpled up, but Grantley held him from the floor and wrested the weapon from the nerveless fingers. He withdrew it from Nick’s pocket and put it to the detective’s left breast, determined to end it all, without fail.
It was at that supreme moment that Chick charged up and took a hand.
Nick’s assistant reached Willard first. The latter’s back was toward him, and he was just in the act of drawing back the chair. Chick’s clubbed weapon descended on his head without warning, and Willard pitched forward on his face.
It was not until then that Chick saw the automatic at his chief’s breast. There was no time to reach Grantley – not a second to waste.
The young detective did what Nick and his men seldom allowed themselves to do – he turned his automatic around again and shot to kill.
Nick’s own life depended upon it, and there was nothing else to do.
The bullet struck Grantley full between the eyes, and the escaped convict dropped without a sound.
The battle was over and won.
****
Doctor Hiram A Grantley – so called – master surgeon and monster of crime, would never return to Sing Sing to serve out his unexpired term; but neither would he trouble the world, or Helga Lund, again.
If the truth were known, it would doubtless be found that Warden Kennedy heaved a sigh of profound relief when he heard of Grantley’s death. It left no room for anxiety over the possibility of another hypnotic escape.
Doctors Chester, Willard, and Graves were speedily brought to trial, and they were convicted of aiding and abetting the deceased Grantley in an illegal experiment in hypnotism on the person of the great Swedish actress.
As for Helga Lund, she was a nervous wreck for nearly a year, but gradually, under the care of the best European physicians, she recovered her health and her confidence in herself.
She has now returned to the stage, and Nick Carter, who has seen her recently in Paris, declares that she is more wonderful than ever.
He wishes he could have spared her that last humiliating ordeal, but she is wise enough to know that, but for him and Chick, the man she had despised would have mad
e his dreadful vengeance complete.
THORNLEY COLTON
Created by Clinton H Stagg (1888-1916)
If Clinton Stagg had not died in a car accident at the age of only 27, his name might well be much more familiar to readers of crime fiction today than it is. Even in the short career he had, he produced a large number of stories and magazine articles and, at the time of his death, he had just moved to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter. It was while he was driving along a road in Santa Monica that his car overturned and he and a fellow writer who was his passenger were killed. Some of Stagg’s best fiction featured the blind detective Thornley Colton, a wealthy New Yorker who takes on cases purely for the intellectual interest they offer. Known as ‘The Problemist’, Colton is one of a number of blind detectives in early crime fiction (Ernest Bramah’s tales of Max Carrados appeared about the same time in the UK) and, like all of them, he is able to solve the mysteries he tackles through high intelligence and the fact that his other senses have been heightened by his disability. The Thornley Colton stories were first published in 1913 in People’s Ideal Fiction Magazine and were collected in book form after Stagg’s death. Plausibility wasn’t always Stagg’s strongpoint in his plotting but, as ‘The Flying Death’ shows, his stories were lively and full of colour and invention.
THE FLYING DEATH
I
The last sobbing notes of the violin died away. Slowly, reverently, the girl lowered the bow and lifted her chin; the throat-filling hush wrought by the conjuring of her music became wild, unrestrained applause as the spell broke. The beating surges of sound from the gallery, the balcony, the floor seemed to frighten her a little; the frail body in its simple white frock shrank before it; but the girlish lips smiled bravely as she bowed her way to the wings.
Clamorous, insistent, the applause continued. She reappeared; silence came as she lifted the violin to her chin. The lilting fantasy of a folk-song rollicked from under the dancing bow. Once more came the enthusiastic outburst when she finished. She gestured her thanks, smiled an instant at the upper right-hand box, laughed and kissed her hand to the lone occupant of lower left and ran from the stage.
‘Sheer genius, Sydney!’ murmured Thornley Colton, in expression of the reverence good music always aroused in him; for music, to the blind man, held all the pleasures that painting, sculpture, and beautiful architecture hold for those whom God has given sight. Now his whole face, from the high forehead to the lean, cleft chin, was alight; even the sightless eyes seemed to shine behind the great blue circles of the smoked-glass, tortoise-shell-rimmed library spectacles that accentuated the striking whiteness of his face and hair.
‘Wonderful!’ breathlessly agreed the red-cheeked, black-haired Sydney Thames, secretary and constant companion of the blind man.
‘It makes my woids muss up when I try to talk,’ gulped The Fee, freckle-faced, red-haired, blue-eyed boy, who had become a member of the Colton household at the conclusion of a particularly baffling murder case. Thornley Colton laughed softly and pushed back his chair. Then real alarm came to the boy’s voice. ‘Gee, yuh ain’t goin’ now?’ he pleaded. ‘They’s a coupla comedy acr’bats an’ a wop knife t’rower yet!’
‘We’ll wait,’ promised Colton, as he made room for a pale-faced young man who had just risen to hurry past him and out of the box.
The problemist moved his chair farther back, and whispered to Sydney. ‘Our friend who just left seems to be troubled with a mighty bad case of nerves,’ he observed. ‘My cane could feel his chair trembling under him the whole time the girl was playing. He seemed to jump a foot when she left the stage that last time, and he’s been muttering under his breath ever since. What happened?’
‘I’d say he was wildly in love with her, and madly jealous of someone else,’ accounted Sydney. ‘She smiled up at him an instant after that last encore, but she immediately turned and kissed her hand to the man in the lower left-hand box. If ever black rage shone in a man’s face it was on that of our neighbour. He isn’t more than twenty-two or three, and he doesn’t look as if he had ever learned to curb a nasty temper.’
‘He left as if he were going in search of someone’s heart blood,’ smiled the blind man, leaning back in his chair.
One of the comedy acrobats had just succeeded in pushing the other from a high table, and was joyously dancing on his rubber stomach, to the great delight of The Fee, and some fourteen or fifteen hundred others.
‘You don’t happen to know the occupant of lower left?’ asked Colton. Somehow the thought of sordid jealousy of two men, and a girl whose witchery could produce such music, seemed to jar.
Sydney gazed covertly down at the occupant of lower left. He was a big-bodied man, and fat.
There were fleshy pouches of good living and bad drinking under his eyes; but no dissipation could hide the iron will, the dominant arrogance the heavy chin showed. He sat back in the deep box, the black of his evening clothes verging into the black of the heavy velvet hangings that covered the wall behind him. The white expanse of shirt front contrasted strikingly with the sombre background; one white fist rested on the back of a gold chair.
‘It’s James P Cartwright, the theatrical manager!’ returned Sydney suddenly. ‘Her manager!’ he supplemented in sudden anger as he compared the innocent girlishness of the violinist and the coarse grossness of the recognized man in the box. Sydney Thames deified all women from afar, for he had forbidden himself the joys of propinquity, because he could never forget that he had no name but that of the English river on the banks of which Thornley Colton had found him, a bundle of dirty baby-clothes, years before.
‘Cartwright has an unenviable reputation among his women of the stage,’ muttered Colton. The smile was gone from the thin, expressive lips now.
The rocking notes of the fantastic folk-song still haunted him; the sobbing cadence of the piece she had played before was in his mind: an omen of tragedy. A soul that could conjure music like that – and a Cartwright, who, gossip said, demanded his price for others’ success!
The two comedy acrobats had disinterred themselves from an avalanche of chairs and a table; the first to his feet had been promptly knocked down by the other, and dragged off the stage by his heels, while The Fee and a few hundred others shouted and clapped their approval. A card announced Signor Delvetoi and his marvellous whirling knives.
Sydney, watching the occupant of the lower left, saw him take out a big watch impatiently, lean ponderously back in a chair, and summon an usher. The uniformed man came, listened a moment, nodded, and opened the door at the stage end of the box, to reappear a moment later and whisper his message, or news. Cartwright nodded, and turned his attention idly toward the stage, where the signor sent a whirling knife toward the high boards before which his yellow-haired partner had set a red apple swinging on a long string. The knife point thudded into the wood; the cut string parted, and the apple rolled to the stage floor.
‘Gee, that’s some stunt!’ ecstatically exclaimed The Fee, as he enthusiastically described the feat of the black-bearded signor to Colton.
A handful of playing cards flurried before the wooden stop. Three whirling knives shot across the whole length of the stage; three cards were pinned fast, and the assistant held them up triumphantly to show the pierced ace spots.
Cartwright inclined his head in a nod of grudging approval, then turned quickly as he heard the door that led back to the stage open. Sydney saw the girl who had played appear in her street clothes, a simple white shirt waist and dark skirt, her coat thrown over her arm. He gritted his teeth at the greeting she gave the theatrical manager, and as he saw the flush of happiness on the winsome face, while the thick lips of the man grinned as he took her coat. Cartwright jerked his thumb toward the stage where the dexterous signor had just succeeded in planting five knives in a black spot not bigger than a half dollar.
He pulled his chair close to that of the girl, and
they sat talking; the girl with many pretty, unconscious gestures, the man listening, with a jerky nod now and then. They were in the rear of the box, not three feet from the heavy velvet hangings that covered the wall back of them. They could not be seen from the body of the theatre, but from the upper box opposite, where Sydney sat, everything in their box was visible.
Sydney interrupted The Fee’s excited description of the signor’s act long enough to tell the news to Colton; and he made no excuse for his spying. The blind man nodded grimly, and continued his patient listening to The Fee, who was having the time of his young life. The signor, in his suit of black silk and his black, pointed beard, had performed miracles with the whirling knives. Now the boy waited breathlessly for this last feat, because the soft music of the orchestra told him it would be the best of all. A huge frame was being lowered from the flies. The blond assistant stepped to the small shelf, thrust her hands through the leather loops, and stood against the golden back, arms spread wide, feet apart. The signor brought his table of glittering knives to the footlights; the frame and the assistant swung aloft. The lights went out. Darkness for a few brief seconds, then the calcium from the balcony outlined the suspended woman and the gold background.
‘Ah!’ The Fee’s gasp swelled a thousand others, as the knife shot into the calcium beam from the darkness below, whirled with a thousand silver fires, and buried its point in the wood, blade grazing the cheek of the woman. A few seconds of breathless suspense, and another followed, to graze the ear. Even Sydney forgot the man and girl in the box as he watched the whirling blades. The weirdness of the thing held him fascinated; the knives, hurled from the hands of the man who was invisible in the darkness below the single light beam, pin-wheeled through the light to find their place unerringly.
Then something caused Sydney Thames to turn his eyes again to the lower box. At the instant a flash of lurid light leaped from the darkness, silhouetting with startling vividness the seated man and girl. The roar of a pistol came to his ears; and while the light cut the darkness he saw behind the seated man and girl the face of the youth who had been in the box with them; the man whose jealousy had been shown so plainly.
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