Doors of the Night Part 22

"Well, what do you expect!" He forced a raucous note into his voice. He was not sure that it sounded genuine. It was not easy to play the Rat with her! "Think it over! It's not so soft a job to get them back to him without leaving a trail behind that might trip me up! See?"

She appeared to consider this for a moment.

"That is true," she said at last. "Well, have you got them here?"

"Yes." He reached into his pocket and took out the chamois pocketbook.

He laughed brusquely, as he held it out to her. "If you can handle that envelope, maybe you can handle the sparklers, too!"

"I can-and I will," she said simply, as she took the pocketbook from him. "That's only fair. I told you once that I would put no difficulties in the way of your keeping yourself solid-if you could!-with your fellow yeggs. And that applies equally to to-night. You may bring the Cadger back here. You will find the house empty."

"Thanks!" he said grimly. "I'll move along then; I've got just about enough time left. And would you mind _locking_ the front door when you go out? I'd like the Cadger to get all the run that's coming to him for his money."

He stepped forward to pa.s.s her, but she laid a detaining hand on his arm.

"Wait!" she said tersely. "I agreed to look after this envelope, but even so you are not through yet to-night, Bundy. I know where Mr. Dayler is this evening, and I am going to bring him back here to his own house myself. But I will give you time first to play out your little farce with your two thugs, and send them about their business. Say, ten o'clock. Mr. Dayler and myself will be here at that time-and so will you."

"Will I?" inquired Billy Kane insolently. "Whats the lay? A trap?"

"No-an experiment," she said evenly. "I would like to find out if there is really anything _human_, if there is a shred of decency left in you.

I want you to see your crime for once from your victim's standpoint. It may help you, if you _are_ human, to keep on 'playing the game'; and that will help you, if you can keep out of the clutches of the underworld, to keep out of the electric chair at Sing Sing. You quite understand, Bundy? At ten o'clock! And I should not even mind if you are found here in this room-in the dark-when Mr. Dayler and myself enter the house-at ten o'clock. And now I think you had better hurry, Bundy."

There was a twisted smile on Billy Kane's lips. He was the Rat, and the Rat would be here, or anywhere else at ten o'clock-if she said so. There was no comment to make. The Rat had no choice.

"All right!" he said gruffly, and moved past her to the door, and out to the hall; and a moment later, reaching the street, he swung into a hurried stride, heading back for the Rat's den.

XVIII-MIRRORED YEARS

It was quite dark here in Dayler's library, yet he had sat so long in this chair that his eyes seemed to have accommodated themselves to the darkness, and it seemed as though he could distinguish every object in the room. Surely, interminably as the minutes dragged themselves out, the quarter-hour that had stood between ten o'clock and the time he had sent the Cadger and Gannet away was up now! His flashlight winked through the blackness, played on the dial of his watch, and the blackness fell again. It still lacked five minutes of the hour.

Strange how his mind worked! There was no speculation as to precisely why she had demanded his presence here, there was only intolerant, angry impatience because she had done so. If it had not been for her, he could have been making vital use of every one of these minutes! There was nothing else to have hindered him! It had been almost childishly easy to pull the wool over Gannet's and the Cadger's eyes. He had let the Cadger and Gannet take all the initiative-apparently. The two men had forced the bas.e.m.e.nt door, and then, going upstairs, had opened the front door for him, which he, strolling down the street a few minutes later, had entered as casually as he had already done before on two occasions that night. After that, the three of them, cl.u.s.tered around the mantel, the Cadger manipulating the dial of the safe while Gannet held the flashlight, had made the discovery in _common_ that the safe had been already looted. He had joined in the dismay, chagrin and fury of his companions; he had joined in the frantic search of desks and drawers, which he had inaugurated, and which he had permitted to endure for a full half hour. At the expiration of that time he had coded a terse cipher report, and had handed it to the Cadger and Gannet for delivery.

They were to leave the house, himself last, a few minutes apart in order to avoid arousing any attention; and the Cadger and Gannet, obediently and unsuspiciously, had gone. And he had remained!

It had been very simple. And there remained no trace of the search that had been made. His eyes now, so strangely accustomed to the darkness, rea.s.sured him on that score. He had warned the men not to leave any traces behind them!

He stirred uneasily in his chair. All this had been essential, necessary, vital, in order to preserve his role of the Rat from suspicion, and himself from subsequent and quick disaster at the hands of the underworld; but the minutes that were slipping away from him now, as he sat here impotent, were priceless. Red Vallon and the Pippin at any moment might run the Man with the Crutch to earth, and his hands were tied. He had no concern with the effect that the loss of the envelope might have had on this Dayler; he was utterly indifferent to either the contents of that envelope, or Dayler's connection with it. It seemed to plumb the very depths of irony that she appeared to labor under the impression she might somehow, in this way, arouse his better nature and touch some softer human chord within him! He was concerned more with the connection between that envelope and the Man with the Crutch; and very much more with the contents of that handbag the Man with the Crutch had carried away from Peters' flat the night before; and still more again with the Man with the Crutch himself! The man had tricked him here tonight, slipped through his fingers this time, but--

The front door was being opened. Billy Kane stood up, shrugging his shoulders. He was in a truculent mood now, impatient to be gone, prompted even now to go, restrained only by the cooler counsel of common sense. She had the whip-hand over him. A word from her, and he would be in exactly the same case as if he had failed in the play he had just made with the Cadger and Gannet. Voices reached him; hers, quiet and controlled; a man's, gruff, irritated, sharply antagonistic.

And then the door from the hall opened, and the lights in the library went on. Billy Kane's eyes, pa.s.sing swiftly over the trim little figure in black across the room, met and held those of a man who, startled now, stepped hastily back, only to discover that his companion had quietly and swiftly closed the door behind them.

The man's lips were suddenly compressed and hard, though the color had ebbed a little from his face.

"Please sit down over there at the table, Mr. Dayler," she requested softly.

"No!" exclaimed the man angrily. "I'll do nothing of the kind! What's the meaning of this? You inveigled me back here by hinting at some kind of story, and you run me, in my own house, into the presence of a thug!"

She shook her head.

"It is true that I asked this-gentleman"-she hesitated over the choice of the word, while her eyes in a sort of mocking humor inventoried Billy Kane's none too reputable appearance and attire-"to come here; but it is equally true that I have 'some kind of a story' that I think will interest you. Bundy, you might try and _persuade_ Mr. Dayler to sit down!"

A grim smile came to Billy Kane's lips. He was a p.a.w.n too, like this Dayler; a p.a.w.n to be moved about at will by this outrageously courageous, imperturbable, and, yes, in spite of his own irritation, adorable little personage. He turned his attention now to Dayler. The other could have been no more than forty-five, yet his hair was not merely prematurely gray, it was white, as a very old man's is white; his face, clean shaven, was kindly, though drawn now in tense lines about the lips and forehead.

"Sit down!" Billy Kane ordered curtly. He was fingering his automatic, playing up to the cue she had given him.

Dayler hesitated; and then abruptly stepped forward and flung himself into a chair at the table, his back to the mantel.

"Well?" he challenged. "You got me out of my club on the pretext of having something to say about a man named Keats whom I once knew; but from the look of things it appears to be much more likely that, with my own house affording you protection, I am to be coolly robbed of my watch, money, and such other valuables as you may be able to lay your hands on!"

The slim little figure had slipped gracefully into a chair, facing Dayler on the opposite side of the table. She smiled curiously.

"But, at least, I will keep my promise first, and tell you about this Keats," she said. "Buck Keats, wasn't it, Mr. Dayler? And, as your servants may be back in another half hour or so, we won't waste any time in getting to the story. It goes back about twenty years. At that time you were in the Yukon, and pretty well away from civilization, and you had been prospecting all summer with your partner, a man quite a little older than you were, a man named Laynton, Joe Laynton-Square Joe, they called him in that country, and you ought to know why. He was a big man-in his body and in his soul-a G.o.d's n.o.bleman, wasn't he, Mr.

Dayler?"

Dayler was leaning forward, staring at her in a strange, puzzled way.

"How do you know all this?" he demanded sharply.

She shook her head again.

"I may not be quite accurate in the little details," she went on. "You will overlook that. You and Laynton delayed your return to Dawson too long that fall. You were caught in bad weather. Your provisions ran low.

Laynton met with a nasty accident with an axe. In reaching up above his head to cut some branches for fuel, the axe in some way glanced off and inflicted a very serious and a very ugly wound in his shoulder and chest. Things went from bad to worse. For days Laynton could do nothing but lie in his blood-soaked bunk. Provisions ran still lower. The winter was settling down hard. You had already delayed too long, and now Laynton couldn't go. And yet you woke up one morning to find his bunk empty."

She paused. Billy Kane's eyes, as he stood beside the table, pa.s.sed from one to the other. Her small gloved hand, resting on the arm of her chair, had closed tightly; and into Dayler's face, grown haggard now, had come the look of a dumb beast in hurt.

"On a sheet of paper on the table"-her voice was lower now-"Laynton had left a message for you, the kind a brave man would leave, explaining it all, and bidding you take the one chance you had and go without him. And piled on the table beside the sheet of paper was his money, quite a few hundred dollars. You went to the door of the shack, and you followed the tracks in the snow. And you found him, and you found his revolver beside him. You were already weak and half delirious yourself for lack of food, and I think this crazed you and unhinged your mind. You buried him in the snow, and picked up the revolver and put it in your pocket. You took the paper and the money and what food there was, and you ran, like the madman you then were, away from the shack. I do not know how long you wandered, nor how you existed, nor the number of miles you put between yourself and the man who had given his life for you; but eventually you were found by a trapper, and the trapper's name was Keats, Buck Keats, a man with a very unsavory record. You spent some time with Keats. You recovered your physical health, but your mind remained affected. What had taken place was temporarily a blank to you. Keats robbed you of Laynton's money and most of your own, and he stole that paper which later on was to mean so much to you. He preferred, if anything were ever known, that you, and not he, should be credited with having stolen Laynton's money, and he further helped out that suggestion by getting you, after some months, out of the country, by having you, in a word, disappear. I imagine you were like a child in his hands. I am sure you do not even know how you got there, but the spring found you, quite normal in all respects save a broken memory, working at anything you could get to do in Mexico, and living there under the name of Dayler.

Your proper name is Forbes, John Forbes, isn't it?"

Dayler's head was forward on the table, and buried in his hands. And Billy Kane, meeting her glance, read through a sudden mist in the brown eyes, a bitter condemnation of himself that he did not quite fully understand. He was not the Rat, was he? He was only playing the Rat in a fight for his life, and to win back a name of his own! How should he understand!

"I am taking too long," she said hurriedly. "Your awakening came then.

You read in a paper of the discovery of a brutal and revolting crime in the Yukon-the murder of Joe Laynton. The snow had melted, and a trooper of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police had found the body. If ever there was a _prima facie_ case of murder it was there: The axe wound, presupposing a quarrel, the blood-soaked bunk, the final wound from a revolver shot, the absence of any weapon left in the possession of the dead man, the fact that he had apparently been stripped of his money, and, most d.a.m.ning of all, that _you_ had disappeared. It all came back to you in a flash then; and, like the last straw, adding to this array of evidence already against you, you realized that you were now living under an _a.s.sumed_ name. The letter, written and signed by Laynton, that would have saved you, was gone. You naturally did not know that it had been stolen from you; you believed that you had lost it. It would take a very brave man, and a man that was very sure of himself indeed, to judge you for what you did then. Without that paper, you, an innocent man, were already as good as hanged if you gave yourself up. You continued to live on as Dayler. Twenty years went by. You prospered. You lived in all quarters of the globe. No breath of suspicion ever a.s.sociated John Dayler with John Forbes. But you knew, because you knew the record of the Royal Northwest Mounted, that the Men Who Never Sleep had not forgotten the case, nor given over the search-and that they never would.

But at last, with the long lapse of years, you felt yourself secure; and finally, a few years ago, you came here and settled in New York."

Dayler's head came up. He pa.s.sed his hand across his eyes.

"How do you know all these things?" he asked again.

"Does it matter?" she answered. "They are true, aren't they?"

"Yes, they are true." His voice was scarcely audible.

"It was Keats who found you, not the Royal Northwest Mounted," she continued. "Keats had long ago left the Yukon, and had settled in Chicago-a drunkard. He was an old man now, and down and out, living from hand to mouth. I do not know how he found you; I only know that after all these years he decided to make rest.i.tution, though counting no doubt on you giving him some money in return for the letter. However, be that as it may, two days ago a man brought you a sealed envelope, which he said a man named Keats, who had just died in Chicago, had confessed, as he was dying, to have stolen from you, and that Keats, as a last request, had asked that it be given back to you. You opened the envelope, and found that it contained Laynton's letter. With this in your possession at last you were absolutely secure, even in the very improbable event of anything ever being done by the police. Why then, after twenty years, should you voluntarily open the case and disrupt the a.s.sociations you had formed, and your life as you had molded it in all that time? In any event, you would consider long and carefully before taking so vital and momentous a step. I do not know what your final decision was, or even if you have come to one yet; but, pending such a decision, you-" She motioned suddenly across the table. "But first, will you please open the table drawer in front of you, Mr. Dayler."

He obeyed her, a sort of slow wonder in his movements. The drawer, open, disclosed, among other supplies of stationery, a pile of long, manila envelopes.