Lonesome Town Part 33

CHAPTER XXIV-LOST YET WON

With the stealth of a Blackfoot brave, Peter Pape approached the powder cart in temporary use as a rostrum. Jane he had left where her safety no longer troubled him. His entire attention reached forward. Having gained the cover of a venerable cottonwood whose drooping catkins fringed the shafts of the lowering sun he stopped and deliberately listened, excused by the necessity of discovering just what was underway.

The slow, accented perusal of the apple-cheeked little big man of law was holding the attention of his a.s.sortment of thugs to a degree favorable for a surprise a.s.sault.

"Eighteen and twelve will show The spot. Begin below.

Above the crock A block will rock, As rocks wrong's overthrow."

To the last word the verse carried to Pape's ears, metered to match the two lines recited to him by Jane from her memory of the mysterious, stolen cryptogram. There seemed no reason to doubt that Allen was reading the rhymed instructions of the late Lauderdale eccentric.

Swinton Welch was first to offer thin-voiced complaint against the poem's ambiguity.

"That third verse strikes me as the hardest yet, judge. What do you reckon them figures mean? I don't see as there's any way to decide whether they stand for rods or yards or feet. Eighteen from what? Twelve to which? Or do you suppose, now, it means that the spot is eighteen-by-twelve?"

With a wave of one chubby hand the lawyer dismissed these demands. "When quite a young man I knew the writer of this rhyme. It is characteristic that he should have put everything as vaguely as possible. He'd have made a wonderful detective, he was such a genius at involving instead of solving things. I'm relying quite a bit on my own gumption in the selection of this place. But I feel sure that I am right at last. We're on a height, surrounded by the requisite number of poplars, aren't we?

The noises we hear from the city, spread about on every hand, might be called by poetic license any kind of a roar. And the whole place is shelved with rock. Since we can't seem to solve those figures, let's blow off the entire top if necessary and trust to the integrity of the 'crock.' You arranged for the acetylene lights, Duffy?"

"They'll be here before dusk."

Pape could not see the speaker from his cover point, but recognized the voice of him of the vegetable ears recently bested in combat.

"Have you thought about the crowd the flare's going to attract, Mr.

Allen?" the pugilist wanted to know.

"I've arranged for the police to stand guard over us."

The complacency with which the lawyer made this a.s.sertion had a nerving effect upon Pape. His frame straightened with a jerk. His muscles tightened. His thoughts sped up. If the police were enlisted with the enemy through political "pull" of the ex-judge, it behooved him to decide at once upon the exact nature of such changes as he, personally, might be able to effect in the afternoon's program. Perhaps too close upon decision, he acted.

"I have permits from the commissioner to cover every emergency," the lawyer continued. "I can promise you that there'll be no interference this time, even--"

"_Except_ from me!"

The correction issued from behind the cottonwood and was followed immediately by the appearance of Peter Pape.

Samuel Allen's a.s.surance gurgled in his throat and the apple-red faded from his cheeks as he slid from his seat on the cart-tail to face the unfriendly, blue-black eye of a Colt.

"The-the impossible person!" he stammered.

"The _possible_ person, don't you mean, judge? It's time you got the general little scheme of me, even though I do look mussed up this crowded afternoon."

Pape's jocularity was a surface effect. The serious cooperation of his every thought and muscle would be needed if he won against such odds.

With his gun he waved back two of the crew who, evidently more accustomed to the glance of the unfriendly eye than was the jurist, were edging nearer. Still grinning with pseudo-pleasantry, he tried to guard against attack from behind by backing toward the second of the ark-bedded carts.

"This morning, Allen, you got me out of limbo through your drag with the law," he continued. "Didn't hope for a so-soon opportunity to refund that debt. But don't think I ain't ready with the interest."

"The only way to keep you out of new trouble is to leave you in the old," snorted the small big man. "If this gun-play is for my amus.e.m.e.nt, I'll say that your methods are as perverted as your sense of humor.

You're about as practical as a Bolshevist. Pray desist. Also-pardon my frankness-get out while you can-out of trouble that doesn't concern you in the slightest."

"Pardon _my_ frankness-" Pape, too, could feign politeness-"but this trouble does concern me in the greatest. I hate being in your debt. I feel I should take this chance to pay and save you!"

"Save me-from what?"

Although the Colt still held his gaze, the jurist put the question with manifest relief. Argument was his stock in profession-perhaps he hoped from that.

Pape couldn't restrain an out-loud chuckle, so near did he seem to the consummation of his promises to Jane. "Just you hand over Granddad Lauderdale's crypt and those _carte_-blank permits and I'll save you from being your own lawyer defending a charge of before-and-after burglary. Urge 'em upon me, judge, then call off your crew and vamoose p.r.o.nto-which is roof-of-America for get out quick yourself."

Allen sent a glance of appeal among his hirelings, but elicited no response. To them there was, in truth, a stronger appeal in the careless way the Westerner handled his "hardware." They looked to be gunmen themselves, but of the metropolitan sort that shoot singly from behind or in concert before. Certain was it that some one would get punctured did the revolver speak and each was concerned lest he be the ill-fated human "tire."

Allen seemed left to his own devices. Crumpling the cryptic sheet in one hand, he started slowly forward. Pape lifted his foot for a stride along the cart-side. But some time elapsed before the sole of his boot again met mother earth. With the suddenness of most successful attacks on a rear guarded over-confidently, the one leg which, for the moment, supported his weight was jerked from under with a violence that pitched him face forward.

As he fell his revolver exclaimed, but only an indignant monosyllable. A veritable avalanche of humanity descended upon him, hard in effect as the rocky ground in their attack with gun b.u.t.ts and fists. For a second time he had miscalculated odds; seemed at last to have met defeat. In the act, as it were, of seizing the Sturgis' loot, he was put out by a blow from a leather black-jack brought down upon his defenseless head by an expert hand.

Some minutes must have pa.s.sed before his brain again functioned. In the interim he had been "hogtied," despite the fact that, literally, the knots were not tied according to the Hoyle of the range. The first thing he noticed on opening his eyes was that Judge Allen had been stripped of his coat and the left sleeves of his outer and under shirts cut away to give place to a bandage. Evidently his instinctive pull on the trigger had sent a bullet into his preferred target, although lack of aim had made it a wing shot.

That the moment was one in which he would best "play Injun" was Pape's first cautionary thought. Not even to ease his painfully cramped limbs did he attempt to move a muscle. After his first roving look, his eyes fixed, with an acquisitive gleam at variance with his helplessness, upon something protruding from the inside pocket of a coat that lay upon the ground near his hurting head.

The something, or one very like it, he had seen before-a folded doc.u.ment engraved in brown ink. The coat also he recognized as that torn off the wounded lawyer.

He next discovered that his ears, as well as eyes, could function.

Without moving, he allowed them to be filled with sound notes upon the disaster which had overtaken him.

The ex-judge: "-and I congratulate you, Duffy, on as neat a turn-table as I've ever seen."

Even more than to the unctuousness of the voice did Pape object to the jurist's punctuation by boot upon that section of his own anatomy within easiest reach. His indignation, however, was diverted by the a.s.surance that it was his enemy of the cauliflower ear who had brought about his fall.

"Easier than throwing a seven with your own bones, your honor," Duffy answered. "Wild-and-woolly here was too tickled with himself to notice me under the cart tightening of a bolt. All I had to do was lunge out and grab an ankle."

"Hadn't you better go and let some doctor look at that arm, judge?" The concerned voice was Swinton Welch's. "I'll direct operations until--"

"You think I'm going right on taking chances on your weakness, Welch?"

Allen's counter-demand snapped with disapproval. "I'll see this thing through, no matter how it hurts. Send for a surgeon if you know one who don't insist on reporting gun-shot patients. Come, let's get this animated interruption stowed away before the police arrive. Questions never asked are easiest answered."

"Leave us throw him in with the powder," suggested a scar-faced bruiser new in the cast, so far as Pape recalled.

And so they might have disposed of him had not Duffy advanced a better proposition. Nearby was a sort of cave where he had "hidden out" on a former emergency, he declared. It was dark and dribbly as a tomb-an ideal safe-deposit for excess baggage.

"To the tomb with the scorpion, then!"

Beneath his pudginess, the little lawyer seemed hard as the rocks he was so anxious to blast. With a gesture, he ordered one of the crew to help him on with his coat.

Pape relaxed the more as three of them laid hold and carried him across the flat. Duffy acted as guide and the lawyer, who a.s.suredly was taking no chances, went along to satisfy himself as to the security of the hide-away. Several yards inside the narrow mouth of Duffy's "sort of"

cave they dropped him upon the rock floor; left him without further concern over when, if at all, he should return to consciousness.

For reasons which had filled him with such elation as nearly to expose his 'possum part, Pape approved their selection of the cave. Now the hope of victory out of defeat came to him with an admission of Allen from the entrance:

"I do feel some weakened by this wound. Guess I'd better rest here a little while. You fellows go back and start turning rocks. Try the tilty ones first and use powder, when necessary, just as if I owned the park.