Persons Unknown Part 37

"Oh, guess again!" said Denny. "Not while she lived, she didn't!"

"And she took with her," Ten Euyck cried, "forty thousand dollars' worth of my diamonds! Perhaps she was in hopes you'd get away and join her!"

"Well," said Denny, turning his eyes toward Herrick, without raising his head, "you!--you're not a criminal!--are you going to stand for that?"

"Doesn't his standing for it speak for itself!" said Ten Euyck. "If you want to defend a woman, why don't you come out like a man and confess that you did it yourself."

They all looked at him in astonishment and, flushing at himself, he subsided.

"Ah, thanks, Ten Euyck, that's what I've been suspecting! You think you can trap me into one of your d.a.m.ned confessions with these tricks! Get rid of that idea. I'll not confess. It's up to you to prove it; prove it! Why should I help you!" He turned again to Herrick, as if in justification. "Yes, I am afraid of jail! I'm a coward about prison, I confess that! and to give myself up to a lifetime of it--no!--Herrick, there's no chance of their being serious in this talk about Christina."

Kane took him by the unwounded shoulder and forced him from his leaning posture, till his face came full into the light. "Upon my word of honor, Denny," he said, "Christina Hope has disappeared."

The shock struck Denny like a sort of paralysis. He did not stir, but he seemed to stiffen. His eyes dilated with a horrified amazement. "What do you mean?" he said.

Kane handed him that evening's paper, folded to the headlines that dealt with the missing girl. He read them with greed, but it was plain that he found their information stupefying. "Chris, now! First, Nancy!" he said, "and then, Christina! What is this thing? What can it be? You," to Kane, "you that are so clever, have you any explanation at all? Have you the least clue? Have you?" he insisted, and from the dark meaning of their faces he seemed to kindle, and half rose, leaning on the table.

"My G.o.d, then," he cried, "what is it? What is it?"

"Well, then," said Kane, "as you yourself suggest, she is very probably in the same place with Nancy Cornish." Denny continued to lean on the table, looking at him with ravenous eyes. "You know that Joe Patrick was knocked down by an automobile on his way to the inquest, that the same so-called accident happened two or three days later to Herrick, here; you know that subsequently four armed men attacked him in the park; to-day you had an experience of your own. Well, all these things hang together and were committed by a band of blackmailers. Your own shoulder gives you a taste of their quality. You can judge for yourself what they'll stop at. Brace yourself. We know, now, for a certainty that Nancy Cornish is in their hands."

Denny continued to lean there, without stirring. "It's a trick! It's one of your little tricks! Is it?" he said to Herrick with a sudden shrillness, "Is it?"

"One of them brought us a message from her. It said, 'Help me, dear Chris!'"

"No, no, no!" said Denny, as if to himself. "It's a lie. It's all a lie.

I won't be frightened. I know it's a lie."

"Is that her writing?"

He cried out, a dreadful, formless sound, and covered his face with his hands. Kane's glance said to the others, "Let him alone! It's working!"

He asked them then, quite gravely and clearly, "When--do you expect--to catch--this--gang?"

"I don't know that we can catch them at all. We don't know how to get at them. We've no idea where they are."

His hands dropped from his face; it throbbed now and blazed; all the nerves had come to life in a quivering network. "Oh, for G.o.d's sake," he said, "don't tell me that!--Go on, then, go on! Tell me!" He looked beseechingly and then in a fury of impatience from face to face. "Don't stand gaping! You must know something! Look here, you don't understand!

You don't know all I've been through all these weeks--wondering!--If she was in that lake where we used to row! If she'd only gone away, hating me! My mind's in pieces trying to think--think--following every sign!

Hundreds of times I've seen her dead! And now you tell me she's alive!

and calling--calling for help! Do you? Do you?"

"Yes," said Kane.

He swayed forward so suddenly that he had to catch at the table. "It's horrible! It's a nightmare!" With a strange monotonous inflection his voice rose higher and higher on the one strained note. "It's the thing I've dreamed of night and day, week out and in! That she was frightened and in danger! With brutes! With the faces of beasts round her! Oh, G.o.d--!"

"Don't!" Herrick cried.

"Yes, but look here!" With an eagerness sudden as a child's, he said to Herrick, "But it's hope! Hope, isn't it? She's alive! And she didn't just leave me!--I've got to get out of here! Yesterday--why, yesterday--this morning--but now! 'Help me!' she says! I've got to get out! I--" He stopped. The dusky choking red that had surged up horribly over his face and forehead receded sharply, and left only his eyes burning black in the white incredulous horror of his face. He cried, "There's no way out!"

"There may be," said the District-Attorney, "if you will look very carefully at this lock of hair."

Denny took the soft red curl in a hand that he vainly strove to steady; they could read recognition, but no further enlightenment in his tormented face.

"Sit down!" Kane said. "Untie the string. Shake the hair loose here on the table under the lamp. Now, does anything strike you? No?"

Once more Herrick had that singular impression of Denny's going, for an instant's flash, perfectly blind. Then he said, quite quietly, "Go! The station you want is Waybrook. Drive five miles inland, on the road to Benning's Point; about three miles south of the Hoover estate. The left-hand side of the road; an old house newly fixed up and painted yellow. Pascoe's the name. And, for G.o.d's sake, go quickly."

The District-Attorney sat back and wiped his forehead. It had been a hard day's work. "Don't you, Herrick, want to take a look at the curiosity without which I might as well have asked a clam for a Fourth of July oration?"

The hair was spread out and thinned under the lamp. And now Herrick could see distinctly that it was of two shades. The outer curl was the dark red of Nancy Cornish; hidden within it was a smaller lock of a singularly fine light shade, like the red of golden fire. This it was which had wrung the address from Denny and stricken down Christina in a faint.

"Nancy Cornish hid it there in the message she was allowed to send,"

guessed Herrick. "She was certain Miss Hope would know the head it came from."

"Then I needn't point out to a gentleman of your discernment that it was the head which astonished Joe Patrick on the night of Ingham's murder.

Directly afterward, I think Miss Hope stored that head, inconspicuously, with her friends in the Arm of Justice."

Denny, rabid with impatience, seemed eating them alive with his savage eyes. "Start!" he bit out. "Go, can't you? Go! What are you waiting for?"

Kane looked up at him with a smile of triumphant ice. "We're waiting for your account of midnight in these rooms between the fourth and fifth of August. And no one stirs to Nancy Cornish till we get it."

Denny's jaw dropped and he hung against the edge of the table as if he were struck too sick to stand.

Ten Euyck, too, cried out and Kane silenced him. "Why not--since he says he's innocent?"

"You dog!" Denny groaned. "You won't save her?"

"_You_ won't save her--you know how!"

"Lose time and you lose everything!"

"What do you know?"

"Know! Know! Of course I know! But do you think you can make me tell?

Try that game! Try it! Try! You know d.a.m.ned well you can't! So what'll you give for what I know?"

"You mean--?"

"Come back to me when you've found Nancy Cornish and you shall have your murderer fast enough! Every detail, every fact, every clue! Till then I don't trust you! Bring her here, bring her!" He leaned forward, beside himself; shaken and exhausted, burning with fever, weak with loss of blood, he reached toward Kane and beat the table with his wounded hands.

"That's my bargain! That's my price! I'm not going to give up for nothing! You don't get my life unless you give me hers--"

"_What?_"

The great gasp broke into a buzz. Denny came slowly to himself and read what he had uttered in their looks. His face went dead, a cold sweat stood out upon it. "O!" he breathed. And once more he covered his face with his hands.

It didn't take many questions to get his story from him after that.

"Yes, I killed him. Yes, I'm confessing. I've got to. All right,--take it down. I killed James Ingham. I went to his apartment after my dress-rehearsal on the night of the fourth of August. I had been told that he had injured Nancy Cornish. I shot him dead. I've regretted it every moment of my life since then. That's all. What are you waiting for now?"