The False Faces Part 43

So that one had, after all, escaped the net of his own treachery!

The 'bus guard was shaking Lanyard's arm with an ungentle hand.

"Here, now, you got no business boardin' a Special."

From his pocket Lanyard whipped the first bank-note his fingers encountered.

"Divide that with the chauffeur," he said crisply--"tell him to drive like the devil. It's life or death with me!"

The protruding eyeb.a.l.l.s of the guard bore witness to the magnitude of the bribe.

"You're on!" he breathed hoa.r.s.ely, and ran forward through the body of the conveyance to advise the driver.

Swarming up the curved stairway to the roof, Lanyard dropped into the rear seat, looking back.

The group round the doorway was recovering from its stupefaction. Three struck off from it toward the line of waiting cars. Of these the foremost was Ekstrom.

Simultaneously the 'bus, lumbering drunkenly, lurched into Columbus Circle, and the roadster left the curb carrying in addition to the driver two pa.s.sengers--Ekstrom on the running-board.

Tardily Lanyard repented of that impulse which had moved him to bestow his one weapon upon Cecelia Brooke.

The night air had a biting edge. A chill rain had begun to drizzle down in minute globules of mist, which both lent each street light its individual nimbus of gold and dulled deceitfully the burnished asphaltum, rendering its surface greasy and treacherous. More than once Lanyard feared lest the 'bus skid and overturn; and before the old red brick building between Broadway and Eighth Avenue shut out the western sector of the Circle, he saw the roadster, driven insanely, shoot crabwise toward the curb, than answer desperate work at the wheel and whirl madly, executing a volte-face so violent that Ekstrom's hold was broken and he was hurled a dozen feet away. And Lanyard's chances were measurably advanced by the delay required in order to pick up the sprawling one, start the engine anew, and turn more cautiously to resume the pursuit.

Striking diagonally across Broadway the 'bus swung into Fifty-seventh Street at the moment when the roadster turned the corner of Columbus Circle.

The head of the guard lifted above the edge of the roof. Clinging to the supports of the stairway, he addressed Lanyard in accents of blended suspicion and respect.

"Lis'n, boss: is this all right, on the level, now?"

"Absolutely, unless that racing-car catches up with us, in which case you'll have a dead man--myself--on your hands."

"Well ... we don't wanna lose our jobs, that's all."

"You won't unless I lose my life."

"Anything you'd like me to do?"

"Go down, wait on the platform, if anybody attempts to get aboard kick him in the act."

"Sure I will!"

The guard disappeared.

Wallowing like a barge in a strong seaway, the omnibus crossed Seventh Avenue and sped downhill toward Sixth with dangerous momentum. Shortly, however, this began to be modified by the brakes, a precaution against mishap which even the fugitive must approve. Ahead loomed the gaunt structure of the Sixth Avenue "L," bridging the roadway at so low an elevation as to afford the omnibus little more than clear headroom. Once beneath it a single bounce up from the surface-car tracks must mean a wreck.

But the pursuit was less than half a block astern and gaining swiftly, even as the speed of the omnibus was growing less and desperately less.

At what seemed little better than a snail's pace it began to pa.s.s beneath the span of the Elevated.

Like a racing thoroughbred the roadster swept up alongside, motor chanting triumphantly, running-board level with the platform step.

Ekstrom, poised to leap aboard, hesitated; a pistol in his hand exploded; a shattered window fell crashing.

There was a yell from the guard, not of pain but of fright. Apparently he executed a von Hindenburg retreat. Without more opposition Ekstrom gained the platform.

In the same breath Lanyard stood up. The lowermost girder of the "L" was immediately overhead. He grasped it, doubled his legs beneath him, swung clear. The omnibus shot from under him, the roadster convoying.

Drawing himself up, he seized a round iron upright of guard-rail and heaved his body in over the edge of the platform round the switching-tower, which was at this hour dark and untenanted.

In the street below a police whistle shrieked, and a fusillade of pistol shots woke scandalised echoes.

Bending almost double Lanyard moved rapidly northward on the footway beside the western tracks, and so gained the old station on the west side of Fifty-eighth Street, for years dedicated to the uses of desuetude. Through this he crept, then down the stairs, encountering at the lower landing an iron gate which obliged him to climb over and jump.

Not a soul paid the least attention to this matter of a gentleman in evening dress without hat or top coat dropping from the stairway of a disused elevated station at two o'clock in the morning.

In New York anything can happen, and most things do, without stirring up meddlesome impulses in innocent bystanders.

XIX

FORCE MAJEURE

This visit to his rooms was the briefest of the several Lanyard made that night, considerations of mortal urgency dictating its drastic abbreviation.

If the events of the last few hours had meant anything whatever they had demonstrated two truths which shone like beacon lights: that Manhattan Island was overpopulated as long as both he and Ekstrom remained on it; that Ekstrom had been goaded to the verge of aberration by the discovery that Lanyard had come safely through the _a.s.syrian_ debacle to take up anew his self-appointed office of Nemesis to the Prussian spy system in general and to the genius of its American bureau in particular.

Henceforth that one would know no more rest while Lanyard lived.

Thus that little street-level apartment forfeited whatever attractions it originally had possessed in the adventurer's estimation. Not only was the address known to Ekstrom's a.s.sociates, and so open to him, but its peculiar characteristics, its facilities for access from the street direct, rendered it a highly practicable death-trap for a hunted man.

Lanyard was well persuaded he need only wait there long enough to receive a deputation from Seventy-ninth Street. And with any a.s.surance that Ekstrom would come alone, he might have been content to wait. Not only had he through too intimate acquaintance with his methods every a.s.surance that Ekstrom would never brave alone what he could induce another to risk with him, but Lanyard was never one willing to play the pa.s.sive part.

A ba.n.a.l axiom of all warfare applied: The advantage is with him who fights upon the offensive.

Since midnight the offensive had shifted from Lanyard's grasp to the enemy's. He was determined to recapture it; and that was something never to be accomplished by sitting still and waiting for events to unfold, but only by carrying the war into the enemy's camp.

He delayed, then, only long enough to change his clothing and to conceal about him certain properties which it seemed unwise to expose to chance discovery on the part of Ekstrom or in the ever-possible event of police intervention.

Within five minutes from the time of his return he was closing behind him the private door.

Wearing a quiet lounge suit but no top coat, with a hat not so soft as to lack character but soft enough to stick upon one's head in time of action, and carrying a stick neither brutishly stout nor ineffectively slender, he strolled up to Seventh Avenue, turned north, entered Central Park--and strolled no more.

Kindly shadows enfolded him, engulfed him altogether. One minute after he had pa.s.sed through the gateway he would have defied unaided apprehension by the most zealous officer of the peace. He went swiftly and secretly, avoiding all lighted ways.

Not till then did conscience stir and remind him of his slighted promise to call up Cecelia Brooke.