The Gray Phantom's Return

by Herman Landon

  CHAPTER XV--A WARNING FROM THE DUKE

  The Phantom walked briskly, with an easy, carefree swagger, breathingfreely for the first time since the beginning of the strange events thathad attended his efforts to solve the mystery of the Gage murder. In therole of an irresponsible journalist with a weakness for strong liquor hecould feel reasonably secure, for the police had been so cruelly naggedand ridiculed that they would think twice before repeating their sadblunder.

  "Stop!" commanded a voice as he swung into Houston Street. The Phantomhalted and smiled impudently into the face of a plain-clothes man whoemerged from a dark doorway to look him over.

  "Oh, Granger," muttered the officer disgustedly after a glance at hisshowy attire and a sniff of the whisky with which the Phantom, makinguse of the reporter's bottle, had prudently scented himself. "Sober fora change, I see. Where do you get the stuff, anyhow?"

  "That would be telling. Any news of the Phantom?"

  "Naw! We thought we had him a while ago, over at a Third Avenue Lstation, but he blew away. I s'pose you're out to nab him and get ascoop for that yellow rag of yours."

  "Maybe," said the Phantom cheerfully. "It would be quite an event in myyoung life. I'll be on my way, if you're sure you don't want to take meto headquarters and get another sample of my finger prints."

  "Aw--beat it!" muttered the detective, touched in a sore spot. ThePhantom chuckled and moved on. His new role promised to be amusing aswell as profitable, and the ease with which he had passed the first testgave him added confidence. Twice within the next fifteen minutes he wasstopped and questioned, only to be dismissed with a disgusted grunt or afacetious remark.

  As he crossed the Bowery a stocky figure in patrolman's uniform appearedaround the corner and moved down the street a few paces ahead of him.After studying his gait and bearing for a few moments, the Phantom knewit was Officer Pinto. He slackened his pace and followed, steppingsoftly so as not to attract the policeman's attention.

  Pinto's steps faltered as he approached the middle of the block, and hewalked with a shuffling and uncertain air. Finally he stopped, and thePhantom thought he was gazing at a window directly in front of him. Hetiptoed a little closer, and now he saw that the building on which theofficer's attention was fixed so intently was none other than the murkyand silent structure that had been occupied by Gage and his housekeeper.

  The policeman drew a little closer to the window, then stood rigid andmotionless, as if the building were exerting a peculiar fascination uponhim. At that moment the Phantom would have given a great deal to knowwhat was going on in the mind of the man he was watching. He could makea guess, but guesses were unsatisfactory. At length the officer shruggedhis shoulders, as if to shake off something that oppressed him, thentried the lock in matter-of-fact fashion and moved on down the street.

  The Phantom hastened after him. He was no longer trying to avoiddetection, and his footfalls sounded clear and sharp in the quietstreet. The policeman stopped, looked back, and peered sharply at theoncomer.

  "Granger--huh!" he snorted after giving the Phantom a derisiveonce-over. "Say, does your ma know you're out as late as this? Gettingall them glad rags mussed up in the rain, too! What's the idea?"

  "The Phantom has got my goat," confessed the pseudo reporter. "It isn'tnatural for a man to pop in and out the way he does without gettingcaught."

  "Well, what are you going to do about it?" grumbled the patrolman,resuming his walk.

  The Phantom fell into step beside him, now and then casting a sidelongglance at his sour and uncommunicative face. All of a sudden he wonderedwhether the policeman was aware that a second murder had been committedin the Gage house, and again it struck him as bafflingly strange that nomention had been made of the finding of the housekeeper's body. What hadbecome of it, and how much, if anything, did Pinto know?

  "Something seems to be eating you," he observed casually, trying toadopt a phraseology suited to his role. "You were staring at that windowas if you expected old Gage's ghost to take a stroll. What were youthinking of, Pinto?"

  The policeman gave a quick, searching look. "Say, you've been watchingme, ain't you? What's the big idea? And how do you know my name?"

  The Phantom laughed engagingly. "How touchy we are to-night! I wasn'twatching you, exactly. Just strolling along, hoping to bump into thePhantom and cover myself with glory. Then I saw you, and I couldn'timagine what you were seeing in that window. As for knowing your name, Ihappen to be aware that the officer on this beat is one Joshua Pinto andthat he was called by the housekeeper the night Gage was murdered."

  The patrolman, evidently satisfied with the explanation, mumbledsomething under his breath.

  "But you haven't answered my question," persisted the Phantom, speakingin gently teasing tones. "I am still wondering what you were thinking ofwhile standing in front of the window."

  "Why, I was--just thinking, that's all."

  "How illuminating! I wonder if, by any chance, your profound meditationshad anything to do with the present whereabouts of Mrs. Mary Trippe,Gage's housekeeper."

  The patrolman came to a dead stop. Of a sudden his face turned almostwhite and his eyes grew wider and wider as they stared into thequestioner's face.

  "What--what d'you mean?" he demanded thickly.

  The Phantom laughed easily. "Why, Pinto, you're the scaredest cop I eversaw. Your nerves must be in a bad way. I was only wondering if you'veseen anything of Mrs. Trippe lately."

  "My nerves _are_ a bit jumpy," admitted Pinto. He was moving again, butthere was evidence of weakness in the region of his knees. "They've beenthat way ever since I had a touch of indigestion last month. What was ityou asked me about Mrs. Trippe?"

  "I walked over there yesterday afternoon, meaning to ask her a questionor two in connection with the murder. I couldn't find her, and theneighbors said they hadn't seen her for a day or two. Got any idea whereshe is?"

  "No, I haven't." Pinto was speaking in calmer tones now. "Likely as notshe's visiting friends or relatives somewhere. Wimmen don't like to stayin a place where there's been a murder."

  "Something in that. By the way, Pinto, when were you last inside thehouse?"

  Again, for a mere instant, the patrolman's steps faltered. He threw theman at his side an uneasy glance. "Why, let me see. It was the day I hadthe Phantom locked up in the bedroom and he gave me the slip. Why didyou want to know?"

  "No reason in particular. I was just thinking that--But my mind'swandering. Got a bit tanked early in the evening. Guess I'll turn in.See you later."

  With a yawn, he turned back, fancying there was a note of relief in thepoliceman's farewell. He smiled as he walked along. His conversationwith Pinto had cleared up one point in his mind. The officer knewsomething of Mrs. Trippe's fate. The dread he had evinced at mention ofthe housekeeper's name proved that, and his prevarications and evasionswere further evidence. The plea of indigestion and nervousness, comingfrom one of Pinto's robust physique, was highly amusing.

  Yet, illuminating as his verbal fencing match with the patrolman hadbeen, it had merely confirmed suspicions already firmly rooted in thePhantom's mind. As yet he had not a single iota of concrete evidence,and there were several snarled threads that had to be untangled beforehe could accomplish much. For instance, there was the mysterysurrounding the murder of Mrs. Trippe and the equally perplexing riddleof what had become of the body. Both of them must be solved before hecould go far toward attaining his object.

  He stopped, noticing that his mental processes had guided his stepstoward the Gage house. It was still drizzling, and he was tired andhungry and wet, but the problem on which he was engaged drove allthought of rest and food from his mind. The blackness overhead wasslowly breaking into a leaden gray, and from all directions came soundsof awakening life. He walked up to the door, believing that the answersto the questions that troubled him were to be found inside the house.

  Then, out of the shadows, as it seemed to him, came an undersizedcreature with a slouching gait and
glittering cat's eyes peering outfrom beneath the wide brim of a soft hat. The Phantom felt a slighttouch on his elbow, and for an instant the sharply gleaming eyes scannedhis face, then the queer-looking character shuffled away as swiftly andsilently as he had appeared.

  The Phantom was tempted to follow, but just then he noticed that a pieceof paper was cramped between his fingers. He unfolded it and examined itin the meager light. All he could see at first was something crude andshapeless sketched with pencil, but gradually the blur dissolved into asymbol which he recognized.

  It was a ducal coronet. The Phantom smiled as he looked down at theemblem of his old rival and enemy, the Duke. The paper handed him by thecurious messenger was a reminder that the hand of his antagonist wasreaching out for him, that though the Duke himself was in prison, hishenchmen and agents were active, being at this very moment on thePhantom's trail.

  He put the paper into his pocket, and in the same moment the amusedsmile faded from his lips. For a time he had forgotten that, to allpractical purposes, he was no longer the Gray Phantom, but one ThomasGranger, journalist. His lips tightened as again he gazed at thetracings on the paper. Did it mean that the Duke's emissaries had seenthrough his disguise and alias, or did it mean--his figure stiffened asthe latter question flashed in his mind--that Thomas Granger was amember of the Duke's band?

  In vain he pondered the problem, unable to decide whether the paper hadbeen intended for himself or for Granger. If for himself, it seemed asomewhat idle and meaningless gesture on the Duke's part, for his oldenemy surely could gain nothing by sending cryptic messages to him. Onthe other hand, assuming that the reporter was the intended recipient,what hidden meaning was Granger supposed to read into a ducal coronet?

  He tried to dismiss the problem from his mind until he could have a talkwith Granger, but thoughts of the mysterious message and the strangemessenger pursued him as he once more turned to the door. The entranceto the store was padlocked, but the lock on the side door yieldedreadily to manipulation with one of the tools in his metal case. A quickglance to left and right assured him he was unobserved. Closing the doorand taking out his electric flash, which he had transferred among otherthings to the suit he was now wearing, he ran up the steep and creakingstairs.

  He stood in a long and narrow hall. At one end was a stairway,presumably leading to the store below, and along the sides of thecorridor were three doors. Opening one of them, he played the electricbeam over the interior, for he did not think it safe to turn on thelight. It was a small, tidily furnished bedroom, and the prevalence offeminine touches hinted that it had been occupied by the housekeeper. Inthe neatness and immaculateness of things there was not the slightestsuggestion of tragedy, and he looked in vain for a sign that theoccupant had been snatched from a humdrum life to a horrible death.

  Yet, as his eyes flitted over the room, he felt a vague and hauntingsense of oppression. It must be the air, he thought, which was heavy andstale, as if the window had not been opened for several days. The notehanded him by the queer messenger was still a disturbing factor in histhoughts, and he took it from his pocket and examined it in the light ofhis flash.

  At first he saw nothing but the crude pencil tracings in which herecognized the emblem of the Duke, but presently, as he gave closerattention to the outlines of the design, he detected tiny waves and jagsthat impressed him as being there for a purpose. He placed hismagnifying lens between the electric flash and the paper, and now theuneven strokes dissolved into uncouth but fairly legible letters. Hechuckled as he perceived that the Duke, always a lover of thetheatrical, was in the habit of communicating with his agents by meansof writing that had to be read through a magnifying lens.

  Quickly he deciphered the script hidden in the ornate tracings. His facegrew hard as a welter of ideas and suspicions surged through his mind.The message read:

  Traitors sometimes die. Report at once.

  The six words seemed to throb with a sinister meaning. They started along train of thoughts in the Phantom's mind. For one thing, they provedthat the message was intended for Granger, since there was no reason whythe Duke should accuse the Gray Phantom of treachery. They also made itclear that the reporter was a member of the Duke's new organization andthat by some faithless act he had incurred the displeasure of theleaders of the band.

  The Phantom loathed a traitor, but the Duke himself was no stickler forfair methods, and that a member of his gang should have been caught in aperfidious act was not particularly surprising. As the Phantom saw it,the chief importance of his discovery lay in the fact that he was stilllaboring under a serious handicap. He had thought that in assuming theguise of a newspaper reporter he would insure himself againstmolestation from all sides, but now it appeared that the man whoseidentity he had borrowed was an object of suspicion and possiblevengeance. The threat in the first sentence of the message was clear andto the point.

  He scowled darkly at the message, then folded it carefully and put it inhis pocket. He still had an advantage, he told himself, for he was safeso far as the police were concerned. What he had to guard against wasthe stealthy machinations and intrigues of the Duke's band. On thewhole, it was fortunate that the note had fallen into his possession,for forewarned was forearmed. Increased alertness and a few extraprecautions would see him clear of the pitfalls.

  Extinguishing his flash, he left the room and descended the stairs atthe end of the hall, emerging behind the counter in the front of thestore. He walked down the narrow aisle between the show case and theshelves that lined the wall. The door to Gage's bedroom was unlocked,and he entered. A shaft of gray light slanting in beneath the windowshade gave blurry outlines to the objects in the room. He passed to thewindow and pulled the curtain aside. It was a dull, bleak dawn, asdismal and gray as the one that had greeted him twenty-four hours agowhen he crawled out of the tunnel.

  His inspection of the room shed not the faintest ray of light on thequestions in his mind. He searched carefully, sweeping the dark cornerswith his flash, but nothing appeared to have been touched since his lastvisit. Of the tragedy he had witnessed, not the slightest sign was to befound. Yet the scene was so vividly impressed on his mind that he feltas though the very walls were alive with the echoes of the dying woman'sgroans. He could still see the quickly moving hand that had held theknife.

  "Whose hand?" he asked. It had been a mere flash, and, as far as hecould recall, there had been nothing distinctive about it. It was notlikely he would recognize the hand if he should see it a second time;yet the question was already settled in his mind. The housekeeperherself had given him the answer to it in the few words she had gaspedout just before the blow was struck:

  "He's killing me! He's afraid I'll tell!"

  She had referred to Pinto, of course, for her previous words and looks,the Gray Phantom thought, had clearly shown that she suspected thepoliceman of having murdered her employer. It was a safe inference,then, that Pinto had slain the housekeeper in order to seal her lipsforever, and the Phantom wondered whether the patrolman was not alsoresponsible for the barricade at the end of the tunnel. It seemedplausible enough. Pinto must have known that there had been a witness tohis deed, though he probably did not know that this witness had seenonly a hand and a knife. It was even possible that the policeman hadseen more of the Phantom than the Phantom had seen of him. At any rate,he was doubtless aware that the housekeeper's words had been addressedto someone hidden in the opening back of the revolving frame. Fearingthat this person would betray him, he had quickly slammed the frame intoplace, after which he had run around to Doctor Bimble's cellar andblocked the mouth of the passage, intending that the witness to hiscrime should smother to death.

  So much seemed clear; at least it furnished a hypothesis in the light ofwhich the strange events of the night before were explainable. The onlypuzzling factor in the situation was the disappearance of the body. ThePhantom, cudgel his wits as he might, could see no other solution thanthat the murderer must have removed it. No one else would have
beenlikely to do so. If the body had been found by anyone else the matterwould have been promptly reported to the police, and without doubtanother crime would have been chalked up against the Gray Phantom.Scanning the mystery from every angle, the Phantom could see no otherexplanation than that the body had been concealed by the murderer.

  "But why?" he asked himself. So far as he could see, the murderer couldhave had no reason for covering up the crime, which in the absence ofcontrary proof would have been imputed to the Gray Phantom. The policeand the press would have jumped instantly to the conclusion that thearch-rogue had followed up the killing of Gage with the murder of thehousekeeper, and their fertile brains could easily have invented severalplausible motives. This, to all appearances, would have suited themurderer to perfection. Why, then, had he gone out of his way to keepthe crime secret?

  The Phantom's mind churned the problem for several minutes before theanswer came to him. As is often the case, it was so ludicrously simplethat he wondered why he had not seen it at once.

  "Clear as daylight!" he decided. "The murderer knew the crime couldn'tbe fastened on me, because I had an alibi. I was in jail, so to speak,when the murder was committed. Of course, I was in jail only by proxy,the real prisoner being Tommie Granger, but the murderer didn't knowthat until later. He thought I was locked up, and that was enough forhim."

  The Phantom backed out of the room. His visit to the scene of the twomurders had helped him to clarify certain problems, but he hadaccomplished nothing definite. His suspicions in regard to Pinto hadbecome stronger, but as yet he had not a shred of actual proof againstthe man. He considered what his next step should be as he walked acrossthe store and started up the stairs. For several reasons, he decided, hemust have a talk with Thomas Granger at once.

  He paused for an instant outside the housekeeper's bedroom, then walkedon to the next door, which opened into a kitchen. The third door, theone farthest down the hall, gave access to a large room, and the talltiers of boxes and packing cases indicated that Gage had used it forstorage purposes. Abstractedly he let the gleam of his electric flashglide over the floor and the long, jagged cracks in the begrimedceiling. He was looking for nothing in particular, and apparently therewas nothing to find.

  Yet, as he started to walk out, something held him. He could not analyzethe sensation at first, but it was one he had experienced before, and itwas associated in his mind with dreadful and awe-inspiring things. Hecould not name it, but it gave him the impression that he stood in thepresence of death.

  He started forward, but of a sudden he checked himself and listenedintently to sounds coming from the direction of the stairs. They wereshort, creaking, and irregular sounds, like those produced by a heavyman when he tries to walk lightly, and they gave the Phantom animpression of hesitancy and furtiveness.

  The stealthy footfalls drew nearer. Quietly the Phantom pushed the doorshut, took the pistol from his pocket, and stepped behind a row ofpacking cases. The footsteps were now almost at the door. An interval ofsilence came, as if the person outside were hesitating before heentered, then the door came open and a dark shape prowled across thefloor.