Boston Blackie

by Jack Boyle

  He looked at his hands and moved them. He touched his eyes, his lips and pressed a hand over his heart to feel it beat. Hands, eyes, lips were all a part of him now, and responsive to his will. In six days, they would all be dead clay responsive to nothing. And what of the will that controlled them now, that consciousness of self, that awing individuality called “I” that has its home in the innermost recesses of the brain? Would it too be merely a thing dead and done? Or—

  The snap of bolts turning in heavy locks and the clang of a door in the corridor dragged the mind of the prisoner back to the present. The door of the cell was unlocked, and a guard stepped in, followed by a convict carrying a tray covered with a newspaper. The Cushions Kid swept a pile of magazines from the one small table, and the convict set the food down. The latter looked toward the condemned man, caught his eye and then, with his back toward the guard, who stood within three feet of them, spoke rapidly in the prison language that makes no sound.

  “Stiff” (letter) “in orange,” he said. “Key in newspaper, page four, column four.” The man laid his hand on the paper that covered the dishes and raised it as if to see whether he had slopped the food about in carrying it. “Page four, column four,” he repeated. Then he turned and went out. The guard followed him and shot the lock in the cell door.

  The instant the clanging corridor door informed him he was alone, the Cushions Kid picked up the orange that lay on the dinner-tray and examined it with eager eyes. It was not until he had gone over the entire surface inch by inch that he discovered a circle in the skin outlined by an all but imperceptible knife-mark. He pried out the inside of the circle and found inside the orange a pellet of paper protected by tinfoil. In case of unexpected interruption, he cut up the orange to destroy any evidence it had been tampered with, and smoothed out the paper, his heart beating high with hope of he knew not what.

  The writing was not Happy’s, as he had hoped; it was Boston Blackie’s. He recognized the well-remembered chirography at once. This was what he read:

  Cigarettes have often saved men’s lives, though physicians declare the ash from the burned paper is injurious to the health, as it forms a black deposit on lung-tissue or anything else it touches. This easily can be proved.

  That was all. There was no signature to the cryptic message, but it needed none.

  “Boston Blackie is framing something for me,” the Kid thought, trembling like a child in the wild joy of new-born hope. “With the old chief outside, there’s a chance, even for me.”

  He scraped the dinner into his slop-bucket. He couldn’t eat, but to avoid possible suspicion, it was necessary to get rid of it.

  “Now we’ll see what’s what,” he said.

  Once more assuring himself that he was alone in the death-house, he picked up the newspaper that had covered the food. He turned to the fourth column of the fourth page. It was a column of society notes. Peeling off several of a packet of cigarette papers, the Cushions Kid touched them with a match and watched them burn to curling crisps of charred ash. He spread the note on the table before him and poured the ashes of the paper on it.

  “We’ll see what cigarette-papers do to the lungs, Blackie, old pal,” he said, rubbing the ash lightly into the paper. Nothing appeared but a gray smudge. Smiling like a schoolboy bent on mischief, the Kid turned the note over.

  “Maybe it’s the back of the lungs and letter that are affected by burned cigarette-papers,” he said to himself as he repeated the operation.

  His guess was right. As his finger-tips gently spread the black ash over the paper, characters outlined in black began to appear.

  “Perfectly scandalous what cigarette-papers do to a man’s lungs, ain’t it, Blackie?” he whispered as he worked the ash evenly over the page until its entire surface was a dirty gray on which, outlined in pure black, were long rows of figures. They had been written with oxalic acid mixed with milk, and were absolutely invisible until the fine ash of the paper adhered and turned them black. When the Kid’s work was done, the first line of Blackie’s message looked like this:

  2-6, 8-4, 6-1, 6-1, 10-1—9-4, 2-1, 3-5, 5-3, 4-2—11-1, 7-3, 20-8, 2-1.

  Burning with impatience, the boy turned to the designated column of the paper. The first of Blackie’s line of figures was “2-6.” The sixth letter of the second word in the column of type was h. The Kid jotted it down beneath the figures. Next was “8-4.” That proved to be an a. The “6-1” repeated proved a double p. Then came y.

  “Happy,” repeated the Kid, working in an agony of fear. The next word was “sends.”

  “Thank God, she’s all right,” he breathed with quick relief. “Ah—‘level’ ‘Happy sends love.’ Dear, dear little girl! Right and true always! And good, thoughtful old Blackie, to guess that even now that’s what I’d want to know first.”

  He worked on, slowly turning the tiny lines of figures into letters and words. As the words became sentences, his breath came in quick, strained gasps, for Blackie’s message outlined a plan of escape that could scarcely fail, barring mishaps.

  The Cushions Kid was told that on the following night he would find a ball of black thread in the banana that would be served with his dinner. He was to weight the end of the thread and lower it from the window of the death-cell after dark. At midnight the convict runner who delivered hot coffee to the watch-tower guards would tie a cord to the slender invisible thread, and at the end of the cord there would be a package containing a revolver, a gimlet, a fuse and caps and a bottle of nitroglycerin. Raising the cord with his thread, the Kid could pull up this precious package and find himself armed and provided with enough explosive to blow out the window-casement of the death-cell.

  With this avenue to freedom open, the drop to the ground would be simple and safe, for in the midnight coffee served the guards on the night set for the escape, there would be enough chloral hydrate to leave them safely unconscious for many hours. The Kid was not to try to cross the quarter-mile of open ground between the death-house and the river, for there was no way of disposing of the night captain and the extra guards in the executive offices. Instead, he was to dodge to the end of the death-house, where a steel grating usually padlocked covered an air hole into the prison sewer, which led direct to the river and was sufficiently large to permit a man to crawl through it. In place of the iron padlock he would find a painted wooden one. Through that sewer the Kid was to go to its mouth on the river, where Boston Blackie would be waiting, with the huge steel bars that guarded the exit already open for him.

  The rest should be easy. They had then only to let the current of the river carry them down as far as the railway bridge, where a track velocipede commandeered from the Folsom section-house would be hidden to carry them over the twenty miles of rails to Brighton, the railway junction, from which there was a freight before daylight that, if all went well, they would ride to the city of Stockton and safety.

  The plan was flawless. As he comprehended in its entirety the road to freedom that was opened to him, the Cushions Kid realized what fearful risks had been undertaken in his behalf. He wondered how Blackie had managed to smuggle the gun and liquid dynamite and chloral into the prison. He wondered how he had dared even to visit the prison, for it was apparent he had visited it and secured co-operation from the inside.

  If he had known that as Blackie in a miner’s garb sat in the prison visiting-room three days before, he had looked straight at a glaring poster which contained his likeness and an offer of a thousand dollars reward for his arrest, the Cushions Kid would have had some idea of the peril which Blackie had faced. If he had seen Blackie in the presence of a guard talking commonplaces to a convict, interspersed by inaudible instructions in the lip language—the Kid would have had an even clearer idea of what the risks had been. Louisiana had undertaken the task of arranging all details inside the prison—undertaken it without a second’s hesitation, though he knew well he was risking a frightful punishment and additional years of servitude for
a man he had never seen. That he was Blackie’s friend, however, was enough.

  Smuggling the arms and explosive into the prison had been a delicate and dangerous task. Waiting until the guards present at this interview with Louisiana were off watch, Blackie had re-entered the prison with a crowd of sight-seers. There had been a crucial moment of danger when the guard, before admitting the party, made a perfunctory search of the men for weapons. Had he found the package slung under Blackie’s left arm the adventure would have culminated then and there in swift disaster. But the guard didn’t find the package.

  A half-hour later, as the party passed through the great, noisy, dusty rock-quarry of the prison, Blackie lagged behind, picking up and examining pieces of rock as the miner he seemed to be might be expected to do. One bowlder was marked, not by chance, with a drilling hammer standing upright. Blackie, stooping behind that rock, in one swift motion transferred the package from beneath his arm to an excavation beneath the bowlder and kicked a stone—not there by chance either—into the opening to conceal the contraband. That night in the comparative safety of Louisiana Slim’s cell were hidden the gun and nitroglycerine (“soup,” the safe-blowers term it) that was to free the condemned man—also chloral for the guards’ coffee and a bunch of skeleton keys to release the padlock that barred the sewer entrance.

  Louisiana and his partner, who had carried the package in from the quarry at a risk of which they were well aware, fondled the weapons that opened the way to possible escape with a longing inconceivable to any but men with many long years of imprisonment before them. The gun, the explosive, the keys, the “keeler” for the guards in the tower, were in their hands and pointed the way to escape for themselves. Freedom beckoned and was within easy reach.

  Louisiana Slim and his cell-partner stared at each other with glittering eyes that revealed souls tempted almost beyond resistance.

  At last Louisiana Slim spoke.

  “It jes naturally can’t be did, Buddy,’ he said. “The Kid’s facing the rope. If we use these tools fer our own selves, he’ll swing sure. Any time we stepped into a joint on the outside, the gang would spit on the floor an’ holler ‘Coppers in the house!’ an’ walk out. An’ they’d be right. Nix, it can’t be did; but God a’mighty, it’s hard—tumble, turrible hard.”

  “Pack the junk up, Slim,” whispered his partner, wiping a wet, clammy brow. “Separate it an’ pack it up. I dassent touch the stuff. I’ve played the game square for twenty years, but I’m afraid to lay hands near this.”

  During the day Slim arranged the delivery of Blackie’s note to the cell of the condemned man. Then he intercepted Fred the Count, the convict who carried the guard’s midnight coffee and was indispensable to Blackie’s plan. The Count was a sleek, suave bigamist and forger whose specialty had been making love to trusting women whom he deserted when he had stripped them of their wealth. He was a constant plotter of revolt and was stamped “right” among his fellows.

  Slim asked him to attach the package to the end of the Cushions Kid’s dangling black thread on the following night and to drop the chloral into the guard’s coffee. As the entire night’s supply of coffee was to be drugged, suspicion after the escape could not center on the Count, though it was obvious he and a dozen others would be subjected to third-degree methods. Slim made no mention of the sewer’s part in the plan; nor did he tell from whom the weapons of escape had come.

  “I’m with you, Slim,” the Count assured him. “I’d go to hell and back and hang in the sack a week if necessary to save a man from being topped. Count on me for my part.”

  The preparations for the rescue were now complete. With his dinner that night the Cushions Kid received the silent message “To-night at one.”

  CHAPTER VI

  “NOT TO SNITCH ON A PAL”

  Darkness settled over the penitentiary, and lights winked out from the cell-houses. At eight o’clock one of them—the one that showed in the cell of Louisiana Slim—suddenly went out, then on again, then out and on once more.

  “Thank God, things have gone as I planned,” cried Blackie, creeping from a hiding-place on the crest of the hill behind the prison as the welcome signal caught his eager-eyes.

  In the death-cell the Kid lay on his bunk simulating slumber while his pulses throbbed with excitement and impatience so intense it was a physical pain. A day-and-night death-watch had not been set over him yet, and he was alone. The lights-out bell sounded, and the incandescents died out in blackness. The prison settled into slumber. To the boy lying alone in the darkness with everything staked on a single roll of Fate’s fickle dice, the dragging minutes of inaction were almost unendurable. The half-hours between the tolling of the prison bell each seemed a lifetime of suspense. But with eleven o’clock at last came the time for action.

  The condemned boy sprang from his couch at the stroke of the bell and groped in his breast for the ball of thread. He tied a stubby piece of pencil to the end of it and lowered it from his window until it rested on the ground. Then he knotted it to one of the bars and crouched in the darkness, waiting.

  It was nearly an hour—it seemed centuries to the waiting Kid—before a quick, furtive step sounded on the gravel beneath the window. The step paused; and the prisoner’s finger, laid on the thread where it was fastened to the bar, felt a gentle tug that proved the man below had found its dangling end. There was a second of silence; then the gravel crunched under footsteps that died away around the corner of the death-house. The bell tolled midnight, breaking the stillness with a sudden shock that was like a blow. The Cushions Kid crept to the window and looked out into the prison yard, lighted by a dozen flaring arc-lights. It was deserted, as he knew it would be while the guards were eating. He raised the thread slowly and began to pull it in with infinite caution.

  Before the cord to which the thread had been tied reached his trembling fingers, the added weight on the tiny string told him the package below was swinging clear of the ground. Meanwhile he was forced to pull the thread over the rough stone of the window ledge—stone that, because of the weight below, threatened to sever it. Would the thread hold? A life—his life—hung swaying in the balance on the end of the inadequate strand of linen.

  Inch by inch the thread came up. At last the end of the knotted cord appeared over the angle of stone. With that in his hands, the danger was over. The Kid rapidly dragged up the package, squeezed it through the bars and clutched it to his breast.

  Sudden relief from the mastering strain of the past minutes left him suddenly weak, sick, faint. He dropped down on his bunk, caressing the package with eager fingers as though to convince himself that hope was now reality.

  From the farther end of the corridor a sound reached his ear. He sprang to his feet as stagnation of mind and body fell from him like a discarded cloak. Bolts were thrown in the locks that guarded the death-house. Some one was entering.

  To be found dressed and awake at that hour of the night would be fatal. The Cushions Kid tossed his package between his blankets, drew them over him and closed his eyes with a heart heavy with dread.

  The last door was thrown open noisily, proving that no effort was being made to steal upon him secretly. The prisoner took heart. It was scarcely possible that his package had been seen as he dragged it to the window, and yet a visit at that particular hour was a strange and threatening coincidence. Two men were approaching the cell, talking as they came.

  “The leak’s up here somewhere,” the Kid heard one say. “Everything’s flooded down below, and getting worse every minute.”

  The condemned man felt rather than spoke a prayer of thankfulness. They weren’t after him or the bundle that nestled in the crook of his knees.

  He heard the footsteps outside the door of his cell. A flashlight roamed its four corners and came to rest upon his face. This was the crucial instant, the Kid felt. He kept his eyes closed and breathed with the deep, even respiration of a sleeper.

  “I don’t see any loose wa
ter round here, but we better make sure,” said a voice that the prisoner recognized as the night captain’s. A key turned in the lock, and the door creaked on its hinges. “It’s a shame to wake the Kid, poor devil, but we’ve got to find that broken pipe before—”

  The Cushions Kid’s arms were suddenly seized and pinioned to his sides beneath the blankets. Burly hands caught him by the throat and jerked him from the bunk to the middle of the floor. He tried to fight, to struggle, but it was useless. The blankets were torn from about him; his hands were twisted behind his back; and in an instant, handcuffed and helpless, he looked up in the glare of suddenly lighted electrics and found himself staring with eyes of hate and hopelessness into the grimly smiling faces of the night captain and a guard.

  “Come on, boys! We got him trussed up tight as a drum,” the captain called, and there was a shuffle of padded feet in the corridor as a half-dozen men, some with revolvers, and some with short-barreled shotguns, poured into the cell. The captain lifted the blankets, and the package that Boston Blackie and the others had risked so much to put into his hands rolled to the floor.

  The sight of that precious package in the hands of his enemies stung the Cushions Kid to furious desperation. Life and liberty were no longer possible, but liberty in a death of his own choosing lay on the floor before him, notwithstanding his manacled hands and watchful captors. In the package on the floor he knew was a bottle of “soup”—nitroglycerin—so refined that any quick jar would explode it. One quick kick, and he would die with the knowledge that the grinning enemies about him had died with him in the sudden overturning of their short-lived triumph.