by Jack Boyle
He sprang forward and aimed a savage blow at the bundle, even as one of the men stooped to pick it up.
Myriads of colored lights flashed through his brain. Then came blackness.
The Cushions Kid slowly won his way back to consciousness with a growing surprise that he was not in another world. Peering down at him were the hated faces of the night captain and the warden of the prison. His hands were still manacled; he was still in his cell.
“What happened?” he asked feebly.
“Your intentions were all right, Kid,” the captain remarked, “but my smash to your jaw made your aim bad—which explains why any of us are here.”
The Cushions Kid sat up, sullen and silent and inexpressibly hopeless. He had failed again. Nothing awaited him now but the death decreed by law. With difficulty he choked back a cry of despair.
That strangled cry encouraged the warden to begin the work for which he had come.
“Well, boy,” he began with an obvious attempt at kind intimacy, “you took a long chance and lost. I can’t blame you. But you never really had a chance. You might have blown your way out of this place, yes. But after you were in the yard, what then? You would have been shot down before you had gone a dozen steps. You owe us something for saving your life, even if it is only for a few days.”
The Kid eyed him narrowly. Evidently he didn’t know of the part the sewer leading to the river played in Boston Blackie’s plans—nor of Boston Blackie, either, though it was perfectly evident that there had been treachery by some one Blackie had been forced to trust. The thought that Blackie even now was waiting at the other end of that sewer forced upon him the necessity of diverting any suspicion in that direction.
“If I had made it to the yard, I’d have shown your gun-screws some fancy shooting,” he said with apparent frankness. “Once on the ground I’d have walked out from under their rifles.”
“Of course your friend on the outside is waiting somewhere just over the deadline for you now,” the warden said interrogatively. “But you never would have lived to reach him.”
“I haven’t anyone on the outside,” said the boy shortly.
“I suppose you want me to think that gun and dynamite just grew on the end of that black thread you had out your window.”
The warden unwittingly had given proof of the treachery that the Cushions Kid suspected. It was conceivable but not probable that some guard might have seen the package being pulled to the window, but it was absolutely impossible that in the dark anyone could have seen the black thread. Knowledge of that proved definite information.
“It doesn’t make any difference now, but I’m curious to know how that gun got hooked on to the end of your line,” the warden continued ingratiatingly. “It wasn’t there before dark.”
“I’m curious to know the name of the yellow-hearted snitch that tipped you it was there.”
“No one snitched. A guard just happened to see you pulling it in,” the warden hastened to assure him.
“Well, then, no one put it there. It just grew out of the gravel,” gravely asserted the condemned boy. The warden saw he was accomplishing nothing and changed his tactics. He crossed to the bunk, sat down and laid his hand on the Kid’s knee.
“Boy,” he said, “I’m going to quit beating around the bush and talk straight. I want to know how that stuff got into this prison. I want to know who handled it after it got into the prison. You can tell me.”
“Nothing doing, Warden.”
“Wait. I hadn’t finished. You’re going to hang in just four days. Just four days, boy. It isn’t pleasant to dangle at the end of six feet of rope. It isn’t pleasant to lie in a cell for four days knowing that you’re going to dangle. Nothing and no one can save you, boy.”
And then after a long pause:
“Unless I do! I’m going to Sacramento to-morrow. I’m going to see the Governor. If I were able to tell him that you aided me in uncovering the men who seem to mistake this place for an arsenal, he might decide to give you a commutation. Do you get me?”
“Nothing doing!”
“Suppose I were to call the Governor up and he were to tell me he would grant a commutation under the conditions I have suggested—what then?”
“Listen, Warden.” The Cushions Kid turned and looked the official squarely in the eye. “If you were going to hang me in five minutes, and the Governor stood where you are now with a full pardon in his hand and offered it to me to snitch on the men who have taken a chance to help me, I’d hang—hang with my mouth shut. That’s final. Let’s cut the foolish chatter.”
The boy’s eyes were as convincing as his words.
“You’ll hang, all right, you fool,” the warden cried, jumping to his feet. “Set a death-watch over him now,” he added, turning to the night captain. “Keep his cell lighted and a man sitting in front of his door watching him day and night. Four days isn’t long. He won’t be so cocky when the time comes to stand on the trap.”
When they were out of hearing, the warden turned to the captain, fuming and fussing because of the narrow escape from a break that would have been hard to explain with credit to the discipline of his prison.
“Will that young fool weaken and talk when his time comes?” he asked.
“No,” replied the officer. “I knew from the first he wouldn’t squeal. Men able to have and hold friends who will take the desperate chances that were taken for him never squeal. They haven’t got it in ’em.”
“Has the Count told all he knows, do you think?”
“He has told all he’s going to—all it’s safe for him to know. I think he handled that package himself, but if he admitted that, he’d have to tell us from whom he got it. And if he did,”—the captain motioned as though his throat were being cut—“he’d do his time quicker than the Kid up there in the death cell with four days to live.”
Back in that death-cell a boy, alone for a few brief minutes before the arrival of the death-watch, flung himself on his face and let an overburdened heart find the natural, human outlet for hopeless grief. The cynical bravado with which he had calmly refused the gift of life was gone. But now for a brief moment he could be just himself—a sobbing, frightened boy facing a certain and terrible death without a kind word or a friendly face to strengthen his shrinking spirit for the greatest of all ordeals.
CHAPTER VII
THE WOMAN CALLED RITA
Spanish Micky, proprietor of a poker-game that enabled him to live in easy affluence on the earnings of the ill-paid guards at the penitentiary, lolled on a couch in his specially furnished room in Folsom Town’s one hotel, indolently tinting and polishing the nails of slender fingers, soft and white as a woman’s.
Across the room, before a dressing-table that had cost much more than any of Micky’s patrons earned from the State in a month, sat Rita the Queen, present partner of the good fortunes that had given Spanish Micky the one gambling-game within reach of an institution with a ten-thousand-dollar monthly payroll. Rita was using a lip-stick and an eyebrow pencil with experienced fingers.
A first glimpse at the pair indicated that Spanish Micky and Rita the Queen were eminently suited to make each other deliriously happy and maddeningly miserable in an endless and delightful succession of emotional tides. Once it had been so. Once love, passionate jealousy and furious anger had alternated in making their life a daily drama worth living—a drama the swift changes of which left no time for ennui. Gradually, however, Micky became secure and satisfied in undisputed possession, and their life had become one of humdrum monotony.
Rita watched Mickey for a second in her mirror, made a grimace of impatient disdain and returned to her eyebrow pencil with a sigh of utter soul-weariness. She was tired of Folsom, tired of the once-loved man who kept her there, tired of idle, purposeless days without adventure or excitement.
“I’ve solved the secret of the mystery-man, Rita.” Spanish Micky’s voice was vibrant with satisfaction as it broke
the woman’s reverie.
“Yes?” There was interest and curiosity in the inflection.
“He’s the fellow who framed the get-away night before last for the guy they’re going to hang up at the prison Friday. It would have gone through, you know, if a con hadn’t tipped the game off. But that ain’t all. This fellow who framed the break wasn’t done when his first play went wrong. He’s been sitting late into the poker-game every night and taking pains to make friends with the prison guards.
“Larry Donovan, who is on duty in the death house after midnight, was in the game and blew his pay-check as usual. He tried to touch me for a twenty. Nothing doing, of course. He sure has the card-fever bad. He tried to borrow all round the table and was turned down, nobody but me having checks to spare. Well, he was runnin’ around crazy mad to play again, when some one says, after he tries to peddle his watch: ‘Gwan out, Larry, and peddle the prison, why don’t you? You’ll be able to sit in for a whole hour then.’
“‘I’d peddle the prison and everything in it for enough checks to keep me in the game till my luck changes,’ he says; and he meant it. I caught the stranger looking at him watchful-like, and right then I had my suspicions. Larry finally goes out to try and make a touch from ‘Dutch,’ the saloon-man. He’s no sooner out the door than the mystery-man says he’s tired and cashes in.”
Spanish Micky stopped, rolled a cigarette with one hand and struck a match with the other.
“Go on—go on. What happened then?” cried Rita, her black eyes flashing with excitement and deep interest.
“The stranger goes out,” Micky continued languidly. “Half an hour later Larry Donovan comes back with money. He’s still playing when it comes time for him to leave to go on watch outside the death cell. Do you get me, Rita? On watch in the death house, with the stranger’s dough in his jeans.”
Micky stopped as though his tale were ended. Rita’s cheeks were flushed with a tint that isn’t bought in boxes, and her eyes were dark, seething pools of emotion. Here at last was what her nature craved—excitement, danger, a last-hour and desperate attempt to save a man already within the shadow of the scaffold.
“And there’ll be an escape to-night?” she questioned, lowering her voice.
“No, there won’t be any escape to-night,” Micky answered between puffs of smoke. “I don’t know where the stranger is, but I know where he will be. Behind bars! Inside, looking out, for him!”
He hesitated in momentary indecision as to the advisability of further revelations; then he continued:
“Listen, Rita: You stick around here to-night and keep your eyes open, and you’ll see a real rumpus. Your old man Micky has pulled some wise inside stuff, kid. After Larry left last night, I called up the warden and told him what I’d seen. I’ve been looking for a chance to do him a good turn ever since the town knockers began to howl about my game’s keeping the boys from the stir from paying their bills. I told him to call Larry Donovan into his office and throw a scare into him and he’d find out something he wants to know. The warden did it, and Larry spit up everything.
“He was to get five thousand dollars in cash to let this fellow Grimes—that’s the one they’re going to hang Friday—tie him up in the death-house to-night and cop his keys. The stranger showed him the real money, and Larry—thinkin’ how many poker-checks he could buy with it—agreed to stand for the getaway. But there won’t be any get-away for Jimmy Grimes or his friend either, for when Mr. Man shows up here to-night, the warden’s going to grab him and his five thousand dollars. Planning a jailbreak calls for from five to forty years, in this State. Smart Stranger might as well pick out a cell up at the big house right now. And meantime Spanish Micky and the warden are pals. Fine time the Knockers will have getting him to bar the boys from my game now, eh, kid? If this mystery-guy carries a gun, and I’ve got a hunch he does, there’s liable to be lead flying to-night, for he’s nervy.”
If Spanish Micky had been as experienced in reading a woman’s mind as he was in reading a deck of cards, he wouldn’t have finished his revelation with the smile of satisfaction with which he now turned to receive Rita’s commendation. He failed utterly to interpret aright what he saw in the girl’s face. He thought it was frightened concern for his safety. Really it was disgust, hatred born of a dead passion, and adventurous resolve.
“Don’t worry, kid. I won’t get hurt,” he said, putting on his coat and hat. “You’ll have to eat alone to-night unless the doings are over before dinnertime, for I’m going to stay down in the poker-rooms where the warden’s six gun-men are hiding till this bird shows up. So long, babe.”
“And I took that thing for my man!” the woman exclaimed with a vicious look at the door through which Micky had vanished. “A copper-hearted rat who ought to be wearing a star and a blue uniform. What a fool I’ve been to waste six months with him!”
Rita wrinkled her brow into a sudden frown.
“Who knows?” she said, answering the unspoken question in her mind. “Stranger things have happened, and he’s class, that’s sure, or he wouldn’t be taking this kind of a chance for a pal in the death cell.”
Rita dressed for a tramp, picked up a fishing-rod and slung a creel over her shoulder. At the door she turned back and took a revolver and a box of cartridges from Spanish Micky’s trunk. Then she went downstairs and sent the clerk to the hotel kitchen for a box of sandwiches—the Folsom House hadn’t discovered bellboys yet. All prepared now for the project in her mind, she swung down the dusty road that led to the river and, incidentally, the prison.
Rita reached neither the river nor the penitentiary. At the fork of the roads a mile from town she selected a grassy slope behind a bowlder and sat down to wait for the coming of the man who monopolized her thoughts—though she didn’t know his name and had spoken to him but once. But Micky’s tale had placed this man as one of the lawless legion who were the heroes of the life she craved. And Rita, being Rita, had no conventions to stay her pretty hand from reaching forth to grasp what it coveted.
At last he came, a dark shadow slipping quietly along the road well after sunset. She rose from the grassy slope almost at his feet—to find a gun against her breast before she could speak.
“It’s Rita. Put up your gun,” she cried.
An electric flashlight flared in her face. Then it carefully sought out with its beam of light every place of concealment about them.
“I’m alone. You’ve nothing to fear from me … I’ve been waiting here all afternoon for you to come.”
She thrilled with the joy of that moment.
“Well, what do you want?” Blackie snapped out with scant courtesy.
“I don’t want anything,” Rita said with careful inflection. “But you do. You want to know, for instance, that in the room behind Spanish Micky’s joint there are six gun-men from the prison waiting for you right now. You—”
“What!” cried Blackie. “Are you sure?”
“I am. Micky was suspicious last night when Larry Donovan, the death-house guard, came back into the poker-game with money after you followed him out. He—”
“I told the lying fool he mustn’t go back, and he “swore he wouldn’t. That’s a square shooter for you! Go on.”
“Micky phoned the warden and told him what he suspected. The warden called Larry in to-day and sweated him. You know the answer to that.”
Blackie swore viciously.
“Come over here, and we’ll sit down while I think this business out,” he said, taking her by the arm and helping her down the bank to her former position by the roadside. “I’m thankful for this service, Rita, very thankful. But I don’t quite understand yet why you’re here. You’re Spanish Micky’s girl, aren’t you?”
“I was, but I’m done. No man can do what he did last night, and say that Rita belongs to him. I’ve been taught to hate coppers. If I can’t have a man, a real man, I’ll live alone the rest of my life.”
Blackie suddenly tu
rned his flashlight full into her face and studied her in silence. She flushed like a young girl.
“You believe me, don’t you? You trust me? You can. Every drop of blood in me is right.”
The girl leaned toward him and clasped his arm with both her hands.
“Yes, I trust you,” Blackie answered unhesitatingly. “I’ll not forget what you have done for me to-night, either.”
“It is because I knew you won’t that I did it.” A slight pressure on his arm gave added meaning to her words. “You can’t go back into the town. What are you going to do?” she asked after a pause.
“Are you absolutely sure Donovan won’t be on duty in the death-house to-night?” Blackie demanded.
“Absolutely.”
“And the Kid has only one more night to live! Well, I’ll stick and keep trying to the end. While he still lives, there’s a chance.”
“You’re going to stay even now when you know you are discovered, know they are looking for you?” Hero-worship intoned every word.
“Sure I Something may happen. You can never tell till you try. Well, Rita, I’ve got to lie out in the hills to-night, and you’ve got to get back to town or you’ll be missed, if you haven’t been already. Good-by. When this business is over, I’ll send you our address, and if you’re ever in a tight place and need help, you’ll get it if you call on me.”
The girl noted the plural “our” with a quick tightening of the lips but no surprise.
“That ‘our’ means his girl,” she thought as Blackie rose and helped her to her feet. “I expected that. Such a man as this doesn’t travel alone. But she’ll have to be some girl to be more attractive and useful to him than I’m going to be—especially more useful.”
“I knew you’d be hungry, so I brought you something to eat,” she said. “Also a gun and an extra box of cartridges,” she added as she handed the articles over. “You may need them before you’re safely out of this. Do you know where the little log cabin is in the clump of woods just below the railroad bridge over the river?”
“Yes.”