Boston Blackie

by Jack Boyle

  While he continued to argue costs and delivery details day after day with Muir, Sir Harry devoted himself with the skill of experience to winning the second and greater part of the stake for which he was playing—the heart of Betty Girard.

  This was an easy task; for to Betty, Sir Harry Westwood Cameron became in a week the dream prince for whom all girls, young and not so young, wait and watch and long—and sometimes really find. He was the personification of romance, the realization of secretly treasured hopes, the fulfillment of desire, for she saw him with eyes blinded by girlish visions of an imaginary Prince Charming. His thin lips, steely, half-veiled eyes and mirthless laugh were to her only delightfully “aristocratic.” Glibly casual references to England’s best names helped to build the pedestal from the foot of which she looked up to him in awed wonder that she, a simple mountain girl, should have the privilege of intimacy with one who belonged in such exalted circles. In a word, Betty Girard was eighteen and motherless.

  Sir Harry wooed her with calculated artistry—and never a word of love. One day he showed her a photograph of himself lounging on a lawn before a baronial-looking country home. Betty could not guess, of course, that it was a picture of one of England’s show places that all Cheapside might visit, if it chose, for a shilling fee.

  “Betty, I’ve wondered very often lately—” Sir Harry checked himself as if with an effort.

  “What?” she urged, studying the photograph with a new thrill.

  “Whether you—” He stopped again and shook his head as she looked up at him. “It isn’t fair to tell you—now,” he continued with a gesture of pained self-denial.

  Betty was too much a woman not to guess the purport of the words he denied her. Why wasn’t it fair to tell her, if he wished to, she wondered. The possibility that some obstacle might bar a still-unconfessed love helped to fan the flame Sir Harry wished to kindle and brought her to an inwardly made admission that she did love Sir Harry Westwood Cameron and always would love him, no matter what threatened to separate them. She cried herself to sleep.

  It never occurred to Betty to ask herself whether she loved Sir Harry enough to go with him to a mountain cabin and be happy there in calico. At eighteen—and sometimes at thirty-eight—women forget to test their love with such unromantic possibilities.

  With the intuitive knowledge of women that is the gift of such men, Sir Harry kept the girl’s mind always centered on himself—sometimes in doubt, sometimes in hope, but always on him. At the end of a fortnight he was satisfied Betty was his for the asking.

  On the day he changed his last twenty-dollar bill, Sir Harry Westwood Cameron decided he had jockeyed long enough with Muir and his lumber bid and that the time had come to marry Betty, collect his toll from the village of Sherwood and vanish. Success now was almost within the reach of his grasping fingers. And so with a look that thrilled Betty’s hero-worshipping heart, he asked her to take him for a last drive in her car.

  “My work in Sherwood is almost done, Betty,” he said. “I must leave in a few days, and before I go, there is something I must tell you. I have tried to keep silent—and failed. Do you care enough to listen?”

  Betty nodded. At last she was to hear the secret she thought would determine whether happiness or sorrow was to be hers.

  Sir Harry was silent until their car stopped on the edge of a rocky promontory which overlooked miles of the Girard forests. Then suddenly he leaned toward her and caught her hands.

  “Betty dear,” he cried as though an overflowing heart were forcing the unbidden words from his lips, “you know I love you. Love like mine reveals itself without words. You’ve seen in my eyes and felt in the touch of my hand all that my lips have longed for days to say. Shall I tell you why I have not spoken? Shall I tell you why, if I could, I would have gone away without speaking?”

  “Yes,” Betty whispered.

  “Because I’m going back to England—back to France, where what is left of my regiment is fighting on the Somme front. In one month or six after I reach French soil I may be a maimed cripple—a burden forever to myself and the wife I long for. I have no right to ask you to leave such a home as yours to risk such a future. And yet—when they love—women like you are such willing martyrs to that love that sometimes I have almost dared to hope. Betty, are you brave enough, do you—can you—care enough to go back to England with me and share as my wife what the future has in store?”

  Betty, thrilled beyond bounds with the joy of knowing the hero she loved had with knightly magnanimity hesitated to ask her to accept even a share of the sacrifice for patriotism he chose uncomplainingly for himself, sobbed contentedly on his breast and promised she would.

  A motor coasting silently down the hill suddenly rounded a turn in the road. Betty Girard sprang away from Sir Harry’s encircling arms and vainly strove to smooth her disheveled hair and hide her flushed cheeks. The driver, a woman, gave the pair one quick glance and passed on out of sight without apparent interest.

  “She saw us!” exclaimed Betty, hanging her head, blushingly.

  “Why should we care, dear? Who is she, anyway? I have seen her a dozen times lately when we’ve been out driving,” Sir Harry answered.

  “She’s one of a vacation party that has been camped in the woods below our house for the last week or two,” Betty replied, stretching out her hands for him to help her to her feet. “Will you drive me home, Harry,”—she used his name for the first time, with a blush,—“and let me tell Dad how very, very happy I am?”

  While Betty told her father that night that some day she was to be Lady Cameron, Mary described to Boston Blackie, in his camp within gunshot of the Girard home, the scene on the promontory of rock.

  “They’re engaged now, beyond a doubt, Blackie,” she concluded.

  “Which means that she’ll be married to him within a week, if he has his way,” Blackie added. “Our hour is coming swiftly now, and the price of success is going to be everlasting watchfulness. Isn’t this a strange old world, Mary? Think of it—the fate of this innocent little mountain girl we had never heard of two weeks ago depends now on us—a crook mob the world would cage, rightly enough, like wild beasts if it could!”

  On the second day after Betty Girard had promised to marry him, Sir Harry Westwood Cameron sat in the office of the mill company reading a contract just handed him by its president. By the terms of the agreement Sir Harry contracted to purchase fifty million feet of redwood lumber, the company agreeing to deliver the timber at the seaboard in monthly lots of five million feet each, with a sharp price-discount as a penalty for delayed deliveries. On his part, Sir Harry agreed to pay spot cash for the lumber as it reached the wharves, with an additional advance payment of ten thousand dollars to stand as a forfeit in case any of the subsequent payments should be defaulted. The contract was a tightly drawn document,—Muir had seen carefully to that,—and there was no conceivable way in which the mill company could lose or be defrauded under its terms.

  The lumberman watched Sir Harry narrowly as he read the contract, then turned back and reread it. Somehow, far back in his canny Scotch mind, there still remained his first reasonless but persistent doubt of the Englishman’s integrity; but if his customer was satisfied with this contract, Muir conceded he must admit himself wrong. Meanwhile he was on his guard.

  “Absolutely correct and satisfactory from my standpoint,” Sir Harry announced finally. “As it suits you, Mr. Muir, shall we sign and consider the matter settled?”

  Sir Harry scrawled his signature at the bottom of the page. Muir did the same.

  “And now except for the matter of the advance payment, our business is satisfactorily settled, I think.” Sir Harry drew out a sheaf of checks on which Muir recognized the same consulate insignia he had seen on his customer’s credentials and filled out one for ten thousand dollars to the Muir Lumber Company. He flipped it across the table to the lumberman.

  “If our deal is as satisfactory to you as I a
m sure it will be to me,” Sir Harry said, “we are both to be congratulated.”

  He lighted a cigarette, smiling inwardly at the double meaning in his words, and sauntered out to the automobile in which Betty Girard was waiting for him.

  Muir indorsed Sir Harry’s check and called his cashier.

  “Mail this to our bank,” he said, “and instruct them to notify me by ’phone when it is honored.” To himself he added: “When it’s cashed, and not till then, we’ll put a night shift, to work. Everything seems all right—it can’t be otherwise as far as we are concerned; and yet I still have a wee doubt in my head. I wonder why.”

  Mid-afternoon found Sir Harry Westwood Cameron again within sight of the offices of the Muir Lumber Company. Timing himself accurately, he hurried in just as the mail to go out on the afternoon logging-train was being made up.

  “I find I made a stupid blunder when I gave Mr. Muir his check this morning,” he said to the cashier. “I drew it on the bank in which the Canadian instead of the British funds are deposited. Has the check gone yet? No! That’s fortunate. This is the check you should have had. I’ll exchange with you, if you don’t mind.”

  He handed out a new check drawn on a different bank and made out, as the other had been, to the Muir company, for ten thousand dollars.

  “Certainly,” acquiesced the cashier, opening the letter he had written the bank at Muir’s command and handing Sir Harry the first check as he laid the second aside to await indorsement before being mailed. Sir Harry tore up the check in his fingers and let the fragments flutter to the floor.

  “Fortunate I happened to discover my error before it passed out of your hands, wasn’t it?” he said. “It would have been a beastly nuisance to have rectified it, bound up as I am by red tape. Thanks, awfully.” And he sauntered out.

  Hidden in the palm of his hand was the check returned to him by the Muir company. The one he had torn to bits in the presence of the cashier was an exact duplicate except that it lacked the one essential that gave it value—the indorsement of John J. Muir.

  The blood raced through Sir Harry’s veins as he turned up Sherwood’s boardwalk. The touch of that magic bit of paper, concealed in his hand, was like intoxicating wine. He knew he needed only to present it at the Muir company’s bank, now that it bore the guaranteeing indorsement of the lumberman, to receive without question gold that would buy all he craved in the world of pleasure. And when that gold was gone, there would still be Betty to be cajoled, threatened or abused into giving him more in endless abundance. A single month of freedom had given him wealth!

  Nothing remained to be done now but to cash the check when the bank at Ukiah, forty miles away, opened in the morning, and then to disappear, leaving those he had mulcted to count the cost of the acquaintanceship of Sir Harry Westwood Cameron.

  Betty, of course, must go with him. Begrudging each moment that still separated him from the actual possession of the money waiting at the bank, he hurried back to the Girard ranch to find her. He showed her a telegram written to himself by himself recalling him secretly and at once to San Francisco to undertake an “urgent mission” and urged her with convincing sophistry to marry him that night in Ukiah.

  “This sudden summons to undertake a new mission may mean anything, Betty dear,” he pleaded. “It may mean a dangerous trip to the City of Mexico—that was spoken of before I came here; it may mean months of separation; it may—” Betty laid her hands in his.

  “The only happiness I hope for, the only happiness I ask of life, is to share all your dangers and troubles,” she said, “I am not afraid—with you.”

  Sir Harry caught her gently and drew her to him.

  “You will go? You will marry me to-night and send me away—if I must leave you—with the comfort of knowing that you, my wife, are waiting for me here and longing, as I shall be, for the happy day when separations are over and we can go home to England—together?” There was a cruelly masterful gleam of satisfaction in Sir Harry’s eyes. Once bound to him by a wedding ring, he never intended that Betty Girard should see her mountain home again—never, at least, till he had wrung the last available dollar from her father’s rich forests.

  “But Dad?” she whispered, stirring in his arms.

  “I will explain to him. He will understand and consent,” Sir Harry answered.

  “Then, if you wish it, I will go.” And Betty, who had begun by declaring the idea of an immediate marriage to be impossible, hurried away to pack a suit-case while Sir Harry went to her father. When a girl is eighteen, in love and spells Romance with a capital R, her own heart pleads with irresistible potency a cause such as Sir Harry’s seemed.

  Old Sherwood Girard, simple-minded and unsuspecting as Betty herself, had drawn his wheel-chair to the spot on his porch from which he could best see the rolling stretches of forest he loved with the love of one who has met and mastered in their peaceful solitudes the problems of a lifetime. Sir Harry showed his forged telegram and explained that he and Betty wished a father’s consent to an immediate and secret marriage.

  “Why secret?” the old man asked, studying Sir Harry’s face with eyes, level and keen, though dimmed by age.

  “Because, Dad,” said Sir Harry, laying his arm affectionately round the old man’s shoulders, “the world must not know that I have even been in Sherwood, until the lumber I have bought here for our armies is safely landed at its destination. Nothing afloat is safe from the U-boats. The mere fact that Sir Harry Westwood Cameron, known representative of the British Government, has been in Sherwood, if published, would be ruinous to our projects. You know what your American newspapers are. They would make a sensation, with pictures, likely enough, of the news that our little Betty has become Lady Cameron. Our wedding will cause no comment in Ukiah, where I am not known and shall not use a title that I sometimes regret is mine. What does it matter when or where we are married? Betty will return to you to-morrow to wait here for the day when this new duty to my king is done and I can return to claim her. Give your consent, Dad. Her happiness and mine depend on it.”

  Sherwood Girard leaned back in his chair in silence. This sudden wedding seemed uncalled for—almost unseemly.

  “And yet,” he mused, “I am old, and age is always slow and hesitant in the face of youth. Twenty years ago Betty’s mother and I thought a month a year while we counted the days to our wedding. Why should I deny my children now, what they wish?”

  He turned to the man beside him.

  “Give me your hand, boy,” he said, gripping the palm outstretched to him as do men to whom a spoken word and a handclasp are a bond that may not be broken. “It shall be as you—and she—wish. And Sir Harry,”—the old man’s voice was tremulous with emotion,—“be very good to my little girl, very good, my boy, and very, very kind. She’s only a child.”

  “I may tell her?” cried Sir Harry, leaping to his feet.

  “Yes, and then send her to me. And may God be good to you—as good as you are to her.”

  “Amen,” added Sir Harry with seeming reverence, but smiling at the design in his heart that made the word a blasphemy.

  Sir Harry drove Betty to the train in the early evening and left her auto in the village garage. He would follow in it after nightfall, he told her, as the necessity of keeping his departure absolutely secret was imperative. Meanwhile she was to go to a Ukiah hotel and wait. She agreed. Without a thought of possible evil, she waved him a tremulous, happy au revoir and began the wedding journey the bigamist intended should deliver her irrevocably into his ruthless hands. With a cruelly satisfied smile Sir Harry watched her go, and returned to the Girard home to wait, in a scorching fever of impatience, for the darkness that was to cover his own flight.

  That night while Sherwood Girard sat in his wheel-chair watching the moon rise over his redwoods and wondering how he could ever endure the loneliness he would suffer if Betty left him while he lived, Sir Harry said a brief farewell, took the auto from the garage,
piled in the suit-cases he had hidden by the roadside and turned the car down the empty, moonlit road that led to Ukiah and the realization of every evil hope he had nursed through five weary prison years.

  CHAPTER XI

  THE SPIRIT OF THE CUSHIONS KID

  Sherwood’s block-long business street was silent, dark and deserted. The one gleam of light in the night was from the incandescent that hung above the big safe in the offices of the Muir Lumber Company.

  Examining the strong-box with the calmly critical eye of an expert stood Boston Blackie. He ran his hand delicately over the burnished steel, fondled the combination knobs and turned to the masked man with him who was unpacking a suit-case.

  “It’s a good box,” he said. “Let’s get at it. It will take a half-hour to cut into it, and that hick watchman might get back before his time.”

  Two steel cylinders that just filled the bottom of the suit-case were taken out and set up before the safe. From each a hose led to a metal nozzle punctured by a tiny blow-hole. A heavy curtain of blankets was carefully draped above and around the outfit to cut off from the street the dazzling, bluish light of the flame that was to eat through the solid steel. Boston Blackie took off his mask, replaced it with heavy automobile goggles and then crawled beneath the blankets, which were propped away from the door of the safe by chairs.

  “If the copper comes before I finish, don’t forget what I told you,” he warned. His companion nodded assent.

  From beneath the blankets there began a hissing, spluttering sound, and between them the faint reflection of a blinding light was visible. The second man, armed and masked, stood just inside the front door peering out into the night from behind drawn curtains.

  Twenty minutes passed. There was a faint thud as a heavy piece of metal fell to a cushioned floor. The spluttering noise ceased for a moment, then began again. Five minutes, and there was another thud on the floor. Then the light beneath the blankets died, and Boston Blackie, throwing them aside, rose from their folds.