by Jack Boyle
The hospital turnkey saluted the Deputy Warden and stood awaiting his orders. There was no surprise in Martin Sherwood’s eyes, and no excitement in his manner.
“And so he’s gone,” he said. “His convict suit in his bunk, you say?” The guard nodded.
“Tell the captain he needn’t bother to search the prison yard or buildings. He’s wasting his time,” Sherwood continued. “Blackie has five to seven hours’ start at least, and he’s miles away from here now.”
“But he can’t be. He must be inside the walls. He couldn’t have got over them,” protested the guard.
“He’s over the walls, safe enough,” Sherwood returned with conviction. “Boston Blackie isn’t a man to saw his way out of a cell and then hide in a dark corner of the prison and wait for us to find him. He’s gone, without a doubt.”
The Deputy pulled his ’phone toward him and called the chief of police of San Francisco at his home.
“Boston Blackie, the safe-blower, has escaped,” he said when a sleepy voice answered him over the wire “What? It’s the first time, yes, but there has to be a first time for everything, you know, particularly when you are dealing with a man like Blackie. Now, Chief, he’s bound to go straight to Mary Dawson, a woman who is living somewhere in your town. I wish you would put your best men out quick to locate her. It ought to be easy, for every crook in town knows them both, and somebody will be sure to tell where she is living. You haven’t a second to spare, for both she and Blackie will drop out of sight before night so completely we never will find them. We’ll offer five hundred dollars reward for Blackie. Sure! All right. I’ll be over.”
Martin Sherwood hung up the ’phone and turned to the work before him with something akin to pleasurable anticipation in his face. Like all truly strong men he found satisfaction in a battle with a worthy foeman.
Meanwhile, in Mary Dawson’s Laguna Street apartment, Boston Blackie was no less alert than Martin Sherwood.
“Does anyone know this address?” he asked the woman who sat on his knee stroking his hair and running gentle, loving fingers sadly over the deep lines left in his haggard face by pain and illness.
“I moved only a month ago when you sent me word,” she said. “Scarcely anyone knows. I met Diamond Frank and Stella last week, and they were up here to dinner.
“We must get away from here at once,” Blackie said. “We’ve got to disappear so completely it will be humanly impossible to trace us. One overlooked clue—the slightest in the world—will lead the Deputy Warden to us. He’s no ordinary copper. It’s a hundred to one he has half the detectives in the town out hunting this flat now, for he knows, of course, that I’d go to you. But little sweetheart, I’ll promise you this: whether he finds us or not, he’ll never take Boston Blackie back to San Gregorio. Have you my guns?”
Mary nodded, shuddering, and began to throw clothes into a trunk.
“Never mind packing the trunk, Mary,” Blackie corrected. “Just throw together what you can get into a couple of suitcases, dear. We’ll leave everything else behind. We’re not going to use any transfer man in this move, little woman.”
Mary sighed as she obeyed without question. Little feminine trinkets are dear to a woman, and she hated to leave them, but Blackie’s word was the only law she knew.
There was nothing to distinguish the man and woman carrying suitcases, who took a car near Mary’s apartment and crossed to the other side of the city, from scores of other passengers who traveled with them—except the man’s emaciation. They rented a room in a modest lodging house on the edge of a good residence district.
“Mary,” said Blackie the moment they were alone, “there’s work for you to do quickly. We’re safe here until to-night, but no longer. Go downtown to Levy’s theatrical shop. Tell them you’re playing a grandmother’s part in an amateur play and get a complete old woman’s outfit—white wig, clothes, shoes, everything. Get a cheap hat and a working girl’s hand-me-down, too. You’re too well dressed not to attract attention where we’re going. Draw every dollar we have in the bank just as soon as possible, for every moment you are on the street is a danger. You better bring something to eat, too-—just a loaf of bread, for I ruined my stomach with lye to get into the prison hospital, and I can’t eat anything but crusts. Above everything, be careful no one recognizes you and trails you out here. Every copper in town must be looking for us by this time.”
He drew two revolvers from the suitcase, looked carefully to their loads and laid them on the bed.
“I’m going to sleep while you’re gone. I didn’t get much rest last night,” he said, smiling happily.
At noon that day, while Boston Blackie lay sleeping in the crosstown lodging house, the police located Mary Dawson’s Laguna Street apartment. Diamond Frank had casually mentioned the address to another crook, who happened to mention it to a bartender who was a stool-pigeon; and so, deviously but surely, it finally reached headquarters.
The chief of police called in a dozen of his best men, armed them and sent them out in two autos.
“Take no chances with him, boys,” the chief warned. “When he’s lying dead in a morgue, it might be safe to walk in on him, but I wouldn’t gamble on it then unless I had seen him killed. He’s a bad one. Take care of yourselves.”
The chief’s men did so to the very best of their ability. They put officers with drawn guns at every door and window—outside. When everything was ready and not even a mouse could have escaped from the house without being riddled by a dozen bullets, the captain in charge of the expedition asked who would volunteer to enter the apartment and arrest the escaped convict. The policemen shifted uneasily on their feet and glanced expectantly at each other, but no one spoke. Somebody had an inspiration.
“Let’s send the landlady to the door with a phony letter,” he suggested. “When the girl comes to the door, we’ll grab her and bust in on Blackie before he knows we’re in the joint.”
The plan was adopted. The landlady knocked on the door, with four brawny men behind her ready to seize whoever opened it. There was no response. Finally the landlady herself opened the door.
“Gone,” chorused the detectives as they saw the empty rooms.
“The girl’s out somewhere, probably to meet him. Then they’ll come back here, both of ’em,” the captain declared, “They haven’t slowed. Look at the trunks and clothes. Now we’ll get ’em dead to rights. We’ll just plant inside here and cover them when they come back.”
But the guards in Mary’s flat stayed there three days ready to pounce on the man—who never came. Meanwhile Sherwood started a canvass of every hotel and lodging house in the city. On the third day a detective brought in the information that a landlady, when shown Blackie’s picture, identified it as that of a man who came with his wife and rented a room on the morning of the escape. They had two suitcases. The woman went out and came back with some packages. The next morning when she went to collect her rent for the second day, the couple had gone. That was all the landlady knew.
“I thought so,” Sherwood mused when the news was ’phoned him. “He’s hidden somewhere he thinks is perfectly secure. Every exit from the city is guarded, but that’s pretty much wasted effort, for Boston Blackie, if I know him, won’t stir from his place of refuge for weeks, maybe months. The man who finds him now will have real reason to compliment himself. And,” he added with unalterable determination, “I’m going to be that man.”
Sherwood turned the management of the prison over to a subordinate and spent his time directing the investigation of the hundreds of clues the reward brought to the police. But all proved futile. Fewer and fewer clues came in. A newer sensation crowded stories of the hunt for Boston Blackie from the first pages of the newspapers. The police frankly were beaten. Only Martin Sherwood kept at the task.
Sherwood puzzled and pondered for days without finding the clue he sought Every detail of the escaped convict’s appearance as he last saw him on the prison law
n was graven photographically on his brain. He remembered the emaciated face, the too brilliant eyes, the shrunken shoulders from which the flesh had fallen away during his illness in the hospital.
“The doctor said that illness was real,” he pondered. “Stomach trouble, he said, and he’s not a man to be fooled. Blackie was really sick, without doubt, and yet that sickness couldn’t have been mere chance. He hadn’t eaten anything but outer crusts of bread for weeks. Even the night he escaped he left the inside of a loaf—and he always did that—always threw away the inside of bread loaves because he couldn’t digest them.”
Martin Sherwood sprang to his feet more nearly excited than he had been in years.
“It’s a long chance,” he said to himself. “But it is a chance. He’ll be more than human if he has thought of that too.”
The Deputy Warden ordered his car and drove out to the city incinerator where garbage wagons of the city consigned their ill-smelling burdens to a cleansing flame. Sherwood explained to the superintendent.
“Tell every garbage collector in the city,” he said, “that I’ll pay the man who finds the hollowed out insides of loaves of bread in a garbage can one hundred dollars for the address from which that can was filled.”
“In three days, Mary, just three short days, we’ll sail out through the Golden Gate. You and I will be together with a new world ahead, and Martin Sherwood behind, nursing the bitterness of defeat!”
Mary, with a better, sweeter happiness in her eyes than Boston Blackie had ever seen there, clung to him as he spoke. They were in the two small rooms—kitchen and bedroom—in which they had lain securely hidden during the ten days which had elapsed since Blackie’s flight from prison. Their landlady, who scrubbed office building floors at night to support herself, lived alone on the floor below. The house was an attic cottage with a garden, in San Francisco’s sunny Mission. Boston Blackie and his Mary sat hand in hand planning a future without a flaw—a future as rosy-hued as the girl’s cheeks. The realization of their hopes was very near now. In three days a steamer sailed for Central American ports. Their passage was paid. The hunt for Blackie had died down. Once aboard the steamer and out of the harbor, a matter of little risk now, they would be safe and free and unafraid.
So they sat and planned in happy whispers,—for caution still bade them be low-voiced while their landlady was in the house,—while just below them, low-voiced and cautious too, Martin Sherwood questioned that landlady.
CHAPTER XXVIII
MAN TO MAN
“I have no roomers but a Miss Collins and her I mother, who is an invalid, poor soul. They have the two rooms in the attic,” she was telling the Deputy. “The girl is learning shorthand and don’t go out much. The old lady is crippled with rheumatism and can’t leave the rooms. Oh, they are nice, quiet, respectable people, sir.”
Sherwood was deeply puzzled. From the garbage can behind this house had come a half-dozen loaves of bread in three days, with the crusts—and only the crusts—eaten off. He had come to the house after painstaking preparation, feeling that Blackie and victory were within his grasp. The landlady’s story of the girl who studied shorthand, and an invalid mother, found no place in his theory of what he would find there, and yet it was evident the woman spoke the truth.
“What does the girl look like? What is the color of her hair?” he asked.
“Red, sir—a beautiful red like a polished copper kettle.”
Mary’s hair was coal black. For the first time Martin Sherwood’s confidence was shaken. “When did they come here?” he asked. “Why, let me see.” The woman reckoned on her fingers. “It was a week ago Thursday, sir, in the evening. They saw my advertisement in the paper and came just before I went to work—which is nine o’clock, sir.”
Blackie had escaped early on the morning of the day she mentioned. On that Thursday night he and Mary had disappeared from the lodging house which was their first place of refuge. The date and hour of their arrival decided Sherwood. He would have a look at this red haired girl and her invalid mother.
“I would like to go up and see them for a moment,” he told the woman. “I’m an officer.” He showed his star. “Oh, no, nothing wrong at all. I just want to see them. I like to keep track of people in the district.”
“Certainly, sir. I’ll call Miss Collins and—”
“No, no—that isn’t necessary,” hastily interrupted Sherwood. “I’ll just step upstairs and knock.”
Though he tried to step lightly, as Sherwood’s tread sounded on the uncarpeted stairway there was a sudden shuffling of feet on the floor above. He smiled, for that augured well, and he felt for the gun slung just inside his coat. Then he rapped.
Muffled sounds came from behind the door. A chair squeaked as it was pushed across the floor. A few seconds of silence; then, plain and unmistakable, came the sound of a woman sobbing hysterically. Sherwood tried the door, found it locked and knocked again peremptorily.
The door suddenly was flung wide open, and in the flood of light from within a woman faced him—a woman with a wealth of bronze hair that should have been black, a woman with tears on cheeks that were as bloodless as death, a woman whom he instantly recognized as Boston Blackie’s Mary.
Martin Sherwood sprang inside with drawn revolver ready to answer the stream of lead he expected from some corner of the room. None came. Instead he saw a woman, white haired and evidently feeble, sitting beside a bed with bowed head while her body shook with convulsive sobs. On the bed, covered with a sheet that was drawn up over the face, lay a silent, motionless form that told its own story.
Sudden disappointment gripped Martin Sherwood’s heart. Had the man he had rated so highly cheated him of his long-coveted triumph only by the coward’s expedient of suicide?
“Where’s Boston Blackie?” he demanded, his gun still covering the room.
Mary pointed silently to the still figure on the bed.
“Dead!” exclaimed the Deputy Warden. “When? how?”
“An hour ago,” she sobbed. “You starved him to death in your prison.” She dropped to her knees. “God have mercy on us now!” she prayed.
Sherwood strode to the bed, beside which the aged woman still sat sobbing, and leaning over, lifted the sheet. As he did so his gun for the first time failed to cover all the room. Beneath the sheet, instead of the face he expected, he saw a roll of blankets carefully molded and tied into the semblance of a human form. Before he could turn, cold steel was pressed against the base of his brain.
“Drop that gun, Sherwood,” said Boston Blackie’s voice from behind him. “Drop it quick. Raise it one inch and you’ll be as dead as you thought I was.”
Sherwood hesitated as a full realization of the new situation flashed through his mind; then he smiled as he thought of the posse he had thrown around the house and let his revolver slip through his fingers to the bed. Here was a worthy antagonist—a bit too worthy, as the cards lay just then! But the deal was far from done.
“Pick up his gun, Mary, and lay it on the table in the corner, well out of the Deputy’s way,” directed Blackie. “Then see if he has another. I don’t care to move the muzzle of my gun from his neck just yet. Now,” he continued, “slip off these skirts. I’m not overly well used to them, even though I’ve worn them for ten days, and if Mr. Sherwood should forget the company he’s in and get suddenly reckless, they might be in my way.”
“Now turn round, Sherwood, and face the music,” ordered Blackie a moment later.
The Deputy Warden turned and faced the convict behind whom lay a discarded white wig and an old woman’s garments. He met his captor’s eyes without a tremor, and smiled.
“Well done, Blackie, I must admit,” he said. “But I should have known that when you didn’t shoot as I came in, things weren’t what they seemed.”
“I didn’t expect you, Sherwood,” Blackie replied, “but as you see, I made preparations to receive you in case you came.”
The co
nvict’s face grew pale and suddenly grave. His grip on the gun leveled at the Deputy’s head tightened.
“You understand, of course, Sherwood, I’ve got to kill you,” he said then.
“As matters stand, naturally it wouldn’t surprise me,” the Deputy answered. His voice was absolutely calm and unshaken, his eyes without the remotest trace of fear.
“If you have anything to say or do or think, be quick,” said the convict.
“I haven’t—thank you.”
The men stared into each other’s eyes, the silence broken only by Mary’s sobs.
“I hate to kill a man as brave as you in cold blood,” said Boston Blackie slowly. “You’re a brave man, Sherwood, even when you don’t hold all the cards in the game as you do inside your prison. I hate to kill you, but I’ve got to. I can’t tie and gag you. You’ll get free before we could get away from the city. I can’t risk that.
“Naturally not,” said Sherwood.
“I couldn’t trust your promise not to bother me, in a life-and-death matter like this, if I let you go alive,” continued Blackie with troubled eyes.
“I wouldn’t give it if you did.” There was no hesitation in the answer.
“Well, then.” The gun that covered the Deputy Warden’s head swayed downward till the muzzle covered his heart. “Are you ready?”
“Any time,” said Sherwood.
The hammer rose under the pressure of the convict’s finger on the trigger. Mary Dawson, crying hysterically now, turned away her face and covered her ears.
“Do you want to go, Mary, before I—I do what I must do?” asked Blackie, realizing what the scene with its inevitable end must mean to the girl. “It would be better for you to go, dear.”
“No, no,” she cried. “I want to share with you all blame for what you do. I won’t go till you do.”
Sherwood turned his eyes curiously on the woman. Sherwood knew what he would have risked for such a woman and such love.