by Jack Boyle
Boston Blackie’s face was strangely gray. The hammer of the revolver rose, hesitated, fell—then rose again. The Deputy, his gaze returning from the woman’s face, looked into the gun unflinchingly and in silence. Another pause freighted with that sort of tension that crumbles the strongest; then slowly the convict let the muzzle of his weapon drop below the heart of the man he faced.
“Sherwood,” he said in a voice that broke between his words, “I hate you as I hate no living man, but I cant kill you as you stand before me unarmed and helpless. I’m going to give you a chance for your life.” He stepped backward and picked up the Deputy Warden’s revolver. He pushed a table between himself and the man he couldn’t kill. He laid the revolvers side by side on it, one pointing toward him, the other toward Sherwood. The clock on the mantel showed three minutes of the hour.
“Sherwood,” he said, “in three minutes that clock will strike. I’m exactly as far from the guns as you. On the first stroke of the clock we’ll reach together for them—and the quickest hand wins.”
Martin Sherwood studied Boston Blackie’s face with something in his eyes no other man had ever seen there. He glanced toward the guns on the table. It was true he was exactly as near them as the convict. Nothing prevented him from reaching now, and firing at the first touch of his finger on the trigger. Blackie deliberately had surrendered his irresistible advantage to give him, Martin Sherwood, his prison torturer, an even chance for life. For the first time the Deputy’s eyes were unsteady and his voice throaty and shaken.
“I won’t bargain with you, Blackie,” he said.
“You’re afraid to risk an even break?”
“You know I’m not,” Sherwood answered, his gaze turning once more to the woman who stood by the door, staring panic-stricken. It was plain that the issue to be decided in that room was life or death to her as well as to the men.
Boston Blackie reached toward his gun, hoping the Deputy Warden would do likewise and end, in one quick exchange of shots, the strain he knew was breaking his nerve. Sherwood let Blackie recover his weapon without moving a muscle. Once more the convict’s revolver rose till it covered Martin Sherwood’s heart. They stood again as they had been, the Deputy at the mercy of the escaped prisoner.
Seconds passed, then minutes, without a word or a motion on either side of the table over which the triangular tragedy was being settled not at all as any of those concerned had planned. The strain was unbearable. The muscles of the convict’s throat twitched. His face was drawn and distorted.
“Pick up that gun and defend yourself,” he cried.
“No,” shouted Sherwood, the calm which his mighty will had until then sustained snapping like an over-tightened violin-string.
“You want to make me feel myself a murderer,” cried Blackie in anguish. “Why didn’t I give you bullet for bullet when you came in the door? I could have killed you then. Now I can’t unless you’ll fight. Once more I ask you, will you take an even break?”
“No,” cried Sherwood again.
With a great cry—the cry of a strong man broken and beaten—Boston Blackie threw his gun upon the floor.
“You win, Sherwood,” he sobbed, losing self-control completely for the first time in a life of daily hazards. “You’ve beaten me.”
He staggered drunkenly toward Mary and folded her in his arms.
“I tried to force myself to pull the trigger by thinking of the life we hoped for together, dear, but I couldn’t do it,” he moaned brokenly. “I’ll go back with him now. Everything is over.”
“I’m glad now you didn’t, dear,” she cried, clinging to him. “It would have been murder. I don’t want you to do that, even to save our happiness. But I’ll wait for you, dear one, wait till your time is done and you come back to me again.”
Boston Blackie straightened his shoulders and turning to Sherwood, held out his wrists for the hand, cuffs.
“Come, come,” he urged. “For God’s sake, don’t prolong this. Don’t stand there gloating. Take me away.”
Martin Sherwood, with something strangely new transfiguring the face Boston Blackie knew and hated, reached to the table and picked up his gun slowly. Just as slowly he dropped it into his pocket. He looked into the two grief-racked faces before him, long and silently.
“I’m sorry to have disturbed you folks,” he said quietly at last. “I came here looking for an escaped convict named Boston Blackie. I have found only you, Miss Collins, and your mother. I’m sorry my misinformation has subjected you both to annoyance. The police officers who are outside”—the Deputy Warden opened a crack in the window curtain and pointed out to the dim shapes in the darkness—“and who surround this house, will be withdrawn at once. Had Boston Blackie been in this room, and had he by some mischance killed me, his shot would have brought a dozen men armed with sawed-off shotguns. Escape for him was absolutely impossible. I saw to that before I entered here alone to capture him. But it all has been a blunder. The man I wanted to take back to prison is not here, and I can only hope my apology will be accepted.”
Blackie stared at him with blazing, unbelieving eyes. From Mary came a cry in which all the pent-up anguish of the lifetime that had been lived in the last half-hour found sudden relief.
“Good night, folks,” said Martin Sherwood, offering Boston Blackie his hand. The convict caught it in his own, and the men looked into each other’s eyes for a second. Then the Deputy Warden went out and closed the door behind him.
Mary sprang into Blackie’s arms, and they dropped together into a chair, dazed with a happiness greater than either had ever known.
“He is a man,” said Blackie. “He is a man even though he’s a copper.”
Martin Sherwood let himself out of the house and beckoned the cordon of police to him as he looked back at the windows of the attic rooms and spoke softly to himself.
“He is a man,” he said. “He is a man, even though he is a convict.”
It was the greatest praise and the greatest concession either had ever made to another man.
Three days later a steamer passed out through the Golden Gate. On the upper deck were a man and a woman, hand in hand, with eyes misty with happiness—Boston Blackie and his Mary.
Originally published in 1919
Cover design by Andrea Worthington
ISBN: 978-1-4976-7240-6
This 2014 edition published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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