by Max Brand
“I only want to go near once,” said Bill Gregg. “I just want to find out if the girl is there.”
“Go break in on ’em?”
“Break in! Ronicky, that’s burglary!”
“Sure it is.”
“Ill just ask for Caroline Smith at the door.”
“Try it.”
The irony made Bill Gregg stop in the very act of leaving and glance back. But he went on again resolutely and stamped up the steps to the front door of the house.
It was opened to him almost at once by a woman, for Bill’s hat come off. For a moment he was explaining. Then there was a pause in his gestures, as she made the reply. Finally he spoke again, but was cut short by the loud banging of the door.
Bill Gregg drew himself up rigidly and slowly replaced the hat on his head. If a man had turned that trick on him, a .45-caliber slug would have gone crashing through the door in search of him to teach him a Westerner’s opinion of such manners.
Ronicky Doone could not help smiling to himself, as he saw Bill Gregg stump stiffly down the stairs, limping a little on his wounded leg, and come back with a grave dignity to the starting point. He was still crimson to the roots of his hair.
“Let’s start,” he said. “If that happens again I’ll be doing a couple of murders in this here little town and getting myself hung.”
“What happened?”
“An old hag jerked open the door after I rang the bell. I asked her nice and polite if a lady named Caroline Smith was in the house? ‘No,’ says she, ‘and if she was, what’s that to you?’ I told her I’d come a long ways to see Caroline. ‘Then go a long ways back without seeing Caroline,’ says this withered old witch, and she banged the door right in my face. Man, I’m still seeing red. Them words of the old woman were whips, and every one of them sure took off the hide. I used to think that old lady Moore in Martindale was a pretty nasty talker, but this one laid over her a mile. But we’re beat, Ronicky. You couldn’t get by that old woman with a thousand men.”
“Maybe not,” said Ronicky Doone, “but we’re going to try. Did you look across the street and see a sign a while ago?”
“Which side?”
“Side right opposite Caroline’s house.”
“Sure. ‘Room To Rent.’”
“I thought so. Then that’s our room.”
“Eh?”
“That’s our room, partner, and right at the front window over the street one of us is going to keep watch day and night, till we make sure that Caroline Smith don’t live in that house. Is that right?”
“That’s a great idea!” He started away from the fence.
“Wait!” Ronicky caught him by the shoulder and held him back. “We’ll wait till night and then go and get that room. If Caroline is in the house yonder, and they know we’re looking for her, it’s easy that she won’t be allowed to come out the front of the house so long as we’re perched up at the window, waiting to see her. We’ll come back tonight and start waiting.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Two Apparitions
They found that the room in the house on Beekman Place, opposite that which they felt covered their quarry, could be secured, and they were shown to it by a quiet old gentlewoman, found a big double room that ran across the whole length of the house. From the back it looked down on the lights glimmering on the black East River and across to the flare of Brooklyn; to the left the whole arc of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge was exposed. In front the windows overlooked Beekman Place and were directly opposite, the front of the house to which the taxi driver had gone that afternoon.
Here they took up the vigil. For four hours one of the two sat with eyes never moving from the street and the windows of the house across the street; and then he left the post, and the other took it.
It was vastly wearying work. Very few vehicles came into the light of the street lamp beneath them, and every person who dismounted from one of them had to be scrutinized with painful diligence.
Once a girl, young and slender and sprightly, stepped out of a taxi, about ten o’clock at night, and ran lightly up the steps of the house. Ronicky caught his friend by the shoulders and dragged him to the window. “There she is now!” he exclaimed.
But the eye of the lover, even though the girl was in a dim light, could not he deceived. The moment he caught her profile, as she turned in opening the door, Bill Gregg shook his head. “That’s not the one. She’s all different, a pile different, Ronicky.”
Ronicky sighed. “I thought we had her,” he said. “Go on back to sleep. I’ll call you again if anything happens.”
But nothing more happened that night, though even in the dull, ghost hours of the early morning they did not relax their vigil. But all the next day there was still no sign of Caroline Smith in the house across the street; no face like hers ever appeared at the windows. Apparently the place was a harmless rooming house of fairly good quality. Not a sign of Caroline Smith appeared even during the second day. By this time the nerves of the two watchers were shattered by the constant strain, and the monotonous view from the front window was beginning to madden them.
“It’s proof that she ain’t yonder,” said Bill Gregg. “Here’s two days gone, and not a sign of her yet. It sure means that she ain’t in that house, unless she’s sick in bed.” And he grew pale at the thought.
“Partner,” said Ronicky Doone, “if they are trying to keep her away from us they sure have the sense to keep her under cover for as long as two days. Ain’t that right? It looks pretty bad for us, but I’m staying here for one solid week, anyway. It’s just about our last chance, Bill. We’ve done our hunting pretty near as well as we could. If we don’t land her this trip, I’m about ready to give up.”
Bill Gregg sadly agreed that this was their last chance and they must play it to the limit. One week was decided on as a fair test. If, at the end of that time, Caroline Smith did not come out of the house across the street they could conclude that she did not stay there. And then there would be nothing for it but to take the first train back West.
The third day passed and the fourth, dreary, dreary days of unfaltering vigilance on the part of the two watchers. And on the fifth morning even Ronicky Doone sat with his head in his hands at the window, peering through the slit between the drawn curtains which sheltered him from being observed at his spying. When he called out softly, the sound brought Gregg, with one long leap out of the chair where he was sleeping, to the window. There could be no shadow of a doubt about it. There stood Caroline Smith in the door of the house!
She closed the door behind her and, walking to the top of the steps, paused there and looked up and down the street.
Bill Gregg groaned, snatched his hat and plunged through the door, and Ronicky heard the brief thunder of his feet down the first flight of stairs, then the heavy thumps, as he raced around the landing. He was able to trace him down all the three flights of steps to the bottom.
And so swift was that descent that, when the girl, idling down the steps across the street, came onto the sidewalk, Bill Gregg rushed out from the other side and ran toward her.
They made a strange picture as they came to a halt at the same instant, the girl shrinking back in apparent fear of the man, and Bill Gregg stopping by that same show of fear, as though by a blow in the face. There was such a contrast between the two figures that Ronicky Doone might have laughed, had he not been shaking his head with sympathy for Bill Gregg.
For never had the miner seemed so clumsily big and gaunt, never had his clothes seemed so unpressed and shapeless, while his soft gray hat, to which he still clung religiously, appeared hopelessly out of place in contrast with the slim prettiness of the girl. She wore a black straw hat, turned back from her face, with a single big red flower at the side of it; her dress was a tailored gray tweed. The same distinction between their clothes was in their faces, the finely modeled prettiness of her features and the big, careless chiseling of the features of Bill Gregg.
Ronicky
Doone did not wonder that, after her first fear, her gesture was one of disdain and surprise.
Bill Gregg had dragged the hat from his head, and the wind lifted his long black hair and made it wild. He went a long, slow step closer to her, with both his hands outstretched.
A strange scene for a street, and Ronicky Doone saw the girl flash a glance over her shoulder and back to the house from which she had just come. Ronicky Doone followed that glance, and he saw, all hidden save the profile of the face, a man standing at an opposite window and smiling scornfully down at that picture in the street.
What a face it was! Never in his life had Ronicky Doone seen a man who, in one instant, filled him with such fear and hatred, such loathing and such dread, such scorn and such terror. The nose was hooked like the nose of a bird of prey; the eyes were long and slanting like those of an Oriental. The face was thin, almost fleshless, so that the bony jaw stood out like the jaw of a death’s-head.
As for the girl, the sight of that onlooker seemed to fill her with a new terror. She shrank back from Bill Gregg until her shoulders were almost pressed against the wall of the house. And Ronicky saw her head shake, as she denied Bill the right of advancing farther. Still he pleaded, and still she ordered him away. Finally Bill Gregg drew himself up and bowed to her and turned on his heel.
The girl hesitated a moment. It seemed to Ronicky, in spite of the fact that she had just driven Bill Gregg away, as if she were on the verge of following him to bring him back. For she made a slight outward gesture with one hand.
If this were in her mind, however, it vanished instantly. She turned with a shudder and hurried away down the street.
As for Bill Gregg he bore himself straight as a soldier and came back across the pavement, but it was the erectness of a soldier who has met with a crushing defeat and only preserves an outward resolution, while all the spirit within is crushed.
Ronicky Doone turned gloomily away from the window and listened to the progress of Gregg up the stairs. What a contrast between the ascent and the descent! He had literally flown down. Now his heels clumped out a slow and regular death march, as he came back to the room.
When Gregg opened the door Ronicky Doone blinked and drew in a deep breath at the sight of the poor fellow’s face. Gregg had known before that he truly loved this girl whom he had never seen, but he had never dreamed what the strength of that love was. Now, in the very moment of seeing his dream of the girl turned into flesh and blood, he had lost her, and there was something like death in the face of the big miner as he dropped his hat on the floor and sank into a chair.
After that he did not move so much as a finger from the position into which he had fallen limply. His legs were twisted awkwardly, sprawling across the floor in front of him; one long arm dragged down toward the floor, as if there was no strength in it to support the weight of the labor-hardened hands; his chin was fallen against his breast.
When Ronicky Doone crossed to him and laid a kind hand on his shoulder he did not look up. “It’s ended,” said Bill Gregg faintly. “Now we hit the back trail and forget all about this.” He added with a faint attempt at cynicism: “I’ve just wasted a pile of good money-making time from the mine, that’s all.”
“H’m!” said Ronicky Doone. “Bill, look me in the eye and tell me, man to man, that you’re a liar!” He added: “Can you ever be happy without her, man?”
The cruelty of that speech made Gregg flush and look up sharply. This was exactly what Ronicky Doone wanted.
“I guess they ain’t any use talking about that part of it,” said Gregg huskily.
“Ain’t there? That’s where you and me don’t agree! Why, Bill, look at the way things have gone! You start out with a photograph of a girl. Now you’ve followed her, found her name, tracked her clear across the continent and know her street address, and you’ve given her a chance to see your own face. Ain’t that something done? After you’ve done all that are you going to give up now? Not you, Bill! You’re going to buck up and go ahead full steam. Eh?”
Bill Gregg smiled sourly. “D’you know what she said when I come rushing up and saying: ‘I’m Bill Gregg!’ D’you know what she said?”
“Well?”
“‘Bill Gregg?’ she says. ‘I don’t remember any such name!’
“That took the wind out of me. I only had enough left to say: ‘The gent that was writing those papers to the correspondence school to you from the West, the one you sent your picture to and—’
“‘Sent my picture to!’ she says and looks as if the ground had opened under her feet. ‘You’re mad!’ she says. And then she looks back over her shoulder as much as to wish she was safe back in her house!”
“D’you know why she looked back over her shoulder?”
“Just for the reason I told you.”
“No, Bill. There was a gent standing up there at a window watching her and how she acted. He’s the gent that kept her from writing to you and signing her name. He’s the one who’s kept her in that house. He’s the one that knew we were here watching all the time, that sent out the girl with exact orders how she should act if you was to come out and speak to her when you seen her! Bill, what that girl told you didn’t come out of her own head. It come out of the head of the gent across the way. When you turned your back on her she looked like she’d run after you and try to explain. But the fear of that fellow up in the window was too much for her, and she didn’t dare. Bill, to get at the girl you got to get that gent I seen grinning from the window.”
“Grinning?” asked Bill Gregg, grinding his teeth and starting from his chair. “Was the skunk laughing at me?”
“Sure! Every minute.”
Bill Gregg groaned. “I’ll smash every bone in his ugly head.”
“Shake!” said Ronicky Doone. “That’s the sort of talk I wanted to hear, and I’ll help, Bill. Unless I’m away wrong, it’ll take the best that you and me can do, working together, to put that gent down!”
CHAPTER NINE
A Bold Venture
But how to reach that man of the smile and the sneer, how, above all, to make sure that he was really the power controlling Caroline Smith, were problems which could not be solved in a moment.
Bill Gregg contributed one helpful idea. “We’ve waited a week to see her; now that we’ve seen her let’s keep on waiting,” he said, and Ronicky agreed.
They resumed the vigil, but it had already been prolonged for such a length of time that it was impossible to keep it as strictly as it had been observed before. Bill Gregg, outworn by the strain of the long watching and the shock of the disappointment of that day, went completely to pieces and in the early evening fell asleep. But Ronicky Doone went out for a light dinner and came back after dark, refreshed and eager for action, only to find that Bill Gregg was incapable of being roused. He slept like a dead man.
Ronicky went to the window and sat alone. Few of the roomers were home in the house opposite. They were out for the evening, or for dinner, at least, and the face of the building was dark and cold, the light from the street lamp glinting unevenly on the windowpanes. He had sat there staring at the old house so many hours in the past that it was beginning to be like a face to him, to be studied as one might study a human being. And the people it sheltered, the old hag who kept the door, the sneering man and Caroline Smith, were to the house like the thoughts behind a man’s face, an inscrutable face. But, if one cannot pry behind the mask of the human, at least it is possible to enter a house and find—
At this point in his thoughts Ronicky Doone rose with a quickening pulse. Suppose he, alone, entered that house tonight by stealth, like a burglar, and found what he could find?
He brushed the idea away. Instantly it returned to him. The danger of the thing, and danger there certainly would be in the vicinity of him of the sardonic profile, appealed to him more and more keenly. Moreover, he must go alone. The heavy-footed Gregg would be a poor helpmate on such an errand of stealth.
Ronicky turned awa
y from the window, turned back to it and looked once more at the tall front of the building opposite; then he started to get ready for the expedition.
The preparations were simple. He put on a pair of low shoes, very light and with rubber heels. In them he could move with the softness and the speed of a cat. Next he dressed in a dark-gray suit, knowing that this is the color hardest to see at night. His old felt hat he had discarded long before in favor of the prevailing style of the average New Yorker. For this night expedition he put on a cap which drew easily over his ears and had a long visor, shadowing the upper part of his face. Since it might be necessary to remain as invisible as possible, he obscured the last bit of white that showed in his costume, with a black neck scarf.
Then he looked in the glass. A lean face looked back at him, the eyes obscured under the cap, a stern, resolute face, with a distinct threat about it. He hardly recognized himself in the face in the glass.
He went to his suit case and brought out his favorite revolver. It was a long and ponderous weapon to be hidden beneath his clothes, but to Ronicky Doone that gun was a friend well tried in many an adventure. His fingers went deftly over it. It literally fell to pieces at his touch, and he examined it cautiously and carefully in all its parts, looking to the cartridges before he assembled the weapon again. For, if it became necessary to shoot this evening, it would be necessary to shoot to kill.
He then strolled down the street, passing the house opposite, with a close scrutiny. A narrow, paved sidewalk ran between it and the house on its right, and all the windows opening on this small court were dark. Moreover, the house which was his quarry was set back several feet from the street, an indentation which would completely hide him from anyone who looked from the street. Ronicky made up his mind at once. He went to the end of the block, crossed over and, turning back on the far side of the street, slipped into the opening between the houses.