“What does this mean? What do you want?” gasped Sir Harry as the loosened gag released his lips.
“You!” Boston Blackie’s eyes hardened into points of steel.
“Me! Who are you?”
Boston Blackie thrust his masked face close to Sir Harry’s. Through the slits in the mask, the bigamist felt rather than saw two cold eyes that seemed to bore him through and through with a message of hate and menace.
“Who am I? In spirit I am the Cushions Kid—the same Cushions Kid round whose neck you tried to put a rope to buy your worthless self a few extra months of freedom—the Cushions Kid, who has left his cell at Folsom Prison tonight to teach you, in the hour when you thought you had beaten the world, that a man who plays always pays—and in the same coin.”
Sir Harry shrank away in a frenzy of uncontrollable fear from the voice that spoke from behind Boston Blackie’s mask, and stared up at him with wide, terror-stricken eyes, scarcely able to believe what they saw.
“And these,”—with a gesture Blackie indicated the other masked men—“can you guess now who they are? There stands the Kokomo Kid, whom you induced to join you in a break and then deliberately betrayed to his death. Do you remember? You thought he was safely underground in the prison cemetery, didn’t you? He isn’t. He’s here tonight too, in spirit, to watch you pay your debts. Now do you begin to understand why you are here and what is before you—Fred the Count?”
As he heard his prison name flung at him with unutterable hatred by the mysterious man before him, Sir Harry sank on his knees with the fear of death in his heart. Whoever these men were—whatever they were—they knew him and all his prison treacheries. He thought he knew what to expect from them. With chattering teeth he pleaded piteously for his life.
“You don’t realize even yet what is before you, or you wouldn’t beg for life,” snarled Blackie in disgust. “You will live to beg for death. Listen carefully, Fred the Count. From the day you left your cell, you have been watched and followed step by step in preparation for this hour. We’re not going to kill you. That’s too quick and easy. Instead we’re sending you back to a cell to stay until they carry you to that cemetery to which you once thought it clever to send other men.
“I let the watchman on the floor there take me in the act of cracking this safe. I let him handcuff me to his wrist. Then we chloroformed him, and now I’m going to handcuff you to him and touch off the burglar-alarm. When Muir and the rest come running down, they’ll find you cuffed to the watchman, who will tell them how he caught you. You see the end now, don’t you? Safe-cracking to an ex-convict means life, and to make quite sure no mistake will be made, I’m going to put this envelope with your prison photo in one of your suit-cases. The boys up at Folsom will welcome you back, won’t they? Ah, you! begin to get it now, don’t you, Count?”
Sir Harry groaned and groveled on the floor. “You’ll learn your lesson well in the years ahead of you.”
Boston Blackie stooped and snapped on Sir Harry the handcuff dangling from the still unconscious watchman’s wrist. Then he unbound him and turning to one of his silently waiting trio said:
“Bring her in. I promised she should see him.”
From the darkness outside the door, a slight, girlish figure with face masked like the rest slipped into the room and stopped before the man on the floor. Suddenly she stooped and looked straight into his face—the face of the now pitiful wreck of a man who but an hour before had boastingly called himself Sir Harry Westwood Cameron, as he hurried toward a bride and a stolen fortune.
“All my life I shall thank God for this moment,” the girl—little Miss Happy—cried softly to the cowering man. “All my life I shall remember your face as I see it now. Until I die—if I must go on till then without the Kid—-the years will be less lonely, less hard, because of the picture of you as you are tonight which I shall always have with me, Fred the Count, you traitor. God, I know now, is just.”
She was gone as silently as she had come.
Boston Blackie pressed the burglar alarm.
“We’re done, Count,” he said. “You’re the first man I ever helped send to prison—the first man I ever knew whom I think belongs there. Courts don’t do the kind of justice we’ve done tonight. Don’t ask mercy of me. Ask it of the men who are in their graves because of you, if you dare.”
“It’s a job! It’s a frame-up! I’ll tell the truth about it,” Sir Harry screamed, raving and struggling with the desperation of utter despair.
“Tell it all to the judge. I believe you, but he won’t,” Blackie flung back at him as he slipped out the rear door behind his pals and disappeared.
When the townspeople, routed from their beds by the alarm from the Muir home, came running to the Company offices, they found Sir Harry Westwood Cameron, English lumber buyer, raging like a wild beast and screaming curses from foam-covered lips as he tried to drag the helpless watchman toward the door by a handcuff that cut them both to the bone.
Sir Harry’s trial was a short one. A jury of sunburned woodsmen heard the watchman’s story, examined the accused man’s prison photo, inspected the indorsed Muir check found in his pocket and then, after listening with smiles and covert winks to the prisoner’s wild tale of four masked conspirators who had dragged him against his will to the scene of the crime, brought in a verdict of guilty.
* * * *
Fred the Count—no longer dapper, well-dressed Sir Harry Westwood Cameron—was on the last stage of his journey back to Folsom Penitentiary. Handcuffed to a sheriff, he crouched dejectedly in the prison van as it slowly climbed the hill that shut the prison from view. As the van turned the crest of the grade, the driver stopped to rest his horses.
Fred the Count looked up. Below him, exactly as he had left it on that morning only a few short weeks before when he went out with the swaggering, self-sufficient ruthlessness of one who thinks himself master of his own fate, was the prison he had never expected to see again. The quarry gang—a group of pygmy figures in stripes—was working among the rocks. One looked up, recognized the Count and called to his fellows.
Tools were thrown to the ground; a score of striped caps were flung high in the air, and cheer after cheer of savage satisfaction floated faintly up from the convicts to the man who was going back among them to do “all of it.” It was his own world’s welcome “home” to Fred the Count.
Abject and utterly broken in spirit, the Count dropped his head on his manacled hands and sobbed aloud.
“If God is good,” he cried, “He will let the knives that are waiting for me down there get me soon. If He is merciful, He will let me die tonight.”
Boston Blackie’s prophecy was fulfilled. Fred the Count was praying for death.
CHAPTER XII
A PROBLEM IN GRAND LARCENY
“Life is like a lake on a summer day, Mary,” said Blackie dropping his tenth consecutive cigarette and twisting restlessly in the easy chair which he had drawn before the glowing grate in their San Francisco apartment. “If you don’t drop a pebble now and then, there’s never a ripple to break the monotony.”
“Fred the Count was a ripple, wasn’t he, Blackie?” asked Mary.
“For a moment, yes. But he’s safely behind the bars of grim old Folsom and is no longer of any interest to anyone but himself. My mind’s getting rusty. I need something to occupy it.”
Mary sighed faintly. She loved the quiet and peace of their home but she knew that when the restless spirit of adventure lured him, the man she loved, inevitably must answer the call.
“Diamond Frank is in town,” she suggested after a moment’s thought.
“Good,” cried Blackie. “That’s an idea! Frank always has the latest gossip from the north. I’ll ’phone him to come up and have a talk.”
An hour later the two, from the center of a pall of cigarette
smoke, were exchanging news of the hidden world in which each was a recognized leader.
“Two million dollars in gold—a truckload—is waiting for anyone smart enough to get it.”
Diamond Frank, an ace in the world of crime, paused and shook his head sadly as might an art connoisseur who contemplates a priceless treasure doomed to lie hidden forever from human eyes.
“But it can’t be done,” he added with regretful resignation. “Not a chance in the world! It’s awful, Blackie, but it’s true. I know, for I’ve tried. Think of it, pal I Enough good yellow gold to make any of us rich enough to be worth robbing, and yet a man can’t lay hands on it.”
“Why?” asked Boston Blackie.
Diamond Frank, lolling back in his chair, summed up the situation with the succinct directness of one who had given his subject painstaking study.
“On the beach at Nome it’s in iron-bound, sealed and padlocked chests guarded night and day by gunmen. Not a chance so far. Then it goes into the strong-room of that old floating tub, the Humboldt. No guards there, Blackie, but there isn’t a stateroom that gives a man a possible chance to cut through to the treasure from top, bottom or sides. The padlock on the strong-room is a double combination that unlocks with two keys, one kept by the captain and one by the purser. It is never unfastened, from Nome to Seattle. A charge of ‘soup’ would blow it off; but that, of course, is out of the question on shipboard, with the strong-room almost opposite the purser’s stateroom. At Seattle it is unloaded to a truck guarded by more gunmen. Then it goes into the First National vaults to stay. There you are I Three tons of gold unwatched on a steamer for from five to eight days—and I traveled all the way to Nome and back on the old Humboldt last fall without finding a thousand-to-one chance of laying a finger on it. It broke my heart, but I had to give it up.”
Boston Blackie lay back in his chair, thoughtfully silent.
“I should say offhand it would be far easier to lay hands on the gold than to get it past the Custom House men and safely away, after I had it,” he remarked at last.
“Jump to it if you see a chance. I’m done,” said Diamond Frank.
“Maybe I will,” said Blackie. And though he dropped the subject as if no longer interested, he sat alone till dawn, after his friend departed, mentally visualizing the treasure room of a tubby, plunging steamer plowing her way southward from the Nome beaches with a king’s ransom lodged in her steel-bound vault.
“It could be done,” he said softly to himself. “And inasmuch as James J. Clancy is president of the company that owns the Humboldt, there is the best reason in the world why Mary and I should do it. All the gold the Humboldt ever carried would not even the score we owe old ‘Eye-for-an-eye’ Jim Clancy, who identified Mary’s father as the hold-up man who robbed him years ago in Spokane—Jim found his identification had been a blunder and justified it as ‘a regrettable incident but not really a miscarriage of justice,’ for the wrongly convicted man, now dead, was,’ he said, ‘one who from his manner of life could have been no benefit to himself, his family or the world that is well rid of him.’”
Blackie’s fingers were clenched, and his eyes were cold and steely with determination as he quoted the words that had been Clancy’s epitaph to the memory of the man he had wronged.
“Yes,” he added to himself grimly, “the man who could say that of big, open-handed, kindly old Dayton Tom, is a man whom it will be a pleasant privilege to rob. We’ll do it.”
Three weeks later the Humboldt lay off the shore whose golden sands made a thriving city of the once-deserted Nome beach. At intervals, above the monotonous surf-roar, the sound of high-pitched laughter and broken bars of dance music floated faintly out across the water. The last homeward-bound steamer of the season was ready to sail, and all Nome was celebrating.
The Humboldt’s upper deck was deserted except for one passenger—a girl who leaned over the after-rail intently watching the labor of seamen who were lowering weighty, carefully guarded chests of gold from a jutting pier to small boats that were to carry them to the strong-room of the waiting ship offshore.
The girl, off guard in the safety of her solitude, watched the movement of the treasure with almost proprietary solicitude. Because of that jealously guarded gold she was a passenger on the Humboldt. Because of it there lay on her forearm, hidden by the sleeve of her traveling suit, a tight fitting bracelet a dozen times more precious to her than its weight in diamonds. Often and involuntarily her fingers slipped beneath her sleeve to caress softly the circlet they found there. It represented a difficult adventure skillfully accomplished. It was confirmatory proof of the logic of the master-mind that had set itself the seemingly impossible task of rifling the steamer’s treasure vault. It was an instrument of revenge infinitely precious to the daughter of the man the world had called “Dayton Tom.”
The boats, each with a shotgun guard idle but watchful in the stern seat, put off from the wharf and drew up beside the Humboldt. A whining cargo engine lowered a rope net to the bobbing carriers, and one by one, with infinite care, the treasure chests were swung to the steamer’s deck and piled there in ten rows, each four boxes high. Forty chests of gold—forty iron-bound storehouses of vast, illimitable power!
The boxes were counted, checked and recounted and then wheeled down the companionway to the ship’s strong-room. Inside the steel-bound vault, with guards barring the doorway against the curious, the chests were counted once again and each of their heavy seals examined by Captain McNaughton, Purser Dave Jessen of the Humboldt and the Nome manager of the express company that was guaranteeing the treasure’s safe delivery in far-away Seattle. Every seal was intact, every chest in its place; and with a sigh of relief as his responsibility ended, the express manager accepted the receipt signed jointly by the ship’s captain and the purser, for two million dollars in gold.
At a command from the Captain, a dozen or more trunks, boxes and treasure parcels intrusted to the steamer for safe-keeping by passengers, were wheeled into the strong-room and checked off the purser’s list. All were there. The Humboldt’s treasure-room was in order. With a final, sweeping glance of satisfied security, the Captain’s eye roamed the interior of the steel-lined room. Then he stepped out, pulled shut the great steel-barred door and put in place the giant padlock that guarded it. The Captain’s key turned softly in the lock. The purser’s followed it with another gentle click of hidden ratchets—and the treasure was as safe as human ingenuity could make it.
Purser Jessen, with a sigh of relief, locked his key in a secret compartment of his private safe. Captain McNaughton hid his key in the money belt that girdled his waist and never left his body night or day. Then he opened a panel in the wall above his berth and threw on an electric switch that turned a death-dealing current through the steel plate in the floor just within the strong-room door and connected, also, a series of alarms that would rouse the ship if the treasure-room door were opened so much as an inch.
“Well, that’s well off my mind!” the Captain murmured, and went on deck to direct his final preparations for sailing.
A shrieking blast came from the steamer’s siren. A score of small boats and launches, each crowded with passengers, put off from the pier. An hour later they swarmed over the Humboldt’s decks by hundreds, and the Humboldt, with a final siren blast, slowly swung her prow seaward and began her long homeward journey.
Nightfall found the girl who had watched the loading of the treasure with such interest standing alone against the after-deck rail abstractedly watching the steamer’s foamy wake fade away into the darkness of aft empty sea. On the passenger list she was registered as “Miss Marie Whitney, Chicago,” a name that cloaked the presence on the Humboldt of Mary Dawson—Boston Blackie’s Mary—able assistant of the husband for whom she was waiting now, tense and eagerly expectant, to surrender the circlet on her wrist against which her fingers lay protectingly.
A step on the deck behind her caught her ear. From the darkness a voice spoke softly.
“Mary,” it said.
The girl stirred in a revealing movement of love, joy and pride in her own well-accomplished task. Without turning her head she stretched two hands behind her and grasped the man’s eagerly.
“I have it, Blackie,” she said, speaking in a whisper. “Absolutely perfect, too! It’s on my left-wrist. Take it quickly—and oh, my dear, do be careful of it. It couldn’t possibly be replaced now. The door is wired, as you thought—alarms ring all over the steamer if it is opened. The wires run out through the upper left wainscoting of the companionway. Everything is arranged as you planned.”
“The man who said this trick couldn’t be turned didn’t know my Mary,” whispered the voice behind the girl’s head, as strong deft fingers slipped the bracelet over her wrist with a caressing touch as thrilling to her as rare wine.
“Your work is done—well done—dearest,” he said. “Take no more risks whatever. No matter what happens, neither recognize nor communicate with Lewes or with me again. With this bracelet in my hand the gold already is ours.”
“Do be careful, Blackie dear,” she urged under the stress of the natural, ever-present fear of a woman for the man she loves. “I’ve had a queer feeling—a sort of premonition—”
“Sh-h-h!” interrupted Blackie. “Someone’s coming.”
Silently as a shadow he glided away across the darkened deck.
A man’s firm, heavy step approached, and as Mary leaned across the rail and stared again in seeming idleness toward the disappearing wake beyond the steamer, a blue uniform appeared at her side, and Dave Jessen, the Humboldt’s purser, stooped and peered into her face.
The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales Page 54