The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  The doctor went back to the hospital shaking his head at the strange vagaries of his superior concerning Boston Blackie. He sent his runner, the half-witted, one-armed boy Blackie had protected on the day of the strike, for the turnkey.

  “The Deputy has ordered Boston Blackie out of the hospital,” he said when the messenger returned with the officer. “He thinks Blackie is framing something. I told him the man won’t do anything worse than die, but he’s set on moving him and so we’ll have to do it. Look’s to me as if Blackie’s sort of on the old man’s nerves since the affair of the jacket. I never knew him to worry so much about any man in the prison. He’s going to put him in with Tennessee Red, his chief stool-pigeon, and see what he can find out. The Deputy won’t have Red’s cell-partner out till tomorrow, so don’t say anything to Blackie tonight.”

  The officers separated. The Squirrel climbed back on his stool and looked out through the barred windows to the lawn, where he could see Boston Blackie laboriously dragging his hose across the grass. There was new grief in the Squirrel’s dull eyes. He had heard what the doctor told the turnkey. They were going to take Blackie away from the hospital dormitory—-Blackie, who gave the Squirrel tobacco and the inside of a loaf of bread each night—-Blackie, who always protected him when the other men teased him—Blackie, his friend. The boy’s eyes filled with tears. Blackie was the only one who liked to hear the Squirrel play his mouth-organ, and now they were going to take him away. But Blackie was smart. The doctor had said “not until tomorrow.” Maybe if the Squirrel told Blackie at dinner time what he had heard, Blackie would find some way to make them let him stay in the hospital. Slowly the ideas filtered through the haze that clouded the dull brain.

  Boston Blackie was sitting in his dormitory cell slowly chewing the crust of a half loaf of bread, from which he had hollowed out the soft inner portion that his tortured stomach couldn’t digest, when the Squirrel slipped into the cell. The boy laid his finger on his lips as Blackie started to speak.

  “They mustn’t know I’m here,” he said. “I heard what the doctor told the screw” (turnkey). “They’re going to take you out of the hospital.”

  Boston Blackie’s loaf fell to the floor.

  “When, little Squirrel, when?” he whispered hoarsely, gripping the boy by the shoulder. A great fear showed in the convict’s eyes.

  “Tomorrow, when the Deputy gets a place ready for you with Tennessee Red,” the boy answered.

  “Thank God, I’ve one more night. One night must be enough.” Blackie, scarcely aware that he was voicing his mind, sank back in relief so intense it left his whole body dripping with perspiration. A new danger occurred to him.

  “What else did the doctor say, little Squirrel?” he asked.

  “He said the Deputy thinks you are framing something, but it isn’t so because you’re going to die in three months. Are you going to die in three months, Blackie?”

  “No, not in three months, little Squirrel,” answered Blackie, and then softly to himself he added: “—but maybe tonight.” He turned again to the boy, his mind swiftly grappling with the details of the task before him, which must be done now in a single night.

  “Will you play your mouth organ for me tonight, Squirrel?” he asked. “Will you play it all the time from lock-up till the lights go out? All the time, Squirrel, and loud so I can hear it plain. Here’s a sack of tobacco for you. You won’t forget? All the time, and loud.”

  “Yes, all the time and loud,” the boy repeated, dog-like devotion in his eyes.

  Boston Blackie mopped a forehead dripping with cold perspiration. All his hopes of freedom depended on a half-witted boy and his mouth-organ.

  Boston Blackie’s mind that afternoon was a jumble of torturing doubts, painstaking calculation and unflinching resolution. The Deputy Warden’s intuition had not misled him. Blackie had planned an escape, and his every act for weeks had been taken with that sole purpose in view. His plan required that he sleep in the hospital dormitory used for tubercular patients and others unfit for the cell-houses, but not bedridden. To accomplish this he diluted prison laundry soap, strong with lye, and drank it day after day until it ruined his stomach and left him unable to digest my food but hard baked crusts of bread. The lye caused him excruciating anguish, but in ten days it accomplished its purpose. Blackie had been ordered to the hospital dormitory to be put on a diet and given treatment for his puzzling stomach trouble. He had been there two months and was still using the lye to prevent the possibility of being turned back to his old quarters. He had wrecked his physique, but each night saw him a step nearer his goal.

  He wasn’t ready to make his bid for freedom, but the Deputy with uncanny divination had given him no choice. He must make the attempt that night or never.

  First he took a spade and laboriously began to dig around the rose bushes that flanked the lawn. No one saw him uncover a rudely improvised saw made with his hoe file from a steel knife stolen from the kitchen. The saw and a tobacco sack containing a single five dollar bill were quickly hidden in his blouse. The bill had come from Mary in the cover of a book sent him according to instructions delivered by a discharged convict.

  Next he asked permission to air his blankets on the clothesline in the lower yard. The toolhouse in which his garden implements were kept was nearby. From beneath its floor he took the treasures that had cost him the hardest work and greatest risk—a civilian pair of trousers, a blue shirt and a mackinaw coat made from a blanket, and a cap. It had taken him one full month to steal them from the tailor shop where the clothes of the new arrivals were kept after they received their prison stripes. The trousers Blackie put on under his striped ones, pinning up the legs well out of sight. When his blankets went back to his cell, the coat, shirt and cap were hidden in them.

  A half hour before lock-up time Blackie rolled up his garden hose and carried it to the toolhouse. Once within its doors and alone, he cut off six feet of the hose and wound it around his body, tying it securely in place. Next from a pile of rubbish he unearthed a single rubber glove which he had filched one day from the hospital dispensary. He had tried in vain to get its mate. Two hundred feet of heavy twine from the mill completed the list of his preparations.

  It would have puzzled even a man as shrewd as Martin Sherwood to determine how Boston Blackie planned to escape from San Gregorio Penitentiary with the motley array of contraband he had gathered together. The hospital dormitory where he celled was on the top floor of a detached building that stood alone in the yard, fully a hundred feet from the wall that surrounded the prison. It was conceivably possible for a man with even such a makeshift saw as Blackie’s to cut the bars of his window and escape from his cell, but freedom from his cell was a long step from real freedom. There still remained the thirty-foot wall to be scaled—a wall guarded on top by a gun-guard in a watch tower and patrolled at the bottom all night by other armed guards.

  At five o’clock Boston Blackie and the other hospital inmates were locked in their cells for the night. Thereafter, twice each hour, a guard was scheduled to pass and inspect the cells. At five minutes past five the Squirrel, faithful to his promise, began to play on his mouth-organ.

  And as the boy played, Blackie chipped away the soap and lampblack with which he had plugged a half-sawed window bar and cut at it with his pitifully inadequate saw in frantic haste. The noise of the mouth organ drowned the gentle rasping of the saw, a vitally necessary precaution.

  A mirror hung on the wall near the door warned Blackie of the approach of the guard each time he made his rounds. Hour after hour the Squirrel played, and hour after hour Blackie sawed. He had spent a month and a half sawing through the first bar and halfway through the second. Tonight in four hours he must complete the task, for at nine o’clock “lights out” would sound throughout the prison, and silence would settle over the dormitory, making further work on the bar impossible.
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  The saw blade cut into his hands and tore his finger tips. His arms were numb with pain. The sing-song rasping seemed like a voice crying out a warning to the guards. The saw grew hot, and again and again he had to cool it in the water bucket. Often it seemed as if he couldn’t drive his tortured muscles another second, but he conjured into his mind a picture of Martin Sherwood’s face with the teeth gleaming in a white line as he bent over a form in the straight-jacket. Sheer will power kept the saw moving then, and so slowly it was almost imperceptible; but surely, nevertheless, it bit through the steel that seemed a living thing bent on binding Blackie to years of prison slavery and punishment.

  At last it was done! With fifteen precious minutes to spare, the saw grated through the outer rim of rust and left the bar severed. With two bars cut and bent outward, Blackie knew he could squeeze his body through the window to the wide ledge outside and four stories above the guarded courtyard below. He swept the glistening filings into his water bucket, hid the saw, worn now smooth as a knife, and tumbled on his bunk a quivering wreck.

  The prison bell tolled out nine; the lights winked out; and silence settled over the dormitory.

  At one o’clock Blackie waited for the guard to pass, and then, with a half hour at his disposal, slipped out of his convict clothes and fashioned them into a dummy which he covered with blankets to resemble a sleeping man.

  He dressed in his civilian clothes, with his six-foot length of hose still coiled about his body. He tucked his one glove carefully into his breast beside the ball of twine. Then he pulled out one of the heavy legs of his stool and tied it across his back. His preparations were complete. He took another stool leg and, using it as a lever, bent the severed bars straight out. A moment later he stood outside on the window ledge.

  Below him the wall fell away sheer for four stories. Six feet above his head the rain-gutter marked the level of the flat roof. So far, Blackie had followed in the footsteps of other men who had tried to escape. But the others, once free from their cells, had gone down, each to be shot to death as he lurked in the courtyard vainly seeking a means to cross the towering wall that barred him in.

  Instead of going down, Blackie went up. He took off his shoes and hung them about his neck. With fingers and toes clutching the bricks that jutted out a few inches around the window coping, he climbed slowly and with infinite caution upward. A single slip, the slightest misstep, and Martin Sherwood would smile and light a cigar in the morning when they carried his body in.

  Inch by inch Blackie raised himself, pressing his body close to the wall to keep from overbalancing. For the first time he realized his physical weakness. His arms were like dead things, and unresponsive to the iron will that commanded them. Again and again, in the agony of forcing his wasted muscles to obedience, he thought of releasing his clutch and falling to a quick death—relief. But always, in the wake of that thought, Martin Sherwood’s face danced before his eyes, and the cruel satisfaction of the Deputy nerved Blackie to climb on.

  At last his groping, bloody fingers clutched the edge of the roof gutter. He faced the last crucial task. He must now swing his feet clear and raise himself to the roof by his arms alone—no great feat for a well man but, to the ill and exhausted convict, one that taxed even his iron resolution to the last atom of its resource.

  Somehow he did it and lay at last safe on the roof, blinking back at the stars, which hung so low it seemed he could reach up and touch them. He lay still, thoughtlessly content, until the chiming prison bell forced on his wandering mind the realization that a precious half hour was gone, leaving him still inside the walls that barred the road to Mary.

  Blackie rose and crept silently to the edge of the roof nearest the wall. He was high above that stone barricade, from which he was separated by a full hundred feet of space. Nothing, apparently, spanned that impassable gap, and yet when one looked again, something did span it—two glistening copper wires that ran down from the roof at a sharp angle to a pole outside the wall above which they hung a full twenty feet. They were uninsulated, live wires which fed the prison machinery and lighting system with a current that was death to whatever touched them—yet they were the key to Boston Blackie’s plan of escape.

  Carefully he unwound the length of rubber hose from about his body. Carefully he laid the insulating rubber over the strands of shining metal. With infinite pains he bound and rebound the stool leg to the dangling length of rubber that hung beneath them. The result was a crazily insecure trapeze which swung under wires, the touch of which was fatal.

  Then Boston Blackie pulled out his ball of jute twine and attached it to a brick chimney, the only thing upright and secure in sight. He glanced toward the wall far beneath him, where a sleepy guard dozed in his tower; then Blackie unhesitatingly seated himself on the bar of his improvised trapeze. With his back toward the wall, he swung clear of the roof and began to slide down the wires, regulating his speed with the cord on the chimney.

  The light wires swayed and sagged but supported his weight. Yard by yard he let himself down. Half the perilous journey through the air was accomplished, and he was directly over the wall, when the chimney cord that kept him from shooting madly backward down the incline suddenly snapped. The hose trapeze shot downward at headlong speed. Instinctively Boston Blackie reached up with both hands to seize the wires and check his fall.

  Even as he reached, realization of the certain death they carried flashed through his brain. He stayed one hand within inches of the wires. With the other—the one covered with his single rubber glove—he caught one of the wires and gradually checked his fall. Slowly he slid over the wall and down toward the pole outside the prison inclosure. When its shadow warned him he had almost reached it, he stopped himself and turning his head, studied the network of wires with deep caution. Seeing no way of avoiding their death-dealing touch if he tried to work his way through them and clamber down the pole, he slipped from his seat on the trapeze, hung by his hands for the fraction of a second and dropped.

  The fall jarred him from head to foot but left him crouching by the light pole—uninjured and outside the walls.

  For five minutes he lay motionless, watching for any sign of an alarm from the walls. None came; he was free.

  Slowly and on his stomach, Indian fashion, Blackie worked his way out from San Gregorio and across the sweet smelling fields that led toward the world of free men. When the last watch tower was behind him, he rose to his feet and raised his arms toward the blinking and kindly stars in a fervent but unspoken prayer of thanksgiving. He had done the impossible. He had escaped from the hitherto unbeatable prison ruled by Martin Sherwood.

  CHAPTER XXVII

  TRAPPED

  Just as the morning bell was rousing the sleepy cell-houses at San Gregorio to another weary day of serfdom, a gaunt wraith of a man climbed a rear stairway to a tiny apartment on Laguna Street, San Francisco. The early morning fog added to his ghostlike appearance as he softly rapped at the bedroom window with the knock that is the open sesame of the underworld. The woman sleeping within awoke instantly with a start, but lay quiet, fearing she still dreamed, for in her dream she had been with Boston Blackie, her husband.

  Again she heard the soft rap at the window. She sprang to the sash, looked out and threw it open, seizing in her arms the scarecrow of a man who stood there and dragging him inside.

  “Mary!” he cried.

  “Blackie!” she answered.

  All the endearments of all the languages accentuated a hundredfold were in the two words.

  “God in Heaven, I thank you,” she whispered, falling to her knees with Blackie’s stained and haggard face clasped to her breast.

  * * * *

  “Boston Blackie is missing from his cell in the hospital, sir. He sawed two window bars and got out during the night. He left his clothes rolled into a dummy on his bunk, and the night guard did
n’t discover it until the morning count a moment ago. But he can’t be far away. He couldn’t have got over the wall and must be hidden somewhere about the prison, the night captain thinks. He has ordered the whole force out to make a search.”

  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.”