When Egypt Went Broke - Holman Day (intellectual books to read TXT) 📗

/> In spite of his haste, he carefully scrutinized each item in this singular parade of the night, keeping near enough to the road for that purpose. It seemed like some sort of a migration. He wondered how comprehensive it was. He wanted to be sure that nobody in whom he was especially interested passed him without his knowledge. There was every kind of an equipage that would convey people or property. Nobody was talking. So far as was possible, the human beings in the procession seemed to be trying to make a secret of the affair. Mothers hushed their children when the youngsters chattered or whimpered. Men merely whispered commands to the horses.
All at once Vaniman beheld the van. It was holding a place in the parade and was moving with the decorous slowness of the other vehicles. On the driver's seat with Wagg were the two convicts. The comrade whom they had deserted waited until it had passed; then he ran out into the road and ducked along close to the rear of it.
They were coming away from the village of Egypt. To what extent had they succeeded in their rascally errand? What burden were they conveying? Vaniman could not curb his wild desire to find out. He had had plenty of experience in dodging into that van. He lifted the flap and leaped in. There was black darkness in there. He put out his hand cautiously. It touched a man. The move that the man made was a sort of fruitless struggle, indicating that his limbs were secured in some way.
Vaniman, in that crisis in his affairs, was not affected by squeamishness. He used his hands. He immediately discovered that the man was tied up hand and foot with torn cloth, strips of sheets or something of the kind. The man's only apparel was a nightshirt. Around his neck, so Vaniman's touch told him, was a leather cord to which keys were attached. Tasper Britt had told his cashier that he always carried his keys to bed with him in that fashion, and he had advised Vaniman to employ the same caution.
This prisoner in the van was certainly the magnate of Egypt. Vaniman found that a towel was bound tightly across the bearded mouth; the young man even ran his hand over the bald pate, now divested of its toupee.
There was no gold in the van. Vaniman made sure of that after he had satisfied himself as to the identity of Britt.
While the young man was endeavoring to steady his whirling thoughts, striving to plan some course of action by which he could turn the situation to his personal benefit, his attention became taken up in another quarter. Through the trap he heard the voice of the short man. "Quick! Off the road. Nobody's in sight!"
The van lurched and the front of it dipped with a violence that drove Vaniman and Britt against the end. Up came the front and the rear sagged. Then the van went bumping and swaying over uneven ground. The claw-clash of the branches of trees against the sides informed Vaniman that the men had driven into the woods.
When the vehicle halted, the young man crawled forward and huddled down into as compact a ball as he could make of himself.
He heard the three men dismounting. "I'll tell the world that this is a handy night for us, whatever it is that's going on in this burg!" It was the voice of that ever-ready spokesman, the short man. "There would have been a head at every window if we had been obliged to go teaming around all by ourselves, in the night. But they wouldn't have noticed a couple of giraffes and a hippopotamus in that procession."
"I couldn't see that they even paid any attention to those women squalling upstairs when we did the job," was the tall man's opinion. "Handy night, say you? Why, that man we braced up to and asked where was Britt's boarding house, he seemed to have so much of his own business on his mind that he wasn't wondering a mite what our business with Britt might be."
"Get busy!" said the other convict. "That business is only just beginning."
There was a stir of feet.
"Hold on!" It was the voice of Wagg, mumbling cautiously. "Tie your handkerchiefs over your faces like I'm doing."
"Right!" the short man agreed. "Always leave 'em guessing when you say good-by!"
A few moments later Wagg lifted the flap; Vaniman saw him outlined against the fog. The convicts reached in and pulled Britt out, and the flap was dropped.
"Look out!" the short man warned. "Loosen that towel only a little and hold your clutch on his gullet, bo! We're not any too far from that road, and we'll understand the good news if he'll only whisper it."
After a few moments he went on. "Man, we've got you--got you foul! You know where that gold coin is. Shut up! No argument. You tell us where it is. Then you won't get hurt. If you don't tell us, you _will_ get hurt. Get busy with your mouth!"
In spite of his abhorrence at this method of extorting the truth, Vaniman was conscious of a feeling of comradeship with the three rapscallions at that moment. They were merely seeking loot. He was seeking the re-establishment of his honor and his love. He waited in the tense silence, straining every nerve to hear. No sound came to him. He wondered whether Britt, cowed, was whispering the information.
"Get busy, I tell you!"
Evidently the prisoner was obstinate.
Minute after minute the short man labored with the captive, the snarl in his insisting voice deepening into the diapason of malevolent threat.
But Britt said no word.
Vaniman, feeling that all the prospects of his life were at stake, decided to play a waiting game. In spite of their culpable motive, the men outside were serving as his aides in the crucial moment. They were demanding information which the usurer owed to the innocent.
"Oh, very well," said the master of ceremonies. "We'll go on with the rest of the program, then. One of you bring that side lamp and light it. And help me get this towel tighter. He's going to try some squalling."
Vaniman saw the flare of the lamp past the edge of the flap. He set his teeth and decided that he would not interfere. When he heard sounds which, muffled in the towel, were like the whines and grunts of a tortured animal, he stiffened his determination to await the issue.
"Now loosen the gag and let him talk! I reckon he has found something to say."
Vaniman heard louder groans. But Britt gave out no information.
"Back with the talk-tickler! Hold it closer! The same foot! We've got a good start on that one."
The man in the van felt his gorge rising, in spite of the fact that the victim was a relentless persecutor of others. The stifled accents of agony were dreadful.
After a time the short man spoke. Into three words he put the venom of a malice that would not be gainsaid. "Now, damn you!" His tone hinted at no regret for what had gone on before; it suggested that there was more to come; it was compelling demand that the captive should employ the respite that was offered.
Britt began to babble; there was a suggestion of partial mania in his tones. Vaniman could not understand what he was saying, but the sharp questions that were interjected by the manager of the affair--the queries that gimleted for additional information--suggested the line of confession that Britt was giving forth.
"Yes--in the bank! Where in the bank? . . . I heard that, but where? . . . In the basement, hey? Well, where in the basement? . . . Concrete block hey? . . . Come across! . . . Along here with that lamp, bo! . . . Exactly where is that block?"
Through Vaniman there flooded something that was almost a delirium of derring do. He did not know just what he would be able to perform--one against three. He did not dare to wait for any farther developments in the thing. He was possessed by the frantic fear that the knaves would use their information and beat him to the treasure. That the money was somewhere in the basement of Britt Block was enough for him at that juncture. He decided that the time for stealth was past. He would proclaim the news. He would tell his story. He would trust the case to the fair judgment of men.
He scrambled forward in the van and made a hasty survey of the situation. Britt was stretched on the ground. The two convicts were kneeling side by side, bending over their captive, and the short man was still plying Britt with questions. Their backs were toward the man in the van. Wagg was kneeling at Britt's feet, holding the carriage lamp, shielding the flare with a curved palm.
The posture of all three of them invited the attack that Vaniman instantly decided on. He could not hope that he would be offered a better opportunity.
He flung aside the flap, he leaped from the opening. Spreading his knees, he landed on the convicts, a knee on each back, and then he brought his hands toward each other with all his strength, cuffing their skulls together with a resounding crack. They fell across Britt. Vaniman was on his feet while Wagg was rising; the guard's slow mind was operating ineptly on his muscles. The young man felled Wagg with a vicious blow under the ear.
The convicts, knocked senseless, were on their faces, pinning Britt to the ground. The butts of the bulldog revolvers in their hip pockets were exposed. Vaniman snatched out the weapons. He aimed one of the revolvers at Wagg, who had struggled to his knees. "Your knife! Throw it to me! Quick!"
Under the menace of the gun Wagg obeyed.
The young man pocketed the guns for a moment. He rolled the reviving convicts off Britt and slashed the prisoner's bonds and tore the towel from his face. It was in his mind to force Britt to crawl into the van. He was regarding Britt as his chief witness and principal exhibit in the exposure he proposed to lay before the people of Egypt. In the back of Vaniman's head there may have been some sort of consideration for the man who had ruined him--scruples against leaving him with those renegades who had tortured him. However, the young man was conscious of the more compelling motive--to carry Britt along with him, to force Britt, before the eyes of men, to uncover the hiding place of the treasure.
He trained his guns on the three men, backing away from them in order to have them at a safe distance. Britt was on his knees. He was staring at Vaniman with unblinking eyes in which unmistakable mania was flaming. The attack on him in his bed that night, the blow that had stunned him so that the assailants might tie him up, the ride in the strange conveyance, the dreadful uncertainty of what it was all about--these matters had wrought cruelly upon the victim's wits. The torture by the flame had further unsettled his mind. And at that moment, coming down from the heavens, so it seemed, a dead man had appeared to him.
Britt's recent experience had rendered him incapable of surveying the thing from a normal viewpoint. He saw the man whom he had disgraced by plot and perjury, the man who was buried under tons of rock, so the state had officially reported, the man to whose return after seven years of punishment Britt had been looking forward with dread. He had slept more peacefully since that tragedy had