The Black Bag - Louis Joseph Vance (best reads of all time txt) 📗

walking slowly, side by side; Hobbs, for the

first time caught off his guard, had dropped behind more than half a long

block. But now Kirkwood’s quick sidelong glance discovered the mate in the

act of taking alarm and quickening his pace. None the less the American was

at the time barely conscious of anything other than a wholly unexpected

furtive pressure of the girl’s gloved fingers on his own.

 

“Good-by,” she whispered.

 

He caught at her hand, protesting. “Dorothy—!”

 

“Good-by,” she repeated breathlessly, with a queer little catch in her

voice. “God be with you, Philip, and—and send you safely back to me….”

 

And she was running away.

 

Dumfounded with dismay, seeing in a flash how all his plans might be set at

naught by this her unforeseen insubordination, he took a step or two after

her; but she was fleet of foot, and, remembering Hobbs, he halted.

 

By this time the mate, too, was running; Kirkwood could hear the heavy

pounding of his clumsy feet. Already Dorothy had almost gained the farther

corner; as she whisked round it with a flutter of skirts, Kirkwood dodged

hastily behind a gate-post. A thought later, Hobbs appeared, head down,

chest out, eyes straining for sight of his quarry, pelting along for dear

life.

 

As, rounding the corner, he stretched out in swifter stride, Kirkwood was

inspired to put a spoke in his wheel; and a foot thrust suddenly out from

behind the gate-post accomplished his purpose with more success than he

had dared anticipate. Stumbling, the mate plunged headlong, arms and legs

asprawl; and the momentum of his pace, though checked, carried him along

the sidewalk, face downwards, a full yard ere he could stay himself.

 

Kirkwood stepped out of the gateway and sheered off as Hobbs picked

himself up; something which he did rather slowly, as if in a daze, without

comprehension of the cause of his misfortune. And for a moment he stood

pulling his wits together and swaying as though on the point of resuming

his rudely interrupted chase; when the noise of Kirkwood’s heels brought

him about face in a twinkling.

 

“Ow, it’s you, eh!” he snarled in a temper as vicious as his countenance;

and both of these were much the worse for wear and tear.

 

“Myself,” admitted Kirkwood fairly; and then, in a gleam of humor: “Weren’t

you looking for me?”

 

His rage seemed to take the little Cockney and shake him by the throat; he

trembled from head to foot, his face shockingly congested, and spat out

dust and fragments of lurid blasphemy like an infuriated cat.

 

Of a sudden, “W’ere’s the gel?” he sputtered thickly as his quick shifting

eyes for the first time noted Dorothy’s absence.

 

“Miss Calendar has other business—none with you. I’ve taken the liberty of

stopping you because I have a word or two—”

 

“Ow, you ‘ave, ‘ave you? Gawd strike me blind, but I’ve a word for you,

too!… ‘And over that bag—and look nippy, or I’ll myke you pye for w’at

you’ve done to me … I’ll myke you pye!” he iterated hoarsely, edging

closer. “‘And it over or—”

 

“You’ve got another guess—” Kirkwood began, but saved his breath in

deference to an imperative demand on him for instant defensive action.

 

To some extent he had underestimated the brute courage of the fellow, the

violent, desperate courage that is distilled of anger in men of his kind.

Despising him, deeming him incapable of any overt act of villainy, Kirkwood

had been a little less wary than he would have been with Calendar or

Mulready. Hobbs had seemed more of the craven type which Stryker graced so

conspicuously. But now the American was to be taught discrimination, to

learn that if Stryker’s nature was like a snake’s for low cunning and

deviousness, Hobbs’ soul was the soul of a viper.

 

Almost imperceptibly he had advanced upon Kirkwood; almost insensibly his

right hand had moved toward his chest; now, with a movement marvelously

deft, it had slipped in and out of his breast pocket. And a six-inch blade

of tarnished steel was winging toward Kirkwood’s throat with the speed of

light.

 

Instinctively he stepped back; as instinctively he guarded with his right

forearm, lifting the hand that held the satchel. The knife, catching in his

sleeve, scratched the arm beneath painfully, and simultaneously was twisted

from the mate’s grasp, while in his surprise Kirkwood’s grip on the

bag-handle relaxed. It was torn forcibly from his fingers just as he

received a heavy blow on his chest from the mate’s fist. He staggered back.

 

By the time he had recovered from the shock, Hobbs was a score of feet

away, the satchel tucked under his arm, his body bent almost double,

running like a jack-rabbit. Ere Kirkwood could get under way, in pursuit,

the mate had dodged out of sight round the corner. When the American caught

sight of him again, he was far down the block, and bettering his pace with

every jump.

 

He was approaching, also, some six or eight good citizens of Calais, men of

the laboring class, at a guess. Their attention attracted by his frantic

flight, they stopped to wonder. One or two moved as though to intercept

him, and he doubled out into the middle of the street with the quickness of

thought; an instant later he shot round another corner and disappeared, the

natives streaming after in hot chase, electrified by the inspiring strains

of “Stop, thief!”—or its French equivalent.

 

Kirkwood, cheering them on with the same wild cry, followed to the farther

street; and there paused, so winded and weak with laughter that he was fain

to catch at a fence picket for support. Standing thus he saw other denizens

of Calais spring as if from the ground miraculously to swell the hue and

cry; and a dumpling of a gendarme materialized from nowhere at all, to fall

in behind the rabble, waving his sword above his head and screaming at the

top of his lungs, the while his fat legs twinkled for all the world like

thick sausage links marvelously animated.

 

The mob straggled round yet another corner and was gone; its clamor

diminished on the still Spring air; and Kirkwood, recovering, abandoned

Mr. Hobbs to the justice of the high gods and the French system of

jurisprudence (at least, he hoped the latter would take an interest in the

case, if haply Hobbs were laid by the heels), and went his way rejoicing.

 

As for the scratch on his arm, it was nothing, as he presently demonstrated

to his complete satisfaction in the seclusion of a chancesent fiacre.

Kirkwood, commissioning it to drive him to the American Consulate, made

his diagnosis en route; wound a handkerchief round the negligible wound,

rolled down his sleeve, and forgot it altogether in the joys of picturing

to himself Hobbs in the act of opening the satchel in expectation of

finding therein the gladstone bag.

 

At the consulate door he paid off the driver and dismissed him; the fiacre

had served his purpose, and he could find his way to the Terminus H�tel at

infinitely less expense. He had a considerably harder task before him as

he ascended the steps to the consular doorway, knocked and made known the

nature of his errand.

 

No malicious destiny could have timed the hour of his call more appositely;

the consul was at home and at the disposal of his fellow-citizens—within

bounds.

 

In the course of thirty minutes or so Kirkwood emerged with dignity from

the consulate, his face crimson to the hair, his soul smarting with

shame and humiliation; and left an amused official representative of his

country’s government with the impression of having been entertained to the

point of ennui by an exceptionally clumsy but pertinacious liar.

 

For the better part of the succeeding hour Kirkwood circumnavigated the

neighborhood of the steamer pier and the Terminus H�tel, striving to render

himself as inconspicuous as he felt insignificant, and keenly on the

alert for any sign or news of Hobbs. In this pursuit he was pleasantly

disappointed.

 

At noon precisely, his suspense grown too onerous for his strength of will,

throwing caution and their understanding to the winds, he walked boldly

into the Terminus, and inquired for Miss Calendar.

 

The assurance he received that she was in safety under its roof did not

deter him from sending up his name and asking her to receive him in the

public lounge; he required the testimony of his senses to convince him that

no harm had come to her in the long hour and a half that had elapsed since

their separation.

 

Woman-like, she kept him waiting. Alone in the public rooms of the hotel,

he suffered excruciating torments. How was he to know that Calendar had not

arrived and found his way to her?

 

When at length she appeared on the threshold of the apartment, bringing

with her the traveling bag and looking wonderfully the better for her

ninety minutes of complete repose and privacy, the relief he experienced

was so intense that he remained transfixed in the middle of the floor,

momentarily able neither to speak nor to move.

 

On her part, so fagged and distraught did he seem, that at sight of his

care-worn countenance she hurried to him with outstretched, compassionate

hands and a low pitiful cry of concern, forgetful entirely of that which he

himself had forgotten—the emotion she had betrayed on parting.

 

“Oh, nothing wrong,” he hastened to reassure her, with a sorry ghost of his

familiar grin; “only I have lost Hobbs and the satchel with your things;

and there’s no sign yet of Mr. Calendar. We can feel pretty comfortable

now, and—and I thought it time we had something like a meal.”

 

The narrative of his adventure which he delivered over their _d�jeuner �

la fourchette_ contained no mention either of his rebuff at the American

Consulate or the scratch he had sustained during Hobbs’ murderous assault;

the one could not concern her, the other would seem but a bid for her

sympathy. He counted it a fortunate thing that the mate’s knife had been

keen enough to penetrate the cloth of his sleeve without tearing it; the

slit it had left was barely noticeable. And he purposely diverted the girl

with flashes of humorous description, so that they discussed both meal and

episode in a mood of wholesome merriment.

 

It was concluded, all too soon for the taste of either, by the waiter’s

announcement that the steamer was on the point of sailing.

 

Outwardly composed, inwardly quaking, they boarded the packet, meeting with

no misadventure whatever—if we are to except the circumstance that, when

the restaurant bill was settled and the girl had punctiliously surrendered

his change with the tickets, Kirkwood found himself in possession of

precisely one franc and twenty centimes.

 

He groaned in spirit to think how differently he might have been fixed, had

he not in his infatuated spirit of honesty been so anxious to give Calendar

more than ample value for his money!

 

An inexorable anxiety held them both near the gangway until it was cast off

and the boat began to draw away from the pier. Then, and not till then, did

an unimpressive, small figure of a man detach itself from the shield of a

pile of luggage and advance to the pier-head. No second glance was

needed to identify Mr. Hobbs; and until the perspective dwarfed him

indistinguishably, he was to be seen, alternately waving Kirkwood ironic

farewell and blowing violent kisses to Miss Calendar from the tips of his

soiled fingers.

 

So he had escaped arrest….

 

At first by turns indignant and relieved to realize that thereafter they

were to