The Gray Mask - Charles Wadsworth Camp (best ebook reader android .TXT) 📗

if you had croaked him you wouldn't dare acknowledge it here. Why, George, you're kneeling where he lay."

He threw back his shoulders. He laughed demonstratively.

"What difference does that make? I'm kneeling to you. And let Slim rave. I'll give you your price. You needn't be ashamed to kiss me, Nora. It wasn't Slim. I did it. The cop jumped me from behind that sofa, and I let him have the knife."

He raised his lips expectantly.

Garth didn't understand at first. He only realized with a savage joy that their lips did not touch. Yet he questioned why the big man, instead of answering the temptation of that mouth, half-open and inviting, drooped backwards until he lay stretched on the floor.

George's cry in his ears aroused him, and he saw in the reeling, drunken shaft of light that blood flowed and joined the ancient stain in the carpet.

He arose. He knew what that scream would unloose upon them.

Springing backward, he grasped the handle of the safe and opened the doors.

"Nora," he whispered. "Come here."

She obeyed him with mechanical precision; but when he took the lamp from her listless hand, turning it upward to examine her face, he read in her eyes awakening realization and horror.

He snapped off the light. Still grasping her hand, he seated himself on the floor with his back to the open safe. He drew her down. For a moment he thought she would resist, then she yielded and sank passively to the cushion at his side.

"Why?" she asked.

"They will be here," he said. "There is no way out except through that door which they will use. It is safer to wait here. Why don't they come?"

"They are careful," she whispered back. "They will come slowly. They will take no chances."

He felt the quick shaking of her body.

"I know what I have done," she said, "what I have done to you."

He realized that his hand still grasped hers. He released it gently.

"I understand a little," he answered, "but if you cared enough to accomplish this madness for him, you should have been even less kind to me than you were this afternoon."

"Perhaps," she answered. "Oh, I don't know. I don't know. I was so young. I loved him so much, and my father said his murderer would never be punished—justice must fail. Maybe it was my Italian blood, but I swore over his body the day they buried him that, if there was no other way, I would get justice for the poor boy. We were practically certain it was this gang. I said nothing to my father. Through a girl I had helped I met Slim. It pleased his vanity to have a spy at headquarters. I made him trust me. But I couldn't find out who—Yet sooner or later I knew the time would come. That's why I worked so hard for to-night, why I wouldn't let anything interfere, because I thought in this room—Well! You see—Listen!"

She breathed hard for a moment.

"Since I've known you I've doubted, but I couldn't turn back. You despise me, Jim, but in a way I have done good. I made them respect me. I have restrained them. I think, because I have been with them, I have saved lives. And always I had planned at the end to punish them as they deserved. But now—in a trap. We're like mice in a trap, Jim. I've done that to you. They'll find me out now, and what's behind the mask, too. They'll kill us both. They'll have to. Listen!"

"We'll make a fight of it, Nora," he said grimly. "No matter what I do, trust me."

"Hush!" she breathed. "I think the door is open."

"I'm going to flash the light," he answered.

"No. I know they are here. I know they are in the room. I hear—"

He snapped the button. The white shaft pierced the darkness. Nora had been right. Slim and three others with ready revolvers were half way across the room. Garth put his finger to his lips.

"Sh—h," he said. "Wait! Don't come any closer."

"What's wrong, Simmons?" Slim whipped out. "Who called? That's George. What—"

"He got fresh with the girl," Garth answered.

Slim waited, taking in the details of the tableau, weighing Garth's words and manner, studying Nora's collapsed figure and its proximity to Garth's.

"You're bluffing, Simmons," he said at last. "I'm after facts now. Toss up your hands."

He raised his revolver, aiming at Garth's body. Nora gave a little cry. Garth laughed.

"You don't quite understand," he answered slowly, "and you're usually so observant, Slim. Look around. The safe is open behind us. Your bullets would clip through Nora and me into those sacks of army destroyers. What then? So you won't be surprised when I take my hands down."

He lowered them. He took his own revolver from his pocket.

"But," he went on, "there's nothing behind you but a steel wall, and if one of you comes a step closer I'll shoot."

The four gathered together, whispering, inaudibly to Garth; but this tense grouping, this excited council warned him of their only possible answer.

"If you try to rush me," he cried, "or if you try to get out of the room, I'll turn the revolver on the safe and blow the whole lot of us to powder in this pleasant steel shell."

Slim turned, white-faced.

"You wouldn't have the nerve," he said. "After all, you're a bull."

"Just to show you," Garth answered quietly, "I'll put the whole pack on the table. You've called the turn, Slim. I'm that."

He snatched the mask from his face, and took a police whistle from his pocket. He raised it to his lips. He blew a call which he felt would penetrate beyond these steel walls. It was the first unrestrained sound the room had heard that night. It thrilled Garth. It was like a tonic. He laughed outright.

"No more fighting in the dark. Thank God!"

The four men stared with the helpless rage, the abandoned suffering of snared animals.

CHAPTER IV GARTH BUYS A BOUTONNIÈRE

Garth wondered if relief would ever come. He was afraid that the slip of frayed white paper must have gone astray. Otherwise, it seemed to him, it would have brought help even before he had sounded his shrill alarm.

He glanced at Nora. She had placed her hand on his arm. She gazed at the open door.

"I thought I heard—"

Then Garth heard, too—a tramping in the house, a struggle outside the door, a voice whose roar betrayed excitement and triumph.

"Where's Garth?"

The door filled with men in uniform.

Nora covered her face with her hands and turned away. With a start Garth grasped the reason. Planning vaguely, he arose and leaned over the prostrate figure of George. The man breathed. The wound was in the shoulder and appeared of little real consequence. He straightened to find the inspector standing over him with a look of pleasure. It hurt Garth to think of that expression's vanishing for one of unbelief and revolt.

"This fellow will stand his trial," he said.

He added gently:

"For the murder of Joe Kridel. It was here, you know."

The inspector puffed.

"Garth, I'm proud of you."

His eye caught the figure of Nora, crouched against the safe. His voice grew hard and business-like.

"Bring that woman here."

Slim, bound and at the door, laughed.

Garth grasped the inspector's arm.

"Don't," he said. "Don't bother about her. Let her go."

But the inspector strode to the safe, raised Nora, and drew her hands from her face.

He gasped and leaned heavily against the divan. All at once he appeared old.

Garth sprang to his side. He knew the inspector must not speak now.

"I'll tell you," he cried. "You have to thank Nora as much as me."

He glanced at the girl.

"That is, we put it over together. It was a winning combination, but we didn't have the nerve to put you wise."

The color rushed back to Nora's cheeks, but the inspector's face did not alter. He looked doubtfully from one to the other. At last he seemed to gather his emotions in a volley of wrath for Garth.

"You dragged a woman in this! You ought to be horsewhipped. Dragging my daughter into this hell!"

Garth took the girl's hand.

"Cheer up, chief," he said, "because if you and she would only let me I'd drag her into a lot worse than that."

He turned to her anxiously. There were tears in her eyes. He questioned if they had sprung from pity for him. She touched his hand. He looked away, for the quick pressure expressed only thanks, and a friendship troubled by his persistence.

During the next few days Garth saw little of Nora, meeting her only once or twice by chance in her father's office. He was not inclined, indeed, to urge a more intimate opportunity. He had let her see rather too much of his heart, and he shrank from an appearance of seeking advantage from her gratitude.

That gratitude existed abundantly, and the inspector shared it. The affair of the gray mask had altered a good deal for Garth. It had placed him all at once apart from his fellows in the bureau. The newspaper publicity, which, unlike most of his kind, he would have preferred to avoid, had swept his reputation far beyond the boundaries of his own city. He acknowledged a benefit in that. Such notoriety might deter the desire for revenge of any of the friends of Slim and George who remained at large.

A very real danger for Nora and himself lay there. It created, too, a tie that the inspector visualized with an increasing friendliness and confidence.

"If Slim and George go to the chair," the big man said on one of those mornings when Garth had stumbled into Nora in the office, "you two are probably safe enough. With those birds salted away the weaker brothers aren't likely to take any wild chances, at least until the thing has been pretty well forgotten."

Apprehension clouded his sleepy eyes.

"But, young people, if Slim and George escaped conviction or managed a getaway, I'd look for a new first-class detective, and—"

He took Nora's hand and studied her face, whose dark beauty remained unafraid.

"I guess I'd need another daughter, which I couldn't very well have."

He laughed brusquely.

"Slim and George are tight enough now, so why borrow trouble."

Garth saw the foreboding of his chief's eyes turn to curiosity, a trifle groping.

"Wish you'd kept out of it, daughter."

"Don't scold," she laughed. "You did enough of that the other night."

"I'm not," he grumbled, "I'm only wondering where you got the nerve, and the brains."

"Some from you, father."

"Not as much as all that. I guess your mother gave you a little that we hum-drum New Yorkers don't quite understand."

"If," Garth said, "anything develops, you'll have to send Nora away."

"If there's time," the inspector agreed.

He turned back to his papers, shaking his head.

It is, perhaps, as well, when one fears, that the march of routine brings new and destructive demands. It was only a few days afterwards that Garth and Nora were involved in events that drove their minds for the time from the threat, which they should never have quite lost sight of. Yet the Elmford murder didn't leave room in one's mind for much else.

On the afternoon before that tragedy Garth, leaving headquarters, made an unaccustomed purchase. Not long ago such affectation would have appealed to his sturdy, straightforward mind of a detective as trivial, possibly unmasculine. He reddened as he handed his ten cents to the shapeless Italian woman whose fingers about his coat lapel were confusingly deft. He had no illusions as to the source of this foppish prompting. The inspector had called him in and told him that Nora would welcome him at the flat for dinner that evening. The event appeared a milestone on the amorous path he sought to explore hand in hand with the girl. He realized his desired destination was not yet in view, but such progress required a deviation from the familiar—some peculiar concession to its significance. So he turned away from the cheap sidewalk stand, wearing, for the first time in his life, a flower