Bunched Knuckles

Chapter V Vengeance

She placed the watch on the floor. Bowman placed his foot on the back of the watch, exerted a slow, steady pressure, until he heard a snapping sound. Then he removed his foot. The crystal was broken into several pieces.

Bowman had no need to speak. The girl grasped his idea instantly. She bent forward, picked up one of the bits of thin, sharp glass and held it in her fingers. Bowman turned around so that his bound arms were within reach of her fingers. He felt the sharp edge of the glass sawing through his bonds, then, after a moment, he was free. It took him but a few seconds to untie the girl.

“Now,” he said, “let’s move that table and the chairs over to that far corner of the room. I think I can stand on them and reach the rafters. Then I can pull the slats out of that ventilator. We can make a rope out of the blankets and lower you down to the ground.”

She nodded, and said, almost casually, “Be careful when you pick up your end of the table. Don’t let it drag on the floor; they might hear it.”

Bowman laughed at the matter-of-fact efficiency of the young woman. “I can tell you one thing,” he said, “if we get out of here okay, you’ve got a first-class stenographic job awaiting you.”

They moved the table to a place beneath one of the rafters. They placed a chair on it. Bowman climbed from the table to the chair and was able to reach the rafter. He swung himself up to the rafter and from there was able to reach the slats in the ventilator. The air here was close and. musty. His clutching fingers were covered with must and cobwebs, but the slats responded to the pressure he exerted. One of them came loose in his hand. He said to Phyllis Proctor, “Catch.”

She held out her hands and neatly caught the slat as he dropped it.

The other three slats followed in quick succession. Jax Bowman inhaled the fresh air, peered out through the oblong hole.

He saw the cabin plane in which he had arrived. The motor was clicking over at idling speed.

He turned and spoke to the girl. “Get those blankets,” he said, “and quickly. They’re getting the plane warmed up. That means they’re planning to take us somewhere.”

She rushed toward the bed. Bowman saw a man walk from the plane toward the house, heard a door in the house open. A man shouted, “Okay, ready at any time you are.”

Phyllis Proctor said in a voice which quavered slightly with excitement, “They’re coming.”

Bowman heard the noise of the bolt being shot back.

There were solid planks along the side of the room, against the slope of the roof. These planks gave Bowman a runway. Swiftly, he moved along them toward the door. If he could reach a position of vantage directly over the door, he might be able to jump down upon whoever entered the room.

Bowman realized he was going to be too late. He had covered but slightly more than half of the distance when the door pushed open. The bony-faced individual who had been called Harry, and whom Bowman surmised was Harry Cutting, entered the room. It took a moment for his eyes to accustom themselves to the semi-darkness. He stood staring at the chair on the table at the end of the room, raised his eyes to the broken ventilator. His hand streaked to his hip.

“Where’s Bowman?” he demanded, apparently not noticing that the girl’s hands were free.

Bowman crouched motionless. There was a moment of tense silence. Bowman wondered if she could keep from giving an involuntary glance upward. Could she keep from showing signs of hysterical panic?

In that moment of silence, Bowman heard distinctly the roar of an airplane’s motor. He surmised that the cabin plane which had been warming up must have taken off.

Phyllis Proctor met the man’s gaze with calm insolence.

“He tore out the lattice work.” she said “That left him a means of escape.”

“And he left you here?” the man demanded.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“How long ago?” he asked, moving toward her.

“Really,” she said calmly, “I can’t tell. You see, we broke his watch in order to get some sharp glass from the crystal.”

The man cursed. An airplane motor roared from the ground, apparently coming directly toward the house. Cutting jabbed his revolver toward her chest.

“You,” he said, “might as well get yours now as later.”

Bowman jumped.

Cutting heard the slight scraping motion made by Bowman’s feet as they left the wood. He whirled to look up. Bowman saw his white, distorted face, saw him swing the gun around.

Bowman had never realized a man could fall so slowly. He felt he was barely drifting through the air. His knees were held together out in front of him. He seemed to be living in some dreadful nightmare in which there was urgent need for speed, but everything moved with the slowness of slow motion pictures.

He saw the man’s face twisting in an agony of effort as he strove to get the gun around and, at the same time, to avoid the impact. Bowman saw flame belch from the muzzle of the gun, realized that the bullet had missed him. Then his left knee struck Cutting’s chest a glancing blow.

Cutting went over backwards. Bowman tried to get his feet under him, and failed. He flung out an arm, caught Cutting’s shoulder. He lit partially on Cutting’s body, partially on his left shoulder. The impact stunned him. Cutting scrambled to his feet. He still held the gun. Bowman, half dazed, lunged forward, tried to catch Cutting’s ankle with his right hand, and missed it. Phyllis Proctor picked up a chair.

The house reverberated to the roar of shots. It took Bowman a second or two to realize that these were not shots thundering at him from Cutting’s gun.

Cutting, his face showing alarm, backed toward the door, sighted deliberately down the revolver. Bowman started to stagger to his feet. Cutting’s bullet might stop him, but he was going to go out fighting. Phyllis Proctor flung the chair. Cutting dodged it, but wasted a precious half second in doing so.

The door burst open. Bowman’s eyes shifted to the figure which plunged through the doorway. It was a startling vision. The upper part of the man’s face was covered by a mask. Around the eyeholes of the mask were two white circles, giving to the eyes a hideous appearance of malevolent vigilance.

Cutting yelled, shifted the gun and fired in a blind panic.

Big Jim Grood’s right fist shot out. Bowman heard the smashing impact of those bunched knuckles on Cutting’s jaw, saw Cutting’s head jerk back as though it had connected with a battering ram. His knees wobbled. His body sagged toward the floor. Grood’s left fist whipped around in an uppercut, blasted the man backwards.

Bowman heard the roar of a plane taking off from the ground.

“Ashe!” he yelled at Grood. “He’s the aviator! Did you get him?”

Jim Grood shook his head, the weird appearance of the mask being emphasized by the motion.

Together, the two men rushed to the door of the house.

Bowman saw a long meadow, smooth and grassy, with a fringe of trees bordering it. The cabin plane in which he had been brought to the place was just clearing the tops of those trees, headed toward the setting sun. A two-seated biplane, evidently the one in which Jim Grood had arrived, was standing near the house, the motor still idling. Sprawled on the ground, under one of the wings, lay a crumpled figure in helmet and goggles.

Big Jim Grood ran forward, shouting curses. Jax Bowman sprinted past him, climbed to the pilot’s seat, gave a hasty glance at the gasoline and temperature gauges, jerked open the throttle of the plane. He felt it gather momentum, felt jolts as the wheels ran along the ground. He estimated the distance to the edge of the field, the height of the trees, took the plane from the ground and zoomed it upward.

Tangled branches clutched at the still spinning wheels, then dropped rapidly behind. The plane climbed steadily upward. Bowman banked into a turn and looked for the plane ahead.

It was winging toward the sunset like a frightened quail fleeing from a hawk.

Bowman opened his throttle wide.

The instinctive sense of a flier led him to check his landmarks. He saw a valley dotted with patches of meadow land, interspersed with oaks, hills that were dark green with redwoods, off to the right a high mountain, to the left, the smooth ribbon of a cement highway.

He gave the plane every bit of speed it possessed.

He knew now that he had the faster plane, that Howard Ashe knew he was being pursued. The cabin plane ahead strove to get elevation, and failed, then tried for speed as it flattened into a long, straight sprint. But Bowman had the elevation, had speed to spare. He came roaring down upon the cabin plane, judging his distance to a nicety. He shot past the front of the plane, his landing gear barely missing the tip of the other’s propeller.

Ashe dove frantically downward, then tried to zoom up, but Bowman, kicking over the rudder, swinging the stick into a banking turn, was directly over Ashe when Ashe tried to bring the other plane up. Ashe went into a power dive and Bowman came roaring down on his tail. Once more Ashe tried to straighten, and once more lacked the nerve to come up into the menace of that other ship which seemed ready to crash down on his propeller.

He banked into turn and, in a moment, was in a tight tailspin.

Jax Bowman gave a swift look at the ground, was startled to find how close it was, to see the menace of the tree tops. He pulled back on his stick. The plane came screaming out of the dive, skimmed over the tree tops like a gull sailing just over the curl of a breaker.

Bowman zoomed upward, banked into a turn, looked back just in time to see the other plane hit a tree. Tree and plane became a confused snarl of exploding wood, fabric and metal. A moment later, the sound of a terrific crash reached Bowman’s ears.

He straightened his plane, judged his position by the mountains, and started back.

Big Jim Grood laboriously finished typing out the message, which he pinned to Harry Cutting’s coat. Cutting’s hands, arms, ankles and legs were bound with neat efficiency.

Bowman taxied into a landing. Big Jim Grood, minus the mask, came out to greet him.

“Everything okay?” Grood asked.

Bowman nodded. “I think,” he said, “the battle was half won before I started. Word of these White Ring masks has been getting around the under world, and Ashe was so frightened he didn’t even have nerve enough to pilot his plane properly. How’s the girl?”

“Okay.”

“And the aviator who was sprawled out there on the ground?”

“Just a tap on the head,” Grood said. “That’s Steve Balcom, an old buddy of mine. I hunted him up when I found I needed a plane.”

“How did you get here?”

“Cinch,” Grood said laconically. “I recognized the moll as soon as you came out of the hotel room. She was Trixie Durane. She’s a cute little trick at that. I sent her to the reformatory as a delinquent six years ago. She’d been playing around with a forger named Hornblower. I located Hornblower. He didn’t want to talk at first, but I persuaded him to come through. He drew me a map showing the place up here.”

“What happened to Trixie?” Bowman asked.

“I could have winged her,” Big Jim Grood admitted reluctantly. “She ran like a deer. She was the first to beat it when we landed. I think she knew what was up.”

“And you let her go?”

“I was thinking it over,” Grood admitted. “You said we didn’t make war on women. I don’t know what I’d have done. But as it turned out, I didn’t have to do anything. Your friend, Ashe, did it for me.”

“Did what?” Bowman asked.

Grood shrugged his big shoulders. “I guess he was afraid she was going to talk, and be a witness against him,” he said. “She was running pretty fast, but Ashe had something that caught up with her.”

Bowman looked about him at the gathering twilight.

“Look here,” he said, “you’ve got to get in touch with the police and explain this situation. I’m afraid it’s going to mark the end of our incognito. The—”

“Forget it,” Big Jim Grood said. “I told you the cops would be tickled to death to have a solution handed to ’em on a silver platter, and wouldn’t care too much about how they got it. I’ve been talking with the boys in San Francisco on long distance. They don’t know who I am, but I spilled a mouthful to ’em. And I typed out a statement that I left on Harry Cutting’s coat. It’ll explain a lot of things; and the boys can match up the typewriter with the machine that wrote those two murder notes.”

“Then,” Bowman said slowly, “what’s holding us back?”

“Nothing on earth,” Jim Grood remarked, grinning, “unless you wanted to stick around to give me some more talk about cop methods not being any good.”

Jax Bowman grinned at the bulky ex-police captain who had worked his way up from pavement pounding.

“Tell me, Jim, how did you make Hornblower talk?”

Big Jim Grood said nothing, but doubled up his huge right hand and surveyed the battle-scarred fist with that look of fond pride which a golfer bestows upon his favorite driver after it has clicked out a three-hundred-yard drive.