Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 105, No. 5, October 10, 1936

I

Late spring drenched the midnight air. Through the narrow little rear window of Mr. James (Red) Binney’s modest cellar saloon drifted honeysuckle from some surviving backyard bush, to mingle with the sterner smells of stale beer and of alcohol denatured in fearsome ways; but it was the honeysuckle alone which penetrated to the unlovely pug nose of that young and unpromising criminal, Johnny Dolan.

His pale eyes grew dreamy as he sniffed the perfume; he scratched his fuzzy chin and sighed vastly. From his fingers he dusted the crumbs of his hamburger sandwich and, with utmost nonchalance, tossed to the bar his very last quarter — for within hours now there would be quarters by the bushel, not to mention fins and sawbucks and even centuries, in such quantity that a person would have to tie a string around the roll.

“Red,” said Johnny Dolan, with utter irrelevance, “I gotta get me a moll.”

Mr. Binney abruptly ceased swabbing his bar and stared, at his customer and friend.

“What was you an’ the Rat drinkin’ before you come in here?” he demanded curiously.

“It’s been done before,” Johnny Dolan said easily. “A moll with nice, shiny black hair an’ one o’ them greeny-brown skins t’ match an’ otherwise — why, Mae West. It’s been done before.”

“Positively, sucker, by guys that has what it takes an’ knows a few o’ the answers in the back o’ the book,” Mr. Binney agreed, “only not by no fish-faced dimwit like you, Johnny, with a pan which makes a person think the house is haunted every time he looks at it. Not by no imitation yegg like you, that couldn’t get the pennies offen a dead man’s eyes without knockin’ over the radio two flights up. Scratch it, kid; y’ain’t the type.”

“Hey, lissen!” Johnny Dolan protested, for he was a little hurt.

“An’ this also you gotta remember about molls,” Mr. Binney pursued, his eye kindling. “Big or little, fat or skinny, black, white or yeller, t’ the last frill, they’ll cross you!”

“Not the kind o’ moll I got in mind,” Johnny smiled serenely.

“Any moll that ever had a run in a stockin’!” Mr. Binney bawled, with swiftly rising heat, from the corner of his mouth. “Looka Flo, the time I had the place in Tenth Avenyer. The once in my life there was five yards in the register, she dumps it in a paper bag an’ scrams with a taxi-driver! Looka Jennie Lynch, that I was gonna marry. She rolls me for a four-carat rock an’ the price o’ furniture for the flat and then — yeah, Rat?” he said, suddenly gentle, for he was, always attentive to cash customers. “What is it you want?”

“A little less o’ yer private life, till I finish this steak in peace!” Mr. Rat McGee snarled, from the corner of his mouth, and went on eating at his table across the room.

He looked exactly the sort of person who would get less of a private life when he so requested.

He was smallish and stooped, but from the last scraggly hair to the tips of his toenails, he was mean. He had a long, sharp nose and a pair of steely gimlet eyes. When he rose, as he did now after tidying his mouth with the back of a hairy paw, one saw that he walked with a pronounced limp. This was the fault of a certain small-arms manufacturer who runs to heavy triggers. The householder who had meant to perforate Rat McGee’s heart, just after three that long-gone winter morning, had pulled down until he merely shattered an ankle.

“Hi, punk!” Mr. McGee said sharply to Johnny Dolan. “On our way!”

“Youse boys off for a little outin’, huh?” Mr. Binney inquired slyly.

“Well, y’see, Red, it’s like this,” Johnny Dolan beamed expansively. “Up in Westchester—”

“Why doncher give him the address an’ a road map?” the Rat rasped viciously.

“Er — sure! I gotcher, pal!” Johnny Dolan said hastily; and without so much as a formal good-by to Mr. Binney, he walked straight through the door, with the Rat clumping laboriously after.

Mr. McGee’s car was just around the corner, a nice enough little two-door affair, but cheap. That is the great disadvantage of using stolen cars exclusively: one must stick to the plentiful, low-priced models or risk trouble through the whole week before one wrecks the vehicle or it grows too hot for comfort. Still, this job was serviceable enough to get them to that very high-hat suburb, Falmont, by two o’clock.

“Run through it again!” the Rat snapped, as he drove up Fifth Avenue.

Johnny Dolan heaved a resigned sigh.

“I a’ready run through it ten thousand times. However, puttin’ on the record again: this doll is pretty near the richest girl in America. She’s one o’ these health cranks which for some reason wants to live a long time and consequently is always asleep before midnight. Accordin’ t’ what your girlfriend, the chambermaid, told you, she sleeps like she was full o’ hop.

“Her room is the last one on the east on the second floor an’ the screens ain’t been put up yet’ for the summer. The stuff is always kept in a green velvet box in a small, black, sorter Chinese cabinet which stands on the left side o’ the room, goin’ in by the window, an’ beyond the bed, which is t’ the right. The trick Chinese key is kept in the right-hand drawer of the doll’s vanity table, in a small purse. Okey dokey?”

“It is, if you really got it through that ivory dome an’ ain’t just reelin’ it off like a poll-parrot,” the Rat conceded grudgingly. “Got yer rod?”

“Don’t I wear it, day an’ night?”

“Loaded?”

“Did I bring it t’ eat soup with?” Johnny Dolan asked mildly.

“Naw, you brought it t’ cool the moll, in case you fall over yer own feet an’ wake her up!” Mr. McGee snarled forcefully. “An’ make no mistake about that angle, punk! The foist peep out o’ her, if she wakes up for any reason whatsoever, stick the rod between her eyes an’ give her the business!”

“Rat,” Johnny Dolan also snarled, and as ominously, for he knew about how Mr. McGee liked his conversation served, “the doll is the same as dead now!”

“If you gotta drill her, drill her quick an’ then chuck me this whole Chinese thing outa the window — an’ no slips!” Rat McGee rumbled on. “An’ remember, I’m only takin’ you in on this on account my bum leg won’t let me climb no ladders, an’ I’m handin’ you plenty when I cut it three ways an’ give you one.”

With a mighty effort, Johnny Dolan made his nod indifferent.

But, inside, was he indifferent? Yeah, he was indifferent just like the guy that sees the rope getting thrown when he’s going down for the third time, just like the guy that’s getting strapped in the hot seat and sees the keeper hurry in with word that the Governor is finally over his indigestion and has changed his mind.

Why? Well, for one reason, because him and the Rat was about to pull one of the ace jobs of the year and, only it don’t never do no good to show a party how grateful you are. Johnny Dolan could have thrown his arms around Rat McGee and kissed him, for letting him on this at all!

Different times, probably, you read in the papers about the jewels this Felicia Rudwell doll keeps around the house? The four emerald bracelets supposed to be worth twenty thousand fish apiece and this here famous Manama pearl necklace they tell you set old man Rudwell back half a million? Them figures, naturally, are a lot of baloney; but at that, the way they’d added it up with Solly Levine, who would be moving the stuff, when this tin Lizzie rolled back to Broadway she’d be carrying better than two hundred grand, net! Yeah, and that meant better than sixty grand for Johnny Dolan alone!

It hit him again, just as it had been hitting him at intervals for three days how, the sheer, incredible tremendousness of the whole enterprise. Once more, Johnny Dolan began to tremble. Why, take for instance, not counting nothing else, the kind of moll a person with sixty grand can drag around and—

“If that slug ain’t left the ladder exactly where I showed him,” Mr. McGee reflected pleasantly, aloud, “we’ll cut the soles offen his feet an’ rip his tongue out by the roots!”

The soles and tongue of the unnamed slug, however, were safe. Nicely hidden, the ladder reposed beneath the hedge. Beyond the hedge were smooth acres of velvet lawn and beyond the lawn, in utter darkness, loomed a great country house. The season’s first few débutante insects chirped drowsy encouragement as Johnny Dolan stole over the lawn at one end of the ladder and Mr. McGee at the other.

And here was the absolutely dippy thing: it seemed that in this big moment Johnny Dolan had sorter changed somehow; he could feel it inside him, like he’d quit being dumb and clumsy and sorter swelled up to the size of the job. What he meant, here they’d already covered about fifty miles of this grass and still he hadn’t tripped and gone down on his nose or been took with a noisy attack of sneezing or anything!

More! With never a sound and never a scrape, the tall ladder had been propped against the wall, comfortably topping the sill of the last east window on the second floor. Even the emotional Mr. McGee’s voice was a bit unsteady as he whispered: “Well, hop to it, punk! Watcher step the next five minutes an’ you’ll be eatin’ cakes with gold syrup on ’em!”

And then Johnny was climbing, up, up, up, and it seemed the funny change in him was holding something elegant: he had reached the very top of the ladder without breaking his neck and he was staring into the gloom beyond the open window.

And also, as he suddenly sensed, it seemed he was going nuts!

He was hearing things. He was hearing a dog whine in the distance, only if wasn’t a dog and it wasn’t in the distance. It didn’t seem to be anywhere at all that you could place, and still it was there. Johnny Dolan scowled perplexedly and listened again. A very soft, strangling “yurrrrrp!” strayed vaguely through the whining sound.

“What’s got you now? A stroke?” hissed wickedly up from the ground.

With a start, Johnny Dolan gripped himself. If he desired, as indeed he did, to lead the life of Riley for the rest of his days, this was no time to be going nuts. He threw a leg over the sill and, having stepped inside, he wrestled the flashlight from his rear trousers pocket.

It was still going on! “Umph... umpha... umph!” and then finished off with a stiffed, sizzling sound like steam escaping from a leaky valve. Briefly, Johnny Dolan’s hair stood on end. It could easy be that there were ghosts in this drum; they’d naturally keep a thing like that out of the papers. Perspiring freely, he fingered at the button of his flashlight and finally jabbed it forward.

He stood gaping, petrified. According to the dope, the Rudwell frill hit the hay by eleven-thirty and there after pounded her ear like there was a chloroform sponge tied over her nose. Well, then, either this was the wrong room or the dope was very, very sour; because on the outside of the great bed some black-haired doll in fancy silk pajamas huddled down, her face buried in the pillow, crying as if her heart would bust!

Next, the moment’s really terrific phase crashed down on him.

When you worked under the Rat’s capable direction, you followed orders to the letter — or else. The Rat had ordered that Johnny Dolan immediately cool the doll if she waked up, and here she was already awake. Bright drops on Mr. Dolan’s forehead turned to streams, which ran down his nose and into his eyes, and his teeth chattered audibly; for in simple truth, despite much hair-raising discussion of homicide, it happened that never yet had Johnny Dolan taken a shot at a human being.

Still, there has to be a first time for everything.

Gasping, swallowing repeatedly, he fumbled with icy fingers in the side pocket of his coat.

“What... what the devil—” the girl cried amazedly, suddenly sitting up in the circle of light.

“H-h-hold it, kid! Not a s-squeak out o’ yuh!” Johnny Dolan panted, and tugged even again.

But she wasn’t acting the way she should. She was mad, not scared. Her reddened eyes snapping, she bounded from the bed and came straight at him — and just there, as it seemed, the great Rudwell house collapsed! The floor, that is to say, apparently flew up and smacked Johnny Dolan and the ceiling also came down and hit him. Ten billion blazing stars flamed briefly before his uncomprehending eyes. Then there was only blackness.

II

He was sprawled on a very soft bed, in some place where there were shaded lights. He moaned weary resignation. So he’d stumbled in front of still another truck, huh, and here he was back in the accident ward? Probably the usual dozen bones were broken, but mostly this truck appeared to have socked him on the right jaw, which was swollen and very toothachy. Without moving, Johnny Dolan let his eyes rove foggily about and... hey! this wasn’t no accident ward! This room was blue, not white, and there was a shelf on the wall full of big silver cups.

“What’s all — the tinware?” he murmured, most remotely.

“Tennis cups. I won ’em. That’s where the muscle came from,” an exquisite contralto voice answered. “I didn’t mean to knock you quite as cold as that, but you asked for it. You were trying to shoot me, weren’t you? Or were you?”

Johnny Dolan’s head rolled over slowly and his heart skipped a beat. The moll in the trick pajamas was sitting, quite clubbily, on the bed beside him — and what a moll! Shiny black hair and beautiful big black eyes and that greeny-brown skin which goes with them; but the outstanding feature of her seemed to be her total lack of’ fear. Johnny Dolan, it may be said, considered himself an extremely tough egg; yet this dame, who had put him down for the count, was smiling.

“Nice to run across you like this, anyhow, burglar,” she said. “What were you meaning to burgle? My jewelry?”

“Yes, lady,” Johnny Dolan said thinly, and stared on.

“And I spoiled it with a straight left to the jaw! Do stop fumbling in that pocket. I have your gun. Feel it?” She jabbed it into his ribs.

“Yes, lady,” Johnny Dolan said. “Would it be okey dokey if I was to sit up now? I wouldn’t try to make no getaway.”

“You wouldn’t go far if you did,” the girl assured him cheerily. “I usually beat ninety on the twenty-five yard target with, a four-inch barrel and this piece of junk has a four-inch barrel if it hasn’t much of anything, else. Sit up, by all means.”

Johnny Dolan wobbled to an upright position, found himself distinctly giddy and for a little held his aching head in his hands. Things in general, however, were clearing with perfectly ghastly speed: even now he had the whole picture.

“Hey, lady!” he said suddenly. “Would it also be okey dokey if I was t’ take it on the lam for that window, an’ then you lemme have it, all five shots? On account of, if I go down that ladder without them bracelets and that, now, necklace, the Rat is gonna gimme the same — an’ I’d rather it come from you!”

The decorative young person opened her eyes.

“Burglar, you’re not going sentimental on me? Who’s the Rat? Your partner?”

“An’ a quite bad actor,” Johnny Dolan explained sadly, “which has cut the heart out of at least one party I positively know about.”

The girl stared on, bosom heaving a little, lips tightening.

“Score one more jackass point for ’em!” she said quite oddly. “They’ve locked me in here like a wild animal and they’ve unplugged my telephone line downstairs; so now, if I want to rouse the blasted family, I’ll have to screech my head off and that’ll scare away your Rat and—” She stopped short; her black eyes flashed at Johnny Dolan. “Ladder, you said?”

“Sure I said ladder. Some slug—”

“Don’t speak for at least a minute!” the peculiar girl commanded. “Don’t even breathe!”

Johnny Dolan gaped at her, sitting there with her hands pressed to her temples and the muzzle of his basement-bargain revolver pointing at the high ceiling. To tell the truth, it seemed that she also was going slightly nuts, the funny, jerky way she was breathing and the way her eyes kept snapping, like she had all her jack on a fifty-to-one shot and he was leading down the stretch by nine lengths.

Then dimples appeared. She smiled, widely and more widely, and Johnny Dolan felt as if he were melting or coming all to pieces. What he meant, he got weak in the joints and the same as hypnotized; for now the doll had hitched much nearer and, believe it or not; it seemed that they were friends!

“What’s your name, burglar?” she asked softly.

“Johnny... well... Dolan.”

“Mine’s Felicia Rudwell. You knew that, naturally. Johnny, were you ever very, very much in love, so much in love that nothing else in the world mattered? Well, you have been, of course. You’ve got a cute little she-burglar in a flat somewhere and the other people in the house think you’re an insurance salesman and married, and all,” the girl hurried on.

“Johnny, I’m in love like that. I’m in love with the most wonderful man that ever lived.” She paused, allowing Johnny Dolan practically to drown in her eyes. “He’s poor as a church-mouse and so of course my family — but I don’t have to tell you that part. We were going to elope tonight; he’s waiting for word from me, over in the Pelway Inn; and somebody tipped off my father and so I’m locked in the solitary. You came in a car, didn’t you? Well, Johnny, would you like to do something that will make me very, very happy, if you were well paid for it?”

“Lady,” Johnny Dolan stuttered gallantly, “you can tie a can to that gettin’ paid stuff, on account of for you any guy would—”

“Piffle!” said the intelligent girl, noting with satisfaction that her work was all and neatly done. “This is business. We’ll make a bargain.”

She whisked off the bed. She whisked to her vanity table and from a purse there she brought a large, quaint old key. She flitted across the room to the black Chinese cabinet and unlocked its heavy door with the key. And lastly, having taken from its depths a green velvet jewel-case, she flitted back to Johnny Dolan.

“Look!” she said and opened the case. “I just want you to know that everything’s — er — quite as you expected it to be, I suppose.”

Well — you hadda say the moll certainly wasn’t stringing him. Johnny Dolan scowled incredulously, but it certainly was all there, just the way they had the dope. In one compartment four bracelets that looked like green fire; in the next the necklace of matched pearls, which were probably elegant, but for which Johnny Dolan, personally, wouldn’t have given a plugged nickel, on account he never did like beads. In the third compartment there were a dozen pretty swell rings.

“Thanks very much, lady,” Johnny Dolan said hoarsely, numbed and bewildered because in all his days he had never dreamed of a burglary like this, and reached for the case.

“Darling, this will have to be a C. O. D. transaction,” Miss Rudwell dimpled, stepping away and closing the case. “You see, I want you and your Rat to deliver me and my grip to the Pelway Inn as soon as possible; and then you may come back for these — and loot the whole darned ranch, too, if you feel like taking a chance! But if we took along the — swag, do you call it in the trade? Mr. Rat may not care to bother with the extra trip. He might want to cut my heart out and just hurry along to the next job. Well? It’s a bargain that way?”

“Any way you say, lady,” Johnny Dolan mumbled.

As he watched her, Miss Rudwell flitted again to the cabinet and replaced the jewel-case. She locked the cabinet carefully, tried the door and withdrew the key.

“Catch!” she said, and tossed it to Johnny Dolan. “And now sit right where you are, please, with your back to me. I’ll have to pack and then — of course, it’s horribly embarrassing! — I’ll do my dressing behind the screen.”

Johnny Dolan hunched there, staring at the key, trying to figure out how a thing like this could happen to a guy.

Chink stuff, this key — all curly-cues and twists; you never see no keys like that here in America. It would probably take a guy, even an extra good guy, a week to make a key like that and get it right.

Behind Johnny, matters were going forward with swishing speed. He heard a screen scrape lightly on the floor, he heard a grip dragged out and opened, he heard drawers open and closets open, he heard the hasty rustle of soft garments. Then drawers and closets began to close again.

“Hold it, just another minute or two, palsy-walsy,” Miss Rudwell whispered jubilantly. “I’ll have to dash off a note to my dad.”

Johnny Dolan held it, not knowing, understand, whether she had her clothes on yet or not. He heard her pen scratch swiftly for a little. Then he heard Miss Rudwell cough — a little tickling sort of cough at first and then it turned into a bark loud enough to wake the dead! She coughed and coughed; he was just getting uneasy about the disturbance when the fit passed and she laughed gently:

“Phew! They can’t have dusted that closet in a month. Welt — all set, Johnny. You go down first and catch my bag.”

When Johnny Dolan reached the bottom of the ladder Rat McGee spoke in an incisive undertone, with tremendous feeling: “Who told yuh t‘ turn on the lights up there, an’ am I bug-house or was you talkin’ to yourself, an’ where is the stuff?”

“One side, lug!” Johnny Dolan ordered, with strange authority, “I gotta catch her bag... I got it!”

Disregarding the several apoplectic wheezes from Mr. McGee, he watched Miss Rudwell come down the ladder like a fireman in a rush. Then, ordinarily stolid malefactor though he was, Mr. McGee gasped out:

“Yuh... yuh dumb cluck! Who t’ hell told yuh t’ steal the moll?”

“Mr. Rat, please! We’re trying to make a quiet getaway, you know,” Miss Rudwell breathed. “Oh, yes, your gun, if you don’t mind, Mr. Rat? Yes, this is Johnny’s pistol in your stomach, held by a woman who’s going places or bust, so if you don’t want to be smeared all over our lawn — oh, thank you! Let’s go!”

III

Five miles over to Petway and five miles back. Another six or eight minutes, and they’d be beside the Rudwell hedge again.

“Welt, we certain’y done that little hunk o’ sugar candy a swell turn,” Johnny Dolan sighed. “Was she wild with joy when the big lob come downstairs ’n’ took her in the clinch, or was she wild with joy!”

Mr. McGee, driving, mouth set hard, said nothing.

Indeed, this past half hour, words had altogether failed the Rat. He had heard it all, of course, and being an astute person he had understood it all; but in spite of that he couldn’t quite believe that any of it had actually happened. Molls of many kinds had figured in the lurid McGee past, but never before a one-punch molt and never before any kind of moll who could take away his rod and hold it between his shoulder-blades while he drove five miles.

“She really had a right t’ return them rods,” Johnny Dolan reflected. “At that, I suppose she figured we’d be dirty with jack before mornin’ an’ could buy better.”

Still Rat McGee said nothing.

“Quite some looker, huh?” Johnny rambled on. “An’ also very much on the up an’ up, as you noticed. It ain’t every moll would ’a’ took it like that, Rat, not scared nor nothin’, an’ cuttin’ her own percentage out o’ the deal that way. It ain’t every moll would ’a’ slipped us her pretties, just for a taxi ride t’ the guy she’s that way about. It ain’t every moll would ’a’—”

“For the luvva tripe, shut up!” Mr. McGee screamed, suddenly exploding. “You’re gettin’ me down! Dolan, I had it told me by several parties, when I first mentioned takin’ you in on this, that everything you touch goes absolutely screwy. I heard about how you spent nine nights cuttin’ a hole up through the floor, an’ then found you was in the delicatessen instead o’ the jeweler’s next door.

“I heard how all one night you followed the bank president with the long tan overcoat, that was supposed to have fifty grand in his inside pocket, an’ finally stuck him up in an alley an’ seen it was the porter he’d given the overcoat to. I heard how—”

“Accidents can happen to anybody,” Johnny Dolan reminded him, indulgently. “You’ll talk different when I hand you that jewel-case.”

Mr. McGee slowed, almost to a stop.

“You poor dumb sap!” he muttered wonderingly. “Ain’t there nothin’ at all inside that dome t’ tell yuh she’s a’ready phoned over an’ there’s fifteen troopers waitin’ in them bushes?”

“Lissen, Rat!” Johnny Dolan responded sharply. “You got the moll very wrong. She ain’t one t’ pull that stuff. T’ prove it, I’ll go across them lawns alone!”

“You’re tellin’ me you’ll go alone!” the Rat hooted derisively. “Punk, get this an’ figure out yer own answers. You’ve put the finger on the grandest little set-up I ever made, an’ for a payoff I probably gotta take the laugh I get when them bulls put the collar on you. Believe you me, sucker, you’ll go alone all right; an’ whatever stretch they give you, remember when you get out, this is waitin’ for you!”

Melodramatically, Mr. McGee reached deftly to the back of his neck and slipped out the thin, shiny knife which lived along the upper part of his spine and which he had not felt warranted in trying on a determined young woman with two pistols. “An’ supposin’ there’s one chance in a million you might get inside the drum again without a skinful o’ lead, pull any more funny tricks an’ come out without the stuff, and it’s still waiting for you!”

He had covered the subject in characteristic fashion, of course — and yet Johnny Dolan remained amazingly unperturbed. His lip curled pityingly as he smiled at the Rat.

“You’re batty,” he said. “There won’t be no fifteen troopers, not with a square moll like her. Look, Rat. If there’s one moll like that in the world, there’s two. No sooner we cash in, I’m gonna find the other an’ — oh, are we here a’ready?”

There were no fifteen troopers. There was not even one trooper. Johnny Dolan walked quite fearlessly across the lawn and straight to the ladder, and never a single soul filed one Objection. He stopped and listened. He laughed softly and with great satisfaction. He’d had the moll absolutely right and he was as safe here as home in his own bed.

He felt in his pocket for the big, queer key. Curiously enough, it was still there. He climbed the ladder quite gracefully, and even paused and yawned when he came to the top. Then, all unafraid, happily conscious that he was working under conditions which rarely come once in a burglar’s lifetime, he swung into Miss Rudwell’s bed-chamber and flashed his light about.

Still and empty, to the last detail it was exactly as he had left it. He chuckled even more contentedly and moved across to the Chinese cabinet. Humming softly to himself, he fitted the key and opened the door.

“And nuts to you, Rat!” Johnny Dolan snickered, as he drew out the velvet jewel-case.

Lissen! would he give one loud, hoarse laugh, right in the Rat’s face, when he handed him this case! And would he jab his thumb into the poor pill’s skinny ribs and ask him now about up and up molls! Indeed and indeed he would, Johnny Dolan decided and, all aquiver with pleasant mirth, he tucked the case under his arm and — huh?

Didn’t it seem like something ought to have rattled in there when he did that? What he meant, this jewelry was all loose. Already at the window, Johnny, Dolan paused and scowled heavily. Positively, the jewels were inside this little box, on account of he had seen them put there and then get locked up in the cabinet.

And the moll had tossed him the key, with him watching all the while. But... well, with a bad actor like the Rat you took no chances. Suddenly cold and uncomfortable, Johnny Dolan perched on the edge of the bed and picked at the cover of the jewel-case. It rose almost too readily.

And, save for one folded scrap of paper, the case was empty!

His mouth sagged open. Little beads came again to his forehead. He twitched bewilderedly at the paper and a ten-dollar bill, folded into it, dropped to his palm. And now he had the thing flattened out, now with the flashlight tucked under his arm and illuminating the half-sheet of note paper, he was reading it:

Well — he had been stunned when he saw the doll crying on this bed. Now, for the second time in the same night in the same room, Johnny Dolan sat there, stunned all over again.

He was getting it slowly, but he was getting it. While she was coughing, understand? The way she’d barked and gargled that time, she could have opened ten cabinets and dumped ten jewel-cases, and still he’d never have heard it. Only to get crossed by that moll!

He stared for a time at the ten-dollar bill and at last mechanically stuffed it in his pocket. So now what? Johnny Dolan scratched his unornamental cranium.

Well, it seemed he had a problem on his hands, huh? One of them problems you guess right the first time or win a pair of white wings for a consolation prize. He could go down and come clean with the Rat and take what the Rat had waiting for him; and maybe some day, if she had that much hard luck, an elderly mother in Rhode Island would hear that her son had been vivisected on some bent-grass in Westchester. Or he would glide down the ladder and, since the Rat was waiting due east of this point, he could strike off in a westerly direction and keep right on going until he could thumb a car headed for Seattle.

The latter course had much the greater appeal. Johnny Dolan tossed aside the case and, hurrying to the window, was about to throw a leg over the sill when he descried the murky, whitish spot moving below. He leaned out and stared. He froze! It was indeed the cap of Rat McGee, who must have taken courage at the complete lack of excitement here!

Johnny Dolan drew back-hurriedly. His knees began to shake, gently and decently at first and then more and more energetically, until they were fairly whizzing around in their sockets and banging against one another. He... he... he had to sit down a minute!

There was a little chair beside him. Johnny Dolan sat on that, swallowing, chattering soundlessly to himself, as monkeys will, shaking his head, trying to make it work fast enough to save the rest of his anatomy... Well, lissen now! He couldn’t sit here like this forever, on account of somebody’d come in the morning to make the bed, or something. So... so when he could stand on these knees, it seemed he’d have to be ready with an alibi that would stick even with the Rat and — what was that?

Near at hand, a door had closed. Near at hand, steps were approaching. Somewhere on this floor, somebody was wide awake and walking around! With one loud gasp, with no second thought at all, Johnny Dolan started over the sill and downward, to take his chances with the Rat.

And then.

The knees did it. Just as he hit the third rung, they seemed to fold like so much wet blotting paper, and it was only by the thickness of a hair that Johnny Dolan succeeded in clutching the ladder. He clutched it far too well. It swung out from the house — and out and still out! — and with another wild gasp he hurled himself against it.

And now he’d dislodged it somehow at the bottom. Yes, now it was sliding under him, out and down, down, down, and — glass crashed with a din that could have been heard in the next county. Splinters flew all around Johnny Dolan.

The ladder itself seemed just to dematerialize. Johnny Dolan, with a mighty thud, struck the ground squarely on his back.

His head bounced once or twice. Then he lay still, blinking. It looked like the damn’ thing must ’a’ slid right out under him, huh, so the top end of it went through the first-floor window. It looked like — Johnny Dolan staggered hurriedly to his feet. Rat McGee, great fists clenched, was wheezing with pure maniacal effect: “You — dumb — aaah!”

His temper gone, his knife quite forgotten, he swung at Johnny Dolan’s jaw with his powerful left. He connected, too, and Johnny Dolan spun away crazily, stumbling, gasping and, now, running. Aye, running as he had never run before in all his days; running so swiftly that, had any fleet gazelle been there to race him, the fleet gazelle must have quit in tears; leaping, too, as leaps the frightened stag before the hounds.

Once, just for a second, he looked back. Hell sure had busted loose! Mr. McGee, clumping slowly after him, had been overtaken by a great white nightgown and a huge pair of light pajamas. There was shouting and scrambling and the distinct sound of a whack. Very faintly, Johnny Dolan caught: “Bashed him with the blighted rolling-pin, Curtis! Fetch a rope before he comes ’round!”

Johnny Dolan kept on running. Not so bright perhaps as a rule, his sense of location now seemed no less than marvelous. He shot into Mr. McGee’s car as if a mighty magnet had dragged him through the door.

Mr. James (Red) Binney paused in the swabbing of his car and studied the approaching Johnny Dolan.

“Stick your head in a beehive, pal?” he queried. “Your pan’s quite swole on both sides. More on the right than on the left, I’d say.”

“It’s my pan,” Johnny Dolan answered morosely.

“An’ who else’d want it?” Mr. Binney merrily laughed and changed the subject. “Well, things didn’t break so good last night, accordin’ to what I read in the early evening editions, huh? The butler an’ the chauffeur put the collar on the Rat, outside that Rudwell house, up above, an’ what with the stretches he’s done a’ready it looks like this time he gets life!”

“That’s his headache,” Johnny Dolan said, more morosely.

He was trying to think. He was trying to get it, and he couldn’t get it. Molls, what he meant. Not any moll — maybe nine molls out of ten would cross you, the way Red said. But that moll! An’ him, the poor sap, kidding himself last night he’d have sixty grand this morning!

Mr. Binney, always anxious to please a customer, changed the subject even again.

“Well, how’s it coinin’ about this knockout you was speakin’ o’ gettin’, Johnny?” he asked jovially.

“What?” Johnny Dolan rasped, coming out of the trance.

Mr. Binney started and stared at him. Johnny Dolan, breathing noisily, stared right back at Mr. Binney. On account of, it this guy had heard something and was trying to make a crack. He relaxed a little. Red hadn’t heard nothing; a moll like her wouldn’t be trading here.

“Gimme beer!” he snapped. “No — hold it! Gimme that beer glass, empty. Now gimme rye!” He dropped a ten dollar bill to the bar. “Take out for the bottle!” Johnny Dolan said savagely.