Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 28, No. 3, November 12, 1927

Ruggles’s dubious past, buried and hidden under ten years of straight living, comes to life again.

Chapter I The Holdup

“Look in there,” Ruggles whispered in my ear; “but don’t make a sound at what you see!”

“I won’t,” I whispered back. Then I looked through our secret peep-hole which gave Ruggles and me a clear view of the unexpected things that were taking place in the living room of our snug little first floor apartment; lighted now by the last tag end of the daylight.

There was a man in there, a hatchet-faced, gray-skinned man of about my own height and build, a man with thick, closely cut gray hair and a tigerish kind of slouch and crouch about him as he moved.

And move he did. He kept moving, moving, moving as if it were an impossibility for him not to move; for an instant, he would crouch against the wall, staring at the door into the vestibule; and the front windows seemed to give him the same anxiety, for, after studying the front door, he would study them with what looked to be nearly a mad intensity.

And all the time his chest rose and fell noticeably, like that of a fugitive who has spent himself in a desperate rush for liberty.

All at once then he became motionless as if turned into stone; even his coarse, heavy hands became motionless; it was as if every sense he had had suddenly concentrated on something, concentrated to its uppermost, and it came to me that he was listening.

That did not prepare me, though, for the long, swift, catlike leap which carried him to our front door; with one hand he flung it open and with his other he covered us with an automatic, which after a staring moment he lowered. To Ruggles, he said:

“Get in here, Garrison. I’ve been waiting near an hour for you!”

It was he who closed the door after us and made sure that the lock was turned. It was he who led us into our living room as if the place were his.

“If you got any other doors any one can come in through, block ’em up,” was his next command.

That was it: this man did not come here to beg our help as our other clients had done — he gave his orders with the confidence of one certain that he should be obeyed. I looked at him resentfully, but he met me with a leer on his hard lips and a cold glitter in his baleful eyes.

“Wipe it off,” he said in a voice with a rasp like a file. “Wipe it off an’ keep it off! You don’t know me, man, and you don’t know what I know!”

Leaving me as if sure he had disposed of me for the time, as indeed he had, he turned on Ruggles and said: “You call yourself Ruggles now, huh? Well, you’ve got some taller an’ you’ve grown up to yer bones; but I don’t see you’ve changed much except fer that name and th’ side yer working on.”

I looked at Ruggles and forgot, on the instant, the unexplainable things I had just heard; for Ruggles sat fixed as a statue, watching the other man as if those two had been alone in that suddenly silent room.

Then, in a voice I should not have recognized if I had not been in that room with him, Ruggles said slowly: “Yes, Markley, I’ve changed my name and the side I’m working on.”

“The name part of it, I can get,” the man, Markley, said hoarsely; “I’ve changed mine a good dozen times! But your leaving us and siding in with the harness-bulls — no, that’s too much! Did you get caught — do a stretch — and get converted?”

“No,” the man I had known for four years as Ruggles said in a dead voice, “I simply made a choice.”

“A clever One, likely,” Markley jeered. “You always were the wise guy, Garr — I mean Ruggles. You can tell me about it later. Just now I’m glad you did sign up with the bulls, for you’ve got to help me now from th’ inside.”

“What?”

“Sure — th’ inside; it was me croaked Dorgan, last week; one o’ my gloves split, and your friend, Stannistreet, th’ detective, found my finger-prints. Now you got to block Stannistreet off somehow an’ git me out o’ this town an’ out of this State — you got to do it an’ do it quick, for it’s th’ chair if Stannistreet gets me!”

The telephone rang. At the sound, Markley glared at the instrument like a hunted animal; his dirty, talonlike fingers closed on the arm of his chair, and the perspiration stood out on his brow.

“If that’s one of Stannistreet’s men and he’s traced me here—”

Ruggles cut Markley short with a gesture and lifted the receiver.

“Yes,” my companion said over the wire, “this is Ruggles. Oh, how are you? What? You say you want to give me a description? Go ahead! I’ll repeat it after you so as to get it straight. Now go ahead!”

There was a pause during which Ruggles looked over the top of the instrument at Markley. “All right. Five feet ten and a half. Weighs about one hundred and sixty pounds. Hair gray and cut close to the head. Eyes light blue? Yes, all right — light blue, with a squint. Cheek bones rather prominent. Complexion gray. An inch-long scar under right eye, becomes purple when man is angered. Desperate character, will not be taken alive, dead shot with each hand. Name is—”

With a snarl of fury, Markley, whom the description had fitted in every detail like a glove, tore the instrument from Ruggles’s hand and listened breathlessly, that forbidding scar under his right eye, burning an ever angrier and more ferocious purple.

Then Markley forced the instrument back into Ruggles’s hand, saying savagely the instant Ruggles hung up: “Stannistreet himself, that was. I thought first you were giving me away. If you had I’d have croaked you where you stood!”

Markley’s hoarse voice shook with passion, and he fixed on Ruggles’s wrist a hand on which the cords stood out like roots.

“Steady, Markley,” Ruggles said evenly. “Steady!”

“Steady, yes,” the fugitive said. “But, if you’re thinking you can tip Stannistreet off that I’m here, think again, for all I’ve got to do is slip him the word that you and I worked in the same gang, once—”

“Yes, I know,” Ruggles broke in. “I know that only too well, Markley.”

Markley’s hard face took on an acid grin. “Oh, I get you,” he said significantly; “your friend here don’t know about what you used to be.”

“There is no need of his knowing,” Ruggles said; “Mr. Crane is my friend as well as my assistant who helps me on all my cases.”

“Then,” Markley kept on, “as I look at it he ought to know — ought to know what gang you travelled with up to ten years ago; he ought to know what you are an’ what me an’ the other four have got on you. He ought to get hep to that an’ I’m goin’ to tell him.”

“No,” Ruggles said slowly.

“Who’s going to stop me? Not you, Mr. — Ruggles! Who then?”

“Stannistreet, the detective. You heard what he said to me; the description he gave me; you recognized his voice on the telephone. But you didn’t get the whole thing.”

“What didn’t I get?” Markley’s ice-colored eyes narrowed to slits.

“He’s on his way up here now,” Ruggles said steadily. “I’m playing this fair with you, Markley. He’s on his way up here now. If you want to get away before he comes, you’d better be starting.

“If you don’t want to get away before he comes, you’ve got to get out of sight. Go into that room there,” indicating our extra bedroom. “Shut the door and lock it on your side; but listen, if you like, through the keyhole.”

“He’s coming here to ask you to take my trail, is he?” Markley asked.

“Yes,” Ruggles replied. “I’m the only one who can get you out of the fix you’re in now, and I’m going to do it. I tell you this, and you know I keep my word.”

“You always did in the old days,” Markley said grudgingly; “but how do I know you will now? You’ve gone back on the old gang an’ probably squealed—”

“You know I didn’t squeal, Markley!”

“How do I know that?”

“Why, if I had, you and Cottrell and Branley and Hilliard and Mueller would have been picked up long ago, wouldn’t you?”

“I never could match up with you when it come to reasoning a thing out,” Markley said skeptically. Then, with that grudging surrender which he had shown before: “But what you say’s right enough: you’d have sent us all to the pen, if you’d squealed. I just got out from a long stretch myself, but I know who put me there, an’ it wasn’t you. What?”

Ruggles had suddenly caught Markley’s arm in a warning grip.

“That’s Stannistreet’s step, there in the vestibule,” Ruggles said in a scarcely audible whisper. “Here’s the key to the door of that bedroom. Go in there, now. No shooting! Know why? Because, though you may get Stannistreet, I’m the only one who can get you clear of the bulls and detectives that are after you, and I won’t lift a finger for you unless you do as I say.”

Chapter II An Urgent Call

Even at that critical moment, when Markley knew that his very life hung in the balance, he had the hardihood and reckless daring to wait.

“Think you can give me orders, do you?” he demanded in that hushed, hoarse whisper of his: “I’ve only got to open my mouth once and your friend, Stannistreet, would be the first to arrest you.”

“To a certain point, you can force me to go,” Ruggles flung back; “but, beyond that, whether you tell one man or all men, I will not go. I have promised to save you if you do what I tell you to. Will you do it?”

For a moment, the two men glared at each other. Then Markley snatched the key from Ruggles’s outstretched hand and darted noiselessly into the bedroom. We heard him close the door, heard the key turn in the lock. Then silence, broken only by our own heavy breathing.

All this had taken place in little more than an instant. It had been Stannistreet’s step which we had heard in our vestibule, and it was his ring which we heard now. Ruggles loosened his collar a little, breathed deeply, stood for an instant irresolute, then went to the front door and opened it.

“Hi, Ruggles,” Stannistreet said. “How are you, Crane? Been so busy, I haven’t seen either of you lately.” The detective, who had said this from the doorway, now came with springy step into our living room, and I closed the front door after him.

He took off his hat, threw it on our center table, and stood looking at us, smiling. A fine-looking man, Stannistreet was, a tall, erect, vigorous man still in his early thirties, with the rather casual air of a successful business man who, when outside of his office, was not given to letting his responsibilities bother him.

The only thing about Stannistreet that gave away the secret of the profession he belonged to, was the fact that he always spoke in a carefully lowered voice, as if he suspected that some hidden person was always listening, listening, listening

Stannistreet not only gave that impression; it was, to my knowledge, an absolute conviction of his; and, if this conviction were a delusion, it was one which had saved his life a good hundred times.

“I just phoned you about Markley,” he said to Ruggles. “Markley’s a particularly bad actor — he croaked Dorgan, the policeman, who had come on Markley holding up a cigar store; Markley escaped, circled the block, then came up behind Dorgan and crushed his skull with a blackjack.”

Ruggles nodded. “The newspapers told how Dorgan had been killed, but they didn’t say who killed him.”

“No, they didn’t know. As a matter of fact, I’m the only one that has got this on Markley,” Stannistreet said eagerly. “I had had lunch on McDougal Street and was coming up and happened to see Markley — you know — no, you don’t; but he’s got a face like a man’s last night on earth.

“Markley was bending over Dorgan; when he saw me, he turned and ran, gave me the slip, but I got his finger-print on a pocketbook he’d got halfway out of Dorgan’s pocket. Markley don’t know it, but I’m the only one who can send him to the chair and I’m going to do it.”

“Well,” Ruggles said almost impatiently, “what do you want me to do, Stannistreet? Better take your hat and go out and take Markley now!” Ruggles actually handed Stannistreet’s hat to him and was leading him to the door. “You’re not wanting to lose any time, of course,” said Ruggles.

“Oh, look here,” the detective remonstrated, “I’m not in such a rush as all this. You don’t get the point, Ruggles; I want you to take Markley. You know the mug of every crook in the country, or in the world, I’ve heard men say, so it won’t be anything hard for you to pick up Markley.”

It was a tribute to Ruggles’s photographic memory, that Stannistreet did not ask this as a question, but simply took it as a fact that Markley, the holdup man and murderer had been “mugged” already in Ruggles’s mental Rogues’ Gallery.

“Yes,” Ruggles said, “I’ve seen him.”

“Well,” Stannistreet went on, “that’s all you need — you’ve seen him. Say, what’s your hurry? Never saw you in such a tear before, Ruggles.” Ruggles was working him toward the door again.

“I tell you Stannistreet, I’ve got a dozen things to do—”

“But will you take on Markley? You will, won’t you?”

“Why should I?” Ruggles asked “You can get him yourself?” Ruggles put his hand on the doorknob.

“Yes, I can get him myself,” Stannistreet said. “I’ve got him bottled up in this town — every exit watched by men who have his description down pat.”

“Then you’d better go through with it.” Ruggles opened the door.

“No,” Stannistreet said; “you are the man to do that.” He stood in the doorway, nodding his head as he spoke. “It will be simpler and better in many ways if you do it; he knows me, and he don’t know you.”

“What makes you think he doesn’t know me?” Ruggles asked.

“This,” Stannistreet said, blocking the doorway with his big shoulders: “Markley’s just out from doing a ten-year stretch in the Columbus pen.

“It was ten years ago that you came here to New York and started the work you’ve been doing ever since — rounding up crooks we detectives hadn’t been able to catch — that’s the truth of it, and I think I’m catching honesty from you, Ruggles.

“You and I know that the crooks, who are doing time, have ways of keeping posted on what’s happening outside; but you’ve always worked on your own; not hooked up with any detective agency; and that’s why I’ll gamble Markley’s never heard of you. I tell you, Ruggles, if Markley stepped into this room now, he wouldn’t know you from Henry Ford or Luther Burbank!”

“Burbank is dead,” Ruggles said absently, “and I don’t want to be.”

Stannistreet looked at Ruggles in surprise. “This is the first time I ever heard you say anything like that. You’ve never seemed afraid—”

“I’m not afraid now.”

“I know that. I’ll tell you something: I know where he hangs out at night, and I’ll show you and you can walk in there and pick him up easy as—”

“I tell you, I’m not afraid!”

“And I tell you, I know that. My gad, I saw you take ‘Red’ Moran single-handed, didn’t I? There’s another reason why you’re the logical one to take Markley: before he was captured, convicted, and sent for that ten-year stretch in the Columbus pen, he worked somewhere in the West with four or five men, all of them bad actors.

“See if you can’t get a line on who they are and where they are now. If they’re anything like Markley, there’s big rewards out for them. You’ll take on the job, won’t you?”

“Yes,” Ruggles said, “I’ll take on the job of getting Markley.” Ruggles was actually crowding Stannistreet out into the vestibule.

“Yes, I’m going,” Stannistreet said, “but there’s one thing more: I told you I’ve got the bird caged — bottled up in this town; every road, ferry, subway, waterway, everything watched.

“The moment he tries to get through, he’ll be nabbed by one of our men, and word ’ll be sent to me. But you ought to know the place he hangs out nights in. 17 Christopher Street — it’s where he sleeps, if he ever does sleep.”

“17 Christopher Street,” Ruggles said reflectively; “that’s Luigi’s joint, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that back room on the second floor — place where you caught Pendler, the drug vendor last March. Markley is there. Going after him to-night?”

“To-night or to-morrow — can’t say, exactly, Stannistreet.”

“Phone me as soon as you’ve nailed him, or have some one phone me. I’ve moved to 144 Perry Street. The landlord and janitor know me as Henry Fowler. Anything more? Then I’ll get out,” Stannistreet said with a flash of his white teeth under his black mustache. “And,” he said over his shoulder as he walked down the steps, “get all the dope on the four or five men Markley used to work with — they’re probably in touch with him here.”

It was not until I had heard Stannistreet’s footsteps die away on the sidewalk that I looked at Ruggles, and then it was to see Ruggles, dull-eyed and weary, as. I had never seen him look before, go to the door of the extra bedroom and say huskily through it:

“All right, Markley, he’s gone.”

The door opened and Markley came out to us, his body crouched, his eyes hard and glistening, his automatic ready in his hand.

“I’ll get that—” he said, applying to Stannistreet a term of horrible indecency. “I’ll get that— He’s the only one can prove I croaked Dorgan. Both o’ you heard him say that yourself!”

“Yes,” Ruggles said, “we heard him. But you’re not going to kill Stannistreet.”

“Why not? With him knocked off, I’ll be safe as if I had a pardon from the President!”

“You won’t croak him, though,” Ruggles said, “for you’re not a fool — at least, you weren’t one in the old days. You’ve just croaked one man, and you won’t make yourself safe by croaking another.”

“What other way is there?”

“This way,” Ruggles said; “we heard Stannistreet say he has blocked every exit from this city. He knows where you’ve been hanging out, Luigi’s place on Christopher Street — he knows the room you sleep in, down there, at night.”

“Much sleep I get,” Markley said with ghastly irony. “I don’t need much. You know how little I can get along on. But I’ve got to have some, for I’m ten years older than I was when the five of us worked, back in Chicago.

“But you always found some way of getting us out of a hole, as long as we did what you said. If I’d took your advice, I guess I’d never have done that ten-year stretch in the pen at Columbus.”

“No, I don’t think you would, Markley.”

“But what scheme you got now?”

“One that will work,” Ruggles replied; “you and Crane, my assistant, here, are about the same height and build; I’ll make him up as you; then he will go to your hang-out on Christopher Street, to-night.

“I’ll see that a cop is tipped off to go there and arrest him; the word will go to Stannistreet that you have been taken; Stannistreet will believe it and call off his men who now are blocking the exits of the city, and you and I, Markley, can slip safely out through any one of a dozen different ways. See?”

“You mean,” Markley asked, “before the harness bulls and the detectives find the bird they’ve arrested is Crane, instead o’ me?”

“Yes,” Ruggles said. “I can fix Crane up in ten minutes so you’ll think, when you stand face to face with him, you’re looking into a mirror.”

“I’d forgot,” Markley said with a wolfish grin. “It’s like one of our old games, Garrison! Remember the time you went to see Cottrell, in jail, and made him up as the district attorney, who had gone in ahead to see one of the other prisoners?

“They let Cottrell out and the district attorney’s chauffeur took Cottrell to the railroad station and saw him off on the train — and that district attorney never did see Cottrell again! Guess that’s an old story, though, to you, Crane — it was back, twelve years ago in Kansas City, as Garrison, I mean Ruggles, has told you.”

“No,” Ruggles said slowly, “I’ve never told Crane that story, and there’s no time to tell it to him now, for I’ve got to get making Crane up for you. There’s no time to lose.”

Ruggles rose quickly to his feet, got his make-up box and, with Markley sitting at my side, was making me up in another moment.

Chapter III A Startling Transformation

Before this, many times, I had seen Ruggles transform himself and me, and I had thought that I was familiar with his skill.

But never, in all my four years of closest association with him as his friend and his assistant, had I seen him work so swiftly and with such startling effect as now.

In an incredibly short time, Ruggles had kept his word to Markley — when Ruggles was done and, at his command, Markley and I stood face to face, Markley stared at me for a long, incredulous moment, then moistened his lips and said huskily:

“By—, you’re right, Garrison; it’s like lookin’ into a… mirror!”

“We can match Markley’s clothes in the collection we keep,” Ruggles said to me.

There was nothing that I could say, for I had happened to catch sight of my reflection in the mirror over the fireplace, and… well, Markley probably was so used to his own appearance that he did not mind it.

But I was not used to it — what I saw in the mirror was a coarse, vicious, squint-eyed brute leaning over and taking a cigar from my private humidor — and I knew that that coarse, vicious, squint-eyed brute was I.

“There’s one thing you must keep in your mind, Markley,” Ruggles went on: “from now on until I give, you the word to go out with me, you must stay here under cover in these rooms. Crane will go out, to-night, as your substitute; he will be arrested in your place, and, for the time being, take the search off from you.”

“That suits me,” Markley said with a coarse laugh. He helped himself to a cigar and settled himself on the couch.

“No, that won’t do,” Ruggles said; “any one may come in here. You must go back into the bedroom and stay there!”

Markley rose to his feet. “That bedroom would be a nice trap,” he ground out. “How do I know you’re not going to double cross me?”

“I have given you my word to get you out of this,” my companion said. “Lock the door on the inside. You’ve got your gun.”

“I guess I have. And, Mr. Ruggles, if I go down, you go down with me.”

“I know that. Have a shot of brandy? Crane and I are going to have one.”

“Why, sure, if you don’t mind, then I’ll get some sleep. That’s a good bed — I’ll say that for you!”

“And good brandy, too,” Ruggles said, a moment later when he came back from our little kitchenette with three glasses loaded.

“Right again,” Markley said, as he tossed his off. He looked eagerly at the bottle; then, seeing Ruggles remained oblivious, Markley stalked into our extra bedroom and closed and locked the door.

For what seemed to me a long time, but probably was only a few moments, the bedroom was as silent as the living room in which Ruggles and I sat. Then, from the bedroom, came the sound of heavy snores.

“Asleep,” I said, “asleep already. He must have been exhausted.”

“He was exhausted,” Ruggles replied, “and, in addition to that, I put enough stuff in his brand to make him sleep even if he had been the least exhausted man in the world.”

Ruggles looked at his watch. “It is eight o’clock now. Markley will sleep until midnight at least. He will wake refreshed and clear-headed then, ready for our escape from the city.”

Ruggles got to his feet. “I’ll see what we’ve got in the ice box,” he went on. “You can’t go out to dinner anywhere made up as you are now — Markley’s description is all over the city, and you’d be picked up by the first policeman who saw you. Dorgan was a very popular police officer, and the Policemen’s Association has offered a reward of two thousand dollars for Markley’s arrest. Stannistreet didn’t mention that, but I heard about it.”

Ruggles went into the rear of our little apartment, and soon returned with a camp supper that was sufficient and satisfying.

When we had finished, and we had carried the dishes into the butler’s pantry and left them for Mrs. Watts, our excellent housekeeper, to wash in the morning, Ruggles telephoned downstairs to her that we were very busy and under no circumstances could see any one during the evening.

Mrs. Watts, the janitor’s wife, had looked after us for four years, and her promise that we should not be disturbed meant that, to all intents and purposes, the telephone was taken out and the front doorbell removed instantly from our apartment.

Ruggles stood near the locked door of the bedroom and listened to Markley’s snoring. Then, to make doubly sure that Markley was asleep, Ruggles dropped from one of the back windows into the court, and entered the bedroom through a hidden panel which, on more than one occasion, had served us well as both entrance and exit.

At Ruggles’s request, I had followed him now, and in a moment his flash light showed Markley’s dreadful face, more forbidding, it seemed to me, in slumber than during his waking hours.

Markley snored, but for all that he was as unconscious as a dead man. Nothing short of the last trumpet, which in his case would summon him to the blackest corner of Hades, could have wakened Markley.

We retraced our steps, and this time Ruggles settled himself in his accustomed chair in our living room.

“You can see how it is,” he said; “it’s come — the thing I’ve been afraid of every moment of the ten years since I turned straight.”

“You mean that that devil in there, Markley, has got something on you?”

“Yes, something real. I’ve told you more than once, Dan, that I was a near-crook; but I wore better. I thought I did, when I told you that.”

“Is there anything we can do?”

“I’m glad you said we,” Ruggles said. He put his hand on my shoulder with a quick, eloquent pressure. Then he got to his feet wearily.

“I think I’ll stretch out on that couch, Dan. I’m tired for what I believe is the first time in my life; and I’ve got to do some thinking. I’ll just lie down there, close my eyes, and work this thing out somehow; and maybe after that I can get some sleep.”

His face, as I looked at it as he turned, seemed to me to have aged incredibly; his wide shoulders, which I never had seen slump before, were slumped now; his head, which I had always seen him carry as erect as a stag’s, was bowed on his breast.

“If I do go to sleep — and I need to — wake me in a couple of hours, will you. It will be half past ten then, and time for us to get started for Christopher Street.”

He lay down on the couch then, snapped off the light near its head, and closed his eyes.

I had not asked him any details of the sudden trouble which now racked him. I knew as much as I ever wanted to know: Ruggles was fighting a battle which not even I, his best friend, could help him with.

That dubious past, which he had buried and hidden under ten years of straight living and marvelous service in the suppression of crime, had come to life again.

Markley knew about it — knew all of it; so did his four companions; the five had constituted a gang with which Ruggles had worked; in just what capacity, was not clear yet; but it must have been definite enough, for Markley had come, now, given his orders, and Ruggles had not even made an attempt to disobey.

His association with this gang of criminals had been definite; he had known them long and known them only too well.

And I saw in this the answer to a question which had come back and back to me: how had Ruggles come to know so well the working of the criminal mind? Yes, I knew the answer to that question now — he knew the criminal because he had once—

Not even now, could I bring myself to finish that statement. But my thoughts raced on: it was because he had lived with them, that he was able now to anticipate the workings of the criminal mind.

For he did know the underworld so marvelously well; he knew all the organizations of crime in America, Europe, and the Far East, as well as Mexico and South America.

But he knew best New York’s great underworld, this vast, teeming Manhattan where, of all the world, perhaps, were the most highly specialized, best organized, and best financed syndicates of crime whose chiefs, lieutenants, and sub-lieutenants he had dedicated himself, his life, and all his extraordinary abilities to fight.

He knew them all, the whole rank and file, from the carefully shrouded backers, whose names never appeared, down to those conscienceless, desperate, mentally undeveloped creatures who ferociously executed their chiefs’ commands and so formed what might be called the cutting edge.

Ruggles knew them all, and they knew him — knew that his death was the only thing that could spell safety for them. He had them all on his list, and he was steadily working down it. Many he had convicted already and placed in the chair or behind the bars. The rest he would reach as soon as their turns came.

For those new recruits of the underworld, those who had not realized until too late that the net was closing in on them, Ruggles felt only the profoundest pity, and for them he did all he could.

But to those who came out, nightly, like the predatory animals they were, to roam the jungles of the greatest city in the world, he showed no mercy; for well he knew that they would show him none when the final show-down came.

Bribes, threats, attacks on his life — all had been tried, time after time, and would be tried, we both knew, until the end.

This continuous hazard was inseparable from the work he did; and for this work he was peculiarly well equipped: his restless and eager mind was a veritable storehouse of information on every subject under the sun, and all of this limitless mass of fact and detail was ever ready at the call of his photographic memory.

Added to this was his extraordinary ability as an actor; and this, and his recently demonstrated power as a master in the art of makeup, had saved us in many desperate crises. And he was able as readily to detect another’s masquerade.

Physically he was quite the finest human animal I have ever seen: something over six feet in height, weighing nearly two hundred stripped, an extremely proficient boxer, he combined with the terrific hitting power of the best heavyweights, that catlike activity and speed which is as a rule associated only with the best of the lightweights.

Chapter IV An Unholy Conference

If, I say, Ruggles had ever lived less than straight, he was doing his best to atone for it now. It was enough for me that, from the first day of our association, I had found him the unfailing, effective, and sympathetic refuge of the terrified, the helpless, and the oppressed who, though innocent, were too terrified even to attempt to prove their innocence.

If, during the four years I had known him, he had broken the law — and most certainly I had known him to break it — it was never for his own gain, but always to right a wrong. Ruggles’s sins were always benevolent.

How successful he had been, until now! Until now, it had seemed to me that he must always succeed — as if nothing could check his successful advance against these predatory animals he opposed. But I knew, in my heart, that I should have anticipated the present moment when his buried past had risen up to thwart him and defy him.

What could I do to help him? Closing my eyes and letting my head rest on my hand, I tried, for what seemed weary hours, to work some way out of it for Ruggles, some escape for him from Markley and those four other members of the band.

The realization of what it seemed to me must be Ruggles’s unescapable fate: his arrest, disgrace, and conviction, had wearied me — made me want to sleep until the end of the world.

It was absolutely still in the room. Markley’s snores still penetrated the door of the bedroom, but Ruggles, I was thankful to see, was sleeping as peacefully as a child.

Sleep called to me. I wanted nothing in the world so much as sleep. Rising, I went to the wall switch, turned it, and felt grateful for the soothing darkness which instantly settled on the room. Feeling my way back to my chair, I settled myself in it again, closed my eyes, and, as before, rested my head on my hand.

I must have slept — it might have been for moments only, or it might have been for hours; then a strong hand roused me.

“Yes,” I said. “All right. Only don’t turn your flash light right in my eyes, Ruggles.”

I sat up, only to be thrown down and pinned to the back of my chair. The gun I had snatched for and found was tom from my fingers. The wall switch was turned, and the flooding electric glare showed me a sight which bewildered me:

Ruggles was not on the couch and he was not in the room; instead, were Markley and four other men, one of whom relaxed his inexorable grip on me as another covered me with his gun.

“Garrison did a good piece of work on ’im, I’ll say that, anyway, fer ’im,” one of them said, after examining my face with patient and searching scrutiny. “Garrison was always good at this. You know yourself, Cottrell.”

“Sure, I know,” the man addressed as Cottrell said. “If it wasn’t fer those clothes o’ yours, Markley, I’d feel like asking this bird here to pay me that bunch of bucks you owe me.”

There was a grim laugh; then they began to talk among themselves of some job they were scheming out. No one spoke to me; they regarded me, from time to time, just as their eyes happened to fall on me; but it was clear that, for the time, they regarded me merely as a piece of furniture.

This gave me an opportunity of studying them in detail; and little by little, from their talk, I became able to place them: the lanky, black-haired man of perhaps forty was Cottrell; Mueller was light-haired and blue-eyed, younger, and stouter, a very powerful man, I set him down.

Hilliard, stooping and small of build, and quick as a cat in his nervous movements, was blue-eyed, too, a much older man, probably in his late fifties — an English crook, I judged, from his general cut and accent.

Branley I was sure was a Frenchman, for all his Saxon name: he was fat and bearded, without a trace of color in his sallow cheeks, and with deep-set furtive eyes which told of a treacherous, brooding nature.

Fortune, or fate, rather, had placed me where I could identify now all the five members of the band with which, in what capacity only Ruggles and they knew, my friend and companion of so many thrilling and dangerous hours, had been associated.

This was the dubious crew on whom Stannistreet had urged Ruggles to “get the dope”; and, even at this dangerous moment, when I was powerless in their hands, I thought of the singularity of this fate.

Stannistreet had asked Ruggles to get the dope; but it was I, the less famous and clever of the two of us, who, by my own ill luck, had been enabled to secure it.

Their talk ran on. I could not get the thread of their plan, but it was evidently clear enough to them. Markley left the engineering of it to Mueller, who seemed to be the brains of the five.

Then Markley helped himself to another cigar from my humidor and said to his pals: “You all might as well fill your pockets with these. No one will smoke them if we don’t.” And as they acted on his suggestion, he looked about the room reflectively, and went on: “It’s no wonder Ruggles took a shine to this place. He’ll think of it, now he’s left it.”

“I wonder where he’ll show up next,” Hilliard said.

“He’ll keep under cover awhile,” Mueller said slowly, “then come out with a moniker and in a business as far away as he can get from the one we ran him out of.”

“But we’ll run into him, some time or other,” Branley said, “and, when we do, we’ll know what to do with him.”

“You said it,” Markley agreed with savage emphasis. “We’ll find him, one of these days, and then make sure of it. He can’t give us away to the bulls without giving himself away, but we’ll all feel safer, once he’s knocked off.”

That seemed to them all to sum the situation up as far as Ruggles was concerned. And the first part of it fitted in with the conclusion which suddenly had come to me: Ruggles had decided on flight as the only way out of his predicament.

And I agreed with him: here were five men, all of whom could, and would, in an extremity, bring Ruggles’s freedom to an end by telling his story to the police. Not all of Ruggles’s long and extraordinary service in suppressing crime would help him then. It would be merely a matter of innocent or guilty, and the law would decide what my friend’s fate would be.

Yes, flight had been the only course for him. For, if he stayed, he would have to aid Markley, the murderer, in escaping; and that in itself would have made Ruggles guilty of a felony.

“Yes, your friend, Mr. Ruggles, has gone,” Markley said, reading my thoughts with his heavy-lidded eyes. “I woke up in there,” jerking his head toward our extra bedroom, “after one of the best little naps I ever had; and when I came in here with these pals o’ mine waiting at the front door as they’d agreed to be, your light was turned off and you were asleep in that chair you’re in now; and your friend, Ruggles, had gone.”

“Out the back window,” Hilliard said; “we’d have nailed ’im if he’d come out the front!”

“Front or back,” Markley went on evenly, “he’s gone; and he’s left you in a fix he didn’t figure on. It’s time you knew what your job is, Crane,” he went on with that savage humor which, already, I had come to associate with him.

“You’re going to knock off Stannistreet to-night — Mr. Stannistreet, the detective, who’s known as Henry Fowler, at the apartment he rents at 144 Perry Street.

“You’re going to knock off Stannistreet before the world’s an hour older, Crane; and these pals o’ mine, who the bulls don’t know, are going to come in and catch you red-handed, and give you up to the bulls, then make their getaway to where I’ll be waiting — and the five of us will just naturally pull our freight out of this nice little town you got here.”

That was it, then — a plan so hideous that it made my blood run cold — a plan, too, which from its very boldness and shrewdness bid fair to succeed.

They had more brains than I had given them credit for, these devils who now leered so triumphantly at me; they had seen their chance to use the trump card which Ruggles unsuspectingly had placed in their hands: his having made me up so exactly to resemble Markley.

The facts came over me with a numbing force; made-up as I now was, Stannistreet and his men would simply laugh at me if I went to them and told them that I was not Markley.

And, even after I had washed my makeup off in their presence and they recognized me as Ruggles’s assistant, I should find myself only in a new predicament.

They would ask me how I came to be made up as Markley and who had done it; and I could not answer those questions without revealing Ruggles’s part in the business.

Because I could see nothing but a blank wall in that direction — for I swore to myself that, come what might, I should never give Ruggles away — I turned my thoughts to another section of the problem: Markley had told me that I was to kill Stannistreet, the detective.

The reason why Markley wanted Stannistreet killed was clear enough: Stannistreet was the only man living who could prove that Markley had killed Dorgan, the policeman.

Gradually, what I was sure was Markley’s real plan, began to become clear to me: Markley did not mean that I was to kill Stannistreet.

Markley would do that himself; but the thing was going to be done in a way which would throw the guilt on me and I was to be taken and held for the killing.

Markley, I realized, had spoken the truth when he said that the police and detectives did not know his pals. Stannistreet himself, had admitted this to Ruggles and had driven the admission home by urging on Ruggles the imperative need of his “getting the dope” on who Markley’s pals were and where they were.

The police not knowing them and not having anything on them yet, there was nothing I could see to prevent the thing working out exactly as Markley had said.

Any one of these pals of his could deliver me to the police for the murder of Stannistreet; that would relax the search for the real Markley and he and his gang would be able to slip safely out of the city before I could establish my real identity.

Once Markley and his men had got me that far, I could see no way of balking them. And yet there was a way, if I could put it into execution: if I could get the make-up off now, they might do to me what they would; but I knew that this was the only way and that this was the last moment I could attempt it.

Chapter V Danger in the Dark

The bathroom was just behind me; if I could reach that, slam and lock the door, I could get the make-up off before they could batter the door down. Ruggles’s example had taught me the value of instant action; with one spring I was out of my chair and at the bathroom door before any one of my captors could stop me.

But my wild rush was my ruin. The rug at the door slipped under my flying feet; I went down in a heap on the hardwood and waxed floor, and in a twinkling Markley and Hilliard and Branley were holding me.

“None o’ that,” Markley said with frightful calm: “we know your game — going to clean yourself up and spoil it. But we won’t stand for that!”

In an instant, I was flung back into the chair I had just left, and my hands and ankles were lashed in a way to make further hope of my plan impossible.

“It’s time we were starting,” Mueller said impassively. He had not moved a muscle, and now looked at me only reflectively. “Call a taxi, Cottrell!”

Then, when Cottrell had left: “Don’t tie his feet! Get that stuff off his ankles, Markley — he’s got to walk down the steps to the taxi, hasn’t he? You’ll find his coat and hat in that closet, probably, Hilliard.

“Put them on him, just fold the coat over his shoulders and button it in front at the top, when Cottrell comes with the taxi. Wait; I’ve got a better way — free his hands, too, Branley!”

“What, you think you’re doing,” Markley demanded. “Don’t touch those cords on his wrists, Branley!”

Mueller still did not move, except to the extent of shifting from one corner of his mouth to the other the cigar he was idly smoking.

“Markley, who’s running this thing? You or I?”

“Well,” Markley replied, “you’re running it, I guess; but I don’t like the idea of his hands being free.”

“If I’m running it, I’m running it,” Mueller said. “I’m going to take him, I mean we’re going to take him, to Luigi’s place on Christopher Street, and—” The rest of the sentence was whispered by Mueller into Markley’s ear.

“Say, that’s too much,” Markley ground out from between his clenched teeth. “The first thing he’ll do will be to—” He, in his ton, whispered something to Mueller.

“No, he won’t — not that first,” Mueller replied. “I’ll tell you what he’ll do first, and it’s just what we want him to do.” Again he whispered something to Markley.

“If he does, it’s what we want, as you say,” Markley replied; “but how can you be so sure?”

“Wait and see,” Mueller said.

Then Cottrell came in, saying that the taxi was at the door.

Mueller had his way: my wrists were freed, and I was told to stand up. Then Hilliard gave me my hat and overcoat.

“You’re going to walk down the steps to the taxi with us,” Mueller said, standing close by me. “You’re going to ride with us and not say a word or make a sign to any one, no matter who you see or what he says to you.

“Try anything, Mr. Crane, and whatever happens to us as a result, you’ll be as dead as Dorgan is now and as Stannistreet soon will be!” He showed me an automatic ready in a hand that was as cool and steady as a rock. Then we went out to the taxi.

From our apartment — the one which had been Ruggles’s and mine — on West Eighty-Sixth Street — to Luigi’s place, at No. 17 Christopher, was about five miles. Again and again, of course, on the way down, we stopped with the traffic, often with a traffic officer at our very side.

One word, shouted by me, would have riveted his attention on us and he would have ordered our driver to pull up to the curb. But Mueller’s gun kept pressing against my side and I knew he would keep his word. At my first attempt to call help, Mueller would plunge me into eternity.

On and on we went, in absolute silence, past officer after officer, not one of whom dreamed that Markley, murderer of their brother officer, was one of the men in that orange and black taxicab.

Then the cab came up to the curb opposite the gloomy rookery known as “Luigi’s place.” Stannistreet had been right when he said that Ruggles and I knew the spot, having captured Pendler, the drug-vendor there in March. Ruggles had not told Stannistreet, but the fact was that we had known that dubious den long before that, for we had taken even more dangerous and worse “wanted” criminals than Pendler, the drug-vendor, from Luigi’s place.

But in spite of the evil repute the old shambling, slatternly building bore, I was sure that none of those who had fled to it from justice, had ever been “wanted” more than Markley was now for the murder of Dorgan, the policeman.

The taxi stopped at a word from Mueller; Hilliard and Branley and Cottrell got out, crossed the street, and went into Luigi’s, leaving Markley, Mueller and me in the taxi.

After a few moments, which Mueller kept track of by the watch on his plump wrist, he got out of the taxi and whispered, as he leaned in through the open door toward me:

“Get out, now, Mr. Crane. Lean over so as to hide your face and alter your appearance as much as you can, then run across the street and into the side door! You know the place?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Don’t speak,” Mueller said softly; “answer me with a gesture. Nod, when you mean yes. I can see you clearly. After you have gone into the side door, you will meet Hilliard, who will direct your next move. Now; run, and bend over! The side door! Understand? Run, when I count three. Got that?”

I nodded.

He counted in his soft voice — “One — two — three!”

At the last word, I bolted — not into the side door, but for the alley to the right.

A bullet, fired from an automatic with a perfect silencer, hit the cement just ahead of me, pinged off and crashed through a window somewhere. I abandoned all hope of the alley and swerved into the side door of Luigi’s and there Hilliard was waiting for me.

Without a word, almost without looking at me, and indicating his next move only by closing an iron hand on one of my wrists, he led me swiftly up a flight of stairs, where Cottrell, as silent as Hilliard, and as prompt, took me up another flight, Hilliard going swiftly down the stairs up which we had come.

It was Branley who met me at the top of the second flight of those ill-kept and forbidding stairs, and he dragged me up still another flight and plunged me into that small, breathless, lightless back room from which, only three months before, Ruggles and I had carried the senseless body of Pendler, the drug-vendor.

What their intention was in bringing me here, only they knew — it had all been worked out by Mueller, undoubtedly, and I realized the futility of my trying to plumb the dark depths of Mueller’s mind.

Back in the comfortable little apartment which had come to mean so much to me, I had heard Mueller assure Markley that when they had brought me to this tomblike room at Luigi’s, I could safely and surely be counted on to do a certain thing — a thing, moreover, absolutely essential to the success of their plot to bring about the death, to-night, of Stannistreet.

There was something bewildering in realizing that, without my being told or in any way consulting me, these men confidently looked to me to perform, on scheduled time and with complete obedience to them, an act by which they, my enemies, would profit.

I tried to imagine what this anticipated act of mine was to be; in their plans for me and for themselves, it unquestionably played a vital part, but the more I groped for it, the less able I was to settle on anything which, in my mind, could be the thing they had planned for me to do.

But, though I could not fathom their plans for me, I knew that they had overplayed their hands: I did indeed know this old rookery — I knew it far better than they thought I did.

It was not for nothing that Ruggles and I had hunted Pendler and others as bad and even worse through this ancient ruin of a building.

Markley and Mueller would be waiting in the taxi across the street, and Cottrell, Hilliard, and Branley unquestionably were stationed at the front and the two side doors; but there was still another exit and I needed no flash light to find it for me.

All in a flash, I had remembered this. Ruggles himself had showed it to me. Instantly, I abandoned all effort at imagining what my recent captors had planned for me to do.

Standing motionless by the wall against which Branley had thrust me, I closed my eyes and visualized the approach to the tunnel by which I knew I should presently escape.

I had ascended three flights of stairs, the first under the espionage of Hilliard, the second with Cottrell, and the third with Branley; I was now on the fourth floor. To reach the exit I had so luckily remembered, I had, I knew, to descend to the street floor; but I would reach it by the back stairs and not by those up which I had come.

It was a matter of only an instant for me to feel in my back hip pocket for my small automatic; there is was, and my fingers told me that it was loaded and ready if I needed it.

Slipping the gun into my right side coat pocket, then taking off my shoes and tying the laces together, I fastened my belt over the connecting strings and thus made the shoes fast at the same time having both my hands free.

There was no light in this room I knew; and it was as dark as if its four walls, floor, and ceiling had been sheathed with tar paper. I felt along until I touched the door, then stood motionless again.

The moment of danger would come when I opened that door and stepped into the hall which, I remembered, was lighted none too well for general purposes and yet much too well for mine, by low-turned and weakly flickering gas jets.

I felt reasonably sure that Markley and his gang would be waiting outside; but they might have stationed some one outside my door, for all that.

Whatever the risk was, however, ft had to be taken, and I took it quickly in a series of bounds which almost instantly carried me past the head of the stairs and into the almost pitch-black corridor in the first angle of which I crouched, panting but overcome with relief.

Chapter VI Number One-Forty-Four

In my first dash through the doorway of the room I had just left, it had seemed to me that I saw a huge, black shape glide into a room a little way down the hall; but there had been no effort at pursuit, and after a moment I could persuade myself that it had been my imagination only and not an actual witness of my swift escape.

Old though the house was, and neglected though it had been for who knew how many years, the floor was solid still and no board creaked under my feet as I hurried along, found myself almost immediately at the head of the back stairs, and began instantly their descent.

Their first turn brought me close to a window; a close, sultry air flowed heavily in on a sullen, heavy bellow of thunder; at the same time, something made me turn swiftly and look up the stairs I had just darted down. What I had expected to see, I could not have told; but, stare as I could, I could see nothing. Then, just as I was turning, grateful for having caught no pursuer in the act of following me the whole world seemed to turn a sickly, livid gray and simultaneously to reel under a volcanic vibration of thunder. In an atom of time, that dazing flash of lightning had passed, but I knew I had seen, leaning over the stair’s rail above me, a huge, hairy face, not speaking, not moving — but seeing me, I could not deny now, and seeming to know where I was going, even to what my desperate errand was.

I had used caution in descending the stairs until now; but now I threw caution to the winds — speed was my only hope and I knew it — escape, before this watcher could warn Markley and his gang where I was.

The burly giant who had peered down at me could not overtake me; my danger was that he might dart to one of the front windows and hail Markley and Mueller from there; if he did, they would have only to rush to the exit for which I was making at the back, and I should be trapped like a fly in a bottle.

My only hope was to reach that exit and get out before they could reach it.

Then I became aware of a new danger: instead of warning Markley and Mueller at the front, my pursuer was descending the stairs after me.

This I knew from the heavy steps whose sound, between the recurrent crashes of thunder, he now made no attempt to hide. On down he came, two steps, three at a time, the banister creaking and seeming about to give way under his heavy hand as he hung to it while sluing round its successive turns.

With my thoughts concentrated on the danger drawing every moment nearer behind me, I had forgotten the dangers lurking before my face: I reached the cellar door only to find standing before it a braced, apelike figure of a man who warned me back with a leveled gun.

If I had wanted to stop, I could not have done it — the door was exactly at the stair’s foot and before the man could pull the trigger of his gun or spring aside I was on top of him, by the sheer momentum of my rush hurling him on his back and knocking him unconscious.

In an instant I had the cellar door open, had sprung through the doorway, closed and bolted it behind me, then was down the brilliantly lighted stairs into the cellar, across it, and had dived like a frog into the tunnel-like exit.

There was wet earth under my stockinged feet now, and in the silence I heard the crash of the cellar door as my gigantic pursuer broke it in; then I was out in an open court, was across this and out between two tenements and on the sidewalk.

With my last strength, I leaped to the running-board of a passing taxicab and, as I crawled, with the driver’s help in through the door, told him to make all the speed his car could do to 144 Perry Street.

If the giant, who had gained on me in our descent of the stairs, had come up with me then, I could have made no resistance: I was as spent as a runner after a marathon and, I believe, should scarcely have felt anything that my huge enemy might have done to me.

But, as the taxi gained speed and I looked through the side window, I could see nothing of my pursuer. The sluicing rain lashed my face and I was glad of its invigorating coolness; but the glare and glitter of the lightning blinded me the next instant, and I ran up the window and leaned back in my seat, working out the details of what my next move must be.

I must warn Stannistreet that Markley was coming to kill him. I could not give the warning over the telephone, for my voice, husky as it was now from anxiety over Ruggles and my despair at discovering that he had gone, would not have been recognized by Stannistreet.

The only thing for me to do was to go direct to the detective’s house and give him the warning face to face. I was confident then I could make Stannistreet believe me.

The taxi was taking me there swiftly. It was no distance from Christopher Street to Perry Street. Before I could realize it, the taxi stopped at the door, and I was paying the driver his charge.

“Wait a minute,” he said quickly. “Sure this is the right place? There’s no light showing here.”

He was right; but the flash light, which I had out in an instant, showed the number “144” above the door.

“Yes,” I said, “this is the place. Pull up to the curb, across the street, and wait for me!”

“How long ’ll I wait,” he asked, naturally enough.

“I don’t know,” I said dully. “Perhaps you had better not — wait.” That was it: I had no idea of when I should come out of that door under those three numerals; I might never come out at all. I heard myself repeating mechanically the words: “Perhaps you had better not wait.”

“Just as you say,” the driver said surlily. He started his taxi, saying to me at the same time: “There’s a taxi parked over there anyway.”

His gears went into second, then into high, and his tail-light dwindled in size, then disappeared down the teeming street.

I dashed up the steps of the apartment house and turned the knob of the door, but the door did not open. There was a bell at the right hand side; I found it after running my fingers up and down the dripping wood. The janitor’s bell, I knew; and I started to press it, then stopped, for I did not want the janitor.

My association with Ruggles had taught me to keep equipped with skeleton keys and had made me an expert in the use of them; so it was not more than a minute before I had the door open and was standing in the vestibule; and there, on the tablet at the right on the wall, was the name by which Stannistreet had told Ruggles and me he was known here by:

That meant the top floor, and I rushed up the stairs.

It was at the back of the house. The halls were dimly lighted — low-power electric light bulbs — evidently the landlord was thrifty. But there was enough light for me to read the numbers over the doors I passed.

I doubted if there was an elevator in the remodeled building, but, even if I had seen an elevator, I should not have taken the time to rouse the elevator boy. I did not want to lose the time, and I did not want him any more than I had wanted the janitor.

I dashed on up the stairs, and “Suite 16” glared at me like the glowing eye of a lighthouse from which the shrouding fog has suddenly lifted. It may have been that my rush up the steep flights of stairs had left me breathless, or it may have been my sudden thankfulness that I had arrived in time.

Be that as it may, my legs suddenly went weak, and I leaned against the open window at the end of the hall for support.

Then I was across the hall and knocked on the door with my clenched fist.

“Stannistreet,” I called, through the door. “Stannistreet?”

The door opened, and Stannistreet looked down at me.

“Markley and his gang are coming to kill you,” I cried, bringing the words out in a rush. “They’s coming—”

No word of his stopped me: it was his automatic, which had leaped to a level with my chest.

“Markley,” Stannistreet said hoarsely. “Markley, by—”

In the blur which fell suddenly between Stannistreet and me, I saw him coming straight at me.

“I am Crane,” I said. “Crane! I—”

“All right — Crane,” Stannistreet said grimly. Then, as his gun rose, then turned, butt down. “Call yourself Crane if you like. Think you could get me the way you did Dorgan?”

His loaded hand, which held my eyes fascinated, fell like a bolt from the sky down on me. Too late I remembered my disguise. “It’s Crane,” I tried to say. Then something crashed down on my head; I felt unsupportable pain, then toppled backward into a bottomless abyss.

When I could see again, I realized, as much as my numbed faculties enabled me to realize anything, that my hands and feet were bound, and a gag I could not dislodge made speech impossible. Some one had propped me up in a chair — Stannistreet, of course — and lashed me securely to the front and the back of it.

I could see the inside of the room now for the first time; Stannistreet was sitting at his desk with his back to me. I had no idea what interval of time had elapsed; but he was evidently pondering, at the moment, some legal document, one of those with which I could see that the desk was littered.

He paid no more attention to me than if I had never existed, and the utter cold-bloodedness of this struck me through and through; I forgot what I should have remembered: that, to Stannistreet, I was Markley, Markley, who had come there, the detective believed, to kill him. I forgot this, I say; I could remember only that Stannistreet, my old friend, Stannistreet sitting there with his back to me at his desk, had knocked me out with the butt of his gun, had bound and gagged me, and now, having made sure of my helplessness, had no further thought of me.

That was it: to him I was Markley, his prisoner, now. Before long, he would look up from his work, over which he was bending motionless now, and, if something reminded him that I was there, lashed to the chair behind him, he would reach for the telephone at his right, on the flat-topped desk, and give the notice of my arrest to police headquarters.

A policeman, two, probably, would come then and take me away, gagged still and unable even to attempt to demonstrate my real identity.

Chapter VII On the Stairs

Then a new phase of my predicament occurred to me: to the police, who would come for me, I should be Markley as I was to Stannistreet. Markley had killed Dorgan, the policeman; and all the police in Manhattan were possessed with one burning desire now — to get their hands on the man who had murdered Dorgan.

I heard then what made my blood turn to ice: the almost inaudible sound of some one coming up the stairs. Stannistreet did not hear it, for he was lost in his examination of the document or whatever it was which had so absorbed his interest.

But I heard that sound; try as I would to doubt it, I knew that I had heard it and could hear it now.

I could hear it because Stannistreet, without realizing it, had left the door open into the hall. I could hear even the faint sound of those catlike, cautious feet coming up the stairs, and I wondered, — almost idly because I was so powerless to do anything, how I could hear so perfectly so soon after my head had been broken by a gun.

And then I realized that Stannistreet had struck me not with his gun, but with his fist; he had knocked me down and groggy for a few seconds, but I was myself now and had possession of all my faculties.

I had possession of them, but I was powerless to use them — powerless to warn Stannistreet that at this very moment when he felt so secure in my being his prisoner, Markley, or some one of his gang, was outside the door now with black murder in his heart and cold death in his hand.

Noiselessly the door slowly swung in and before me in the doorway, which I could just crane my back to, see, stood Markley himself. I saw him and he saw me. His coming corroborated all my worst fears, but did not surprise me; and his eyes, as they rested on me, showed no surprise.

Then, with the speed of light and the soundlessness of a shadow, he had whipped a blackjack from under his left arm and was poised close behind the still unsuspecting Stannistreet. I made one final effort to dislodge the gag which Stannistreet had so effectively forced into my mouth, but I could do nothing.

Far from crying out to warn Stannistreet, I could not make a sound. I could only watch Markley draw the blackjack back, then bring it down in one terrific, crushing, killing blow.

It caught Stannistreet from behind and crushed his skull like an egg shell: what, up to the instant before, had been Stannistreet, now was only a broken dead thing, sagged forward, face down on the desk, as void of life now as if in that inert body there had never been a spark of life at all.

And yet, such was Markley’s ferocity, he struck once more, and then again, each time bringing forth that terrible sound which had followed the first blow.

Sure then that his awful work was done, Markley bounded to me and said hoarsely:

“Mueller said you’d beat it here, if we set you free at Luigi’s, and Mueller was right. Now you’ll stay here until the bull Hilliard has tipped off has got here and arrests you for killing Stannistreet. I’m off — out of the city, and the others with me!”

“Just a moment, Markley!”

The voice came from the doorway, the open door into the hall, and my hair rose on my head and I could not have spoken a word even if the gag had been loosed from my mouth — for it was Stannistreet standing there, Stannistreet alive and alert, looking not at me, but at Markley.

“Tricked, by—” Markley said in a ghastly, choking voice.

“Trapped,” Stannistreet corrected evenly. “Up with your hands!”

Markley’s only answer was one wild, desperate spring, a knife gleaming in his right hand. Stannistreet’s gun sprang to a level; the room roared once, and Markley went down, dead even before his face crashed down on the door sill.

Stannistreet bent quickly over the body. As he did so, a vast, slouching figure leaned in from the hall, unseen by Stannistreet. In that moment, when I had thought all was right at last, I recognized the gigantic figure which had pursued me down the dark stairs at Luigi’s, and I knew that, after all, we were lost, for I was powerless to aid Stannistreet, who at the moment was all off his guard; and, even if my hands had been free, this burly brute could still have mastered Stannistreet and me.

He leaned down over Stannistreet like a looming personification of Vengeance. His huge, hooked hands were almost on Stannistreet’s neck.

With one final effort I could have been capable of at no lesser crisis, I snapped the cords which had fastened my wrists, then I tore at the gag, only to go nerveless as a bag at the words:

“Needn’t look again; he’s dead, Stannistreet.”

The voice was Ruggles’s.

“And that,” Ruggles said when, half an hour later, he and I were back in the living room of our snug little apartment, “is the end of Markley. Stannistreet gets full credit for the capture, and all the reward, of course, and will probably get a promotion.

“I have asked him not to say anything about our part in the matter.” Ruggles looked at me gravely. “Stannistreet feels very badly at having had to give you that crack on the head, but it was—”

“It was necessary to the scheme you worked out for the certain capture of Markley. I realize that, Ruggles, so let’s say no more about it. But what was the rest of your share in the business? I think I’m entitled to know that, don’t you?”

“Absolutely! The thing went like this: you remember, I put some stuff in that brandy we gave Markley early this evening, here at our rooms, and he went to sleep on the bed in that extra bedroom. I figured he was good for several hours’ sleep, and I lay down on the couch, closing my eyes and more than half dozing.”

“All of that,” I said; “you were as fast asleep as Markley himself, though you didn’t make as much noise about it!”

“When you turned the light off,” Ruggles said, “I knew you were going to get some rest yourself and it was up to me to keep my eyes open.

“After awhile, I got up, went out the back window and into Markley’s room the way we did before, and Markley wasn’t there — for all his irregular living, he had the constitution of a gorilla, and the dope that would have kept a gorilla asleep had not been sufficient to quell the restless vitality of Markley.

“I knew then that I had a job oh my hands — it was clear as day, of course, that Markley had gone off to kill Stannistreet, and I had got to prevent that and, at the same time, not let things get to the point where Markley would tell what he knew about me to Stannistreet.”

“Why didn’t you let me in on it?” I could not help asking.

“Because I knew you could help best by staying behind. You see, I knew Markley and his gang only too well, Dan, and I knew Markley wouldn’t pull a thing like knocking off Stannistreet without talking it over with his gang first.

“It was safe to assume they were around near here somewhere and that Markley had gone out to collect them, then would come here and hold a council of war; plan the killing of Stannistreet and the escape of the band afterward. Having collected them and posted them by the place here where he could call them, Markley would come back.

“If he found both you and me gone, he’d know we’d gone to tip Stannistreet off; but if Markley found me gone but you here with that make-up still on, he would be sure I had taken to flight — then Markley would figure he had all the rest of the night to get Stannistreet in, and I should have time to warn Stannistreet and set the stage for Markley’s capture at Stannistreet’s apartment.”

Ruggles held a match over the bowl of the pipe he had filled, then went on.

“I went out, got Stannistreet on the phone, and told him to get a ‘dummy’ at the little costumer’s shop on Sullivan Street, dress it up right with a wig to match Stannistreet’s hair, and have the costumer set it at Stannistreet’s desk in the living-room of his apartment.

“That costumer used to be in the theatrical business and he’s an artist; from the rear, with that lighting effect, there’s not one man in fifty who wouldn’t have sworn it was Stannistreet.”

“It fooled me, all right,” I admitted, “but go on.”

“After I got that through Stannistreet’s head, I came back here and hid where Markley and his gang couldn’t see me. He came in first, found you asleep and me gone, and then went out and got the others.

“You know what happened after that. I followed your taxi down to Luigi’s, phoned Stannistreet again, this time to say the thing was coming along fast; you were to be disguised as Markley; you were to be set free on the chance you’d beat it to his, Stannistreet’s, apartment to warn him.

“Markley was to follow right on your heels, do the killing, and leave you to be held for it long enough for Markley and his men to get out of the city.”

“What did Stannistreet say to that?”

“He thought I was cracked, at first,” Ruggles replied; “but after he’d got it straight, he said they could run it off as fast as they liked.

“The dummy was in the chair at the desk and could do everything except smoke a cigarette, and Stannistreet himself was ready and would try not to hit you too hard when he domed you.”

“He forgot about that part of it,” I said, resentfully, for my head still ached. “Why did he have to soak me that way? Why didn’t he let me explain things to him and then have me wait in one of the other rooms or come home here?”

“Don’t you see,” Ruggles asked. “Stannistreet had to have a witness of what Markley did, and you, under all the circumstances, were the logical one.”

“Why?”

“Because Markley expected to find you there — he was sure you would be there — sure that Stannistreet would be sure you were Markley himself and would therefore capture you and after that be off his guard and in a position easy to kill. And, you see, Markley was only a couple of steps behind you, I mean behind us, when we reached Stannistreet’s apartment.”

“ ‘Us,’ you say,” I demanded. “What do you mean — ‘us’?”

“I was on the back of your taxi,” Ruggles said. “I came up the stairs only one turn behind you.”

“Followed me from Luigi’s all the way to Stannistreet’s, then let him beat me up that way, bind and gag me?”

“Yes, because, as you’ve said yourself, Dan, it was the only sure way we had of saving Stannistreet’s life, capturing Markley, and not having Markley blab the story of my past out to Stannistreet — Markley knew too much about me, Dan, altogether too much about me.”

“What Markley knows, you needn’t worry about any more,” I said, “for Markley’s dead.”

“Cottrell is not dead,” Ruggles said gravely; “neither is Branley, or Hilliard, or Mueller, and they know of me all that Markley knew. They know, and it is only fair that you should know: I was the ‘fixer’ for that gang. You know what that means.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t know what that means, and I don’t want to.”

“You’ll hear it, sooner or later, from one of the four if you don’t hear it from me,” Ruggles said unwillingly. “Those four crooks know enough about me to put me where I’ve put a good many men, and they won’t rest, to the end of their days, until they’ve ‘got’ me.”

“You should worry,” I said; “they’re beating it away from New York as fast as they can, at this moment, and they won’t show up here again in a dog’s age! You’ve nothing to fear from them, Ruggles! Besides, they ought to feel only gratitude toward you: in the old days, as Markley himself said, you got them out of many a bad hole.”

“Yes, I did that,” Ruggles admitted; “but they’ll hold me responsible for Stannistreet getting Markley; and I am responsible for that, though I did it only because Markley broke his word to me — you remember, I said I’d stand by him only on his promise not to try to kill Stannistreet.”

“Well, that lets you out, doesn’t it?”

“Not in their eyes — not in Hilliard’s Cottrell’s, Brantley’s, or Mueller’s; they’ll say I double crossed Markley, and they’ll come back here, all at the same time, or one by one, to get me. I’ve brought you into danger enough before this, old man, but it will be just a case of living from minute to minute from now on. You’d better leave me.”

“I’m not quitting.”

Ruggles’s powerful hand closed over my fingers. “I’m glad you’re not! Dan, remember this, though: I warned you.”