The Gray Mask Part 48

Slim, on the other hand, let slip nothing of the criminal. His quiet clothing gave him an air almost clerical. His sharp features expressed a polite interest. He could not, a casual spectator would have said, be capable of the evil with which he was charged.

Garth watched the men perpetually. He saw the hatred slip through while he quietly told the story that would condemn them to death. During Nora's recital, too, both men exposed something of their powerful desire for revenge against these two who quietly droned away their lives.

Garth took Nora from the courtroom well aware that, given the opportunity, Slim and George would not let them move a foot without exacting full payment.

Garth respected Nora's mood. He put her in a cab and sent her home, then wandered restlessly about the down town streets.

Perhaps Nora's att.i.tude was partly responsible for his feeling of oppression, of imminence. Nothing could happen, he told himself again.

Slim and George would start for the death house to-morrow. They would have no chance. If they delegated such work to their subordinates still at large, Garth fancied that he could take care of himself and Nora, too. It was the exceptional cunning of Slim and George that he shrank from, had feared ever since the night Nora and he had trapped them.

Angry with himself he went to headquarters. The inspector admitted that he, too, would breathe easier when the two were in the chair.

The next day Garth managed to dismiss his premonition. He chatted with two or three detectives in the outside office. The inspector sent for him. The moment he answered the summons he knew something disastrous had occurred. He felt that the exceptional, almost with the effect of a physical violence, had entered the room ahead of him.

The inspector held the telephone. The receiver was at his ear. His huge figure projected to Garth an uncontrolled fear. His voice, customarily rumbling and authoritative, was no more than a groping whisper.

"Why the devil doesn't Nora answer? Do you know, Garth, that Slim and George are loose on the town?"

Garth started back. He would have responded just so to a blow in the face.

"They are on their way to the death house," he countered.

"You mean they were," the inspector said, "condemned by your testimony and Nora's."

His voice rose and thickened.

"I've just got the word. An explosion was planted in front of their van on the way to the Grand Central. There was a crowd of rats from the slums. Those birds were torn from the sheriff's men, and their bracelets knocked off. They were spirited away. But don't you suppose Slim and George would gamble I'll never let them out of this town? Every exit's barred now. They know their liberty's only good to pay old debts.

What'll they do at the start?"

Garth braced himself against the desk.

"They'll go for Nora first. Then they'll get me. I've been afraid of it all along."

"I'm trying to warn her," the inspector raged. "She doesn't answer."

He shouted into the transmitter:

"Are you all dead out there? Get me that number, or by heaven--"

While the inspector stormed to be put in communication with his daughter Garth tried to plan. Could he devise any useful defence against Slim's imagination, abnormally clever and inscrutable; or against such naked brutality as George's? And the malevolence of these two would be all the more certain in its action since no fear of punishment would restrain it. The murder, or worse, of Garth and Nora, which undoubtedly they intended, could earn for them only the death penalty to which they were already condemned.

"You've got to get Nora," Garth urged the inspector. "The servant at least should be there."

"Her afternoon out, and Nora said she would be home."

"Then," Garth cried, "they made for her like a shot."

He turned and strode to the door.

"Where are you going, Jim?"

"Keep after that number," Garth called back. "If you get Nora tell her I'm on the way, and to sit tight."

The inspector tried to stop him.

"You're out of your head. Your only chance is to keep under cover.

They'll give you a bullet in the back."

"Somebody's got to look after Nora," Garth called, and caught up his coat and hat, and ran from the building.

He threaded a course through the homeward bound crowds, experiencing the sensations of a truant from an impending and destructive retribution, his eyes alert for a sudden movement, his ears constantly prepared for the sharp crack of a revolver.

As he ran he recalled that evening last summer when he had side-tracked Simmons and had taken his place behind a replica of the gray mask. He could see Nora in her cheap finery, and George, he remembered with a sense of sheer terror, had loved Nora in his way; had, in fact, through his brutal and amorous eagerness, delivered himself into her hands. He threw aside all caution. He ran faster. Somehow, no matter what the cost, he had to keep Nora out of the grasp of those men.

He reached the flat, breathless and wondering that he had not been disturbed. No one answered his ring. He questioned the hall-boy. The inspector's daughter had left fifteen minutes ago. She had said headquarters had telephoned her to go to her father without delay. The situation was clear. Garth grasped the hall-boy's arm.

"Didn't you follow her to the door? Didn't you see where she went?"

The boy shook his head, clearly alarmed before such vehemence.

"Then you must have heard. Did you hear anything?"

The boy tried to free his arm. He whimpered.

"No. Unless--maybe somebody screamed, but there are so many children in the street, playin' and hollerin'--"

Garth let him go and ran to the sidewalk. A man stood there. In spite of the sharp cold he wore no coat. Garth recognized him for a tailor who worked in a nearby shop. The tailor's excitement made him nearly incoherent, but Garth drew from him a description of Slim and George. As the inspector's daughter had stepped to the sidewalk, he said, the men had sprung upon her, stifled her one scream, and driven her off in an automobile.

"I saw it from my shop," he spluttered. "I've been telephoning the inspector. I just got him, because his wire was busy."

"Which direction did they take?"

The tailor pointed south. Garth hurried to the curb, stooped, and found fresh tire marks. He was aware of his helplessness unless Nora's ingenuity had hit upon some trick for his guidance. He searched with a greedy hope. While his eyes roved about the frozen dust of the gutter he acknowledged that the inspector had appraised his men justly. Slim and George wouldn't even try to leave the city until the hue and cry had somewhat abated. Into the windings of the underworld they had carried Nora, and Garth knew how devious those windings were--what silent and invisible machinery would nourish and secrete and protect.

He lifted a tiny tuft of fur which had nestled, almost hidden, in the dust of the gutter. He examined it closely. It's colour and texture were reminiscent of the m.u.f.f he had frequently seen Nora carry. It might be a souvenir of her struggle, or else--

He arose and walked down the street, searching every inch of the pavement. At the corner his breath quickened, for he knew the piece of fur had not rested in the gutter by accident. Two others were there, trampled, but suggestive of the direction taken by the automobile. He could picture Nora surrept.i.tiously tearing the bits from her m.u.f.f and dropping them from the window of the car.

He hastened on. As soon as he was confident the pieces const.i.tuted an intelligible trail he conquered his impatience long enough to enter a drug store and telephone his discovery to the inspector.

"I'm going on," he explained. "The Lord knows what I'll find, so get after me right away."

The voice that reached him could not conceal its suspense.

"Go fast, Garth, and I'll follow with every man I can raise. Pull Nora out of this and ask me for my badge."

Garth went on, following the trail into the dark and intricate thoroughfares of the lower east side, knowing that each moment his pursuit might be abruptly and fatally ended by a flash of light from the obscurity ahead.