The Man Who Couldn't Sleep Part 29

"Inside of two hours' time," was my answer.

"Don't _wake_ those _kids_!" he commanded, looking back over his shoulder.

I caught him by the sleeve, and held him there, for some vague premonition of a sudden withdrawal and a bolted door made me desperate.

And time, I knew, was getting short.

"For heaven's sake, listen to me," I said as I held him. And as he stood there under the singing gas-jet, with his hurriedly lit and skeptically tilted stogie in one corner of his mouth, I told him in as few words as I could what had happened that night.

"Come in while I get me boots on," he quietly remarked, leading me into an unlighted hallway and from that into a bedroom about the size of a s.h.i.+p's cabin. "And speak low," he said, with a nod toward the rear end of the hall. Then as he sat on the edge of the bed pulling on his shoes he made me recount everything for the second time, stopping me with an occasional question, fixing me occasionally with a cogitative eye.

"But we haven't a minute to lose," I warned him, for the second time, as he slipped away into a remoter cubby-hole of a room to see, as he put it, "if the kids were keeping covered."

He rejoined me at the stairhead, with the softest of Irish smiles still on his face. By the time we had reached the street and stepped into the waiting taxi, that smile had disappeared. He merely smoked another stogie as we made our way toward the end of Twenty-eighth Street.

At Tenth Avenue, he suddenly decided it was better for us to go on foot. So he threw away his stogie end, a little ruefully, and led me down a street as narrow and empty as a river bed. He led me into a part of New York that I had never before known. It was a district of bald brick walls, of rough flag and cobble-stone underfoot, of lonely street lamps, of s.h.i.+pping platforms and unbroken warehouse sides, of storage yards and milk depots, with railway tracks bisecting streets as empty as though they were the streets of a dead city. No one appeared before us. Nothing gave signs of being alive in that area of desolate ugliness which seemed like the back yard of all the world concentrated in a few huddled squares.

We were almost on West Street itself before I was conscious of the periodic sound of boat whistles complaining through the night. The air, I noticed, took on a fresher and cleaner smell. Creegan, without speaking, drew me in close to a wall-end, at the corner, and together we stood staring out toward the Hudson.

Directly in front of us, beyond a forest of barrels which stippled the asphalt, a veritable city of barrels that looked like the stumpage of a burned-over Douglas-pine woodland, stood the facade of the Panama Company's pier structure. It looked substantial and solemn enough, under its sober sheeting of corrugated iron. And two equally solemn figures, somber and silent in their dark overcoats, stood impa.s.sively on guard before its closed doors.

"Come on," Creegan finally whispered, walking quickly south to the end of Twenty-seventh Street. He suddenly stopped and caught at my arm to arrest my own steps. We stood there, listening. Out of the silence, apparently from mid-river, sounded the quick staccato coughing of a gasoline motor. It sounded for a moment or two, and then it grew silent.

We stood there without moving. Then the figure at my side seemed stung into sudden madness. Without a word of warning or explanation, my companion clucked down and went dodging in and out between the huddled clumps of barrels, threading a circuitous path toward the slip edge. I saw him drop down on all fours and peer over the string-piece. Then I saw him draw back, rise to his feet, and run northward toward the pier door where the two watchmen stood.

What he said to those watchmen I had no means of knowing. One of them, however, swung about and tattooed on the door with a night-stick before Creegan could catch at his arm and stop him. Before I could join them, some one from within had thrown open the door. I saw Creegan and the first man dive into the chill-aired, high-vaulted building, with its exotic odors of spice and coffee and mysterious tropical bales. I heard somebody call out to turn on the lights, and then Creegan's disgustedly warning voice call back for him to shut up. Then somewhere in the gloom inside a further colloquy took place, a tangle of voices, a call for quietness, followed by a sibilant hiss of caution.

Creegan appeared in the doorway again. I could see that he was motioning for me.

"Come on," he whispered. And I tiptoed in after him, under that echoing vaulted roof where the outline of a wheeled gangway looked oddly like the skeleton of some great dinosaur, and the pungent spicy odors took me at one breath two thousand miles southward into the Tropics.

"Take off those shoes," quietly commanded Creegan. And I dropped beside him on the bare pier planks and slipped my feet out of s.h.i.+mmey's ungainly toed shoes.

A man moved aside from a door as we stepped silently up to it. Creegan turned to whisper a word or two in his ear. Then he opened the door and led me by the sleeve into the utter darkness within, closing and locking the door after him.

I was startled by the sudden contact of Creegan's groping fingers. I realized that he was thrusting a short cylindrical object up against my body.

"Take this," he whispered.

"What is it?" I demanded in an answering whisper.

"It's a flashlight. Press here--see! And throw it on when I say so!"

I took the flashlight, pressed as he told me, and saw a feeble glow of light from its gla.s.s-globed end. About this end he had swathed a cotton pocket handkerchief. More actual illumination would have come from a tallow candle. But it seemed sufficient for Creegan's purpose.

I could see him peer about, step across to a pile of stout wooden boxes, count them, test one as to its weight, squint once more searchingly about the room, and then drop full length on the plank flooring and press his ear to the wood.

He writhed and crawled about there, from one quarter of the room to another, every minute or so pressing an ear against the boards under him, for all the world like a physician sounding a patient's lungs. He kept returning, I noticed, to one area in the center of the room, not more than a yard away from the pile of wooden boxes. Then he leaned forward on his knees, his hands supporting his body in a grotesque bear-like posture. He continued to kneel there, intently watching the oak plank directly in front of him.

I saw one hand suddenly move forward and feel along an inch or two of this plank, come to a stop, and then suddenly raise and wave in the air. I did not realize, at that moment, that the signal was for me.

"Put her out," he whispered. And as I lifted my thumb from the contact point the room was again plunged into utter darkness. Yet through that darkness I could hear a distinct sound, a minute yet unmistakable noise of splintering wood, followed by an even louder sound, as though an auger were being withdrawn from a hole in the planking at my feet.

Then up from the floor on which Creegan knelt a thin ray of light flickered and wavered and disappeared. A rumble of guarded voices crept to my ears, and again I could detect that faint yet pregnant gnawing sound as the busy auger once more ate into the oak planking on which we stood.

I suddenly felt Creegan's hand grope against my knee. He rose to his feet beside me.

"It's all right," he whispered, with a calmness which left me a little ashamed of my own excitement. "You stay here until I come back."

I stood there listening to the slight noise of the door as he opened it and closed it after him. I stood there as I once more heard the telltale splintering of wood, indicating that the auger had completed its second hole through the planking. Then came the sound of its withdrawal, and again the wavering pencil of light as the men under the pier examined their work and adjusted their auger-end for its next perforation.

A new anxiety began to weigh on me. I began to wonder what could be keeping Creegan so long. I grew terrified at the thought that he might be too late. Vague contingencies on which I had failed to reckon began to present themselves to me. I realized that those three desperate men, once they saw I was again coming between them and their ends, would be satisfied with no half measure.

Then occurred a movement which nearly brought a cry from my startled lips. A hand, reaching slowly out through the darkness, came in contact with my knee, and clutched it. That contact, coming as it did without warning, without reason, sent a horripilating chill through all my body. The wonder was that I did not kick out, like a frightened colt, or start to flail about me with my flashlight. All I did, however, was to twist and swing away. Yet before I could get to my feet, the hand had clutched the side of my coat. And as those clutching fingers held there, I heard a voice whisper out of the darkness:

"Here, take this," and the moment I heard it I was able to breathe again, for I knew it was Creegan. "You may need it."

He was holding what I took to be a policeman's night-stick up in front of me. I took it from him, marveling how he could have re-entered that room without my hearing him.

"There's a light-switch against the wall there, they say," was his next whispered message to me. "Find it. Keep back there and throw it on if I give the word."

I felt and pawed and padded about the wall for an uncertain moment or two. "Got it?" came Creegan's whispering voice across the darkness.

"Yes," I whispered back.

He did not speak again, for a newer sound fell on both his ears and mine. It was a sound of prodding and prying, as though the men below were jimmying at their loosened square of planking.

I leaned forward, listening, for I could hear the squeak and grate of the s.h.i.+fting timber block. I did not hear it actually fall away. But I was suddenly conscious of a breath of cooler air in the room where I stood and the persistent ripple of water against pile-sides.

Then I heard a treble voice say, "A little higher."

The speaker seemed so close that I felt I could have stooped down and touched his body. I knew, even before I saw the spurt of flame where he struck a match along the floor, that the man was already half-way up through the hole. I could see the dirt-covered, claw-like hand as it held the match, nursing the tiny flame, patiently waiting for it to grow. It was not until this hand held the flaring match up before his very face that Creegan moved.

That movement was as simple as it was unexpected. I had no distinct vision of it, but I knew what it meant. I knew, the moment I heard the dull and sickening impact of seasoned wood against a human skull-bone.

There was just one blow. But it was so well placed that a second seemed unnecessary. Then, as far as I could judge, Creegan took hold of the stunned man and drew him bodily up through the hole in the floor.

A moment later a voice was saying, "Here, pull!" And I knew that the second man was on his way up into the room.

What prevented Creegan from repeating his maneuver with the night-stick I could not tell. But I knew the second attack was not the clean-cut job of the first, for even as Creegan seized the body half-way up through the opening, the struggle must have begun.

The consciousness that that struggle was not to be promptly decided, that a third factor might at any moment appear in the fight, stung me into the necessity of some sort of blind action on my own part. I remembered the first man, and that he would surely be armed. I ran out toward the center of the room, stumbled over the boxes of gold, and fell sprawling along the floor. Without so much as getting on my feet again I groped about until I found the prostrate body. It took me only a moment to feel about that limp ma.s.s, discover the revolver, and draw it from its pocket. I was still on my knees when I heard Creegan call out through the darkness.

"The light!" he gasped. "Turn on the light!"

I swung recklessly about at the note of alarm in his voice and tried to grope my way toward him. Only some last extremity could have wrung that call from him. It was only too plain that his position was now a perilous one. But what that peril was I could not decipher.

"Where are you?" I gasped, feeling that wherever he lay he needed help, that the quickest service I could render him would be to reach his side.

"The light, you fool!" he cried out. "The light!"