A Woman at Bay Part 47

"When you know what has become of Chick, and where he is now, figure out the best way in which we can set him at liberty at once, or, if you can manage to do it before you return to me, do it. If you succeed in setting him at liberty yourself within the next half hour, I will, before the sun goes down to-morrow, give you nine hundred dollars more, and that will be a pretty good nest egg for you, Phil."

"I'll do the job, you needn't fret."

"Wait, there is another thing."

"Well, sir?"

"If you find that you cannot liberate him yourself without a.s.sistance, you are to return to me at once, and we will plan together how it can best be accomplished. When we have done that, if through your aid I succeed in getting Chick safely away from here, you shall have the nine hundred plunks extra just the same."

"On the level, Carter?"

"Yes, on the level, Phil. I mean every word I say."

"Well, I'm the huckleberry that can do it."

"Wait, Phil, before you start, there is one more thing still."

"What! another?"

"Yes. This. After we have gotten safely out of this pickle, and the place has quieted down, it will be up to you to find out for me where Black Madge hangs up her clothes. It is important, Phil, that I should get that woman back into the prison where she belongs."

"I ain't no stool pigeon," grumbled the bartender.

"Neither am I asking you to be a stool pigeon," said the detective.

"What I want you to do is simple enough. I am not laying any plans against any of the regular frequenters of this place. It's only Black Madge I want, and you have confessed already that you don't like her.

Now, it's up to you if you want to go through this whole job, and do it right. And, Phil, if you will stick to me and see the whole game through the way I have outlined it to you, another thousand goes with the first one."

"Geewhiz! do you mean that?"

"I certainly do."

"Well, then, I'm game for the whole layout, and I will see it through to the end, but I don't want you to forget, Carter, that, if anything ever comes of it so that my part in this business is found out by any one of that crowd down there now, male or female, I wouldn't give a snap for my chances of being alive twenty-four hours afterward."

"They won't find it out through me," said the detective. "If they find it out at all it will be through you. And there's one thing more you must remember, Phil, and that is if you betray me you will be in a whole lot worse fix than you would be if your friends downstairs discover your treachery. For if you do betray me, I will never let up on you, Phil, until I see you behind the bars for a term of years that will make you an old man before you come out again."

CHAPTER XXVII.

THE GLARE OF A MATCH.

When the bartender had taken his departure, Nick found a cigar in one of his pockets, and seated himself to smoke quietly until Phil should return. But when more than half an hour later the cigar was consumed, and he had thrown it aside, he began to feel a sense of uneasiness that the man should be gone so long a time.

However, he realized that it was no easy task that Phil had undertaken, and that he might well occupy an hour or more in accomplis.h.i.+ng it.

He had no more cigars to smoke, but he seated himself resolutely in a chair, determined to wait with patience until his messenger should return.

There was a small clock, ticking away merrily on the mantel, at the far end of the room, and the detective watched it while the minute hand worked its way slowly around the dial, until an hour, then an hour and a quarter, and, finally, an hour and twenty minutes had elapsed since the departure of the bartender.

His impatience was now so great, and his natural distrust of the confederate he had employed was so prominent in his mind that he left his chair, having first extinguished the light, and, going to the door, opened it softly and peered outside.

The hallway was in utter darkness, the same as when he was there last, and, although he listened intently, he could not hear the suggestion of a sound from the lower regions of the house. After waiting a few moments longer, he tiptoed forward cautiously to the stairs, and descended them, being careful to step as closely as possible to the spindles of the bal.u.s.trade, in order that they might not creak beneath his weight, and thus alarm others in the house. In this way he gained the lower floor.

Nick was somewhat handicapped without his flash light, but he remembered quite distinctly the location of the sound he had heard two hours earlier, when the party from the laundry had followed him in, and pa.s.sed through the hallway to a rear door. Now he sought that door by following carefully along the wall until he came to it.

But, although he searched diligently for many minutes, he could not find so much as a suggestion of a door anywhere.

He remembered then that in all probability there was no perceptible door at all; that the door which was there somewhere was concealed in the wainscoting in some way, or otherwise hidden from casual observation. To have maintained a door of entrance to the saloon from that hallway would have rendered it entirely unnecessary for Grinnel to keep up his private entrance to the saloon from the other street. Nick's only method of finding it now was to light a match, and this he hesitated to do, not knowing what warning its glare might convey to others.

But there was no alternative, and presently he began his search by lighting matches one after another, permitting them to flare up sufficiently for a moment's vision, and then throwing them quickly to the floor, after the manner adopted by burglars when they were engaged in robbing a house before the pocket flash light was invented.

He was not long in discovering the entrance he sought. The walls along the hallway were not plastered; they were merely built up with matched boards, which had stood there unpainted for so long a time that they had achieved a veneer of filth and dirt which made them look, in the flare of the match, like mahogany.

But he could easily see where there was a keyhole cut into one of these boards, and, although around it there was no other evidence of a door, he knew that if he could turn the tumblers in that lock it would be revealed to him.

He went to work with his picklock, and, as he supposed, the instant the bolt of the lock was shot back the door opened easily and noiselessly in his grasp, and from beyond it he could at once hear the murmur of distant voices; also very far ahead of him, and beneath what was evidently another door, he could perceive a gleam of light.

He stepped through, and closed it after him, but, realizing that it was more than likely that he might wish to leave in a hurry, he left it unlocked.

And now he tiptoed forward to the door beneath which the light shone, and, getting upon his hands and knees, held his ear down where he could hear with more distinctness.

The effect was almost the same as if he were inside the saloon.

Strangely enough, also, it was Madge's voice that came to him first, for it appeared that she was seated near that very door, and by the answers that were returned to her, Nick knew that no less a person than Mike Grinnel himself was her companion. And they were speaking in low tones, but, nevertheless, every word they uttered could be heard distinctly by the detective.

It was in the midst of their conversation, evidently, that Nick began to listen, and Madge was saying:

"I swore then, Mike, that I would be even with him, and that if I ever succeeded in getting out of that prison where he put me I would never rest another minute until Nick Carter was placed beyond the power of injuring anybody."

"You bit off a little more than you could chew, didn't you, Madge?"

asked Mike Grinnel, in his slow, even voice, in which he never permitted a sign of emotion.

"No, I didn't," she retorted. "I made some mistakes, maybe. I shouldn't, for instance, have written him the letter I did."

"What was the letter, Madge?"

"Like a fool I wrote him a threatening letter, in which I told him to look out for me. That was my vanity, I suppose. I wanted him to know that I was on his track. I wanted to worry him; to give him something to think of, and a lot of things to look out for."

"Well, what then, Madge?"

"It was then, Mike, that I began to get the guns together, Slippery Al, and Gentleman Jim, and the others, and, of course, I made this place our headquarters."

"That, Madge, is just what you shouldn't have done. That's what I'm finding fault with you about now.

"Well," she said, "it's done, and it can't be helped; and Nick Carter has been here, and he's gotten away again; but, all the same, we've got Chick in our power, and if I do to him as I feel like doing now, he will regret the day that he ever took my trail."

"If you leave him where he is now, Madge, he'll do that," said Grinnel, laughing softly.