Chapter IX: Part 9

The back cellar entrance beneath a Chinese tea-shop, and after that the rear of the coal bin! Billy Kane was laughing to himself, but the laugh was void of mirth. There was a grim, horrible sort of irony about it all. Believing him, Billy Kane, to be the Rat, Red Vallon had _reported_ the accomplishment of the first stage in the execution of the plan with gusto. After that, deft questioning had elicited from the gangster the secret of this entrance to Wong Yen’s, and then luck, and then the guard taken unawares. The guard could hardly be blamed. The guard naturally enough, had little reason to suspect the approach to that coal bin of any one who had not the “open sesame” to what was beyond, and he had been lurking there where the boards of the bin ingeniously slid apart, and had shown not the slightest uneasiness at his, Billy Kane’s, presence until it was too late. Then there had been a steep, narrow passage downward, and then—_this_. Beyond, near or far, he did not know which, these sub-cellars hid the real thing that the so-called underground Chinatown above counterfeited, hid debauchery and vice, and cradled crime, and here the poppy reigned, and the dregs of humanity skulked fearful of the sunlight.

“They had flung the Wop into a corner and left him until they got around to finishing the job,” Red Vallon had explained callously. The Wop, therefore, must be somewhere near at hand. But he, Billy Kane, could see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing.

His physical faculties strained and alert, subconsciously Billy Kane’s mind was milling over that conversation with the gangster of an hour ago, and upon him, in spite of his own present peril, there came a cold and merciless fury. It was more to-night than the ordinary moral obligation, more than the mere responsibility to render abortive the crimes that came to his knowledge through his tenure of this rôle of the Rat, that was actuating him now; it was the callous, damnable brutality of the scheme that, linked with its hellish ingenuity, seemed to outrage every instinct of manhood he possessed, and fired him with an overmastering desire, not only to frustrate the crime itself, but to take toll in a personal, physical way, if he could, from those who were enacting it.

It was one of those plans, conceived by the Rat, that waited patiently for its hour of maturity to arrive, and then was executed and carried through to its fulfilment by the minions of that Directorate of crime of which the Rat appeared to be the most versatile and vicious member, but without the Rat, necessarily, taking any further active part in it. And he, Billy Kane, who fate had seen fit to mold with features that were evidently a counterpart of that master rogue’s, who was for the moment accepted and obeyed as the Rat, and was supposed to be the originator of the plan itself, could not very well ask Red Vallon, for instance, for details! Therefore he did not know all the details, but he knew enough!

He had wormed quite a little out of Red Vallon without the gangster suspecting anything more than that he, Billy Kane as the Rat, was taking particular pains to see that the stage was properly set, and that the possibility of failure was reduced to its absolute minimum. It was very simple. It required simply a man’s life—the murder of the Wop.

He knew something of the Wop, for the Wop’s story was common property. The Wop, in the old days, five years ago, before he had gone “up the river” for a “job” in the line which was his particular specialty, was known both as a tough customer and as one of the cleverest “box-workers” in the safe-cracking profession. The testimony of one Ivan Barloff had been mainly responsible for the Wop’s capture and conviction, and the Wop had travelled to Sing Sing with a thirst for vengeance gnawing at his soul, and with the threat quivering on his twisted lips that he would get even with the other when he got out again. Nor had the five years of prison hell seemed to assuage any of the Wop’s desire to square accounts! He had repeated his threat many times in prison, and he had been indifferent as to who heard him. The feud was no secret to the police. That was the gist of it.

As for Ivan Barloff, Billy Kane was somewhat more precisely informed, both because the time he, Billy Kane, had spent on the East Side in carrying out David Ellsworth’s philanthropies could hardly have been passed without at least a hearsay acquaintanceship with so well-known a character in that quarter as Ivan Barloff, and because, too, Red Vallon, in that last interview, had seemed to take a malicious delight in exploiting his own vastly more intimate knowledge of the little old Russian of many parts. On his own account he knew, naturally, only what the public knew and believed about the man: Barloff was a sort of father to the flock, a very numerous flock, of Poles and Russians of the uneducated and illiterate class. He was all things to them. He was counselor and confidant, he was money lender, he was entrusted with what money they had as savings for investment, he wrote their letters, he collected their rents, being a kind of owners’ sub-agent, and he lived amongst them, alone, in a little old frame house that was sandwiched in among the ramshackle tenements that housed so many of his compatriots in that section. In appearance he was a very dirty and unkempt old man, and ostensibly he was as honest as he was dirty—and he was accepted as such by public, police and compatriots alike.

Red Vallon, however, had thrown quite a different light on the other’s character. The man possessed the craft and cunning of a devil, and a devil’s inhumanity. He had fed like a leech on the guileless trust of his ignorant clientele. He had made money—a great deal of money. Thousands were stored away in his rickety old safe, that was so rickety it disarmed suspicion; and, preserving his secret, he patronized no bank, but covered his constantly increasing fortune with the guise of squalor and poverty, which he kept on a level scarcely, if any, above that of those he filched.

The man was a miser of the most sordid and cold-blooded sort. A nickel was not too mean a thing to scheme for, if by any means he could lay his hands upon it. Also, the man had other remunerative relationships, very carefully selected relationships, with others than those with whom he openly associated. To a select few of the underworld he acted at times as “fence,” receiving such stolen goods as he could readily dispose of among his compatriots, who, innocent of any guilty knowledge, bought the articles eagerly at a greatly reduced figure, imagining, if they stopped to imagine at all, that the articles represented unredeemed pledges on money loaned here and there by Barloff.

Billy Kane’s lips twisted in a thin smile there in the darkness. It was a deal such as that, so he had gleaned from Red Vallon, that had originated the feud between Ivan Barloff and the Wop. The Wop had brought some of the proceeds of one of his predatory safe-breaking raids to Barloff, and a bargain was concluded between them; but in some way that night Barloff became aware that the police had followed the Wop to his, Barloff’s, house. Barloff was taking no chances. He promptly cleared his own skirts at the expense of five years in Sing Sing for the Wop. He scurried to the nearest police station with the stolen articles, and with unctuous righteousness explained that he was suspicious as to how the Wop had come by them, but had bought them to pull the wool over the Wop’s eyes so as to enable him, Barloff, to communicate with the police, and give the police a chance to make an investigation. Barloff got away with it, and the Wop got his ride “up the river.” It was perhaps not unnatural that the Wop had sworn revenge, and had made no secret of it!

Billy Kane’s twisted smile deepened. It was all very simple. It involved simply the taking of a man’s life—the Wop’s—which was a very small matter in the eyes of that Crime Trust which was running rampant now through the underworld. Also, the Rat was a man of large vision. He builded ahead and waited patiently. Barloff was known by the Rat to have a great deal of money in ready cash. It would not have been a very difficult matter perhaps to have robbed the old Russian at any time, but there was always the certainty of an investigation as an aftermath, and investigations sometimes had a tendency to lead in awkward directions. Much better, therefore, and much safer, that the trend of the investigation, and its limits, should be fixed in advance—by the Rat. And so they had waited for the Wop to regain his freedom.

They had not waited five years, however, for the scheme probably had not occurred to the Rat until perhaps a few months ago. But now the Wop being free at last, the Wop’s first act of freedom was to be made to appear that of putting his oft-repeated threat into execution. Barloff was to be lured out of his house on some specious pretext, the house would then be entered, and a forged note in the Wop’s scrawl, carefully prepared beforehand, jeering in its tone and to the effect that the Wop would have got Barloff as well as Barloff’s cash if the latter had not been fortunate enough to have been out of the house at the time, would be left pinned, say, to the wall. There would not be much room for investigation! The Wop, being dead, would not make any defense. The Wop would never be found; and as the natural thing for the Wop to do was to disappear after leaving his defiant message behind him, who was to imagine that such disappearance was not of the Wop’s own free will and design? The Wop was the cat’s-paw!

The blackness was absolute. Billy Kane was feeling out again with both hands. He seemed to have lost in a measure even his sense of direction. He was either in a very much wider passage than that through which he had entered, or else the excavation around him was actually itself one of the sub-cellars. If he could but get the touch of a wall again to guide him! Yes, here it was! It swerved sharply, almost at right angles, to the left. He followed it, moving slowly, scarcely more than a few inches at a time.

It was strange how his brain worked on ceaselessly, seemingly oblivious to his immediate surroundings, seemingly concerned with things extraneous to his present danger! And yet that was not altogether true. One thing had a bearing on another; and one thing led to another. It was like the cogs of wheels fitting into each other as they turned around and around. This tenure of the Rat’s rôle, that was no less dangerous, was apposite. Where was the Rat? While he, Billy Kane, fought to free himself from the stigma of David Ellsworth’s murder, while he fought for his own good name and his own life on that score, this rôle of the Rat, while it afforded temporary sanctuary from the police, forced him into perils that——

His lips compressed tightly. He had stumbled over something soft and yielding. His outstretched hand, though it saved him, slipped along the wall and came up against another wall, again at right angles, but this time where, obviously, the walls made a corner. He stooped down, and felt over the obstruction that his foot had encountered. It was a man’s body. It moved now, and writhed a little at his touch. It was the Wop almost certainly, the Wop “flung into a corner” out of the way like a sack of meal. But the man was still alive. Thank God for that! He had been afraid that the initiatory stage of the work might have been only too well accomplished.

His hands felt upward along the bound body, and touched the other’s face, and felt the cloth gag twisted and knotted around the man’s mouth. His hands felt still a little higher up—to the close-cropped prison hair. It was the Wop beyond question. He took a knife from his pocket.

“Don’t make a sound!” he breathed, as he removed the gag, and cut away the cords from around the other’s feet and hands. “You’re the Wop, aren’t you?”

The man’s affirmation was almost inarticulate. Billy Kane slipped his arm around the other’s shoulders and lifted the man into a sitting posture. He had a flask of brandy in his pocket, brought purposely for the Wop’s benefit, and he held the flask now to the other’s lips. The stimulant seemed to inject new life and strength into the man.

“Who—who are you?” the Wop asked weakly.

“Don’t talk!” Billy Kane cautioned. “The one thing to do is to get out of here now. Do you think you can walk at all?”

“Yes,” the man answered. “I—I’m not as bad as all that.”

“Try, then,” said Billy Kane.

The progress was slow, pitifully slow. The Wop, despite his own assertion, was both weak and cramped, and at first he was almost a dead weight, as he clung with an arm flung around Billy Kane’s shoulders; but gradually he appeared to get back his strength. They stopped every two or three yards both to rest and listen. Again Billy Kane held the flask to the other’s lips. Again they went on.

“My Gawd, it’s—it’s black in here!” the Wop mumbled, and shivered a little.

Billy Kane made no answer. He was taking care now not to lose touch with the walls. The ground under foot was beginning to rise steeply. He caught his foot and almost fell over a huddled thing on the earth—the Chinese guard. A certain murk seemed to be penetrating the blackness. He stopped again, felt out in front of him, and listened intently for a moment, and then he placed his lips to the Wop’s ear.

“There’s an opening here into a coal bin,” he whispered. “Get down on your hands and knees and crawl through. Straight across from the coal bin there’s a short flight of steps up to a door that opens on the alley. We’ll make a break for it now. Keep close to me. And don’t make a noise. There’s a cellar stairway to the room above, and the room above isn’t likely to be empty! Understand?”

“Yes,” said the Wop.

“Come on, then,” said Billy Kane.

He crawled through the opening with the Wop at his heels, and rose to his feet, then gripping at the Wop’s arm, he stole across the cellar, gained the steps and, an instant later, stepped out into a dark and narrow alleyway. He did not pause here; he hurried the Wop down the alleyway, and halted only when within a few yards of the first intersecting street: just far enough back in the alleyway to keep well beyond the radius of light from the adjoining thoroughfare.

Neither man spoke for a moment. After the silence of that death trap behind them, the roar of an elevated train from Chatham Square near by seemed to Billy Kane a din infernal, and greater only by a little than the rattle of wheels, the clatter of horses’ hoofs, and the multitudinous noises of ordinary traffic. He could just make out the Wop’s features. One side of the man’s face was streaked with clotted blood stains; but apart from that the Wop now showed little outward evidence of the attack that had been made upon him. He stood there now, quite steady on his feet, his eyes studying Billy Kane’s mask in a puzzled way.

“Say,” said the Wop, a sudden huskiness in his voice. “I owe you something. What’s your name?”

Billy Kane shook his head.

“Never mind about that,” he said quietly. “There’s something else that’s of vastly greater importance so far as you are concerned. Do you know why they got after you to-night, or who it was that got you in that trap?”

“No,” said the Wop.

“I’ll tell you, then,” said Billy Kane. “It was because you threatened to get even with Ivan Barloff.”

“Barloff!” The Wop’s fists clenched, and he stepped closer to Billy Kane. “So it was Barloff, was it? He must have had the fear of God in him, then, to make him spend any money—even to hire thugs! Barloff, eh? Well, I’m going to see Barloff pretty soon!”

“No, you’re not!” said Billy Kane crisply. “That’s exactly why I am telling you this. It isn’t Barloff. It’s a crowd that knew of your threat, and _they’re_ getting after Barloff, and framing you up for the job. They’re planting a little evidence against you in Barloff’s place in exchange for Barloff’s cash, and with you finished off via the murder route, they expect the police to throw up their hands after a while and admit you’ve made a clean get-away—with the swag.”

The Wop’s face was close to Billy Kane’s, and the Wop’s face was suddenly pinched and white. He touched his lips with his tongue. And then, as suddenly, the blood flushed back, and he thrust out his under jaw truculently.

“They would, eh—the dirty swabs!” he snarled. “Who are they? I’ll make ’em crawl for this!”

Billy Kane smiled grimly.

“No, I guess not!” he said softly. “You’re very much better out of it. But I promise you they’ll not get away with it if you’ll do what you are told now.”

The Wop knuckled his forehead in a perplexed way.

“What do you want me to do?” There was a lingering sullen note in the Wop’s voice.

“Just this,” said Billy Kane quietly. “I want you to get out from under. You’re not looking for another five years in Sing Sing, are you?”

The Wop flinched. He drew his knuckles again across his eyes.

“No,” he said hoarsely.

Billy Kane nodded.

“Quite so!” he said calmly. “Well, then, it is simply a question of establishing an alibi for you that will be absolutely hole-proof from now until, say, midnight. Where can you go?”

“I know Gus Moray, that runs the Silver King saloon,” said the Wop. “He’d swear to it, all right.”

“Yes; whether you were there or not!” said Billy Kane dryly. “That’s not good enough! If anything breaks wrong to-night you’ve got to have something better than an alibi in a dive like that to stack up against what will look like open-and-shut evidence against you. You’ve got to get on a higher plane than that.”

The Wop shook his head.

“I ain’t been a very regular church attendant,” he said, with a sickly grin, “and——” He stopped short, and suddenly leaned toward Billy Kane. “Say, would a minister do?”

“It would be an improvement,” admitted Billy Kane, with a smile.

“Well, I got it, then!” announced the Wop. His hesitancy had vanished. He seemed eager, almost anxious now. The iron of five years of prison was evidently far too poignant a memory to risk it being turned into reality again. “I got it! There’s a guy named Mister Claflin that ran one of them mission joints down around where I uster hang out before I went up. He’s all right! He’s the only soul on God’s earth came near me when I was doing my spaces. Twice he came up to Sing Sing to see me. He didn’t hold no prayer meeting with me neither, but he’s got a grip in his hand that makes a fellow feel he ain’t all dirt. He’s white, he is!”

“Do you know where he lives?” inquired Billy Kane crisply.

“No,” said the Wop, and was suddenly downcast. “And he ain’t at the mission any more, ’cause he told me he’d got a regular layout uptown somewhere.”

“No matter!” said Billy Kane cheerfully. “Any drug store has a directory. You can find the address there. Got any money?”

The Wop felt through his pockets, and the red flared into his face again.

“Frisked!” he flung out savagely.

Billy Kane handed the other a banknote.

“Spend this on the first taxi you can grab,” he said. “You’ve got to get there as soon as you can, and you’ve got to keep under cover getting there. If Mr. Claflin is not at home, wait in his house for him. Don’t let them sidetrack you. And make it a point of establishing the hour you get there, either with the minister himself, or whoever happens to be at home. And stay there until midnight anyhow. Understand?”

“Yes,” said the Wop.

“Well, then,” said Billy Kane, “beat it!”

The Wop hesitated.

“Say, ain’t I going to know who you are?” he blurted out. “Say, I ain’t anything but a crook, just a damned crook with a prison record, but—but I’d like to pay what I owe. Ain’t you going to give me the chance?”

“You’ve got it now.” Billy Kane’s hand went to the other’s shoulder. “It’s a rotten road to Sing Sing. You’re out of it now—stay out of it.” He gave the Wop a friendly push toward the street. “We’ve no more time to lose. Beat it!” he said, and without giving the Wop time to reply, he turned abruptly, and ran back along the alleyway.

XXI—WITHOUT MERCY

Billy Kane went on to the intersecting street at the other end of the alleyway, removed his mask, and stepped out on the sidewalk. He looked at his watch under a street lamp, and smiled whimsically in surprise. It was still only half-past eight. All told, he could not have been in Wong Yen’s more than fifteen minutes, hardly that, in fact, and it seemed as though he had been there half the night!

Well, it was Barloff’s now! Barloff’s was a little farther uptown, a little deeper over in the East Side. Billy Kane’s smile, from whimsical, became tinged a little with weariness, became a little wan, as he walked along. He was the victim of a plot himself, that was aimed at his life, that sought to throw the guilt of a crime upon his shoulders, just as the Wop was. And circumstances not only permitted, but seemed to force him constantly into these byways to save others, while he himself stood condemned in the eyes of the public as a murderer and a thief; and there was bitter irony in the thought that he could not clear his own name, that he seemed powerless to help himself, while the mantle of one of the underworld’s archcriminals, which temporarily afforded him sanctuary from the police, supplied him with almost unlimited information and the means of helping others!

His brows knitted suddenly into a puzzled frown. Was that altogether true?

There seemed to be a most strange coincidence in these excursions, forced or voluntary, of his into the byways of criminal things, a coincidence that always seemed in some way to link up his own plight with these other criminal schemes in which he became involved. There was the night that Peters had been murdered, for instance, which had led him to the knowledge that the Man With The Crutch was at least a co-murderer of David Ellsworth. And then the attempt at blackmail of two nights ago had again disclosed the hand of the Man With The Crutch, and, more significant still, had enabled him, Billy Kane, to recover the cash stolen from the library vault on the night of the Ellsworth murder. Who was this Man With The Crutch—this man with a crutch whose shaft was stained to resemble grained wood and so disguise the murderous iron of which it actually consisted, and which, he was sure now, was the weapon that had brought both David Ellsworth and Peters to their deaths?

Billy Kane shook his head. It was a curious chain of coincidence, but it could be only coincidence. And there was a limit to that. To-night, for instance, it would put a pretty severe strain upon the imagination to conceive of any connection between the Wop and the Man With The Crutch! And yet——

He shrugged his shoulders. He would have said the same thing two nights ago, wouldn’t he? It was very strange! It was all strange! He seemed to be existing in a sphere of unreality. There was the Man With The Crutch, whom neither police nor underworld could find since that raid on the man’s room; there was the constant, ominous swirl and eddy of hidden and unseen things on every hand; there was the Rat—and there was the Woman in Black!

His face softened suddenly. He had not seen _her_ since yesterday morning when she had entered the Rat’s den through the secret door, and he had returned to her Dayler’s letter. She had not been in a pleasant mood at what she believed had been his trickery; and, failing to have restored that letter to her, she would have turned him, whom she, like every one else, believed to be the Rat, incontinently over to the police. What was the hold she had upon the Rat? Where was she to-night? How was it that her hand had not already showed in this attempt upon the Wop, since she seemed to have always in her possession the details of the Rat’s schemes?

He shrugged his shoulders again. What was the use! To-night, at least, she could harbor no delusion that he was acting under any spur of hers! No, that wasn’t it—that wasn’t what was troubling him. What troubled him was that she should think him what he was, or, rather, all that he was not! Strange that her opinion of him, even when his back was against the wall and his life was literally in jeopardy at every turn, should make any difference! Strange that the loathing and contempt in those brown eyes, that were fearless and deep and steady, should haunt him, and add to his own abhorrence of the rôle he played because he must let her think him the Rat! Well, what did it matter? What was she to him? What was she becoming to him? He laughed a little uncertainly. There was no need to answer that question, was there—even if he could? What did anything matter unless he could clear his own name, which was now mired deeper than the Rat’s!

He turned a corner, walked on the length of a block, and on the next corner, drawing back into a doorway out of the radius of the street lamp, paused a moment to get his bearings. He smiled a little grimly. If the affair ever came to her knowledge, would she give the Rat credit this time for a spontaneous change of heart in saving the Wop’s life, and saving Ivan Barloff’s cash? He scowled suddenly. The latter proposition did not altogether please him. Barloff was not far removed in guilt from those who proposed to victimize Barloff! There would be a certain ironical justice in robbing from Barloff the cash that Barloff had all too patiently, a great portion of it at least, robbed from others! But Red Vallon and his pack were not to get it, were they? It was the lesser evil to warn Barloff, that was all. In the main, therefore, the night’s work was over, since the Wop was safe, for five minutes’ conversation with Barloff would end the whole affair now, so far as he, Billy Kane, was concerned.

He glanced down the street. Just a little ahead, on the opposite side, huddled in between two six-story tenements, was Barloff’s squat, dingy, little house. There was a faint glow of light, as though it came from somewhere far in the interior, showing through the single front window on the ground floor. Billy Kane considered this thoughtfully for a few seconds. Barloff was at home evidently, but the probability was that one, at least, of Red Vallon’s men was on watch in front of the house. In fact, it wasn’t probability; it was a certainty. Barloff, according to Red Vallon, was to receive a fake telephone message that would lure him out of the house, and someone undoubtedly would be waiting to report the old Russian’s exit. It therefore, to say the least of it, would be—Billy Kane’s smile was mirthless—unwise for the Rat to walk up to Barloff’s front door under the existing conditions!

He might have telephoned. He shook his head, as he crossed the road, and, keeping in the shadows, stepped into the cross street. He preferred to interview Barloff via Barloff’s back yard. He was still obsessed with the desire to take personal toll from all concerned in the miserable night’s work, but he realized that impulse and sane action did not always go hand in glove. He could not afford to play fast and loose with this rôle of the Rat, or take any unnecessary risks, but he could satisfy himself to the extent, at least, of a personal interview with Barloff, who was perhaps after all the most despicable of the lot, and put into the puny, shrivelled soul of the man a fear that would make for some degree of future righteousness!

A lane, as he had expected, ran in the rear of the tenements and Barloff’s house. Billy Kane slipped into this, located Barloff’s house, low-lying against the sky line between the taller buildings, swung himself over the fence, dropped noiselessly to the ground, and for a moment stood there motionless.

The yard was very small, and, but a few feet in front of him, a light from the open and uncurtained window of Barloff’s rear room streamed out across the intervening space. Voices reached him, but he could not distinguish the words; neither, from where he stood, could he see anyone in the room, though the window was quite low, little more than breast high from the ground.

And then a form inside the room passed across the window space, a woman’s form; and again a voice reached him, a woman’s voice, and Billy Kane drew in his breath sharply. He still could not distinguish the words, but he had recognized the voice.

Once again he had jumped too hastily to conclusions in so far as she was concerned—it was the Woman in Black. There was no question as to why she was there; it was obvious that she had simply forestalled him in warning the old Russian; but—a perplexed frown furrowed Billy Kane’s forehead—her hand would have showed a little late in the game to have saved the Wop!

He stole forward, keeping in the shadows of the side fence, reached the rear wall of the house, edged across to the side of the window where he could both see and hear, and crouched there. His eyes swept the interior in a swift, comprehensive survey. It was a sordid, ill-furnished, bare-floored room, and very dirty. A seedy old morris chair in the center of the room supplied the only suggestion of comfort or luxury, and that an incongruous one, that the place possessed. Apart from that, there was a huge and aged safe, a relic of the days when such things were locked with keys, which was backed up against one wall; and near an open door, which apparently led into the front room, there was a battered desk with an equally battered swivel chair—and that was all, unless the telephone that stood upon the desk might be included in the furnishings. There was, however, another door, also open, which faced the safe, and which apparently gave on a passageway that in turn opened on the back yard. Billy Kane glanced around him. Yes, there was a rear door here, just a little to his right.

His eyes reverted to the interior of the room. _She_ was still pacing up and down its length from the desk to the window and back again. Perhaps it was the effect of the green-shaded incandescent bulb that dangled over the desk, but, as she turned facing the window, he saw that her face, drawn in sharp, pinched lines, was very white, and that in the dark brown eyes, all softness gone from them now, there was a hard and bitter light. And at the desk, the old Russian, a gray-bearded and threadbare figure in dirty and grease-spotted clothes, huddled deep down in his chair, and wrung his hands together, and with little, black, shifty eyes, that peered over the rims of steel-bowed spectacles, followed her about in a fascinated sort of way, and the while he kept circling his lips with his tongue.

“The Wop! The Wop!” he shrilled out suddenly, and seemed to cower lower in his chair. “Yes, yes, I am afraid! My God, I am afraid! He is strong. He would have no pity on an old man. He has sworn it. I know! I have been afraid of this day. Why did they let him out? They know, too! And I was only honest—everybody knows that. He was a thief. What else could an honest man do except what I did? He—he will kill me, and——”

“The Wop is dead.” Her voice was low, bitter, hard, and yet, too, it seemed to hold impatience and irritation directed against the Russian. “I have told you that. It is not the Wop you have to fear now. The Wop is dead.”

“But you are not sure, not positive, not absolutely positive of it!” Barloff was wringing his hands the harder; and his tones, rather than being assertive, seemed to be pleading for a denial.

“I am positive enough of it,” she answered evenly, “to see that the one who is responsible pays for it to-night! It is my fault”—her voice caught a little, but hardened instantly—“I trusted where I was a fool to trust, and I have paid for it with another’s life. But that has nothing to do with you. You know now that the telephone message you received a little while ago was simply to lure you out of the house at half past nine in order that they might have a clear field in which, without contradiction, to make it appear that the robbery they are planning was the Wop’s work. It is scarcely nine o’clock yet. You have plenty of time in which to act. You can appeal to the police, or——”

Billy Kane was no longer paying any attention to her words. Tense, strained, he stood there. He seemed to be trying to lash his brain into virility, into activity. He seemed to be groping out in an ineffectual mental way for some means to avert a disaster that he realized was closing down upon him. She believed the Wop was dead. She naturally held the Rat responsible—and he was the Rat, so far as she was concerned. She had warned him, without mincing words, that if any crime in which the Rat was involved was carried through to its fulfilment she would hold him responsible and hand him over to the police. She had reason to believe that he had already tried to double cross her once; she now believed that to-night he had tried to do it again. She would leave here, and go straight to the police. The police, then, would not only be looking for Billy Kane, they would be looking for the Rat—and they would get Billy Kane! And that would be the end of it all!

The end of it—when he already knew who the murderer of David Ellsworth was; when, apart from the collection of rubies, he had already recovered the proceeds of the Ellsworth vault robbery; when, if he could only cling for a few days more to this rôle he played, he might hope to clear his own name, to stand foursquare with the world again, and to bring to justice those who had taken old David Ellsworth’s life. Somehow, in some way, he must prevent her from carrying out what was now her obvious intention of unmasking the Rat. But he dared not show himself in front of the house to intercept her when she went out—he dared not show himself as the Rat out there. To bring the underworld down upon him was only to invite a swifter destruction from another source.

He gnawed in perplexity at his lips, staring into the room. She kept pacing up and down. Barloff had risen from his seat, and in a curious, cringing way, standing now by the rickety old safe, was fondling it and patting it with his hands.

“Yes, yes!” Barloff was crooning. “I thank you—I thank you! I do not know who you are, but I thank you! I have not much, very little, very, very little, but I am an old man, and what would become of me if I lost my little? The police, yes, the police——”

The old Russian, his back now to the window, was still talking, more to himself than to her. She came close to the window this time and Billy Kane suddenly showed himself. She was very clever, very self-centered, very sure of herself. If she was startled, she gave no sign of it. She came still closer until she leaned for a moment against the sill.

“Out here—the lane—when you leave!” he whispered quickly.

She nodded her head, but her lips had tightened in a forbidding little smile as she turned away again,

Billy Kane drew back from the window. There was a sense of relief upon him; but also a vague, disquieting, and very much stronger sense of something else that he could not quite define; only that between them there always seemed to stand that barrier of a forbidding smile, and that cool, contemptuous light in the brown eyes that very often changed from contempt to loathing and abhorrence. He shrugged his shoulders suddenly. He was a fool—that was all!

Her voice drifted out to him, dying away as he neared the fence:

“I am going now, Mr. Barloff, and I should advise you not to waste any time in taking whatever precautions you intend to take. You had better communicate at once with the police, and——”

Billy Kane swung himself over the fence, and stood there waiting in the lane. A minute, two, three passed, and then he caught the sound of a light step, and she stood before him in the darkness.

“Well?” she said curtly. “I am here, Bundy. What do you want?”

He was the Rat, alias Bundy Morgan, in her eyes, and it was the Rat who spoke.

“I heard you in there,” he said gruffly. “You’re going to beat it for the police, and wise them up about me. Well, you want to can that stunt, because I’ve got a little explanation to make. See?”

“You do not need to make any explanation,” she answered evenly. “My stupidity is at an end! That enigmatic little memo of yours was a better safeguard in itself than the hiding place in which you had secreted it, for I did not understand it until I saw a few lines in the paper this evening giving a short résumé of the Wop’s somewhat unedifying career, and stating that he had been released from prison. I was too late to save the Wop himself, but was not too late to prevent you from climbing in through that window, and carrying out the rest of your abominable scheme.”

“I went there to warn Barloff myself,” said Billy Kane.

She laughed icily.

“Do you expect me to believe that, after you have murdered a man so that you could put the onus of another crime upon him! This is the end to-night! I was mad to trust you at all. I was madder still to give you another chance, when I caught you playing a double game both with your own criminal associates and with me when you stole that letter from Dayler two nights ago!” She came a little closer to him. Both hands were tightly clenched. Her lips quivered a little; her voice choked. “I did not know what it was like to feel guilty of murder, to feel that one had taken another’s life. I know now. My folly in giving you a moment’s freedom has made me as guilty as you. But the end has come. Do you understand? You might put me out of the road, too, here in this lane, but that would not change the result any. You know that. You know in that case that the police would be after you anyway—that I have taken care of that. On the other hand, you may run for it now, and you may make it a question of hours, or a question of days, but as soon as the police lay hands on you your career is finished.”

There was a strange stirring within Billy Kane’s soul. She was very close to him, so close that he could see the pinched, haggard look in her face, and see the lips quiver again, and see the clenched hands rise to her eyes as though to shut out the abhorrent sight of him from her, and to shut out perhaps, too, the pictured sight of a man murdered, and for whose life she not illogically held herself accountable.

His hands gripped hard—hard as the mental grip in which he held himself. A sudden yearning, an almost uncontrollable impulse was upon him to reach out and sweep this lithe, fearless little figure that had become so mysteriously a part of his life, a greater part than he had ever realized before, into his arms. She would struggle like a wild cat, and fight with every ounce of strength, yes, and hatred, that was in her, but he could hold her because he was the stronger, and tell her that he was not the Rat, and—— He swallowed hard. And then what? Tell her that he was Billy Kane? A wan smile came to his lips. She would perhaps prefer the Rat! The Rat, publicly at least, was known as the less infamous of the two! He laughed a little harshly.

“Forget it!” he said roughly. “I’ve played straight with you, and before you go spilling any beans to the police you’d better get onto yourself. You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“I know that the Wop was murdered to-night in Wong Yen’s by you, or your orders,” she said passionately. “I know that the Wop is dead—that is enough!”

“Nix!” said Billy Kane, alias Bundy Morgan, alias the Rat. “The Wop isn’t dead, and he isn’t in Wong Yen’s either. I pulled him out of there.”

She stared at him, coming still closer in the darkness until he could feel her breath upon his face. It was a long minute before she spoke.

“I do not believe you!” she said in a dead voice.

He shrugged his shoulders.

“I did not expect you to!” The Rat’s tones were insolent now. “But you can prove it, can’t you? The Wop’s safe. He’s at a minister’s house. The minister’s name is Claflin. I don’t know the address, but you can easily find it. It wouldn’t do me any good to lie to you, would it? You can’t drag me to the police by force, and whether you squealed to them in the next ten minutes, or half an hour later after finding out I was lying, I’d be just as bad off, wouldn’t I?”

She drew back—but her eyes were still fixed steadily upon him.

“Yes,” she said.

“Well?” demanded Billy Kane.

“I can find this minister’s house in that half hour, I think,” she said in a low voice. “And the Wop—if he is there.” Her voice hardened. “You are quite right, Bundy, it will have done you no good to have lied. I promise you that! If I do not find the Wop, the police will find—_you_!”

She was gone.

XXII—THE FIGHT

Billy Kane stood in the lane for a moment, staring after her through the darkness and his lips puckered in a sort of impotent little smile. She would find the Wop, of course, and thereafter the old relationship between them would be reëstablished, and——.

He whirled suddenly, and in an instant was astride the top of the fence, his face set and hard, as there came, low but unmistakably from the interior of Barloff’s house, the sound of blows and the rending of wood, as though a door were being violently forced. A glance showed him that the window had been closed and the shade drawn down. Barloff had evidently got that far in safeguarding himself, only Red Vallon’s Apachés had struck, perhaps suspicious of _her_ visit, without waiting for the old Russian to go out! What else could those blows mean but an attack on Barloff? Certainly, Barloff must still be in there, for Barloff, warned, wasn’t going out; he was going to appeal, by telephone presumably, to the police.

Billy Kane’s mind was racing, as he whipped his mask from his pocket, adjusted it over his face, dropped to the ground, and ran across the yard. The night’s work obviously now, was far from over yet! He had still to play, after all, that other rôle of his in the underworld—the man in the mask! Red Vallon had said that the Pigeon, French Marr and the Cadger were to carry out the robbery inside the house. That made three to one! His one chance then was to take them by surprise.

He was working now with Whitie Jack’s skeleton keys at the rear door. The Cadger was an expert safeworker, just as the Wop was, and that was part of the game to make it appear to be the Wop’s work. The Wop was safe now, of course, but—he bit at his lips, cursing his clumsiness with the keys—old Barloff certainly wasn’t! They had intended to get Barloff out of the house, but if, without waiting for that, they struck with Barloff there, they would not stand on any more ceremony with the old man than they had with the Wop, since the Wop was to stand for it anyway. It was strange, ominously strange, that there was no outcry from Barloff, that even the sound of blows and splintering wood had ceased!

The door gave under his hand. He pushed it open cautiously, a bare half inch at a time. In front of him was a small room, obviously the kitchen, that connected with the rest of the house only by the side door of Barloff’s rear room from which the light now filtered in across the kitchen floor. He stole silently forward in the direction of the lighted doorway and halted, as, a little back from the edge of the door jamb, he stared in amazement into the room beyond.

The door near Barloff’s desk that led into the front room hung shattered on its hinges, its panels broken and splintered, but the only occupant of the room was Barloff himself. The man was standing there, a hatchet in his hand, surveying the wreckage, and mumbling inaudibly to himself.

And then suddenly there came a twisted smile of comprehension to Billy Kane’s lips. Old Barloff laid the hatchet down on the desk, and, rubbing his hands together in a sort of fiendish exaltation, a malicious grin on his cunning and crafty face, ran over to the safe and knelt before it. His mumble became quite audible now:

“The Wop! The Wop! Dead—eh? And all these little rentals, these nice little rentals, just in! And. if they are stolen—eh? I am a poor man—eh? I could not replace them. And so they would be mine—mine. She’s sure he is dead. She said so—that they murdered him. But she did not see it with her own eyes. If she comes back and tells the police that, I will say that the Wop must have escaped the trap they set for him, for with my own eyes I saw him, and since he is dead he will not be able to deny that. Yes, yes, Barloff, your old brain is still your best friend! And the others—ha, ha! They have planted it on the Wop—ha, ha! It would be a pity to disappoint them—and lose the rentals. Yes, yes, Barloff, that is so, is it not? Certainly, the Wop has robbed you, and tried to get revenge on you, too, because you were honest enough to go to the police five years ago!”

The man had the safe open now, and was snatching books and papers from the interior, and throwing them in a litter upon the floor. And now he had an old tin cash box in his hands. He laid this on the floor and opened it, and in a sort of hideous rapacity seemed to gloat over it. He dipped in his hands and lifted out banknotes, and let them filter through his fingers, and rubbed his hands together, and buried them again in the money; while behind the steel-bowed spectacles his little black eyes glittered with feverish exaltation again, and his whole body seemed to quiver in unholy, greedy worship.

Billy Kane’s jaw locked hard. The man’s whole life was a damnable hypocrisy—a rogue’s alias. Thousands the man had somewhere, and, by comparison, the paltry hundreds in the cash box, if hundreds even there were, seemed to hold up as to a mirror the man’s soul, stripped bare, until it stood out in all its naked, shrivelled miserliness, its godless grovelling to the only god it knew!

“The rentals—all the rentals!” mumbled Barloff again. “I am a poor man—how can I pay them over to-morrow when they have been stolen from me to-night, and I have nothing left? Yes, yes, Barloff, you are getting old, but you are not yet a fool!”

The man was suddenly all haste. He snatched up the cash box, and ran to the piece of furniture which had struck Billy Kane as so incongruous an adjunct to the furnishings of the room—the old morris chair. He turned this over on its back, there was a faint click of a hidden spring, and the bottom underneath the seat gaped outward on what were evidently ingeniously concealed hinges. Billy Kane’s eyes, behind his mask, narrowed in grim humor, as he caught a glimpse of piles of neatly stacked banknotes in the hollow bottom of the chair, that was a sort of spacious, boxlike compartment—and then the old miser had thrust in the cash box, closed the seat again, and righted the chair. Old Barloff, after all, did not place all his faith in a presumptive burglar’s chivalry for the obvious helplessness of the rickety old safe!

Barloff was rubbing his hands together unctuously once more, as he hurried back now to the desk. The desk was close to the already splintered door that led to the front of the house, and Barloff, catching up the hatchet in one hand, pulled the portable telephone instrument toward him with the other, and snatched the receiver from its hook.

“The police—quick—quick!” he called into the transmitter, his voice pitched in a well-simulated scream of terror, and brought the hatchet down with a crash on the splintered panels.

Billy Kane made no movement save that his lips twitched a little. The low, cunning trickery of the man produced a sort of nauseating disgust, and, too, a sort of merciless anger; but, given enough rope now, Barloff was in a fair way to hang himself, and it would afford him, Billy Kane, a very genuine pleasure to adjust, as he now proposed to do, the noose that would accomplish that hanging!

Barloff was still raining his hatchet blows on the door; and then suddenly, evidently having got his connection, he was screaming again, between blows, into the mouthpiece of the telephone:

“Is that the police?——Yes, yes!——Quick——This is Ivan Barloff——Barloff, Barloff, Barloff——yes, Barloff——Quick——Help!——For God’s sake, help!——It is the Wop!——Do you hear?——The Wop!”

Barloff slammed the receiver back on the hook, and flung the hatchet down on the floor. It was quiet in the room now except that the old man was talking again to himself, in a sort of triumphant glee:

“Ha, ha—got to escape from the Wop now—got to escape——yes, yes, Barloff, you have done well, very well—but you must hurry now—yes, hurry.”

Billy Kane drew silently back into the darkness at the far side of the kitchen. There was still a little more rope left to give Barloff for Barloff’s undoing! He, Billy Kane, had no intention of interfering with the hypocritical old scoundrel’s self-styled escape, nor of preventing Barloff now from rushing, for instance, to the police to amplify his tale; but Barloff, to “escape” and carry out his ruse successfully, could not rush out through the door supposed to be barred by the Wop and so reach the street that way! Barloff then, if Barloff were logical, had a choice of the kitchen and back door, or the window.