Chapter II: The Lone Wolf

Slatey the Skull was a gentleman of leisure and perverted education; he was also a nitroglycerin expert, making a specialty of the application of this sovereign explosive to burglar-proof safes.

He was a child of the congested cities, loving the noise and clatter of their streets, the whir of machinery, the hum and hustle of their myriad life. But tuberculosis clutched at his panting, crumbling lungs with the pitiless fingers of death, and the ravages of the disease had changed a naturally ruddy countenance into the emaciated, soapstone-colored face which gave him the name among his fellows.

Under sentence of death, imposed, not by the law of the land which he defied, but by the law of life which defied him, he had wandered from the city to the deep woods and sparsely populated villages of the South as a wild goat leaves its fellows and crawls into some desolate mountain cave to languish and die alone.

Despairing of his own life, indifferent to the lives of others, he was a lone wolf, perilous, predaceous, as quick to strike and as deadly as a viper. His admiring fellows said of him that he could “smell money.”

Slipping like a shadow from the log-train which stopped for water at Tickfall shortly after midnight, he wandered up the crooked, silent, deserted streets toward the business portion of the village.

Pausing before the door of the Gaitskill store, his thin, flexible nostrils quivered like a rabbit’s nose. Flattening himself against the door like the wraith of a man, his keen eyes searched the streets, his acutely sensitive ears listened intently.

Then he turned, and with an ease like the magic of a sleight-of-hand performer, he opened the door and entered the store.

“I smell a nigger,” he muttered with a curse, as the stale odor of cigar smoke racked his frail body with noiseless coughing.

Leaving the front door unlocked, he walked noiselessly down the avenue between the counters to open the door in the rear. There he found Mustard Prophet sleeping on a pile of sacks, invisible to the eye, but easily vizualized by the trained mind of the Skull as he listened to Mustard’s stertorous breathing.

“A nigger,” he racked with his noiseless cough, “stuffed like a fat woman’s stocking, sleeping like a stiff!”

He walked back to the little office partitioned off in the middle of the store. His frail fingers fumbled with the combination knob of the safe for a moment, then caressed its top and sides.

“Forty years old,” he sighed, “and made of pot-metal. If I was not so weak, I’d turn it over and kick a hole in the bottom of it with my sore toe. As it is, I’ll have to work with this soup and cough like an alligator for a week with its fumes in my lungs.”

Ten minutes later the door of the safe swung crazily open, hanging upon a half-broken hinge.

The bony arm and hand of the Skull explored the contents. His fingers grasped the top of the coarse bag which Colonel Gaitskill had placed there a few hours before, and he lifted it out.

“No further seek its contents to disclose or draw its dollars from their frail abode,” the Skull parodied. “The simp put it all in one sack for me and tied the top with a rawhide string.”

His fingers fumbled the contents of the sack through the thick cloth.

“Gosh!” he sighed. “Gold and silver and a little dirty paper money--heavy as pig-iron--and I’m too weak to carry an empty pill-box across the street to a homeopathic doctor.”

Nevertheless, he took the bag with him as he started to leave. At the rear door, he paused at the pallet where Mustard lay sprawled out and a sardonic smile distorted his skull-like face.

“Behold the guardian of this gold!” he muttered. “Strange the South has been the fall guy for this sort of servant ever since the South began. Well, Cæsar had his Brutus, and every colonel has his coon!”

Then he stepped out into the lot and closed the door behind him.

There was the crack of a pistol, and a bullet plugged into the door-jamb.

“You missed, friend!” the Skull called tauntingly. “I had my sharp edge turned toward you!”

The night prowler in the Southern village seeking spoils is exposed to no danger by the night watchman sleeping sweetly on a soft stone step. The yeggman dreads the fox-hunters.

They leave town at sundown accompanied by friends, followed by dogs, comforted by the contents of sundry jugs. They are kept keyed up to alert wakefulness by the excitement of the chase and return only when the jugs are empty.

It was a party of fox-hunters, headed by Sheriff Flournoy, with whom Slatey the Skull had now to deal. Passing through the town on their return from the hunt they had heard the dull explosion in the store and had made an investigation. They were now in ambush, waiting for the appearance of the safe-blower.

It was Flournoy’s pistol which had roused the Skull to his danger.

But the Skull was not disturbed. Shifting his bag of money so that he carried it on his left arm as a woman carries a bundle, he slipped his automatic from his pocket.

Crouching low in the darkness and walking with the noiseless tread of a cat within ten feet of Flournoy, he passed unobserved by the sheriff out of the lot into the alley and on to the front of the store. The bullets zipped around him as he ran out of the alley toward the middle of the street, but the Skull’s first shot was upward at the electric street light which went out, leaving him sheltered by almost total darkness.

Running down the alley, Flournoy fired into that circle of darkness at a venture.

The answer of the Skull’s gun was instantaneous. The sheriff felt a jar which almost paralyzed his right arm. Making an investigation he uttered a low exclamation of wonder and admiration: The Skull’s bullet had struck and destroyed the sheriff’s weapon.

In the mean time the rest of the fox-hunters had been spreading out, trailing along the street in front of the store. In a moment half a dozen pistols began to shoot and the Skull was engaged in the battle of his life.

In the Louisiana villages promiscuous shooting upon the street at night is a fire-alarm. Roused by such shooting, men quickly slip on their clothes, seize their own firearms, and run down the street toward the first alarm, firing into the air as they run, thus rousing the whole town.

All over Tickfall, men heard what they thought was a fire-signal from the business section of the village. Fearful of losing their stores and offices, they ran toward the fray, shouting and shooting, until Tickfall sounded like a battle with a thousand men engaged.

“The beggars are coming to town,” Slatey the Skull quoted with a skinny smile. “I’ll wait until the mob arrives, then slip through the crowd in the dark.”

But alas, the Skull was not acquainted with Sheriff Flournoy.

Adopting the old Indian trick of lying flat on the ground, thus throwing the object he was approaching against the sky so that he could see it, the sheriff with bones like an ox and a mouth as grim and cruel as a bear-trap was slowly crawling toward the sardonic creature of skin and bones, as frail and delicate as a girl, who sat sedately beside the stolen money-bag.

Suddenly Slatey screamed like a wildcat and sprang to his feet.

Wrestling with his feeble strength, shooting wildly, biting, clawing, he struggled in the bear-like hug of the giant sheriff. Then something snapped inside the Skull’s body and with a frightened “Ah!” he sank limply into the hands of his captor.

At that moment the street was filled with armed men, white and black, looking for the conflagration. Explanations flew from lip to lip. Some one entered the Gaitskill store and turned on the lights.

Then Sheriff Flournoy entered carrying Slatey the Skull.

“Is he dead?” the crowd asked in one breath.

“I think not,” the sheriff said. “I did not shoot.”

“Gib him a leetle dram, Mister Johnnie,” Pap Curtain spoke up.

“Go over to my office and get my flask, Pap,” the sheriff commanded, as he tossed Curtain his office keys, “You’ll find it on my desk.”

Pap Curtain started after that flask at full speed. In the middle of the street, under the broken electric light, his foot struck a coarse canvas bag, he stumbled, fell headlong, butted a hitching post with a resounding whack and stayed right there.

Ten minutes later the crowd found him, unconscious, clutching the office keys in his cold hand.

One negro, a belated arrival, saw Pap Curtain fall.

He ran to Pap’s rescue, but never arrived. His foot also struck that bag. Stooping, he picked it up, felt of its contents, recognized the familiar rattle of coins, and promptly departed, taking that bag with him lest some other person fall over it and get hurt.

The sheriff had no sooner sent Pap Curtain after a flask than several were produced and tendered. The liquor, poured down the throat of Slatey, started a shudderlike cough and a bloody spume issued from the wounded man’s mouth. Then he spoke splutteringly:

“You broke a rib and caved it through the only good lung I have, Mr. Officer. I guess you win.”

“Where’s the money?” Flournoy demanded.

“I--ah--” A shuddering, racking cough stopped all speech and the pitiful creature struggled as if he were never to breathe again. At last he spoke:

“I’m suffering very much. Get a doctor--”

“Where’s the money?” several men asked in a chorus.

“That’s for you to find out,” the Skull answered, with a momentary flash of his old lawless spirit. Then weakly: “Get a doctor!”

“Where’s the money?” Colonel Gaitskill asked, bending over Slatey.

“Where’s the sawbones, Santa Claus?” Slatey mocked, coughing little flecks of blood off his lips.

“Get a doctor!” Gaitskill commanded sharply, glaring at the crowd.

Dr. Shuttle stepped forth, producing, with an important air, a pocket medical case containing a hypodermic needle and several vials of medicine.

Dr. Shuttle was young and very ambitious. He quickly made a hypodermic injection into the Skull’s side. It eased the criminal’s pain. In fact he has never suffered since. In short, he died.

“Where’s the money?” the sheriff demanded again, shaking the lifeless form.

The Skull’s mouth drooped open in a grotesque imitation of a laugh. Slatey had nothing more to say.

“Thunderation!” the sheriff exclaimed in a mighty voice. “Hunt around for that money-bag. This fellow did not get away with it.”

Oil lanterns were quickly procured and the crowd searched the street, the alley, the lot in the rear and the neighboring places. They discovered nothing but the limp form of Pap Curtain.

While the crowd was gathering around Curtain, from inside the store a mighty shout arose:

“Here’s the other one, Flournoy!”

The crowd plunged into the store, surged to the rear and gathered in a tight circle around the prostrate form of Mustard Prophet.

He was still asleep!