Chapter I: Hear of the Glass Room

They were not masked; it was daylight. The hour was late in the afternoon, to be sure; but I saw them plainly as they made no attempt at concealment. And I could guess at the significance of this. They showed themselves, without care, for they felt absolutely sure I would never have a chance to give evidence against them.

I used to wonder why a man doesn’t put up a fight, in spite of having a gun shoved against him, when he knows he’s in for the worst possible after he surrenders to such a circle as met me. The fact is, at the moment, the gun at your belt is wholly convincing; you aren’t competent to imagine incidents subsequent to the occasion of its going off. So you don’t force the occasion.

“Step in there,” somebody said to me; and I stepped. “There” was a door in the rear of a building; it led into an empty room and to another door indicated as my destination.

Here was a closet without further portal and without window; its light came through the door by which I entered; and it was so dark that, when I was thrust in and the door slammed and bolted, I supposed myself alone.

I stood still, with my hand on the door panel, while the after-images of light faded from my retinas and became replaced by the blackness of pitch dark. I indulged myself--or attempted to--in some of that logic said by Jerry, a little time ago, to be the present prerogative of gervers, guns and gorillas, and in which I felt certain that pumpers of poison gas would not be found lacking.

The last step on their ladder of reason was not difficult for my mind to ascend. I had spoiled their great scheme at the Sencort Trust; therefore now I was to be punished. Perhaps, in contemplation of the certainty of this, I should have been satisfied; but I had to go about the gathering up of earlier starts and sequences.

I felt myself caught in a continuity, frequently suggested but not finally convincing, until suddenly that gat at my stomach summed up everything for me. “Here you are!” it spoke. “You’ve gone this way and that; but now you’ve come to it!”

I got to thinking what Jerry told me of “his friend”--Keeban, his strange, sinister twin--“sitting in with destiny” by knowing, in advance, what he was going to do to others. I’d thought of him sitting in with destiny on Dorothy Crewe and old Win Scofield and on Jerry himself; but I hadn’t thought of him sitting in with destiny on me. Stupid, now that I came to see it; for of course I was in his calculations all along; he’d used me, as long as I proved profitable and now that I’d failed him, he’d finish me.

For I knew than that Keeban had me. He had not shown himself in that circle of reception in the alley. No; every face there had been unknown to me, unless one was the dyke-keeper of Klangenberg’s delicatessen. They were normal-appearing, good-looking youths who made the majority in that circle.

I’d often noticed--haven’t you--how indistinguishable our felons are from the philanthropists of the day. Mix up the captions--as the best of newspapers sometimes do--accompanying the illustrated page pictures of the gentry who last night did “Fanny’s First Play” for the Presbyterian Home and the guests and ladies who last night failed to start their Fiat promptly after they had it all filled from the ring and wrist-watch trays in Caldon’s windows, and who could be sure which words went with which faces?

Admit the truth; you’d hire most murderers on sight. Others do; why not you? They look normal.

Nero was normal, H. G. Wells says; he had a little peculiarity, to be sure, but that was merely incidental to his position, not to his nature. He was so placed, you see, that the ideas, which remain mere passing black thoughts and impulses with the rest of us, could without any trouble or personal effort at all become actual deeds with him. That was the secret of Nero. Before a man condemns Nero as being of a separate species from himself, he should examine very carefully his own secret thoughts. This is Wells’s own advice and monition.

It occurred to me there in the dark in reference to the normals on the other side of the door. They looked all right; but they showed signs of an education decidedly deficient on inhibitions, and altogether too prodigal at translating dark thoughts and impulses into action.

I wondered about Jerry and how much he might be knowing of my present position; twice, recently, you remember, I’d had word from him. I did the drowning-man acts,--both of them; I caught at the straw that somehow he might save me, and I reviewed, if not my entire life, yet several significant epochs of it; and I got to thinking about Doris.

She was in with the worst, I was now sure; she not only had had me hit on the head, when I came to see her, but she’d worked in that scheme to gas Sencort and his guests. I kept thinking about her and the dances we’d had together at the Flamingo Feather and our dinner on the train when I’d had the best time ever in my life.

Meanwhile I was listening and I began to realize that there was a soft, regular sound separate from and nearer than those which reached me through the door. It was the zephyr of breath. Some one was in the closet with me.

“Hello,” I whispered. “Who’s here?”

A hand touched my side and I seized it,--a small, firm hand mighty like Doris’s.

“Hello; who’re you?” I asked.

“Hello, Steve,” she said. “Doris! By Christopher, Doris!”

“Anybody else in here?” I asked. That sounds stupider now than at the time; for after this, I was ready for anything.

“No,” she said.

“What’re you doing here?” I asked her; and she said, “What d’you suppose?”

That was it; what did I suppose? Here she was with me. I was there because I’d run down and showed Teverson those slotted pipes and spoiled the best of Keeban’s schemes. Now why should she be here except for the same reason?

“They saw you down on Wall Street,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I see,” I whispered.

“Do you?” she asked me.

I bent at the same time that my hands, which had been holding hers, felt up her arms, over her shoulders and located her cheeks. I held her between my hands and, bending, kissed her. On the lips, it was; I found them fair. She helped, perhaps, a little.

“How long you been here,” I asked her, my lips burning like flame; and how I liked it!

“What time is it?” she asked.

“’Bout five when they shoved me in.”

“I came at three.”

I kissed her again at that; I was still bending and had her cheeks between my hands.

“How’d they get you? You take a cab?”

“That’s how they got you?”

“Me,” I said. “But you--you weren’t so easy, were you?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she temporized.

Queer--wasn’t that--how she wanted to show consideration for me? “I should have told you,” she blamed herself, “that they’d be watching the Sencort building, and when they bumped off just guinea pigs, they’d lay for who fooled ’em.”

“I had a tip to skip out,” I said. “But I didn’t start in time. Where did they get you?”

Now she told me, “They took me out of my room by the back way.”

I held to her but differently--oh, entirely differently--from my hold of her in that Sencort room. For I knew not only that she’d not been in that scheme, not only that she’d gone there to warn Teverson, as she said, but also I knew she’d nothing to do with that blow on my _medulla oblongata_ at Cheron Street.

“Vine’s doing this, I suppose,” I whispered.

“Yes.”

“He sent me both those telegrams?”

“No; only the second; I came on, as I wired you. He grabbed me when I arrived and threw you the second wire. I didn’t see the street till he was through with you.”

“What’d he do to you?”

“Me? Oh, he was all right about me, then.”

“He didn’t hurt you at all?”

She knew what I meant and replied, “He did not! Christina saw to that.”

“Oh, she’s back with him?”

“Umhm. That’s why she saw to it.”

“All right,” I said; and kept hold of her. My property, she was; mine.

“You’re forgiving me?” I said.

“For what?”

“Down on Wall Street; and what I did after I’d been hit.”

“Oh, that was you, Steve, just you.”

Pretty soon, then, I asked her, “What’s Vine’s idea for us now?”

You’d have thought I would have asked that the first thing. But question any doctor; inquire how patients act when they know there’s no hope for them. Do they say right away, “What is it, doctor?” They do not; they say, “Lovely weather; and what a view from this window!”

Doris was like a doctor in that, when I got around to asking her, she did her stalling, too; but finally she told me, “Well, I guess for us it’s the ‘glass room’.”

XX

DORIS AND I ARE TAKEN TO IT.

When she said “for us,” I got another thrill there in the dark, and right away I got quite the opposite when she said “the glass room.”

I had not heard of it before. No; that was the première for the phrase with me; but it was one of those phrases which carry their own connotation; and this was decidedly an uncomfortable one.

“What’s the ‘glass room’?” I asked her.

“Never mind,” she said, and it was like a mother to a child. You’ve heard something of the sort when a visitor let slip, before the children, a remark about the feature atrocity in the morning paper. “Never mind,” Doris said again to me.

“Well, I’m grown,” I said. “And since I’m apparently a candidate for it, why not tell me--unless you prefer to have it come as a complete surprise to me?”

“Don’t!” she asked me; and we stood in silence in the dark.

“You’ve explored the cavern, I suppose between three and five,” I said, starting up the small talk again.

“Yes.”

“It runs to solid walls, I take it?”

“Very solid.”

“Nothing like a trap door in the floor, by any chance?”

“Not by any.”

“Now a noise would probably be one of the worst advised projects possible, don’t you think?”

“It wouldn’t change the end at all,” Doris said, “and would only put us worse off now. They’d tie and gag us--or else let us yell for their amusement.”

“Of course some one’s just outside.”

“Of course.”

We were silent again and I listened. “Yet we don’t know. I hear nobody now.”

I threw my weight against the panels, bracing my feet as firmly as I could. The wood creaked but did not break. Hearing some one at the other side, I relaxed and the door opened.

“Who’s so crazy to come out?” one of the normals said to me. “Come along.” He punched me with his pistol. I came.

He slammed the door on Doris and threw over the bolt. Without another word to me, but guiding me by punches of his automatic against my side, he herded me into another closet, equipped with a heavy door. Here I was alone.

Standing alone in the dark, I wondered why they put me in with Doris, first; and I wondered now that it was too late to ask her again, exactly what “the glass room” was. Then my two perplexities partly answered each other.

She, having been caught doing a “double cross” on her crowd, knew what was going to happen to her; and they put me with her so she would tell me and so, while I waited, I would have the benefit of my own anticipations of the “glass room.”

Suggestive sort of name, wasn’t it?

I stood in that closet, or sat on the floor, for three hours. It turned out to be not yet nine when the normals removed me. Of course it seemed several times longer; many more than three hours’ thoughts went through my head.

“Ready for the ‘glass room’ now?” one of the normals said to me.

I said something in the manner of “Go ahead.”

“Come along then,” he said; and prodded me as before. But this time, as they were taking me out, they did a little more. They tied my hands and stuffed my mouth full of cotton and bound it in. After they had prodded me into their car, they threw a rope around my feet and pulled it tight.

I did not see Doris at all, then. I had no idea whether they already had attended to her, or whether she was next or whether they were leaving her behind.

In the car, the curtains were down; I couldn’t see out, yet I had some idea of where we were going. First we headed east, running with the long blocks, then we swung to the right and went with the short squares, crossing many streets and stopping many times at traffic signals.

That was one of the queerest features of the ride, to feel that the car, carrying me bound and gagged to the glass room, was halting, with the most punctilious, to obey the street regulations.

The three normals said little to me and not much more to each other. Altogether it was a quiet ride and, in itself, uneventful. We turned east again after our run south and I knew that we were in that bulge of the city below the numbered streets.

We went on to a bridge,--the Williamsburg bridge, I thought; and when we were off it, and had taken a couple of turns, I lost all reckoning. I wasn’t particularly up on Long Island City and Brooklyn.

When we reached our terminus, they threw the noose from my feet and prodded me to precede them from the car. Others were there waiting,--other normals, I mean. I saw nobody else in my fix. We were between two large, dark buildings which seemed to compose a factory of some sort. I saw corrugated, sheet-steel shutters covering the windows, not only next to the ground but upon the upper floors. The factory unit to the right communicated with the one to the left by a bridge-of-sighs effect about twenty feet from the ground. The whole place had a shut and deserted look which was intensified by the distance of the nearest night lamps.

There was a dark, overcast sky. I remember glancing up to get a glimpse of a star or so, if I could; but nothing like one was showing. So I took a long deep breath of the outside air, as the next best thing to do, before following some of the normals, and preceding others, into an aperture which developed a door somewhat farther along.

We were in a large, wide space of a character familiar to me; it was bare of furniture, except for many long, low tables, several chairs and stools and, here and there, a desk. Chutes slanted down upon the tables. These were for the delivery of goods in the days when the factory was working; here the shipments had been made up and dispatched.

I saw all this in the yellow glow from a couple of old electric bulbs in fixtures on the sides of the great supporting columns which stood in rows through the room. Although these lights proved that current was coming into the building, the state of this shipping floor was conclusive that the factory was shut down. It was an easy trick, I knew, for one of the normals to “cut in” the current which had been turned off by the company.

Several empty boxes, ready for goods which never slid down the chutes, were piled up on one side and I passed near enough to read the stencilling on their ends.

“Stamby-Temke Chemical Company,” they said.

I had a dim notion of the name. It seemed to me that this was one of the plants which had boomed during the war and afterwards had continued, with the idea that German dyes and chemicals would not again compete in the American market. They had quoted us coloring matter and synthetic fruit flavors; but we weren’t interested.

The normals walked me upon the broad platform of a freight elevator. I saw by the city license framed on its side that this was operated by electric power. A normal moved a lever and we slowly rose past one dark floor, two, three, four. Upon the fifth, we stepped out. Several lights were burning here and better ones than below,--bright Mazdas, these were. We were in another wide room but this had rows of desks and work benches; big bottles and carboys gleamed from shelves. The glass in the windows reflected the lights like mirrors, for they were black behind, with steel shutters tight screening them. None of this light escaped.

One of the normals jerked the binder from before my mouth and I coughed out the cotton without hindrance. From this floor, no shout could escape; nor could a shot be heard outside.

They watched me but let me alone. I sat on the edge of a desk and looked about at them. Just now, they were doing nothing.

It was plain, of course, that they had complete control of this empty plant. Probably Stamby-Temke had a watchman but the normals either overpowered him, terrorized him or bought him over. Perhaps he was one of them, who had applied for the job for the purpose of obtaining these buildings for their use. Evidently they were quite at home here.

They were so at ease, indeed, that they must be sure that no one would disturb them. I attempted a pose “at ease” but with my hands tied back of me, and more particularly with the feeling I had, I certainly made a poor pretense at it.

Something was going to happen to me here, I knew; and I was going to have nothing to say about it. The occurrence would be of that sort which precedes the finding of a body in a deserted building.

You’ve read in the papers, as I had, how the vice-president of the John Doe Company, making an inspection of a disused building prior to reopening it, was shocked to come upon the body of a man, evidently dead for some time. His clothing and so on; marks of identification and so on. The police state that the man undoubtedly met a violent end and prior to his death and so on. It is evident that the man was brought there by several others who used the building for--well, here I was to find out for what these normals used this building.

The elevator, which had descended after depositing us, reappeared with another group of normals and with a girl. Doris! Yes; there she was! If they had tied and gagged her while bringing her here, they had loosed her again; she stepped off the elevator and moved a little away from the normals. Not even her hands were tied; but she was in the same fix I was; that was clear.

They were letting her go to see what she would try to do, as they had let me. I got up from my seat on the desk; she came toward me. “Hello,” I said; and she said the same and sat in a chair near me. I slumped down again on the edge of the desk.

There was an average of eight of the normals about us in that big office; some kept sifting in and out, from and to a farther room, where there appeared to be somebody or something particularly important.

Doris glanced that way several times and they watched her; I watched her, too. She appeared alert and on edge with eyes bright and with lips thin and tight; but she didn’t show fright.

I’m not sure what I showed but I know what I felt. I was dull, not alert like her. One sort of nature seems to dull itself when in for what it can’t prevent; that was mine. I guessed that the “glass room” was over in that farther end of this floor.

During those three hours alone in that closet, I had spent a good deal of thought on the “glass room”; and, knowing that the scheme at the Sencort Trust had employed gas, naturally I set to fitting gas in the arrangements of the “glass room.” So now that I had seen this was a chemical factory, I was sure I was right. They had some ritual with gas for Doris and me. A rather elaborate ritual, if one were to judge by the time it took them to make ready. Or perhaps they were waiting for somebody.

A telephone instrument stood on the desk beside me. The last time I’d sat down, I had placed myself next it. Now I didn’t take it up; I merely moved my hand and lifted the receiver from the hook.

One of the normals saw me and made no move. He had no reason for worry; there was no response in the wire; the circuit was dead.

“Know anything to do?” I asked Doris in a whisper.

“Not now,” she replied.

The normals did not care; they did not even come closer to hear what we said.

“This is the place, I suppose,” I continued.

She nodded.

“What’s your idea for later?” I asked her.

“I’ll have it--later,” she said.

So that was it. She had no better plan than I who had none at all.

Just then Jerry came in. That is, I thought at first he was Jerry. My heart leaped at the sight of him; physically it leaped; I felt it pounding in me. I thought he was Jerry, you see. I thought he had come here as Keeban; I believed he was playing the part of Keeban but that really he was Jerry who had come to try to save me.

XXI

DORIS ENTERS THE GLASS ROOM.

You see, I had remained sure up to this time that there were two of them. Now and then, for short periods, I had questioned myself about it; but always my certainty of Jerry, as somebody distinct from Keeban, won over my doubt. I would never grant that Jerry, my brother, could be guilty of what Keeban had done.

Then, if they were only one, why would Jerry warn me and send me to prevent the plan of Keeban, as he had sent me to the Sencort Trust?

“Here’s Jerry!” I said to myself, and that jump of my heart encouraged me. “He’s playing Keeban. He’s come for me.”

The normals nodded or gazed at him; he gave hardly a glance at them. He looked to Doris and came over to me.

My pulse had stopped jumping then, when I saw him closer. “He’s not Jerry!” I warned myself. “He’s Keeban!” And then my senses did another roundabout. “He’s Keeban and Jerry, too!” For here was a body which I was sure was Jerry’s and some one else possessed it. That some one must be the soul we’d called Keeban--Jerry and I. Here was Keeban who’d robbed Dorothy Crewe and thrown her in the street; here was Keeban who had shot Win Scofield for his insurance and had knocked me on the head when I called at Cheron Street; here was Keeban who had tried to kill, by poison gas, Strathon, Géroud and Teverson and the Sencort directors in their room. And here--in the sense, at least, that I felt him physically present--was Jerry, who had been brother of mine for twenty-five years. And his present purpose was to finish me.

“Well, Steve,” he said, “You did a good job.”

“All right, I guess,” I replied.

“Damn good,” he granted to me. “You got any idea of what you beat me out of?”

“No,” I said, doing my best to stand up to him; and while I talked to him, I thought, “He warned me. He told me to do it. That wasn’t Keeban, of course. Jerry had the body then. Jerry must come into him at times. Then Jerry knows and goes horrified at what Keeban does. Jerry himself sent me that warning to try to stop him. He did the same in the killing of Win Scofield.”

He went on talking, “You beat me out of more than you’d make in the bean business if you lived as many more years as you’re going to live minutes. You like that girl over there?”

I didn’t reply to that; but he went on as if I had.

“Good you do. She’s traveling right along with you. Plenty of space for two in the old glass room. Now Stenewisc, he was simply a fool.”

“Stenewisc, who made the gas?” I asked him. I was trying to keep him talking for the general reason that every minute gained was another minute lived; and besides, below everything else in my mind, was the idea that something might turn this body back from Keeban to Jerry again. I got to figuring like this:

“Years ago, when we were at college, he started being Keeban for a couple of short periods which confused him afterwards. He was Jerry nearly all the time. Then he stopped turning into Keeban until that night of the Sparlings’ dance. He became Keeban for a time, then he was Jerry again when he came home to talk to me, after which he went back to being Keeban. He has stayed Keeban most of the time since, especially through that Scofield business; but once or twice he became Jerry. But now, except when he sent those two notes to me, he’s been Keeban all the time.”

“Stenewisc, he never had any sense,” he went on to me. “He had the gas during the war. But would he sell it to the army or to the English or the French or, if he didn’t like that side, would he sell to the other? He would not. He wouldn’t help any government anywhere; he wouldn’t help a government even to wipe out the rest. He was set to do the wiping himself, personally. He had his big idea.”

I kept quiet; and he stood close. This was like Jerry himself, this impulse to talk on.

“He figured he could croak everybody--give him a little more time and plenty of gas. Everybody in New York, anyway.” Keeban laughed. “Lot of good that would do. Get up!” he told me.

I got up.

“Get up!” he said to Doris; and she arose.

The normals formed before us and behind; and so we started to march to the glass room.

There was an ordinary wood and plaster partition first which set off another large room at the end of this floor. The usual employment of this place was plain enough, even to me with only college course knowledge of chemical matters. Here were the laboratories for experimentation and research where a commercial firm, such as Stamby-Temke, would keep a covey of chemists testing their products, analyzing the goods of competitors and making experiments to improve their own formulæ for colors, caustics, preservatives, antiseptics, poisons, solvents, reagents and what not.

Most of these tests would be simple enough and involve no danger to any one; but some would generate gases, poisonous or otherwise noxious, which should not be allowed in an open room; therefore the firm had installed, at the end of this laboratory, a special compartment which was, beyond any doubt, “the glass room.”

Its outer wall was not of glass; rather, it was not all glass, though there were two windows in it. No blinds were drawn before them but they were black from the steel shutters outside. The other three walls were of glass from floor to ceiling and, as the normals brought us nearer, I could see that the glass was heavy, clear plate such as is used in show windows and that it was carefully and evenly joined in steel framing.

Where the glass met the frame, and about the single, glass door, the joints were caulked and sealed, making the place air-tight and gas-tight, undoubtedly. There was a way of ventilating it without using the windows, I saw; for cords communicated with ceiling traps. The traps were open now; the blackness above was the darkness of the sky. One set of cords hung inside the room, another hung just outside the glass.

I guessed that, when Stamby-Temke had the building, the chemists who worked in the glass room used the inner set when they wished to clear the air of their cabinet; the outer cords must be for emergencies, in case the chemists in the outer laboratory saw the experimenters in the cabinet overcome; then the rescuers could open the ceiling before going into the glass room.

The fact that the traps now were up suggested that the cabinet recently had been used. For whom? I wondered. I was sure of the purpose of the cabinet. Here was the place of punishment and of discipline.

Keeban strode into the glass room and pulled the cords. The ceiling closed and he came out. His normals stood about him, grinning. They took on an additional detachment of manner which I didn’t like at all; it was detachment from us--from Doris and me--that I mean.

She was keeping her nerve and she was standing steady. She was gazing into the glass room with a look which made me think that, though she’d known about this cabinet, she had never actually seen it before.

I haven’t mentioned its furnishings. The room had a bench with nothing on it; there was a table in the middle of the cabinet. Nothing was on that either, but from its position, and from the way that Doris and the normals looked at that, it had a much more menacing suggestion.

It was a narrow table, no wider than a couch; it was about the length of a couch. And somehow, though it was perfectly flat and hard, it suggested a couch. At least, I imagined myself spread out upon it. The reason I fancied this was simple. I was sure that they meant to put me into that cabinet; and the only place they could put me and tie me safely would be to bind me to that table.

Then they would pump in Stenewisc’s gas--his KX, which so competently had accounted for Costrelman and his butler and for the four guinea pigs which, but for me, might have been Lord Strathon and M. Géroud and Sencort and Teverson. But for Doris and me, I mean; for I knew--and Keeban and his normals knew--that if I had failed to warn Teverson, Doris was there to do it. Consequently, we were to get the gas now; and we were not to get it simply, but impressively as a part of a ceremony of punishment and discipline.

For Doris had done the double cross; she had “speiled” and “spouted”; and not only had she spoiled the biggest job this crowd ever had “on” but by her squeal or her willingness to squeal had made every man here a candidate for the electric chair. That was their judgment and their sentence against her.

It was not a fair judgment, nor a fair sentence, even from their own point of view, I thought. It was strange that, standing there and staring into the glass room, I angered at this more than anything else, that their sentence of her wasn’t fair. She never could have agreed to mix in murder; she had mixed with them only for counterfeiting, for her shoving of “the queer”; and through that contact, she had learned of the plot to kill which she could not stand for.

Other flashes of comprehension came to me there, too. Keeban was fast developing, I understood. He’d started, so far as I knew, only with robbery; then he’d run to shooting of old Win Scofield and, from that, to his attempt at the simultaneous gassing of the group appointed to gather in the Sencort directors’ room. Keeban had tried to carry Doris with him from counterfeiting into killing; he had failed. He must have been carrying some, or most, of these normals with him from smaller offenses into those which threatened “the chair.”

He could not simply have happened upon a group of normals going the exact gait he was going; he had to speed up some of them and keep them with him and impress them with the certainty of something worse than “the chair”, if any failed him. So he was giving “the glass room” to Doris and me, not merely for our punishment, but for an example to the others. And more of the others were arriving now. I heard footsteps and voices, a girl’s voice among them and her laugh. I turned about. Shirley, Win Scofield’s widow, had come with two young men beside her.

The sight of her brought me images of recollection. How I had seen her sing in her house that night before the shooting! How, like a cabaret Récamier, she had received me after her husband was dead! How I witnessed her dance at the Flamingo Feather that night she had stabbed at her partner, Keeban!

Sometimes, since, I had doubted the authenticity of my own witnessing that night; I wondered if, actually, she had tried, in that sudden, swift dart of the dagger, to kill Keeban, her partner. Now I wondered that no longer.

She came in smiling; but her smile was too like Doris’s when she now smiled at me. For a moment I thought that Shirley was with us; she, also, was to be a guest of the glass room. Then I realized that this was not so. She had come only to see us entertained within the glass. I realized that it was for her we had been waiting. She had come but not of her own will. She had been brought to see this entertainment which was planned for her.

I got a glimpse of Keeban’s face; and there I saw a leer which seemed to say:

“You stabbed at me. I let you get away with it. But watch your step. Now see what I can do.”

She kept on smiling. She looked at Doris but didn’t speak. She didn’t even nod at Doris, indeed; and Doris took no heed of her. She gazed at me, did Shirley Scofield,--Christina. And she smiled at me as she had at Keeban, and she smiled at the normals, too. That smile meant nothing; no more than their grins in reply to her.

Keeban spoke aloud. “Everybody’s here.” It seemed to be a prearranged signal. Two of the normals came up to me and took my arms; two more placed themselves in position similarly to escort Doris.

“What’s the big rush, boys?” said Keeban then. “Didn’t they show us something new down on Wall Street? Don’t we show it back to them?”

He laughed; and how he looked like Jerry when he laughed! But he didn’t sound like Jerry. Not at all. That other person possessed the body.

“Where are they?” he asked the nearest of his normals.

“Oh!” said the normal, remembering. “In there.”

“Get them,” said Keeban.

The fellow stepped to a locker at the side of the room; he stooped, and, reaching in, he brought out a pair of white rabbits in one hand, another pair hung by their ears from his other fist.

“Rabbits,” said Keeban, with a sort of play at apology to Doris and me. “I know you got guinea pigs; but rabbits do just as well and they show better.”

He took them from the man who held them and he stepped again into the glass room and tossed the four white rabbits upon the table. Carefully he closed the door when he came out.

He went to the end of the cabinet where now I noticed, when he touched it, a thin pipe with a cock right against the glass. He twisted the cock and he returned to us.

The end of the pipe pierced the glass, I saw; but now that the cock was turned, nothing visible came from it. Stenewisc’s gas was colorless and odorless, I remembered. I did not expect to smell it through the glass of the cabinet; but I could not help expecting the rabbits, on the table there, to show some alarm. They discerned nothing threatening, however.

Timidly they tried this end of the table and now that. They hopped about, nosing each other, naturally enough. Nothing at all seemed to be happening. Then a lethargy crept over them. They did not sleep; they remained awake but became slower and slower in their motions. Yet nothing alarmed them; they seemed to sense nothing at all but the difficulty of motion. They nosed up, seeming to search for this intangible thing which was restraining them. They drooped, as though pressed down; but they remained awake and gave not a squeal nor a quiver of pain.

Surely it was painless, as well as invisible and intangible, too,--this amazing death from Stenewisc’s gas.

“No trouble at all, you see,” said Keeban to me. “You never know it.”

He knew how horrible that gradual, invisible death was; a shot or a knife, or anything sudden, would have been ten times more merciful. It’s a strange thing to say, but I’m sure that pain--some pain, at least--would have made it less terrible. It was uncanny, you see.

“They’d never have suspected it,” he spoke again to me. “They’d each thought the rest were getting thick in the head and nobody would’ve tried to get up from the table--till they couldn’t.”

He was speaking of the four, who would have been in the Sencort directors’ room, if I hadn’t interfered; and his words, and this sight of the rabbits before me, made me see how the Englishman and the Frenchman and Teverson and Sencort would have gone, without feeling, without knowing, with nothing really to alarm them till too late.

“Great stuff,” said Keeban again and not to me but to the normals. “We’ll make it worth millions yet--millions! We’ll get the next bunch and then sell Wall Street the gas--at our own price! Boys, the curtain raiser’s over.”

For the rabbits had drooped into death. There was not a mark nor a twist on them to show it. Keeban shut off the gas, where he had turned it on; he pulled the cords to open the ceiling.

“Perfectly safe in two minutes,” he assured Doris and me. “It’s light; the stuff rises.”

Doris and I looked at each other. What had been done had been planned of course to break our nerve. I can’t say what cracks showed in mine, nor how much satisfaction I was giving them. I can say that what she was supplying them was mighty small.

We had two minutes, one of us or both of us; and she wasn’t for wasting them. Nor was I thinking of things far away. I couldn’t; and I didn’t want to.

I felt my flashes of home; of my mother and my father. I felt flashes of Jerry, as he used to be when he was my brother. To see him here beside me now stopped these old sensations. My mind brought to me the night he’d come and told me how “Keeban” must have taken away Dorothy Crewe; it brought me to the police station where, that same night, he broke away; it brought me to the Flamingo Feather where I danced with Doris, calling her Cleopatra. It brought me to Caldon’s, where I happened on her “shoving the queer”; it took me to the Blackstone and the train and to that supper with her again. It took me to that closet where I’d kissed her, as I had never kissed any girl before.

Here we were, caught together, with Keeban going once more into the glass room. He went himself and picked up the rabbits and flung them at our feet on the floor.

“How about it now?” he said to me. “What’s the order? The lady first?”

I swore at him. He had my nerve, you see. I swore and strained at the cords on my hands. A lot of good it did me. He laughed.

“All right, Steve!” said Doris to me. “All right!” Quickly but calmly she said it. Calmly is not the word. It doesn’t do at all. No word would. “All right, Steve!”

“All right, Doris!” I said in reply. Of course nothing was right, except one thing; and that was whatever held her to me.

“Margaret’s my name,” she told me; and she touched me. They let her; they weren’t holding her just then.

“Margaret,” I said. “Thanks. I like that name.”

Keeban nodded to his normals; and they took, and tied her. Then he, himself, carried her in.

They tied her to the table, much as I had seen they would. They came out and closed the door. He twisted that cock on the pipe; I saw his wrist go around and around.

I stood and stared and waited. There was just one thing that I might try; and it was not yet time for that.

Doris--Margaret--lay on her back, each wrist and each ankle looped to a leg of the table. She lay looking up at the closed ceiling, not moving except for the rise and fall of her bosom with breathing. She had tried her cords and found the uselessness of struggle; so she lay and waited.

I watched her and waited for my moment. I would have known it was not much to wait for, if I had thought it out. But you don’t think out affairs like that; when there is only one thing to do, you have to take a chance on whatever it is. So I stood, with Keeban beside me and Christina a few feet away and the eleven normals beyond us and between and I watched the girl on the table breathing.

They watched her, too. Christina, Shirley Scofield,--with what sort of feelings? And the normals about us, what were they thinking, too? I didn’t even try to wonder about Jerry who had become Keeban and who was doing this thing.

My hands, tied together, grasped the top of the back of a chair against which I leaned; and my muscles went tight to raise it and, spinning, to swing it upon him and kill him. Yet I knew I would not do that; I might knock him down; that was all. It would not help my girl at all.

She half turned her head toward me and then, quickly, she faced to the ceiling again. She wanted to look at me, I thought; and then she had thought it must seem like an appeal to me, which I could not bear when I could not help her.

I held on to the back of that chair and waited, watching her bosom rise and fall. I kept saying to myself something that Teverson told me. When Costrelman and his butler had been killed by the gas, others in the room had been affected but had recovered. An under-dose was not deadly, therefore; that is, if this were the same gas.

I could see nothing; smell nothing; sense nothing going on in that cabinet; but neither had I when the rabbits had died.

My plan depended entirely upon time. There must be gas in the cabinet, but not too much gas,--not enough to kill my girl in there.

She breathed more slowly, I thought; I stared and seemed sure of it. At the same time, Keeban began looking at me. He suspected I was about to act; and I did it. I lifted that heavy chair behind me and, spinning, I swung it against the glass side of the cabinet and smashed it through. I followed it myself and was inside, smashing, kicking, demolishing glass. A girl screamed.

Keeban started after me; I felt--or I had felt--his hand grabbing me; but now his clutch was gone. He was away from that break in the glass. I heard him call and cough, “Beat it! Duck! Don’t suck it in!” Shirley, for it was Shirley, screamed again.

I thought, “He knows. A little kills. I’ve got it. Cleopatra, Doris, Margaret; she’s got it, too.” But I had her and I hardly cared. The rest of them had got away.

My smash of the glass, with Keeban’s yell--and more than that, his example--had given the start. Now shots were speeding them along. I didn’t know who was shooting; they were out of the laboratories; and still they were going away.

I had that ceiling over the glass room open; I did that before I cut my cords. Now, by sawing against the glass, I freed my wrists and I had off Doris’s cords.

The fight outside--still I did not know who was fighting--had passed from that wide room where the elevator was; it went farther or it went down.

I got out of the glass room and around to that cock in the pipe which Keeban had turned.

The valve was turned tight; no doubt about it; for I twisted it half a turn open and twisted it back again to make sure. “He didn’t give you the gas!” I called to Doris. “It wasn’t turned on!”

Then he came back into the room, bloody and leaping; and he was Jerry! The change, which I’d given up hoping for, had come over him.

“Steve!” he called to me. “Steve! Come down and see him. I’ve got him. Christina croaked him cold! And I’ve got him! Come down and see him!”

“Who?” I said; for I was shaky; and in my mind, then, there was only one of them.

“Keeban!” he told me. “He’s cold, downstairs where Christina croaked him.”

XXII

A CROAKING AND FINIS.

Doris was up and she was steady. “You didn’t get the gas,” Jerry was telling her.

She said nothing to him. It was harder for her than for me to understand what he had done; yet she got it before I did.

“You’re Jerry Fanneal,” she said to him.

“That’s me.”

He went to a window and threw up the sash and flung back the shutter. He fired three shots in the air.

“You were here--not Harry Vine--just now.”

“He’s been cold for half an hour. That’s what delayed you.”

“What?”

“Christina stopped to croak him, Harry Vine, Keeban. She wouldn’t take a chance.”

He was wiping blood from his shoulder where he’d been hurt. I was bloody in several spots and Margaret was wiping that off me.

“Come along,” said Jerry: and he took us downstairs. And there he lay--himself in duplicate--dead on the floor. He had been stabbed through the throat.

I bent over him and, with Jerry himself bending beside me, still I got a shock at seeing him. “Two of you,” I said over and over. “Two of you.” I was still shaken, you see.

“Two of us!” said Jerry, and he touched that body so identical with his own. “The difference between us was this: when he was turned loose, he walked the wrong way across the Lincoln Park grass.”

“Two of you!” I said and straightened, my arm on Jerry’s shoulder. “See here! When we were boys, with our beds side by side, what was the book you kept underneath to read in the mornings?”

“The Wonder Clock,” he told me.

“And the story you liked best of all?”

“‘One Good Turn Deserves Another.’”

“Jerry!” I cried to him; and I stood there holding to him, staring down at Keeban.

“I didn’t kill him,” Jerry said to me. “I came here to get him; I meant to bag him. Christina came with him but she worked with me. She knew I was here. She meant to kill him. I didn’t know that till after I’d stepped out and went at him. She gave him the steel; she wanted to croak him. She thought he’d get her, if she didn’t.”

Doris said: “He would have. Where’s she now?”

“Gone,” said Jerry; and Doris asked no more.

Jerry ceased to stare down at Keeban. “We were twins, I suppose; that must be it; and he walked the wrong way across Lincoln Park. That was all there was to it.” His mind kept going back to that. “Steve,” he said to me.

“What?” I asked; I thought again he was turned to philosophy; but he said,

“Upstairs, you swung your chair hard, old top. I thought you’d never do it.”

“I see now,” I replied. “You were waiting for me to do that.”

He nodded. “You had to make the move; then I could do the rest. You got to it just in time, old fellow!”

“In time?” I said stupidly. “The pipe wasn’t turned on.”

“Yet you were just in time; in a minute more, they’d got wise that it wasn’t.”

We heard men downstairs now. “Who’s that?” I said.

“Must be the bulls; his gang,” Jerry glanced at Keeban again, “got out; all that will ever get. Well, come on, bulls; a lot you can hurt me now!”

He looked up from his brother and straightened; and I felt for him perhaps one thousandth of his relief from what had been on him since that night he came into my room, after the Sparlings’ dance, and said Keeban had come and gone with Dorothy Crewe.

I put my hand on him while we waited, Doris and he and I, for the approaching steps of the bulls.

“You can go back to anybody now; you can go back to Dorothy Crewe.”

“I’ll not go back,” he told me.

“You wouldn’t,” I said.

“Are you going back, Steve?”

“Where?” I asked.

“To the bean business and--your Dorothy Crewe?”

“I don’t know about going back to the bean business,” I said. “And I never had any Dorothy Crewe; but if I had I wouldn’t go back to her. No; I know that!”

The bulls came on us. We were in the light, but they flashed their own lanterns in our faces. “Up with ’em!” They had our hands over our heads at the points of their pistols. And when they saw Jerry, they felt sure of a haul.

“Here’s _him_!” they called to those behind. “Here’s him who’s wanted from Chi to the Street! Here’s him!”

“Take a look at the floor,” Jerry advised them. “And when you take me along, have him with us.”

“How’s this, Mr. Fanneal? How’s this?” And then I reaped one advantage of my previous notoriety. They knew me; and there, with Jerry beside me and Keeban on the floor, I tried to tell them.

Of course, they took us to the station for the second telling, which was not the last by any means. They held Jerry that night; but they did not hold Margaret and me. Of her, they knew nothing; and what I knew of her, I did not tell them.

If I told them all the truth about her, one section of this truth ought to make up for the other; her trying to warn Teverson, and taking the risk she ran, surely was full compensation for her passing “the queer.” I felt that; but not being certain that others would so judge, I kept to myself what I knew. And I kept her to myself, too.

I had her in a cab; and this was no stray taxi, you may be sure. This was certain to go where I ordered it; and the number I gave was that of my friend on the Avenue.

“We can both go there and stay,” I said. “That’s one use for friends.”

“No,” said Doris. “Not for me.”

“Oh, yes,” I said; and, being alone with her in the back of that taxi, I firmly and forcibly held her. Also I kissed her, several times.

“Don’t!” She fought with me; and furiously, too.

“I love you,” I repeated to her. “And you love me. God knows why, but you kissed me in that closet; and you----”

She told me then and there that none of that counted. She had thought we were going to be killed, you see, or she never would have shown any interest in me. Now we weren’t killed, she said; and certainly that was true. We’d have to go back to our own lines, me to the bean business and she to “shoving the queer.”

“You can’t do that,” I told her.

“Why not?” she came back at me.

“You’ve no more of the queer to shove. Your father’s taken.”

“And you’re glad of that!” she accused me.

“I’m not glad!” I denied. “I’d do anything to free him.”

“You wouldn’t shove the queer with me!” she retorted.

“Didn’t I do it--just about?”

“But you didn’t want to. You didn’t like it!”

“I never liked anything so much as that trip on the train, except when I had you later.”

“Well, that’s over now!” she said.

“I guess not. You and I have just started!”

“We’ve not....”

That’s how we argued in that cab. I was wild about her; she did love me; and after a while I made her remember it. Naturally we had quite a time; we’d just been under rather a strain together.

I took her to my friend’s that night; and the second day I took her to the Church Around the Corner and married her. I waited till the second day so Jerry could be best man.

Jerry has not yet gone back to the bean business; I think he never will return. One of many results of his finding Keeban is that Jerry found his mother--an old woman who, when she was young, had twin boys one of whom wandered away; and for twenty-five years she has known only the one who turned to crime. Now she knows Jerry; he knows her. Naturally he’s bewildered a bit about his future.

I am back in the bean business; that’s where I belong. I’m at my desk. I’ve returned.

But I’ve returned rather like the soldier Kipling sings about who returned to Hackensack “but not the same.” And I’m not the same for a similar reason.

“Things ’ave transpired which made me learn,
The size and meanin’ of the game.”

I’ve thought about that a lot, these days. My parents picked up Jerry and adopted him to “broaden” me and immediately set about the business of making him as much like ourselves as possible. They succeeded to the point where we both would have gone through life bean merchants, and happy at it, but for Keeban.

He’s the one that did things to us.

But for him, the game would have been my club and golf course, the Drive, the Drake, the other items I’ve mentioned.

I’d have married, I suppose, some girl with my exact previous notions of the game.

Now, as I’ve mentioned, I’m married to Doris. And I have, I know, the best wife in the world. Certainly the most interesting.

Some of the family friends, who know the facts, feel there is something fundamentally wrong with my wife.

There is not; and there never was anything wrong--except counterfeiting.

She doesn’t admit that was wrong. She concedes that now that she’s married to me there is no actual occasion for anyone in the family engraving a steel plate but she makes this concession in a way which suggests that, should occasion ever arise, she will not be without recourse as a breadwinner.

The interesting part, for me, is I don’t know how much she means it. So I’m playing that bean business safe to keep the occasions down below and quite out of her reach.

If one ever blows the lid off, I’ll tell you.

+-------------------------------------------------+ |Transcriber’s note: | | | |Obvious typographic errors have been corrected. | | | +-------------------------------------------------+