Chapter XXVIII: Staring Death in the Face

There were several years of entire blank behind Carleton Lynne, so far as his memory was concerned.

He had gone to the Klondike before that time, prospecting for gold, and he had gone to that country of blizzards and gold, starvation and plenty with a man named Henry Carroll, to whom Red Mike had already made reference in the foregoing conversation.

In the mind of Lynne there was here and there a hazy recollection of some of the lesser things that had happened to him after he so nearly died of exposure and injuries in the far north; but in the main he knew nothing of those intervening years, and had known little or nothing of himself, not even his name, until a short time before Patsy found him, to bear out the proof that the impostor in the East, Henry Carroll, was not the heir to so many millions.

And the young man, as yet only twenty-six, was still an invalid, although he had lost nothing of his old spirit and daring--and back of the date when he had fallen exhausted in the snow and had been left for dead, his memory was clear enough.

Therefore, naturally, he remembered the man who had intruded upon him in his sleeping room in the Lynne mansion in New York City, which he had been in possession of so short a time--for everything that had happened to him before that dreadful experience was as strong in his recollection as if the happening had been yesterday.

And this Red Mike had been one of the bad characters of that former experience in the Klondike.

He had been a bad man and a dangerous one, until he was cornered; but at such times, like others of his ilk, he had inevitably proved himself an unconscionable coward.

Mike had been at one time the proprietor of a saloon, a gambler, and everything that was bad; he had been a sluice robber, a road agent, a thief, a bully, and he had been suspected of at least one murder done in cold blood, where the victim had been shot in the back, and without an opportunity to defend himself.

But there had been no proof of it, and he had not been made to suffer the consequences of it, as should have been the case.

And once upon a time, when Lynne and Carroll and two others had found the man lost in the snow and near the point of perishing they had rescued him and saved his life.

Most men would be grateful forever for such an act of succor, but it had seemed to incur the enmity and hatred of Red Mike, rather than his friendliness.

And then, just before Lynne started out on the trail which was to be his last one in that country--the time he was supposed to have lost his life--Lynne had had occasion to administer a thorough thrashing to the Red one.

These are small things, to be sure, but with a character like Red Mike’s there is no such thing as forgetting them--and Mike had not forgotten.

And Mike, with all his roughness, uncouth manners, and scoundrelly principles, was a well-educated, well-bred person, who had gone wrong, or whose natural propensities for evil had dominated every other impulse within him.

Just why Mike should be there in that room at the dead of night, Lynne did not know, and at the moment could not guess, although he thought that he could read between the lines and conjecture upon it vaguely.

Carleton Lynne recalled the fact that once when he was in the company of Henry Carroll--now on his way to the death chair at Sing Sing--and this same Red Mike, he had been led to talk about his rich uncle in the East, J. Cephas Lynne, and to speak of the millions possessed by that relative whom he had not seen since he was a child; and since Patsy found Carleton Lynne in Idaho, and had related to him all that had happened to bring about the death of J. Cephas Lynne and his only daughter, Edythe, and to take to New York a man who personated Carleton Lynne--well, the rightful heir had been enabled to understand something of the conditions that had brought about such a strange circumstance; or rather, such a condition of circumstances.

He could understand, or thought he could, how, after he was supposed to be dead, Carroll had remembered that conversation in which reference to the rich uncle had been made; how Carroll had looked the matter up, had learned of the death of Cephas Lynne and the daughter, and that the great fortune was going a-begging.

And so--well, Henry Carroll had possessed himself of the papers and old photographs of his supposedly dead associate, and had finally gone East to impersonate Lynne, and to make claim to the fortune.

And now, as Lynne faced Red Mike, there in his own sleeping room, he could understand, too, how the desperado had been all the time on the track of Carroll, resolved that he would force some kind of a division of the wealth from the man who had once been Lynne’s partner.

But then things had taken another turn.

Carroll had fallen under the influence of a woman--Mrs. Hurd-Babbington; he had committed the crimes which were speeding him toward the death chair, and the rightful heir had been found in this man who was now sitting so calmly in his bed, facing the armed man who had intruded upon the privacy of his room in the dead of night.

That was the exact situation at the moment as nearly as it can be explained here.

There had been no difficulty in establishing the identity of the real Carleton Lynne, and in proving his right to inherit the millions of J. Cephas Lynne, and so now, at this moment, he was the master of millions--and be it said, as little affected by that mastery as if they had been counted by units instead of by hundreds of thousands.

Nevertheless, Lynne knew thoroughly well the character of the man who threatened him.

A coward to the backbone, he was none the less dangerous with the power in his possession, as it now was, to murder a defenseless man; and again, this man, without a single trait of character that made for good, understood perfectly well the character of the man in the bed; knew that he could accept that man’s word, and that if given, it would be kept.

And so, with the pistol in his hand, he demanded such a promise, on pain of death.

Put yourself in such a place for a moment, in thought, and consider what you would do under such circumstances.

Suppose yourself to be as yet barely convalescent after a long and severe illness, with all your strength sapped and gone, and with no physical ability to cope with such a person as Red Mike.

What would you do, if, being the possessor of many millions, you were awakened from your sleep under just such conditions?

The answer is obvious, of course.

You, and I, and nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of every thousand would give the required promise readily enough, and as readily break it, convinced that a promise given under such conditions cannot be a sacred one, and should therefore not be kept.

But not so Carleton Lynne.

Red Mike was well aware of the one weakness of this new master of millions, and he was smart enough to play upon it--for it is a weakness to have set up one principle on a pedestal, and to have sworn that no sort of condition would ever compel a departure from it.

Well, then, what would you do, under such circumstances, if it were morally as impossible for you to give your word and then break it, as it were physically impossible for you to throw the intruder out of the window?

There does not seem to be much left that it could be possible to do, does there?

Lynne hitched himself still higher in the bed and threw back the clothing that covered him; then, clad only in his pajamas, he swung his legs around over the side of the bed, and thrust his feet into a pair of bath slippers that were within reach.

Then he sat quite still, with his hands resting on his knees, while he bent forward just a little and peered smilingly into the face of the burly, red-headed, but nevertheless handsome, scoundrel who was now holding the automatic pistol with the muzzle of it covering his heart.

The thing that had awakened Lynne from sleep was the switching on of the electric lights when Mike entered the room, so that now, with four incandescents glowing, the room was shadowless.

“No funny business now, Lynne,” said the intruder. “You can give me that promise just as well without getting out of bed--so stay there.”

“Well, I won’t stay there, Mike, and that’s all about it,” was the cool reply. “I’ve got to think this thing over.”

“Rats! There isn’t anything to think over. All you’ve got to say is ‘yes; I’ll do it, Mike,’ and after you have said that, we’ll arrange the details, and then I’ll put my gun back in my pocket, and hit the trail. You can do that just as well where you are, as----”

“Look here, Mike, a man doesn’t give away two millions without making conditions, does he? You wouldn’t, would you?”

Red Mike permitted himself to grin.

“Well, make your conditions where you are, then. I’ll agree to ’em.”

“I won’t do it. Shoot, if you want to; but I won’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Make any verbal conditions with you. You’d agree to anything, and break your agreement the next hour. I know you.”

“Well, what do you want?”

“Before I make any promises, such as you demand, I’m going to draw up a paper which you have got to sign with your full name.”

“Oh; I have, eh? Well, maybe I won’t do that, Lynne.”

“Then you won’t get any promise out of me; that’s flat; not with twenty automatics in your hands.”

Saying this, Lynne kicked off the slippers, and made as if to return to the bedcoverings.

“Hold on there,” Mike exclaimed. “What kind of a paper do you want to write?”

“You’ll know what it is after I have written it and you have read it over.”

The reader will see by all this that notwithstanding the years that had passed since any former meeting between these two men, Lynne nevertheless knew his man perfectly well. If he had permitted himself to be bullied at all, there would have been nothing for him to do but to comply with the demands that were made upon him. But, by pretending that he was at the point of consent, and then insisting upon certain useless forms, Lynne believed that an opportunity could be found to do the thing he had determined to attempt in order to escape from the present predicament.

“Where do you want to write it? At that desk over there?”

“Probably.”

“Have you got a gun, or any sort of weapon hidden away in that desk, where you can get your hand on it?”

“No.”

“Are you going to make that promise?”

“We will discuss that after you have consented to sign the paper I shall draw,” was the calm reply. “Not before.”

“All right. Go to the desk and write it. But, mind you, Lynne, I shall watch every move you make, and if I so much as see an indication on your part of trying to get out of this scrape, I’ll turn this gun loose, and you’ll get eight bullets in your back faster’n you could count ’em.”