"Nothing like that." Morphew denied, with contempt for the suggestion. "Got too much confidence in your good sense."
"And yet you tell me you leave nothing to chance!"
"You're a great little kidder, all right." A sour smile commented on the concession. "As far as that goes, I don't expect you back here tonight."
"No?" Lanyard queried in surprise. "You meant to be a consistent gambler, then—trust me to return to New York with my loot alone?"
"Not exactly. You'll need a good car for your getaway, and a racing driver that knows all the back-roads—"
"Ah! not such a besotted gambler after all."
"I've marked a place on the map I gave you, a place just outside the grounds where you'll find a racing car waiting, when you're ready. Once you're in that, and the driver steps on the gas, nothing but an airplane stands a ghost of a show of overtaking you."
"Truly, you have thought of everything . . ."
"I'm that way."
There was a lull. Lanyard with an abstracted air folded the sheaf of papers and put them away in his pocket, then became amiably aware that both Morphew and Pagan were watching his every action with the eagerest interest.
"Eh bien, messieurs! Shall we, as you say, rejoin the ladies?"
"You"—Morphew abandoned all effort to disguise the strain upon his self-control—"you're going to go through with it?"
Lanyard's shoulders were more expressive even than the spoken retort: "What else has one to do?"
Sitting back, Morphew absently mopped his face with a napkin. "One hell of a hot night," he muttered. . . . "That's all right, then. You're such a fire-eater I didn't know but you might try to buck on me at the last minute."
"Tranquilize yourself, monsieur. My word has been passed. There is but one thing I cannot promise: I may not be able to make the clean sweep of the Vandergrift jewels that you desire."
"What's to stop you, once you get set at that safe?"
"Who knows, monsieur?" Lanyard pushed back his chair. "The element of chance enters into every human affair. Who knows whose hand will cast the dice tonight? Who knows how they will fall?"
To himself he added a cry of despair: "Mother of God! who cares?"
The earlier hours of that night aged without departure from its programme as arranged by Morphew. With entire apathy Lanyard made himself flexible to every maneuvre which that one or Pagan recommended in bogus anxiety "to armour-plate his alibi"—Pagan's phrase, meaning so to colour appearances in advance that nobody would have any excuse for believing Lanyard had not been far from the theatre of the contemplated crime at the hour of its commission. Unshaken assurance that the intrigue had a single object, his permanent removal from Morphew's path at the smallest cost in embarrassment to the latter, prevented Lanyard's lending himself to the artful but meaningless dodges they proposed with anything but the compliance of complete fatigue. It couldn't matter to him what people might think and say of him after that event to whose occurrence he was looking forward with a resignation that, alone of all its preliminary business, afforded him a certain thrill of interest; he wondered a little at the manifestation of such indifference to life in one who had always ere now loved life so well . . .
The sequelae of that mental illness which had blotted seven months out of memory no doubt had something to do with the psychic background to the strange frame of mind which now was his—impossible to surmise how much or how little, lacking as he did the true data of that eclipse, having to guide speculation only Liane's account and Morphew's, each fragmentary and replete with inherent discrepancies as well as in conflict with the other on points of first importance. And even given a faithful record of all those days and nights when the Lone Wolf had walked and the mind of Michael Lanyard had been dark, still it would need a psychoanalyst to say in what manner and to what degree the after-effects of such an experience might be influencing his mental processes of today.
Not that it mattered now, not that Lanyard really cared; for him it sufficed to have in his heart tonight this living pain of longing for a love forever forfeit through no conscious error or omission, through no volition of his own.
Eight months ago he had reconciled himself to the thought of renouncing his love that Eve might never be made to repent her response, that her faith in him might endure. But since blind fate had conspired with human malice to uproot faith, stamp it out in that kind bosom and destroy it altogether, life held for him no more promise to make it worth the living, he could look back into the very face of death and know never a tremor of dismay. As even now . . .
It was quite true, he was not afraid. He searched his heart and found it steadfast, was confident it would not fail him when his hour struck. He was willing enough to go, only stipulating that when he went he would not go alone, Morphew must go with him. Upon this he was determined, and with so passionate a fixity of purpose that he wondered how Morphew could be in his company and remain insensible to what was in his mind.
They sat together, otherwise alone, long after midnight, in a sector of the veranda as dark as the house behind it. In the entrance-hall a night-light burned, throwing its dim fan of rays down the steps to the porte-cochère. Liane and Folly had some time since gone to bed, leaving Lanyard to enjoy a "conference" with Morphew of the latter's allegation, before leaving to return to town in the car that had fetched him. The servants, too, were all presumably abed, since Morphew had faithfully acted out the farce, for the benefit of Lanyard, of telling the butler not to wait up and promising to close up the front part of the house in person.
Not long after, the landaulet had ground its tyres upon the gravel of the drive, had stopped beneath the porte-cochère long enough to permit Pagan and Morphew to speed an imaginary parting guest with farewells loud and clear, then had crunched noisily away with Pagan as its passenger, under-studying Lanyard, to be set down outside the gates ere the car proceeded to New York; while Lanyard and Morphew had settled down to await his furtive return afoot.
A lengthy period of what would have been quiet had Morphew not been, as usual, masticating an unlighted cigar, ended in a snort of complacence: "Well! guess we're all set . . ."
"Not altogether."
"What's the matter? Haven't you had chance enough to study those diagrams?"
"I know them by heart. Nevertheless, you have forgotten one essential of my equipment."
"What's that? A jimmy?"
"I seldom use one, certainly shall have no use for one tonight."
"Don't see how you expect to get into the library without something of the sort."
"O you of little faith!" Lanyard laughed softly. "That is a matter for my skill."
"Well! maybe you do know your business best. But considering you don't use tools or soup on a box, damned if I see what else it can be you miss."
"A pistol, monsieur."
Distaste for the suggestion was evidenced by a delay which prefaced the response: "Thought you didn't go in for that sort of thing."
"What sort of a thing?"
"Toting a gun on a job. Thought it was against your principles to be fixed to shed blood if you got in a jam."
"It was. It was likewise contrary to the code of the Lone Wolf to work with accomplices. You have prescribed a new technique for me altogether; you can hardly object if I consent to adopt it only upon provisions which seem to me wise. After all, it is my liberty that is involved—very possibly my life, too."
"All rot. There isn't the slightest danger to you on this job, everything like that has been looked out for."
"You feel sure, monsieur?"
"Positive."
After a pause Lanyard asked: "Tell me, monsieur: have you noticed that, since we have been sitting here, a man has stolen up behind that clump of shrubbery yonder and is keeping watch on us?"
"What's that?" The legs of Morphew's chair grated harshly on the flooring. "What man? Where?"
"You didn't see him, then, as he came skulking across the lawns?"
"No—"
"Then you are not in a position to assert the fellow is not where I have indicated?"
"No—but see here—"
"Be at ease—there is nobody." Lanyard laughed quietly. "But neither am I in a position to assert—and stake my life on it—that I will find nobody on guard in the Vandergrift library tonight. So I will have a pistol for self-protection when I go to pay my call."
"You make that a positive condition?"
"Assuredly, monsieur. And if it comes to that—why not?"
"Suppose you'll have to have it, then."
"A supposition that does great credit to monsieur's efficiency of apprehension. If, however, you are afraid to trust me with firearms, I will cheerfully consent to a postponement till you have had time to think the matter over."
"Why should I be afraid to trust you with a gat?"
"The very question I have been asking myself. Believe me, monsieur, confidence alone can beget confidence."
"You've got me all wrong," Morphew sulkily insisted. "Oh, well! if you've got to have the thing—here."
An automatic pistol changed hands. Making sure that the safety catch was set—which proved that the weapon was loaded and ready for use—Lanyard contentedly dropped it into his pocket.
His first small success to break that tedious tale of reverses . . .
"At last," he announced, "the faithful Pagan!"
"Where?" Morphew goggled blindly at the gloom that clothed the grounds. "I don't see him . . ."
"If your sight by night is no better than that," Lanyard observed, "I feel sure, for the first time, it wasn't you who played Lone Wolf while my back was turned."
Morphew swung himself sharply—and cursed himself sotto-voce for the constructive self-betrayal.
"What put that silly fool idea into your head?"
"Don't be angry, monsieur—it was not said seriously."
A shadow picked out with the white wedge of a shirt-bosom sped lightly across the gravel and up the steps. Morphew's cluck brought it fawning to his side.
"His master's voice," Lanyard chuckled.
"See here!" Pagan bristled belligerently under the lee of his patron, "d'you know you're damned impertinent?"
"Yes."
If Pagan had a retort adequate to the insolence of that monosyllable, Morphew forbade it.
"Here! that's enough. You've been a hell of a long time; what kept you?"
"You shouldn't risk leaving our good friend alone so long," Lanyard cut in. "He's too trustful, people take advantage of his confidence in human nature and over-reach him. Regard that even I have been able to wheedle a pistol out of him while you were playing chuckfarthing on the tombstones—or whatever the mischief was you've been up to."
"Is that right?" Consternation jarred the toady out of his mean rôle for an instant. "What the devil—"
"Calm yourself, my good Pagan. If your terrors were not baseless, I would be making good use of the weapon this instant—if I had waited so long—instead of sitting here and playing the deuce with your nerves."
"Cut it out, can't you?" Morphew muttered. "This is no time to be squabbling like a couple of kids. You need every minute you've got to run over your plans—"
"Quite unnecessary, monsieur; my mind is already made up."
"All the same, it's better we should leave you to think things over—"
"I shall miss you like fun."
"Besides, it's only half an hour more now; and Pete and I want to be in bed and sound asleep by the time you go into action. Anything more you want to take up with me?"
"At this moment, monsieur—nothing."
"Then we'll be going." Morphew heaved out of his chair. "Good night," he mumbled in heavy effort to sound well-disposed. "Don't let 'em put anything over on you—watch your step."
"I shall not fail to do so." Lanyard was so occupied with cigarette-case and matches that he didn't see the hand which Morphew half-heartedly offered and with ill-disguised relief withdrew. "And you, too, monsieur—dream sweetly and—but surely there must be some appropriate American expression—don't fall out of bed!"
Pagan offered slightly curdled noises of valediction. Lanyard accepted them for what they were worth and dismissed their maker with the same gesture. Like lion and jackal—like a corpulent sloth of a lion attended by an exceptionally spry and pert jackal—the two familiars went into the house.
The front doors were closed and bolted, the shine of their fan-light grew more dull, the stairs complained of a weighty and deliberate tread, windows in the second storey burned brightly for several minutes, throwing saffron beams over the edge of the veranda roof to stain the lawns, then were darkened, Lanyard imagined that he heard a creak—Morphew's bed, or some door resenting an attempt to open it by stealth—and heard nothing more from the interior of the house.
There was no real stillness where he sat, on the edge of the open night. A wind soft and warm was blowing, gravid with presentiments of rain; occasional gusts of sterner stuff wrung aeolian roars from tormented tree tops, sharpened the rattle of leaves incessantly a-shiver, and sent strange, shapeless shadows scurrying across the lawns like spirits of darkness reft from their moorings in shrubbery and undergrowth. The moon had set, the stars were few and far and faint, vast convoys of cloud cruising beneath them drenched the world with Cimmerian mirk for minutes at a time; a night made to the order of sinners and spies . . .
He knew very well he was spied upon even then, while he sat small and still, his cigarette burning itself out a dozen feet away on the drive, the phosphorescent dial of his watch in the close cup of his palm. A quarter to three—five minutes more . . . He had told Morphew the truth about the man whom he had seen steal up to stand watch over them—more accurately, over Lanyard—from the cover of a mass of shrubbery; had lied in denying the discovery; both for sheer mischievous enjoyment of Morphew's loss of countenance when he saw the whole tissue of his scheme imperiled by the mischance, as he must have reckoned it, of a botched job of surveillance.
Taking fright of what he had overheard Lanyard say, likely enough, that spy had made early occasion to seek a safer hiding place. But nothing persuaded Lanyard that he had marked down the only man assigned to the duty of seeing that he performed in faithful accord with his commitments. He counted confidently on every step of his private via dolorosa being dogged by a corporal's guard of shadows . . .
It was, however, in his mind to give them something less elusive thanhisshadow to prove their skill with . . .
At ten minutes to three he pocketed his watch, opened the large blade of the pen-knife that had thoughtfully been provided him, and inched forward in his chair, eyes to the sky. And when the next great continent of cloud had blacked out the stars for a space and passed, Lanyard's place was vacant; and he, standing on the inside of the french window through which he had in effect dissolved, without causing a sound more than the thin click of a latch prized back by the knife blade, would have risked a round wager that nobody had seen him leave his chair.
He stood in the drawing-room, with every faculty at concert pitch, for more than a minute. But nothing stirred in the entrance-hall, so far as that was disclosed by a wide arched doorway, and he heard no sound from upstairs. Another arched opening joined the drawing to the dining-room, which last was quite black; but he chose that way to his goal rather than brave the lights in the entrance-hall, passed on to the butler's pantry and there hit upon what he had been seeking—the service stairway, unlighted and, at least to the pressure of practiced feet, agreeably taciturn.
Delivered by this route into the hallway of the second storey, and guided by prior acquaintance with the location of Morphew's bedchamber, Lanyard paused outside its door to unlatch the safety device on his commandeered pistol, then with what was equivalent to a single supple movement let himself into the room.
But the pistol, trained on the bed the moment his shoulders felt the door behind them, fell immediately to his side; eyes that had faithfully guided the errant footsteps of the Lone Wolf through many a blacker night needed no light to assure them that the room was untenanted.
He reminded himself that Morphew's bedchamber was linked with Pagan's by way of an intervening dressing-room, and found the communicating doors not locked. But Pagan too, it appeared, had been perfidiously remiss in the matter of going to bed. Neither could Lanyard see anything to prove that either man had changed a garment or stopped in his room longer than the lights had burned; which had been just long enough to cover the time it ordinarily takes a man to shed his clothes and otherwise prepare for bed.
In that first dash of disappointment Lanyard was tempted to believe that Morphew's bag of tricks boasted as deep a bottom as his own. He was criminally spendthrift with his time, however, every second that he delayed there, scolding himself for his want of prevision, his idiocy in trusting the pair of them an inch out of his sight—while they were abroad, out there in the night, marshalling their forces, picketing every possible avenue of escape, leaving open to him only the way he was pledged to go—and setting their trap at its end.
He returned the way he had come, opened the door of Morphew's room, slipped out with all haste compatible with prudence—and found his retreat cut off.
In night dress and négligé Folly McFee stood between him and the head of the main staircase, which he would have to pass to regain the service stairs.
The hallway was without light other than leakage from the entrance-hall by way of the staircase well, a faint diffusion, barely enough to define the shadows, seemingly enough for Folly notwithstanding, since she betrayed neither dread of the marauder nor doubt of his identity, nor yet any astonishment to see him there who should have been twenty miles away.
In accents circumspect but crisp and even she demanded: "What are you doing there?"
With a shrug Lanyard put away his pistol. He had been wretchedly premature, he perceived, when, having bluffed Morphew into giving him that weapon, he had congratulated himself on the turn it signalized in the tide of his luck.
"Dropping in on your dear betrothed," he replied, moving nearer, "just by way of giving him a glad surprise."
She had no patience for such ill-timed levity. "What do you mean? What did you want with Morphew?"
"If you must know, I meant to invite him to take a walk with me."
"At the pistol's point!"
"Precisely."
"Well!"—a note of scorn sounded in her voice, or Lanyard was deceived—"why didn't you? Wouldn't he go?"
"I regret to report that the gentleman is not at home."
"Not—!" Acute dismay drove the woman back to the rail round the well. A hand flew to her lips as if to muffle them. "Morphew isn't in his room?"
"Neither is Pagan; I'm afraid they are up to some sort of naughtiness."
"For God's sake! don't joke." Folly flew back to him, laid hold of his arm with hands of almost savage entreaty. "Don't you see your danger? Don't youknowwhat they intend?"
"Too well. That's why I wanted Morphew's company on my walk—not the best life insurance one could wish, but better than none."
"Ah! but why"—now the woman was almost sobbing—"whydidn't you run for it while you had a chance?"
"For the best of all reasons—I hadn't the chance."
"But they left you alone down there on the veranda—"
"Half a minute." Lanyard firmly freed his arm and caught her wrists instead, applying pressure enough to command attention. "You knew that much, knew I hadn't gone off in that car—"
"Of course."
"How much more do you know?"
"There isn't time to tell you. Be content that I know everything—"
"Why he brought me here tonight?" She nodded. "What he's forced me to promise I'd do?"
"Everything, I tell you!"
"In the name of wonder! how?"
She gave no answer. The quiet of the hour took up their hurried, low-pitched murmurs as blotting-paper takes up ink. They stood without moving, close together, like lovers. He was aware of the hastened movement of her bosom, and though the glow from below was too feeble to read her face by, fancied that her eyes were louring.
"Tell me how you know . . ."
"Please! you hurt." She made him loose her wrists, yet did not move beyond his reach. "Enough that I do know," her whisper insisted. "My name may be Folly, but I'll prove to you yet I'm far from a fool."
"You claim that," Lanyard retorted, "yet you're going to marry Morphew—"
"And you believe it!" She laughed bitterly. "Now you tell me, which of us is the fool?"
"It was you who informed me. How do I know what or what not to believe? I'm like a man newly blinded, groping my way round a strange house, hoping against hope to find a friend's hand—"
"Here . . ."
Lanyard set his lips to the hand Folly flung him, and folded it between his own.
"Then tell me—"
"I can't, there's no time. You must go—go at once—save yourself before they can come back and catch you here."
"Not a step till I know."
"Oh, you will drive me mad!" Amazingly, on top of that, the slender body shook with guarded laughter. "Very well, then! I'll tell you—but on two conditions: You must promise me to go immediately after, and not to let Morphew suspect. I want to be the first to tell him, and see his face when he learns . . . I've had dictographs wired in all through the house."
"But—good God—for what purpose?"
"You'resostupid!" The rug deadened the stamp of a frivolous slipper. "Why do you think I care whether you go or stay? Why do you suppose I ever let them think they'd got round me again? Only because I wanted to help . . ."
"For my sake!"
"You're not really stupid, you know," Folly commented, and whipped her hand back into her own keeping. "You've known all along . . . Now keep your promise and go. Get as far away as you can and . . . Give me a ring in the morning, I'll tell you what has happened."
"'What has happened'!" On the point of taking her at her word, Lanyard checked in suspicion. "What can happen, if I let Morphew down?"
"You don't think that would stop him? You don't know that monster. I heard him tell Pagan, if you should fail him tonight, refuse to go through or succeed in escaping, there would be a robbery just the same, and of course you'd get all the credit."
"You were right," Lanyard affirmed. "There's no time to waste."
Too late the young woman saw her error and sought to detain him by putting herself in his path.
"What are you going to do?"
"Bid you good night."
Lanyard's hands clipped her elbows to her sides and lifted her bodily till her face was level with his own. Soundly if hastily kissed, she was set to one side, and when she recovered was alone.
A wilder spirit now ruled the night: the freshening wind blew with zest more constant, with briefer and less frequent lulls, the trees it worried fought back in bootless fury, with thrashing limbs and lows of torment, a heavier wrack coursed the skies, the blinded stars found fewer rifts through which to wash the world with their troubled and misleading light. Lanyard, traversing an unknown terrain, with nothing but impatient memories of Morphew's rough sketch-map to guide him, threw caution to the very wind whose wanton spirit shouted down his noisy flounderings, and shouldered headlong through hedges, coppices and thickets, reckless whether or not he were heard or seen and followed. His prayer, indeed, was not so much that he might give Morphew and his crew the slip, as that chance might throw him into direct personal collision with his enemy.
From that moment, when, after dinner, Morphew had first broached his mind on this foray and Lanyard had taken the tacit implication that he might refuse to play his part appointed only by dedicating himself to an early and a wasted end, he had been determined to find some means—and the fouler the fitter—of coercing Morphew into keeping him company step by step and sharing whatever fate would be his in the outcome.
From the moment when his hand had closed upon the grip of the pistol which he had talked Morphew into trusting him with, he had felt fondly confident, not that he would escape with his life, but that Morphew shouldn't.
Now to find his plan of campaign anticipated, and with a readiness and thoroughness to warrant the belief that his most secret thoughts were not safe from Morphew's acumen, infected Lanyard with a phase of madness, with an actual mania: he was a man-killer in intention as he blundered through the dark, he had fixed in mind a solitary thought, to be in time to abort the proposed burglary by taking Morphew's life. The penalty for that would be so little to pay for vindication of himself to himself—to Eve: the tale would surely find its way to her, some day, wherever she might be; some day she would learn how and why he had died, would understand . . .
He found himself finally at check on the fringe of a black spinney, peering across a hundred yards of lawn at a pale, columned façade that loomed against the confused sky with a certain stateliness of line and mass.
The dwelling seemed to be fast asleep. In the intervening open nothing human moved: only the bystanding trees tossed their arms and lamented as they looked on, like a grouped chorus morbidly curious.
If Morphew and his lot were about, they were keeping to good cover.
The Lone Wolf in his day would have rendered such discretion tribute of slavish flattery, would have picked his way toward the house from shadow to shadow, taking profit of the shelter afforded by every bush and hole between him and his objective, like an Indian stalking his kill: the Lanyard of that night struck straight away across the lawns at the top of his speed. The worst that could reward such audacity would be an attempt to overhaul or intercept him, in which event there would be gun-play, Lanyard could promise that, a fusillade sure to give the alarm: better the hazard of that than to lose precious minutes trying to avoid being seen, thereby granting the thief in the house the time he needed, if he knew his business, to consummate his purpose and escape.
For the thief was in the house already: Lanyard's first cast across the lawns at the wing that held the library—with whose location Morphew's ground plan of the dwelling had made him acquainted—had been repaid by discovery of a lancing play of light in the dark beyond the windows, the thin, broken and restless, blue-white blade of an electric torch in hands either cynically indifferent to detection, or absurdly amateurish.
He would be in time—perhaps. If so, with none to spare. He pelted madly toward the veranda, took its steps at a stride and, with calculated intent to make all the noise he could and bring the household down about his ears and that other's, battered a shoulder like a ram against the joint in the middle of the nearest window.
It gave with an ease he hadn't discounted, its wings flew open with a sounding crash; and tripping on the sill Lanyard tumbled in on all fours, while the walls bellowed with the report of a pistol, and broken glass showered about him, tinkling and clashing.
Instantly he reared up on his knees, as a man will when mortally hit, flopped to one side, out of that too exposed position in front of the window, and lay very still, his own pistol ready, his vision probing the obscurity for some sign of stir.
The electric torch defeated that effort. It had been dropped with switch set, at the instant of Lanyard's violent entrance, and now lay at some distance in from the windows, its beam steadfast to the front of an opened safe; manufacturing a wide patch of vivid colour that made the encompassing mirk more dense, too dense for penetration by merely mortal eyes. Lanyard, at least, could see nothing else; and though he distinctly heard the pile of a rug whisper to a movement of sly feet, it passed his perceptions to determine the quarter in which that rustle had its rise. It ceased of a sudden, and he heard nothing more, other than the swish and flap of the curtain bellying in from the shattered window.
The burglar hadn't left by way of any window, he was certain; therefore was still in the room, waiting like Lanyard for some incautious sign to guide his aim. But to play a waiting game with him would be intolerable, and too apt, as well, to end in precisely that which Lanyard was bent on preventing, the intrusion of some member of the household to draw the marauder's fire. The raving of the wind in the trees made it impossible to distinguish lesser sounds from beyond those four walls; but it was hardly conceivable that the rending crash with which the window had admitted Lanyard, the shot that had followed, and that loud rain of splintered glass, should have failed to alarm every inmate of the house.
Lanyard conjured up to the eye of his mind the plot of the library he had studied at Morphew's instance. According to it—as memory served—the window he had broken through was the one nearest a wall in which (close by Lanyard's head it ought to be) a double doorway opened in from the main hall of the house, with a switch for the ceiling light conveniently at hand.
Gathering himself together, Lanyard rose in a reckless bound and lunged blindly toward the door, found it where he had thought it ought to be, and began to grope for the switch.
His first fumblings were wide of their mark, but he persevered, heart in mouth, expecting every moment to see the black backwards of the room stabbed by a jet of crimson and orange flame—perhaps to be lucky enough to hear the accompanying blast But the other held his fire, no doubt shrewdly guessing what Lanyard was up to and reckoning it the part of wisdom to wait for the light to make his aim sure; the advantage would be all to him when it came, for he would know approximately where to look for Lanyard, whereas the latter had no clue whatsoever to the whereabouts of his adversary.
His fingers at length hit on the switch, a great central chandelier sprayed the room with radiance.
Lanyard occupied it alone, at least seemed to: the library was over-furnished with huge, old-fashioned pieces, any one of which might easily have been serving the safe-breaker as a temporary screen, from behind any one of which Lanyard had to look for his coup-de-grâce to come at any instant. . . . Or, he dared not be unmindful, that might come through one of the windows. Doubt of his temper could now no longer exist in Morphew's intelligence. The one slender chance Lanyard had of eluding a bullet from either the outlaw in the room or the assassins outside lay in keeping constantly on the move.
He quartered the library with swift strides, bent almost double, zig-zagging from the shelter of one article of furniture to that of the next, and finding the other man nowhere. In this manner he circled a massive table of old oak that occupied the middle of the floor and was passing the violated safe when the toe of one boot struck something that incontinently, in effect, came to life, and slithered away across the hardwood like a serpent of light.
Involuntarily Lanyard pulled up, stooped lower, and retrieved the thing: a diamond necklace of all but incalculable worth.
His breath stuck in his throat, his heart stood still, his consciousness was in an instant sponged clear of every other thought than this: he knew that necklace, knew it almost as well as he knew the palm of his hand, and knew it had no business being where he found it, three thousand miles and more from the home of its owner in the south of France.
Like a man in hypnosis measuring his actions in obedience to the will of another, without taking his eyes from the necklace Lanyard stood up, put his pistol down upon the table, and used both hands to straighten out the string of blue-white stones and held them to the light.
Veritably Eve's . . .
Unaware of any noise of warning, again like the subject of a hypnotist, he slowly turned his head, and saw Eve standing in the doorway, a vision of loveliness unflawed by any fault, supremely gracious of line and warm of colour in that austere frame, beauty stricken by sorrow posed against a tall black panel.
One hand held the door-knob, the other at her bosom clutched together folds of a gossamer robe she had thrown over her shoulders on getting out of bed. Her lips, barely parted, were silent, her unswerving look was dark with amazement and reproach.
Twenty seconds tolled by thunders wore out of Lanyard's ken: he remained, like Eve, transfixed, his eyes mirroring in some small part his mind's stark disarray . . . reading in hers sick contempt to see him standing there, caught red-handed at the Lone Wolf's base business, the man she had given all her trust and love to surprised in the act of thieving the jewels of the woman he had professed to adore . . .
And then wonderfully she moved, advanced a pace or two out of the doorway, and lifted to him hands of charity and suppliance, her countenance mild and kind for him, that voice of sweetness incomparable tenderly fluting one word of entreaty, his name:
"Michael!"
Existing then only in her love and in the love he bore her, forgetting all else in life, Lanyard came to himself in trembling, and stumbled toward her hands . . .
It was the swift change of her expression that halted him, the startled dread that afflicted her as something at his back drew her attention.
Galvanized by that hint of peril to his beloved, Lanyard whirled on a heel. But the cry of angry challenge that rose to his lips was audible only as a broken rattle, he was instantaneously stricken to futility to find himself confronted by Michael Lanyard his living apparition.
It was like a trick of delirium, a phantom parody of Lanyard materialized from behind a huge wing-chair beyond the far end of the table: his counterfeit in every particular of dress and feature, his facsimile grotesquely forged.
One look recognized the likeness and its fraudulence; that is to say, assured Lanyard that he wasn't confronting a mirror. A gleam of grim joy shone on his features. He covered in a leap half the distance between them, saw a pistol in the grasp of the impostor swing level with his head, ducked before it spat. His own weapon was out of reach, but the string of diamonds in his hand licked out from it like a whiplash of white flame, and fell squarely across the other's eyes. A second shot went wild as the man's head jerked back from the stinging impact of the stones. And then Lanyard was at his throat . . .
The sheer fury of his onslaught bore both back to the wing-chair and over its legs as it toppled and fell on its side. The pinned wrist of the hand that held the pistol was twisted with such cunning that the fingers relaxed, the weapon described a flashing arc through the air, dropped to the polished floor, and slid a dozen feet away from the combatants. Even more to the purpose, when that writhing tangle of bodies resolved itself, Lanyard was on top. But the under dog rallied with the fury of one fighting for his very life, and rained brutal blows on Lanyard's face. Indifferent to these, Lanyard dug both thumbs into the fellow's throat and slowly but savagely choked him into semi-strangulation.
He lay still at length, gagging and wheezing, tongue protruding, eyes starting from their sockets. And Lanyard released his pressure on the windpipe only to twine vindictive fingers into the hair of his victim and tug for glory and the Saints—till a wig and false forehead en bloc came away in his grasp.
After that it was the work of half a minute to snatch a handkerchief from a breast-pocket, scrub off most of that mask of grease-paint, and bring to light glimpses of the ruined beauty of the dancing yegg.
Eve's shadow fell athwart the two, and Lanyard, for all the labouring of his lungs, had an irrepressible chuckle as he looked up into her bewildered face.
"Permit me to introduce the Lone Wolf's last incarnation!" he cried, and jumped up, brandishing the scalp he had taken—"known to the police and social circles of the cabarets as Henry Mallison—Mally for short!"
No responsive elation lightened the dark regard that shifted from Lanyard's face to Mallison's and back again, only a smile pitiful and chiding dawned. "So this," Eve slowly said, and slowly shook her head at the man who loved her, "is why you ran away!"
That look he could no more interpret than he could the riddle of her words; both he requited with a muddled stare. "I?" he blankly wondered—"ran away—?"
She nodded once. "But you didn't know, I'm sure, what you were doing then; it's natural you should not remember. You are yourself tonight—you were not, then."
"Yes," he cried—"thank God! tonight I am myself . . ."
One of her hands went out to this, he caught it between his own, was drawn by it to her bosom. Common impulse moved them aside and away from the man they had forgotten, the man who lay sobbing and fighting for breath on the floor beyond the desk.
"So you come back to me!" It was as if in the gaze that plunged into her eyes his very soul passed out from him to lose itself, and all awareness of the world without themselves as well, in that treasury of love illimitable and incalculable which those eyes disclosed. "So, as I knew you would, you come back to me at last, your honour cleansed! Michael," the woman breathed, yearning to him—"my Michael!"
"What are you telling me?Iran away from you—!"
"Three months after you were injured in that motor accident, while your memory still was uncertain, when often you couldn't recall one day's events on the next . . . without a word of explanation or farewell, one day you left me, disappeared . . ."
"Leftyou!"
"I knew, of course, why . . . It was when the papers were revelling in the sensational 'return'—as they called it—of the Lone Wolf. I had tried to keep it from you, fearing the consequences of the excitement, in your condition; but the hue and cry was out for you, I was at my wits' ends to hide you away from the police, it was necessary to tell you why . . . What I had so feared happened: you brooded incessantly, whenever your mental condition made you forget the affair for a time—as when you'd wake up from a sound night's sleep remembering nothing of the previous day—something was sure to happen to remind you. A hundred times you begged me to let you go, that you might find and expose the scoundrel who was masquerading in your reputation; I knew you were incompetent for that, at the time, and always managed somehow to talk you out of it, until—as I say—abruptly, without word or sign, you left me."
"Leftyou!"
"Ah! but you don't know." Her smile grew gently arch, fondly teasing. "Don't you, my Michael! even remember—"
She gave a startled movement, averting her attention to the windows, her body became tense in his embrace, her hands convulsively tightened upon his shoulders.
The veranda was booming with a sudden, concerted rush of many feet. Lanyard offered to release the woman, but she clung to him as if in terror; and at the last he had to use his strength, because he foresaw what was to befall, forcibly breaking her hold and throwing her from him lest she share a peril that, he was resolved, must at any cost be his alone.
Crying out, not loudly but in protest and solicitude for him, she staggered back; and Lanyard turned toward the desk to retrieve his pistol—too late. Already a man was shouldering in through the broken window. He brought up standing with an automatic trained on Lanyard.
"Stick 'em up, my man!" he rumbled—"and be quick about it."
Lanyard was quick about it. His own weapon lay on the far edge of the desk, at least eight feet away; before he could have covered half that distance a bullet would have stopped him. Hands level with his ears, he swung slowly to face Morphew.
Gross, ungainly, panting, rocking from one to the other of his heavily planted feet, the Sultan of Loot stood with head slightly lowered and thrust forward, face of a pig hideously twisted by a leer of malice successful and exultant.
Behind him the window filled with followers, through it half a dozen defiled into the room; three who were immediately identified as individuals of Morphew's bodyguard who had helped manhandle Lanyard in the Morphew town-house the night before; after these, the inevitable Pagan, strutting, smirking; finally, two that were new figures in Lanyard's sight—one an able-bodied young Irishman in police uniform but lacking that elusive poise which somehow distinguishes members of the New York police force, the other a simple citizen proudly parading a nickel-plated badge on the bosom of his waistcoat.
"And keep 'em up, Lanyard!" Morphew was admonishing in an uglier note of malice. "Don't take any chances with me this time—if I have to shoot, I'll shoot to kill. You're caught at last, caught with the goods on!"
"'Caught'?" Eve de Montalais challenged. She stepped forward, coming between Morphew and his chosen prey. "What are you saying? Caught doing what?"
A mottled fat paw impatiently waved her out of the way; Morphew's dourest scowl covered her. "Stand aside, madam!" he growled. "Don't make me take a chance of hitting you; that man's a desperate criminal, if you don't know it; the first move he makes, I'll fire—"
"But I do not know he is a desperate criminal," Eve sharply contradicted. "As for you, whoever you may be, I think you must be mad . . ."
"I guess you are," Morphew brusquely retorted. Yet his slotted eyes winced from hers. "Caught him yourself—didn't you?—just now, robbing your safe—"
"And if I did?" the woman surprisingly quibbled. "What concern is that of yours? Have I invited your interference? Have I asked your help in the management of my own affairs?"
"Maybe you haven't," Morphew sullenly contended—"but you're getting it whether you want it or not—"
"With what authority, pray?"
"My authority, madam!" the man retorted in open rage—"the authority of an honest, law-abiding citizen. I've been after that yegg there for months. Now I've got him, by God! he don't escape with his life." He jerked a peremptory head at the policeman and the man who sported the nickel-plated badge. "Take your prisoner, Mr. Sheriff—"
"One moment!" Eve interposed a ringing demand that halted these two before they had fairly got in motion to obey Morphew's behest. "I am the householder here, if you please—you'll arrest nobody on these premises without my sanction or a proper warrant. This gentleman has done nothing to deserve arrest—"
"Nothing?" Morphew jeered. "You call burglary nothing?"
"He has committed no burglary—"
"Didn't break into this room and bust open that safe, I suppose?"
"To the contrary," Eve asseverated, "Mr. Lanyard is here in his own right; more than that, he has prevented a burglary—"
"A likely story!" Morphew commented with a snort of grim derision. "If he didn't do it, I want to know who did!"
"But allow me to answer this honest and law-abiding citizen, madame," Lanyard lightly put in. And wittingly at risk of his life he lowered one hand to touch the woman's shoulder as he moved to one side, that she might no longer persist in shielding him with her own body. "Permit me to relieve the confusion of mind which distresses the amiable Monsieur Morphew—"
"You keep your trap shut!"
"Softly, my good Morphew! I am about to do you a service—appreciating as I do how worried you have been, and how pained, by the ungrateful behavior of your tool and accomplice, Mal—"
"Shut your mouth, d'you hear?" Morphew bellowed, swaying his huge head upon his shoulders like an infuriated animal about to charge. "Take your prisoner, Mr. Sheriff! If this woman won't charge him with the burglary he's committed here tonight,Icharge him with breaking into my house in New York last night—"
The bellow ran out in a gasp that was followed by a choking noise. A long arm had shot out over Morphew's shoulder from behind, and the bony but powerful hand at the end of it had closed upon his wrist, jerking the muzzle of the pistol toward the ceiling. As he swung round with an incoherent roar another hand, the mate to the first, deftly seized the weapon and twisted it from his grasp. He stared, in apoplectic speechlessness, into the countenance composed yet sardonic of Crane.
Unobserved by anybody other than Eve and Lanyard, the detective had quietly stepped in through the open window, closely followed by an associate, a mild-mannered body hall-marked police detective by the derby hat of tradition.
"Y'oughtn't to get gay like that with loaded firearms," Crane counselled in gently pained reproach—"y'ought to know better, a man your age!" His mouth hardened and he clamped fingers like the jaws of a vice on Morphew's shoulder, nipping truculent bluster in the bud. "Crane's my name, if you want to know, but bull's my nature, Mister Morphew; and remember this"—eyes that had the glint of steel between narrowed lids cowed Morphew's—"I don't ask no better luck than for you to give me a good excuse to get even with you for all the trouble you've been putting me to, first and last. Keep a civil tongue on your head if you value your health!"
Morphew cast glances mutely eloquent of tormented appeal to his henchmen; but they were one and all inattentive, to a man preoccupied with the attitude of Crane's associate. And yet it had all the seeming of the most inoffensive attitude imaginable. The mild-mannered man was doing nothing whatever more than mildly keeping mild eyes on them and his hands in his overcoat pockets. It is true that both the said pockets boasted singular bulges, as if two forefingers of derision were being pointed under their cover . . .
"But what the—who the—what the hell right 've you—?" Morphew stammered.
"Well!" Crane chuckled, "I don't know. Kind of thought I'd drop in and see how your little frame-up was working. Got the hottest kind of a tip half an hour ago . . . Give you three guesses where it came from." One of his eyebrows climbed his forehead on a slant, giving his face a diabolically whimsical cast; his thin-lipped mouth widened in an unkind smile. "Never mind guessing, Morphy, spare the old intellect the strain. Here she comes now . . ."
A vision of elfin fantasy, with a fur-trimmed opera-wrap of crimson and gold brocade negligently draped over her déshabillé, who quite frankly hadn't stopped to dress, Folly McFee airily sauntered in from the veranda and paused and posed, reviewing the tableau with glances of mischievous amusement.
"Why, Morphy!" in affected solicitude she cried—"whatever has happened? You look fussed to a perfect frazzle . . ."
"Best little side-kick any guy ever worked with," Crane quite seriously affirmed. "Take it from me, Morph old boy, I'll look a long ways before I find another little lady like that, who won't even stick at letting her name be linked with the name of a mongrel like you, just to get the low-down on your naughty little ways and shoot the information along to yours truly."
A shove, seemingly playful and effortless, nevertheless shook the balance of that hulking body; Morphew staggered back a step or two, regained physical equilibrium with some effort, and braced himself like a badgered brute in a bull-pen, feet wide apart, head swaying low upon hunched and rocking shoulders. Rage and chagrin lent wattled cheeks the complexion of flesh sorely bruised, his lower lip was pendulous, his hooded light eyes, their whites newly shot with congested blood, were wickedly agleam.
Lanyard, watchful, ready for anything now that Crane had deprived Morphew of his pistol, told himself he had never seen a man more nearly out of his mind with fury, had never encountered at close quarters an animal more dangerous.
"But will you kindly look who's here!" Crane's happy drawl was hailing—"as I live, old Hank Mallison, the spring-heeled yegg, none other!"
Only his mild-mannered colleague had no attention to spare for the spectacle of Mallison, like a spectre in a pantomime, slowly and laboriously, with the help of hands that clutched the desk, hoisting himself into view.
"Folks!" Crane solemnly declared—"I'm an officer of the law and everything, but this is one big night. It ain't every night a poor dumb dick like me is privileged to gaze upon the only authentic pirated copy of the Lone Wolf. So if I can only wheedle our friend here, the King of the Bootleggers, into selling me a bottle of his best bootliquor, the drinks are on me, all round!"
On his feet at length, Mallison rested, trembling visibly, still stupid with the effects of the thrashing he had suffered at Lanyard's hands. In a face that retained recognizable traces of his make-up as the Lone Wolf, his eyes had something of the bewildered look of a beaten dog's—but for the merest instant only; terror replaced it in a twinkling when his puzzled, questing glances discovered the presence of Morphew.
There was an instant then that was gravid with presentiments of tragedy, in which no one spoke, no one stirred from his place, no one moved in any way but Morphew—for Mallison seemed frozen to immobility by sheer fear.
Morphew was crouching lower, gathering himself together. The hands that had been hanging limp lifted and tensed into the likeness of great livid claws that itched for Mallison's throat. Morphew's lips had rolled back from his teeth, from deep in his throat a dull, brutish growl was rising. Of a sudden it waxed to an inhuman howl, and simultaneously that ponderous bulk of flesh launched itself like a thunderbolt incarnate across the room . . .
In its third stride it was stopped and thrown back as if it had dashed itself against an invisible barrier. Mallison had found Lanyard's pistol and fired. He fired again as Morphew was falling. But his third shot ploughed the ceiling. Lanyard had gone into action while the first report was still a noise of deafening reverberations in the room; resting his hands upon the top of the desk, he vaulted it, his feet striking Mallison's chest. The man went down with Lanyard on top of him . . .
"Simple enough," Crane opined, "like all these funny little games crooks frame up, once you locate the chink that gives you a look in at the machinery."
He stood in the main doorway. Behind him the wind-swept sky was dull grey with the dusk of a new day. On the drive, at the foot of the veranda steps, a motor-car was waiting, Pagan and Mallison on the back seat with the mild-mannered man, the left wrist of the latter hand-cuffed to the right of the dancing yegg. Another car that could be seen in the distance, turning out of the grounds to the highroad, was carrying away Morphew's henchmen under guard, in the wake of an ambulance from the nearest hospital that had arrived just in time to receive the lifeless body of the Sultan of Loot.
"If crooks could think straight, they might make good, once in every so often; but they can't, that's why we call 'em crooks; and that's why everything they cook up and make such a mystery of is so blamed silly and childish when you come to take it to pieces. Here's Morphew, the biggest frog in his pond, going off his nut with jealousy because the little McFee lady liked Lanyard a whole lot better'n him, and getting Mallison to play Lone Wolf and pull off a couple of jobs so's Mrs. McFee would see what a sap she'd been, falling for a so-called reformed crook. And here's Mallison getting chesty because he's doing the Lone Wolf act to the Queen's taste, and giving Morphew the double-cross—which was plain suicidal mania, if you ask me—and trying to go on with the game on his own. And then there's the Delorme woman, kidnapping Lanyard while he wasn't mentally responsible, with the notion, as near's a body can figure it, she could make him believe he belonged to her and had gone wrong again, so the only thing for them to do was to team up and collect a handsome living from the world at large . . ."
He smiled a vaguely pitying smile at nothing in particular. "These things wouldn't ever happen," he concluded, "if all crooks weren't crazy. . . . Well! time I was on my way." He bent with unexpected courtliness over Eve's hand, and shook Lanyard's. "The top of the morning to you, madam. So long, Lanyard—we won't say good bye—and the best of luck!"
The tyres crunched loudly on the cracked stone of the driveway, the high wind raved about the house and soughed through the tossing limbs of trees; but between Eve and Lanyard there was silence, on her part the stillness of tranquil expectancy, on his the dumbness of constraint.
"So it comes true," he said with a bleak smile, mustering up heart to meet her eyes at last—"what I foretold in the beginning. Say good bye to me, Eve, and let me go."
The hand he offered to take did not move to meet his. "Where will you go?" she quietly enquired.
"Back to England," he said in a sigh—"I suppose—as soon as I can get in touch with the Secret Service and request my recall. That is, if they'll have me again, after their faith in me has been sapped by this Mallison business. It's a question of what and how much they choose to believe."
"That will take a few days at least," she gravely considered. "I shall have plenty of time to wind up my small affairs in this country—I shall be ready, Michael, whenever you wish to go."
He hung his head and shook it wearily. "It is impossible," he said. "Surely you must know now mine isn't a life I can ask the woman I love to share."
"But you love me?"
"You know it."
"And you would leave me?"
"I must."
"Then," she made believe to sigh—"if you insist on having it that way—I can only presume you wish me to divorce you on the grounds of desertion."
"Divorce me!"
She went straightway to his bosom, clung to it in tears and laughter. "Will you ever forgive me—I wonder!—for taking advantage of your helplessness? As soon as possible after that accident, as soon as you were able to talk—we were married!"
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