The Gray Mask by Charles Wadsworth Camp (children's ebooks online .txt) 📕

Suddenly Nora screamed. She flung herself upon him tigerishly.

"Jim!" she whispered. "Now!"

The contact swept him with a bitter, distorted content. He had to force himself to grasp her shoulders, and to bend them back. Her hand rose. Scarcely understanding her intention, he saw her strike herself sharply across the face. An ugly, reddish mark survived. There was a suggestion of tears in her voice.

"You coward, Jim!"

The curtains were wider, but always, as he forced her back, he combatted the desire to draw her closer instead, to heal with his lips the scar with which his precipitancy had marked her.

She cried out again. He glanced at the curtains. He let her go, staring with a sense of loathing at a yellow, wrinkled face, which protruded from the purple, and permitted him to see, glistening above it, a braid of hair, serpent-like and perilous.

The leering face was withdrawn. Garth heard a low whistle modulated on an unfamiliar, minor interval.

"Don't resist them, Jim," Nora whispered. "I'll do what I can."

Then she turned and ran, screaming, through the curtains.

Garth dashed for the hidden door which led to the front of the house. If only he could break through there, reach a window, and signal the inspector, but when he tore the curtains back he faced panels of an exceptional stoutness, unquestionably built to deaden sound as well as to form a competent barricade. He surrendered to the realization that he was caught in the heart of this evil house. He wondered if Nora's strategy retarded his captors.

A stealthy shuffling turned him from the door so that he faced the hall. He had heard that same sound last night when the diminutive Chinaman had approached him. Now he saw three of the same mold whose queues appeared to writhe in the brown and stifling light as they glided along the hall, their talon-like hands outstretched.

He guessed that the picture was intended to terrify, to impress upon him the futility of resistance, yet while he had his revolver the success of such an attack was remote.

"Stay where you are," he said, puzzled, trying to understand. "Come any closer and I'll shoot."

The yellow mouths grinned. Then, when it was too late, Garth understood the trick. A rush of colder air on his back informed him that the heavy door was open. He stood between two fires. In fact, before he could turn, his wrists were grasped. Two leering faces were close to him, but as the revolver was wrenched from his hand, he pulled the trigger twice. With the great door open those explosions might penetrate beyond the house wall, might carry even to the inspector's men on the sidewalk.

They had at least aroused in the thick brown twilight of the house a restless, incoherent stirring. Voices muttered. Steps pattered here and there. A muffled bell commenced to complain. Through the curtains from the inner room stepped a man—a white man with cruelly intelligent features. Garth realized that he probably faced the head of this organization which for so long had outwitted the police.

Garth laughed with an effort at bravado.

"That was a signal," he said. "Block's surrounded. They'll be in here before you can light a joss stick. Call these things off, or you're as good as in the chair."

Upstairs the stirrings increased. Someone shrieked.

Nora appeared at the man's elbow. Her face was twisted with an abandoned terror.

"Men in the yard!" she gasped.

Garth guessed that it was a part of her scheme to turn the hunt from him, to give him that one moment he needed. And it worked. He felt his hands released. The Chinamen crouched along the wall, as if trying to conceal themselves, whining pitifully.

Garth jumped through the front hall. The vestibule door was locked and the key was missing. There was no time to conquer locks. His opportunity was limited. So he ran into the front room. The window catch baffled him. He didn't dare wait to fumble with it. He raised his fists and crashed them through the glass. His hands, scratched and bleeding a little, waved a frantic appeal. He shouted. And he heard answering voices and the pounding of feet. He saw figures glide into view and spring up the steps. The battering of shoulders filled the house with a turmoil that drowned its own increasing agitation.

He went back to the inner hall.

"Nora!" he called.

He pushed through the curtains into a room fantastic with Oriental furnishings. Black, in a panic, had Nora in his grasp. The girl struggled mutely.

"Drop her, Black!"

Black turned.

"That ends our bargain," Garth said harshly.

"She tried to stop me," Black quavered.

"He's the brother-in-law," Garth said scornfully, "of the very man who's been trying in his useless way to smash this gang. What do you think of that?"

Nora came forward. She was shocked, but it was clear she failed to share his scorn. As the front door yielded she put her hand on his arm.

"Have you ever seen his wife, Jim?" she asked simply.

He nodded.

"So have I," she went on. "She's the one I'm thinking of. She's too young, too happy, to have her whole life stained by this thing."

But Garth's anger persisted. Black, however, in response to Nora's nod, slipped behind the window curtains. The inspector, Manford, and a number of detectives rushed in.

"Get your men through the house," Nora advised.

The inspector motioned the men to go. He lumbered over to Nora. He put his arms around her. An excessive gratitude moistened his eyes and thickened his voice.

"Thank the Lord!"

"Thank Jim," she said, "although he risked everything by appearing here."

"If you'd told us more of your plans," Garth said, "we would have worked better together."

"I didn't dare," she answered. "I knew so little myself. So much depended on success."

Manford's fragile fingers pulled at his moustache. The humor in his eyes did not quite veil a real admiration.

"Well!" he said gaily. "Let me congratulate you, inspector. The police have put something worth while over—through a woman."

Garth, whose eagerness had carried him closer to the girl, noticed for the first time on her neck a bruise left by Black's urgent fingers. A sudden, unreasoning temper swept him with the necessity for atonement. Impulsively he burst out:

"Inspector, one of the beasts you want is behind those curtains." Nora cried out.

"Jim! You might have let me have that. His wife!"

The inspector glanced from one to the other.

"What's on your mind, Nora?"

Manford laughed easily.

"No sentiment in this game, young woman. If we thought of the wives there'd be few arrests."

With an air of satisfaction, as if the climactic feature of the raid had been reserved for his importance, he snatched the curtains open. Black cowered in the embrasure of the boarded window, glaring out at his brother-in-law. He moistened his lips.

"Don't let them tell Anna, Billy."

Manford's satisfaction, founded on a self-imposed superiority, suddenly expired. He became rather pitifully human. His cheeks darkened. His insinuating antagonism for the inspector dwindled and faltered, finally, into a passionate mendicancy. He would meet any terms to spare his sister's entanglement in the destroying scandal.

"I'm afraid you might think the police didn't do its duty," the inspector said softly. "I just heard your own motto—no sentiment for the wives."

Garth had not shifted his glance from Nora. Her disapproval more and more impressed him, yet, with the bruise still eloquent on her white neck, he forced himself only with distaste to bargain.

"He's my prisoner, Manford. If the inspector says the word we'll tamper with the law and get him away and home. There's one condition. He does as I say for the next couple of years—takes any treatment I suggest."

"Don't worry. I'll see to that," Manford said. "It's good of you, Garth."

He turned to his brother-in-law.

"Are you willing, John?"

Black stumbled from the embrasure. He reached out his hands appealingly.

"Yes, yes. I want to—with all my heart."

"Then, inspector—" Manford began.

The inspector winked good-humouredly.

"Since we're all such old friends I agree. I've never had a come-back yet from reading a little humanity and mercy into the law. You've a good deal to learn about police work, young man. Let's start your education now. We'll see what the boys have bagged."

When the crowded police van had left, Nora, Garth, and the inspector stepped into the crisp night air.

"Garth," the inspector said, "you and Nora ought to have medals or something. That pale-face at the head of the gang is Jerry Smith. He must have been sent on from San Francisco. If there's a country-wide syndicate of crime he's on the board of directors along with your old friend Slim."

"Some day," Garth said, "that syndicate will be tapped properly."

Nora, after her experience in the heavy, repellent atmosphere of the house, was anxious to remain in the air. She proposed that they walk down town.

Garth, aware of her displeasure, scarcely dared suggest an answer to his curiosity, but the inspector, in a happier mood, did not hesitate.

"Maybe, Nora, you'll tell us how you got in that dive as a first class housemaid."

"There was only one way I could think of," she answered. "The place was bound to make cases for Bellevue, so I went to the head nurse and took her into my confidence. She kept me posted. At every chance I went there and was apparently ill myself of the same dreadful illness as the patient in the next cot. About two weeks ago the head nurse telephoned me a case had come in which looked promising. I've been there since. I'll confess, the best I hoped for was the number of the house, but this girl grew confidential finally. She had actually worked there. When she found she couldn't go back for a long time, and learned that I was about to be discharged as cured, she whispered a telephone number and a name. She said they would want somebody and it was hard to get just the right kind. I called up last night and told them about her and my anxiety for the place. A meeting was arranged with Smith in a café. He wouldn't give me the address, but he agreed to take me there this afternoon. You see he wouldn't have let me out again until he was sure of me—no afternoons off there."

"Clever, Nora," the inspector muttered.

She shook her head.

"Only choosing the best chance. I knew I couldn't trace them in any obvious fashion. They were too careful. Few customers had the run of the place. The stuff was taken to the rest. The way they had Black followed last night to make sure he left no trail shows how they accounted for everything. He had evidently been seen answering to that generous symptom of his before."

Garth noticed that she did not speak to him directly, but her resentment could not completely veil her relief at his safety, her appreciation of the courage that had urged him to her rescue, her gratitude that his daring had brought about the end she had so ardently desired. He hoped, moreover, that there was, about her quiet manner, something to be followed to that necessary but impulsive moment in the brown radiance of the evil house.

Yet that illusion she did not permit him to hold for long. He left the inspector and her at the flat with an uncomfortable feeling of having failed to measure up to the idea of him she had developed. She did not mention Black again, but her restraint persisted. Sooner or later, he tried to tell himself, something would destroy that—probably another case that would throw them together, that would make them depend one upon the other.

At headquarters one day the doorman told him that the inspector had been taken ill. The detective satisfied himself that nothing serious was to be feared, so he smiled, thinking the situation might offer something useful for himself.

It was really the trivial fact of the inspector's cold that involved Nora and Garth in the troubles of Addington Alsop. Those gathered into one of the most daring and