Persons Unknown Part 56

"You'll go to the Governor, yourself, to-morrow? To-morrow!"

"Please G.o.d! Ah, Herrick, you make one more! Hear anything, Sheriff?" he called into the hall.

Kane had turned to close the shutters at his back but Christina, blind with triumph, continued to Herrick: "He saw my shadow at Riley's. I told him all that I suspected and he believed me. He spoke to the Governor.

They promised me if I could give Mr. Kane that man and the headquarters of the others I should have Will's life in exchange. I knew from Nancy's holding that letter and it's being addressed in Allegra's hand that it must be the story which caused his feeling against Ingham--that Nancy, as well as I, must have hoped it might even set him free. Mr. Kane got me a doctor and as soon as I had my voice he sent me to a little hotel up the river here, kept by Ten Euyck's old servants whom he would know must recognize him, and there I sent for him. He was afraid to come there, of course, into my disreputable company. But he was fine and eager to meet me somewhere. We hoped he would name that stronghold of Allegra's where he would feel safe and when he named this house our hopes leaped.--Oh, I'm so tired!" cried Christina, sitting down on the floor like a worn-out child and snuggling her head forward in her lap.

"Are those doors fast?" called Kane from his second window. "That shutter's loose! What's that balcony? This room won't stand a siege!

You, Herrick, the sheriff and I and five men--can we hold this house?"

Sheriff Buckley had just limped in with his bruised, cut face further discolored by the blood from a scalp-wound which he was binding with a handkerchief. Herrick had already noticed that Kane's arm was tied tight, just above the elbow, with a gaily flaunting necktie and around this necktie the torn sleeve was soaked and stained.--"Against how many?" he replied.

It was not till then that, lifting a face of weary dismay, "Are we still fighting?" Christina almost sobbingly demanded.

"Now, don't frighten the lady!" The sheriff turned to Kane. "We just got into a mix-up at the gate with the whole Dago gang. They'll never come up here after us."

All three men, none the less, were busy latching shutters, locking, barricading. They were not interrupted and no alarm but their own seemed in the air. As they worked Kane said, "There's something up we don't understand. This is something more than any bunch of Pascoes. We expected a fight. We had over a dozen men. We were attacked by a hundred. They had made an obstacle race for the motors. One they put out for good. But the sheriff got this one through."

"We've left 'em a mile behind!" said the sheriff. "Before they can get here the river police'll have taken the yacht. They'll be up here before long. We're safe here awhile, all to ourselves, and they can't get within a hundred feet of the house without being picked off by our boys upstairs!"

As he spoke the pane above Herrick's head, where he struggled with the loose shutter, cracked into flying splinters. A small hard object had hurtled into the room and thumped at Kane's feet. A bewilderment ludicrous as hysteria came over Herrick. For the object that carried a bit of paper rolled in its mouth was a little golden pistol--which though sufficiently valued to carry on its handle a monogram of three capital A's, picked out in jewels, was yet no pistol at all. It was a dummy made all in one piece!

"So!" said the District-Attorney. "Now we know!"

"What?"

"I asked you, Herrick, if we could hold this house. And you asked me against how many. I can't tell you against how many but I can now tell you against what. Against an army of which you have read, not so long since, a considerable deal in the papers. Against the Camorra."

"Here!"

"After us?"

"The Italian Camorra!"

"In America!"

"Yes," Kane insisted, "and under those trees."

"In costume!" cried Christina, with rising spirits and flitting to the window.

"A skeleton pistol is its badge. The owner of this trinket is a member.

Please, Miss Hope, translate us this paper."

She read aloud, "Alieni the infamous and all his house die here to-night the death of traitors."

"Well, the information's dear, but we're getting plenty of it! There's an advance guard, evidently, set hereabouts!--Alieni! And capital A's!

It's their traitor's badge they've stolen to threaten him. If we only knew who Alieni is? And where he is! And what they think he has to do with us!"

Herrick told them where he had seen the pistol before. To no one did this, at that time, bring any light. Kane's mind was busy with the fortunes of the police-boat. "The Camorra easily swarms thick enough to overpower that!" He paused, surveying their fortress. If they had needed anything to tell them they were doomed they might have found it in the colloquial, dry calm of Kane's voice as he said, "We should, perhaps, have sent Miss Hope upstairs."

"Oh, I beseech you--anything but a trap. Let me stay where I can run!"

"The more as they may try to smoke us out!"

Silence grew up in their midst.

The great front doors were barred and chained; through the house five men were on watch; the door into the hall was barricaded with the gilt piano, whence still the Cupids smiled, stacked above and below with the little table and the chairs; down the room's long front the five great windows, three more crossing at the farther end, were dark with the latched shutters of which the second on the front was the suspected. So frail were the defenses! So short a time from the first blow must the slats give and the gla.s.s crash in!

"I think you'd best take the end, Mr. Kane; me and Mr. Herrick the front windows--Lord, who's this?"

The black figure with gleaming s.h.i.+rt-front was seated in a little gilt chair in the wall's darkest angle; with outstretched legs and tilted head it confronted them from very gla.s.sy eyes. But it was only the dead body of Ten Euyck, who must have reared up thus with his last breath and joined their council.

"Well," cried the sheriff, gaily, "you make another--if they think so!"

Seizing the chair he trundled it across the room; on the floor he found Ten Euyck's gun and propped it into the pa.s.sive fingers. "There! If this blind falls down, you'll be better 'n the piano--they'll waste a lot of attention on you! Now, if they only make noise enough, down by the river--Oh, you mustn't let him make you whimper, miss!"

Herrick was mainly aware of a terrible impatience. The surprise and confusion of their peril made its expectation a raging fever, as if only a horrible scarecrow in a mirror waited to be smashed. Despite the whole week's frenzied pulse, despite the happenings of the last four hours, Herrick could not believe in what lay before and all about them. These were men he knew, with whom he had put through other adventures; the girl beside him had never seemed so much a girl as in this failure of her hardihood--he saw her for the first time with loosened hair that touched her face with a childish softness, made for cheris.h.i.+ng--it tightened something in his heart as though to crack it, but it was absurd to suppose that in half an hour, in ten or twenty minutes, they would be there on the floor, unconscious of each other, ended, wiped out! Christina lifted her arms in a gesture instinctive with all womankind and gathering up this tumble of hair her dear, quick fingers twined and thrust till it was heaped into its place--why, of course not!

This strange night camp amid broken furniture, the spreading pool of oil, the jewels lying mixed with the supper's wreckage, Christina silent again and holding his hand tight, the two wounded, haggard men, all these his mind admitted, all these were conceivable. But what was soon to come was not conceivable! Yet--hark! Was that--No, only some creak of the old house! What sound would be the last before the deluge? How long must they wait? Already the air seemed thick and hard to breathe, the twilight of the room hung on them like a solid weight and the one candle Christina had lighted made scarce a twinkle of sane, human comfort in the vast yellowish gloom.--

"If you please, miss, put out that light!"

"Oh!"

"We can't afford to advertise!"

The light was gone.

In the pitch-black airlessness Herrick could feel Christina kneeling against him, quiet but for the broken breathing that told him she was still afraid of the dark. As he put his left arm round her shoulders she pressed her cold cheek to his hand.

"It's funny, isn't it? We never even had time to get an engagement-ring!--Here they come!"

A sound as of excited animals plunged through the groves about the house; with tramplings and scufflings a great herd seemed to surge out upon the vacant drive. As it confronted the empty automobile, the tranquil terraces and the blank front of the locked house it paused, uncertainly; then a high, prolonged whistle sounded, shorter whistles responded from every stretch and nook of woodland and there fell again, to the stupefaction of those within, a perfect silence.

This continued unbroken, baffling, interminable, inscrutable, and solid as the walls of a cell. Christina in her endeavor for control gave a slight, nervous cough, no more than a rough catch of the breath, such as Herrick had heard her give many a time when their taxi skimmed too close to a trolley in the safe, crowded, far-off streets. And with this familiar little sound apprehension awoke in him, full-armed. The merciful veil was torn from his imagination, his soul gaped to the knowledge of death and of direr things that precede death. On the instant all he had ever known of struggle changed; chivalry, civilization, restraint, vanished like things that never were; if, at that moment, the bodies of a hundred other women as sweet, as defenseless, as tender as his love's had stood in her way he could have set his heel upon them all to save her. Then, close at hand, as if from somewhere within the wall, came the imperative, prolonged tingle of a telephone!

They turned, dumbfounded, shaken with incredulous, mad hope. But whence came it? Where was it? Christina stirred and slid to her feet; her dress went whispering across the room; the men, not daring to leave their posts, knew she must be feeling along the rear wall and still through the darkness the telephone rang. Then she gave a low cry--a narrow door in the gla.s.s paneling had slipped sideways so that she stretched her hands into a kind of pantry; the instrument's shrill call was now directly in her ears--"It's Nicola!"

The three questioning whispers sprang at her at once.

"He wants to speak to Mr. Ten Euyck."

Blankness answered. The ringing became more impatient.

"Take the message."

But no message was to be had. Nicola's party was at the boathouse, in great trouble, in danger--never mind what! He wanted to speak to Mr. Ten Euyck. "He says, 'Get him to pa.s.s me his word to shelter us or what will you give--what will you give for news of Nancy Cornish?'"

"Tell him I, Kane, 'll buy his news."

Christina dropped back against the wall. "When he has spoken to Mr. Ten Euyck."