Stamped in Gold/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI.
THE ESCAPE.
FRANK ALWIN in his cellar prison must have slept, and woke with his headache gone, feeling ravenously hungry. He was sore from head to foot when he got up, and he felt a little dizzy, but he was infinitely stronger and better than when he had lain down the night before. Evidently the men had returned while he was asleep, for on the table was a large box of crackers, a slab of cheese, and a cold bottle. He had seldom enjoyed a meal more.
The boast of the bath was wholly justified. There was a cabinet full of linen and towels, and a cold bath was just the kind of tonic he wanted. Though he had apparently been searched, his watch had not been taken away; it was going, and it pointed to twelve o'clock. It might have been midnight, for no ray of daylight entered this subterranean room. The one electric globe which the men had left on still burned steadily.
He spent the rest of the day in exploring his prison, and made a few interesting discoveries. A small opening from the bathroom led to a tiny, square apartment, which at first appeared to have no special function, nor to possess any kind of door. This last impression was erroneous. It was indeed furnished with a sliding door which was now run back.
The “room” was four feet square and unlighted. It puzzled him as to why the door should have been open until he discovered that what he thought was a storeroom in reality served as a big ventilating shaft. A current of fresh air came from above, and the underground cellar-was only habitable so long as the door was open.
He remembered, too, his first impressions, upon being carried into the cellar, of the closeness and stuffiness of the atmosphere, which must have freshened as soon as the obstacle to ventilation was removed. He felt all round the wall, and presently came in one corner to a steel bar placed diagonally from wall to wall. He felt upward and found another and yet another. So, in addition to this being a ventilating chamber, it must also be an avenue of egress.
Bracing himself to the effort, he began to climb upward, counting the rungs as he mounted. He adventured upward in some doubt, because the first rung of the ladder was loose and had given under his feet; but those that remained were firm enough. After the twenty-eighth rung his groping hand felt into space, and, bringing it down gingerly, he located a small stone platform. To this he climbed. It was triangular in shape, and was just large enough to allow him space to sit.
He felt along the angle of the walls and found a wooden door, big enough to crawl through, supposing it were open. In point of fact, it was closed. He felt the keyhole. He knew instinctively that this was the only way out, and that any unaided effort of his to escape in this direction must be futile.
After a little while he swung his legs over into the darkness and descended again to the basement. He was weakened before he reached the cellar, and he lay down for an hour before he made any other attempt. He usually carried a bunch of keys in his pocket, but these had been taken away by the men who had captured him. A careful search of the cellar failed to reveal anything that looked like a key.
Late in the afternoon he made his second investigation, this time carrying with him the lower rung of the ladder which, after an hour's work, he had wrenched from the wall. With this he attacked the door. It was a long and painful job, but he succeeded. He had light now—a dim reflected light which came up from the open eaves of the building.
He was in the ribs of the building, in the space between the sloping roof and the ceiling, and he could look down under the eaves and see the green of grass. He stopped suddenly in his survey and listened. There were voices, and those voices were of the two men who had captured him. Hastily he made his way back down the ladder to the cellar, and was lying on the bed when the door opened and they came in. One carried a pie, the other two bottles of beer, which they placed on the table. The faces of both men were covered, as on the night previous.
“Hullo,” said one, and Frank recognized the man called Tom. “How are you feeling now?”
“I'm all right,” said the actor.
“I hope you remain so,” replied the other unpleasantly. “Here's some grub for you.”
He put the packages on the table, threw a cursory glance round the room, then brought his eyes back to Alwin.
“Found your way to the wash house, have you?” he said. “Now let me tell you, young fellow”—his voice took a more serious and more menacing strain—“you're in a pretty tight fix, and if you get out of this without an obituary notice you'll be lucky. If every man had his due, you would have been dead. And if Rosie—if a friend of mine hadn't had a fool idea”
“I won't trouble to tell you that you have committed a very serious crime,” interrupted Frank.
“Don't,” said the other briefly. “It isn't necessary. What ought to get you thinking is the possibility of a more serious crime being committed. See here, Mr. Alwin,” said the man, speaking earnestly, “you have a pull with Smith; why don't you persuade him to let up on The Golden Hades business? He's still alive”
“What do you mean?” asked Frank. “You haven't dared”
“Aw! Dared!” said the man in contempt. “Listen. We're nearly through and if Ro—if one of the gang hadn't blundered, nobody would have been hurt. Smith knows a lot, and he's going to make trouble for us if he starts poking his nose into the treasury department. Suppose you write to him and tell him you'll explain everything when you see him, that you're well and happy, and ask him to let up on us until you see him? It isn't the bills we want, believe me; he hasn't those any more! We just won't have him carry his investigations any further. Now, Mr. Alwin, you're a sensible man. Will you write to him?”
Frank shook his head. “I will not,” he said decidedly. “Wilbur Smith can look after himself and he can look after you, too. If you went after him and left him alive, you'll be sorry!”
The cold eyes above the handkerchief mask surveyed Frank in a long, dispassionate scrutiny.
“All right,” said the man. “I never killed anybody yet in cold blood. Maybe you are going to be my first experience.”
Without another word he turned away and walked over to the box which his companion was examining. They exchanged a few words, dropping their voices, and Frank only heard “nine o'clock, after the séance.”
He made a meal, for he was hungry. Waiting until quiet reigned, he again mounted the ladder and continued his search. If there was any way out, he could not find it. He tried the roof, using his bar, but the cross pieces which supported it were of iron and set too closely together to allow him to squeeze through, and though he did succeed in knocking off a shingle, he saw the futility of continuing.
There was another way of escape—the merest possibility, but one which he was determined to try. He worked then as he had never worked before in his life. His head was throbbing and every bone was aching when he dropped on the bed at seven o'clock in sheer exhaustion.
His chief difficulty was to prevent himself falling asleep. He was dozing when he heard a tapping above his head, and became at once wide awake. There was no sound at the door when he listened, no suggestion of footsteps on the stairs. He hesitated a moment, then, taking off his shoes, he made the ascent to the roof, crept through the broken door, and lay on the cross beams with his ear pressed against the rough plaster work of the ceiling of the room below.
Hitherto he had hesitated to disturb this, knowing that detection was inevitable if any portion of the ceiling fell and if the room below was occupied, but now his curiosity overcame him. With a pencil which he found in his pocket he drilled through the soft fiber, pulling out little knobs of plaster until the hole was big enough to see through.
He glued his eye to the aperture and saw nothing but a section of black and white tesselated pavement. He enlarged the hole, being careful that not a single crumb of plaster fell to the pavement below. Now and again he stopped to listen, but there was no sound. He had made a gap in the ceiling as large as the palm of his hand when a sound of feet on the pavement below caused him to pause. Now he had an excellent view. He saw a plain interior along which Corinthian pillars, which he judged to be made of plaster, ran in two lines, from one end of the building, which was hidden from view by a long velvet curtain, to the other, where on a pedestal of marble stood something hidden under a white cloth.
As he looked the blue curtain parted and two men came in. They were clothed from head to foot in long, brown robes, their faces and heads hidden under a monk's cowl. Frank Alwin looked at them in amazement. Their attitude was that of sublime reverence. Their hands were clasped, their heads sunk forward. Slowly they moved along the pavement and came to within a few feet of the pedestal. The first man—by far the taller of the two—sank upon his knees as the second man passed to the pedestal and with an obeisance lifted the cloth.
Frank started. As the cloth lifted a blaze of light leaped from the altar, flooding the figure which was revealed. There was no mistaking that golden form sitting erect, a trident in his hand. It was The Golden Hades!
Spellbound, Frank watched the two men standing in rapt attitudes before the idol, and strained his ears to follow the weird ritual. He did not recognize the voice of the speaker. It was certainly neither of the two men who had been with him in the cellar. The voice was rich, tremulous with emotion, almost ecstatic.
“Oh, Hades! Great god of the underworld! Spouse of Prosperine! Giver of wealth! Behold thy servants! Oh, Mighty Pluto, by whose benefaction this man, who abases himself before you, hath grown to the splendor of great possessions, hear him, and be favorable to him, since he desires to share his wealth with the poor, that thy name shall be again established. Oh, Pluto! Dread lord of Hell! Give thou thy servant the word of thy approval!”
The taller man lifted his head and looked at the idol. Frank could see only the back of him; even had he been better placed it was doubtful whether the face would have been visible, for the only light in this strange temple were two electric bulbs which burned on either side of the altar and the reflected glare from the hidden lights concealed in the altar itself.
For a few moments no sound was heard, and then there came a voice. It was a far-away voice, hollow and unnatural, and it seemed to come from the figure.
“Thy gifts are favorable in my sight, oh, faithful servant! Thou shalt give to my chosen that which thou lovest best, and it shall be well with thee, and thy name shall be written in the Book of Hades in golden letters, and thou shalt sit with me as a god in the days to come.”
The tall figure prostrated himself and remained prone for five minutes, then he rose, and together the men walked slowly down the aisle between the pillars and passed through the curtain out of sight.
Frank found himself breathing quickly, the perspiration streaming down his unshaven face as he slipped noiselessly through the door, down the iron ladder into the cellar again. He had plenty of time and had recovered his breath and was apparently asleep when the door opened and he heard a familiar voice.
The men who entered were not those who had taken part in that strange ceremony; that he would swear. He lay perfectly still under a blanket. One of the men tiptoed toward him. He needed all his self-possession to remain quiet, for he had no doubt at all that if it suited the purpose of these criminals, they would make short work of him.
He gripped the iron bar which he had brought into bed with him, determined to make a fight if need be, but they seemed satisfied with their scrutiny.
“You were a long time coming, Tom,” said one voice, and the other answered under his breath. Frank thought he said something about a “tube.”
Presently he heard a creak and a grunt, and gathered that they were carrying out the first of the two boxes. The door closed behind them and the key turned, for they were taking no chances. They brought the box through a second door into the open and deposited it in the portico of a tiny Greek temple of beautiful design, which stood in the midst of thickly wooded grounds. There was no sign of house or of any other human habitation. The men deposited the box, and one of them, taking off his handkerchief, wiped his perspiring face.
“Now what about that guy down there?”
He jerked his thumb to the side door leading from the-portico to the crypt.
“He's not much use to us. Even Rosie admits that, and he's a pretty dangerous man.”
They looked at each other in silence.
“I couldn't kill a man in cold blood,” said the first speaker after a while, “but maybe if I gave him a punch or two he'd show fight—and then it would be easy.”
The other nodded.
“Come on,” said the first man, making for the door. “Let's get the other box up, and then we'll go down and settle with him after.”
With some labor the second box was carried to the portico and placed by the side of the first. They sat recovering their breath for fully ten minutes. The night was still and the sky was full of stars. The dim shadow of two trees, the ghostly shadows of the temple, added perhaps an unusual terror to the somber task they had set themselves.
They seemed reluctant to move.
“Rosie fixed the next batch for the Philadelphia depot,” said one, as if to make conversation. The other grunted.
Presently the man called Tom, rose, and took something from his pocket—something which glistened dully in the starlight.
“Come on,” he said suddenly.
They made their way downstairs, unlocked the door of the crypt, and entered together. Tom walked straight over to the bed, and laid his hand upon the blanket.
“Now, then,” he said, “you've got to get out of this, you”
With a jerk he pulled back the blanket and disclosed nothing more human than a long, irregular ridge of papers and books. The man called Sam uttered an oath.
“He's gone,” he said and raced upstairs.
The box under the portico was empty.