Tongues of Flame (MacFarlane)/Chapter 7
THE nightly poker game was on at the Grizzly Club. Henry Harrington, a wildly excited young man, and feeling as if he could never sleep, had been glad to recall it. He met Clayton upon the stairs and, three and one-half hours tardy, the two edged into the game. Harrington was lucky as usual and by twothirty in the morning was some thirteen dollars ahead and gloating over Clayton, who was nearly as much behind, when into one of the absorbed silences of the play there echoed a distant reverberation. It boomed from somewhere outside, not very loudly, but very unmistakably—the detonation of high explosives.
"What was that?" asked Gallup, the grocery man, quick and nervous.
"Sounded like an explosion!" said Guy Getz, the butcher.
"Like blowing a safe to me!" imagined Charlie Clayton.
Gallup and Getz, who both had safes, sprang up; but Harrington was ahead of them at the window and, throwing it wide, stood peering down the empty silence of North Street to where that wide and solid-looking three-story brick structure which housed the administrative office of Boland General squatted in the darkness.
"It sounded down there to me," he remarked.
"Cash in, fellows!" demanded Gallup, who had been banking. "I'm going to see what happened." But Harrington was the first to push his stack of chips across the green board and therefore the first to dash down the stairs. He arrived at the administration building after a run of two blocks, with the rest of the poker game trailing after, to find the torch-light of a lone policeman flashing amid the wreckage of a vault in the ground floor office of O. T. Morgan, land commissioner of Boland General, where homed the Edgewater Townsite Company, the Wahpeetah Townsite Company and all the wide range of the tax and title interests of Old Two Blades.
"I was right on their heels," croaked Policeman Ryan excitedly; "but they blew the wrong vault anyway. Only papers in this one."
But Harrington thought the litter of document-containers, huge record-books and rolls of maps scattered over the floor might be that created by eager hands, pulling them out, searching them over and making hasty selections before an imperative departure.
"Maybe they were after papers!" he divined.
"Hornblower!" ejaculated Guy Getz, without a moment's hesitation.
"You bet your life! You'd ought to have let us croaked him, Henry!" declared Phil Gallup.
"It might be Hornblower, of course," conceded Henry, glumly, and stood meditative, surveying and re-surveying the confusion, while excitement grew with each new arrival. Two or three night watchmen came in, another policeman and then Scott, the Chief of Police. Somebody telephoned O. T. Morgan and Cosby, head of Boland General's private detective force. Nobody touched anything. It lay as it fell for the small-town hawkshaws to arrange about finger-prints and search for clues.
When Cosby came in, and presently O. T. Morgan himself, half-dressed, Henry felt that any faint responsibility requiring his presence had ended. He was rather puzzled by it and wanted to get away by himself and think. There was such an awful lot of things for him to think about now anyway. So he made his way out of the group unnoticed and started for his hotel.
All told perhaps forty minutes had elapsed since the explosion. Thinking to save time, he started diagonally across the courthouse lawn, which was tree-studded and shrubbery-embroidered. "Hornblower? It would be like that devil—trying to throw a smoke-screen over the title issue by a theatrical stunt like this!" So he was speculating, none too conscious of immediate surroundings until he ran head on into an automobile, half-enveloped in the shrubbery. It was a touring car with the top up, lightless, but with its shape discernible in the faint glow of the stars, and the hood warm as if the engine had just been running.
"Funny place to park a car!" he had breathed in a startled undertone, when there came to his ears for the second time this night the sound of a low explosion.
"Another?" he ejaculated, nerves already tense, and as he did so the windows in the end of the courthouse nearest to him rattled mockingly.
"By George! That explosion was in there," he decided with sudden gravity, "and that's the Recorder's office on that end. Why, hell's bells! It must be Hornblower sure. Cute of his gang, I'll say—nervy, too—to come right over here and go to work in entire safety when they've got every policeman in the town hanging round that pile of junk they made of Morgan's place."
Peering, he saw the hall of records entry door half open and from it there issued a sound as of someone coming out. "This car was for their getaway," he divined. "They'd have had a driver in it only they had to divide the gang and didn't want to trust too many people," he reasoned, and sank back into the gloom.
Yes, here they came—shuffling feet upon the stone steps and two dark forms blurred against the gray shadow of the building. Once the men were on the turf Henry lost the sound of footsteps and against the shrubbery background their figures were invisible until with startling suddenness their arrival at the car-side was announced by the tumbling of something heavy into the tonneau—heavy, like, for instance, a book of the deeds of Socatullo County.
It came to Henry like a flash that these men must be professional cracksmen and therefore tools only; that if this were a Hornblower enterprise, they and the other gang would report to him somewhere soon and it would be a gratifying piece of detective work to appear at the rendezvous and confront them all. He decided on the instant and twined his wiry form into the tire rack at the back, prepared to enjoy himself.
"Just one darned thing after another," he chuckled happily, as the car started with a jerk and a bump. "The night is still young."
The car was picking up fast and within a minute its springs were bounding wildly, with the tire rack flinging Henry recklessly hither and yon. Gravel was spit into his face, dust clouds enveloped him; he had all he could do to maintain his position, but he managed it and was able to do some thinking beside.
He knew that the driver had taken the Inlet Road, and that there were numerous branchings off to small docks and landings on the Basin, whose shore waters were dotted with small islands—ideal places for seclusion and trysting, whether of lovers or looters. When, therefore, after not more than a few miles run, the car slowed down and, succeeding the hollow rumble of a bridge, dipped suddenly off the road, Harrington was not surprised and thought he knew exactly where he was—at the mouth of Cub Creek; where, by an odd coincidence, was the landing from which canoes and small launches took off for that very island which Quackenbaugh and Scanlon had been arguing over tonight in Mr. Boland's den.
As the momentum ceased, Henry dropped flat upon the ground, and peering underneath saw ahead of him, in the light rays from the vehicle that had furnished his own transportation, the wheels of another car. "Just what I thought," he was breathing to himself with satisfaction, when the lights clicked off and in the same motion the engine also. A full minute must have passed, then another, but no sound was uttered.
Henry was aware, however, that movement was going on about him; quiet, persistent, methodical movement in which several persons were taking part. Something was afoot. What was it? He must not miss anything. He wriggled backward from under the car and as his eyes circled slowly in the darkness they came upon a tiny ray of light that went out almost as he glimpsed it. Then he understood. By means of brief, intermittent flashes some leader was calling confederates about him, and—hark! there were low muttered voices now; yes, men were talking—conferring together.
Henry decided upon a strategic detour to the left and then forward toward the voices; but just as his hands and knees told him that he had groped to the rough log landing, he sat up with a start. He had recognized one of the voices conferring not half a dozen feet away—a sort of master voice. It was—it was, so help him, the voice of Thomas Scanlon, Chief Counsel for Boland General. Harrington, unable to trust his own ears, listened longer to make sure.
Yes, there was not a doubt; it was the voice of Scanlon in tones that were unmistakable but words too low for him to catch.
Scanlon? Scanlon? Henry puzzled for a moment and then the whole thing came clear. Scanlon was a traitor; he was plotting against his own company—against the town, against Mr. Boland. Henry having scorned Hornblower's proffer, that brassy schemer had found a partner in Scanlon. They were working together now—that was the meaning of this latest development—this theft of the records of Boland General, to make some contemplated inside job look like an outside one.
Harrington had the natural antipathy of an honest man for a traitor—and a traitor to John Boland—to a whole people, seemed a rarely reprehensible brand of Judas.
He straightened up slowly to his full height. Fearless in his indignation he meant to confront the pair of them, for Hornblower was doubtless there also. He took two steps forward and then for the third time this night there burst upon his ears the sound of a low explosion. It appeared to take place just behind him. He heard it back there, right behind his ear, as it were—right up against the back of his head; but he heard none of its reverberations. He heard nothing. Sound was blotted out for him. Sound and time—everything was blotted out.