The Trey o' Hearts Part 2

CHAPTER XVIII
The Island

NOT more than thirty seconds could have elapsed before Barcus recovered from the shock of the motor's treachery sufficiently to reverse the wheels throttle down the carburetor, and jump out of the engine-pit. But in that small space of time the lifeboat and Alan Law had parted company as definitely as though one of them had been levitated bodily to the far side of the globe. It could not have been more than a minute after the accident before Barcus was guiding the boat over what he could have sworn was the precise spot where Alan had disappeared, but without discovering a sign of him. For the next twenty minutes he divided attention, between vain attempts to soothe the distracted girt and to educe a reply from Alan by stentorian hailing. Then of a sudden he verged so close upon the object of his search that he was warned off in a manner sufficiently arresting by nothing more or less, in fact, than a gunshot. On the echo of this a man's rough voice warned peremptorily:

"Sheer off, damn you! Sheer off! If you come ​on another yard I'll blow your heads off your shoulders!"

Precipitately Barcus reversed and then silenced the engine.

"Alan!" he yelled. "Alan! Give a hail to tell us you're safe!"

The answer came in another voice—Judith's, clear, musical, effervescent with sardonic humour.

"Be at peace, little one—bleat no more! Mr. Law is with us—and safe——!"

Barcus sought counsel of Rose. Her eyes were blank with despair. He shook his head helplessly. With no way on her, the lifeboat drifted.

After a little the girl crept aft, and they conferred in guarded tones.

"What can we do?" Rose implored. "We can't leave him. … Oh, when I think of him there, in her power, I could go mad!"

"If only I knew," Barcus protested, "but my hands are tied. There's nothing to go by—except the bare chance that the reef she mentioned may he Norton's. It doesn't seem possible, but we may have made that much southing. If so, "we're about three miles off the mainland, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Katama Island, a little desolate rocky bump inhabited mainly by fishermen."

The girl racked her hands. "But how could ​Judith have got there—with her men—and dry ammunition?"

"Don't ask me. Going on my experience with the lady, I'd be willing to bet she was picked up by the steamer that ran us down, and proceeded to make a prize of it—or tried to. Perhaps she found or stole a boat from somebody; she couldn't have made Norton's Reef by swimming—it's too far. That's, the answer, they were picked up, stole a boat, and piled it up on the reef."

"And there's no hope——!"

"If we could make the mainland and get help. …"

His accents died away into a disconsolate silence that held unbroken for more than an hour. Rose went back to her place in the bow, crouched there, a huddled shape of wretchedness; and in the stern sat Barcus submerged in a dejection no less profoundly dismal, his gaze directed vacantly at his feet.

Alan was delivered into the hands of the enemy; defeated in the game he had played with such brave spirit—his life for the forfeit.

Brief though their friendship was in actual duration of time, Barcus had come to hold the man in such affection as only is possible between men who have faced danger and endured hardship shoulder to shoulder.

​Tom Barcus mourned a brave man and loyal friend. …

So slowly did the current bring the lifeboat toward the beach and so still was the tide that neither appreciated they were near land until the bows grounded with a slight jar and a grating sound.

With a cry of "Land, by all that's lucky!" Barcus jumped up, then stooping, lent the girl a hand, and helped her to her feet. Then sandy beach was revealed to their wondering eyes, backed by a looming wall of rock whose top was lost in vapour.

Hardly had Rose found time to comprehend this good fortune, when Barcus was over the side and dragging the boat up on the shoals. Then lifting Rose down, he set her on dry land, rummaged out anchor and cable and planted the former well up under the foot of the cliff.

As he rose from this last labour, the westering sun broke through the fog. In less than five minutes thereafter the wind had rolled the fog back and sent it spinning far out to sea, while the shore was deluged with sunlight bright and deliciously warm.

"You're about all in?"

She nodded confirmation of what was no more than simple truth.

"Where are we?" she added.

He could only make her party to his own perplexity.

​"You're not fit to travel," he pursued. "Do you mind being left alone while I take a turn up the beach and have a look around? We can't be far from some sort of civilization; even if this is an island, there are few desert islands along this coast. I'll find something soon enough, no fear. … There's a niche among the rocks up there," Barcus indicated, "almost a cave, where you'll be warm and dry enough, and secure from overhead observation. Maybe you can even manage a wink of sleep." …

She negatived that suggestion with a dreary smile: no sleep for her until sheer exhaustion overpowered her or she knew Alan's fate!

And so iterating his promise to be no longer than might be absolutely needful, he left her.

 

CHAPTER XIX
The Sunset Tide

FOR a time after Barcus had tramped off she lingered upon the sands, in the mouth of the shelter he had selected, staring hungrily out over the shimmering sea. Slowly the sea darkened with the slow decline of the sun, by whose altitude above the horizon the day had now not ninety minutes more to run. She thought drowsily that if that sun sank without her learning that her lover lived, it would not rise again upon a world tenanted by Rose Trine.

It was not true, she told herself, that people never die of broken hearts. … Then sleep overwhelmed her suddenly, like a great, dark cloud. But its dominion over her was not of long duration. She came to her senses to find Barcus gently shaking her by the shoulder, and sat up with a cry of mystified compassion; for in the brief time that he had been absent—it had not been more than an hour—most unquestionably Mr. Barcus had been severely used.

He had acquired a long but shallow cut over one eye, together with a bruised and swollen cheek; and what simple articles of clothing remained to him, ​after his strenuous experiences of the last forty-eight hours, had been reduced to even more primitive simplicity: his shirt, for example, now lacked one entire sleeve.

"No," he told her, "don't waste time pitying me. I'm all right—and so is Alan! That's the main thing for you to understand; he's still alive and sound——"

"Where is he? Take me to him!" she demanded.

"That's the rub," Barcus confessed, knuckling his hair. "I dassent take you to him. Judith might not like it. Besides, it isn't safe to mingle with the inhabitants of this tight little island, and you can't get to Alan without mingling considerably. Sit down; I'll tell you all about it, and we'll try to figure some way out. Maybe we can frame up a rescue under cover of night."

And when the girl settled herself beside him, he launched into a detailed report.

"It's Katam Island," he announced, "but the place has changed since I visited it some years ago. Then it was a decent community; now, unless all signs fail, it's a den of smugglers. I noticed a number of Chinese about; and when I ventured to introduce myself to the village gin-mill and ask a few innocent questions, the entire population landed on me like a thousand of brick. I suspect we've stumbled on a settlement of earnest workers at the gentle ​art of helping poor Chinamen evade the exclusion laws."

With a wry smile, he continued: "I came to just in time to witness the landing of your amiable sister, her gang, and Alan, in company with as choice a crew of scoundrels as you'd care to see. I gathered from a few words that leaked out of the back door of the barroom that Judith had stolen a boat from the ship that picked her up, and then piled it up on Norton's Reef; and shortly after she had gathered Alan in, the schooner of these smugglers happened along, and she hailed it and struck a bargain with them. Anyway, her lot and the islanders were soon as thick as thieves, and tanking up so sociably that I got a chance to whisper a word to Alan and tell him you were all right, and that he'd find us both down here on the beach, if he escaped. He's locked up now in a little stone hut on the edge of the cliff, with the door guarded and the window overlooking a sheer drop of thirty feet or so to the beach. When I'd seen that much, I calculated it was about time for me to go before Mam'selle Judith nicked me with the evil eye."

"You don't think she saw you?" the girl cried.

"I don't think so," Barcus allowed gravely; and then, lifting his gaze, he added as he rose in a bound, "I just know she did—that's all!"

In another instant he was battling with three ​ruffians who had come suddenly round a shoulder of rock. Weak with suffering and fatigue, he was overborne in a twinkling, and his hands were made fast behind his back. Rose's resistance was as futile as his own; she, too, was captive, and her hands were bound like his.

Suddenly the sound of a strange laugh chilled the blood in Barcus, and he swung sharply to confront Judith Trine.

He was by no means poor-spirited, but he shrank from the look she gave him, and was relieved when with a sneer she passed him by and planted herself before her sister.

"Well?" she demanded brusquely. "How many more lessons will you need to make you realize I mean to have my way, and that you'll cross me only to suffer for it?"

Rose's courage won the admiration of Barcus. Far from cringing, she seemed to find fresh heart in her sister's challenge.

"So you've tried again?" she inquired. "You've offered him your love yet another time, have you?"

"Silence!" Judith cried in fury.

"Only to learn once more that he would rather death than you?" Rose persisted, unflinching. "And so you come to take your spite out on me, do you? You pitiful thing!"

​Judith controlled herself and her voice marvellously.

"You will see," she said evenly. "I have prepared a way to make you understand what opposition to me means. ..." She waved a hand toward the nearest point of rocks. "Take them along!" she commanded.

Her men without hesitation or further instructions marched Rose and Barcus down to the end of the spit and on into the water.

It was nearly knee-deep before Barcus was halted, forced to sit down, and swiftly made fast in that position, submerged to his chest. This accomplished, the men turned attention to Rose, lashing her in similar wise at Barcus's side.

Then quietly those well-trained servants turned their backs and marched off.

Judith, watching them, laughed her short, mirthless laugh.

"The tide will be high," she said, "precisely at sunset. You may time your lives by that. When the sun dips into the sea, then will your lives go down with it."

She turned on her heel and strode swiftly away.

For some time Barcus struggled vainly. As for Rose, she wasted no strength in struggling.

He noted that already the water had risen more than an inch.

Humbled even in his terror by that radiant calm ​that dwelt upon his companion, he ventured diffidently: "Rose—Miss Trine—I'm sorry," he said, which was not at all what he had meant to say. "I've done my best. I suppose it's wrong to give up, but they've made it too much for me this time."

"I know," she said gently.

The sun was close upon the rim of the world. He closed his eyes to shut out the vision of its slow, implacable descent.

The water was now almost level with his lips.

"It's a good-bye now," he faltered.

"Not yet!" her voice rang beside him, vibrant. "Look—up there—along the cliff!"

Two men were running along the cliff, and the man in the lead was Alan.

Then, even as Barcus gazed, the skyline of the cliff was empty; one or the other had tripped and fallen over the brink, and falling had grasped his enemy and carried him down as well.

By no chance, Barcus told himself, could either escape uninjured.

Yet, to his amazement, he saw one break from the other's embrace and rise. He who lay still was Judith's man.

With a violent effort Barcus lifted his mouth above water and shrieked:

"Alan! Alan! Help! Here—at the end of the point—in the water—help!"

​A precious minute was lost before Alan discovered their two heads. Then he ran toward them as he had never run before, and as he came whipped out a jackknife and freed its blade.

Even so—since it was, of course, Rose who was first freed—Barcus was half-drowned before Alan helped him in turn up to the beach.

And as this happened the last blood-red rim of the sun was washed under by the waves.

Two minutes later the lifeboat was afloat, and Mr. Barcus, already recovered, was labouring with the flywheel of the motor, stimulated by the sight of a party, led by Judith, racing down the beach.

But it was not until well out from shore that any one of them found time for speech. Then Mr. Barcus straightened up from his assiduous attentions to the motor, and inquired:

"Would you mind, Mr. Law, telling how you got out of that hut?"

"Jumped," Alan responded tersely, "from the window. There was no other way."

"You bear a charmed life," was the only comment. "If ever I get out of this affair I'm going to have a try at your life, myself, just once, for luck!"

CHAPTER XX
The Rocket

AFTER several hours of good behaviour the demon charged with dominion over powerboats rammed the nose of the lifeboat deep into the flank of a skulking shoal of viscid mud quite fifty feet from shore.

While the motor and the men were labouring, panting, struggling, and splashing in a vain effort to work the boat off the shoal, the gasoline gave out. With a gasp, a grunt, and a sigh, the motor fell dumb. The two men, likewise breathless, looked at one another stupidly, but found no words. …

"Why not wade ashore?" Rose suggested mildly from the place she had taken astern in order to lighten the bow. "It isn't so far—and what's one more wetting?"

"But there's no sense in Miss Trine wading," Barcus suggested; "we're web-footed as it is; and she's too tired."

"Well, what then?"

"We can carry her, can't we?"

After a toilsome progress Rose at length slipped ​from the seat formed by the clasped hands of the two men. "Gee!" grunted Barcus frankly, "and it was me who suggested this!"

The girl responded with a quiet laugh, as natural of effect as one could wish until it ended in a sigh, and, without the least warning, she crumpled upon herself and would have fallen heavily, in a dead faint, but for Alan's quickness.

"Good Lord!" Barcus exclaimed, as Alan gently lowered the inert body of the girl to the sands. "And to think I didn't understand she was so nearly all in—chaffing her like that! I'd like to kick myself!"

"Don't be impatient," Alan advised grimly. "And you might fetch me some water."

It was an order by no means easy to fill; Barcus had only his cupped hands, and little water remained in these by the time he had dashed from the shallows back to the spot where Rose lay, while the few drops he did manage to sprinkle upon her face seemed to avail nothing. In the end Alan gave up the attempt. "She's all rights" he reported, releasing a wrist whose pulse he had been timing. "She fainted, right enough, to begin with, but now she's just asleep—and needs it, God knows! It would be kinder to let her rest, at least until I see what sort of a reception that lighthouse over yonder is inclined to offer us."

​"You'll go, then?" Barcus inquired. "I'd just as lief, myself——"

"No; let me," Alan insisted. "It's not far—not more than a quarter of a mile.

Barcus nodded, his face drawn and gray in the moon-glare. "Thank God!" he breathed brokenly, "you're able—afraid I'm not."

He sat down suddenly and rested his head on his knees. "Don't be longer than you can help," he muttered thickly.

The truth, however, was that Alan himself was hardly more fit for the tramp. Fatigue seemed to have fastened weights to heels that dragged with ever-heavier reluctance as he plodded along the beach.

But all at once he heard a series of staccato snorts, the mellow tolling of a brazen bell, the rumble of a train!

And then he ran, weariness altogether forgotten in the surge of hope attending this discovery that he was again in touch with civilization.

As he came round the headland he saw before him the quiet vista of a village street with a railroad station.

He burst into the station just as the agent was closing up for the night.

"Nah," the latter averred; "they ain't no more trains till mornin'. Can't y' see I'm shuttin' up?"

"But surely there must be a telegraph station——"

​"You bet your life they is—right here. An' I'm shuttin' it up, too. Call around at eight o'clock to-morrer mornin'."

"But I must send a telegram now," Alan protested. "It's a matter of life and death."

"Sure, young feller. It always is—after business hours."

Alan thrust a hand into his trousers-pocket. "Will a dollar influence your better judgment?" he suggested.

"Let's see your dollar," the other returned, open incredulity informing his countenance.

Alan brought forth an empty hand. "Make a light," he said sharply. "My money's in a belt round my waist. Open up your office. You'll get your dollar, no fear!"

Peremptorily he shouldered past the agent and entered the station; he quickly made good his word, unbuckling an oilskin belt beneath his shirt and extracting a fold of banknotes that struck sparks of respect from the agent's flinty arrogance.

"All right," he grumbled. "Write your message. It ain't often I do this, but I'll make an exception for you."

Alan delayed long enough only to make a few inquiries, drawing out the information that the quickest way to any city of importance was by boat across Buzzard's Bay to New Bedford. Boats, it was ​implied, were plentiful, readily to be chartered. A timetable supplied all other needful advice, and Alan wrote his message swiftly.

Addressed to Digby in New York, it required that gentleman to arrange for a motor-car to wait on the waterfront of New Bedford from 3:00 a. m. till called for in the name of Mr. Law, as well as for a special train at Providence, similarly instructed.

With hope like new life animating him, Alan hurried forth from the station, heedless of the interest in him betrayed by two village loafers, trotted up the street, ordered supper for three at the village hotel, and set off again down the beach.

But now, all unconscious of the fact, he went no more alone.

He found his sweetheart and his friend much as he had left them—with this difference, that Barcus now lay flat on his back and was snoring lustily. He was roused only with the greatest difficulty, and awoke grumbling.

He was placated quickly enough, however, by Alan's information.

But when it was the turn of Rose, both faltered. None the less, it must be done; Alan hardened his heart with the reminder of their urgent necessity, and eventually brought her to with the aid of a few drops of some brandy which he had purchased at the village.

​Between them, they helped her up the beach, past the point, and at length to the door of the hotel, where—reanimated by the mere promise of food—Rose disengaged their arms and entered without more assistance, while Barcus in his own famished eagerness was deterred from treading her heels by the hand of Alan falling heavily upon his arm.

"Wait!" the latter admonished in a half-whisper. "Look there!"

Barcus followed the direction of his gesture, and was transfixed by sight of a rocket appearing into the night-draped sky from a point invisible beyond the headland. The two consulted one another with startled and fearful eyes.

As with one voice they murmured one word:

"Judith!"

To this Alan added gravely:

"Or some spy of hers!" Then rousing, Alan released his friend, with a smart shove urging him across the threshold of the hotel.

"Go on," he insisted," Join Rose and get your supper. I'll be with you as soon as I can arrange for a boat. Tell her nothing more than that—that I thought it unwise to wait longer before looking round."

He turned to find his landlord approaching. His question was barely uttered before the man lifted a willing voice and hailed a fellow townsman idling nearby.

​"Hey, Jake—come here!"

Introduced as Mr. Breed, Jake pleaded guilty to ownership of the fastest and staunchest power-cruiser in the adjacent waters. His terms, though extortionate, were undisputed. And Alan readily consented to Mr. Breed's condition—that his crew (of one man) accompany the vessel to bring her back from New Bedford. Then, enjoining haste, and promising to be at the town-wharf within ten minutes, he hastened to join Rose and Barcus and complete the ruin that they had wrought on a plentiful hot supper.

Neither man mentioned the rocket or his fears. Pending developments, there was no profit in exciting Rose's anxieties: haste was the one prescription of that hour.

This they observed religiously: within the stipulated ten minutes they were waiting upon a float at the side of the town-wharf, while the promised rowboat of Mr. Breed leisurely drew in to meet them.

Having embarked, the burden of Alan's solicitude grew lighter with every dip and splash of blades that, wielded by a crew of villainous countenance, brought them nearer a handsome motor boat which Mr. Breed designated as his own. It was not until Alan looked up to find Mr. Breed covering him with a revolver that he had the least apprehension of any danger near at hand.

​"I'll take that money-belt of yours, young feller," Mr. Breed announced. "And you be quick about it—not forgetting what's in your trousers pocket!"

In the passion of his indignation, Alan neglected to play the game by the rules. The indifference he displayed toward the weapon was positively unprofessional, for he struck it aside as though it were nothing more dangerous than a straw. And in the same flutter of an eyelash, he launched himself like a wildcat at the throat of Mr. Breed, who went suddenly over the stern, his firearm sinking to the bottom while he splashed and gurgled and blasphemed and saw his crew (who had been the first to suggest this affair while the two watched Alan through the window of the railway station) make sad business of an attempt to overpower Mr. Barcus.

The splash made by the first on entering the water, indeed, anticipated the second splash by less than a minute. And then Mr. Barcus was bending his back to the oars while Alan knelt in the stem and brandished a boat-hook, asserting his intention of braining the first who dared swim alongside.

"And just for this," he added before getting out of earshot, "I'm going to treat my party to a joy-ride in your pretty power-boat. You'll not get a cent; but if you send a man to Newport to-morrow he can have the boat back."

He made the peroration as Barcus brought them ​up under the quarter of the power-cruiser. Within two minutes the motor was spinning contentedly, the mooring had been slipped, the motor-boat was heading out into the sound. Rose, made comfortable on a transom of the tiny cabin, went almost instantly asleep, while Alan made all snug, and joined his friend by the wheel.

For the best part of an hour neither spoke. Alan drowsed, soothed by the slap of waves against the side and the dull sing-song of the engine. When he roused himself, for no particular reason, it was to regard with admiration the spectacle of Barcus, tirelessly vigilant and efficient, at the wheel.

"My friend," he observed, languidly, "as our acquaintance ripens I am more and more impressed with the belief that neither of us was born to die a natural death, whether abed or at the hands of those who dislike us; but rather to be hanged as common pirates."

"You have the courage of ignorance," Barcus replied coolly. "If you'll take the trouble to glance astern——"

Alan sat up with a start to see behind them the milk-white sails of an able schooner.

Sheets all taut and every inch of canvas fat with a beam wind, she footed it merrily in their wake, a silver jet spouting from her cutwater.

CHAPTER XXI
Crack o' Doom

MR. LAW'S capacity for surprise was exhausted. He viewed the schooner with no more display of emotion than resided in narrowing eyelids and tightening muscles about his mouth.

"Much farther to go?" he inquired presently.

"At our present pace—say two hours."

"And can we hold our own?"

"Just about," Barcus allowed.

"Anything to be done?"

"Nothing but pray, if you remember how."

Later, however, after another glance astern, Barcus revised this opinion. "Take the wheel and let me have a squint at that engine. She ought to have more power than she's developing just now. … No good," he soon reported briefly, taking the wheel again; "she'll go just so fast and no faster."

As the next hour wore itself out, it was seen that the pursuer was gaining. Inch by inch she crept up in the wake of her prey; and they counted surely on being overhauled by the time they could effect a landing, if not before.

​In the end, however, they made it by the narrowest margin. The features of Judith Trine, watching them from the schooner's side, were distinctly revealed in the chill gray light of the early dawn as they aimed for the first fair landing on the main waterfront of the city.

Long since Alan had wakened Rose and brought her on deck. With matchless seamanship, Barcus laid the smaller boat smoothly alongside the wharf. By the time they had climbed to the street level the schooner was scraping the piles at the end of the dock.

Alan swept the neighbouring street with a hungry glance. There was neither policeman, nor watchman, nor motor-car in sight. If they ran for it, they must surely be overtaken. Something must be done to hinder the crew of the schooner from landing.

"Here!" he cried sharply to Barcus. "You take Rose, hurry to the street, and find that motor-car. I know she's there; Digby never failed me yet!"

"But you——?"

"Don't waste time. I'll be with you in three shakes. I've got a scheme!"

Urged frantically, the reluctant pair made off at a round pace. Then bare-handed and alone, he turned back to oppose his strength and courage and wits against a dozen.

​As for his scheme, Alan Law had none other than to give battle, and sacrifice himself, if need be. His eye lighted on a four-foot length of stout three-inch oak scantling—an excellently formidable club.

Snatching this up, he pelted down the wharf, arriving at the end barely in time to oppose the first man who landed from the schooner. This one the club took on the side of the head; he fell without a murmur. The one who followed took a cracked crown back to the schooner's deck. The third brought a capstan-bar and proved more difficult to deal with. Others were swarming to his aid when a swing of the bar knocked Alan's club from his grasp. But his opponent was luckless; before he could recover from the sweep of his blow, Alan had landed on his chin a fist that had all his heart and soul behind it. A flourishing pair of heels and a ringing thump on the schooner's deck finished that episode.

But now, disarmed, Alan's case was desperate. He was being surrounded.

Wildly casting about for some weapon, he leaped toward a pyramid of little but heavy kegs, and seizing one, swung it overhead and cast it full force into the midriff of his nearest enemy; so that this one doubled up convulsively, with a sickish grunt, and vanished in turn over the end of the ​wharf. His fellow followed with less injury, in his effort to escape a second hurtling keg, which, meeting with no resistance, pursued him even to the deck, where the force of its impact split its seams.

None of the combatants noticed that the powder that filtered out was black and coarse. Alan, indeed, had only the haziest notion that gunpowder kegs were his ammunition. He had discharged the last of a dozen more when he became aware that Judith had climbed up the rigging and, lightly poised, was drawing a revolver preparatory to coming ashore.

In the same breath he heard a friendly shout of warning far up the dock, and knew that Barcus was coming to his aid.

Judith's revolver fell level with his head, and he thought that his last minute had dawned. He made a forlorn attempt to dash in under the weapon and grapple with her, but it was not that which caused the weapon, even as the woman pulled the trigger, to lift from its deadly aim and explode harmlessly in the air. Alan closed with her, wrested the pistol from her grasp, and mechanically tossed it aside. It went over the end of the wharf and fell on the deck of the schooner.

It was an old-fashioned weapon, and the force with which it struck the deck released the hammer. ​Instantly a .44 cartridge blazed into the open head of a broken powder keg.

With a roar like the Trump of Doom a mighty gust of flame and smoke broke forth, and the decks of the schooner were riven and shattered; her masts tottered and fell. …

CHAPTER XXII
Juggernaut

ALAN came to himself supported by Barcus, his senses still reeling from the concussion of that thunderbolt which he had so unwittingly loosed—the cloud of sulphurous smoke not yet dissipated by the wind. Judith lay at his feet, stunned; and round about other figures, of men insensible, if not, for all he could say, dead.

And then Barcus was hustling him down the wharf.

"Come! Come!" he rallied Alan. "Pull yourself together. Rose is waiting in the car, and if you don't want to be arrested you'll stir your stumps, my son! That explosion is going to bring New Bedford buzzing round our ears like a swarm of hornets!"

His prediction was justified, for just then a policeman appeared as if by magic. Brandishing his night-stick, he made for Alan, as if Instinctively recognizing the cause of the disaster, and would have done him serious injury had not Barcus flung himself at the officer's legs, tackling clean and low.

They went down with a crash, and the fight was on; but Barcus managed to shriek:

​"Run, you simp, run! Make your getaway with Rose while the going's good! I can take care of myself."

At the same time a hand descended on Alan's shoulder, and he found himself in the grasp of a pugnaciously inclined citizen who reaped unhappy reward for his temerity, being tripped and thrown as Alan realized that Barcus was right—that his first duty was to Rose.

Whereupon he swung about, butted his way through a group of three confused and strong-lunged persons, and in three bounds gained the running-board of the waiting motor-car, in whose body Rose was standing as if half-minded to alight.

"Clear out!" he told the chauffeur violently. "Make yourself scarce!"

As the man hesitated, Alan threw him bodily from the car, dropped into his seat, and threw in the clutch. They were a hundred feet distant from the scene of the accident before Alan was fairly settled in his place. Alan shook himself together and drew upon the lore of a master of motoring. The car shot through that street like a hunted shadow.

As he grew more and more calm, he congratulated himself on the car. If not capable of a racing pace, it would serve his ends as speedily as was consistent with reasonable care for the life of the woman he loved.

​Yet his congratulations were premature, they were not ten minutes out of the environs of the city when Rose left her seat and knelt behind his, to communicate the intelligence that they were already being pursued by a heavy touring-car, driven by a man, a woman in the seat by his side—Judith the latter, the man an old employee of her father by the name of Marrophat.

Marrophat!

He looked back, recognized this Marrophat as well as Judith, and realized that theirs was the faster machine.

They could overtake the fugitives practically when they would. Why did they not do so at once? They must be awaiting a favourable opportunity. Ah, well, he would——

And then, quite clearly, he recognized the time and the place in the character of the road that lay before him as the car sped like a dragonfly down a slight grade. From the bottom of the grade it swung away in a wide curve, bordered for some distance by railroad tracks on a slightly lower level.

He had guessed the fiendish plan of the other driver only too truly. As they approached at express speed the stretch where the roar paralleled the tracks Alan sought to hug the left-hand side of the road, but in vain.

Roaring, with its muffler cut out, the pursuing ​car swept up and baffled him, bringing its right forward wheel up beside the left rear wheel of his car, then more slowly forging up until, with its weight, bulk, and superior power, it forced him inch by inch to the right, toward the tracks, until his right-hand wheels left the road and ran on uneven turf, until the left-hand wheels as well lost grip on the road metal, until the car began to dip on the slope to the tracks.

He heard the far hoot-toot of a freight locomotive. There followed a maniac moment, when the world was upside down. Alan's car slipped and skidded, swung sideways with frightful momentum toward the tracks, caught its wheels against the ties, and. …

The sun swung in the heavens like a ball on a string. There was a crash, a roar. There was nothing—oblivion. …

The car had turned turtle, pinning Rose and Alan beneath it.

And there was something very like a miracle in all this: for neither was killed, nor even injured beyond bruises. Alan started back to consciousness to find himself inextricably jammed beneath the machine, only his head and shoulders protruding, and in the same moment found himself looking into the eyes of Rose and heard her voice.

"Alan!" she gasped. "You are not killed?"

​"No—not even much hurt, I fancy," he replied. "And you?"

"Not much——"

The deep-throated roar of the locomotive bellowing danger silenced him. He closed his eyes.

Then abruptly the weight was lifted from his chest. He saw a man dragging Rose from under the machine, and saw that the man was Marrophat. And almost immediately some one lifted his head and shoulders, caught him with two hands beneath his armpits, and drew him clear of the machine. And the face of the rescuer was the face of Judith Trine.

The crash he had expected, of the car being crumpled up by the oncoming locomotive, did not follow. As he scrambled to his feet, his first glance was up the track, and discovered the train slowing to a halt.

His next was one of wonder for the countenance of Judith Trine as she stood, at a little distance, regarding him: her look a curious compound of relief, regret, hatred, love.

His third glance described beyond her the figure of Marrophat carrying Rose in his arms, stumbling as he ran toward his car on the highroad.

He moved to pursue, but found his way barred by Judith.

"No!" she cried. "No, you shall not——"

Her hand caught the grip of a revolver that protruded from her pocket.

​"You will never have the courage to pull that trigger when I'm helpless in your hands!"

The hot blood mantled her exquisite face like red fire. She caught her breath with a sob, then flung wildly at him:

"Well, if you must know—it's true. I can't bring myself to kill you. For all that, you shall die—I could not save you if I would! And this I promise you, you shall never see Rose again before you die!"

And while he stood gaping, she ran, quickly covering the little distance between him and the car. As she jumped into this and dropped down upon the seat beside her half-conscious sister, Marrophat swung the car away.

It vanished in a dust-cloud as a throng of railroad employees surrounded and assailed him with clamorous questions.

CHAPTER XXIII
The House Divided

ALONE—chained to the invalid chair wherein, day in, day out, for years on end, he had suffered the Promethean torments of the life that would not die out of his wretched carcass— Seneca Trine sat waiting, with the impassivity of a graven figure.

"Another hour! … In sixty minutes more they will be here, Judith and Marrophat and Rosepoor fool—and him! They will put him down before me, bound and helpless, if not dead …"

A slight pause prefaced words that were a whimpered prayer: "God grant that Alan Law may be laid down still living here at my feet! Then …"

A bitter smile twisted his tortured features. "When I have seen him die as his father died—then—ah, God!—then at last I, too, may die!"

There was a long silence, then a groan of exasperated protest: "Why do they not come? Why does Judith delay? She must have found so many opportunities to leap and strike, why has she always failed? Where is that message she sent me yesterday?"

​His one sound hand groped out and sought a mass of papers on the desk beside him, sorting out from among then two yellow forms. Painfully he blinked over these and slowly his pain-bent lips conned their wording.

"Alan and Rose safe with me—will bring both home to-morrow night without fail," he read the first aloud, and then the second: "Have motor-car waiting for me to-morrow morning from three o'clock till called for—New Bedford waterfront—Judith."

"No!" he affirmed with the fervour of one persuaded by his own desires, "I must not doubt the girl! Patience!" he whispered, and, closing his eyes, rested his head against the back of the chair and was for a long time still. … But when the girl entered softly, as if fearful of disturbing his slumbers, she found him with head erect and eyes ablaze.

"Judith!" he cried, his great voice vibrating like a brazen bell. "At last! You have brought him? Where is he?" The girl dropped her head. After an instant of incredulous disappointment the man shot a single, frigid question at her.

"You have failed?"

"I have failed," she confessed.

"Why?"

She shrugged slightly. "Who knows why one fails? I did my best; he was too much for me, ​outwitted me at every turn, and now I bring you only Rose."

She faltered, awed by the glare of his infuriated eyes. "Let me explain," she begged.

He snapped her short. "There is something beneath this, something you will not tell me."

His hand sought the row of buttons on the desk and pressed one long. Almost instantly a servant glided into the room.

"My daughter Rose—have her brought here to me at once!"

In another moment the replica of his daughter Judith was ushered into his presence.

Upon this one he loosed the lightnings of his wrath without ruth. They met for the first time since she had mutinied against him, and left his roof to go to the lover whose life her father sought.

Rose suffered him in silence. His most galling recrimination educed no retort. But she listened with covert avidity, hoping that some word of his might betray the secret of her lover's fate since she had been torn from his protection. That word, however, did not come before Judith stirred her sister's temper beyond control.

In a lull in Trine's tirade, Judith chose to interject:

"Don't be so hard on the silly fool, she's not responsible, she's sick with love for that good-looking simpleton!"

​"And you!" Rose turned on her passionately. "What about you? If I love Alan Law, at least I love him openly. I'm not ashamed to own it—and I don't pursue him, as you do, pretending I mean to sacrifice him to a wicked family feud, and then spare him, as you do, hoping so to work upon his sympathies. There," she cried to her father, "there stands the daughter who has betrayed your faith."

The retort on Judith's lips was checked by her father's gesture and a word that rang through the room like the tolling of a bell. "Silence!"

Abashed, she averted her face and hung her head.

"I think," Trine announced in a voice of ice, "I have learned now what I needed to know."

His fingers sought the row of buttons, and when a servant responded, he inquired.

"Mr. Marrophat has returned?"

"He is in the waiting-room, sir."

"Conduct Miss Judith Trine to him and tell him I hold him personally responsible for her safekeeping. He will understand."

"Very good, sir."

"No!" Trine silenced Judith's attempt to protest and exculpate herself, "not another word. Go!"

Sullenly the girl obeyed.

And for a long time thereafter the father, alone with Rose, essayed in vain to break down her mutinous silence.

​Only, in the end, he was able to shatter her calm by a remark so uttered as to seem an inadvertent avowal that he had already brought about the assassination of her lover. Even that failed of its purpose, for her taciturnity yielded only to hysteria; and realizing that he wasted breath. Trine summoned two of his creatures and had her led weeping from the room to be held prisoner in her bedchamber on the topmost floor of the house.

CHAPTER XXIV
II—A Sporting Offer

THAT same evening Mr. Alan Law issued forth from the Grand Central Station, hailed a taxi-cab, had himself conveyed to the Hotel Monolith, and registered as Arthur Lawrence.

But it was his true name that he gave to the person whom he called up on the telephone after being shown to his rooms. But then he was speaking to his old friend and man of business, Mr. Digby. Within another ten minutes this last was in conference with his employer.

"I think you must be out of your head," Digby insisted nervously, once their first greetings were over. "You in New York while Trine lives and knows you're this side of the water! It was dangerous enough before, when we had every reason to believe he was satisfied with having caused your father's death. But now——"

He fluttered his hands in a panicky gesture.

"Nonsense!" Alan laughed. "Remember this is New York, with a policeman on every corner!"

"Are you really so infatuated as to repose faith ​in the protective powers of the police?" Digby demanded.

"Well, I saw one of 'em do some rather efficient scrapping this morning!" Alan paused and smote his palm with a remorseful fist. "By the Eternal, I'm forgetting poor Barcus!"

"Barcus?"

"Chap whose boat I chartered into Portland—sheer luck on my part—he's one of the salt of the earth. I left him on the waterfront there at dawn, mixing it up with the police force in order to divert their minds from Rose and me. It's too long to tell now. First, something must be done for the boy. You've got influence of some sort in New Bedford, surely?"

Digby reflected. "There's George Blaine, justice of the peace——"

"The very man! Telegraph him in Barcus's interests immediately. And telegraph Barcus as well. Send him a hundred for expenses and tell him to join me here in New York as quickly as he can!"

"Your friend's address?" Digby inquired, as he sat down at the desk and fumbled with the supply of hotel stationery.

"New Bedford jail, of course!" Alan chuckled, but cut his laugh in two as something fluttered from the pack of envelopes and fell to the floor between the two men. It was a Trey of Hearts.

​"Now will you believe?" Digby demanded huskily,

"In what? A simple coincidence?" Alan flouted. "Take my word for it, this is nothing more nor less than a souvenir of a poker party held by yesterday's tenant of this suite."

"Perhaps—perhaps!" Digby assented, stroking his tremulous lips. "But I'm afraid for you. Do me this favour at least: do leave town—go incognito to some quiet place nearby and wait there for the sailing of the next trans-Atlantic steamer. Oh, surely you can't deny me this one wish of my fond old heart, my boy!"

With unfeigned affection Alan dropped a hand on Digby's shoulder.

"There's nothing on earth I would not do for you," he said. "But this thing—I can't do it, even for you. Rose Trine is here in New York, at the mercy of her father and sister; and you may judge what their mercy will be when you learn all that she has done for me. I can't go until I find her and take her with me."

"I have your word you'll go providing I find and restore Rose to you?"

"You have my word to that, unquestionably. Bring Rose to me, and I'll gladly shake the dust of New York from my shoes, and never return till Trine is dead."

"It shall be done," Digby promised. "It must!"

​"You believe that?"

"In twelve hours Rose shall be restored to you."

"Will you make a book on it? If you believe you can carry out your promise, wire the White Star Line to reserve the best available suite on the Oceanic, sailing to-morrow morning at ten, and make arrangements for a marriage before the boat sails!"

"I'll go you," Digby agreed, "and if I fail, I forfeit the cost of the reservation. But about this marriage—you'll have to have a license in this State—and can't get one except by applying in person with your bride-to-be."

"Then we'll marry in Jersey," Alan insisted. "Dig up some clergyman over there, and tell him to be prepared to earn a heavy honorarium between seven and nine to-morrow morning."

"One moment; give me time to write these wires," Digby pleaded.

And to Alan's surprise the little man proceeded to compose the telegrams as if he really believed in his ability to make good his word.

CHAPTER XXV
The Time o' Night

WITH the further pledge that Alan would hear from him before dawn, the little brown man scuttled away. Not ill-pleased to be left to his own devices (whose proposed character Digby would never have approved had he so much as suspected them), Alan none the less deferred action until after midnight.

It was about one in the morning when he arrived, after taking elaborate precautions, in the neighbourhood of the Riverside Drive and before the home of his mortal enemy, a grim white house that towered, stark and tall, upon a corner. All its windows were dark but one—and that one, in the topmost tier, showed only a feeble glimmer, so slight that Alan almost overlooked it.

He believed with small doubt that Rose was a prisoner within those walls, and, this being the presumptive case, that small, high window of the light might well be hers. That it might equally well be another's was beside the point; the possibility remained, and while this was so he could not rest ​without doing his best to learn the truth. Now one way of accomplishing this offered itself to his fertile and ardent imagination.

Directly across the street from the Trine residence a colossal apartment structure stood half-finished, the gaunt iron skeleton rearing a web of steel stencilled against the shining sky. After certain precautionary maneuvers, Alan approached the watchman's shelter of the unfinished tenement. To his infinite disgust, Alan found the guardian very wide awake. This in itself might have been deemed a suspicious circumstance; not for nothing does an honest night watchman so deny the laws of nature and the tenets of his craft. But Alan overcame with banknotes what seemed an uncommonly stubborn reluctance, and got his way.

He could not know that another skulked behind a barrier of lime barrels and overheard all that passed. All ignorant, the young man addressed himself to an uncommonly unpleasant climb. The ladders were crazily constructed and none too securely poised, but at length he gained the gridiron of girders on a plane with the lighted window across the way, and crept along one of these, gingerly on his hands and knees, until he came to its end, and might, if he cared to, look down a hundred feet to the sidewalks.

That view, however, did not tempt; he kept his eyes level, and was rewarded with a bare glimpse of a ​prettily papered wall framed in the lace of half-drawn curtains. Something moved within the room, but beyond the range of his vision; he saw an indefinite shadow flicker across the wall, but more than that, nothing.

Behind him, grim, ravening death stalked Alan in the darkness. He had not the least suspicion that all was not well.

Of a sudden, the tenant of the room came to the window and stood there looking pensively out, altogether unconscious of the watcher. Was the woman Rose or Judith? That she was one of those he could plainly see. At last she revealed herself by a gesture indelibly stamped on tablets of his memory: a slight gesture of grave dubiety, fingertips lightly touching her lips and cheek. The woman in the window, then, was Rose.

He drew from his pocket a notebook, tore out a blank page, and with the assistance of a ray of moonlight, scrawled a message.

When he looked up from this task, she had vanished.

Sitting astride the girder, he took his watch—a cheap affair he had picked up when reclothing himself in the garments of civilized society at Providence that morning—opened the back of the case, and closed it upon the folded message. Then drawing back his arm, he cast it from him with such force ​that it almost unseated him at the end of the swing. But nothing less would have served to bridge that yawning chasm. And the watch flew, straight and true, squarely through the lighted window and to the farther wall. …

That much he saw, but whether the girl came to the window after picking it up he never knew. In that very instant he heard a sound behind him of heavy breathing. The assassin had come close upon his prey when Alan turned and discovered his peril. Crawling, as Alan had crawled, on hands and knees along the girder, the man had inched up within a yard.

The moonbeam which had aided Alan in the composition of his message struck across the other's face and showed it like a mask of deadly hatred, with its eyeballs glaring and its lips drawn back from the naked blade gripped between its teeth—a stiletto nothing sort of a foot in length.

With a low cry of desperation Alan snatched off his hat, a soft and shapeless felt affair, and flung it squarely in the fellow's face. Before he could recover—before, that is, it dropped away and cleared his vision—Alan had bent forward and grasped the wrist of the hand that held the knife. He snatched simultaneously at the other hand, but it eluded him.

Immediately the two became engaged in a furious contest for possession of the stiletto. Alan had this ​advantage, as long as the knife might not strike, that his right arm was free, while the assassin had only his left. With this he strove to reach his knife-hand and possess himself of the weapon. As persistently Alan foiled his purpose by dragging the knife-hand toward him and swinging it far out to one side. At the same time he struck repeatedly with his clenched right fist at the other's face. As often as not his blows failed to land; when they did land, it was lightly, for the most part; the distance between them was just a bit beyond his reach, the assassin could dodge a blow by drawing back his head, and Alan dared not unlock his feet beneath the girder in order to inch forward within better range. His blows did little damage beyond disconcerting the other, but this proved a very considerable factor in the duel. In the end they served, together with that steady, resistlessly downward and outward drag, to break the grip of the man's locked legs.

He pitched forward on his face along the girder, kicking wildly, grasping at the air. The stiletto fell and disappeared. Before Alan could release his hold, or ease the strain upon the right arm of the assassin, the fellow had slipped from the girder and hung helpless in space, dangling at the end of Alan's arm—with no more than the grip of five fingers between him and death.

Then the battle began anew, but now it was a ​battle with a man half-crazed with fright and struggling so madly that he well-nigh frustrated the efforts of his rescuer.

Its progress remained forever a blank in Alan's memory. He knew that he was doing his best to save an enemy from annihilation: that was all. How he contrived to lift the fellow with his left arm high enough to get a grip on his collar and hold him so until his arms caught the girder and he was able to help himself up—with much assistance—was something inexplicable.

Yet it happened so, in the upshot, the assassin lay like a limp rag across the girder, head and arms hanging on one side, legs and feet on the other, spent with his terrific exertions and physically sick with terror.

In this state Alan left him; he had done enough; let the man shift for himself from this time on. Cautiously crawling over the other's body, he edged along to the head of the ladder. When he looked back from safety, the cut-throat lay as Alan had left him, kicking convulsively. And the window across the way was blank.

Reflecting that little noise had marked the progress of that duel in the dark, that Rose in consequence could hardly have known anything of it, he let himself down story by story to the street, and made off without pausing to see whether the night watchman's blatant slumbers were real or feigned.

CHAPTER XXVI
Changeling

AT DAWN Judith rose and bathed and dressed herself in negligee. In the adjoining room she could hear small, stealthy noises—the sounds made by her sister moving about and preparing against the unguessable moment when her rescue would be attempted, according to the information conveyed in that midnight message.

For, by chance, Judith had been in the recess of her darkened window when Alan edged out along the girder, on the building opposite. Judith recognized him at the moment when he was inditing his message, while grim death stalked him from behind.

She had seen him throw the watch and she had witnessed with wildly beating heart that duel in the air, unable to surmise its outcome only from the fact that the victor spared the life of the vanquished.

The infatuate chivalry of that man! …

A dozen emotions tore at her heart. She was estranged from her father. She was at odds with his creature, Marrophat, because she had repulsed his overtures at love-making. And the old ​contempt in which she had ever held her sister Rose had been transmuted into violent hatred.

And it had been her destiny to learn to love the man who loved her sister and was loved by her in turn.

That she could no longer suffer this state of affairs to endure was the one clear fact on the horizon of her tempestuous soul. The clock was striking six as she left her room; across the street workingmen were about to begin the labours of the day. Brushing past the guard outside the door to Rose's room, Judith turned the key that remained in the lock on the outside, removed it, entered, and locked the door behind her.

Without any surprise she found her sister already dressed to the point of donning her outer garments. Rendered half-frantic by this unexpected interruption, threatening as it did the perilous scheme that Alan had proposed, Rose greeted her sister with a countenance at once aghast and wrathful.

"What do you want?" she demanded. "I insist that you leave this room at once!"

"I may leave this room, and I may not, dear little sister. But one of us will never leave it alive."

"Judith!"

"One moment!" Crossing to a side table, Judith took up a glass from a tray that held a silver water-pitcher, and returned with it to the table that occupied the middle of the floor. At the same time ​she opened a hand till then fast clenched and discovered a small blue bottle with a red label shrieking the warning "POISON!"

"Strychnine," she explained composedly, "in solution," and emptied the bottle into the glass.

A measure of courage returned to Rose. "Do you expect to be able to make me drink that?" she demanded.

"Not I—but Destiny, if it will! See here!" From a pocket of her dressing-gown Judith produced a sealed deck of playing cards. "Let these declare the will of Destiny toward us. I will break the seal, shuffle the cards, and deal," she explained, suiting action to the word. "The one who gets the Trey of Hearts will drain that glass. Is it a bargain?"

"Never! Oh, now I know that you are altogether mad!"

Whipping a small revolver from another pocket of her dressing-gown, Judith placed it on the table, ready to her hand.

"You will shoot me if I do not consent?"

"Not you, but him. If you refuse, little sister, I will shoot Alan Law dead when he comes to keep his appointment with you."

"Ah!" Rose cried in mingled fright and amazement, "how did you find out——"

"Never mind. Is it a bargain?"

With a shudder Rose bowed her head.

​"Deal—and may God judge between us!"

One by one Judith stripped the cards from the top of the deck, dealing first to Rose, then to herself. Twelve had been dealt when she held her hand an instant.

"I have a premonition about thirteen," she said, with a cruel smile for Rose.

But the card that fell to Rose was a Queen of Hearts.

"Another superstition gone smash!" Judith commented, and dealt herself the Trey of Hearts.

Judith's hand moved steadily toward the glass.

"Judith! you cannot mean to drink it?"

With a strangled cry. Rose covered her face with her hands to shut out the sight, stood momentarily swaying, and dropped to the floor in a complete faint.

Judith carried the glass to her lips, but before she could tilt it, her glance darted through the window and saw that which caused her to stay her hand.

On the topmost tier of girders of the building opposite Alan Law stood amid a little knot of amused and animated labourers, one foot in the great steel hook of the hoisting tackle. As Judith stared, he waved a hand to some person invisible.

Immediately the arm began to lift, the tackle to move slowly through the blocks. Very gently he was swung up and outward. ….

With a cry Judith flung the poison from her, leaped ​across the room, snatched up the street garments Rose had dropped, and struggled madly into them.

Before the shadow of Alan, clinging to the hook and chain, fell athwart the window, she was dressed, and clambered out upon the sill.

The hook hung steady within six inches of the window-ledge. Alan extended his arm.

"Nothing to fear, except lest I hold you too tight, dear one!"

Without a word Judith set her foot beside his in the hook, surrendered to his embrace, and closed her eyes. Immediately they were swung away from the window, over toward the opposite sidewalk, and gently lowered to the street.

"Safe and sound—and not a soul over there the wiser as yet," he declared with a derisive nod toward the home of Trine. "Come along! Here's a limousine waiting. In twenty minutes we'll be at the ferry, in forty over in Jersey, within an hour married, within four hours safe at sea!"

She made the need for haste cover her consternation. And when they were safely ensconced in the town-car and swiftly tearing downtown—the time was not yet. She could not declare herself. Nor could she refuse his endearments, who had gone so long athirst for them. So that presently she was returning them passionately—and the infamy of it all was dim and blurred in her understanding.

CHAPTER XXVII
The Ring

THEIRS was the last vehicle to swing between the gates of the Twenty-third Street ferry before these last were closed.

And this was well, for Alan, glancing through the rear window, started involuntarily when he descried a powerful touring-car tearing toward the ferry-house, its one passenger half rising from the front seat, beside the driver, and exhibiting a countenance purple with congested chagrin as he saw his car barred out of the carriage entrance.

The girl caught nervously at Alan's hand.

"What is it, dear?"

He made a gesture of exasperation.

"Marrophat," he snapped.

She uttered a hushed cry of dismay. But at that instant the taxicab rolled aboard the ferry-boat, the deck gates were closed, a hoarse whistle rent the roaring silence of the city, winches rattled and chains clanked, and the boat wore ponderously out of its slip.

"So much for Mr. Marrophat!" Alan crowed, sitting ​down. "Foiled again! But what I want to know is how the deuce did he get such an accurate line on my plans? How did he know that I was coming here, to the Erie Ferry? It passes me. However, he can't stop us now."

"This isn't the only ferry. There's the Pennsylvania and the Lackawanna—and by hard driving he might even manage to catch the boat that connects with this from the Christopher Street ferry of the Erie!"

"Impossible! I don't believe it! I won't!"

But the incident had served appreciably to chill their spirits. They accomplished the remainder of that voyage in a silence that was ho less depressed because they sat hand in hand throughout.

Nor was their taxicab three minutes out of the ferry-house on the Jersey shore when the girl's fears were amply justified; a shout from behind drew Alan's head out of the window. Marrophat's touring-car was within fifty yards, and Marrophat, standing on the running-board, was shouting inarticulately and flourishing an imperative hand; while the distance between them was momentarily growing less noticeable—since the taxi-motor was not to be expected to develop sufficient power to maintain its lead on a six-cylinder car of the latest and most powerful model.

As Marrophat's car drew abreast Alan said quietly: ​"Don't be alarmed, I can attend to this gentleman single-handed."

And this he proceeded to demonstrate with admirable ease, even though called upon to do so far sooner than he had thought to be—thanks to Marrophat's harebrained precipitancy. For Trine's first lieutenant now took his life in his hands and in one bound bridged the distance between the flying cars and landed on the taxi's running-board.

"Stop!" he screamed madly. "Stop, I say! You don't know what you're doing! Let me tell you——"

He got that far but no farther. In the same breath Alan had flung wide the door and was at the fellow's throat. There was a struggle of negligible duration. Marrophat was in no way his antagonist's match; within three seconds he threw out both hands, clutched hopelessly at the framework of the cab, and fell heavily to the street.

Simultaneously the touring-car dropped back and stopped.

The taxi sped on and Alan looked back in time to catch a glimpse of a number of loafers lifting Marrophat to his feet.

"Not seriously injured, I fancy," he told the girl. "Worse luck!" he added gloomily.

But it seemed that he was to have greater cause than this to complain of his luck before that ride was ended. Three blocks farther on a tire blew out ​and the taxi slowed down and limped dejectedly to the curb.

Alan and the chauffeur piled out in the same instant, the one standing guard—with an eye out as well for another cab—while the other assessed damages.

"Nothing for it but a new tire, sir," the chauffeur reported sympathetically.

"Go to it," Alan advised him tersely, "and if you make a quick job of it I'll make it worth your while. Here's my card."

The man took the card, and, after a glance at the name, touched his hat with more noticeable respect.

"All right, Mr. Law," he agreed, "anything you say." And forthwith got to work.

The rapidity with which he completed the change of tires proved him an excellent chauffeur, an adept at his craft; but the delay was one disastrous for all that. The touring-car came in sight just as they were off again, but for the time being contented itself with trailing about fifty feet in the rear, while the taxi fled the Hoboken waterfront and found its way into the broader streets of a suburban quarter.

When they were well into this last, the touring-car drew in swiftly and Marrophat, rising in his seat, levelled a revolver over the windshield and fired. The crack of his weapon was coincident with a metallic thud beneath the rear seat of the taxicab. ​

ALAN'S GUN DISAPPEARS WHILE HE SLEEPS.

​

​With a satisfied leer Marrophat settled back and pocketed his revolver.

Surmising that the gasoline tank had been punctured by the bullet, he was inclined to believe that Marrophat hoped to stop the taxicab by depriving it, in course of time, of its fuel. With this in mind he was presently surprised to see Marrophat's car stop and Marrophat himself get down. The brow of a hill intervened, shutting off sight of the blackguard as he knelt and lit a match. It was the girl who gave the alarm, suddenly withdrawing her head from the window.

"He's fired the gasoline! It's flaming along the street, following the line of the leak—and catching up with us."

Without pausing to put his hand to the latch, Alan kicked the door open.

"Jump!" he cried. "For your life—jump! As soon as that flame catches up with the tank——"

Simultaneously the chauffeur, overhearing, shut off the power. The three gained the sidewalk barely in time. In the flutter of an eyelash the explosion followed. There was a roar—and then a heap of smoking ruins.

Without waiting to admire the spectacle, Alan caught the arm of the girl and hurried her up the street. Chance brought them to the next corner as another cab, fareless, hove into view. Promising its ​driver anything he might ask, Alan gave him the address, and helped the girl in. The second car made better time than the first, and soon swept up to a corner house of modest and homely aspect. Two minutes more, and Alan was exchanging salutations with Digby's good friend, the Reverend Mr. Wright.

Embarrassment worked confusion with the young man's perceptive faculties. He was dimly aware of a decently furnished minister's study; of two witnesses, womenfolk of the minister's household; of the Reverend Mr. Wright himself as a benevolent voice rolling sonorously forth from a black-clad presence; of the woman of his heart standing opposite him; of questions asked and responses made; of a ring that was magically conjured from some store apparently maintained against precisely similar emergencies; of a hand that took the hand that was to be his wife's and placed it in his; of his clumsy and witless bungling with the task of fitting that ring to the finger of his sweetheart's hand. …

And then a door banged violently in the hallway; a man's voice made some indistinguishable demand; Rose's hand was suddenly whipped away before he could fit on the ring; the study door was flung open, and Marrophat precipitated himself into the room.

"You fool! Drop that ring! Stop this farce! Don't you know who you're marrying? That woman is Judith Trine—not Rose!"

​Blankly Alan turned to the girl. The manner and look of Rose had dropped from her like a cast garment, confessing the truth of Marrophat's assertion. And as if this were not enough, Judith confessed it doubly with a sudden outbreak of characteristic rage.

"You devil!" she cried to Marrophat. "Keep out of my way forever after this, or take the consequences! God knows," she panted, "why I don't kill you as you stand!"

The front door slammed behind the girl.

When Alan, the first to recover, gained the sidewalk, she was already in the taxicab. Whatever reward she had promised the man, he whipped his machine away as if from the fear of sudden death. Darting from the house, Marrophat leaped into his own car and tore off in pursuit.

CHAPTER XXVIII
Mock Rose

TAKING the dazed young man by the hand, as though he had been a child, the Reverend Mr. Wright led Alan back to his study and established him in a comfortable armchair beside his desk.

At the elbow of the Reverend Mr. Wright a telephone shrilled. With a gesture of professional patience he turned to the instrument, lifted the receiver to his ear, and spoke in musically modulated accents:

"Yes; this is Mr. Wright. … Ah, you, Mr. Digby. … Not coming? But, my dear sir, Mr. Law is already here. I must tell you——"

"If you please," Alan begged, "let me speak to Digby at once. Forgive me——"

Reluctantly the minister surrendered the telephone.

"That you, Digby?"

"Alan! Bless my soul, what are you doing over there?"

"Rose? What about her?" Alan demanded, stammering with anxiety.

"Why—one of my spies has just reported by telephone. He saw a young woman—either Rose or ​Judith—climb out of one of the basement windows of Trine's house this morning. Then several rough-looking customers rushed out of Trine's house, seized the girl, and made off with her in a motor-car bearing a New Jersey license number."

Without a word of response, and without a word of apology to the Reverend Mr. Wright, Alan dropped the receiver and fled that house like a man demented.

There was neither a motor-car in sight nor any time to waste in seeking one. Alan could only hope to find one on his way back toward the ferry. He traversed a vast amount of strange territory, and it must have been upward of an hour before he came into a street which he recognized.

As he paused, to cast about him for the way to the ferry, a touring-car turned a corner at top-speed and slowed to a stop before an unsavoury tenement. This touring-car was occupied by half a dozen ruffians in whose hands a young girl struggled, as they jumped out and wrestled her out with brutal inconsideration.

Like a shot Alan had crossed the street, but only to bring up nose to the panels pf the tenement door, and to find himself seized and thrown roughly aside by a burly denizen when he grasped the knob and made as if to follow in.

"Keep back, young feller!" his assailant warned him.

​To the speaker's side another ranged, eying Alan with a formidable scowl. An elbow planted heavily in the pit of the stomach of one disposed of him for the time being. A blow from the shoulder sent the other reeling to the gutter. And Alan was in the tenement's lowermost hall. Sounds of scuffling feet were audible on the first landing. Alan addressed himself impetuously to the staircase, gaining its top in half a dozen leaps, and only in time to see a door slammed at the forward end of the hall and hear a key turned in its lock.

A cluster of men blocked his way. He threw himself headlong into their midst, and gained the closed door before they sought to stay him.

He shook the knob and shouted: "Rose! Rose!"

Her cry came back to him, a muffled scream: "Alan! Help! Help!"

Backing away with a mad idea of throwing himself bodily against the door and breaking it down, he was suddenly confronted by a hideously menacing face.

Without the hesitation of a heart-beat Alan swung heavily for the thug's jaw. The blow went solidly home. The man fell like a poled ox.

Pendemonium ensued. Rallying to their comrade, the ruffians attacked Alan with one mind and one intent. Simultaneously the lamp on the wall was struck from its bracket and crashed to the floor, ​its glass well breaking and loosing a flood of kerosene to receive the burning wick. The explosion followed instantly. In a trice the hallway was a lake of burning oil.

Still fighting like a madman, contesting every foot of the way, Alan was borne downstairs by the fleeing mob and out of the front door. The doorway vomited men and women of the tenement. By the time they left the way clear a solid wall of flame stood behind it.

Thrice Alan essayed to pass that barrier of fire, and thrice it threw him back.

Then drawing aside, he endeavoured to come to his sober senses, and cast about for some more feasible way to effect the rescue of his Rose.

That way was revealed to him in another instant.

The tenement occupied one corner of a narrow street and directly opposite stood a storage warehouse. Before this last was the common landing stage for truck deliveries protected by a shed roof. And, suspended from a timber that peered out over the eaves, a hoisting tackle dragged the ground with its ropes.

It was the work of another minute to rig a loop in the line and fasten it round his body beneath the arms. Volunteers did not lack—a couple of husky longshoremen sprang to the ropes. They heaved with a will. His feet left the ground. He caught the ​eaves of the shed roof and drew himself up on this last, back a little way down it, and calculating his direction nicely, with a running jump launched himself out over the street.

The momentum of his leap carried him truly toward that window where Rose was waiting. Then its force slackened. For an awful instant he believed that he had failed. But with the last expiring ounce of impetus he was brought within grasping distance of the window-sill.

Hauling himself up, he gathered her into his arms. …

A great tongue of flames licked angrily out of the window as he swung her back to safety.

CHAPTER XXIX
Jailbird

THE period of restraint in durance vile suffered by one Thomas Barcus proved in the upshot far more brief than had been fondly hoped not only by his just judge but, singularly enough, by the misdemeanant himself.

"Ten days' rest will do me no harm," he assured himself. So meditating, he committed himself, body and soul, to the sleep he so sorely needed. But his rest was to be by no means so long. He was sentenced at 10 a. m., and it was little short of 10 p. m. of the same day when his repose was disturbed by the rattle of a key in the lock of the door to his cell.

Sitting up, Mr. Barcus rubbed his eyes and combed his hair with his fingers.

"What did I tell you?" he observed resignedly. "It begins again already. …"

He was conducted to the presence of the judge himself, who at once ordered his release.

"If only you had told me you were a friend of Mr. Digby's," the judge hastened to say as soon as the ​two were ensconced in the privacy of the judicial limousine, "I would have known better how to guide myself in this unfortunate affair. As it is, I can only assure you of my profound regret that I was not better advised. And I trust sincerely that you will not fail to tell Mr. Digby that I acted immediately on receipt of his telegram."

"Rest easy, I won't forget," Barcus promised him enigmatically, at pains to cover the truth that Digby was nothing more to him than the name of Alan Law's man of business.

"This is what Mr. Digby says," the judge replied, laboriously deciphering the message by the light of a match: "'Please see to immediate release of one Thomas Barcus probably in jail in your jurisdiction for rioting on waterfront this morning. Pay his fine and instruct him to report to me in New York at earliest feasible hour. Give him all the money he wants and look to me for remuneration'——"

The private comment of Barcus to this was: "I've suspected that this was a fairy-tale all along. Now I know it is!"

Not until a sound night's sleep had topped off the beginning of his rest in jail did Barcus come down to earth. He demonstrated his return to common sense by making a round breakfast in Grand Central Station before looking up the residence of Digby in the telephone directory, reasoning that, if he was to ​rejoin his fortunes to those of Alan Law, it was best to be fortified in every conceivable way before delivering himself anew to a career of peril and privation.

The information he garnered from Mr. Digby over the telephone shook only momentarily Barcus's conviction that intimate acquaintance with battle, murder, and sudden death was the inevitable reward of association with this friend of his heart.

"Alan being married to Rose Trine in Jersey City at this very minute!" he breathed, as he emerged from the booth memorizing the address of the officiating clergyman. "I don't believe it; the course of true love can't be running as smooth as all that. Why, its impossible! Alan hasn't ridden the tidal wave yet, nor tamed the bucking earthquake! He has thus far flirted with death in little more than two-score different forms; if this is his finish, he's a rank quitter—hardly half a hero!"

Forthwith he engaged a taxicab to convey him to Jersey City.

"I'd give my earldom," he asseverated, "rather than miss the eruption, or whatever it is, that is bound to take place just in time to crab this unnatural dénouement!"

And when he beheld a dense volume of smoke advertising a conflagration on the Jersey shore, he shook a sagacious head.

​"If Alan isn't mixed up in that somehow," he declared, "I'm a sorry failure as a prophet of woe and disaster!"

There was as much intuitive apprehension as humour responsible for this remark; witness the fact that, on landing, he risked the delay required to turn aside and have a look at the fire.

It proved to be situated in the heart of a squalid slum. The firemen had already given up all hope, apparently, of saving anything but the adjoining buildings; that they had done their best was shown by the tangle of apparatus that cumbered the space within the fire-lines.

Mr. Barcus viewed the scene for some moments; then, tolerably satisfied that there was nothing here to excuse his "hunch" about Alan Law, was on the point of instructing his chauffeur to drive on when his attention was attracted by a curious movement in the throng of sightseers. A number of men began to force their way in a V-shaped wedge through the throng, making toward its very heart, the point on the fire-lines nearest the burning building.

What this meant, Mr. Barcus had not the slightest idea. But his attention was fixed by the face of a man who was following in the hollow of the V—an evil white face that seemed somehow vaguely familiar. It was several seconds before Barcus identified it as the face of the man who had borne Judith Trine ​away in a motor-car from the New Bedford wharf the previous morning: beyond doubt one of Seneca Trine's first lieutenants.

At the same time, at the point where the V had paused, a wild uproar lifted up. A cry was audible—"Firebug! Lynch him! Lynch the firebug!" And at this the mob turned and streamed away in pursuit of an invisible quarry, who chose to attempt his escape by a route directly opposite to that which would have led him within view of Mr. Barcus.

Barcus was on the point of stepping out of his cab when he was stayed by sight of the evil white face returning, still in the hollow of the flying V. And now Barcus saw that the man of the white face was not alone. There was a woman with him. And, Barcus reflected, why might not this be Rose Trine, suffering new persecution at the hands of her unnatural father's creatures?

He was too far away to make sure, but he pointed White Face out to his chauffeur as the V reached a touring-car and the woman was lifted in (unresisting and apparently in a dead faint), and when the touring-car started away the taxicab of Mr. Barcus trailed it.

Ten minutes later, from the rear deck of a ferry-boat in midstream, a boat bearing back to New York not only the touring-car of White Face but the cab of Mr. Barcus, the latter gentleman witnessed an ​incident of uncommon character, even for New York, wherein (we're told) anything may happen, and most things do.

He saw a young man, hatless, coatless, almost shirtless, tear down to the end of one of the Jersey wharves, his heels snapped at by a ravening rabble, which he was so desperately anxious to escape that he dived headforemost into the greasy, tide-twisted river.

He took the water neatly, came up ininjured and clear-headed, and without an instant's hesitation struck away toward the middle of the Hudson. But he was not to make his getaway so easily. In a moment it was seen that he was being rapidly overtaken by a couple of harbour policemen in a dory.

During the breathless suspense of that chase the ferry-boat drew stolidly farther and still farther away from the scene. Barcus could not tell whether, as it seemed, the police-laden dory was really overhauling the swimmer, or whether the illusion of perspective deceived him. At all events, it seemed a frightfully near thing when the interruption befell which alone could have saved the man whom Barcus believed to be none other than Alan Law.

Out of the very sky dropped a hydroplane, cutting the water with a long graceful curve that brought it, almost at a standstill, directly to the head of the ​swimmer, and at the same time forced the police-boat to sheer wildly off in order to escape collision.

Immediately the swimmer caught the pontoon of the hydroplane, pulled himself up out of the water, and clambered to the seat beside the aviator. Before he was fairly seated the plane was swinging back into its fastest pace. With the ease of a wild goose it left the water, described a wide circle above the bluffs of Weehawken, and swept away southward. In that quarter it was presently lost to the sight of Mr, Barcus, who gravely lifted his hat in parting salutation.

"You are a brave man, my friend," he apostrophized the spirit of Alan Law, "and an uncommon lucky one, and a bit of a damn fool into the bargain. But the more I see of you the more firmly I believe your own assertion that you were born to be hanged!"

CHAPTER XXX
Bird-man

ABOUT eight o'clock in the evening of the same day a motor-car deposited at the Hotel Monolith a gentleman whose weather-beaten and oil-stained motoring-cap and duster covered little clothing more than shirt and trousers and assorted oddly in the eyes of the desk-clerk with the rather meticulously turned-out guest known to him as Mr. Arthur Lawrence, and to the management of the hotel as Mr. Alan Law incognito.

Eventually persuaded, the clerk yielded up the key to Mr. Lawrence's suite of rooms together with two notes superscribed with the same nom de guerre.

The first proved to be a characteristic communication:

"Dear Ulysses:—Thanks for the jail delivery. When I saw you snatched out of the North River this morning I was engaged in trailing a pale-faced villain in a motor-car; he was a bold, bad kidnapper; Rose was in his power, as we say in such cases. I sleuthed after 'em, even to the house of Seneca Trine. ​Latter followed a furtive young man from the house of Trine to the office of the general manager of the New York Central, where he made arrangements for a special to convey the said Trine and retinue to Chicago. It leaves at three o'clock this afternoon. I was unable to ascertain whether Rose is to participate in this hegira, but I know I shall. I have bribed the train-crew to let me impersonate the porter. So, should you be moved to follow and succeed in catching up with us, and observe anybody who looks rather off-colour in the party, don't shoot, the said body will be Me.

"Yours for the quiet life,⁠
"Tom Barcus."

The second note was a mere hurried scrawl:

"They are taking me West by special train—I don't know where or why. A servant has promised to see that this reaches you. Save me!"

Over this Alan wrinkled an incredulous nose. The hand was the hand of Rose, but the phraseology was not in her spirit. He picked up the envelope to compare the handwriting of the address with that of the enclosure—and shook out a Trey of Hearts. This last was covered, as to its face, with a plainly written message:

"With the compliments of Seneca Trine to Alan Law. We are due in Chicago at eleven to-morrow ​morning and leave immediately for the Pacific Coast via Santa Fé Route."

Comparison between this and the message purporting to be from Rose distilled the conviction that the same hand was responsible for both.

Alan shrugged. So he was to be lured away from New York and Rose by this transparent trick, was he? No fear! But—he had a plan!

Promptly Alan called up the Aviation Fields at Hempstead Plains and got into communication with a gentleman answering to the surname of Coast, the same bird-man who had come to Alan's rescue with his hydroplane. Their arrangements were quickly consummated. Coast agreeing to wait for Alan with his biplane in Van Cortlandt Park from midnight till daybreak, prepared if need be to undertake a trans-continental flight.

Another man would have needed twelve hours in bed at the least to compensate for such a day; Mr. Law after three hours of sleep awakened in a lamb-like temper when called at 11:30.

At midnight he committed an act of burglarly, calmly and with determination breaking his way into the house of Seneca Trine through the area windows and basement.

Nothing hindered and none opposed him. He explored the dwelling minutely, room by room, story ​by story, intent on one subject only—to find Rose Trine, or else make sure she was not there.

He negotiated the flight of steps which led to the topmost floor with extraordinary stealth, advised thereto by a sound which had theretofore been inaudible to him. Possibly the manservant whom he fovind snoring in a chair outside a closed door had not fallen asleep and begun to snore until the moment when Alan set foot upon the lower step of that final ascent.

Turning the head of the stairs, Alan paused, intent on this man who must somehow be disposed of before he might solve the riddle of that shut and guarded door.

Aside from actual violence no solution offered to the puzzle; and violence was abruptly forced upon him.

No sound warned him of the door that opened at his back as he stood watching the sleeping guard. A piercing shriek was the first intimation received that his presence had been discovered. A glance over-shoulder showed him the figure of a maid-servant, her mouth still wide and full of sound, and Alan fell upon the guard like a thunderbolt. The man had barely time to jump up when a fist caught him on the point of his jaw, and he returned to unconsciousness.

Backing off, Alan took a short run and flung ​himself full-force against the door. With a splintering crash it broke inward, and without dignity or decorum he sprawled on all fours into the presence of Judith Trine.

Picking himself awkwardly up, Alan flushed crimson with embarrassment to find himself confronting this woman who had come so unwillingly to accord him her love and had fought so passionately to win him from her sister.

For her part, Judith laughed mockingly.

"Poor Mr. Law! Always disappointed. Believe me, I am sorry, for once, it is I and not Rose whom you find locked up here! For I am locked up by way of punishment—thanks to my having had pity on you once too often—while my father decamped mysteriously for parts unknown."

"You don't know where he's gone, then?"

"Do you?" she asked sharply.

"In a general way, by special train to the West——"

"Taking Rose?"

"So I'm told."

The woman choked upon her anger, but quickly mastered it.

"He shall pay for this!" she asseverated.

"Your father? I wish him nothing more nor less than your enmity," Alan assured her civilly. "But since it seems that he has gone, and Rose with him, if you'll forgive me, I think I'll be going——"

​"Then be advised, and take me with you."

"In what capacity, please? As enemy or—ally?"

"As ally—you're right, we can't be friends—until we overtake that special train. After that, by your leave, I'll shift for myself."

"It's not such a bad notion," he reflected, "with you under my eye, you can't do much to interfere——"

"If I promise——" she suggested.

"I'll take your word," he agreed simply. "But you're in for a lot of hardship, I'm afraid. The one way to catch up with your father is by aeroplane."

"Don't consider me as a woman when it comes to hardship."

"I've no reason to, going on what I know of you."

"Give me one minute to find my coat and hat. …"

The police, summoned by the maid, entered the front door as the two crept out of the area window.

CHAPTER XXXI
As A Crow Flies

ALAN had plenty of time for thought. Speech was impossible while the biplane was in motion, and it was seldom otherwise, but only infrequently at pause when the necessity for replenishing its store of oil and gasoline would force it to descend.

Between whiles the plane flew fast and high, as the crow flies, athwart the Eastern and Middle Western States.

Chicago they saw as a smudge on the northern horizon about one o'clock in the afternoon; thereafter some little time was lost in descents to ascertain the identity of the many railroad lines.

And it was some hours later, though still daylight, when they picked up the special flying like a hunted thing across the levels, on the line of the Santa Fé.

Alan contrived to focus his binoculars upon the rear platform of the car and saw a white-coated figure with a black face that was watching the biplane in the same manner—that is, with glasses. It was the right train then!

And the man in the white coat was Barcus.

​And hardly had he comforted himself with this assurance when the motor stopped. The aviator merely shook a weary head and muttered the words: "Engine trouble."

Swiftly the earth rose to receive the volplaning mechanism. Under Coast's admirable handling the biplane settled down on the outskirts of a city whose name Alan never learned.

Barely were they down before he was out and making his way toward the manager's office connected with the adjacent train-yard.

Judith followed him like a shadow.

Lavish disbursement of money won him his way. Within twenty minutes Alan and Judith were spinning through open country in the cab of an engine running light, with only clear track between it and the special.

The several hours that ensued before the lights of the special appeared were none too many for the task of overcoming the scruples of the engineer and fireman. But convinced (at least outwardly) that they were not dealing with a lunatic, they at length accepted his money and his promise of a life pension should they lose their jobs, and, disregarding signals, brought the light engine rapidly up toward the rear of the special.

Within a few hundred feet of the special, Alan saw first one figure hurtle over the rear rail, fall to the ​tracks, and scramble off just in time to escape annihilation. A blur of white remained on the back platform, and Alan understood that Barcus had merely been clearing the way of Trine's guards. Another minute, and less than fifty feet separated the two trains. Then Alan crept out alongside of the boiler. It seemed an hour before he worked himself up to the cow-catcher, now within four feet of the rear platform of the special. On this last he could see a woman's figure, and beside her a man in a white coat, clinging for dear life to the knob of the door, holding it shut against the frantic efforts of some person inside.

Another hour of suspense dragged out—or such was the effect—while the light engine bridged these four scant feet.

At length it was feasible to attempt the thing. Rose was half over the rail of the car ahead, ready to jump. Straining forward and holding on to a bar so hot that it scorched his palm, he offered a hand to the girl on the rail.

Her hand fell confidently into it. She jumped. His arm wound round her as she landed on the platform of the cow-catcher. He heard her breathe his name, then passed her to the footway at the side. The fireman was waiting there to help her. Alan turned his attention to Barcus.

To his dismay he found that the engine was losing ​ground. The space was widening as Barcus released the knob and threw himself over the rail. By a flying leap, the man gained the platform. Then their engine ground slowly to a halt as the rear lights of the train swept from sight around a bend.

And then the engineer, backed by his fireman, started an argumentative complaint. "They hadn't bargained to be shot at with pistols," and so forth, and so forth. But while engineer and fireman were "chewing the rag like a couple of sea-lawyers," as Mr. Barcus elegantly phrased it, there came a diversion.

Revolvers began to pop once more. And they looked up the track to see the special backing down upon them, several persons on the back platform plying busy trigger-fingers all the while.

As these last threw open the platform gates and dropped to the ballast, still perforating the air with many bullets, all those under fire turned simultaneously and sought shelter at the rear of the tender. At a word from Alan, Barcus and the two girls ran on with him around the engine, and, undiscovered, made for the special now close at hand on the track ahead. It began to move forward as they reached it, but they scrambled aboard somehow. Mr. Barcus who had acted as rear-guard, or at any rate bullet-shield, for the others, heaved a heartfelt sigh as he ​sat down heavily on a camp-chair and mopped his brow, while the lights of the locomotive dropped swiftly back into the gloaming. The fact that several of the figures grouped round it continued to fire their revolvers at the fast-departing special troubled him not at all.

"If any of those guys," he assured Mr. Law presently, "could hit a barn door with a Gatling gun at twenty paces—well, I wouldn't be proving myself the giddy ass I am by sticking to your ill-starred fortunes. There wouldn't be any to stick to, because you'd have been snuffed out long, long ago—with all the chances they've had to blow your fool head off!"

CHAPTER XXXII
Pullman

COME inside," Law suggested, "and introduce me to the brakeman. I presume I've got to fix things up with him——"

"If there's really any doubt in your mind as to that," Barcus said, rising, "I don't mind telling you you're right."

"He's approachable?"

"Is he?" Barcus laughed. "Would I be here if he wasn't? He's so approachable he meets you at your own front door. Never in all his life has anything happened to him like this, he's already figuring on buying a house in Flatbush with the coin he's grafted off of me since we came to an understanding. Ever so often his conscience begins to reproach him, and that's my high-sign to dig and come through."

He paused as Alan entered the car before him and was greeted by a storm of vituperation that fairly blistered the panels of the Pullman. Mr. Seneca Trine, helpless in his invalid chair, was celebrating this introduction to the young man whom he had ​never before seen but whose life he had schemed to take these many years. His heavy voice boomed and echoed through the car like the sounding of a tocsin. …

Alan made no effort to respond, but listened with his head critically to one side and an exasperating expression of deep interest informing his countenance until Mr. Trine was out of breath and vitriol; when the younger man bowed with the slightest shade of mockery in his manner and waved a tolerant hand to Barcus.

"He has, no doubt," Alan inquired, "his own private cell aboard this car?"

"Yas, suh," Barcus agreed, aping well the manners of his apparent caste and colour. "Ain't dat de troof?" he chuckled.

"Take him away, then," Alan requested wearily— "if you please."

"Yas, suh," Barcus replied, with nimble alacrity, seizing the back of the wheeled chair and swinging it around for a spin up the length of the car.

Before Trine had recovered enough to curse him properly, the door to his drawing-room was closed and Barcus was ambling back down the aisle.

His grin of relish at this turning of the tables on the monomaniac proved, however, short-lived. It erased itself in a twinkling when Judith shouldered roughly past him, wearing a sullen and forbidding ​countenance, and flung herself into the drawing-room with her father.

"Storm signals," mused Mr. Barcus. "What possessed our dear friend to bring that tigress along, I'd like to know. He might as well have loaded himself down with a five-gallon can of nitro-glycerine."

The cause of her temper was not far to seek: at the far end of the car Alan was bending solicitously over the chair in which Rose was resting. One of his arms was around her shoulder. Her face was lifted confidently to his.

Mr. Barcus saw no more. He turned delicately away, and set himself to round out two of the compartments formerly dedicated to the uses of Trine's creatures, preparing them for the accommodation of Rose and Alan. Judith, he decided, might shift for herself; he owed that young woman nothing—or, if anything, a dozen or so narrow squeaks for her life, such as those to which she had gratuitously treated him.

He mused morosely on his apprehension of trouble a-brew, simmering over the waxing fire of that strange woman's jealousy. He didn't like the prospect at all. If only Alan and Rose had not been so desperately in love that they couldn't keep away from one another! If only Alan had been sensible enough to outwit the woman and leave her behind when he ​started in pursuit of the special! If only there had not been that light engine in pursuit—as Barcus firmly believed it must be—loaded to the guards with Trine's unscrupulous hirelings!

No telling when they might not catch up!

The fear of this last catastrophe worked, together with his fears of Judith, to make that night almost a sleepless one for Barcus. He spent it in a chair whence he could watch both the door to the compartment Judith had chosen for her own (formerly Marrophat's room), and the endless ribbons of steel that swept beneath the trucks, and, shining fugitively in the light from the observation platform, streamed away into the darkness astern.

But nothing happened. He napped uneasily from time to time, waking with a start of fright, but only to find nothing amiss. Ever Judith stopped behind that closed door, and ever the track behind was innocent of the glare of a pursuing headlight.

Later he had cause to believe that Judith, during one of his cat-naps, had stolen out of that door and had managed to get into most effective communication with the engine-crew and brakeman. Unquestionably these three had been quite content with Alan's liberal-handed contributions to their bank-accounts up to that hour. Furthermore, they had his promise of a munificent reward if they finished the run to California, to say nothing of the word of ​Law, son of the railroad builder, that they would be protected in event of losing their jobs through any contingency of this mad adventure.

Certainly, Barcus thought afterward, nothing but a greater bid from Trine, through Judith, substantiated by a heavy advance on account, could have won their allegiance from Alan. …

Whether Judith was responsible or not, this is what happened in the course of the next morning: the special was forced to take a siding to make way for the California Limited Eastbound; and when this had passed, the engine of the special coughed apologetically and pulled swiftly out, leaving the Pullman stalled on the siding.

From the rear of the tender the brakeman and fireman waved affecting farewells to the indignant faces of Alan and Barcus when they showed in the front doorway.

CHAPTER XXXIII
Hand-car

WELL!" Mr. Barcus broke a silence whose eloquence may not be translated in print. "Can you beat it?"

"Not with this outfit," Alan admitted gloomily.

"But, damn it! We've got to!"

"Profanity—even yours, my friend—won't make this Pullman move without an engine."

"All the same we can't stop here waiting for that gang of things to return in the light engine and cut our blessed throats."

Mr. Law answered this unanswerable contention only with a shrug. Then, stepping out on the forward platform of the Pullman, he cast a hopeless eye over the landscape. Then he lowered his gaze to the tracks and siding—and started sharply.

"Eh, what now?" Barcus inquired.

"Some thoughtful body has left an old hand-car over there in the ditch," Alan replied. "Maybe it isn't beyond service—looks as if it might work. Come along and lend me a hand."

​

THE DRUNKEN GUIDE BETRAYED HIS IDENTITY TO ROSE.

​

IT WAS A STRANGE MEETING BETWEEN THE SISTERS.

​"Half a minute," Barcus answered, dodging suddenly back into the car.

When he reappeared, after some five minutes, Rose accompanied him, and Barcus was smiling.

"Sorry to keep you waiting, old top," he explained, "but I was smitten with an inspiration. There didn't seem to be any sense in letting the amiable Judith loose upon this fair land, so I found a coil of wire in the porter's closet and wired the handle of the drawing-room door fast to the bars across the aisle. It'll take her some time to get out."

"What about the window?"

"It doesn't open wide enough for anybody but a living skeleton to get through."

"You don't yet know the lady," said Alan with grim foreboding.

Ten minutes more had passed before the two grimy and perspiring gentlemen succeeded in placing the hand-car upon the tracks. Far back along the line a locomotive hooted mournfully.

"That's a freight whistle," Barcus advised, helping Rose aboard the hand-car.

"Maybe you can distinguish the whistle of a freight-car locomotive from that of a passenger-train engine. I don't say you can't, but I'll take no chance on your judgment being good. Hop aboard here, if you're coming with us!"

Groaning soulfully, Barcus hopped aboard.

​"It isn't the hard work I mind," he explained, laying hold of the handle-bar; "it's my silly pride, it's this swift descent from the sublime to the utilitarian that irks me. Think of it: yesterday a Pullman porter, to-day a donkey engine!"

None the less, he put a willing back into the work. Slowly the hand-car gathered momentum and surged noisily up the track as Alan and Barcus, on opposite sides of the handle-bar, alternately rose and fell back; slowly it mounted the slight grade to the bend in the track, rounded it, lost sight of the stalled Pullman on the siding, and began to move more swiftly on a moderate down-grade.

Behind it the thunder of an approaching train grew momentarily in volume. But just as Alan was about to advocate leaving the tracks to clear the way for the train, its rumble began to diminish and gradually was stilled.

"What do you make of that?" Alan panted.

"The freight has taken the siding to wait for some through train to pass. We'll have to look sharp and be ready to jump."

Five minutes later a second whistle, of a different tone, startled them.

"Afraid it's all up with us now," Alan groaned, "that sounded precisely like the whistle of the light engine."

"Sure it did!" Barcus agreed. "It wouldn't be ​us if we had any better luck. The saints be praised for this down-grade!"

The hand-car made a very fair pace, at the urge of the two, and the grade was happily long, turning and twisting like a snake through the hills.

Moreover, it seemed that the light engine had stopped at the siding long enough to couple up Trine's Pullman. It was fully a quarter of an hour before a growing rumble warned the trio on the hand-car, just as it gained the end of the grade. At this point discovery of the switch of a spur-line that shot off southward into the hills furnished Alan with an inspiration.

Stopping the hand-car after it had jolted over the frogs, he jumped down, set the switch to shunt the pursuit off upon the spur, and leaped back upon the car. Meeting his eye, Barcus nodded his approval. The stratagem served them. The special took the switch without pause, and the roar of its progress, shut off by an intervening mountain, was suddenly stilled to a murmur.

But even so there was neither rest for the weary nor much excuse for self-congratulation: the rumble of the special was not altogether lost to hearing when the thunder of the freight drowned it out. Then Alan stood up and signed to Barcus to imitate his example.

"Jump off—leave the hand-car where it is—they'll have to stop to clear it off the track."

​"And then——"

"I'll buy a lift from them," Alan promised. "It's our only hope. We can't keep up this heart-breaking business forever, and it can't be long before Trine and Marrophat discover their mistake!"

CHAPTER XXXIV
Caboose

SO GREAT is the power of money that it was not more than ten minutes before Rose was settled to rest in such comfort as the caboose on the end of the freight train afforded, while Alan and Barcus sat within its doorway and smoked, mutely speculating on the length of time that would elapse before the special train again appeared, and whether they dared hope its occupants would fail to notice the abandoned hand-car and draw the logical inference.

An hour passed without event, and evening drew its shades athwart the barren and inhospitable wastes of tumbled hills and arid plains. All seemed well, and no one aboard the freight suspected that, in the box-car next forward of the caboose, a woman in man's clothing lay perdue, chuckling impishly to herself in anticipation of the time and event she was biding with such patience as she could muster—time and event alike being hidden from her understanding.

Oh, most assuredly the time would come! Mark how events had already played into her hands, how Barcus had held her prisoner in the compartment ​long enough to permit her hurriedly to change from her proper dress to a suit of Marrophat's; how she had finally managed to wriggle out of the broken window without being injured; how her father had welcomed her and taken her donning that attire in earnest of her vow to him never again to weaken in the business he required of her; how the freight, pausing at the siding, had afforded her an opportunity to board it unseen—the very train upon which her enemies now rested in fancied security!

And already she had a plan …

Conning it, she hugged herself in malicious glee, blinding herself deliberately to the hideous business that might attend her success, forcing herself to remember one thing only—the pledge she had renewed on her knees to her father.

The whistle of a locomotive overtaking the freight sounded the signal for her to take action. Rising, she glanced out of the open door. A curve in the track below the freight, labouring slowly up a steep grade, enabled her to catch a glimpse of a headlight followed by a string of lighted windows—the special, beyond a doubt.

Without hesitation, since the train was not running at speed, she dropped out to the ballast, wheeled about, caught the hand-bar at the end of the box-car as it passed, and swung herself up between it and the caboose. Climbing to the top of the box-car, she ​peered through the gloaming and discerned two heads protruding from the windows of the special's engine, one on either side.

At a venture she snatched off her coat and waved it in the air. An arm answered the signal from one window of the pursuing locomotive.

Marrophat, of course!

She turned and peered ahead. The freight was approaching a trestle that spanned a wide and shallow gully. So much the better!

Dropping down again between the cars, she set herself to uncoupling the caboose. In this she was successful just as the last car rolled out on the trestle.

Its own impetus carried the caboose to the middle of the trestle before it stopped. As this happened, Alan and Barcus, already warned by the slowing down of the car, and alive to the fact that the special was in pursuit, leaped out upon the ties and helped Rose to alight.

Already the last of the freight was whisking off the trestle. And behind them the special was plunging forward at unabated speed. There was no time to reach either end of the trestle.

With common impulse the two men glanced down to the bottom of the gully, then looked at each other with eyes informed by common inspiration.

Barcus announced in a breath: "Thirty-feet, not more."

​Alan replied: "Can you hold the weight of the two of us for half a minute?"

Barcus shrugged: "I can try. We might as well—even if I can't."

While speaking, he was lowering himself between the ties.

"All right," he announced briefly.

With a word to Rose, Alan slipped down beside Barcus, shifted his hold to the body of the latter, and climbed down over him until he was supported solely by the grasp of his two hands on Barcus's ankles. Instantly Rose followed him, slipping down over the two men till she in turn hung by her grasp on Alan's ankles. Then she released her hold and dropped the balance of the distance to the ground, a scant ten feet, landing without injury.

A thought later Alan dropped lightly at her side, staggered a trifle, recovered, and dragged her out of the way. Then Barcus fell heavily and went upon his back, but immediately picked himself up and joined the others in a scramble for safety.

Overhead the special engine struck the caboose with a crash like the explosion of a cannon. It collapsed like a thing of pasteboard, and a shower of timbers, splinters, and broken iron rained about the heads of the fugitives.

But the gods smiled upon them for their courage—they escaped without a scratch.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article  Metasyntactic variable, which is released under the  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.