Under his mask a dull red had suffused Jimmie Dale's cheeks; subconsciously almost his hand had crept into his pocket, and his fingers had closed around the stock of his automatic. It was brutal work; miserable, inhuman work. A shirt stud, three for a nickel—and five, ten, fifteen years, the best of a man's life, behind the drear walls and the steel bars of Sing Sing. Was it possible that men like these two lived, festering God's green earth! His automatic came from his pocket. They were stuffing the jewels into a small canvas bag now. Well, the game wasn't finished yet; there was still another hand to play! The little sack would prove a convenient receptacle. It ought not to take but a moment more before all the jewels were inside, and——
Jimmie Dale drew suddenly back from the doorway. Had he forgotten? In the natural sweep of anger, in the hot-blooded fury that the scene in there had brought him, had he forgotten—those voices in Mother Margot's rooms! What was that now? A creak upon the stairs? Yes, he was sure of it! Another! One o'clock! It must be after one o'clock. Some one was coming!
Every faculty alert, he crouched back now—farther back, away from the door, where he was lost in the darkness of the hall. Yes, there was some one almost at the head of the stairs now, coming stealthily, almost without sound—only once in a while a faint, protesting squeak from a stair tread that would not be audible inside Twisty Munn's room. Those jewels, Twisty Munn, Kid Gregg were the lesser issue now. It was the Phantom who had brought him here, the hope that the Phantom would come himself in person.
Tense, silent, Jimmie Dale crouched there. The Phantom! If it were the Phantom in any one of the characters that he, Jimmie Dale, could recognise, there would be no failure this time such as there had been last night! Whoever passed from the hall into that room would stand out, if only for an instant, clearly defined in the lighted doorway—and an instant would be enough!
A second passed—still another. A dark form bulked at the head of the stairs. It was joined by another. Two of them, then! And now there was no sound—yet the two dark forms there moved. They came on down the hall like queer, wavering, intangible shapes that seemed almost like brain hallucinations in the darkness.
Outflung before him, Jimmie Dale's automatic held a bead on the doorway. They had stopped there now, stopped in that thin crack of light that seeped out through the inch of open door that he himself had left. And the face of one came into the light. Bunty Myers! It was not the Phantom; it was Bunty Myers, the Phantom's unholy chief-of-staff! But both of the men could not be the Phantom. The other! Who was the other?
A whisper came. A revolver barrel glinted in the light-thread. Jimmie Dale strained forward. The other! Just a glimpse of the man's face! There could be no disguise that would blind his eyes to Gentleman Laroque, the real man, any longer; no disguise however clever that could——
The door crashed inward, a wave of light flooded out into the hall, and the two forms at the door leaped forward into the room. But, for the single instant Jimmie Dale had asked, the light had shone on the second man's face—and upon Jimmie Dale there surged a sense of bitter disappointment that seemed to engulf him, seemed to hold him momentarily stunned. Neither was the second man the Phantom; it was only the Kitten, one of the gang that used to rendezvous in the back upstairs room of Wally Kerrigan's “club.” The Kitten who only last night had—Well, he might have known! It was the Phantom's way. It was the Phantom and Bunty Myers he had heard talking—he knew that now—but the Phantom had left the actual work, as he had done a score of times before, to his tools and pawns.
His mind seemed strangely numbed. He stared into the room. Two men had just leaped through that lighted doorway. It was like some scene flashing upon a cinema screen, wasn't it? Shirt studs, three for a nickel—and the best of a man's life behind the bars of Sing Sing! He shook himself free as from some clogging mental weight. Yes, that was what it meant, whether Bunty Myers or Kid Gregg came off the victor—and there wasn't any other issue now because the Phantom wasn't here.
He crept forward to the door. Old Twisty Munn was cringing in a corner, twining his claw-like fingers in and out of each other, licking at his lips, his face gray with fear. On the table stood the little canvas bag, tied now with a string at the top—and behind the table, Kid Gregg, a cigarette still dangling from his upper lip, had risen from his chair, and was staring with a queer, inane smile into the muzzle of Bunty Myers' revolver a yard or so away.
“Put up your hands!” snarled Bunty Myers.
“Sure!” smiled Kid Gregg; and—the revolver in his hand previously hidden by the edge of the table—whipped up the weapon and fired.
It was answered by almost simultaneous reports as Bunty Myers and the Kitten fired together; it was answered by a scream of terror from Twisty Munn—and then the crash of the overturned table as Kid Gregg spun half around like a spent top and pitched against it.
But Jimmie Dale, too, was in action now. From the edge of the door jamb his hand shot forward, closed upon the electric-light switch, and the room was in darkness. And the next instant he had flung himself forward across the room. The little canvas bag! He had marked the exact spot on the floor where it had fallen from the table. Queer, this scuffling of feet around him; savage oaths; snarls of confusion; doors opening somewhere below in the tenement; the creak of stairs, and—Yes, here it was! His hand closed upon the bag and thrust it into his pocket. He turned and sprang for the doorway again. Something blocked his way, struck at him viciously, clutched at his clothing. He struck back with a short-arm jab, tore himself free, and lunged forward again.
A revolver flash lanced through the blackness behind him—another. Twisty Munn still screamed in terror. And a bedlam seemed loosed now throughout the tenement. But Jimmie Dale had gained the door.
He slammed it shut behind him, and, springing for the stairs, took them three and four at a jump. A man holding a candle, peering upward from the landing below, blocked his way for an instant—and went down before Jimmie Dale's rush.
Two more flights to go! Doors opened. Frightened faces were thrust out. There came the cries of children—and then from above the pound of feet, racing as madly as his own down the upper stairs.
Jimmie Dale laughed strangely to himself. That would be Bunty Myers and the Kitten, but they mattered nothing now. There had been murder above, Kid Gregg was dead, and their one concern would be to hunt cover without loss of time, because if they were known to Twisty Munn they were in desperate case indeed!
He was not concerned with any pursuit from Bunty Myers or the Kitten. It was a question only of what margin he himself had before the uproar here would have brought the police upon the scene. It was the shouts and yells that pursued him from the awakened and terrified occupants of the tenement wherein lay his real source of danger.
A minute! That was all he asked. The margin of a minute! He risked a leap of almost half the length of the lower stairs, stumbled at the bottom, recovered himself, jumped for the front door, wrenched it open and dashed out. The street was still empty. Thank God! He ran like a deer for the corner, gained it, doubled at the next one, and then dropped into an nonchalant walk.
XX.
At a Quarter to Three
He was safe now. He laughed shortly, without mirth. Safe! Yes, for the moment—but the night wasn't ended yet. He laboured under no delusions on that score. The rendezvous at Twisty's, instead of the hoped-for meeting with the Phantom, had left him with the heritage of a little canvas bag whose physical contents became but a handful of miserable, worthless baubles compared with the potentialities it held for a long-term penitentiary sentence for an innocent man. Nothing that had transpired at Twisty Munn's had changed by one iota the vile, low, cunning trap that Kid Gregg had laid for his victim—and had now paid for with his own life. The police would receive the letter; the police would find that shirt stud at the scene of the robbery, find this young fool Culver at Hoy Loo's, and find in Culver's shirt that a stud was missing from amongst its fellows.
Jimmie