He was at the window now. He opened it, and stood up on the sill—and suddenly, poised there, he remained motionless. From the direction of the road he thought he had caught the sound of a motor. It was gone now. Perhaps he had been mistaken. The road was, as nearly as he could calculate it, a good hundred and fifty yards back from the water.
He felt swiftly up above his head outside the window. He did not dare use the flashlight now. Whether he was mistaken about the motor or not, the Kitten was already due, and a light would show a long way through the darkness. And, besides, there was partial moonlight, and he could see a little. His fingers were feeling, searching, prying over the rough boarding. It was very ingenious, this—the eaves boarded in to meet the wall of the house—only he could not find any section of it that seemed at all loose or movable. It would be craftily done, of course; he would hardly expect anything else, but——It was strange! Very strange! The Kitten had been able to pass on no more detailed information about this than he, Jimmie Dale, had overheard; and if he, Jimmie Dale, could not open it, how could the Kitten's confederate have done so? Just luck? A stumbling on the trick of it? It was rather strange!
Jimmie Dale became motionless again, intent, alert. There could be no question about it now. There was the unmistakable crunch of several footsteps approaching the house from the direction of the road. The Kitten was coming!
In a flash Jimmie Dale reached into the leather girdle, and a powerful little blued-steel jimmy was in his hand. It was very strange! So strange that he meant to see inside there, Kitten or no Kitten! The jimmy ripped into a board above his head, and pried one end of it loose. He felt quickly inside. It was naturally hollow here, and he reached in as far as he could, feeling in both directions. Nothing! He tore the board completely away now, and moving a little along the sill, reached in from the other end. It was here! He was wrenching out an oblong shaped, black metal box of the style generally used in the safe deposit vaults. It was here! His brain seemed stunned for a moment. He did not understand. He could not understand—except that he had been wrong—wrong in his deduction from that scene at Sadie Foy's, wrong in his theory of the meaning of that message. And yet it had been so logical, so surely the truth! And yet, just as logically now, he was forced to the conclusion that he had been wrong. There had seemed, still seemed, to be no other possible explanation of that message, and yet—and yet he must have been wrong. Nobody—no Phantom's delegate—had been here. And the Kitten himself was coming now—because those were the footsteps of four or five men. Perhaps the—He pried the box itself hurriedly open. No; the contents had not been taken and the box left! The faint light disclosed package after package of banknotes.
The crunch of footsteps came again, still nearer to the house. Jimmie Dale lowered himself from the sill, and, carrying the box, retreated quickly across the attic to the door opposite to that by which he had entered—the door that faced the Sound. He opened it silently, stepped out on the landing—and the next instant crouched quickly back in the angle between the door jamb and the wall, on the side of the jamb away from the stairs. Too late! He had not thought they were so near. There was a footstep below. One of them was coming up this way—was even on the stairs now. He could not see, he could only hear. His automatic swung forward. Some one was close to him now. His jaws clamped. No, he had not been seen, either. The footstep passed the threshold of the door, entered the attic, and was crossing it now in the direction of the window. And now through the open door Jimmie Dale could make out a figure, little more than a shadowy outline, in the faint ray of moonlight from the window.
And then Jimmie Dale hung there riveted to the spot. It was quick—quick as the winking of an eye. The figure, at the window now, halted abruptly, and swung sharply around to face the opposite doorway. And, coincidently, it seemed, the door opened, and as a flashlight streamed in and fell full upon the figure, and Jimmie Dale saw the man's face, there was a chorus of savage oaths, and almost simultaneously the flash and roar of a revolver shot. And the figure turned and ran toward the doorway near which Jimmie Dale stood.
It was Bunty Myers.
A voice screamed out in rage:
“Blast youse, Kitten, if youse hadn't bumped against my arm I'd have got him, an' got him good!”
Jimmie Dale's face was set, drawn, rigid, a queer tightness about the corner of his lips. He had been right, a thousand times right! It was not he who had been wrong, nor his intuition, nor his logic at fault. It was Bunty Myers who had been wrong—something had gone wrong with the man's plans, something had——
A fusillade of shots poured into the room after the flying figure. Bunty Myers stumbled, recovered himself, came on again, staggered through the doorway, and stumbled again—this time dropping to the floor.
And then Jimmie Dale was at work. He slammed the door shut, and snatching out his pick-lock, locked it. Bunty Myers! Hewanted Bunty Myers! This was the man he had set out to find to-night, and—No, it wasn't only that! Thank God, he wasn't quite so raw as that! Those thugs in there, those apaches, would kill the man like a dog, as they had already tried to do, for interfering with their meat. And the more so now that they would find that meat gone! The Kitten couldn't stop them without giving himself away. It wasn't Bunty Myers, it was a man's life now—if the man were not already too far gone.
He held the box under his left arm, as he bent forward to the huddled form on the floor.
“Quick!” he whispered. “Put your arm around my neck. Do you hear? Make an effort! It's your only chance.”
The man, with Jimmie Dale's assistance, lurched to his feet. They staggered, half fell down the stairs together. Bunty Myers was mumbling almost incoherently:
“I—I had a breakdown on the way—out—Kitten. Damn fool, Kitten, why couldn't youse hold—back—eh?—only a—a little late—youse——”
A sweat of agony was standing out on Jimmie Dale's forehead. He was half carrying the man. His side was torturing him.
“My God!” whispered Jimmie Dale between drawn lips.
Behind, upstairs, they were smashing at the locked door. They would either have to break it down or come around the other way through the house. It was worth a couple of minutes' start—and there was the boat there now on the shore just a few yards away.
He plunged on, staggering. Bunty Myers had become almost a dead weight. Well, he couldn't leave the man to be killed, could he? The man kept muttering now, muttering, muttering:
“...Up an' down—see?—'ell of a note—up an' down—up an' down——”
Bunty Myers collapsed a limp heap in the bottom of the boat. Jimmie Dale shoved it off, and jumped in. There were no oars, save a broken one. He seized it, and began to paddle. Footsteps pounded on the verandah, racing around the house. A yell went up:
“Dere he is! Dere he is—in de boat!”
There was the crash and flame spurt of shots, the spat of lead on the water. Jimmie Dale threw himself flat in the boat beside Bunty Myers. With the initial push, and the few strokes he had managed, the boat was quite a little distance from the shore, and what breeze there was was carrying it still farther out and also in the direction of the marshy tract through which he had first tried to reach the house. They could not, therefore, follow him along the shore.
A medley of voices from the shore, punctuated by oaths, reached him:
“Get a boat.... Dere'll be one up at dat swell ranch even if it is closed for de summer.... Sure! Bust de boathouse in.... Beat it quick.... He's good an' hurt, an' he won't get far.... He was winged upstairs in de attic w'en he fell——”
Jimmie Dale wrenched his flask from his pocket. They had only seen one man. Of course! His head was swimming crazily. He gulped down some brandy, and then felt for Bunty Myers' lips.
“Drink this!” he said