The Man With the Mole/Chapter 5

PERRY had a brief chat with Baldy in the morning before the latter went away on his own business, and Sperry and Elizabeth, with a lunch packed for themselves, and another for certain special friends of the girl’s at the zoo, took the subway for Bronx Park. There were not many visitors on this chilly day, but they had a rare time. Elizabeth appeared to know the keepers well, and they were given certain privileges such as standing inside the rail when the big cats were fed, and scratching the warty back of the blind hippopotamus. Sperry seemed to be living in another world of strange happenings, and he pledged himself to the present. His own trouble-time seemed very hazy, and the haze was permeated with a rosy glow born of the happenings of the moment. He and the girl became very chummy, and he told her all about his own thwarted ambitions. He told her of the exploits of his chosen profession: how they could bridge vast chasms and make trails over great ranges: how they could dam waters that would make deserts blossom like the rose, and advance the cause of progress.

“It’s a fine profession,” she said enthusiastically. “If I were a man that’s what I’d like to be. Pioneers of progress, that’s what you are.”

“Do you think you’d like the life?” asked Sperry. He knew he was talking nonsense, speaking like this to the daughter of a master crook, himself a fugitive from justice, or at least from the law; disinherited, disgraced, about to plunge further into lawlessness. But all things seemed but the figments of a pleasant dream, and he was in no mind to wake up when he had this girl as dream-mate, this enthusiastic girl that was so wonderful a pal. He had never dreamed a girl could be like this: never met a girl who could so understand a chap, so enter into his thoughts, have the same ideas, the same hopes.

They had come to the cage of the bears and he halted.

“I wish,” he said, and stopped. The bears doubtless had their dreams. And the bars were the limit of their reality. Caged!

“What?” she asked, a little shyly.

“Nothing,” answered Sperry. “I was just getting broody over my luck, that’s all.”

“Don’t do that,” she said. “You trust to daddy. He—he likes you. I know it.”

Sperry flung his bitter mood aside.

“Why?” he challenged her with a direct glance. She did not evade it, though her face changed slowly to the transparent hue of the petals of an American Beauty rose.

“He let you take me out to-day,” she said slowly. “He has never let any other man do that.” Sperry wanted to take her in his arms. There was no one in sight but the gobbling bears, busy over the buns they had brought them. The girl knew it, and he saw her eyes thank him as he refrained and kept the faith that Baldy Brown of Chi, master crook, had reposed in him. But the want remained.

“Daddy is going to help you,” she said. “Perhaps it will come true, after all, your building dams and bridges.”

“I hope it will all come true,” said Sperry. And he saw her cheeks bloom again.

It was all wild nonsense they were talking. He realized that as they wept homeward. To-night he was to play chauffeur to a band of desperadoes. And she, was she juggling, too? Playing at make-believe, despite her surroundings, her fate, as a crippled child may pretend that it has wings?

The strangeness of the whole affair was emphasized in the preparation of dinner. Baldy himself took a hand, mashing the potatoes while Sperry concocted the salad dressing and Elizabeth broiled the thick steak and handled the rest of the concomitants. It was like a picnic, Sperry felt; the informal meals that attend great happenings. At eight o’clock they were through.

“You know my motto, son,” said Baldy. “Nothing like a full meal.” And, while Elizabeth was clearing and cleaning up, he gave Sperry final instructions.

“We’ll pick up a man on Bleecker Street,” he said. “I’ll show you where. He’s an outside man, like you. But not an active one. Now, when we arrive, I’ll show you where to park. You hang on there till some one comes up and says: ‘All right Duke.’ You come back with, ‘Duke Who?’ If he says ‘Manning,’ it’s all right. If any one comes up with a broken line of talk, you beat it. If a bull comes by and asks you what you are hanging around for you tell him you are chaffeur [sic] for Mr. Gamwell of the Marine Insurance Association, and you point right across the road to the fifth floor of the opposite building. Gamwell won’t be there, but the lights will be on in his suite. And there’ll be some one there to answer if the bull gets fresh. It’ll all go straight enough.”

Sperry did not doubt the smoothness of the operations from the care with which the preliminaries had been arranged. And he could, in some measure, understand the joy of the outlaw, the pitting of brain against brain, the risk, the thrill of it all.

“You take your orders from whoever gets on the front seat,” said Baldy. “There’ll likely be two men, perhaps three: depends on the load. I won’t be with you. When you are through with the job, beat it back to the garage and make the trip home by subway and walking. Here’s a key to the door.”

As the cool steel met his palm, Sperry felt assured of his position with Baldy. He was surely trusted.

“You can depend on me,” he said. Elizabeth came in at the moment, through with the dishes, and the talk switched. Baldy left, and presently Sperry departed for the garage. The new tires were on, he noticed, before he sped downtown.

At Washington Square, on the south side, he picked up Baldy, and on Bleecker, the second man. At ten-thirty they parked the car on a street well downtown in the financial district. Sperry recognized the locality, strange as it was at this deserted time. The car had stopped around the corner from the jeweler’s shop where he had seen Remington. There both Baldy and the other outside man got out. The latter walked up the street, but Baldy stayed to point out the lights in the fifth floor of a tall building across from where the Speedwell stood beside the curb. Then he, too, left, melted mysteriously in the shadows.

Sperry had always associated robberies with the small hours, but now he recognized that downtown life practically ceased after six-thirty. The “gang” was now at work, and he had no longer any doubt that their object was the pilfering of the vaults of the jewelry store, or that the red-haired clerk was involved as he was, in a minor capacity. He pondered over what he was to do. Baldy had asked him if he knew the Berkshires. Was he to drive the loot to some treasure-trove in the hills, there to await the disposition of the chief? He filled in the time with cigarettes and conjectures, and finally, warm in his coat and the fur robe with which the Speedwell was provided, leaned back half drowsily. No policeman broke his reverie, though one passed twice. He heard Old Trinity chime the quarters and knew that it was close to midnight before a figure came to the side of the car.

“All right, Duke?”

The voice seemed dimly familiar, though he could not place it. The man’s face was muffled both with a beard and the high collar of his coat upturned, and a scarf which circled his neck. A soft-brimmed hat was pulled low down over his brows.

“Duke Who?” parried Sperry.

“Manning,” replied the man and clambered to the front seat without further ado. “Round the block,” he said, “slowly.”

Sperry obeyed orders, conscious that the bearded man kept a sharp lookout. They met no one. Three quarters around he got the word to halt, close to an alley dividing the big block. A shadow drifted along in the obscurity of the other side of the street. The bearded man noted it.

“It's all right,” he whispered. “That’s our lookout. If he whistles, beat it, and stop at the corner of Broadway and Chambers.”

The speaker slipped out and down and disappeared in the murky alley. He was back again in an instant. Following him came a procession of dim shapes, each bearing a heavy package that they stowed quickly in the tonneau of the car. At last two men climbed in after the bundles and pulled a rug over the loot and themselves. The bearded man got in again beside Sperry.

“Slick and quick!” he said, with a chuckle. “North, and go it.”

North they went and still north, climbing up where reservoirs gleamed among the pines, quickening their pace, plunging, lunging on to the urging of the man at Sperry’s side, until, above Lake Mahopac, a front tire exploded and nearly threw them into a ditch.

No one helped him. The two men in the tonneau stood about with the third until Sperry ordered one of them to hold an electric torch on his repairing. The bearded man did as requested, throwing the ray where Sperry ordered. Once he delayed to shift it, and Sperry, sweating with his work, despite the crisp night, spoke to him sharply. The man looked at him queerly, but said nothing. At last the job was finished, and Sperry put on his gloves and started the car once more. The going was hard and the roads here and there marked for detours, so that it was after five by the clock in the front of the car before they began to climb hills with which Sperry was familiar, the hills on the other side of the ridge from Swiftbrook Bowl. But it was still dark, still far from sunrise. He had been brusquely asked if he knew the way to Galton, and had answered in the affirmative. Now they were approaching that town.

“Straight through,” said the bearded man in his husky voice. “Don’t turn off to Ironton. Keep on up the mountain.”

Sperry obeyed. They struck a bad road, deep-rutted, slippery with mud, and the car made slow progress? One of the men behind spoke for the first time.

“Open her up, can’t you? We got to get through before daylight.” They passed by sleepy hamlets and hit the windy ridge at the watershed, then pitched down between wooded ravines. A clearing came, a suggestion of highland meadow strips, the sound of a foaming torrent, the outline of a steeple against a blackish sky.

“Is this Darlington?” asked the bearded man. “Then the first road to the left past the village.”

They made it as the first hint of dawn showed. There was a faint difference in the quality of the light. Trees began to separate themselves. On a slope irregular ranks of tombstones developed, gray and ghastly.

The guide put a hand on Sperry’s arm.

“Into the graveyard,” he said.

There were no gates, only a gravel road, crisp under the tires. To the right rose a high bank in which tombs had been dug like caves, and sealed with iron doors. Their tops were rounded and turfed above the level of the bank. Here they halted. The two men got out and one of them busied himself with a skeleton key, while the second held the electric torch.

Sperry read in its arc the graven lettering in the stonework about the iron doors: “Family Tomb of Alvin Allen. 1843.”

The ghouls were going to deposit the loot in the ancient monument. Doubtless all the Allens were dead, their crumbled remnants in the vault.

“Come on,” said the bearded man from the ground, “lend a hand here. It’s lightening strong. Want us to get nipped?”

The three of them were bearing in their packages with frantic haste. Daylight was coming. There was no time to spare lest some chore-seeking villager might see them and give an alarm. Sperry lent a hand, bearing a heavy parcel into the musty burial place, and coming out gratefully into the fresh air for another. At last they were through. He started to mount the car.

“Confound it!” said the bearded man. “We’ve left the keys back there. Duke, you’ve got the torch. Go get them, will you, while I light up? And hurry.”

Sperry went back into the charnel-house reluctantly, but loath to suggest that he was not willing to do his share. He had held a feeling ever since they left New York that he was on probation with his passengers, that they sensed somehow that he was not an accepted and qualified member of their craft, but was tolerated only on Baldy’s say-so. He could not see the keys and threw about the circle of his light. Suddenly he felt quick fanning of the close air, heard a grating sound, then the noise of the outer bar swinging into place with a dull clang, followed by the click of locks.

The ray of his lamp shone on the closed doors of the vault. He flung himself at them, pounding, kicking, without result, with hardly noise enough to reach to the road. He could barely hear the explosion of the engine as it broke into life and left him there, deliberately abandoned among the loot and the coffins of the moldering dead!