The Man With the Mole/Chapter 6

FTER the first rage and sense of horror had passed, Sperry forced himself to sum up the situation calmly. He deliberately shut off the light of the electric lamp, knowing he might need it badly later. The place seemed to fill with phantoms, indignant at this outrage of their last rest. It was cold and damp. Somewhere water percolated through and dropped on the rough cement of the floor, like the tick of a clock counting his last minutes.

For he could not last very long, deliberately abandoned as he had been without hope of rescue. The air was limited, and, if any came through the door cracks or an unseen crevice, it was only enough to prolong life a short time. The place seemed to put a coating on his tongue, to choke his laboring lungs.

In the absolute silence, save for the "tock-tock” of the dripping water, Sperry could hear his heart beating as he strove for control. His burial had been preconceived by the bearded man whose voice was dimly familiar, though he had seen little of the man’s face, muffled as it had been by the collar of his coat, a slouch hat, and a woolen scarf. Was it just a general suspicion based on some slip he had made that showed him up plainly as not one of them—as a possible spy?

If the voice of the bearded man had been dimly familiar to him, why, in like degree, in stronger degree, for he had not attempted any disguise of it, his own might have been familiar to this man. And he had shown his baseball finger while working on the blowout. Had he been recognized? Would they come back for him or send some one to make his arrest and claim the reward?

That was not likely, since they had left all the loot with him. He had been deliberately left to die of hunger, thirst, and lack of air.

Once more he switched on his torch and flashed it about his jail. It was bricked, the roof in the shape of a low arch, above which he had, noticed, outside, that earth, turfed at the top, was piled thick. The ray faltered and he noticed, to his horror, that the battery was fast losing strength. And, to his imagination, perhaps, but none the less real, the air seemed heavier, more vitiated. He swept the place for some tool with which to attack the bricks and dig through the dirt, at least to air, if not to freedom. He wondered whether the packages they had brought might not hold some safe-breakers’ tools. While the light rapidly waned in the torch, he opened them. Most were cases made of heavy fiber, such as travelers use, strapped. Two were grips. These he handled first. One of them was full of smaller cases, which presumably contained articles of jewelry. These he did not touch. The second held a mass of gold chains and watches stripped from trays.

The battery gave only a flickering glimmer now as he attacked the sample cases. The first was a jumble of velvet-covered boxes, many of which had been opened and uncertainly closed. Among them strings of jewels, brooches, necklaces, and rings shot out streaks of many-colored light. And then the torch failed utterly. By sense of touch he went through the rest of the loot and found no tools. Mechanically he restrapped the sample cases as his mind sought some way out.

A coffin handle?

Stumbling across the boxes, he groped his way to the stone slabs on which the caskets rested. He reached up and felt along the side of one of the grim receptacles, his fingers clutching a handle that felt as if it were made of iron, though it was pitted with rust. Apparently it had been wrought in the early days when the trappings of the dead were less elaborate in these hillside communities. It might make a good weapon with which to pick a way through the bricks and mortar if he could only get it free from the wood. That he might do with his pocket-knife.

Something moved in the mausoleum, something that sounded like the pat of a naked foot. Sperry’s hair bristled, though his reasoning told him it must be made by a material thing. What was it? He listened, holding to the handle of the casket. It came again and halted. He cautiously shifted a foot and touched something, small, yielding, alive. Instantly the truth flashed upon him. It was a toad. He moved again in his relief and set his foot fair upon the creature. He slipped, clinging to the iron handle. The wood, set there almost a century ago, perhaps, exposed to damp from without and within, gave way with a soft, shuddering crash under Sperry’s weight. One end of the handle still clung for a moment and then, before he could recover his balance, the whole hideous thing was upon him, rotted wood and shreds of something that once had been quick and human. Dust and crumbling shreds of cerements, blinding, choking, appalling, descended on him with a soft rush as if intent upon a smothering vengeance!

Sperry fell, half paralyzed by the horror of it, and his head struck upon some dull edge. Light flashed before his inner sight, and then—oblivion!

When he came to, his head was aching dully but persistently. There was a great weight upon his chest and he could barely breathe. He could only move his extremities feebly. How long he had been there he knew not, but his returning consciousness told him that the air was nearly exhausted and that lack of it, with the blow, with want of food and a frightful, torturing thirst, had chained him too effectually for him to think of another attempt to break through the chamber that held the long dead and the barely living. How long he had been there he had no way of telling. This was the end, or very close to it.

Tock, tock! The drip on the floor sounded on his sensitive nerves and brain cells, congested by blood sluggish and poisoned for lack of oxygen, like the blows of a sledge upon some mighty brazen gong, tolling off his last seconds. A swift vision came to him of the figures on Trinity’s clock in New York, pounding the hours.

The weight on his chest turned to a pain within, an agony at each laboring breath. He was breathing carbonic gases and he longed for their complete anesthesia. He no longer wished for life nor thought coherently.

The pains ceased and a blessed ease encompassed him. He had passed the Rubicon. Light was in his eyes, a brilliant, dazzling light! Sweet air greeted his lungs. Vaguely he felt himself moving, slowly—slowly! Something was between his lips, something that burned and choked him, but trickled down his throat and started a fire of life within him. He looked up and saw the stars. Then they were obscured by a shape and he heard a voice calling his name—his own name “Jack! Jack!”

He tried to meet the summons, sounding like the hail of some one far down a tunnel, some one he loved. The stars again! More of that life-giving fluid! And then came the light, not so dazzling. And, above it, radiant, imploring, anxious, was the face of Elizabeth.

Youth and hope and love now brought him swiftly back to life. A strong arm was about him and he sat up. Another voice blended with the girl’s in low tones. It was Baldy’s.

“Give him some of the soup, Bess. Here’s the thermos. We’ll get him into the car. I’ll close up this place.”

He supped the broth and tried to get to his feet. Baldy’s strength supporting him on one side, the girl’s hand under one elbow, he climbed up into the tonneau of a car and sank on its padded cushions with the girl beside him, rapidly recovering. Baldy was closing the tomb once more. But this time, thank Heaven, he was on the outside.

“How did you find me?” he asked.

“Don’t talk until we get out of this,” said Baldy. “Bess, you’ll have to back out of here. I'm not an expert on these machines. Here, Jack, put away this sandwich and take another drink.”

Sperry took the bread and meat and the flask and obeyed orders as the girl left him and took the front seat, her father edging over. The car reversed down the little ascent to the tomb, through the entrance of the cemetery to the main road, sped along it for perhaps a quarter of a mile, and turned into a steep lane up which it plugged through stiff mud to the hill top, turned in between the remnants of a gate, and struggled through what had once been a farmway to a standstill beside a crudely constructed cabin. A broken chimney jagged on the skyline; the windows were boarded, the door still intact.

The man with the mole got out and worked on the closed door. Sperry, almost himself again, got into the front seat with Elizabeth.

“How did you ever find me?” he asked.

“Daddy will tell you. I told you to believe in him, you know.”

Seeing that her father was implicated with him in the deliberate robbery of a jewelry establishment, Sperry made no audible answer. But he took the girl’s hand and pressed it. They exchanged a glance, a look that ignored all circumstance and set them on a bridge of their own, a mutual platform of appreciation and sincerity. And Sperry found himself glowing with an added resolve to protect this pure-eyed girl from all knowledge of her father’s crookedness, a renewal of his desire to prove his own integrity. Something passed between them, as of a current between two wires that touch in a magnetic field, and Sperry felt a tingle that mounted to his heart and stayed there. Just then it was Elizabeth whom he credited with his rescue. Her father did not count.

Baldy came back from the open door of the shack, got a lantern from the car, and a roll of blankets, asking Sperry to bring a box packed full with papered parcels, if he was able. The girl followed them inside the cabin that held some inexpensive furniture, including a rough bed and a rusty stove.

“Sperry,” said the man with the mole, “I want you to camp out here for a day or two. Here is enough to make you fairly comfortable. There is wood outside, but I would rather you did not light any fire unless you must have it. This place is just above the cemetery. I want you to watch for the man or men who come to remove the loot, and to follow them. It is barely possible you may recognize one of them. But follow them, somewhere, to where they take the stuff. Then come back to New York and let me know as fast as you can travel. Here is money.”

Sperry took it somewhat confusedly. Was Baldy seeking to double cross the others? But in that case he would simply have taken the loot.

“Won’t they suspect something when they find I am not there?” he asked.

“There is nothing to suspect. We are not going to interfere with the removal of the stuff. It will not be the crowd that you brought here and who left you inside. In any event, the men who come would not be astonished to find you there dead, or taken away. They do not bother themselves about any details other than those laid out for them to handle. The chief attends to the finer points and all the links. The point is, Jack, the gang is getting a bit tired of working in the dark. They want to get in touch with the chief. I am at the head of that idea. I want to have a straight talk with him myself. Hitherto he issued all orders through Blackberry and one or two others. I am no cat’s-paw, and the rest follow me. I believe this stuff in the tomb will go direct to the chief. I want to trace it. The tomb has been used before for a receiving house for the stuff. It is none of it sold to fences. The chief finances the whole proposition, and bides his time in disposing of the loot through channels known only to himself. He gets more for it that way, but the rest of us don’t—not enough of the difference. Now, if they won’t let me see the chief, I’m going to find out for myself who he is, and get to him. And you can help me. Will you?”

He spoke in a low voice. The girl was trying to make the shack less comfortless. Sperry gave her a glance and then answered Baldy.

“Considering you have just literally picked me out of the jaws of death, I should be worse than ungrateful not to help you. I owe you a lot.”

“We’ll come to a just settlement, some day, my son,” said Baldy. “You’ll have to sleep days and watch nights. They’ll come some time after dark. I wouldn’t be surprised if they bring a team of horses, as being less noticeable. I’ve a notion they won’t go very far. That will make it all the easier for you. The gang is uneasy. There are hints that the police are closing in and they think, with me, it is time for a final divvy. Of course, I haven’t so much coming as some of them, but I am, in a way, the leader in this. As it stands, if anything breaks, the chief has got the goods and we stand for the conviction. He is too well covered.

“He is a bit uneasy, too, I think. Anyway, he has ordered one last haul—I’ll tell you about that when you come back to town—and then we may all split up. But there is going to be a personal talk and a regular accounting first, with the chief in person. I don’t think you’ll have to stick round here long. Sorry for the accommodations, but it wouldn’t do for you to be seen. Now we’ve got to be off.”

“Won’t you tell me how you found me?” asked Sperry.

Baldy smiled. “I wanted to find out where this cache was. I like to have two strings to my bow. You were one of them. The other? You remember my having those two tires changed at the garage? Well, I supplied the car, and I also supplied two tires that are so marked as to make a very plain trail in the mud for any one used to following them. When the car came back without you—they left it at a downtown garage and let me know in the regular way—when they came back with a yarn about you having got cold feet and given them the slip, I suspected that they had figured you out wrong in some way. They didn’t like my bringing you in the way I did, and I imagined a grudge—and perhaps something else. Anyhow, I knew the destination was somewhere in the Berkshires. On the main road I picked up the tire marks, and I didn’t lose them. Now tell me just how it all happened.”

He and the girl listened while Sperry summed up the incidents briefly.

“It was the chap with the beard who did it, then?” asked Baldy. “I didn’t see much of him. I was inside, and he showed only once. But we’ll attend to him later. You had better lay low for a bit with the gang. And now we must be going.”

He went outside to the car. Sperry looked at the girl. He seemed fairly launched in criminality, and yet this girl, daughter of Baldy Brown, appeared a thing apart from such affairs, mixed up in them as she undoubtedly was. She held out both her hands and he took them. Again the thrill mounted and took possession of him. She seemed to sway a little toward him, and the next instant her lips had met his.

They stepped apart as Baldy returned. How much he had seen, Sperry could not guess, did not think of until the car had left and he was preparing to go on watch. But he was very fully conscious of a strange, a welcome exhilaration that not all his troubles, all his desperation could modify. Elizabeth and he were living in a world apart, and that world was lit by the unquenchable hope of love.

Baldy had left him an automatic pistol, and he slipped it into his pocket, before, fortified with food and drink, braced still by the touch of the girl’s lips, he put out his lantern, closed the door, and crept down the hill through leafless brush and a little grove of spectral white birches in the verge of which he crouched, amid the dried ferns, just above the mound of the vault, keeping his lonely vigil.