The Wheel of Death/Chapter 4

Wentworth's idea in ordering the opening of the door was twofold. He wished to do the unexpected thing, and he wanted to finish the present affair so that he could get away from the apartment. He had been traced to this hideout place of his, and its usefulness to him was ended. Somewhere in the vastness of New York it would be necessary for him to establish another place where he might lose his identity and from which he could emerge in the various disguises he used.

His present problem was to make his departure as soon as possible, without disclosing his real identity either to the underworld or to the police.

As he stood to one side of the room, with his pistol held lightly against his hip, there was a trace of boyish carelessness about him. He seemed to have gained a lightness of heart from the moment that he had hung up the telephone. The reprieve of Arnold Dennis had been his first objective and he had reached it. A week lay before him in which to prove to the Governor that his request had been just, and much may be done in a week by a man like Richard Wentworth.

The pistol, held with such apparent carelessness, covered the door which Ram Singh stealthily approached. It was a deadly weapon, capable of ejecting the empty shells and substituting new cartridges in the barrel as fast as the trigger could be pulled. And Wentworth could handle it, as he could any kind of a firearm, with a fatal accuracy which was little less than wizardry.

Ram Singh silently drew back the bolt and placed his hand upon the door knob. In his other hand he held the big knife.

Wentworth turned his body slightly so that the muzzle of his pistol could not be seen by anybody standing in the doorway when the door was opened. Yet he could fire instantly, if necessary, by advancing the hand which rested against his hip.

Then Ram Singh swung the door swiftly open and stood unseen behind it.

Standing in the doorway was a man with a revolver in his hand. That man was in uniform, and upon his breast was the shield of the New York police!

Wentworth could have shot the man before him. He could have shot him in the heart, in the head or through the shield upon his breast. But Wentworth did not shoot policemen. He fought policemen, when he was forced to fight them, only with the cleverness of his mind.

Standing perfectly still, he faced the uniformed man without the slightest indication of surprise. He wondered if his lost pistol had already been identified by the police and if, in some way, they had traced him to this apartment.

Instead of advancing his pistol hand, resting against his hip, he drew it gently backward and, unseen, slipped the pistol into his hip pocket. Then he dropped the hand to his side. . . Desperate as the situation might prove to be, he must depend upon his wits and not upon the force of bullets.

"Come out of there, fella!" commanded the officer, keeping Wentworth covered with the revolver.

Wentworth frowned. "There must be some mistake, officer, I— "

"Mistake, nothing! Come out of there!"

Wentworth took a few paces forward as if he were about to comply with the order. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Ram Singh standing rigidly and unseen behind the door he had opened, waiting for an order from his master or for some indication of what should be done.

"What is the charge?" asked Wentworth, halting half way across the room and hoping to gain some bit of information.

"You'll hear the charge at the station house," answered the policeman. "Shake a leg, mister!"

It was then that Wentworth discovered something. He saw that which even his sharp eyes had failed to note up to that moment. The policeman was wearing patent leather shoes.

No New York policeman would wear patent leather shoes in uniform while on duty. Therefore the man before him was no policeman at all.

Too late Wentworth realized that he was facing one of Grogan's criminals. The man had him covered, and any attempt to reach back into his hip pocket for his own weapon would almost certainly mean instant death!

In the few seconds before he spoke again, Wentworth tried to figure out why the masquerader had not shot him at once upon entering. If only he knew the reason for this delay, he might still be able to extricate himself by means of his wits. Two explanations seemed possible. His enemies might be afraid of the sound of a shot, fearing the intervention of the police. Or the other, more plausible one that they did not know who he was and wished to find out something about him before they killed him. Wentworth decided to probe the possibility of this second explanation.

"You must have the wrong bird, officer," he said. "Who do you think I am?"

The man hesitated, and Wentworth felt that he was on the right track. "You don't even know my name," he complained. "You sure have the wrong bird, officer."

"Well, what is your name?" demanded the pseudo-policeman, lowering his gun a trifle.

Suddenly a way to escape flashed into Wentworth's mind. The man's question had given him a chance to speak to Ram Singh without the knowledge of his enemy! "My name," said Wentworth, "is Darwaza Bundo."

Crash! The door was slammed and bolted by the quick thinking Ram Singh almost as the words "darwaza bundo" were uttered— those words, in Hindustani, meaning "shut the door."

In the hall there were angry exclamations. Footsteps sounded as men crowded around the door without any attempt at concealment. There was loud and irritated conversation. The apartment house was the kind which housed people who sometimes fought and who sometimes became noisy with drink. It required very serious disorders to attract much attention in that building.

After a few moments of thought Wentworth came to a decision. He desired to leave that apartment secretly and without leaving behind him any trace of himself or of his activities. He also desired to take Molly away so that nobody would know she had ever been there.

The door trembled again under the weight of several shoulders from without. That weakening door was the first thing which had to be attended to and, from the bedroom, Wentworth, with the aid of Ram Singh, dragged the iron bed into the living room and rolled it against the door. Other furniture, almost all of it, was next wedged against the door beside the staunch, iron bed.

Then Wentworth turned to Molly who was silently watching him with worshipful eyes. She did not seem frightened. There was only one thing which could frighten her, and that was her father's danger.

"We must get out of here, Molly," Wentworth said. "Are you willing to do what I say?"

She nodded her head eagerly. "Yes, anything!" And she meant it.

But Molly did not know what was going to happen to her. At Wentworth's request she sat upon the only chair which was not being used to barricade the door. Behind her Ram Singh stood with a pair of shears, and rapidly her fair curls fell to the floor, leaving her with hair of boyish length. The hair was cut a little raggedly as though it had been done at home by mother with a bowl. Ram Singh was an artist in matters of disguise.

Wentworth, watching the trembling of the barricaded door, gave Ram Singh further directions about Molly and let his servant work his skill upon her.

From the closet of nondescript clothing, the Hindu selected a pair of ragged trousers and shortened the legs a full foot, with the same shears which had clipped the fair curls. Molly put on the trousers and a flannel shirt in the bedroom and returned to have the slack waist of the trousers drawn snug above her hips by means of a stout piece of twine. A torn coat, much too big, concealed the girlishness of her form from casual inspection; and a cloth cap, also too big, gave her the impish appearance of a gamin of the streets. But her complexion was too good and Ram Singh's agile fingers applied some traces of shoe blacking before Molly had really become a boy to all outward appearances.

So rapidly had Ram Singh worked that the transformation had only required a very few minutes. But even during that short time the barricade at the door had loosened perceptibly, and a heavy bar was being forced in at the back of the door to tear it from its hinges.

But Wentworth himself now took the chair in which Molly had sat, his pistol on his knee as he watched the door. Again Ram Singh went to work. The sticky hair was brushed violently before being treated with a subtle powder which left it white except for some gray streaks. A ragged, gray mustache was added to the upper lip, so skillfully that only a jerk could detect the fraud. The cheeks were smeared with a liquid from one of Ram Singh's tiny bottles, and they magically lost their freshness and became pallid and old. Eyebrows were touched by a tiny brush, and the hints of wrinkles were traced.

Richard Wentworth had become an old man. He drew on a long, black coat and placed a battered, felt hat upon his head. There was a tin cup in the pocket of the black coat, and around his neck Ram Singh hung a card marked "BLIND."

There only remained the adding of black patches over the eyes but although the black patches had pin holes, through which Wentworth could see fairly well, he did not consider it wise to impede his sight in the slightest until the last moment.

Molly Dennis, returning from the bathroom where she had been staring at her new self in the mirror, failed to recognize Wentworth until he spoke to her.

"And you, Ram Singh," directed Wentworth, "will go, when I leave here, to the Oriental Restaurant on Seventh Avenue. There you will lose yourself among the men from India until anybody, who may have followed you from here, has lost all trace of you."

"Han, sahib!" agreed Ram Singh with emphasis. "Boy go! Bad man no can find."

"Good boy!"

The Hindu boy's face glowed with pleasure, as it always did at the least compliment from his master.

"But how are we going to get out of here?" Molly asked, teetering from one foot to the other and looking down at her raggedly clothed legs.

"I'll show you," Wentworth answered and spoke rapidly to the Hindu in his own language, so that his meaning would be quite clear.

Ram Singh, blindly obedient, hurried into the closet and returned with a great armful of the heterogeneous clothing which Wentworth used in his many disguises. He carried the clothes into the bathroom and dumped them into the bathtub. Again and again he returned to the closet and carried more and more clothes into the bathroom, where he dumped them, in a tumbled mass into the tub.

"And where are we going when we do get out of here?" asked Molly, very much puzzled by what Ram Singh was doing.

"My Dear Molly," returned Wentworth, smiling, "we are going back where we came from— back to Dan Grogan's Restaurant."