The Max Brand Megapack (199 page)

“I don’t know, but just drift along behind him till he stops. Can you do that?”

“Watch me!”

And, with Ronicky and Bill Gregg installed in his machine, he started smoothly on the trail.

Straight down the cross street, under the roaring elevated tracks of Second and Third Avenues, they passed, and on First Avenue they turned and darted sharply south for a round dozen blocks, then went due east and came, to a halt after a brief run.

“He’s stopped in Beekman Place,” said the driver, jerking open the door. “If I run in there he’ll see me.”

Ronicky stepped from the machine, paid him and dismissed him with a word of praise for his fine trailing. Then he stepped around the corner.

What he saw was a little street closed at both ends and only two or three blocks long. It had the serene, detached air of a village a thousand miles from any great city, with its grave rows of homely houses standing solemnly face to face. Well to the left, the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge swung its great arch across the river, and it led, Ronicky knew, to Long Island City beyond, but here everything was cupped in the village quiet.

The machine which they had been pursuing was drawn up on the right-hand side of the street, looking south, and, even as Ronicky glanced around the corner, he saw the driver leave his seat, dart up a flight of steps and ring the bell.

Ronicky could not see who opened the door, but, after a moment of talk, the chauffeur from the car they had pursued was allowed to enter. And, as he stepped across the threshold, he drew off his cap with a touch of reverence which seemed totally out of keeping with his character as Ronicky had seen it.

“Bill,” he said to Gregg, “we’ve got something. You seen him go up those steps to that house?”

“Sure.”

Bill Gregg’s eyes were flashing with the excitement. “That house has somebody in it who knows Caroline Smith, and that somebody is excited because we’re hunting for her,” said Bill. “Maybe it holds Caroline herself. Who can tell that? Let’s go see.”

“Wait till that taxi driver goes. If he’d wanted us to know about Caroline he’d of told us. He doesn’t want us to know and he’d maybe take it pretty much to heart if he knew we’d followed him.”

“What he thinks don’t worry me none. I can tend to three like him.”

“Maybe, but you couldn’t handle thirty, and coyotes like him hunt in packs, always. The best fighting pair of coyotes that ever stepped wouldn’t have no chance against a lofer wolf, but no lofer wolf could stand off a dozen or so of the little devils. So keep clear of these little rat-faced gents, Bill. They hunt in crowds.”

Presently they saw the chauffeur coming down the steps. Even at that distance it could be seen that he was smiling broadly, and that he was intensely pleased with himself and the rest of the world.

Starting up his machine, he swung it around dexterously, as only New York taxi drivers can, and sped down the street by the way he had come, passing Gregg and Ronicky, who had flattened themselves against the fence to keep from being seen. They observed that, while he controlled the car with one hand, with the other he was examining the contents of his wallet.

“Money for him!” exclaimed Ronicky, as soon as the car was out of sight around the corner. “This begins to look pretty thick, Bill. Because he goes and tells them that he’s taken us off the trail they not only thank him, but they pay him for it. And, by the face of him, as he went by, they pay him pretty high. Bill, it’s easy to figure that they don’t want any friend near Caroline Smith, and most like they don’t even want us near that house.”

“I only want to go near once,” said Bill Gregg. “I just want to find out if the girl is there.”

“Go break in on ’em?”

“Break in! Ronicky, that’s burglary!”

“Sure it is.”

“Ill just ask for Caroline Smith at the door.”

“Try it.”

The irony made Bill Gregg stop in the very act of leaving and glance back. But he went on again resolutely and stamped up the steps to the front door of the house.

It was opened to him almost at once by a woman, for Bill’s hat come off. For a moment he was explaining. Then there was a pause in his gestures, as she made the reply. Finally he spoke again, but was cut short by the loud banging of the door.

Bill Gregg drew himself up rigidly and slowly replaced the hat on his head. If a man had turned that trick on him, a .45-caliber slug would have gone crashing through the door in search of him to teach him a Westerner’s opinion of such manners.

Ronicky Doone could not help smiling to himself, as he saw Bill Gregg stump stiffly down the stairs, limping a little on his wounded leg, and come back with a grave dignity to the starting point. He was still crimson to the roots of his hair.

“Let’s start,” he said. “If that happens again I’ll be doing a couple of murders in this here little town and getting myself hung.”

“What happened?”

“An old hag jerked open the door after I rang the bell. I asked her nice and polite if a lady named Caroline Smith was in the house? ‘No,’ says she, ‘and if she was, what’s that to you?’ I told her I’d come a long ways to see Caroline. ‘Then go a long ways back without seeing Caroline,’ says this withered old witch, and she banged the door right in my face. Man, I’m still seeing red. Them words of the old woman were whips, and every one of them sure took off the hide. I used to think that old lady Moore in Martindale was a pretty nasty talker, but this one laid over her a mile. But we’re beat, Ronicky. You couldn’t get by that old woman with a thousand men.”

“Maybe not,” said Ronicky Doone, “but we’re going to try. Did you look across the street and see a sign a while ago?”

“Which side?”

“Side right opposite Caroline’s house.”

“Sure. ‘Room To Rent.’”

“I thought so. Then that’s our room.”

“Eh?”

“That’s our room, partner, and right at the front window over the street one of us is going to keep watch day and night, till we make sure that Caroline Smith don’t live in that house. Is that right?”

“That’s a great idea!” He started away from the fence.

“Wait!” Ronicky caught him by the shoulder and held him back. “We’ll wait till night and then go and get that room. If Caroline is in the house yonder, and they know we’re looking for her, it’s easy that she won’t be allowed to come out the front of the house so long as we’re perched up at the window, waiting to see her. We’ll come back tonight and start waiting.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Two Apparitions

They found that the room in the house on Beekman Place, opposite that which they felt covered their quarry, could be secured, and they were shown to it by a quiet old gentlewoman, found a big double room that ran across the whole length of the house. From the back it looked down on the lights glimmering on the black East River and across to the flare of Brooklyn; to the left the whole arc of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge was exposed. In front the windows overlooked Beekman Place and were directly opposite, the front of the house to which the taxi driver had gone that afternoon.

Here they took up the vigil. For four hours one of the two sat with eyes never moving from the street and the windows of the house across the street; and then he left the post, and the other took it.

It was vastly wearying work. Very few vehicles came into the light of the street lamp beneath them, and every person who dismounted from one of them had to be scrutinized with painful diligence.

Once a girl, young and slender and sprightly, stepped out of a taxi, about ten o’clock at night, and ran lightly up the steps of the house. Ronicky caught his friend by the shoulders and dragged him to the window. “There she is now!” he exclaimed.

But the eye of the lover, even though the girl was in a dim light, could not he deceived. The moment he caught her profile, as she turned in opening the door, Bill Gregg shook his head. “That’s not the one. She’s all different, a pile different, Ronicky.”

Ronicky sighed. “I thought we had her,” he said. “Go on back to sleep. I’ll call you again if anything happens.”

But nothing more happened that night, though even in the dull, ghost hours of the early morning they did not relax their vigil. But all the next day there was still no sign of Caroline Smith in the house across the street; no face like hers ever appeared at the windows. Apparently the place was a harmless rooming house of fairly good quality. Not a sign of Caroline Smith appeared even during the second day. By this time the nerves of the two watchers were shattered by the constant strain, and the monotonous view from the front window was beginning to madden them.

“It’s proof that she ain’t yonder,” said Bill Gregg. “Here’s two days gone, and not a sign of her yet. It sure means that she ain’t in that house, unless she’s sick in bed.” And he grew pale at the thought.

“Partner,” said Ronicky Doone, “if they are trying to keep her away from us they sure have the sense to keep her under cover for as long as two days. Ain’t that right? It looks pretty bad for us, but I’m staying here for one solid week, anyway. It’s just about our last chance, Bill. We’ve done our hunting pretty near as well as we could. If we don’t land her this trip, I’m about ready to give up.”

Bill Gregg sadly agreed that this was their last chance and they must play it to the limit. One week was decided on as a fair test. If, at the end of that time, Caroline Smith did not come out of the house across the street they could conclude that she did not stay there. And then there would be nothing for it but to take the first train back West.

The third day passed and the fourth, dreary, dreary days of unfaltering vigilance on the part of the two watchers. And on the fifth morning even Ronicky Doone sat with his head in his hands at the window, peering through the slit between the drawn curtains which sheltered him from being observed at his spying. When he called out softly, the sound brought Gregg, with one long leap out of the chair where he was sleeping, to the window. There could be no shadow of a doubt about it. There stood Caroline Smith in the door of the house!

She closed the door behind her and, walking to the top of the steps, paused there and looked up and down the street.

Bill Gregg groaned, snatched his hat and plunged through the door, and Ronicky heard the brief thunder of his feet down the first flight of stairs, then the heavy thumps, as he raced around the landing. He was able to trace him down all the three flights of steps to the bottom.

And so swift was that descent that, when the girl, idling down the steps across the street, came onto the sidewalk, Bill Gregg rushed out from the other side and ran toward her.

They made a strange picture as they came to a halt at the same instant, the girl shrinking back in apparent fear of the man, and Bill Gregg stopping by that same show of fear, as though by a blow in the face. There was such a contrast between the two figures that Ronicky Doone might have laughed, had he not been shaking his head with sympathy for Bill Gregg.

For never had the miner seemed so clumsily big and gaunt, never had his clothes seemed so unpressed and shapeless, while his soft gray hat, to which he still clung religiously, appeared hopelessly out of place in contrast with the slim prettiness of the girl. She wore a black straw hat, turned back from her face, with a single big red flower at the side of it; her dress was a tailored gray tweed. The same distinction between their clothes was in their faces, the finely modeled prettiness of her features and the big, careless chiseling of the features of Bill Gregg.

Ronicky Doone did not wonder that, after her first fear, her gesture was one of disdain and surprise.

Bill Gregg had dragged the hat from his head, and the wind lifted his long black hair and made it wild. He went a long, slow step closer to her, with both his hands outstretched.

A strange scene for a street, and Ronicky Doone saw the girl flash a glance over her shoulder and back to the house from which she had just come. Ronicky Doone followed that glance, and he saw, all hidden save the profile of the face, a man standing at an opposite window and smiling scornfully down at that picture in the street.

What a face it was! Never in his life had Ronicky Doone seen a man who, in one instant, filled him with such fear and hatred, such loathing and such dread, such scorn and such terror. The nose was hooked like the nose of a bird of prey; the eyes were long and slanting like those of an Oriental. The face was thin, almost fleshless, so that the bony jaw stood out like the jaw of a death’s-head.

As for the girl, the sight of that onlooker seemed to fill her with a new terror. She shrank back from Bill Gregg until her shoulders were almost pressed against the wall of the house. And Ronicky saw her head shake, as she denied Bill the right of advancing farther. Still he pleaded, and still she ordered him away. Finally Bill Gregg drew himself up and bowed to her and turned on his heel.

The girl hesitated a moment. It seemed to Ronicky, in spite of the fact that she had just driven Bill Gregg away, as if she were on the verge of following him to bring him back. For she made a slight outward gesture with one hand.

If this were in her mind, however, it vanished instantly. She turned with a shudder and hurried away down the street.

As for Bill Gregg he bore himself straight as a soldier and came back across the pavement, but it was the erectness of a soldier who has met with a crushing defeat and only preserves an outward resolution, while all the spirit within is crushed.

Ronicky Doone turned gloomily away from the window and listened to the progress of Gregg up the stairs. What a contrast between the ascent and the descent! He had literally flown down. Now his heels clumped out a slow and regular death march, as he came back to the room.

When Gregg opened the door Ronicky Doone blinked and drew in a deep breath at the sight of the poor fellow’s face. Gregg had known before that he truly loved this girl whom he had never seen, but he had never dreamed what the strength of that love was. Now, in the very moment of seeing his dream of the girl turned into flesh and blood, he had lost her, and there was something like death in the face of the big miner as he dropped his hat on the floor and sank into a chair.