The Crevice Part 14

That he didn't die of heart-disease, after all!"

"I traced Armstrong to the town where he was living in obscurity, and followed his movements." Blaine's reply seemed to be purposely irrelevant. "I could not, however, find where he had been on the night of Mr. Lawton's death. Now that he has come to me voluntarily, we shall discover if the voice Miss Lawton overheard in that moment when she listened on the stairs, was his or not.... Come back this afternoon, Mr. Hamilton, and I will give you full information and instructions about that Long Bay errand. In the meantime, guard yourself well from a possible attack, although I do not think another attempt upon your life will be made so soon. Take this, and if you have need of it, do not hesitate to use it. We can afford no half-measures now. Shoot, and shoot to kill!"

He opened a lower drawer in his ma.s.sive desk and, drawing from it a business-like looking revolver of large caliber, presented it to the lawyer. With a warm hand-clasp he dismissed him, and, going to the telephone, called up Anita Lawton's home.

"I want you to attend carefully, Miss Lawton. I am speaking from my office. A man will be here with me in a few minutes, and I shall seat him close to the transmitter of my 'phone, leaving the receiver off the hook. Please listen carefully to his voice. I only wish you to hear a phrase or two, when I will hang up the receiver, and call you up later. Try to concentrate with all your powers, and tell me afterward if you have ever heard that voice until now; if it is the voice of the man you did not see, who was in the library with your father just before he died."

He heard her give a quick gasp, and then her voice came to him, low and sweet and steady.

"I will listen carefully, Mr. Blaine, and do my best to tell you the truth."

The detective pulled a large leather chair close to the telephone, and Herbert Armstrong was ushered in.

The man was pitiful in appearance, but scarcely demented, as the operative had described him. He was tall and shabbily clothed, gaunt almost to the point of emaciation, but with no sign of dissipation.

His eyes, though sunken, were clear, and they gazed levelly with those of the detective.

"Come in, Mr. Armstrong." Blaine waved genially toward the arm-chair.

"What can I do for you?"

The man did not offer to shake hands, but sank wearily into the chair a.s.signed him.

"Do? You can stop hounding me, Henry Blaine! You and Pennington Lawton brought my tragedy upon me as surely as I brought it upon myself, and now you will not leave me alone with my grief and ruin, to drag my miserable life out to the end, but you or your men must dog my every foot-step, spy upon me, hunt me down like a pack of wolves! And why?

Why?"

The man's voice had run its gamut, in the emotion which consumed him, and from a menacing growl of protest, it had risen to a shrill wail of weakness and despair.

Henry Blaine was satisfied.

"Excuse me, Mr. Armstrong," he said gently. "The receiver is off my telephone, here at your elbow. It would be unfortunate if we were overheard. If you will allow me--"

But he got no further. Quick as he was, the other man was quicker. He sprang up furiously, and dashed the telephone off the desk.

"Is this another of your d--d tricks?" he shouted. "If it is, whoever was listening may hear the rest. You and Pennington Lawton between you, drove my wife to suicide, but you'll not drive _me_ there! I'm ruined, and broken, and hopeless, but I'll live on, live till I'm even, do you hear? Live till I'm square with the game!"

His violence died out as swiftly as it had arisen, and he sank down in the chair, his face buried in his bony hands, his thin shoulders shaken with sobs.

Blaine quietly replaced the telephone and receiver, and seated himself.

"Come, man, pull yourself together!" he said, not unkindly. "I'm not hounding you; Lawton never harmed you, and now he is dead. He was my client and I was bound to protect his interests, but as man to man, the fault was yours and you know it. I tried to keep you from making a fool of yourself and wrecking three lives, but I only succeeded in saving one."

"But your men are hounding me, following me, shadowing me! I have come to find out why!"

"And I would like to find out where you were on a certain night last month--the ninth, to be exact," responded Blaine quietly.

"What affair is it of yours?" the other man asked wearily, adding: "How should I know, now? One night is like another, to me."

"If you hate Pennington Lawton's memory as you seem to, the ninth of November should stand out in your thoughts in letters of fire," the detective went on, in even, quiet tone. "That was the night on which Lawton died."

"Lawton?" Herbert Armstrong raised his haggard face. The meaning of Blaine's remark utterly failed to pierce his consciousness. "The date doesn't mean anything to me, but I remember the night, if that's what you want to know about, although I'm hanged if I can see what it's got to do with me! I'll never forget that night, because of the news which reached me in the morning, that my worst enemy on earth had pa.s.sed away."

"Were you in Illington the evening before?" asked Blaine.

"I was not. I was in New Harbor, where I live, playing pinochle all night long with two other down-and-outs like myself, in a cheap hall bed-room--I, Herbert Armstrong, who used to play for thousands a game, in the best clubs in Illington! And I never knew that the man who had brought me to that pa.s.s was gasping his life away! Think of it! We played until dawn, when the extras, cried in the street below, gave us the news!"

"If you will give me the address of this boarding-house you mention, and the names of your two friends, I can promise that you will be under no further espionage, Mr. Armstrong."

"I don't care whether you know it or not, if that's all you want!" The gaunt man shrugged wearily. "I'm tired of being hounded, and I'm too weak and too tired to oppose you, even if it did matter."

He gave the required names and addresses, and slouched away, his animosity gone, and only a dull, miserable lethargy sagging upon his worn body.

When the outer door of the offices had closed upon him, Henry Blaine again called up Anita Lawton. This time her voice came to him sharpened by acute distress.

"I did not recognize the tones of the person's voice, Mr. Blaine, only I am quite, quite sure that he was not the man in the library with my father the night of his death. But oh, what did he mean by the terrible things he said? It could not be that my father brought ruin and tragedy upon any one, much less drove them to suicide. Won't you tell me, Mr. Blaine? Ramon won't, although I am convinced he knows all about it. I must know."

"You shall, Miss Lawton. I think the time has come when you should no longer be left in the dark. I will tell Mr. Hamilton when he comes to me this afternoon for the interview we have arranged that you must know the whole story."

But Ramon Hamilton failed to appear for the promised interview. Henry Blaine called up his office and his home, but was unable to locate him. Then Miss Lawton began making anxious inquiries, and finally the mother of the young lawyer appealed to the detective, but in vain.

Late that night the truth was established beyond peradventure of a doubt. Ramon Hamilton had disappeared as if the earth had opened and engulfed him.

CHAPTER X

MARGARET HEFFERMAN'S FAILURE

The disappearance of Ramon Hamilton, coming so soon after the sudden death of his prospective father-in-law, caused a profound sensation.

In the small hours of the night, before the press had been apprised of the event and when every probable or possible place where the young lawyer might be had been communicated with in vain, Henry Blaine set the perfect machinery of his forces at work to trace him.

It was dawn before he could spare a precious moment to go to Anita Lawton. On his arrival he found her pacing the floor, wringing her slim hands in anguish.

"He is dead." She spoke with the dull hopelessness of utter conviction. "I shall never see him again. I feel it! I know it!"

"My dear child!" Blaine put his hands upon her shoulders in fatherly compa.s.sion. "You must put all such morbid fancies from your mind. He is not dead and we shall find him. It may be all a mistake--perhaps some important matter concerning a client made it necessary for him to leave the city over night."

She shook her head despairingly.

"No, Mr. Blaine. You know as well as I that Ramon is just starting in his profession. He has no clients of any prominence, and my father's influence was really all that his rising reputation was being built upon. Besides, nothing but a serious accident or--or death would keep him from me!"

"If he had met with any accident his ident.i.ty would have been discovered and we would be notified, unless, as in the case when he was run down by that motor-car, he did not wish them to let you know for fear of worrying you."

Blaine watched the young girl narrowly as he spoke. Was she aware of the two additional attempts only the day before on the life of the man she loved?

"He merely followed a dear, unselfish impulse because he knew that in a few hours at most he would be with me; but now it is morning! The dawn of a new day, and no word from him! Those terrible people who tried to kill him that other time to keep him from coming to me in my trouble have made away with him. I am sure of it now."

The detective breathed more freely. Evidently Ramon Hamilton had had the good sense to keep from her his recent danger.

"You can be sure of nothing, Miss Lawton, save the fact that Mr.