The Incendiary Part 20

Attached to the cracksman's breast was a large sponge saturated with chloroform. The turnkey had inhaled this and was soundly asleep.

"Now for running the gantlet, Bobbs."

Dobbs' motions were lightning-like. First he laid the turnkey softly outside, then climbed through the cell-bars, this time feet foremost, for the cuts had been made nearly two feet apart vertically and the bars were not set close together. Once outside, he motioned to Robert to follow him, while he detached the prostrate man's keys from his girdle, dabbing his nose now and then with the sponge. Squeezing them tightly so as to avoid clanking, he coolly selected one of the largest.

"That comes of watching Longlegs w'en the others were 'ollering," he whispered to Robert, holding up his prize. It was the key to the door at the blind end of the corridor, which a turnkey pa.s.sing through with the intention of going out into the yard would naturally select from his bunch and carry separate. Hawkins' habit of swinging his keys nonchalantly had not escaped Dobbs' observant eyes.

"Now," whispered Dobbs, making for the blind end of the corridor. There was no time to remove the lantern and the chloroformed turnkey from sight. Most of the convicts were still asleep, but two or three, awakened by the noises, started up in their night clothes and stood behind the bars, making gestures but uttering no sound.

Thus far Dobbs' plan had proved successful. There was no other outlet than the one he had chosen, since the cells were backed against the middle of the bastile and were impregnable at the rear. There remained two strong doors in the opposite wall to force. One turn of the key in its wards slipped the lock of the first. Before the second Dobbs waited and listened. A rhythm of receding footsteps was heard outside. Suddenly they seemed to cease.

"He's turned the corner," whispered the cracksman, immediately opening the outer door.

"Pull the inside one to, me boy."

Robert did as he commanded.

"Out with you now."

Robert preceded his confederate into the deserted yard, while Dobbs closed the great outer gate softly and sprung its iron bolt. Pursuit from within was thus cut off.

"Now run, me boy."

Robert followed, easily keeping up with his leader. As they approached the end of the bastile, Dobbs slowed his pace.

"Tiptoes, now," he cried stealthily working his way up to the corner of the building, where he stood crouching as if in ambush. Their shadows were thrown forward beyond the corner, so that the cracksman could not get within a yard of the edge.

"The hother cove Hi greased, but this one we'll 'ave to sponge, Bobbs," he said, taking the sponge from his breast and sprinkling it anew from a tiny vial.

"'Ere ee comes a-waggin' of 'is 'ead, but this at 'is beak will set 'im snoozin', Hi fawncy."

The footsteps came nearer and nearer, as monotonously regular as the ticking of a clock, but slow and heavy, as if the sentinel were a man of size. Dobbs stood ready to spring, the sponge in his right hand, his left free to disarm the deputy if he should present his gun. The form of a man turned the angle. It was Koerber, the giant, whom Col. Mainwaring had transferred from the caneshop to this less responsible duty.

Luckily Dobbs caught him in the midst of a capacious gape, and the great sponge stuffed into his open mouth served at once as gag and smothering instrument.

"'Old 'is harm," cried Dobbs to Robert, who leaped to his side and held down the powerful right arm of the German t.i.tan. Koerber kicked and fought with desperation, bruising each of his a.s.sailants, but the sponge m.u.f.fled his outcries and gradually he sunk in a stupor, Dobbs, with a strength no one would have suspected, breaking the fall of his body and laying him gently on the ground.

Another long application of the sponge and again he sped away. Koerber's beat stopped at the middle of the end-section of the yard, where he and the other sentinel must have met and saluted. But no one had come to his aid, and when the two fugitives crossed the "left yard," as it was called, making directly for the wall, no one impeded their progress. Eighty yards away, near the greenhouses, the back of a deputy could be seen marching in the opposite direction. Was this the man whom Dobbs had "greased?"

The cracksman had made a bee-line for the twenty-foot wall. How did he hope to surmount such a barrier? It was as smooth as a planed board, with hardly crevice enough at the cemented seams to give a cat's claw footing.

"Ere's a hinstrument of my hown inventing which I call the 'andy 'inge," said Dobbs, removing from his bosom an iron thing coiled around with rope. Unreeling the rope with lightning twists, he displayed for a second a plain, strong hinge, very broadplated and sharp at the inner angle. With a cast that no professional angler could excel, he flung this far over the top of the wall, and drew it taut, by means of the rope. The edges of the wall being drilled off perfectly square, the hinge must have caught on the other side, and the security of the apparatus as a means of ascent was only limited by the strength of the rope. The device was as simple, yet as ingenious, as the clock-face.

"Climb, me boy," said Dobbs.

Robert was up in a few seconds, the rope being thick enough to give his hands good purchase, and the cool night air and exhilaration buoying his strength. Dobbs climbed with more difficulty and was puffing heavily when, with Robert's help, he reached the broad top of the wall.

"Hi'll 'ave you gazetted hensign in the royal navy, Bobbs, next time Hi confab with 'er royal 'ighness," he smiled, his humor never appearing to desert him. "Such climbing would do credit to a powder monkey."

Just then, with the two figures standing on the top of the wall, a loud clang smote the silent air. It was followed by another and another till the world seemed awake once more.

"The alarm bell!" cried Dobbs. "They're after us! Drop!"

Both men were on the ground in a second, Dobbs coiling his "handy hinge" as he led the way running. Fear lent him wings and though he panted and his voice grew husky, he managed to keep abreast of his fleeter companion. The prison wall skirted a long, ill-lighted alley, which debouched in an unfrequented street. Here the houses were scattered, barren lots intervening, and a glimpse of the river breaking into the background now and then. It was broad moonlight, and the trees and fences afforded little shelter to the runaways.

Any policeman who met them would have been justified in shooting down two men, one in convict garb, fleeing from the direction of the prison. Doubtless Dobbs had prepared himself for this emergency, but luck favored him here and his reserve resources were not called into play. To left and right and left again he turned, finally climbing a low fence and crossing a stableyard that bordered on the river. A second fence to climb and Robert found himself on the rocky embankment of the stream.

How dark and beautiful it was in the moonlight! "Free, and I know not another as infinite word"--the line of the poet came back to him, and for an instant he felt in his veins all the glory of that treasure for which nations have thought rivers of their purest blood no extravagant price. But there was little leisure now for meditation. The alarm bell could still be heard sounding distinctly at the distance of a quarter of a mile and Dobbs was peering down the embankment, which cast an inky pall over the water in its shadow.

Presently he whistled. An answer came, some fifty yards to the right. Clutching his comrade's arm, the Englishman ran along the bank to the spot from which the response proceeded. A light keel-boat with a single occupant was moored in the gloom below, but so far below that to jump would surely capsize her, for the tide was at its ebb and the stream had sunk like an emptying ca.n.a.l lock.

"Shall we plunge in?" asked Robert, not averse to the bracing midnight bath.

"'Ardly, with a four-mile row in wet clothes before us, me hangel," answered the cracksman, "and the 'andy 'inge still lovingly clasped to my bosom."

Scooping out some earth at the rim of the flags which crowned the embankment wall, he made a hollow for the hinge and threw the rope down into the boat. The corner to which it clung had not been chiseled off clean like the edge of the prison wall and there was some chance of its slipping, but the risk had to be run.

This time Dobbs descended first. Robert followed him nimbly. All through the adventure he had reflected and even echoed the cracksman's humorous mood, and had displayed as little nervousness as if it were a student's lark upon which he was engaged instead of the grave crime of prison breach. So when the hinge slipped, just as he was dangling midway, and he fell plump into Dobbs' arm, with a coil of rope and an iron implement behind him, he only laughed as delightedly as a high-perched tomboy after climbing a forbidden fence.

"Well, that gives us back the hinge," he said. "We might have had to leave it."

Evidently the serious-talking young radical had a vein of drollery under his thoughtful exterior.

"You didn't 'urt yourself?" asked Dobbs, gathering his own dispersed members together.

"Not a bit. You're as good as a feather bed. I'd just enjoy tumbling on you four or five times a day."

But Dobbs, ruefully rubbing his barked s.h.i.+ns, only ordered the boatman to "give way," which is nautical for "pull straight ahead," and in three or four strokes they were clear of the embankment and out in the full current of the flowing tide.

CHAPTER XXVI.

ITS CHICK PROVES PECULIAR.

Have you never lain back at midnight in the bow of a Whitehall, with your hands clasped behind your head and your legs lazily outstretched--no comrades but the oarsman amids.h.i.+ps, and the fellow-pa.s.senger facing you from the stern, no sound but the gurgle of your own gliding, no sensation but the onward impulse of the boat, as gentle as the swaying of a garden swing, and the scarcely perceptible breeze aerating the surface of the river? Then the moon has never tinted the atmosphere for you with such voluptuous purity as it did for Robert Floyd that night, and the spa.r.s.e, dim stars have never announced themselves so articulately as the lights of a grander city than that whose gloomy ma.s.ses and scattered lamps they overhung. Even Dobbs' lighting of a cigar--no cosmic event, surely--did not jar upon the grand totality. The tiny flame, drawn in and then flaring up, gave flash-light glimpses of a face unmatched in the shrewdness and humor of its lines.

For fully ten minutes not a word was spoken. Suddenly Dobbs' voice snapped out: "The hother duds, quick, chummy. There's a bobby on the draw."

A pair of black trousers was thrown toward him by the oarsman and Dobbs drew them on over his prison garb.

"Now the coat."

He was turning his striped blouse inside out.

"Now, let's 'ear you in the chorus," said Dobbs, who immediately set up a sailor's song about Nancy Lee. Robert and the boatman swelled the chorus as desired, with rollicking "Heave ho's."

"Quit your caterwauling there!" cried the policeman above. The pseudo-sailors at once hushed as if much frightened and rowed swiftly under the bridge, while the policeman, satisfied with this display of obedience, stalked along on his lonely beat. Above the bridge the river narrowed and the banks were no longer of granite, but of arable loam scalloped into a thousand little inlets. An hour must have elapsed and three more bridges had been pa.s.sed, when the boatman turned into one of these coves and drove his keel against a grating sand bank. The pa.s.sengers jumped out and shook the cramp from their limbs.

"Is that all, Mr. M----"

A finger on Dobbs' lips checked the boatman's sentence half-way and a nod gave the answer to his uncompleted question. Robert was not paying attention, but when Dobbs touched his arm and led the way up to the road, he promptly followed. By this time the milkmen and marketmen were about. A rattle of distant wheels broke the silence now and then. The dawn-birds trebled their matin greeting and a pearly flush located the eastern quarter of the sky. After a few turns, Dobbs approached the side entrance of a large house, not unlike an inn. The waiter who answered his tap appeared to have been expecting him.

"'Ere we are, Bobbs, me boy. 'Ere we'll s.h.i.+ft our duds and 'ave a talk over the breakfast victuals. Whew! Hi'm tired! Fetch a lamp, Johnnie, into the guest chamber. We haren't clemmin' on you, we've got rocks. Hey, Johnnie?"

The white-ap.r.o.ned waiter grinned and led them into a private room with a table in the middle.

"The porker, Johnnie, and plenty of good hold hale with the fixins."

Dobbs had drawn his chair up to the table, set Floyd opposite him, and made one hand wash the other with the true gourmand's expectancy while he gave this savory order.

"Well, you bloomin' old milksop! Hi suppose you'll put me in your prayers now, hey? Hey? Hey?"

Dobbs poked Robert under the ribs in a fas.h.i.+on which the young man might have resented in any but a familiar and a benefactor. Apparently his acknowledgment of his obligation was not warm enough for the cracksman, who began grumbling in an injured tone.

"Thankful? Wot's thankful? A word. Hi don't want words. Words is for magistrates and ministers and such like 'ipocrites. Hi want a mark of confidence. 'Asn't Dobbs trusted Bobbs?"

"Yes, he has."

"Well, w'y won't Bobbs trust Dobbs? Are we mis-mated? Do we work at cross-purposes? Hi need a pal, Bobbs--upon which you may remark w'ere is the s.h.i.+llin' comin' from wot's payin' this piper? But there's pals and pals! And if Hi offer my friends.h.i.+p to a honorable a.s.sociate Hi made the acquaintance of while we was both serving in Col. Mainwaring's regiment, wot's Jim Budge got to say? Cut and run, Jim, says I, and much obliged for your 'elp. 'Ave a gla.s.s, Bobbs?"

The waiter had brought in several bottles of ale. Robert filled out a gla.s.s of the brown, foaming liquor and poured it down with a gusto that seemed to cheer Dobbs immensely.

"The uniform, Johnnie, and don't overtoast the porker."

Johnnie seemed afflicted once more with his grinning fit, for he stuffed his ap.r.o.n in his mouth when he got to the door.

"What are your plans ahead, Dobbs?" asked Floyd, nibbling a pretzel, while the cracksman helped himself liberally to the ale.

"My plans is Chicago. Hi'm going into business as a reformer."

"Ha, ha; what will you reform--yourself first, I suppose?"

"Hi'll begin on the police force. You haren't a-drinkin', Bobbs. Your 'ealth, me boy, a-standin' toast to the 'ealth of Dobbs' pal. Hip, hip, hip-oh, 'ere's Johnnie, with the porker."

Johnnie seemed to have caught a sharp glance from Dobbs on the threshold, for his grin subsided and he was obsequious in his attentions to the breakfasting pair. Dobbs accepted them as a lord would the bows of a lackey, but Robert felt constrained to brush off the importunate caresses which he had no means of repaying in coin.

"If there's one meat in creation wot's sweet and savory," said Dobbs ecstatically, digging a fork in the dish just brought, "it's a juicy little 3-months-old baby porker, swimmin' in greens and gravy."

Robert could hardly help smiling while Dobbs carved the young pig, smacking his lips prodigiously meanwhile.

"A hearty breakfast, me boy; we've a long ride before us."

"Where to?"

"Pitch in and don't spare the gravy--w'ere to? W'ot say to the Hargentine Republic, w'ere you can sue for your uncle's money by proxy, hey?"

"My uncle's money?"

"It's your'n, now the will's busted."

"I don't want the money and never wanted it."

"Then wot are you 'ere for?"

"Only the fresh air and the trip. I thought they might do me good."

"See 'ere, Bobbs, if you think Hi'm a-fis.h.i.+n' for a slice o' your bloomin' pile, Hi'll show you Hi'm straight as a flag-pole. Them's not the harticles of partners.h.i.+p Hi propose."

"I never said they were, Dobbs."

"But your heye says you suspect me, and it don't pay to be too suspicious, me boy. Hi'm opposed to suspicion, bein' of a hinnocent nature myself. 'Aven't you learned that, Bobbs, halready? 'Aven't Hi trusted a hutter stranger with my rat's tooth and gone 'alvesies with 'im, doublin' the risk and not doublin' the enjoyment?"

"You've placed me under a great obligation, certainly. I wouldn't have missed this night for the world."

"'Ere's a 'ealth to it, Bobbs--a standin' toast--and may we never bunk in the bastile again. Hip, hip, hip--"

"Here are the clothes, Mr. Mc--"

The cras.h.i.+ng of a beer bottle on the floor cut the name off at the initial letter, and for some reason Johnnie did not finish it after he had picked up the fragments.

"Lay the duds on the chair, Johnnie; we haren't done discussin' the porker." A black business outfit, including headgear and footgear, bore witness to the cracksman's foresight. "Bring us some more hale. 'Ave a pretzel, Bobbs (hic)."

Bobbs was undeniably succ.u.mbing to the influence of his potations, but Robert knew the thirst-creating properties of salted cracker, so he declined the proffered morsel.

"Won't break bread with me! Hi say, Bobbs, this is a houtrage--a houtrage. W'ere'd you be this minute if it wasn't for me? Afore a tender little juicy porker, asprawlin' of your legs under the table and a-facin' a hail jolly Johnnie, w'ich is me? Or snoozin' in a ten-foot kennel, with sweet dreams o' the swingin' gallows?"

"I wouldn't be here, certainly, Dobbs."

"You wouldn't be 'ere! That's so. A gla.s.s on the 'ead of it. Your 'and, Bobbs, and your 'ealth. Bobbs says (hic), and Bobbs is a gemman (hic), Bobbs says he wouldn't be 'ere. But afore we part," here the cracksman sat down again, "Hi 'ope ee'll show ee's a gemman and not mistrust 'is pal. Hi ain't no psalm-singer, Bobbs, me boy. Wot's more natural, with a blank check before 'im, than for the confidential clark to facsimilate 'is marster's hautograph? Wot's the hodds? Hi'll drink with 'im hall the same--and a gla.s.s on the 'ead of it, Bobbs."

Dobbs was rapidly becoming incoherent and his incoherence took a boastful turn.

"Ho, Hi cawn't 'elp a-grinnin, w'en Hi think of old Koerber a-wakin' up and a-roarin' for 'elp. Didn't Hi do 'im brown, Bobbs (hic)?"

"He was no match for you, certainly."

"Ee? Koerber? Lemme tell you there's few in the fawncy stand as 'igh as Bill Dobbs. Wot's Jim Budge? A hordinary bloomin' safe-cracker as must 'ave a pal. Ee cawn't stand alone, no more'n one leg of a scissors, which is the Hirish for bachelor. Barney Pease (hic) is truly great, Hi own. For sleight-of-'and work ee 'as no superior in the three kingdoms."

"Not even the solitary cracksman?"

"Not even the solitary cracksman, w'ich is me. But sleight-of-'and hisn't hall, Bobbs. It's sleight-of-'ead! Do you fawncy Barney Pease could 'ave got you over that sky-sc.r.a.pin' wall? It was Bill Dobbs' 'andy 'inge done that. Lor' bless us! We'll be famous for this 'ere night's outin'."