The Adventures of Jimmie Dale [47]
ever took in my life," said Jimmie Dale very seriously to himself, as his fingers twisted, and doubled, and tied the remaining pieces of cord together, and finally fashioned a running noose in one end. "I don't--" The cord and the flashlight went into his pocket, the room was in darkness, the black mask was whipped from his breast pocket and adjusted to his face, and his automatic was in his hand. Came the creak of a footstep, as though on a ladder exactly below him, another, and another, receding curiously in its direction, yet at the same time growing louder in sound as if nearer the floor-- then a crack of light showed in the floor in the centre of the room. This held for an instant, then expanded suddenly into a great luminous square--and through a trapdoor, opened wide now, a man's head appeared. Jimmie Dale's eyes, fixed through the space between the piles of cases, narrowed--there was, indeed, little doubt but that the shoe- store proprietor below was an accomplice! The store served a most convenient purpose in every respect--as a secret means of entry into the room, as a sort of guarantee of innocence for the room itself. Why not! To the superficial observer, to the man who might by some chance blunder into the room--it was but an adjunct of the store itself! The man in the trap-doorway paused with his shoulders above the floor, looked around, listened, then drew himself up, walked across the floor, and shot the heavy bolt on the door that led into the hallway of the house. He returned then to the trapdoor, bent over it, and whistled softly. Two more men, in answer to the summons, came up into the room. "The Cap'll be along in a minute," one of them said. "Turn on the light." A switch clicked, flooding the room with sudden brilliancy from half a dozen electric bulbs. "Too many!" grunted the same voice again. "We ain't working to- night--turn out half of 'em." The sudden transition from the darkness for a moment dazzled Jimmie Dale's eyes--but the next moment he was searching the faces of the three men. There were few crooks, few denizens of the crime world below the now obsolete but still famous dead line that, as Larry the Bat, he did not know at least by sight. "Moulton, Whitie Burns, and Marty Dean," confided Jimmie Dale softly to himself. "And I don't know of any worse, except--the Cap. And gun fighters, every one of them, too--nice odds, to say nothing of--" "Here's the Cap now!" announced one of the three. "Hello, Cap, where'd you raise the mustache?" Jimmie Dale's eyes shifted to the trapdoor, and into them crept a contemptuous and sardonic smile--the man who was coming up now and hoisting himself to the floor was the man who, half an hour before, had threatened young Sammy Matthews with arrest. The Cap, alias Bert Malone, alias a score of other names, closed the trapdoor after him, pulled off his mustache and gray wig, tucked them in his pocket, and faced his companions brusquely. "Never mind about the mustache," he said curtly. "Get busy, the lot of you. Stir around and get the works out!" "What for?" inquired Whitie Burns, a sharp, ferret-faced little man. "We got enough of the old stuff on hand now, and that bum break Gregor made when he pinched the cracked plate put the finish on that. Say, Cap--" "Close your face, Whitie, and get the works out!" Malone cut in shortly. "We've only got the whole night ahead of us--but we'll need it all. We're going to run the queer off that cracked plate." One of the others, Marty Dean this time, a certain brutal aggressiveness in both features and physique, edged forward. "Say, what's the lay?" he demanded. "A joke? We printed one fiver off that plate--and then we knew enough to quit. With that crack along the corner, you couldn't pass 'em on a blind man! And Gregor saying he thought we could patch the plate up enough to get by with gives me a pain--he's got jingles in his dome factory! Run them fivers eh--say, are you cracked, too?" "Aw, forget it!" observed Malone caustically. "Who's running this gang?" Then, with a malicious grin: "I got a customer