The Trey o' Hearts/Chapter 25
CHAPTER XXV
The Time o' Night
WITH the further pledge that Alan would hear from him before dawn, the little brown man scuttled away. Not ill-pleased to be left to his own devices (whose proposed character Digby would never have approved had he so much as suspected them), Alan none the less deferred action until after midnight.
It was about one in the morning when he arrived, after taking elaborate precautions, in the neighbourhood of the Riverside Drive and before the home of his mortal enemy, a grim white house that towered, stark and tall, upon a corner. All its windows were dark but one—and that one, in the topmost tier, showed only a feeble glimmer, so slight that Alan almost overlooked it.
He believed with small doubt that Rose was a prisoner within those walls, and, this being the presumptive case, that small, high window of the light might well be hers. That it might equally well be another's was beside the point; the possibility remained, and while this was so he could not rest without doing his best to learn the truth. Now one way of accomplishing this offered itself to his fertile and ardent imagination.
Directly across the street from the Trine residence a colossal apartment structure stood half-finished, the gaunt iron skeleton rearing a web of steel stencilled against the shining sky. After certain precautionary maneuvers, Alan approached the watchman's shelter of the unfinished tenement. To his infinite disgust, Alan found the guardian very wide awake. This in itself might have been deemed a suspicious circumstance; not for nothing does an honest night watchman so deny the laws of nature and the tenets of his craft. But Alan overcame with banknotes what seemed an uncommonly stubborn reluctance, and got his way.
He could not know that another skulked behind a barrier of lime barrels and overheard all that passed. All ignorant, the young man addressed himself to an uncommonly unpleasant climb. The ladders were crazily constructed and none too securely poised, but at length he gained the gridiron of girders on a plane with the lighted window across the way, and crept along one of these, gingerly on his hands and knees, until he came to its end, and might, if he cared to, look down a hundred feet to the sidewalks.
That view, however, did not tempt; he kept his eyes level, and was rewarded with a bare glimpse of a prettily papered wall framed in the lace of half-drawn curtains. Something moved within the room, but beyond the range of his vision; he saw an indefinite shadow flicker across the wall, but more than that, nothing.
Behind him, grim, ravening death stalked Alan in the darkness. He had not the least suspicion that all was not well.
Of a sudden, the tenant of the room came to the window and stood there looking pensively out, altogether unconscious of the watcher. Was the woman Rose or Judith? That she was one of those he could plainly see. At last she revealed herself by a gesture indelibly stamped on tablets of his memory: a slight gesture of grave dubiety, fingertips lightly touching her lips and cheek. The woman in the window, then, was Rose.
He drew from his pocket a notebook, tore out a blank page, and with the assistance of a ray of moonlight, scrawled a message.
When he looked up from this task, she had vanished.
Sitting astride the girder, he took his watch—a cheap affair he had picked up when reclothing himself in the garments of civilized society at Providence that morning—opened the back of the case, and closed it upon the folded message. Then drawing back his arm, he cast it from him with such force that it almost unseated him at the end of the swing. But nothing less would have served to bridge that yawning chasm. And the watch flew, straight and true, squarely through the lighted window and to the farther wall. …
That much he saw, but whether the girl came to the window after picking it up he never knew. In that very instant he heard a sound behind him of heavy breathing. The assassin had come close upon his prey when Alan turned and discovered his peril. Crawling, as Alan had crawled, on hands and knees along the girder, the man had inched up within a yard.
The moonbeam which had aided Alan in the composition of his message struck across the other's face and showed it like a mask of deadly hatred, with its eyeballs glaring and its lips drawn back from the naked blade gripped between its teeth—a stiletto nothing sort of a foot in length.
With a low cry of desperation Alan snatched off his hat, a soft and shapeless felt affair, and flung it squarely in the fellow's face. Before he could recover—before, that is, it dropped away and cleared his vision—Alan had bent forward and grasped the wrist of the hand that held the knife. He snatched simultaneously at the other hand, but it eluded him.
Immediately the two became engaged in a furious contest for possession of the stiletto. Alan had this advantage, as long as the knife might not strike, that his right arm was free, while the assassin had only his left. With this he strove to reach his knife-hand and possess himself of the weapon. As persistently Alan foiled his purpose by dragging the knife-hand toward him and swinging it far out to one side. At the same time he struck repeatedly with his clenched right fist at the other's face. As often as not his blows failed to land; when they did land, it was lightly, for the most part; the distance between them was just a bit beyond his reach, the assassin could dodge a blow by drawing back his head, and Alan dared not unlock his feet beneath the girder in order to inch forward within better range. His blows did little damage beyond disconcerting the other, but this proved a very considerable factor in the duel. In the end they served, together with that steady, resistlessly downward and outward drag, to break the grip of the man's locked legs.
He pitched forward on his face along the girder, kicking wildly, grasping at the air. The stiletto fell and disappeared. Before Alan could release his hold, or ease the strain upon the right arm of the assassin, the fellow had slipped from the girder and hung helpless in space, dangling at the end of Alan's arm—with no more than the grip of five fingers between him and death.
Then the battle began anew, but now it was a battle with a man half-crazed with fright and struggling so madly that he well-nigh frustrated the efforts of his rescuer.
Its progress remained forever a blank in Alan's memory. He knew that he was doing his best to save an enemy from annihilation: that was all. How he contrived to lift the fellow with his left arm high enough to get a grip on his collar and hold him so until his arms caught the girder and he was able to help himself up—with much assistance—was something inexplicable.
Yet it happened so, in the upshot, the assassin lay like a limp rag across the girder, head and arms hanging on one side, legs and feet on the other, spent with his terrific exertions and physically sick with terror.
In this state Alan left him; he had done enough; let the man shift for himself from this time on. Cautiously crawling over the other's body, he edged along to the head of the ladder. When he looked back from safety, the cut-throat lay as Alan had left him, kicking convulsively. And the window across the way was blank.
Reflecting that little noise had marked the progress of that duel in the dark, that Rose in consequence could hardly have known anything of it, he let himself down story by story to the street, and made off without pausing to see whether the night watchman's blatant slumbers were real or feigned.