Two thousand feet up in the air we sat and spoke in quiet voices of the horror that was past and the horror that threatened us. Far down below, London was waking up to a night of pleasure. People were dressing for dinners and the theater, thousands upon thousands of toilers had left their work and were about to enjoy the hours of rest and recreation. And not a soul, probably, among all those millions that crawled like ants at our feet had the least suspicion of what was going on in our high place.
They were accustomed to the great towers now. The sensation of their building was over and done, there were no more thrills. If they had only known!
I was not aware if strata of clouds hid us from the world below, as so often happened; but if the night were clear I do remember thinking that any one who cast their eyes up into the sky might well notice an unusual brilliancy in the pleasure city of the millionaire, that mysterious theater of the unknown, which dominated the greatest city in the world.
... "Well, Tom," said Mr. Morse, "Pu-Yi tells me that you are now acquainted with all the facts. The question we have to decide is, what are we to do?"
He turned to Juanita, and nodded. She left the room.
"The situation, as I understand it," I replied, "is that Midwinter"--I had a curious reluctance in p.r.o.nouncing the name aloud--"is either concealed here in the City or has made his escape. If he is here, we shall know before to-morrow morning, shall we not?"
"Precisely. I have spent the last hour in going over the plans of the City with the chiefs of the staff. We have divided up the two stages into small sections, and even while I am talking to you the search has begun. The orders are to shoot at sight, to kill that man with less compunction than one would kill a mad dog. If he is really here, he cannot possibly escape."
"Very well, then," I said, "let us turn our attention to the other possibility. a.s.suming that he has got away, I think we may safely say that the danger is very much lessened."
"While we remain here in the City--yes," Morse agreed.
"And you are determined to do that?"
He took the cigar he had been smoking from his lips, and his hand shook a little. "Think what you like of me," he said, "but remember that there is Juanita. I say to you, Kirby, that if I never descend to the world again alive, I must stay here until Mark Antony Midwinter is dead."
Well, I had already made up my mind on this point. "I think you are quite right," I told him. "Still, he will not make a second appearance in the City. You can treble your precautions. He must be attacked down in the world."
Then a thought struck me for the first time. "But how," I said, "did he and Zorilla ever come here in the first instance? Treachery among the staff? It is the only explanation."
Pu-Yi shook his head. "You may put that out of your mind, Sir Thomas,"
he said. "That is my department. I know what you cannot know about my chosen compatriots."
"But the man isn"t a specter! He"s a devil incarnate, but there"s nothing supernatural about him."
Then little Rolston spoke. "I"ve been down below all day," he said, "and though I haven"t discovered anything of Midwinter, I am certain of how he and Zorilla got here."
We all turned to him with startled faces.
"Do you remember, Sir Thomas," he said, "that, shortly after your arrival, when you were looking down upon London from one of the galleries, there was a big fair in Richmond Park?"
I remembered, and said so.
"Among the other attractions, there was a captive balloon--"
Morse brought his hand heavily down upon the table with a loud exclamation in Spanish.
"Yes, there was, but--but it was quite half a mile away and never came up anything like our height here."
"No," the boy answered, "not at that time. But do you remember how during the fog last night I told you I had seen something, or thought I had seen something, like a group of statuary falling before my bedroom window?"
Something seemed to snap in my mind. "Good heavens! And I thought it was merely a trick of the mist! Nothing was discovered?"
"No, but in view of what happened afterwards, I formed a theory. I put it to the test this morning. I made a few inquiries as to the proprietors of the captive balloon and the engine which wound it up and down by means of a steel cable on a drum. I need not go into details at the moment, but the whole apparatus did not leave Richmond Park when it was supposed to do so. The wind was drifting in the right direction, the balloon could be more or less controlled--certainly as to height. I have learned that there was a telephone from the car down to the ground.
Desperate men, resolved to stick at nothing, might well have arranged for the balloon to rise above the City--the cable was quite long enough for that--and descend upon part of it by means of a parachute, or, if not that, a hanging rope. More dangerous feats than that have been done in the air and are upon record. It seems to me there is no doubt whatever that this is the way the two men broke through all our precautions."
There was a long silence when he had spoken. Mendoza Morse leant back in his chair with the perspiration glittering in little beads upon his face, but he wore an aspect of relief.
"You"ve sure got it, my friend," he said at length, "that was how the trick was done! It was the one possibility which had never occurred to me, and hence we were unprovided. Well, that relieves my mind to a certain extent. We can take it that we are safe in the City, if Midwinter has escaped. How are we to make an end of him?"
"The difficulty is," I said, "that we are, so to speak, both literally and actually above, or outside, the Law. If that were not so, if ordinary methods could deal with this man, or could have dealt with the Hermandad in the past, Mr. Morse would never have planned and built the eighth wonder of the world. No word of what has happened in the last day or two must get down to the public--isn"t that so?"
Morse nodded. "It goes without saying," he said. "We have our own law in the City in the Clouds. At the present moment, there are three bodies awaiting final disposal--and there won"t be any inquest on them."
"That," Rolston broke in, "was something I was waiting to hear. It"s important."
He stopped, and looked at me with his usual modesty, as if waiting permission to speak. I smiled at him, and he went on.
"It is an absolute necessity," he said, "to enter into the psychology of Midwinter. We may be sure that his purpose is as strong as ever. The death of Zorilla, and his present failure, will not deter him in the least, knowing what we know of him?"
He looked inquiringly at Morse.
"It won"t turn him a hair"s breadth," said the millionaire. "If he was mad with blood-l.u.s.t and hatred before, he must be ten times worse now."
"So I thought, sir. He has lost his companion, as desperate and as cunning as himself, but we can be quite certain that he is not without resources. I think it safe to a.s.sume that he has practically an unlimited supply of money. He must have other confederates, though whether they are in his full confidence or not is a debatable question.
That, however, at the moment, is not of great importance. We have him in London, let us suppose, for it is the safest place in the world for a man to hide--in London, determined, and hungering for revenge. We have no idea what his next scheme will be, and in all human probability he hasn"t planned either. He must be considerably shaken. He will know, now, how tremendously strong our defenses are, and it will not escape a man of his intelligence that they will now be greatly strengthened. It will take him some time to gather his wits together and work out another scheme. The only thing to do, it seems to me, is to force his hand."
"And how?" Morse and I said, simultaneously.
"We must trap him--not here at all, but down there, in London"--he made a little gesture towards the floor with his hand, and as he did so, once more the strange and eerie remembrance of where we were came over me, lost for a time in the comfortable seclusion of a room that might have been in Berkeley Square.
"Here _we_, that is the Press, come in," said Rolston, smiling proudly at me.
I smiled inwardly at the grandiloquence of the tone, and yet, how true it was!--this lad who, so short a time ago had got to see me by a trick, was certainly the most brilliant modern journalist I had ever met. I made him a little bow, and, delighted beyond measure, he continued.
"Let it be put about," he said, "with plenty of detail, rumor, contradiction of the rumor and so on--in fact we will get up a little stunt about it--that Mr. Mendoza Morse has tired of his whim. For a time, at any rate, he is going to make his reappearance in the world. If necessary, announce Miss Juanita"s engagement to Sir Thomas. Get all London interested and excited again."
Morse nodded, his face wrinkled with thought. "I think I see," he said, "but go on."
"When this is done, let us put ourselves in Midwinter"s place. I believe that he will have no suspicion of a trap. He will argue it in this way.
We are too much afraid of him to attack ourselves. Hitherto, all our measures have been measures of defense and escape. It will hardly occur to him that we have changed all our tactics. He will think that, with the failure of his attempt, the bad failure, and the death of Zorilla--which I have no doubt he will have discovered by now--we imagine he will abandon all his attempts. He will say to himself that we now believe ourselves safe and that his power is over, his initiative broken, that he will never dare to go on with his campaign. Everything seems in favor of it. I should say that it is a hundred to one that his line of thought will be precisely as I have said."
"By Jove, and I think so, too! Good for you, Rolston!" I shouted, seeing where he was going.
His boyish face was wreathed in smiles. "Thank you," he said. "Well, we are to lay a trap, and it is on the details of that trap that everything depends. I see, by to-day"s _Times_, that Birmingham House in Berkeley Square, is to let. The Duke is ordered a long cruise in the Pacific. Let Mr. Morse immediately take the house and issue invitations for a great ball to celebrate Miss Juanita"s engagement. If that house and that ball are not to Midwinter as a candle is to a moth, then my theory is useless! Somehow or other he will be there, either before or actually on the occasion. By some means or other he will get into the house."
He stopped, and with a little apologetic look took out his cigarette case and began to smoke. He really was wonderful. This was the lad, airily ordering one of the richest men in the world to take the Duke of Birmingham"s great mansion, whose capital but a few short weeks ago was one penny, bronze. I remember how he was forced to confess it to me, even as I congratulated him.
We talked on for another half-hour, or rather little Bill Rolston talked, the rest of us only putting in a word now and then. He seemed to have mapped out every detail of the new campaign, and we were content to listen and admire.
Of course I am not a person without original ideas, or unaccustomed to organization--my career, such as it is, has proved that. But on that night, at least, I could initiate nothing, and I was even glad when the conference came to an end. Morse was much the same--he confessed it to me as we left the room--and the truth is that we were both feeling the results of the terrible shocks we had undergone. Rolston was younger and fresher, and besides his peril had not been as great as mine or the millionaire"s.
Pu-Yi vanished in his mysterious fashion, and Morse, Rolston and I went to dinner. There was no question of dressing on such a night as this, but, if you believe me, the meal was a merry one!
It was Juanita"s whim to have dinner served in a wonderful conservatory built out on that side of the Palacete which looked upon the gardens separating it from the eastern villa where Rolston and I were housed.