A half-dozen steps and I had shoved in between them. The presumptuous youths sprawled to opposite points of the compa.s.s and I had drawn her hand through my arm. I could feel it tremble, but I carried her onward exultantly, masterfully. A man takes his own when he finds it. Then at the next street-lamp I stopped and released her. Within the circle of the light we stood and gazed into each other"s eyes.
The Lady Allegra who was! It seems odd to think of her now as Alice Allaire--a pretty enough name but not particularly romantic. And when she changes it to Thorp, as she has just promised to do--But perhaps I am going a bit too fast. However, her story is simplicity itself.
My dear girl is an orphan, and six months ago she went to live with her guardian and uncle, David Magnus. But the situation quickly became intolerable. The attentions of the odious creature Olivers were openly encouraged by Dr. Magnus, and the child, although friendless and in a strange city, had no recourse but to run away. Surely, her voice would secure her a living! But the weeks pa.s.sed and her store of money was running dangerously low. The Houston Street vaudeville had been the one chance that had offered, and she had hoped to make it good. But that first appearance had been her last. After the fiasco of which I had been a witness she had been discharged on the spot. We smile as we recall it now, but it had been a terrible catastrophe to contemplate at the time. What would you have done?
We went straight to Indiman, and he listened with close attention.
"You have property, then?" he asked.
Miss Allaire looked troubled. "There is money. I even think it must be a large estate. But I don"t know; my uncle never spoke of my affairs."
"One of those cases where it is virtually impossible to prove anything," said Indiman to me. "Nevertheless, Magnus would be quite satisfied to have the absence of his niece made a permanent one--it saves the bother of making any explanations whatever."
"The phonographic records were the only clew," I observed. "At least he thought so."
"Yes, and consequently he has been working all this while to get them away from me. We"re ready now to make a deal, but I"d like to know what stakes are on the table before playing a card."
"There was an ante of ten thousand dollars, you remember."
"Quite so. Well, Miss Allaire, if you are willing to have me play the partie in your behalf--"
"I could ask for nothing better," said the girl, quickly.
"Agreed, then. And, really, I think it is the only chance. Magnus is too clever a man not to have covered his tracks, and in an ordinary legal battle you would probably be worsted. But he doesn"t want a fight if he can help it, and that is the club I propose to use. Now you"ll have to go, for I expect Chivers at two."
I am glad that I glanced back for that last time as we left the room.
Indiman was smiling, his head thrown back and his eyes aglow. The fight was on, and he was awaiting it as another man might his bride. To be remembered at one"s best; I know I should wish that for myself.
A fortnight pa.s.sed. I had not heard a word from Indiman, and I dared not intrude upon him without an invitation. I had taken Miss Allaire to the Margaret Louise Home for Women, but two weeks is the limit of residence there. What was to be done now? My own slender funds were exhausted and Alice had not a penny. So we did the wisest possible thing under the circ.u.mstances--or the most foolish, whichever you care to term it. An hour after we had been married I went down to Printing House Square and literally forced a city editor"s hand for an a.s.signment to general reportorial work. At least we should not starve.
I informed Indiman by letter of the event, but received no reply.
On the afternoon of the 21st of March I was in the city room of the Planet. Mr. Dodge, the city editor, beckoned to me. He spoke quickly:
"Our representative at Police Headquarters has just telephoned that a man has been found dead in the Barowsky Brothers" bank building, and there"s some yarn to the effect that he is the fourth to die alone in that particular office. Better go down and take a look at things. May be a good story in it."
So there was, but the Planet never published it; they accepted my resignation in lieu of an explanation.
I tried to think of indifferent matters as I hurried over to William H.
Seward Square, but my heart kept pounding against my ribs. Could it be that Indiman--that he had lost the game?
There was the usual crowd of curiosity-mongers hanging about the bank building, and of course the police had taken charge. But the sergeant happened to be well disposed towards newsmen, and my Planet badge procured me instant admission to the scene of the tragedy. I pa.s.sed into the back room. I could see the rigid figure sitting in the big chair. I forced myself to look at him squarely.
The dead man was David Magnus.
I went straight from William H. Seward Square to our boarding-house. A bulky package had just come for me through a special-delivery messenger. It contained negotiable securities to the amount of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars; also a half-dozen sheets of letter-paper in Indiman"s handwriting. I transcribe the latter:
"Congratulations, my dear Thorp, on your marriage. They"re a bit belated, I know, but I haven"t been in the mood for writing of late.
Moreover, I wanted to make sure of Mrs. Thorp"s dowry. I enclose the proceeds of the campaign, and fancy that the settlement isn"t so far out of the way. But then our good friend Magnus never expected that he would be called upon to pay it. Here"s the story as I wrote it down from day to day.
"March 1. It"s plain enough that Magnus has been embezzling the fortune of his niece, Miss Allaire. From what the girl could tell me of her late parent"s mode of living I put them down as being comfortably off, if not rich. So I have intimated that I might consider an offer of fifty thousand dollars for the phonographic records in my safe-deposit vault. At least I will now draw the enemy"s fire.
"March 3. Chivers has called and affects to regard my proposition as absurd. I have riposted by raising my price to seventy-five thousand dollars. He protested angrily, and I immediately made it one hundred thousand dollars.
"March 8. Five days of silence and then another call from Chivers. I met him with the statement that now I would not take less than one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. He seemed flurried and said that he would have to consult his princ.i.p.al. "As you like," I remarked, carelessly, "but it will then cost you one hundred and fifty thousand dollars." Magnus is evidently alarmed and is wondering how much I really know.
"March 9. No word from the hostile camp. The inference is that I may now look for a move on my antagonists" part, "Otherwise," as he says in that precious note, "there will have to be a new adjustment of averages." Precisely.
"The position is probably a dangerous one, and I must take the obvious precautions. To begin with, I shall not leave these rooms until the affair is over, and I have made arrangements with an up-town restaurant to supply me with my meals in sealed vessels. I am thus insured against a street a.s.sault and poison. But all this is probably useless. The Magnus method of attack will be far more subtle.
"I have just written to Chivers that two hundred thousand dollars will now be necessary if he wants those phonographic records.
"March 11. I have had a talk with Louis, the janitor, about the Barowsky "affairs." Three men found dead in the big chair that faces the centre-table in my living-room. The date in every case was the 21st of March. If not an extraordinary coincidence there is food for reflection in this plain statement. It gives me ten clear days, and I can eat my dinner to-night in comparative comfort.
"March 12. I have a.s.sumed that the psychological moment is scheduled for March 21st, but both the direction and the nature of the blow are still unknown. I have made a minute examination of the rooms and all that they contain, but can discover nothing in the nature of a trap.
There are no secret doors, no collapsing walls, no hidden tubes for the dissemination of poisonous vapors. My windows are not overlooked from any outside point of vantage, thus eliminating the silent bullet of the air-gun. In a word, the machinery of the melodrama seems to be entirely non-existent. And yet I know that unless I can get the end of the clew before the 21st of March I shall sit dead in the big chair over there, just as the three who have gone before me.
"March 18. Still no answer from Chivers. I have sent him a final communication fixing my price at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and saying that unless the proposition is accepted within three days further negotiations will be broken off.
"March 19. The offer is accepted. At noon on Friday, the 21st, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in negotiable securities will be placed in my hands, and I am to give in return an order on the safe-deposit company for the phonographic plates. But there is one paragraph in the letter that puzzles me. It reads:
""My client will come in person on Friday to conclude the business, but only in the event of the day being bright and sunny. If rainy or cloudy you may expect him at a somewhat earlier hour on Sat.u.r.day or the next clear day whichever it may be."
"Now what does this mean? On the face of it, a disinclination on the part of an elderly gentleman to expose himself to these chill March winds. But Magnus is not very old, and he does not look in the least rheumatic.
"I have forgotten to mention the one peculiarity that I discovered in the furniture of my living-room. The big chair is immovably fixed to the floor, its heavy pivot-base being riveted down to an iron bed-plate. And the chair itself is not made of mahogany, as I had supposed, but of an unknown metallic alloy that simulates the wood very closely. Well, I was prepared for something like this.
"Another interesting point. The windows in the living-room face in a southerly direction, and the sun is now every day getting a little farther round, penetrating a little deeper, at every noon hour, into the room. On the 21st it will cross the line, and at least one ray will illumine a spot that for several months has not been touched by the direct sunlight. What spot?
"It is nearing twelve o"clock, and as I sit in the big chair I can see the bar of golden light creeping steadily onward. It reaches the chair, and half-way around the pivot-base. Then the heavenly clock begins its retrograde movement, and the ray of sunlight is forced to retreat. But to-morrow it will come a little farther, and so again on the day after.
"Around the sash in the big window the architect has inserted a row of gla.s.s bull"s-eyes, a style of ornamentation suited to the semi-Oriental tastes of William H. Seward Square. I go up and examine them closely.
They seem ordinary enough--but stop! The third from the bottom; it has a peculiar depth and clearness. It might very well be a lens--a burning-gla.s.s, to use the old-fashioned term. How close has the sun drawn to this particular bull"s-eye? To-morrow I will take note.
"March 20. At high noon the sun has reached within a hair"s-breadth of the third bull"s-eye from the bottom. To-morrow it will surely shine through my suspect, and if the latter be a true lens it will concentrate, for several minutes, a high degree of heat at the particular spot upon which its rays are focussed. That spot I have found, by experiment, to be one of a series of small bosses set in the pivot-base of the big chair. I applied the flame of a match and immediately the metal boss began to soften. I understand now. The boss is made of a fusible alloy that melts at a certain prearranged temperature; it is simply a variation of the common safety plug used in all the systems of mechanical protection against fire. At noon to-morrow, March 21st, the rays of the sun will be concentrated by the lens in the window-sash and will fall upon this boss of fusible metal.
The plug will melt, releasing a spring, let us say, and a train of action will be set in motion.
"The precise nature of that action I shall probably not discover. I incline to the belief that it is of an electrical nature. A connection is to be thereby established with one of the deadly currents that can be tapped for the asking here in New York. It may be objected that the men who died in the chair over there showed no external marks of death by electrical shock. But the autopsy, if it had been performed by Coroner Lunkhead, might have told a different story. Magnus is as good an electrician as he is a chemist, and he could easily rig up some kind of transformer reducing the power of the current just enough to paralyze the victim--death by a myriad of small shocks instead of one big one. Now it is plain why the spider will not come to spring his trap unless the sun shines on the 21st of March. If it doesn"t, the play goes over to the next clear day, only that the curtain will rise a minute or so earlier in correspondence with the onward march of the sun-G.o.d, the executioner in the cast of our drama. Well, I have made my preparations to counter-check. To-morrow we shall see what we shall see.
"March 21. I have still an hour before the expressman will come for the clock-case, and I must take the opportunity to finish my notes. The dead man sits opposite me at the table, but that does not matter. There is plenty of room for us both.
"The day dawned clear and fine, and at ten o"clock the sun was shining brightly. He will come then.
"At eleven I began to wonder how Dr. Magnus proposes to witness my last agonies without risk of suspicion attaching to his precious self. If he is seen entering and leaving my room this morning he may be called upon for an explanation later. One cannot be too careful in playing the delicate role of the amateur a.s.sa.s.sin.
"But I have wronged my excellent friend. He has foreseen the difficulty and provided against it. At precisely half after eleven a couple of expressmen delivered what purported to be a clock-case at my outer office. It was addressed to me and I receipted for it without hesitation.
""I understand that we are to call for it again at two o"clock," said one of the men. "That"ll give you time to pack up the other clock?"
""Very good," said I.