“What’s your name, burglar?” she asked softly.
“Johnny... well... Dolan.”
“Mine’s Felicia Rudwell. You knew that, naturally. Johnny, were you ever very, very much in love, so much in love that nothing else in the world mattered? Well, you have been, of course. You’ve got a cute little she-burglar in a flat somewhere and the other people in the house think you’re an insurance salesman and married, and all,” the girl hurried on.
“Johnny, I’m in love like that. I’m in love with the most wonderful man that ever lived.” She paused, allowing Johnny Dolan practically to drown in her eyes. “He’s poor as a church-mouse and so of course my family — but I don’t have to tell you that part. We were going to elope tonight; he’s waiting for word from me, over in the Pelway Inn; and somebody tipped off my father and so I’m locked in the solitary. You came in a car, didn’t you? Well, Johnny, would you like to do something that will make me very, very happy, if you were well paid for it?”
“Lady,” Johnny Dolan stuttered gallantly, “you can tie a can to that gettin’ paid stuff, on account of for you any guy would—”
“Piffle!” said the intelligent girl, noting with satisfaction that her work was all and neatly done. “This is business. We’ll make a bargain.”
She whisked off the bed. She whisked to her vanity table and from a purse there she brought a large, quaint old key. She flitted across the room to the black Chinese cabinet and unlocked its heavy door with the key. And lastly, having taken from its depths a green velvet jewel-case, she flitted back to Johnny Dolan.
“Look!” she said and opened the case. “I just want you to know that everything’s — er — quite as you expected it to be, I suppose.”
Well — you hadda say the moll certainly wasn’t stringing him. Johnny Dolan scowled incredulously, but it certainly was all there, just the way they had the dope. In one compartment four bracelets that looked like green fire; in the next the necklace of matched pearls, which were probably elegant, but for which Johnny Dolan, personally, wouldn’t have given a plugged nickel, on account he never did like beads. In the third compartment there were a dozen pretty swell rings.
“Thanks very much, lady,” Johnny Dolan said hoarsely, numbed and bewildered because in all his days he had never dreamed of a burglary like this, and reached for the case.
“Darling, this will have to be a C. O. D. transaction,” Miss Rudwell dimpled, stepping away and closing the case. “You see, I want you and your Rat to deliver me and my grip to the Pelway Inn as soon as possible; and then you may come back for these — and loot the whole darned ranch, too, if you feel like taking a chance! But if we took along the — swag, do you call it in the trade? Mr. Rat may not care to bother with the extra trip. He might want to cut my heart out and just hurry along to the next job. Well? It’s a bargain that way?”
“Any way you say, lady,” Johnny Dolan mumbled.
As he watched her, Miss Rudwell flitted again to the cabinet and replaced the jewel-case. She locked the cabinet carefully, tried the door and withdrew the key.
“Catch!” she said, and tossed it to Johnny Dolan. “And now sit right where you are, please, with your back to me. I’ll have to pack and then — of course, it’s horribly embarrassing! — I’ll do my dressing behind the screen.”
Johnny Dolan hunched there, staring at the key, trying to figure out how a thing like this could happen to a guy.
Chink stuff, this key — all curly-cues and twists; you never see no keys like that here in America. It would probably take a guy, even an extra good guy, a week to make a key like that and get it right.
Behind Johnny, matters were going forward with swishing speed. He heard a screen scrape lightly on the floor, he heard a grip dragged out and opened, he heard drawers open and closets open, he heard the hasty rustle of soft garments. Then drawers and closets began to close again.
“Hold it, just another minute or two, palsy-walsy,” Miss Rudwell whispered jubilantly. “I’ll have to dash off a note to my dad.”
Johnny Dolan held it, not knowing, understand, whether she had her clothes on yet or not. He heard her pen scratch swiftly for a little. Then he heard Miss Rudwell cough — a little tickling sort of cough at first and then it turned into a bark loud enough to wake the dead! She coughed and coughed; he was just getting uneasy about the disturbance when the fit passed and she laughed gently:
“Phew! They can’t have dusted that closet in a month. Welt — all set, Johnny. You go down first and catch my bag.”
When Johnny Dolan reached the bottom of the ladder Rat McGee spoke in an incisive undertone, with tremendous feeling: “Who told yuh t‘ turn on the lights up there, an’ am I bug-house or was you talkin’ to yourself, an’ where is the stuff?”
“One side, lug!” Johnny Dolan ordered, with strange authority, “I gotta catch her bag... I got it!”
Disregarding the several apoplectic wheezes from Mr. McGee, he watched Miss Rudwell come down the ladder like a fireman in a rush. Then, ordinarily stolid malefactor though he was, Mr. McGee gasped out:
“Yuh... yuh dumb cluck! Who t’ hell told yuh t’ steal the moll?”
“Mr. Rat, please! We’re trying to make a quiet getaway, you know,” Miss Rudwell breathed. “Oh, yes, your gun, if you don’t mind, Mr. Rat? Yes, this is Johnny’s pistol in your stomach, held by a woman who’s going places or bust, so if you don’t want to be smeared all over our lawn — oh, thank you! Let’s go!”
III
Five miles over to Petway and five miles back. Another six or eight minutes, and they’d be beside the Rudwell hedge again.
“Welt, we certain’y done that little hunk o’ sugar candy a swell turn,” Johnny Dolan sighed. “Was she wild with joy when the big lob come downstairs ’n’ took her in the clinch, or was she wild with joy!”
Mr. McGee, driving, mouth set hard, said nothing.
Indeed, this past half hour, words had altogether failed the Rat. He had heard it all, of course, and being an astute person he had understood it all; but in spite of that he couldn’t quite believe that any of it had actually happened. Molls of many kinds had figured in the lurid McGee past, but never before a one-punch molt and never before any kind of moll who could take away his rod and hold it between his shoulder-blades while he drove five miles.
“She really had a right t’ return them rods,” Johnny Dolan reflected. “At that, I suppose she figured we’d be dirty with jack before mornin’ an’ could buy better.”
Still Rat McGee said nothing.
“Quite some looker, huh?” Johnny rambled on. “An’ also very much on the up an’ up, as you noticed. It ain’t every moll would ’a’ took it like that, Rat, not scared nor nothin’, an’ cuttin’ her own percentage out o’ the deal that way. It ain’t every moll would ’a’ slipped us her pretties, just for a taxi ride t’ the guy she’s that way about. It ain’t every moll would ’a’—”
“For the luvva tripe, shut up!” Mr. McGee screamed, suddenly exploding. “You’re gettin’ me down! Dolan, I had it told me by several parties, when I first mentioned takin’ you in on this, that everything you touch goes absolutely screwy. I heard about how you spent nine nights cuttin’ a hole up through the floor, an’ then found you was in the delicatessen instead o’ the jeweler’s next door.
“I heard how all one night you followed the bank president with the long tan overcoat, that was supposed to have fifty grand in his inside pocket, an’ finally stuck him up in an alley an’ seen it was the porter he’d given the overcoat to. I heard how—”