Abrupt silence returned — silence of surrender, of death all around them. And Evans’ voice broke it. “Light!” he bellowed. “Any man who wants to live step to the middle of the room — and reach high! Round ’em up, boys.”
Gas fumes wavered into dissolution in the draft from broken windows, wrecked doors. Sudden light blinded momentarily the streaming gas-tortured eyes of prisoners and victors alike as seven men huddled together under police guns, hands held high. Phineas Spear fought blindness. Vaguely he saw the sprawled motionless forms on the floor. He recognized Lefty Crooks, still cursing as he sat braced against the wall of that shambles, holding with both hands the spouting hole in his thigh. He saw Lou Rosetti, deathly still, collapsed over the gun that had done grim execution. He scanned the prisoners, but the man in the boots and satin tunic was not among them. Then masks were ripped off, cringing faces were revealed — well known, some of them, in Liberty. And the last one. the twisted, dark face of Max Horstmann.
There was a button missing from the coat of his suit — torn off, with ends of thread hanging loose. Spear’s fingers plunged into his vest, reappeared gripping a black button. Silently he held it out, pointed to the missing button on the lawyer’s coat and Horstmann’s eyes followed his tense finger. He paled. The hands over his head shook.
“Horstmann,” Spear grated, “this button was found in Randall Pierson’s hand. And Pierson is dead — murdered!”
“No!” he choked, “No! I tell you I didn’t kill him! Bardin. Bardin killed him — when he jumped at me. It was Bardin, I tell you! I...”
Spear whirled to Evans. “We’ve lost him! Somehow he got away. The man in the boots was Bardin. We’ve got to search.”
“No, you don’t!”
He stood in the doorway, the madness in his eyes — madness that had driven him in his ever growing greed for power — changed now into a flame of sheer insanity. Gripped in his hands was a machine-gun that threatened them all, but it bore directly on Phineas Spear and Cara Collin. Until she screamed, fell a dozen feet away under the impact of his outflung arm. She tried to rise. Jake Wolcott caught her, held her. Spear faced the maniac with the gun.
Bardin swayed drunkenly. His face beneath streaked mud and grime was livid. The once polished boots were briar-torn, water darkened. The gun trembled in his hands and every man in that room knew that when he touched the trigger Phineas Spear would not die alone. That knowledge held them frozen, indecisive. No one but Spear moved. He walked straight into the muzzle of the gun.
Bardin laughed. He spoke in a voice that was hardly human, barely coherent: “You thought you could beat me — me! You thought you could stand between me and my goal! Well — others have thought so. Southard did — and he died! So will you, Spear — now!”
The gun shivered in his hands. Stabbing tongues spoke eloquently of death. The roar was of many guns, but Phineas Spear halted where he stood, stumbled, and pitched slowly forward.
“Mr. Rosetti,” the cool, impersonal voice so many miles away assured him, “is definitely off the danger list. Naturally it will take some time for him to regain strength.”
“Thank you,” he said softly.
He replaced the phone without noise and relaxed luxuriously in his own bed. His fingers touched gingerly the two inch groove — almost completely healed, now — that had been plowed across the top of his head by a bullet from a madman’s gun. A man whose grinding obsession for power had completely unbalanced a mind that must never have been entirely rational.
Phineas Spear lay in somber thought. The full revelation of Bardin’s madness would never cease to amaze him, its flaming finish could never be entirely forgotten. And yet it had happened — he remembered Randall Pierson’s bitter words — it was happening all over the world. Whole nations had surrendered all their human rights to such men as Bardin! The man had wanted to be king!
In a hidden safe at his almost fortress-like home, Bardin’s plans had been found — staggering in their scope. Laughable, perhaps — to some — but tragically so! The Guardsmen of America was Bardin’s brain-creature. It was to be a national organization — an army of terrorists — his storm-troops. The battle that had ended his insane ambition had been but a drop in the oceans of blood of a civil war — a smashing of democracy — a dictatorship!
Impossible! Not in America!
Phineas Spear had felt that himself. Yet he had seen the thing come perilously close to success in an American town! It had come slowly, insidiously — as it had come elsewhere. Criminal syndicalism was the name the law gave it — mingled with arson, murder and a hundred other crimes. Funny about “isms,” he thought grimly. Fascism, Communism, all the other isms with which the world deluded itself. Democracy — Liberty — Freedom — no “isms” in them, none necessary!
But that was over and done with — at least so far as Bardin was concerned. Doubtless there were others. But doubtless there would be men to deal with them, too. Men like Lou Rosetti — half-killed himself, he had found the strength somehow to turn his gun upon Bardin, had riddled him before the man could fire more than the first wild burst that had downed Spear. Men like all the rest of them: slow, sometimes, to fight, but fighters all when the time for fighting came.
His mind returned to Abel Parkes — the minute pawn whose helplessness had first aroused Phineas Spear’s curiosity. Abel Parkes was free now, freed by a hair! Literally! A hair stuck on Senator Southard’s cane — the cane with which he had struck his last blow at the Guardsmen! For his murderer had been a Guardsman, and the light colored hair on the cane had trapped the man who had tried to trap Spear in Southard’s empty house.
He thought, too, of what walls had told him! Speaking walls. The walls of a stairway, stained all the way down with the prints of a bloody hand. An impossible detail unless deliberately done! For blood — or any thick liquid — wipes off quickly with contact. And each succeeding print will be lighter, less heavily marked. But on the wall of the Southard stairway there were a dozen hand prints — and they seemed to become more gory as they progressed instead of less. As though the killer had gone back and reddened his hand again in order to mark a trail to the door old Parkes always used.
But it was over, and the sun rose higher over Lake Louise in the Canadian mountains, transforming it into a jewel, radiantly brilliant from the window of their room. Phineas Spear grew restive. Smiling faintly, he nudged the coverlet hidden figure beside him.
It stirred. A mop of dark hair appeared and a yawn was audible.
“Don’t do that,” he grinned, “or I’ll go back to sleep. And it’s too nice outside. Take a look at the Lake, Mrs. Spear.”
She sat up. “Gorgeous!” She yawned again, and dropped back.
He said, “Woman — in the name of starvation, will you have me eat alone?”
Cara stirred comfortably.
“Eat?” She sat up again, smiled. “Make mine ham and eggs!”
Ghost in C-Minor
by Richard Sale
Daffy Dill tackles the Case of Mad Music in a madman’s house and the restless ghost of a cocker spaniel...!
It was about five P. M. on a Friday evening and I was cleaning up my desk in the city room of the New York Chronicle, the metropolis’ best (self-termed) newspaper, when the telephone buzzed a couple of times in its merriest tune.
Dinah Mason, the light of my life, was standing by the desk at the time. She looked ravishing and she looked hungry. When she heard Alexander Bell’s folly speak its piece, she scowled darkly. “Don’t answer it,” she ordered. “You’ve invited me to dinner and I intend to eat. From the tone of that musical chime, it sounds as though the Old Man had plans to send you garnering news.”