There was no sign of life in that direction. He sat down and slipped on his shoes. Then he began to walk around the grassy margin of the pond in tire direction of the prostrate Mark. But he was not looking in Mark’s direction; his vigilance was expended upon the service driveway and the house.
Mark Telfair hastily wormed himself across the grass, wriggling back from the edge of the water. It was his only chance to avoid discovery. He reached the low hedge by the path and crawled along beside it until he came to an opening where the path divided. Then he slipped around to the other side of the hedge and lay flat on the ground, edging his body in close to the stems of the endless row of privet bushes. He could see through the hedge under the leafy screen. But there was also a chance that the man he had captured and then assisted to escape would see him.
Chink Mitchell came soundlessly on around the verge of the pond. He drew abreast of Mark’s long body; then passed within three strides of it. He walked on, perhaps twenty feet further, and then stopped.
Where he halted was the only place around the rim of the pond where there was a stone retaining wall. Elsewhere the banks were natural grassy slopes; here a small dam had been constructed to raise the level of the pond.
The ex-convict stood upon this stone embankment a moment, once more reconnoitering with unfailing stealth. Then he busied himself in a manner that Mark, flattened out on the ground, was unable to make out. But suddenly Mark’s ears answered the question that his eyes had failed to solve.
He heard the clink of metal; the faint jingle of a chain. Then, plainly, he made out the soft murmur and splash of running water.
“A sluice gate!” he breathed. “He’s opened a gate! He’s draining the pond!”
With sudden abandonment of the extreme caution that he had used so far he worked his way closer to the stone dam.
Chink Mitchell was kneeling by the gate he had opened, staring down at the surface of the pond. The water was slipping out through the sluice at a rapid rate, but the pond was broad and long. It would take some time to drain.
As the minutes passed by Chink Mitchell’s attitude of attention grew more tense. He crouched at the edge of the dam, poised like a puma on a branch above a rabbit. The water lilies were sinking on their stems; a shelving strip of black mud was already showing around the rim of the pond.
Mitchell stood up. He wrenched at the mechanism of the sluice gate with feverish impatience; the murmur of the outrushing water deepened to a subdued roar. He came back to the wall a few feet away from the sluice gate and slid his legs over the edge. In a moment he was standing upright in two feet of water. Slashing through the lilypads he waded this way and that. His head turned constantly, scanning every inch of water. As the area of the pond diminished, the water fell more rapidly. Mark Telfair watched it drop, using the impatient legs of the chauffeur as his gauge.
Suddenly Chink Mitchell uttered a low cry and floundered through the lilies.
A few feet from the pond’s edge, where the lilies were thickest, the pads had not dropped flat upon the level bed of mud. They were raised; the broad pads, bending, outlined a sort of rough oblong upon which they rested.
Chink Mitchell flung himself toward that outlined object. He tore aside the lilies; groped in the mud and suddenly lifted up something that, mud-coated and swathed in wrappings though it was, vaguely suggested a large dispatch box in shape. With this clutched in his hands he waded rapidly toward the wall.
Mark Telfair was on his knees, now, with Mitchell’s automatic clutched in his hand.
Mitchell reached the low dam. He rested his burden on the stone top.
Mark Telfair’s breath went out of his body as suddenly as if his chest had been caved in. A man’s figure had appeared on the dam, just over Chink Mitchell. Mark started up; then crouched again.
The ex-convict uttered an audible gasp. His clutching hands released his hold on the wall. He stared upward in dumfounded silence.
“So you figured out where Herrington hid it at last, did you?” the man above him said in a mild tone of voice, “I never gave you credit for such brains, Chink.”
That smooth voice, the voice of Deputy Warden John Crawford, did not startle Telfair as the warden’s sudden appearance had done. He remained stock still, listening intently to catch the words above the decreasing murmur of the drained pond.
“I... I was gettin’ it for us both, Crawford,” Chink Mitchell said with an effort. Then his words flooded out: “That damn D. A. is nearly on to us; with that keeper you killed lyin’ in the garage it wasn’t safe to leave—”
“You’ve saved me some trouble — thanks!” Warden Crawford said in his quiet voice. He bent as he spoke, and faintly accentuated the last word. And as he voiced his thanks his right hand slid in a swift, easy movement along the side of Mitchell’s neck. Something he held gleamed briefly in the moonlight as he made that sure, unhurried gesture.
The ex-convict emitted a bubbling cry. He staggered backward, both muddy hands at his neck. For a moment he balanced, swaying. The smooth surface of the water at his feet was disturbed by something that pattered down upon it from his neck in drops like heavy rain; that continued to fall despite those clutching hands.
Mark Telfair was already leaping toward, the wall. He was on it when the acting warden saw him and recognized his tall figure even in the feeble light.
“Telfair!” he cried, instantly, and waved a hand that still held a knife toward the box at his feet. “I’ve found it— He attacked me and I had to — look at this — look here! Open it! It’s the—”
Mark did not answer. Neither did he bend toward the box. He leaped in. The knife hand suddenly ceased to indicate the muddy thing at Crawford’s feet and. swept upward in a sudden, lightning-like thrust. But Telfair’s left arm was rising to knock it aside even before the blade shot toward him. And his right hand, still clutching Mitchell’s automatic, came down like a mallet on the head of the warden. The man dropped to the ground as if drilled by a bullet.
Mark sprang into the pond and caught Chink Mitchell as he collapsed in the mud. He dragged the gasping man to the wall and heaved him up on top beside the prostrate warden. Then he raised. Mitchell’s pistol and fired shot after shot into the air.
Chapter IX
Not Evidence!
The residence of Martin P. H. Smythe blazed with lights. In the lawyer’s small study four men sat around a table.
One of these was Mr. Smythe himself, who kept shifting his unlit cigar from hand to mouth as rapidly as if it were red hot. His forehead bore furrows of perplexity. Beside him sat the chief of police of the town of Ossining, hastily and carelessly dressed, but now wide awake. The chief was unhappy.
Mark Telfair was the third man. He was talking on the telephone and staring with unwinking attention at the fourth, Deputy Warden John Crawford. The deputy, despite a bump on his head as big as a walnut, seemed quite at ease.
On the table was a big steel box, from which a heavy casing of rubber had been removed. It had been pried open. Its contents, eight thick stacks of bills and several piles of bonds, not even damp after their long immersion, lay beside it on the polished mahogany.
Mark Telfair finished his conversation and hung up the receiver. “Warden Grant is returning tonight to take command of the prison,” he stated succinctly. “His doctor thinks now that he is recovering, not from an attack of ptomaine, but from a light dose of some poison like arsenic, which might have been slipped into a vacuum bottle of coffee.”