In the dimly lighted basement hall they all stopped suddenly and listened.
Gertie screamed aloud: “Oh, my heavenly faith!”
Mrs. Loos gasped: “There it is again!”
De Kane glared a question at Henry, and Milly clutched his arm in her fright. Even Doran turned white.
“Sounds like a cat, doesn’t it?” Henry remarked placidly. “Yes, I should say it is a cat.”
It certainly was the yowl of a cat, a long drawn, deep-toned snarling cry, faint and muffled.
“Come along,” said Henry, and led the way to the stair that communicated with the cellar below.
At the stair head was a small closet. Henry took a key from his pocket. “Try the door, captain,” he invited.
“It’s locked,” De Kane announced.
Just then the yowling came again, louder, more insistent. It came from behind the locked door.
“The door is locked,” Henry agreed. “I locked it. That was about three o’clock this afternoon. You see, I have the key.”
Henry used the key and opened the door a crack.
“Lightnin’!” he whispered through the crack. “Hey, puss, puss! Hey, boy!”
Something black and slinking tried to force itself through the crack of the door.
“Look him over carefully,” Henry invited, holding the door against the cat. “Examine that head, will you? See anything?”
“Anything!” De Kane shouted. “It’s the black cat with the crooked white scar. The black cat Doran says he saw on Stuyvesant’s bed!”
De Kane wheeled on the furnace man.
“You lied,” he roared. “You lied from start to finish. You and your mysterious black cat. You went out and bought that dope and gave it to the old man yourself. When he died, you scarred his throat to bear out your damned lie about the cat scaring him to death. And when that lie wouldn’t hold water, you tried to blame murder on an innocent woman. Answer me, Doran! Was it you who killed Matthew Stuyvesant?”
Doran’s wandering eye turned back to the gaunt black cat. He shuddered. “Yes,” he snarled. “Yes, I did.”
“Well,” said Henry Rood, drawing a deep breath of relief, “nobody would ever have proved it if you hadn’t been too artistic with that story about the cat. But when you asked me to believe that Lightnin’ let himself out of a locked door and ran upstairs and scared the old man to death, then ran back and locked himself in again, you asked for something beyond belief. Even a cat can’t do impossible things, Doran.”
One Good Man
by Edward Parrish Ware
“If you do find ’em,” snarled Lundsford, “better slip away without lettin’ ’em know it — they’re bad medicine!”
I
Where the Jonesboro, Lake City and Eastern Railroad spans Lake St. Francis, that body of water is a mile wide. The railway trestle describes a long curve, beginning immediately it leaves the west bank, and an eastbound train becomes invisible from Lake City, the village at the head of the trestle, almost at once. There is no town on the eastern bank of the lake. Nothing, for miles, but wilderness.
Lake St. Francis is something of a wilderness in appearance itself. The channel of the river from which it takes its name is but a narrow ribbon, flanked on the east by cypress trees, mud banks, flags and other growths — a paradise for fishermen. A stranger, however, would need a guide to find his way about in the eastern portion.
Just after dark, one September night, two long dugouts glided up the lake, crossing occasional areas of moonlit water, but invisible from the town because of the character of the place. Each craft held two men, and they were silent; even the dip of their paddles in the water made not the slightest ripple. Reaching a tree-clad mudbank a hundred yards below the juncture of railway trestle and shore, both boats found the shadowed side and laid against it. There was no conversation, no smoking — nothing, in fine, that might have betrayed a presence there.
After half an hour’s wait, a tall man in the first dugout, who appeared to be leading the expedition, silently nosed his boat away, and slipped through the growth to a landing on the east shore. The second craft followed as noiselessly.
Fifteen minutes later, the night train for Barfield’s Point left Lake City for the eastern terminus. It consisted of two coaches and a combination express, baggage and mail car, the latter having two men aboard. The engineer felt his way carefully over the long trestle, for the unstable foundations of the piers made caution imperative; until the low ground of the lake region should be left behind, he would proceed under close control, a sharp lookout for bad track.
The last coach had barely cleared the approach on the east side, and the engineer was cautiously giving his cylinders more steam, when a red lantern seemed to leap out of the night, ahead, describing frantic revolutions, as though the bearer were in a high state of excitement.
The engine driver applied the air, and the train slid to a screeching stop; then he stepped to the cab door and called out:
“What’s wrong? Track dropped down?”
That was the bit of roadbed nuisance causing the greater part of trouble on the line.
“No — but you’ll drop down, and out, if you don’t obey orders, and hustle about it, too!”
The voice came from directly below, and the engineman looked down into the muzzle of a revolver. A second later, a tall man, completely masked, swung up into the cab and another boarded the engine from the fireman’s side.
A shrill whistle sounded from the rear, and the tall man swung his gun on the engineer.
“Pull ahead until I tell you to stop — and give her steam!” he ordered.
The engineer, too astonished to use his tongue — for no such thing had ever before been perpetrated on the little road — obeyed.
When the train came to a stop, Morris Brake, the mail messenger, opened the door of the car and looked ahead — to find himself caught by the ankles and brought to the floor with a thud. An instant later two men crawled over his prostrate body into the car. They were armed, and wore masks. One seized the messenger and drew him inside, then closed the door. At that moment the car, cut loose from the rest of the train, began moving rapidly ahead.
“Open your safe!” came the command from one of the bandits, while his mate held the baggage man helpless under his gun.
Brake got to his feet, and turned to the safe. He was a man of high courage, and there was an unusually large sum of money in the safe — used jointly by the mail service and the express company. He manipulated the combination, swung the door open, seized a revolver which lay inside and wheeled — to meet instant death at the hands of the bandit.
The whistle of the locomotive sounded a short blast — evidently a signal to the men in the car. Paying no attention to the dead messenger, the bandit took a grain sack from beneath his coat and scooped the contents of the safe into it, then turned to the door as the train slowed to a stop.
“All right, Bud!” he exclaimed.
The man called Bud swung his clubbed gun, and the baggageman dropped heavily to the floor.
In the engine cab, both the driver and the fireman had been rendered unconscious in a like manner, and, ten minutes after the holdup began, the four thieves were racing to where their boats lay hidden. Racing for Lake St. Francis, to lose themselves in the great swamp to the south— trackless, wild, almost impenetrable save to those in the know.
In the sack carried by the bandit who had slain the mail messenger reposed the sum of ten thousand dollars — funds of the express company and the government.