His voice trailed off. For the lawyer, Gibbons, had stopped listening and had taken his eyes away. A man in the hypnotic state tells the truth because he must. Jason Hertz had told all of interest that he knew!
Gibbons moved back and Hertz sat staring straight ahead of him. His labored breathing told that he was in the hypnotic trance. He might stay thus for hours.
Gibbons drew a pencil and notebook from his pocket. He placed the pencil in Hertz’s fingers, put the notebook under his hand.
“Write, Jason Hertz! Write one of those notes to your boss — telling him you are out of prison, ready to serve him again.”
The fingers of Jason Hertz moved mechanically. The pencil whispered across the paper like the pencil of a spiritualistic medium doing automatic writing. When the note was finished. Gibbons tore the page loose, folded it, and put it in his pocket.
Then he began a series of quick, mysterious movements.
HE brought the light nearer Hertz, studied his face, and, after a few seconds, walked to a cabinet standing against the wall. He opened the front and drew from it a collection of odd-shaped apparatus.
There was a magnesium flare set in the center of a silvered, parabolic reflector. There was a small movie camera, a dictaphonic machine driven by a spring motor, and a set of elaborate measuring instruments based on the formulae of the Bertillon System. He placed them in front of Jason Hertz.
Lighting the flare, he focused it on Hertz’s face and body.
“Get up!” he ordered. “Walk around, Hertz.”
The escaped convict obeyed, rising from his seat and moving about the room in the manner of a sleepwalker. But his muscles made characteristic movements that the lens of the movie camera in Gibbons’ hands began to record.
“Sit down,” said Gibbons after a time.
Again Hertz obeyed, and Gibbons brought the camera closer.
“Smile,” he commanded, and Hertz did so. Then in quick succession Gibbons ordered the felon to scowl, laugh, register fear, surprise, and arrogance.
He set the camera down with a snap, turned off the magnesium light, and started the motor of the dictaphone machine.
“Now, Hertz — follow me. Repeat first the vowel sounds — aaa — ah — oh — ooo — ee! Now the consonants. Ker — ter — bur — mer—”
The needle of the dictaphone recorded the vibrations of Hertz’s voice on the hard-rubber cylinder. Gibbons was using the science of phonetics, setting down every inflection of the convict’s lips, throat, and tongue for future use. When he was satisfied that he had missed nothing, he closed the dictaphone and set to work with his measuring instruments, going over the planes of Hertz’s face. He jotted down the widths of Hertz’s eyes, mouth, and nostrils, the angle of his jaw, the slope of his forehead, the height of his cheek bones.
Satisfied at last, he put his apparatus away, keeping only the movie film, the cylinder from the dictaphone, and the figures he had set down.
He took up the notebook and pencil and began scribbling a brief note.
“You have betrayed your friends, Hertz,” he wrote. “You know the penalty of betrayal in the underworld. There is murder abroad, torture, horror. Your only chance to live is to escape from the country. I am giving you that chance. To catch a wolf I am freeing a rat. In the enclosed envelope you will find a passport already filled out and a boat ticket to South America. Take them, go, and never come back.”
The lawyer took a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket, put it in the note he had written, placed it in the envelope with the ticket and passport and pinned it to the front of Hertz’s coat. Then he paused a moment, holding the pencil in his hand.
With a strange, grim smile on his face, he reached forward and made a mark on the envelope — a mysterious “X” that seemed to have no purpose or meaning.
But if Jason Hertz could have seen it, he would have understood more about the strange adventure he had been through. For the man whose symbol and trade-mark that “X” was had built up a reputation which had reached even behind prison walls. It was a reputation for swift movement, startling courage, masterly disguises that no man could penetrate — and mysterious motives that no man could fathom.
It was a reputation that baffled the police as well as the underworld. For the man who hid behind “X,” symbol of the unknown quantity, seemed to be working against crime, even while classed as a criminal.
Gibbons turned then and strode through the door into the night, and behind him floated an eerie yet melodious whistle that had in it an unearthly quality like a voice from some other world.
Chapter III
IT was an hour later that Gibbons, the lawyer, parked his roadster and walked along a quiet street at the outskirts of the city. His movements were quick, eager. There was a strange, restless brightness in his eyes.
The silence of the night was punctured by the shrill cry of a newsboy, peddling an early morning edition. Gibbons bought a paper and the restlessness in his eyes deepened as he stared at the front page. Black headlines were spread across it. They told of another mysterious torture murder — a millionaire’s son found dead in his penthouse apartment, his face eaten away by acid.
Somewhere down the block a police siren sounded and a green roadster whirled by. Gibbons, watching from the shadows, recognized the man in it — a detective from the homicide squad. Murder seemed to whisper through the darkness of the night. Menace lay like a pall over the city.
The lawyer’s pace increased. Once he paused in his swift stride to press a hand to the left side of his chest. An old wound, received on a battlefield in the World War, had given him a momentary twinge of pain.
A harsh laugh fell from his lips. Years ago doctors had predicted that he had only a few months to live; but he had gone on living, defying death. Perhaps it was this closeness to death that made him so restless — or perhaps it was something else.
He reached a wealthy residential section at length. The river flowed beside him, millionaires’ homes and expensive apartment buildings rose at his right. At the corner of the block he stopped. A high wall followed the line of the side street. A huge pile of masonry, bleak and austere, towered above the sidewalk, the windows of it boarded up. It was the old Montgomery mansion, facing the river, the house that the litigation of heirs, quarreling about the estate, had kept empty for years. Its luxurious rooms were gathering dust now. Mice moved unmolested across its polished floors. Moths were nibbling at the expensive rugs.
The man who called himself Gibbons turned and walked down the side street. There was no one in sight. He followed the wall as silently as a shadow. A few gaunt shrubs that had not been properly tended for years made a sparse fringe along the wall.
Suddenly the man stopped. He parted two shrubs and stepped behind them. His hands moved in the darkness for an instant. An old door leading into the ancient garden swung open. The door closed softly behind him.
He was in a place of ruin, decay, and desolation with the teeming life of the city shut away. Under the glow of the sky overhead, he picked his way through the garden, passed statues fallen from their pedestals, passed a tumble-down summerhouse, passed a fountain that had long since ceased to spray moisture.
He appeared to be at home, appeared to know where he was going, appeared to belong there. He came to the rear of the house, lifted the cover of the cellar door, and descended a flight of stone steps.