With this, Cox started the car and they sped swiftly southward, along a smooth highway. The sense of time and distance came to the wounded boy vaguely, but presently the white glare of the road gave place to cool arches of trees and the car stopped.
A glimpse of the balanced stone, now raised on end, aroused Ramsey to realities. They were in the old lumber trail. Two other cars were parked in the gully and a half dozen men lounged around them. Two of them were handcuffed. A third came forward to Cox.
“We dodged the lookout and got them as they came in,” he reported.
“What had they with them?”
“Groceries, paper and ether.”
“You’ve been up to the Bag of Bones?”
“Yes sir. No signs of them anywhere.”
The Bag of Bones! The words aroused Jack like the lash of a whip. There he and Cox had smelled the ether; there Jack had seen the flashing light — In a rush of words the boy told of his night vision, the glow in the ash tree on the rocks.
“Surest thing you know, sonny,” Cox exploded. “They needed that light for the fine points in their job.”
Jack was groping for other facts which evaded him. Then, clear as a trumpet, came Mary Gage’s words:
“Lean Jaw: Under the ash tree on the rocks, lift the hollow stump.”
“You say you can get no trace of them?” he cried.
“Right.”
“Then I can! Help me! We’ll go to the Bag of Bones.”
“You’re knocked out, sonny—”
“I must! She is there.”
“Brady! Grosman!” Cox called. “Help the boy!”
They lifted Jack from the car, two men carrying him between them on arms and hands doubly crossed. Jack doggedly insisting, Cox hiding his anxiety in muttered curses, the carriers swaying and stumbling with their burden, they made their way along the trail.
Near the Bag of Bones two of Cox’s men were on guard. Between them, handcuffed, was the man with the black beard.
“Good work!” Cox commented. “Watch him close. He faces a murder charge. No sign of the others?”
“No, sir.”
“Hoist me to the top of those rocks,” Jack insisted.
“You ain’t going up there, sonny?”
“It’s the only way I can find out!”
Lifting and shoving, they raised Jack over the boulders. At last they stood on the level summit. Jack glanced at the ash tree, then studied the ground beneath it.
“See! There! The hollow stump! Two of you lift it!”
“Say, boy, you’ve gone nutty—”
“Lift that hollow stump!”
Cox’s men laid hands on the large stump, the roots of which seemed to b deeply embedded in the earth. As they tugged at the rotting wood, the stump and a section of soil and rock came away in ragged angles, like a piece from a picture puzzle, disclosing the entrance to a cave thus camouflaged on a trap door by a master hand.
“All of you! Down! Quick!” Cox ordered.
A rush to the opening, the tumble of men down a ladder, shouts and the impact of a struggle in the darkness below, a pistol shot, a woman’s scream — It happened too quickly to be measured by time.
Swiftly as it came, however, the fight was not ended before Ramsey was on the ladder, dropping into the shadows.
He found Mary, benumbed with terror, crouching in a corner of the cavern. Raising her in his arms, he comforted and revived her. Mary sobbed out her story with arms around his neck.
“Say, sonny, let’s go,” Cox finally intervened. “Thanks to you, I’ve made the neatest round-up in my fourteen years of Government service — Crooks, printing press, copper plates, engravers’ tools — the whole outfit. Have a look at this—” He extended a crisp twenty-dollar bill — “the neatest take-off you’ll see in a blue moon.”
“Mary — Miss Gage wants to go to my mother’s in Honesdale.”
“Hum — She’s one of the gang.”
“I didn’t know what they were doing here — Indeed!” cried the girl.
“She’s right there!” It was Gage who spoke, scowling on them from the knot of prisoners.
“Surely you won’t punish her!” Jack insisted. “Why, Mr. Cox, she deserves all the credit for this. She told me how to find the trapdoor to this cave.”
“Oh!” Cox reflected in doubt. “We might let her stay with your mother till we need her in court—”
One of Cox’s men put in a decisive word. As he left his post as a guard for the prisoners and came forward, Jack saw that his left hand was covered with bandages.
“They’re right, Boss,” he said. “I’m sure you’re safe in letting her go. Miss Mary knew nothing of what was doing here. If she had been one of the gang and had known about it, I would have found it out, being with her all the time—”
“Why Jimmie Willets!” cried the girl.
“Present!” he replied with a grin. “Barring my whiskers and the other camouflage.”
“Then you’re not half-witted?”
“Not to notice it, Miss Mary.”
“And you hanging around our cabin all the time; helping me steal the traps—”
“Got to do crazy things in my job, Miss Mary.”
“Oh, Jimmie!”
“I’ll take your word for it, Willets,” Cox remarked. “Sonny, will you and Miss Gage accept our thanks and apologies? You’d better hustle along now with your elopement.”
The Mystery of the One-Legged Man
by J. B. Hawley
I
Newspaper readers will recall the series of brutal and seemingly senseless murders that occurred in England and were attributed to a criminal whom some clever writer dubbed Peg-Leg because after each of his appearances he left conclusive evidence in the form of footprints that he was minus his right leg and wore in its place an old-fashioned wooden affair ending in a round steel ferrule.
I have said that these murders were seemingly senseless affairs, and that must have been the opinion of everyone who considered that they were committed without any apparent motive. From none of his victims was anything stolen and in the history of their lives there were no passages to denote the existence of an enemy who might kill in a spirit of revenge for a real or fancied grievance.
The first of these horrible crimes occurred in York. The victim was a certain John Elder, manufacturer of buttons, a highly respectable citizen.
On the night of his death, Elder had retired to his study to write some letters. As the evening was warm he had opened the French window, and according to the testimony of his butler who was the last of his household to see him alive, had dragged forward a small table and placed it just in the window’s opening. He had seated himself beside this table and begun to write when the servant left the room.
At about eleven o’clock this same servant had heard a cry coming from the study. He had hurried to see if anything were wrong with his master and had found him lying beside the table with a knife wound gaping in his chest. Outside the French window, the police had found unmistakable footprints of a one-legged man. These they followed across the lawn until they came to the road where they became blurred and finally lost in the medley of other prints on this much-traveled thoroughfare.
Of course the detectives rounded up every one-legged man in York and questioned them closely. But all had unquestionable alibis, and as the police were unable to discover or invent a means of tracing the criminal, they eventually dropped the case.
Peg-Leg’s second victim was a little higher on the social scale. No lover of English sport will ever forget the name of Sir Roger Bascom. Nor will the many unfortunate souls whom he helped in their need be more backward in cherishing his memory. As in the case of John Elder, Bascom was killed between the hours of eleven and midnight. And on the grounds of his estate in Sussex were found another series of the footprints of a one-legged man. Because of his prominence, the police put forth their best efforts to run down his murderer. But these went as unrewarded as had those of their colleagues in York.