III
Porter left his eager young ex-assistant already changing to a street coat and drove to the office of a private detective agency noted for its faithfulness to its clients and its utter lack of curiosity. Here he quietly arranged to have the two men shadowed day and night, with immediate reports to him of anything unusual.
His trap was ready to be baited.
Robertson, he felt sure, would bring the deaf and dumb man to him. He had decided to handle the blind man himself, because here, he felt sure, was the weakest side of the triangle. The blind man, more helpless than either of the others, was burning with desire to avenge what he believed to have been a deliberate attempt to abandon him and cheat him out of the proceeds of the joint enterprise.
It was best, he decided, in this case to strike quickly and directly. But he did not go again to the station by the graveyard railing. Instead he loitered in the vicinity of the lodging-house until, after the evening crowds had deserted the streets, the tattered boy appeared with his charge in tow, leading homeward a bitter, cursing blind man.
“Excuse me,” said Dr. Porter, resisting a temptation to seize the man by the throat and choke a confession out of him, “but I am a physician. I am making a study of blindness. Perhaps I might be able to help you, if you would let me.”
“I ain’t got no money to pay doctors,” Goggles replied, bitterly.
“It isn’t a matter of money,” Porter answered. “I tell you I am studying the various forms of blindness. I have opened a clinic at the dispensary around the corner. We make no charge to those who have no money to pay.”
“Could you give me back my eyes?” the blind man asked eagerly.
“Perhaps. How did you lose your sight?”
“Explosion.”
“Powder factory?”
“Something like that.”
“How long ago?”
“Two years, come August.”
“That is most interesting. I think I can do something for you. Can you be at my clinic at 10 in the morning? Ask for me. My name is Dr. Moore.”
“You think there’s a chance I could see again?” the blind man asked after a full minute’s study. “I could pay well, if I could get my eyes back.”
“You mean you could work and earn the money then?”
“I wouldn’t have to earn it. It’s coming to me. I mean I could catch the-that gyped me out of my share of the — well, out of my rights.”
“You’ll come, then?” Porter asked, almost too eagerly he feared.
“Yes, I’ll be there.”
One of the quarry had smelled the bait.
Two days later young Dr. Robertson was having a similar conversation with a man to whom he talked on his fingers and who answered in a low monotone. Here, too, was a man who finally admitted a great desire to regain one of his lost senses. This man did not. seek vengeance, but expressed a fear that through his disability certain enemies were plotting against him. He was intensely anxious to hear what was going on around him and promised payment for a cure — not in money, but in the form of a handsome present of jewelry.
In the course of the following week another derelict had confessed to Dr. Robertson that he might be able to raise money for a goodly reward in case his speech was restored. He had no money, he confessed, but could realize on some valuable property he owned, if he could only talk about it like other men. Being dumb he was at a great disadvantage, and, also, he would like to tell a couple of — exactly what he thought of them in plain words. This in itself, he declared profanely, would be worth a great deal to him.
Each of the three men had stipulated that there should be no publicity about the cases. No one was to know they were under treatment. They each announced a great desire to “surprise their friends” and insisted upon arrangements for their visits at hours when they would not be seen by other patients. To these stipulations, Drs. Robertson and Porter finally agreed as a special concession, although Dr. Porter knocked what little professional dignity Dr. Robertson had been able to acquire completely out of him as he slapped him on the back in token of great and complete satisfaction.
IV
On each of the three cases “Dr. Moore” worked patiently and painstakingly. He soon lost all fear of detection as the man whose house had been robbed. If the three crooks remembered the name of their victim, it was apparently only as “some doctor” and there were thousands of doctors. All of his expert training in his profession he applied to the work of really restoring these three men to the full use of their faculties, and all of the skill in reading human character, gleaned from his long years of practice, he devoted to extracting and piecing together their secrets. He worked as physician and psychologist combined.
Both processes were tedious, but combined required only a couple of weeks altogether after the men had fully surrendered their confidence to him and his energetic young assistant, who in the casual conversational manner of the competent physician did most of the real questioning. That they learned anything like all of the truth neither of them believed for a moment. That all they did learn was true was another premise they rejected. But, trying and testing each statement gleaned, comparing and matching it to others to see if it fitted, and putting the whole “jig-saw puzzle” together, they felt that they had at least the framework of a section of the lives of these three crooks and the clue to their strange association.
As Dr. Porter had originally deduced, the three were ex-convicts. Deafy and Goggles had been friends for years and went to Sing Sing for the same burglary. At that time both men were in full possession of their senses. They had become acquainted with Dummy, sentenced for some petty crime, while in prison — attracted to him by his infirmity, which lent a sort of morbid diversion to a drab existence. Through this association they perfected their knowledge of the silent codes of which they already had a smattering, and formed a friendship with a promise of an offensive and defensive alliance when they should be again “outside.”
The release of Goggles and Deafy came first, and they at once set about making up for lost time, forgetting their silent pal, victim of an attack of scarlet fever, after the manner of their kind. Goggles was a wonder with safes. He could open almost any of them, it seems, by merely listening to t-he click of the tumblers as he turned the knob of the combination. Deafy was supposed to be the “soup” expert — the man who used a drill and a bottle of nitroglycerine upon such boxes as resisted the skill of his companion.
They had a most prosperous time of it for a month or two, baffling the police, obtaining their fill of adventure and lining their pockets — all three satisfactions at one time.
Dummy was released about this time and speedily hunted up his old friends. He was broke, morose, desperate and vengeful. They did not like him as a pal half so much as they thought they would back there in the big, lonely prison. Perhaps it was because Dummy did not measure up to real yegg standards. But the dumb man had declared himself in on two or three of their jobs, and thereafter it was sort of a game of hide and seek. They dodged him whenever they could and accepted him as a partner when they couldn’t help it.
One night when Deafy and Goggles were working alone something had happened. The safe had resisted the skill of the silent worker and the drill and the soup had been called upon to finish the job. Just what happened neither of them knew, but there had been a roar and a blinding flash and a deaf man had dragged a blind man from a wrecked office to safety.