The Senator’s muscular hand shook as he opened the door for his caller; the skinny hand that pulled Inch’s black hat down on his head was as steady as a Sudlow County boulder.
III
A dim light from the corridor entered room 411 through the transom; through the closed window came a faint glow from the street lights; the two diluted the darkness in the room to an artificial, bluish twilight.
Gene Inch sat on a chair in a corner near the door, facing the door. He wore a suit of coarse, heavy underwear, which bulged in ill-fitting folds here and there over his angular figure. Clamped between his teeth was the stem of a cold pipe; a battered and scratched revolver of heavy caliber hung from one hand. His bare feet were flat on the carpeted floor in an attitude of patient ease.
A clock somewhere struck ten. Twenty minutes passed. Then the knob of the unlocked door turned, the door opened, and a burly figure stood in the doorway. A black pistold held high against the figure’s chest pointed into the room.
The muzzle of Inch’s revolver slid forward and nudged the side of the burly man. The latter’s muscles jumped suddenly, but his feet did not move. Slowly his right hand opened and the automatic thudded dully on the floor.
Inch stepped back and said:
“Come in and close the door behind you.”
Then he motioned his captive to a chair and himself sat on the edge of the bed.
“You’re Bush, I reckon.”
“Yes, and if you think—”
“Shut your mouth and listen!”
Bush subsided before the menace in the reedy voice of this queer little man in ridiculous habit who squinted wickedly at him in the dusk over the barrel of the enormous revolver.
“Take off your coat.”
Bush obeyed.
“Throw it on the foot of the bed.”
Bush hesitated. It might be possible to fling the coat at this old man’s head and close with him. But, his eyes now accustomed to the dim light, he saw that the withered finger around the trigger held it back against the grip — the cocked hammer was restrained only by the pressure of the thumb. That pressure removed, the hammer would fall. Gently Bush tossed his coat to the bed. Inch went through the pockets with his left hand, removing everything. Then he threw the coat on the floor.
“Turn out your other pockets.”
Bush emptied the pockets of his trousers and waistcoat: a knife, some keys, a few coins, a roll of paper money, a watch, a handkerchief.
“This suit is tailor-made, huh?” Inch said. “Then there had ought to be labels on the pants and vest as well as the coat. Take the knife and rip ’em all out, and make a neat job of it. Give me your hat.”
While the puzzled blackmailer — not yet suspecting his captor’s intention — removed all the markings from his clothes Inch examined the hat. No initials were in it.
“Put on your coat and hat,” he ordered. “Now put all them things back in your pockets except them bills, and your watch. You can drop the labels on the floor. Now stand back against the wall.”
Inch picked up the roll of paper money and put it in the pocket of his trousers, which hung over the back of a chair. The watch, the cloth labels, and the things he had taken from Bush’s coat he rolled in a handkerchief and put in his ancient valise.
“Say—” Bush began.
“Shut your mouth, damn you!” Inch snapped irritably, shaking his revolver at the blackmailer.
Then the old man looked carefully around the room and chuckled with sour satisfaction. He backed to the bed and pulled the covers down with his free hand and got into the bed, the revolver still menacing the other. He pulled the white covers up across his chest, half-sitting, half-lying against the pillows. Then slowly he drew the revolver back toward his body. The muzzle cleared the edge of the covers and slid out of sight.
Bush’s mouth hung slack, bewilderment filled his face. As the weapon disappeared beneath the covers he contracted his leg muscles in the first move of springs. Before he could bend his knees in the second movement the room shook with a heavy explosion. A smoldering hole appeared on the white surface of the top sheet and grew rapidly larger. Bush toppled to the floor with blood seeping from a hole in his left breast. The room reeked with the blended odors of gunpowder and burning cloth.
Inch scrambled out of bed, took a flashlight and a homemade black mask from a dresser drawer, and dropped them beside the dead man. Then he kicked the automatic pistol, which lay near the door, over near one lifeless hand.
Fifteen minutes later the hotel detective and a policeman were examining the remains of Henry Bush, and listening to Gene Inch’s story of retiring early, waking to see a man bending over the chair on which his closers hung, carefully drawing his revolver from under the pillow, being surprised in that act by the burglar, and having to shoot through the bed-covers.
The detective and the patrolman finished their examination and conferred.
“Nothing to identify him by at all.”
“No; not even a watch or anything we could trace.”
“No use trying to trace the gun; you never can. Burglars don’t get ’em that way.”
The policeman turned to Inch.
“Come down to headquarters in the morning — about ten o’clock.”
And then, admiringly:
“You sure-God hit him pretty for having to shoot through them bed-clothes!”
IV
“The Senator is not in,” said the girl in the outer office.
“Now, sister, you tell him Gene Inch wants to see him.”
“But he—”
“Run along and tell him, sister.”
The Senator came to the door of his private office to receive Inch and to usher him in. The Senator’s face was palling and he seemed to be having trouble with his breathing. The eyes that met Inch’s held a strange mixture of hope and fear, eagerness and reluctance.
When they were alone in the private office Inch nodded with cool assurance.
“It’s all done. Everything is all right.”
“And he—”
“I seen by the papers where a unidentified burglar was killed trying to rob a farmer in a Baltimore hotel.”
The Senator relaxed into a chair with a sobbing intake of breath, and the color began to flow back in his face.
“Are you positive, Gene, that there can be no slip-up?”
Inch clucked scornfully.
“Ain’t nothing can happen! Everything is all right!”
The Senator got to his feet and stretched out both hands to his savior.
“I can’t ever pay you in full for what you have done, Gene, but no matter—”
Inch turned his rounded back upon the other’s gratitude and walked to the door. With one hand on the knob he turned, leered malevolently at the Senator, and said:
“I’ll expect a check on the first of every month; and I hope you get to be president — it’ll mean a lot to me.”
For a long space the Senator stood staring dumbly into the little man’s flat, lifeless eyes. Then comprehension came to him. His knees sagged and he crumpled into his chair.
“But, Gene—”
“But hell!” Inch snarled. “The first of every month!”
Holiday
The New Pearsons, July 1923
Paul left the post-office carrying his monthly compensation cheque in its unmistakable narrow manila envelope with the mocking bold-faced instructions to postmasters should the addressee have died meanwhile, and hurried hack along the wooden walk to his ward, intent upon catching the physician in charge before he left for the morning. The ward surgeon, a delicately plump man in khaki, with a mouth permanently puckered, perhaps by its habit of framing a mild, prolonged “oh” whenever, as not infrequently happened, he could not find the exactly adequate words, was just leaving his office.