As he came in, he waved to the guards.
“You can go off duty for an hour, boys,” he said. “Go and stretch your legs. I’ll keep an eye on the lads.”
“I’m glad to be off the job,” said Bill. “That bird Mantry, I wanta sock him in the eye.”
The guards left.
As the two passed off duty, through the door came the tall form and the pale face of Wayland. He stood back, as though not wishing to speak or interfere in any way until he had received express permission from the warden.
“What’s the matter between you and Bill?” asked the warden, standing in front of the cell and taking out a cigar. He began to teeter back and forth in his big, square-toed shoes. They were well polished, but the leather was so soft that the brightness of the surface was spoiled by a thousand intercrossing wrinkles. “You boys oughta all be friends,” added the warden.
“I just thought that Bill looked like a cross between a greaser and a dumb-bell,” said Mantry, grinning, “and so I told him that I’d seen his ma and pa, and what they looked like.”
The warden chuckled.
“Here’s a fellow that thinks he’s got something to say to you men,” said the warden. “Step up, Wayland. Talk to ‘em. I won’t interfere. Step right up to the bars and talk. I’ll wait over in the corner, and I won’t listen in. I guess you won’t be pulling the bars apart to let the gang out.”
He chuckled again, and paced over to a corner of the corridor, while Oliver Wayland stepped up before the bars of the cell and looked at the three.
The criminals stared with suddenly interested eyes upon this man. They could remember how he had stood in the bank, with arms stretched up past his white face. He was nearly as pale now, but there was a firmness of resolution about him that was new.
Men who handle weapons know that there is courage of another sort than that which leads to the shooting of bullets or the wielding of knives. Perhaps there was this other courage, this moral strength, in the ex-cashier.
“You’re the chief, Bray,” he said. “I want to talk with you.”
“Fire away,” said Bray, and he came in turn close to the bars.
“Bray,” said Wayland, “we know that none of you fellows have any part of the half million that was stolen from the bank. We know that you had a fourth partner who got away with the loot. And we’ve an idea that you’re not too fond of him.”
“Have you got that idea?” asked Bray, his upper lip lifting a little. “What give it to you?”
“You didn’t have a penny to fight your case for you,” said Wayland. “You gave your friend a chance to get away with the cash, and apparently he didn’t try to get in touch with a lawyer and buy him up to help you afterward. He simply lay low to take the coin and let you hang.”
“You talk like a gent with sense,” said Bray. “You talk like you’d gone through the first grade, or something.”
“Well,” said Wayland, “I didn’t come here to waste words on you. I came to offer you a chance for your lives. The law doesn’t know the name of your fourth partner. It doesn’t even know, very well, what he looks like. And it wants to find out. The only way it can find out is through you men. Will you talk?”
Dave Lister came close and said:
“What would we get out of it? Clean free of jail?”
Oliver Wayland hesitated. “No,” he said at last. “Not clean free of jail. But you’d get a chance of sentence. A new trial, and something less than life imprisonment. I don’t know exactly. But I’ve talked with some people high up, and they say that it can be managed. Will you talk?”
“You’re damn right we’ll talk!” said Lister. “We’ll tell you his name, what he looks like, and where he hangs out. Is that enough?”
“Plenty!” said Wayland. “And if “
“Lister is joking,” said Bray.
“Joking?” said Lister, with amazement, “when we got a chance “
“A chance to whine and howl, eh? A chance to turn State’s evidence, Dave? Is that what you call a chance?” demanded Bray suddenly.
Lister gaped.
“Joe,” he appealed to Mantry. “Here’s where we could maybe change to a “
“Aw, shut up,” said Joe Mantry, shrugging his sleek shoulders. “The chief knows what’s right, and he knows what’s wrong. Leave it to him.”
He added: “He has to hang with us, don’t he?”
This last argument seemed to be so final and convincing that even Lister was silenced.
Wayland said: “You boys can’t turn down an opportunity like this. You can’t do it! I’m not talking through my hat. Speak up now, and by midnight I’ll be in touch with people who are close to the governor. You’ll have a stay of execution before morning. Otherwise ” He made a gesture with his hand.
“Otherwise,” completed Bray, “we go to hell, eh?”
“You do,” agreed Wayland. “And you leave a traitor to enjoy the half million that you fellows worked to get. You took the main chances. I didn’t even see a fourth man until you were all riding down the street.”
“Outside jobs and inside jobs,” said Bray philosophically, “have to have gents workin’ on ‘em. That fourth gent had the easy break at the work. He had the easy break when we made the get-away—the rest of us could be free, by this time, while he was waiting to have his neck stretched. But that don’t make us talk now!”
“Why not?” asked Wayland.
“What he’d get from the law wouldn’t be enough to please us. I never gave a damn for what law courts could do. I wouldn’t have them work on that skunk in my place right now. That’s what we all feel. So long, brother!”
Wayland gave Bray one desperate look, but Bray was set as iron. Lister looked despondent, Mantry indifferent
“I give up,” said Wayland suddenly to the warden. And he walked out down the corridor.
The warden, as the door closed, clipped his cigar with a little gold cigar cutter which had been given to him by the prison staff. When he dropped it back into his coat pocket, it clinked against a heavy bunch of keys.
Phil Bray, hearing that sound, half closed his eyes and looked far away among the shadows of his own mind. He had a pleased expression, as of one who is listening to good music and knows that the best part of the piece is still to be played.
The warden lighted his cigar, tossing his head a little as he puffed out the first heavy clouds. He coughed. Thin blue smoke exploded from his lips. He wiped a speck of tobacco from his mouth with the red tip of his tongue,
“You fellows got everything you want?” he asked.
“Mostly everything,” said young Joe Mantry.
“Except one of those cigars,” remarked Phil Bray.
The warden opened his eyes a little. He was inclined to be angry because of the impertinence. These were his own cigars, and he valued them as treasures. But he remembered that men in the death house are supposed to have every wish gratified; it was his own fault if he had come up here and breathed the smoke of a good Havana into the faces of the prisoners.
“All right, Bray,” he said. “Here you are.”
He pulled one of the Havanas from his pocket and stepped right in toward the bars. Only at the last instant he saw what was coming, and tried to jerk his head away, but it was too late,
Phil Bray had driven his fist, straight and true, right between two of the bars, and now the weight of it lodged on the point of the warden’s chin.
Jefferson Bergman threw his hand over his head and fell on his back. Then he began to stir a little, moving slighdy from side to side.
None of the prisoners spoke. They understood the plan of Phil Bray before a word of it had been uttered. Now they reached through the bars and tried to catch hold of the leg and the foot of Bergman that was nearer to the cell.
Bray and Mantry could not get a grip, but the long arm of the penman enabled him to get his clutch on the flap of the trouser leg. He closed his fingers like the talons of a bird. Then, pulling back, he swayed the leg in toward the cell.
Instantly Bergman kicked himself free!
He got to his feet with a groan and an oath. He had a gun in his right hand now. The good Havana had been smashed, and the cinders had burned and blackened all one side of his face, yet he still kept the cigar well gripped between his teeth.
He cursed as he swayed to his feet. It had been a double shock—the fist against his jaw and the back of his head against the floor. The result was that when he regained his feet he stumbled suddenly forward toward the bars of the cell.
Bray was not quick enough to seize the opportunity. Perhaps he was not quite swift enough in his reactions to take advantage of the chance. But the long, skinny arms of the penman plunged through between the bars at once. He caught Bergman by the coat collar, jerked him violently forward, and crashed his forehead firmly against a steel bar.
The revolver slid down his trouser leg and clinked against the floor.
Bergman stood with staring, idiotic eyes. He put out one hand and took a mild grip on the bars. And the penman, a whine of impatient and savage joy in his throat, beat the head of the warden again and again against the bars.
They cut the flesh right through to the bone. Blood gushed down the face of the warden. Horrible wounds multiplied. His knees had buckled. But the frenzy of Dave Lister gave him strength to hold up the loose, bulky weight and still crash the head of Bergman against the bars.
At last the burden slid out of his numb finger tips.
He stood there gasping, shaking, looking down at his hands. Blood was spattered over his fingers, and smeared over the sleeves of his coat.
“That was a good one,” said Phil Bray. “I guess you cooked the poor bum, Dave. Got ‘em, Joe?”
Joe Mantry’s hand was fumbling in the coat pocket of the warden. He found the keys, jumped up with them, and, reaching his hand through the bars of the door, started trying keys in the lock.
Phil Bray went back to the table, poured out a good shot of whisky, and let it run slowly down his throat.
“I was just thinking,” he said in a meditative voice. “What you suppose that Jimmy Lovell could feel like if he could see what we’re doin’ now?”
The penman stared at his chief.
“You’re as cool as anything,” he declared. “I don’t care what Jimmy would feel like. I know what I’ll feel like once I get on the outside of the guard wall.”
“Sure,” agreed Bray.
“They won’t get us alive the next time,” said Dave Lister, trembling from head to foot.
“Sure they won’t. They won’t get us at all,” answered the chief.
“Take those keys yourself—lemme take ‘em—Joe’s wasting time—and they’re coming! The guard’s coming back,” breathed Lister.
“Easy, Dave,” said the chief. “We don’t know nothing about locks—not compared with Mantry. We ain’t got no fingers—not compared with him.”
Something clicked softly. The door of the cell opened, and the three, lost in a moment of panic and joy that carried even big Phil Bray away with the enthusiasm, rushed out into the corridor.
They were still far from freedom, but this first step seemed half of the distance.
What should they do next?
There were two revolvers—one in the coat of the warden and the other which had slid from his hand to the floor. Bray took one of them. The penman took the other, cursed, and reluctantly passed it across to Joe Mantry, as to a greater genius with firearms.
He said to Joe: “You know me, kid.”
“Yeah. You’ll get a pill before I do, if the pinch comes,” said Mantry.
They had agreed through the mere interchange of mute glances that they would not be taken. If it came to the final stand and shooting, they would save three bullets for themselves.
“You’re the best doctor. See if the warden’s dead, Dave,” ordered Bray.
So Dave kneeled beside the warden and put his ear over the heart of the big fellow.
“Dead,” he said. “I must ‘a’ bashed in his skull for him. Now what?”
“That’s the right double cross,” said Mantry to the chief.
“Yeah,” said big Phil Bray. “That’s a double cross that done us some good. How do we get out of here? If we go down the stairs, we’re sure to bump into somebody.”
“Yeah. Try the back door of the death house, and then over the roof. When we done our last turn in the yard I seen a ladder against the west side.”
“I remember. Where the masons got their scaffolding,” said Bray to this suggestion from Mantry. “But they’d take the ladder down by night.”
“They wouldn’t,” said Mantry. “They wouldn’t take it down. Because that’s our only chance.”
They looked at one another for a split part of a second. Then Bray said:
“All right, Joe. Try the back door.”
It stood at the farther end of the corridor. Mantry found the right key for it almost at once, and they slipped through the door onto the roof. It was almost flat. A little distance away that roof dropped two stories to the level of the rest of the building. They could see three walls of the prison in part. On those, to the south and east they could see the sentinels walking their beats. They could see the gleam of the rifles. Beyond the walls were the guard-houses, the little circular redoubts, with strong searchlights^ mounted in the top of each, throwing sweeping rays over the blackness of the ground.
How could a man do anything unseen?
Well, they were to die in the morning, anyway.
Bray ran back to the cell, got two blankets from a cot, and came out again, knotting the comers of the blankets together. That made a rope of some length. They hurried out to the edge of the roof, crawling. A strong drain projected. Bray tied an end of the blanket rope to the drain and let the rest of the length dangle. It came about eight or nine feet short of the roof beneath. A wind was blowing. It fanned the blanket out and swung it to the side across the field of one of the little barred windows.
Behind that window was some fellow who called himself unlucky—some one who had a little stretch, a fiver or so, to do. A fellow who wasn’t due to die in the morning, who didn’t have to come out by night and try to run the impossible gantlet of the walls, the guards, the guardhouses beyond the walls.
The three had their shoes off by this time, and Bray went down first. The others followed. It was not a very jarring drop to the roof below. So they left the blanket dangling, hanging like a Ump, pale-gray flag to attract attention. Then they stole across the roof to the place where the scaffold for the masons and the ladder had been placed that day.
The scaffold was gone, and the ladder lay flat in the yard far below!