Nellie relaxed. It had been a good thought, but it didn’t mean anything. Then she brightened up again.
“The watchman. Do you happen to know when he makes his rounds?”
“Yes,” said Harriet. “Every hour on the half-hour. He takes about thirty minutes to do it and just stays on the first floor the other thirty minutes. He is due on the top floor at about ten forty.”
Nellie looked at her watch, and then her hand jerked to a metal desk lamp that someone had put in here because it wasn’t being used for the moment. It was ten forty-four.
“He may be out already!” she exclaimed. “Why didn’t I think of it at once! He may—”
She was unscrewing the single light bulb.
“He turns on the lights at each floor as he makes his rounds, doesn’t he?” she snapped.
“Why, yes,” said Harriet. She was making a great effort to keep from hysteria, because already it was hard to breathe. “He turns on the lights while he goes over the floor, then turns them out when he—”
Darkness in the vault. Nellie had unscrewed the light bulb. A flash of blue. She had shorted the socket with the metal desk lamp. Then there was deafening thunder in the vault as she battered on the door with the lamp’s heavy base.
And the door opened.
“Come out with your hands up!” barked a truculent voice. “Why — it’s only a couple of girls—”
The watchman, an elderly fellow with stooped shoulders and a drooping mustache — and with a large gun held menacingly in his competent hand — gaped at the two, then stared hardest at Harriet.
“What are you doing—” he began, stupefied. But he stopped. “What are you two doing here, I mean?”
Nellie’s quick eye went from him to Harriet, and she was just in time to see Harriet’s finger come from her lips in a gesture of silence.
“We got locked in, Mr. Harris,” Harriet said.
“You’ve been in there from five o’clock to now? And you ain’t dead of suffocation?” he said. Then he shrugged. “Well, it’s no business of mine. I came onto the fifth floor, turned the lights on, and half of ’em shorted out. Then I heard a banging from inside the vault. That’s all I know, Miss — I mean, that’s all I know. Can I do anything for you now?”
“No,” said Harriet, teeth chattering. “We… we just want to get out as fast as possible.”
Nellie said nothing till they were in the coupé. Then: “That watchman certainly acted like you were the queen of the May,” she declared. “Just who are you, anyhow?”
“Harriet Smith. I worked there, as I said. So the watchman knew me.”
“You don’t happen to know Mr. Beall, the owner, himself, do you?”
“Of c-course not. I’m a girl— You aren’t going toward Bleek Street.”
“No,” said Nellie. “I’m not. I’m going toward Long Island. To Beall’s home. I want to see if Mr. Beall has been there all evening, or if he has been sneaking around his own office stealing his own envelopes and locking girls in his office vault!”
“I’ve told you before,” said Harriet hotly, “that it just isn’t possible for Mr. Beall to be mixed up in anything criminal.”
“We’ll see,” said Nellie. “If he has been at home all the time, all he has to do is say so.” They sped out the Long Island pike. “After that, we’ll go to Bleek Street and get some rest. We’ve had enough danger for one night.”
But if Nellie thought that, fate, it seemed, thought differently. There was to be still more danger before they hit the pillows.
Nellie kept an eye out for Cole Wilson’s car as they neared the Beall estate. Cole was on Beall’s trail. She saw no sign of him, and that looked bad for Bealclass="underline" It looked as if Beall had indeed been out, and was now being followed at a distance by Cole.
Nellie didn’t attempt to sneak up on the house. She drove openly up the lane from the suburban street and stopped openly in front of the door. She and Harriet got out. Nellie rang the doorbell. The door was opened and Nellie stepped in.
And twenty-eight men fell all over her!
At least it seemed like twenty-eight. Actually, afterward, it came out that there were only four. But Nellie decided each must have had as many arms and legs as a hundred-legged worm.
The diminutive blonde went down under that rush. And the men separated, two grabbing Harriet and two continuing to maul Nellie. Which was a mistake. The separation, that is.
Anyone, of course, would have thought two men could handle a one hundred-pound slip of a girl. But this was not just another girl. This was Nellie Gray.
Nellie’s pink little right hand got a grip on an arm just above the elbow. Thumb and middle finger pressed hard there. The owner of the arm yelled and tumbled clear backward in an effort to get away from the resulting blaze of pain.
Nellie let him go and turned her scientific attention on the other. She was on one knee now, with the man locked close to her because he had his right arm crooked around her dainty neck.
It was a bad hold, but she knew all about what to do with it. She caught the wrist of the choking arm, turned sharply in a kind of unwinding movement, and then the man was sliding on the floor a yard away on his face. His own weight, expertly aided by Nellie’s move, had dislocated his arm at the shoulder.
“Well, for—” snarled one of the two men with Harriet, as he saw the girl knock the spots out of two thugs. He charged toward Nellie, leaving Harriet with just the one guardian. At the same moment, in a doorway down the hall, a man appeared.
The man looked pale and dizzy. He was in slippers and robe, proving that he belonged here. A lump on his forehead testified to recent violence. He tottered toward the group in the hall.
The man who had left Harriet had a gun in his hand. He wasn’t going to monkey around any more. He was going to club that gun down on Nellie’s head! He raised it high—
Nellie was watching the two men she had downed, and didn’t know about the man behind her. She’d have been cracked on the head by the gun barrel, only the man in slippers and robe acted.
He had an inkwell in his hand. He threw it, and luck favored the throw. The heavy glass cube hit the man behind Nellie in the biceps on the right arm. The man gasped and his arm sagged.
“Scram!” snapped the man with the dislocated shoulder, suiting the word with action by running for the door.
Then Harriet and Nellie and the man in slippers had the hall to themselves. Nellie cried out in angry disappointment and chased after the men. She wanted them prisoner. But they were too fast.
She heard car doors slam, the whine of a motor from the rear near the garage and the shriek of a motor going thirty or thirty-five in low gear. A fender clanged on the gatepost at the street, and car and men were gone.
Nellie drew a deep breath and looked at the man in the dressing robe. He was young, and his features seemed just a little familiar.
“Thanks,” she said. “That fellow would have conked me if you hadn’t thrown the inkwell.”
The young fellow waved his hand vaguely to dismiss the thanks. He was staring at Harriet, and staring quite angrily.
“Sis!” he said. “What the devil have you been doing lately? Where have you been?”
Nellie whirled on Harriet. Once more the girl had a finger to her lips for silence, but it hadn’t worked this time as it had with the watchman.
“Sis, huh?” said Nellie slowly. “So she is Beall’s daughter.”
“Sure!” said the young man sourly. “Who was she supposed to be?”
Harriet was biting her lips and looking frustrated and angry.
“She said her name was Harriet Smith,” Nellie said.
“So it is,” the man replied. “Harriet Smythe Beall. I’m Johnson Barr Beall; she’s my sister. And Dad and I have been hunting all over for her. We thought she’d been kidnaped, too.”