Part 22

"I knew, of course, why . . . It was when the papers were revelling in the sensational 'return'--as they called it--of the Lone Wolf. I had tried to keep it from you, fearing the consequences of the excitement, in your condition; but the hue and cry was out for you, I was at my wits' ends to hide you away from the police, it was necessary to tell you why . . . What I had so feared happened: you brooded incessantly, whenever your mental condition made you forget the affair for a time--as when you'd wake up from a sound night's sleep remembering nothing of the previous day--something was sure to happen to remind you. A hundred times you begged me to let you go, that you might find and expose the scoundrel who was masquerading in your reputation; I knew you were incompetent for that, at the time, and always managed somehow to talk you out of it, until--as I say--abruptly, without word or sign, you left me."

"Left _you_!"

"Ah! but you don't know." Her smile grew gently arch, fondly teasing. "Don't you, my Michael! even remember--"

She gave a startled movement, averting her attention to the windows, her body became tense in his embrace, her hands convulsively tightened upon his shoulders.

The veranda was booming with a sudden, concerted rush of many feet. Lanyard offered to release the woman, but she clung to him as if in terror; and at the last he had to use his strength, because he foresaw what was to befall, forcibly breaking her hold and throwing her from him lest she share a peril that, he was resolved, must at any cost be his alone.

Crying out, not loudly but in protest and solicitude for him, she staggered back; and Lanyard turned toward the desk to retrieve his pistol--too late. Already a man was shouldering in through the broken window. He brought up standing with an automatic trained on Lanyard.

"Stick 'em up, my man!" he rumbled--"and be quick about it."

Lanyard was quick about it. His own weapon lay on the far edge of the desk, at least eight feet away; before he could have covered half that distance a bullet would have stopped him. Hands level with his ears, he swung slowly to face Morphew.

Gross, ungainly, panting, rocking from one to the other of his heavily planted feet, the Sultan of Loot stood with head slightly lowered and thrust forward, face of a pig hideously twisted by a leer of malice successful and exultant.

Behind him the window filled with followers, through it half a dozen defiled into the room; three who were immediately identified as individuals of Morphew's bodyguard who had helped manhandle Lanyard in the Morphew town-house the night before; after these, the inevitable Pagan, strutting, smirking; finally, two that were new figures in Lanyard's sight--one an able-bodied young Irishman in police uniform but lacking that elusive poise which somehow distinguishes members of the New York police force, the other a simple citizen proudly parading a nickel-plated badge on the bosom of his waistcoat.

"And keep 'em up, Lanyard!" Morphew was admonishing in an uglier note of malice. "Don't take any chances with me this time--if I have to shoot, I'll shoot to kill. You're caught at last, caught with the goods on!"

"'Caught'?" Eve de Montalais challenged. She stepped forward, coming between Morphew and his chosen prey. "What are you saying? Caught doing what?"

A mottled fat paw impatiently waved her out of the way; Morphew's dourest scowl covered her. "Stand aside, madam!" he growled. "Don't make me take a chance of hitting you; that man's a desperate criminal, if you don't know it; the first move he makes, I'll fire--"

"But I do not know he is a desperate criminal," Eve sharply contradicted. "As for you, whoever you may be, I think you must be mad . . ."

"I guess you are," Morphew brusquely retorted. Yet his slotted eyes winced from hers. "Caught him yourself--didn't you?--just now, robbing your safe--"

"And if I did?" the woman surprisingly quibbled. "What concern is that of yours? Have I invited your interference? Have I asked your help in the management of my own affairs?"

"Maybe you haven't," Morphew sullenly contended--"but you're getting it whether you want it or not--"

"With what authority, pray?"

"My authority, madam!" the man retorted in open rage--"the authority of an honest, law-abiding citizen. I've been after that yegg there for months. Now I've got him, by God! he don't escape with his life." He jerked a peremptory head at the policeman and the man who sported the nickel-plated badge. "Take your prisoner, Mr. Sheriff--"

"One moment!" Eve interposed a ringing demand that halted these two before they had fairly got in motion to obey Morphew's behest. "I am the householder here, if you please--you'll arrest nobody on these premises without my sanction or a proper warrant. This gentleman has done nothing to deserve arrest--"

"Nothing?" Morphew jeered. "You call burglary nothing?"

"He has committed no burglary--"

"Didn't break into this room and bust open that safe, I suppose?"

"To the contrary," Eve asseverated, "Mr. Lanyard is here in his own right; more than that, he has prevented a burglary--"

"A likely story!" Morphew commented with a snort of grim derision. "If he didn't do it, I want to know who did!"

"But allow me to answer this honest and law-abiding citizen, madame," Lanyard lightly put in. And wittingly at risk of his life he lowered one hand to touch the woman's shoulder as he moved to one side, that she might no longer persist in shielding him with her own body. "Permit me to relieve the confusion of mind which distresses the amiable Monsieur Morphew--"

"You keep your trap shut!"

"Softly, my good Morphew! I am about to do you a service--appreciating as I do how worried you have been, and how pained, by the ungrateful behavior of your tool and accomplice, Mal--"

"Shut your mouth, d'you hear?" Morphew bellowed, swaying his huge head upon his shoulders like an infuriated animal about to charge. "Take your prisoner, Mr. Sheriff! If this woman won't charge him with the burglary he's committed here tonight, _I_ charge him with breaking into my house in New York last night--"

The bellow ran out in a gasp that was followed by a choking noise. A long arm had shot out over Morphew's shoulder from behind, and the bony but powerful hand at the end of it had closed upon his wrist, jerking the muzzle of the pistol toward the ceiling. As he swung round with an incoherent roar another hand, the mate to the first, deftly seized the weapon and twisted it from his grasp. He stared, in apoplectic speechlessness, into the countenance composed yet sardonic of Crane.

Unobserved by anybody other than Eve and Lanyard, the detective had quietly stepped in through the open window, closely followed by an associate, a mild-mannered body hall-marked police detective by the derby hat of tradition.

"Y'oughtn't to get gay like that with loaded firearms," Crane counselled in gently pained reproach--"y'ought to know better, a man your age!" His mouth hardened and he clamped fingers like the jaws of a vice on Morphew's shoulder, nipping truculent bluster in the bud. "Crane's my name, if you want to know, but bull's my nature, Mister Morphew; and remember this"--eyes that had the glint of steel between narrowed lids cowed Morphew's--"I don't ask no better luck than for you to give me a good excuse to get even with you for all the trouble you've been putting me to, first and last. Keep a civil tongue on your head if you value your health!"

Morphew cast glances mutely eloquent of tormented appeal to his henchmen; but they were one and all inattentive, to a man preoccupied with the attitude of Crane's associate. And yet it had all the seeming of the most inoffensive attitude imaginable. The mild-mannered man was doing nothing whatever more than mildly keeping mild eyes on them and his hands in his overcoat pockets. It is true that both the said pockets boasted singular bulges, as if two forefingers of derision were being pointed under their cover . . .

"But what the--who the--what the hell right 've you--?" Morphew stammered.

"Well!" Crane chuckled, "I don't know. Kind of thought I'd drop in and see how your little frame-up was working. Got the hottest kind of a tip half an hour ago . . . Give you three guesses where it came from." One of his eyebrows climbed his forehead on a slant, giving his face a diabolically whimsical cast; his thin-lipped mouth widened in an unkind smile. "Never mind guessing, Morphy, spare the old intellect the strain. Here she comes now . . ."

A vision of elfin fantasy, with a fur-trimmed opera-wrap of crimson and gold brocade negligently draped over her déshabillé, who quite frankly hadn't stopped to dress, Folly McFee airily sauntered in from the veranda and paused and posed, reviewing the tableau with glances of mischievous amusement.

"Why, Morphy!" in affected solicitude she cried--"whatever has happened? You look fussed to a perfect frazzle . . ."

"Best little side-kick any guy ever worked with," Crane quite seriously affirmed. "Take it from me, Morph old boy, I'll look a long ways before I find another little lady like that, who won't even stick at letting her name be linked with the name of a mongrel like you, just to get the low-down on your naughty little ways and shoot the information along to yours truly."

A shove, seemingly playful and effortless, nevertheless shook the balance of that hulking body; Morphew staggered back a step or two, regained physical equilibrium with some effort, and braced himself like a badgered brute in a bull-pen, feet wide apart, head swaying low upon hunched and rocking shoulders. Rage and chagrin lent wattled cheeks the complexion of flesh sorely bruised, his lower lip was pendulous, his hooded light eyes, their whites newly shot with congested blood, were wickedly agleam.

Lanyard, watchful, ready for anything now that Crane had deprived Morphew of his pistol, told himself he had never seen a man more nearly out of his mind with fury, had never encountered at close quarters an animal more dangerous.

"But will you kindly look who's here!" Crane's happy drawl was hailing--"as I live, old Hank Mallison, the spring-heeled yegg, none other!"

Only his mild-mannered colleague had no attention to spare for the spectacle of Mallison, like a spectre in a pantomime, slowly and laboriously, with the help of hands that clutched the desk, hoisting himself into view.

"Folks!" Crane solemnly declared--"I'm an officer of the law and everything, but this is one big night. It ain't every night a poor dumb dick like me is privileged to gaze upon the only authentic pirated copy of the Lone Wolf. So if I can only wheedle our friend here, the King of the Bootleggers, into selling me a bottle of his best bootliquor, the drinks are on me, all round!"

On his feet at length, Mallison rested, trembling visibly, still stupid with the effects of the thrashing he had suffered at Lanyard's hands. In a face that retained recognizable traces of his make-up as the Lone Wolf, his eyes had something of the bewildered look of a beaten dog's--but for the merest instant only; terror replaced it in a twinkling when his puzzled, questing glances discovered the presence of Morphew.

There was an instant then that was gravid with presentiments of tragedy, in which no one spoke, no one stirred from his place, no one moved in any way but Morphew--for Mallison seemed frozen to immobility by sheer fear.

Morphew was crouching lower, gathering himself together. The hands that had been hanging limp lifted and tensed into the likeness of great livid claws that itched for Mallison's throat. Morphew's lips had rolled back from his teeth, from deep in his throat a dull, brutish growl was rising. Of a sudden it waxed to an inhuman howl, and simultaneously that ponderous bulk of flesh launched itself like a thunderbolt incarnate across the room . . .

In its third stride it was stopped and thrown back as if it had dashed itself against an invisible barrier. Mallison had found Lanyard's pistol and fired. He fired again as Morphew was falling. But his third shot ploughed the ceiling. Lanyard had gone into action while the first report was still a noise of deafening reverberations in the room; resting his hands upon the top of the desk, he vaulted it, his feet striking Mallison's chest. The man went down with Lanyard on top of him . . .

XXVI

"Simple enough," Crane opined, "like all these funny little games crooks frame up, once you locate the chink that gives you a look in at the machinery."

He stood in the main doorway. Behind him the wind-swept sky was dull grey with the dusk of a new day. On the drive, at the foot of the veranda steps, a motor-car was waiting, Pagan and Mallison on the back seat with the mild-mannered man, the left wrist of the latter hand-cuffed to the right of the dancing yegg. Another car that could be seen in the distance, turning out of the grounds to the highroad, was carrying away Morphew's henchmen under guard, in the wake of an ambulance from the nearest hospital that had arrived just in time to receive the lifeless body of the Sultan of Loot.

"If crooks could think straight, they might make good, once in every so often; but they can't, that's why we call 'em crooks; and that's why everything they cook up and make such a mystery of is so blamed silly and childish when you come to take it to pieces. Here's Morphew, the biggest frog in his pond, going off his nut with jealousy because the little McFee lady liked Lanyard a whole lot better'n him, and getting Mallison to play Lone Wolf and pull off a couple of jobs so's Mrs. McFee would see what a sap she'd been, falling for a so-called reformed crook. And here's Mallison getting chesty because he's doing the Lone Wolf act to the Queen's taste, and giving Morphew the double-cross--which was plain suicidal mania, if you ask me--and trying to go on with the game on his own. And then there's the Delorme woman, kidnapping Lanyard while he wasn't mentally responsible, with the notion, as near's a body can figure it, she could make him believe he belonged to her and had gone wrong again, so the only thing for them to do was to team up and collect a handsome living from the world at large . . ."

He smiled a vaguely pitying smile at nothing in particular. "These things wouldn't ever happen," he concluded, "if all crooks weren't crazy. . . . Well! time I was on my way." He bent with unexpected courtliness over Eve's hand, and shook Lanyard's. "The top of the morning to you, madam. So long, Lanyard--we won't say good bye--and the best of luck!"

The tyres crunched loudly on the cracked stone of the driveway, the high wind raved about the house and soughed through the tossing limbs of trees; but between Eve and Lanyard there was silence, on her part the stillness of tranquil expectancy, on his the dumbness of constraint.

"So it comes true," he said with a bleak smile, mustering up heart to meet her eyes at last--"what I foretold in the beginning. Say good bye to me, Eve, and let me go."

The hand he offered to take did not move to meet his. "Where will you go?" she quietly enquired.

"Back to England," he said in a sigh--"I suppose--as soon as I can get in touch with the Secret Service and request my recall. That is, if they'll have me again, after their faith in me has been sapped by this Mallison business. It's a question of what and how much they choose to believe."

"That will take a few days at least," she gravely considered. "I shall have plenty of time to wind up my small affairs in this country--I shall be ready, Michael, whenever you wish to go."

He hung his head and shook it wearily. "It is impossible," he said. "Surely you must know now mine isn't a life I can ask the woman I love to share."

"But you love me?"

"You know it."

"And you would leave me?"

"I must."

"Then," she made believe to sigh--"if you insist on having it that way--I can only presume you wish me to divorce you on the grounds of desertion."

"Divorce me!"

She went straightway to his bosom, clung to it in tears and laughter. "Will you ever forgive me--I wonder!--for taking advantage of your helplessness? As soon as possible after that accident, as soon as you were able to talk--we were married!"

THE END

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