Part 7

“I'm sorry.” She seemed genuinely disturbed, and the sweet old face was full of sympathy. “I'm sure you did not know that it was not good, and ten dollars is a great deal to lose, isn't it? It's too bad. Do you remember where you got it?”

“Look here, you're dippy!” snapped the man. “I tell you it's not counterfeit. Anyway, it's all I've got. If you want your pay, take it!”

“You owe me thirty-five cents, but I can't take it out of this.” She shook her head in a troubled way. “This is a counterfeit.”

“You seem to be pretty well posted—on counterfeits!” sneered the man offensively. “How do you know it's a counterfeit—eh?”

“Because I've seen one like this before,” she said simply. “My son showed me one the last time he was in from his run, and he warned me to be careful about taking any.”

“Oh, your son—eh?” sneered the man again. “Some son! Wised you up, did he? Carries it around with him—eh? And who does he shove it off on?”

There was a queer little sound from the old lady—like a quick, hurt catch of her breath. The Hawk's eyes travelled swiftly to her face. She had turned a little pale, and her lips were trembling—but she was drawn up very proudly, and the thin shoulders were squared back.

“I love my boy,” she said in a low voice, and tears came suddenly into her eyes, “I love him with all my heart, but I should a thousand times rather see him dead than know him for a thief. And a man who attempts to pass these things knowingly is a—thief. I have been very respectful to you, sir, and I do not deserve what you have said. I assumed that you had been swindled yourself, and that you were perfectly honest in offering the bill to me, but now from your——”

“What's the trouble, Mother Barrett?”—a big railroader farther up the counter had laid down his knife and fork, and swung round on his stool.

With a hurried glance in that direction, the man hastily thrust the counterfeit note into his pocket, laid down thirty-five cents on the counter—and, with a dive across the room, disappeared through the door.

The Hawk stared thoughtfully after him.

“I couldn't butt in on that, and hand him one,” said the Hawk to himself almost apologetically. “Not with twenty thousand in sight! I couldn't afford to get into a row, and maybe miss the local, and spill the beans, could I?”

He looked around again to find the little old woman wiping her spectacles, and smiling at him a little wistfully.

“I'm sorry that you had to listen to any unpleasantness,” she said. “My little place isn't very pretentious, but I would not like to have you, a stranger, think that sort of thing was customary here. What can I get you, sir?”

It was no wonder that the railroaders evidently swore by old Mother Barrett, and that one of them had been quick to shift her trouble to his own shoulders!

“I guess he was a bad one, all right!” growled the Hawk.

She shook her head regretfully. There was no resentment left—it was as though, indeed, the man was a charge upon her own conscience.

“He meant to be dishonest, I am afraid,” she admitted reluctantly; “but I am sure he cannot be thoroughly bad, for he wasn't very old—just a young man.”

She was a very simple, trusting little old lady—as well as a sweet little old lady. Why should her illusions be dispelled? The Hawk nodded gravely.

“Perhaps,” suggested the Hawk, “perhaps he hasn't had any one to keep him straight. Perhaps he hasn't got what keeps a good many chaps straight—a good mother.”

The mist was quick in her eyes again. He had not meant to bring that—he had meant only to show her a genuine admiration and respect.

“Perhaps not,” she answered slowly. “But if he has, I hope she will never know.” She shook her head again; and then: “But you have not told me yet what you would like, sir?”

The Hawk gave his order. He ate mechanically. Back in his mind he was reviewing a rather extensive acquaintanceship with certain gentry whose morals were not wholly above reproach. Failing, however, to identify the individual with the counterfeit note as one of this select number, he finally dismissed the man somewhat contemptuously from his mind.

“Just a piker crook, I guess,” decided the Hawk. “I'd like to have found out though how many more of those he's got, and who the fool was that let an amateur skate like that loose with any of the goods!”

He finished his meal, paid his bill, smiled a goodnight to old Mother Barrett, walked out of the short-order house, and made his way over to the station. Five minutes later, having purchased a magazine, the Hawk, with a ticket in his pocket for a station a number of miles beyond Burke's Siding, curled himself up with his pipe on a seat in the smoker of the local.

The train started, and the Hawk apparently became immersed in his magazine. The Hawk, however, though he turned a page from time to time, was concerned with matters very far removed from the printed words before him. The game to-night was more hazardous, more difficult, and for a vastly greater stake than any in which he had before pitted his wits or played his lone hand against the combined brains of the Butcher, his fellows, and their unknown leader, who collectively were referred to by the papers as—the Wire Devils.

The Hawk tamped down the ash in the bowl of his pipe with a wary forefinger. He, the Hawk, according to MacVightie, was the leader of this ingenious criminal league! It was very complimentary of MacVightie—very! Between MacVightie and the Wire Devils themselves, he was a personage much sought after! MacVightie, however, was not without grounds for his assertion and belief—the Hawk grinned pleasantly—he, the Hawk, had certainly, and for some time back, helped himself to the leader's share of the spoils, and helped himself very generously!

The grin died away. He had beaten them so far, appropriated from under their very noses the loot they had so carefully planned to obtain, and he had mocked and taunted them contemptuously in the doing of it; but the cold fact remained that luck sometimes was known to turn, and that the pitcher that went too often to the well ran the risk of getting—smashed! If they ever caught him, his life would not be worth an instant's purchase. He knew some of them, and he knew them well for what they were, and he laboured under no delusions on that score! The Butcher, for example, who was the Number One of the message, had already nearly done for him once; and the Butcher had nothing on Number Three, who was the Bantam, or on Number Seven, who was Whitie Jim—or, it was safe to presume, on any of the others that he had not yet identified—this Number Four and Number Six, for instance, who were mentioned in the cipher message to-night. And how many more were there? He did not know—except that there was the Master Spider of them all.

The Hawk had ceased now even to turn cursorily the pages of the magazine. He was staring out of the window.

“I wonder,” muttered the Hawk grimly, “when I'll run up against him? And who he is? And where the head office is?”

He nodded his head after a moment. MacVightie had called the turn. The Wire Devils formed as powerful and dangerous a criminal organisation as had probably ever existed anywhere. And not for very long would they put all their resources at work to pull off some coup, only to find that he, the Hawk, had made use of their preparations to snatch the prize away from them; they were much more likely to put all their resources at work—with the Hawk as their sole objective!

The Hawk's lips tightened. He might under-estimate, but he could not exaggerate, his danger! The man in the seat behind him might be one of them for all he knew. Somewhere, hidden away in his web, at the end of a telegraph wire, was the Master Spider directing the operations; and there must be very many of them—the little spiders—spread all over the division. Where there was a telegraph sounder that sounder carried the messages, the plans, the secret orders of the brain behind the organisation; and the very audaciousness with which they made themselves free of the railroad's telegraph system to communicate with each other was in itself a guarantee of success. If one of their messages was interfered with, they threatened to cut the wires; and that meant, if luckily it meant no more, that train operating was at an end until the break could be located and repaired. Were they tapping the wire somewhere? What chance was there to find out where? There were hundreds of old splices on the wires. Or, if found, what would prevent them tapping the wire on the next occasion many miles away? Also the sources of information that they tapped must be far-flung. How, for instance, unless they too had a “Bud” back there in New York, did they know of this diamond shipment coming through to-night?

The Hawk's lips grew still a little tighter. His safety so far had depended on the fact that he possessed the key to their cipher messages, which not only enabled him to reap where they had sown, but warned him of any move they might make against him. But it was becoming increasingly difficult to intercept those messages. He had MacVightie to thank for that. Where before he had only to crawl into some little way-station where there was no night operator, MacVightie now had every one of those stations securely guarded. Yes, it had become exceedingly more difficult! If only he could find out where those messages emanated from, or the system in force for receiving them!

The Hawk slid further down in his seat, tossed the magazine to one side, pulled his hat over his eyes, and appeared to sleep. All that was neither here nor there—to-night. He had the message to-night—but he had not yet got that twenty thousand dollars in unset stones! He would perhaps do well, now that he had the leisure, to give the details of that matter a little more critical attention than they had received when he had made up his mind that his best chance lay in the three miles between Burke's Siding and the point where the Butcher and his men planned to hold up the train. According to the message, the implication was that there would be nobody in the express car at that time except a drugged messenger. And now, somehow, he did not quite like the appearance of that. It seemed a little queer. What was the object of drugging the man if they did not take immediate advantage of it? He pondered the problem for a long time. No, after all, it was logical enough—since they meant to remove the safe bodily. There evidently was not a specialised cracksman amongst them who had lifted his profession to the plane of art, no “knob-twirler” such as—well, such as himself! The Hawk opened his eyes sleepily to inspect the tips of his carefully manicured fingers. Otherwise, with no one to interfere but a drugged messenger, they could have opened the safe, looted it, and, since the Fast Mail carried only through express matter, have slipped away from the car at the first stop, with no one being the wiser until, somewhere up the line, the messenger returned to life and gave the alarm.

Yes, it was very craftily worked out. The Master Spider was far from a fool! They would have to “soup” the safe, and blow it open. If they attempted that while the train was en route they ran the risk of being heard, and trapped like rats in the car; and if they were heard, even if they managed to stop the train and make their escape, they invited instant and definite pursuit on the spot. The reason for drugging the express messenger became quite evident now. If the man were already helpless when they held up the train, they, at one and the same time, assured their access to an otherwise guarded car without danger to themselves, and without danger of being balked at the last moment of their reward—which the messenger, with a small package like that, might easily have been able to accomplish if he were a game man. He could have opened the safe, say, the instant the first alarm came as they tried to force the car door, taken out the package, and secreted it somewhere. It needed only the nerve after that to defy them, and they had evidently given him credit for it whether he possessed it or not.

Yes, decidedly, the Master Spider was no fool in the spinning of his web! As it was, the safe, which would only be a small affair anyhow, would disappear bodily; and between the point where the train was held up and the point where they finally left the engine and express car there would be a distance of at least ten miles, even allowing that they approached no nearer than within two miles of Bradley, the first station west of Burke's Siding. With the wires cut and the coaches of the Fast Mail stalled three miles out of Burke's, considerable time must elapse before any one could make a move against them; and even when the pursuit finally started, MacVightie, for instance, would be confronted with that somewhat illusive stretch of ten miles in which to decide where the pursuit should begin. Ten miles was some little distance! MacVightie would be quite at liberty to make his guess, and there was the chance, with the trifling odds of some few odd thousand to one against it, that he might guess right—unless he guessed that the safe had been removed at the point where the engine and car were finally left, in which case MacVightie would guess wrong.

If the Hawk was asleep, he was perhaps dreaming—for the Hawk smiled. The chances were just about those few odd thousand to one that MacVightie would guess exactly that way—wrong. Yes, it was an exceedingly neat little web that the Master Spider had spun. If he, the Hawk, were permitted to make a guess, he would guess that the safe would never be found!

His mind reverted to the cipher message. The safe was to be delivered at “five-mile crossing.” Where that was the Hawk did not know—except that it must necessarily be somewhere between the point where the train was held up and Bradley. However, that was a detail with which he need hardly concern himself. Long before this “five-mile crossing” was reached, his vest pocket, if he played in luck, would be very comfortably lined! He would enter the express car as the Fast Mail pulled out of Burke's Siding, trust to certain long and intimate experience to open the safe—and get off the train as it slowed down at the Butcher's very thoughtful request! For the rest, the details—circumstances must govern there. In the main, that would be his plan.

The Hawk “slept” on. Station after station was passed. His mind now dealt in little snatches of thought. There was MacVightie and the police circular; and the search of his room that day; and speculation as to how they had managed to drug the express messenger; and the man with the counterfeit ten-dollar bill in old Mother Barrett's short-order house; and the little old woman herself, with her shabby clothes and her tired, gentle face—and finally the Hawk stirred, glanced at his watch, and, as the train whistled, picked up his magazine and sauntered down the car aisle to the door.

They were approaching Burke's Siding. The Hawk opened the door, went out on the platform, and descended to the lowest step. The train slowed. A water-tank loomed up, receded—and the Hawk dropped to the ground. A minute later, as the tail-lights winked by and came to a stop at the station a short distance down the track, he had made his way back, to the water-tank, crossed to the opposite side of the track, and stretched himself out on the grass in the hollow at the foot of the embankment. The Fast Mail's sole excuse for a stop at Burke's Siding was the water-tank—which would bring the express car to a halt directly in front of the spot where he now lay.

The local pulled out, and racketed away into the night. The tail-lights vanished. Silence fell. There was only the chirping of the insects now, and the strange, queer, indefinable medley of little night-sounds. Burke's Siding was a lonely place. There was a faint yellow gleam from the station windows, and there was the twinkle of the switch lights—no other sign of life. It was pitch black—so black that the Hawk could just barely distinguish the outline of the water-tank across the track.

“It's a nice night,” observed the Hawk pleasantly to himself. “A very nice night! It's strange how some people prefer a moon!”

IX—THE LOOTING OF THE FAST MAIL

THE minutes went by, ten, fifteen, twenty of them—a half hour—and then, from far down the track, hoarse through the night, came the scream of a whistle. From his pocket the Hawk took out his diminutive flashlight, thin as a pencil. It might have been the winking of a firefly, as he played it on the dial of his watch.

“On the dot!” murmured the Hawk. “Some train—the Fast Mail! I guess, though, she'll be a little late, at that, to-night—when she pulls into Selkirk!” A roar and rumble was in the night again, increasing steadily in volume. Down the right of way, in the distance, a flash of light stabbed through the black. It grew brighter and brighter. The Hawk, wary of the spread of the powerful electric headlight, edged further away from the trackside. And now the rails gleamed like polished silver—and the water-tank stood up out of the darkness, a thing of monstrous size. There was the hiss of steam, the rasp and grind of the setting brakes, the glinting rays from the windows of a long string of coaches that trailed back to the station platform, and a big ten-wheeler, like some human thirsty thing, was panting beside the water-tank.

The engineer, with his torch, swung from the gangway for an oil around. There was the creak of the descending spout, the rush of water, and, silhouetted against the water-tank, the Hawk could make out the fireman standing on the back of the tender. And now, poking with his long-spouted oil can, weirdly swallowed up in the darkness at intervals as he thrust the torch far in under the big machine, the engineer moved slowly along the side of the engine, and finally disappeared around the end of the pilot.

The Hawk stole forward closer to the track again, his eyes on the fireman, who, now that the engineers torch was on the other side, was more sharply outlined than before. Came then the swish and gush of water as it overflowed, the spout banged back against the water-tank, and the fireman scrambled back over the tender into the cab. It was the moment the Hawk had been waiting for. Swiftly, but still crawling as a safeguard against being seen by any of the train crew in the rear, he moved up the embankment, and in an instant had swung himself up between the tender and the forward door of the express car. There was no platform here, of course, but the end beam of the car, making a sort of wide threshold, gave him ample room on which to stand.

The roar of escaping steam drowned out all other sounds; the back of the tender hid him from any chance of observation from the cab. He tried the door cautiously. It was locked, of course—there were twenty thousand dollars' worth of stones in the safe inside! The Hawk felt carefully over the lock with his fingers, classifying it in the darkness, as it were, by the sense of touch, and produced from his packet his bunch of skeleton keys. He inserted one of the keys, worked with it for a moment, then shook his head, and selected another. This time he felt the lock-bolt slide back. The train was jerking into motion now. He exchanged his keys for his automatic, turned the knob softly, opened the door an inch, and listened. Even the Wire Devils were not infallible, and if by any chance the messenger—

The Hawk whistled low and contentedly under his breath. He had caught a glimpse of the interior of the car—and now he slipped quickly through the door, closing the door behind him.

A quarter length down the car, in the aisle made by the express packages which were piled high on either side, the messenger, a young man of perhaps twenty-two, was huddled, apparently unconscious, in his chair. In a flash the Hawk was down the car, and bending sharply over the other. The man sat in a helpless, sagging attitude; he was breathing heavily, and his head, hanging forward and a little to one side, swayed limply with the motion of the car. There was no question as to the messenger's condition—he was drugged, and well drugged. From the man, the Hawk's eyes travelled to a sort of desk, or ledge, built out from the side of the car, and topped by a pigeonholed rack stuffed with express forms and official-looking manila envelopes. On the desk was a small leather satchel containing some lunch, and a bottle of what was evidently cold tea, now but barely a quarter full; and, as though to supply further evidence that the man had succumbed in the midst of his meal, a little to one side lay a meat sandwich, half eaten.

The Hawk nodded quietly to himself, as again his eyes shifted—this time to a small safe, about three feet square, that stood beneath the desk. It was quite easy to understand now. The Wire Devils had only to ascertain the fact that it was the messenger's habit to eat his lunch at a certain time, choose the point of attack on the line to correspond therewith, and see that a sufficient quantity of knockout drops was introduced into the cold tea—not a very weighty undertaking for the Wire Devils!

Well, it was a bit rough on the boy—the Hawk was kneeling now in front of the safe—but he, the Hawk, was greatly indebted to the Wire Devils! Twenty thousand dollars was a snug little sum—quite a snug little sum!

The figure in the chair, with swaying head, breathed stertorously; there was the pound, quick in its tempo, of the trucks beating at the rail joints; the give-and-take of the car in protesting little creaks; and, over all, a muffled roar as the Fast Mail tore through the night—but the Hawk heard none of this. His ear was pressed close against the face of the safe listening for the tumblers' fall, as his fingers twirled the dial knob.

After a little while the Hawk spoke aloud.

“Left, twenty-eight, one quarter... two right, fourteen... two left, eighteen, one-half,” he said.

He straightened up, swung the handle of the safe—and a dismayed, anxious look flashed across his face. There was not much time, very little time—-and he had missed it! How far along those three miles from Burke's Siding to where the Butcher was waiting had the train already come?

He tried again, coolly, methodically—and again he missed.

“I guess I'm out of practice to fall down on a tin box like this!” he muttered grimly. “But the first two are right, that's sure—it's the last turn that's wrong somewhere. Give me another minute or two”—he was twirling the dial knob with deft, quick fingers once more—“that's all I ask, and——”

A sudden jolt flung him forward against the safe. Came the scream of the whistle, the screech of the tight-set brakes, the bump, and jerk, and pound, and grind of the flying train coming to an emergency stop. The limp form of the messenger, sliding down, was almost doubled over the arm of the chair.

In an instant the Hawk had recovered his balance, and, his face set like iron, his jaws clamped hard, he snatched at the knob, and with desperate haste now made another attempt. There were a few seconds left, a few seconds before the train would come finally to a standstill and—no, they were gone now, those seconds—and he had missed again!

His automatic was in his hand as he stood up. It was no longer a question of twenty thousand dollars' worth of unset diamonds—it was a question of his life. There was a bitter smile on his lips, as he ran for the forward door. It looked as though the pitcher had at last gone once too often to the well! The train had stopped now. He reached the door, and opened it guardedly a little way. A great red flare from somewhere ahead lighted up the night. He heard and recognised the Butcher's voice, menacing, raucous, punctuated with vicious oaths: