Kate plus 10
“Settle down,” suggested Kate ironically.
“I am going to quit.”
“Come, come, be sensible, Kate,” said the Colonel, patting her on the
shoulder. “You have been a very good girl and we owe you almost
everything we have. I am sure everyone agrees that you have been the
brains of our--er--association. The only time when any of us have been
caught is when we have gone out on a side line of our own. Now leave
well alone.”
“When hunters have caught the fox,” she said, “do they leave well
alone and never hunt again? In war, when a soldier comes through a
battle safely, does he leave well alone and never go into action
again? Does the huntsman who is nearly caught by a lion leave well,
and lions, alone?”
“This is different,” said her uncle doggedly.
“But I don’t understand it. If what you say is right, then I am wrong
and have been wrong all my life. I am wrong and the police are right.”
“Of course, they’re right,” said Gregori; “what rubbish you are
talking.”
“The police are right?” she asked in open-eyed astonishment.
“Of course they are right. They must protect society. In five years’
time, when I am settled on my little estate in Spain and my house is
burgled do you imagine I shall not call in the police?”
“I know they are right in their way,” she said, as if she were
speaking her thoughts aloud, “but we are right, too.”
“We cannot both be right,” said Colonel Westhanger.
“I asked you some time ago,” she said, turning to him, “which was the
better life--the dull life or ours. They cannot both be better. The
elementary conditions cannot change. That life must be the best, or
ours.”
“That life is best,” said the Colonel decisively.
She looked at him steadily.
“Then why have you let me live this?” she asked. “You cannot change
me. I cannot change. I cannot!” she said with vehemence and the men
noted with amazement the emotion she displayed. “Nothing can change
me!”
Gregori reached out and took her hand, but she snatched it away.
“I will tell you what can change you, little girl,” he said undeterred
by the rebuff, “love can change you. Give me a chance.”
She looked at him and laughed in his face.
“Will you be good or bad, honest or dishonest? You will only be a half
man, living two lives. Marry you! And am I to go into witness boxes to
testify against your burglar? And prosecute your poachers? I am living
now, what I believe to be the truth. I believe I have the right to
match my wits against the world and take, by my intelligence, what the
old robber barons took by brutal strength. If I pass to the other side
I should be a liar, living a life in which I did not believe. I am
going on.”
“Then you will go on by yourself.”
“Will I?” she asked softly.
“Go out and find somebody who thinks as you think if you can,” sneered
Gregori; “you will be obliged to live a lie, anyway. You will never
meet a man who believes in stealing, who believes in fraud and who
will go on so believing, until he is an old man. You will never meet a
man on the other side of life who would trust you if he knew you, and
he _would_ know you unless you--went on lying.”
He laughed.
“You are in a cleft stick, my little friend, and if you take my tip
you will stick to the friends who know you.”
He laughed again.
“Suppose I come down into Spain and burgle your house--” her eyes lit
up--“and I would do it! Or, suppose, when you have--settled down--and
when you have all deposited your symbols of success in your banks, I
planned a little coup and smashed your banks? I could do it easily and
I would do it,” she said. “What would you do?”
Their faces were a study. The Colonel was stroking his white
moustache. Francis Stockmar was scowling horribly. Mr. Cunningham was
staring blankly at the opposite wall.
“Naturally you would not play such a low-down trick upon your old
friends,” said the Colonel soothingly; “nobody believes you would,
Kate. I mean, it would be tragic for some of us, after spending years
of our lives accumulating a little nest egg to find we had become
beggars in a night. Of course, speaking personally, I should consider
myself exonerated from any responsibility I had in regard to our
relationship and I should have to tell the police--”
“You would call the police, too, would you? Would you, Stockmar?”
“Yas,” said the stolid Austrian, “of goorse. The mooney to recover,
ain’t it?”
“And you?”
“I don’t think you would do anything so treacherous,” said Mr.
Cunningham; “naturally, we would not take that sort of thing lying
down.”
“Naturally,” said Colling Jacques, “the whole matter is this, when we
go back to the respectable world and obey the laws, we, as citizens,
are entitled to the protection which the laws give us.”
“I see. You are, so to speak, touching wood. The wood is the law.”
“That is it,” he said.
Kate got up and walked to the one window of the room and looked out
upon the dreary yard with its tangle of twisted machinery, its rusted
boilers, its chaos of rotting cement bags.
“Well, you can all do as you like,” she turned on them, “but I tell
you this, that if you think you are going to--settle down--at my
expense, and if you think I have been planning and scheming and
play-acting and lying in order that you might all become respected
parish councillors, you have made a mistake. You talk about my
friends, if you are my friends, God help me! There is one man in the
world who is worth the whole crowd of you.”
She was interrupted by a crash as though a heavy body had been thrown
against a door. Somebody fumbled with the lock and Gregori jumped up
and threw it open. They half carried, half pushed a gagged and bound
man through the doorway. Behind him peered the saturnine, malignant
face of his captor, Doctor Garon.
“Got him,” he said triumphantly.
“Who is it?” asked Gregori, staring at the half conscious man.
The girl did not ask. She went suddenly cold, for she knew it was
Michael Pretherston.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE INDEPENDENT STRATEGY OF SEÑOR
GREGORI
It is a fact worth remarking upon, that in all her career, though
she had been associated with the most desperate of criminals, and
though she had been surrounded on all sides by men who would stop at
nothing to gain their ends, Kate had never witnessed an act of
violence. Such arrests of members of the confederation as she had seen
had been very humdrum affairs. The arrival of two strangers, a
consultation carried on in a low tone by a pleasant detective officer,
an urgent call to somebody to “get my hat” and the disappearance, very
often for a long time, of the member affected. She had never seen a
fellow creature man-handled nor did she believe that there was in her
confederates the tigerish malignity which was now displayed. She
looked from face to face in amazement and horror as they crowded round
the handcuffed figure and flung him into a chair.
Michael had been choked to insensibility at the first attack. With the
loosening of the rope, he had recovered consciousness and put up a
fight, and had been hammered back to insensibility by the three men
who had watched him from the moment he had crossed the open ground to
the east of the railway, and had lain in wait for him. They had
manacled him with his own handcuffs. This he realized, as he came back
to consciousness, with his head throbbing and every bone in his body
aching.
He leant his elbows on the table and buried his face in his hands,
striving to collect his thoughts. It was the cold steel of the
handcuff against his nose which was the starting point from whence he
unravelled the situation. The blow which had felled him had
fortunately been broken by his soft felt hat and he raised his hand
and gingerly felt the bump which Dr. Garon’s loaded cane had raised.
“Now then, wake up,” said Gregori’s voice roughly, “let’s have a look
at you.”
Michael raised his head and looked at the speaker.
“Hello, Gregori,” he said dully. He looked round the room and caught
the girl’s eyes and for a moment held them.
“You seem to have tumbled into it, my young friend,” said Colonel
Westhanger.
Michael slowly shifted his eyes to the speaker and smiled.
“We all seem to have tumbled into it, you worse than anybody. This
means a life sentence for you, Colonel.”
The old man’s face went white.
“It is only bluff,” said Garon; “he is here by himself. I have been
watching him for an hour. You tried to pull off the job on your
lonely!”
“Alone,” said the Colonel and the girl watching him saw his face go
hard. “Alone! Are you sure?”
“Absolutely sure,” said the doctor.
He sat straddle-legged on a chair leaning on the back and puffing the
cigar he had just lighted.
“It would be rather a serious business if you had made a mistake,
wouldn’t it?” drawled Michael. He was recovering his scattered senses
and something of his good spirits. “You fellows had better make the
best of a bad job.”
“What is your idea of the best of a bad job,” sneered Gregori,--“to
take the handcuffs off you and put them on me and the Colonel? If it
means a ‘lifer’ for the Colonel! what does it mean for me? You don’t
suppose I am going back to Dartmoor to build walls for the moor
farmers, do you?”
“What is the alternative?” asked Michael.
“I’ll tell you what is the alternative,” hissed the other thrusting
his face into the detective’s, “it is the only alternative that will
give me any satisfaction--and it is to put you out.”
“Dot is id,” nodded Stockmar.
The girl’s heart almost stopped beating and for a moment she closed
her eyes and gripped tight to the edge of the table. She felt
physically sick and her knees were trembling under her. Fortunately
their attention was fully occupied with Michael and nobody noticed
that she had grown of a sudden peaked and grey. She bit her lips and
by sheer effort of will regained control of herself. She looked at
Michael: that little smile of his still played about the corners of
his mouth and the eyes that were lifted to Colling Jacques were full
of good humor.
“It is you or us, Pretherston,” the engineer was saying; “you don’t
suppose we have been working for this stuff and taken all the risk,
only to see ourselves standing in the dock of the Old Bailey?”
“Winchester,” corrected the detective, “it is a very pretty assize
court--the vaulted ceiling will appeal to you, Jacques. It is in the
Gothic style.”
“One moment,” said the Colonel suddenly.
With a nod he called the men to a corner of the room and for five
minutes there was a whispered consultation. The girl and Michael were
left alone and obeying some impulse which she could not define, she
suddenly turned her back upon him and walked to the window, a
proceeding which Gregori noticed out of the corner of his eye.
Presently the little conference broke up and the Colonel came back
with the others.
“Look here, Pretherston, I am going to make a proposition to you. You
are not a rich man, I take it.”
“My private affairs don’t concern you,” said Michael calmly, “and I
certainly am not prepared to discuss them with you.”
“This job is worth two and a half millions and there are ten of us in
it. Help us to make a getaway and there is not far short of a quarter
of a million for you.”
The girl swung round and looked at Michael. How would he take this
offer? She knew how great was the appeal which money made to men,
especially money easily earnt. She waited in breathless, almost
painful, suspense.
“Two hundred and fifty thousand pounds,” said Michael--“that is a lot
of money. But, why do you put such a proposition to me?”
“It is a lot of money,” repeated the Colonel significantly.
Michael laughed.
“I suppose there was a time in your life,” he drawled, “when if
somebody had offered you money to do a dishonest act, you would have