Three sevens A detective story
“Are you goin’ to leave us here?” whined the killer.
No answer. But there was a response in Craig’s mind. He wouldn’t
leave them here. What good would it do him if he did leave them here?
Would he enjoy himself if he did--trailing a memory of them around
with him as long as he lived, in the bright springs, the wide summers
of the plains, the colored autumns of the woods, the blue and snowy
winters--the memory of these who had but a single season?
No! He would remain, or die, or kill in the name of justice, rather
than desert these comrades in misery.
Like that he came to the closed and locked iron door at the foot of
the stairs. There he bent his head and listened. For a long time he
could hear nothing. Then, gradually, he was aware of a slight sound
of breathing. Not his own breathing. He timed himself. The breathing
came from the other side of the door.
The guard was already there--spying, listening. And then, as Craig
drew back, he could hear the guard stealthily slip the bolt, begin
cautiously to open the door. Not only in Craig’s heart, but as if in
every other sinew and fiber of him, he felt the prophetic thrill of
predestined victory.
It was the feeling that was in him when he shot out his left arm and
got a strangle hold on the guard from the back, using his right hand
for the more dangerous, but scarcely more important, work of twisting
the guard’s own right arm up and back. The guard had been armed with
flash light and truncheon. These he dropped. Also, he wore a gun--a
pistol in a holster against his breast. But not from the first moment
had the guard had the slightest chance to fight back at all.
He resisted, but he resisted blindly. It was plain that sheer terror
was all that spurred him on. He couldn’t have known what had him,
even--what sort of a terror had been distilled from the darkness.
For, with most men, superstition is always there just under the
surface as close and potent as a nightmare during sleep.
He saw Craig standing over him.
“Well, for----” the guard began.
“Not a word above a whisper,” said Craig.
The guard scrambled up to a sitting position, was for jumping to his
feet. He felt a hand, not very heavy but firm, on the top of his head.
“Stay where you are. Undress!”
“The hell----”
“You’re under orders. Quick!”
All the time that the guard was pulling off his coat, then his vest,
then the straps of his holster, his cap, the felt shoes, relieving
himself of every last detail of his accouterment, he was staring into
the muzzle of his own gun. He was like a man who was hypnotized.
Even so, it probably wasn’t the deadly danger of that pointed gun
that awed him most. It was the presence of the impossible. Something
had happened that he couldn’t understand. He looked up and down the
punishment block--the six iron boxes, like safes, where horror was
stored. He looked curiously at the sawed door of cell No. 3.
“Now, get up,” said Craig, “and raise your hands, and walk down to
No. 6.”
There was the beginning of a rustle and a subdued riot of emotion
from the cages.
“Hurry up, Tommy!”
“Tommy, let me out, quick!”
Craig spoke from the side of his mouth.
“I’m going to let you all out of the cells as soon as I can. But
you’ll have to wait a while. Get me? This is no ordinary break.”
Maybe there was a touch of wonder on the prisoners as well as on the
captured guard. What was it all about?
It was Eddie’s cell that Craig opened first, and Eddie came crawling
out of this like an ancient rat that had just been changed into a man
and was overcome by the miracle and also somewhat by the joke of it.
Eddie had a pointed, rather ratlike face when it came to the contour,
but his wonderstruck smile was human, and the lines of suffering in
his grizzled cheeks. Like Lazarus coming out of the tomb, had Lazarus
been old, dressed in prison rags, badly in need of a barber.
He seized the revolver Craig handed him, and his eyes showed bright
comprehension and appreciation. Eddie was at home in prison affairs,
even in affairs like this.
The guard recovered his voice to some extent.
“I got a family, boys.”
“We ain’t going to hurt you,” whispered Eddie. “Get into the cell,
you bum. We ain’t going to hurt no one; are we, Mr. Masters?”
Somehow, Eddie had got the idea that Craig was a gentleman. And, when
Craig answered that no, they weren’t going to hurt any one if that
could be helped, Eddie said that ’twas this thought that would bring
them luck.
Himself, Craig hoped so. He was going to need luck--all the luck in
the world. He was telling himself so, and telling the darkness so,
and infinity in general, as he took the gun from Eddie, gave him the
final instructions, and started for the head of the stairs.
The luck had run all right so far. The guard was in the cell and
locked up. Eddie had shown himself a man to be trusted. As for Craig,
he had on the guard’s uniform--not much of a disguise in his own
unclipped and unshaven state, but it would have to do. And he had
that deadly weapon in his hand--a badge of power to transform almost
any man, even a convict, into something of a commanding general.
“Send me luck!” whispered Craig silently, from his heart.
He repeated the petition at every step--stone steps--of the stairway
leading to the guardroom up there where Eddie had told him there
might be as many as half a dozen guards assembled for the Saturday
night pinochle.
In any case, he got the luck he wanted. There were the half dozen
guards that Eddie had said would be there, and their game was already
under way. They were so intent on it that they never even looked up
as Craig pushed the door open, and entered. His stolen felt shoes
had made no sound. Even his heart was as if silent--normal; and his
breathing was soft.
Craig stood there for a full three seconds surveying them in that
stark and white-washed room flooded with raw, artificial light. Then
one of the guards, glancing in his direction, started to move or
speak. All this in the most fleeting interval. And Craig spoke to
them.
“Move or cheep,” he said, “and I’ll kill you--so help me God!”
CHAPTER III
HEADQUARTERS
Just a whisper, but it was enough. He had the drop on them. He not
only had the drop on them, but the guards, anything but intellectual
giants in other respects, were pretty good judges of certain men in
certain circumstances. They knew that this man meant what he said.
“Lift your hands,” said Craig. “Steady!” He himself was as steady as
concrete, but his nerves and his brain were nimble. He could see in
all directions at once--or felt as if he could. “Now,” said he, “get
up slow and easy--that’s right--and face the wall.”
They obeyed. They were not cowards precisely. It was just Mr. Death
pointing his finger at them, that was all. Not all of them were
brave men, either--one in particular. This was Copton, the guard
responsible for the break that had sent Craig to the dark cells,
_after_ a session in the hospital. Copton had gone flabby and white.
He shook. To look at Copton was to see that he believed all this to
be a measure of vengeance aimed solely against himself. Copton was
sure of this when Craig spoke commandingly to him.
“Copton,” said Craig, “step backward to the table and put your gun on
it, then your billy, then turn your pockets wrong side out--quick!”
Copton jumped. He did as he was ordered, as quickly as his flabby
nerves would permit him to, expecting a shot in the liver from one
moment to the next. But he picked up a bit of courage when Craig
spoke to him next. And it was just as well that he did, too. For,
even now, there wasn’t a second to be lost--no telling at what moment
some other guard might come drifting in, or the principal keeper
himself, thus spoiling everything.
“And now, Copton,” said Craig, “disarm the others. Holsters off with
the guns! Billies and handcuffs with them.”
He had picked on Copton because the man was so deadly frightened that
there was no danger of his disobeying. Just then, Copton would have
murdered his own grandmother, if so ordered. He was that kind. And
plus this fear of his, was his gratitude for being permitted to live
yet a little longer. He had mistreated Craig. Now Craig had him in
his power. Copton was sick with fright.
There was a guard named Tweed--a big, young man, without much sense,
with something of the blind courage of a young buffalo. Craig saw,
just in time, a premonitory flexing of Tweed’s arms.
“Steady, there, Tweed,” he said.
He made Copton handcuff Tweed right there, with his hands still up.
But there were signs of wavering elsewhere. So Craig made Copton take
a gun from the pile and drill it on his comrades, and the guards were
more afraid of this frightened renegade with a gun, one would have
said, than they were of Craig himself.
As a matter of fact, as measured by the ticking of a watch, all
that had transpired since Craig’s first appearance here in the room
upstairs, must have been at breathless speed, leisurely but fast,
as is the way of big events, like the piling into each other of two
racing locomotives, or the fall of a big redwood tree. And the danger
was all over by the time that “Eddie, the Yegg” came crawling up from
the subcellar.
Eddie quietly took one of the piled-up guns.
“I counted the hundred you told me to, sir,” he said in his prison
whisper. Craig had ordered Eddie to wait that long.
“Good,” said Craig. “Now, take the gun from Copton. And”--he raised
his voice slightly--“I’ll remind you gentlemen that no one will be
hurt if you obey orders. One false move, and we’ll bag the lot of
you.”
The six guards were marched with Eddie, sidewise, at their head and
Craig at the rear down into the subcellar. There, Copton aiding,
these keepers also were stripped--five of them, not including Copton.
For Craig had other work he wanted Copton to do--work in which
Copton would need his uniform. And Copton was willing. His gratitude
at being spared was now greater than his fear that he wouldn’t be
spared, and he would have murdered all five, and the one already in
the cell, had Craig but spoken the word.
But now Craig turned out the feverish Bangor, and put two of the
guards in that small box which had been Bangor’s sick room for upward
of a week. Then he delivered an oath to George Washington, and George
swore, while the other convicts, those still in the cells, uttered
oaths of another sort and made obscene jests at the keepers’ expense,
until Craig spoke to them.
Even in this short time Craig had grown in power other than the power
of a gun and a commanding position. He told them to shut up for their
own good, and they obeyed him. After having seen what they had seen,
who wouldn’t have been ready to believe anything?
In George Washington’s cell, Craig also put two of the stripped and
humiliated keepers, being careful to assure them, most politely,
that, in a short time, he would see that every one got more
comfortable quarters. But as to what all this was about, not a word,
except such words as he had already spoken to Eddie, and Eddie to him.
Then the remaining keeper he had brought down from upstairs, always
excepting Copton, he placed in the cell with the first night guard
taken. Thus, while the night was still young, were six guards
disarmed, disuniformed, locked up in cells where no amount of
shouting would do them any good, and yet one other guard cowed, till
no more dangerous than a rabbit in the presence of a rattlesnake.
“What are you going to do with him now?” asked Eddie, with his weak
and tragic face reflecting a species of horror as he looked at the
stricken Copton.
“I am going to ask him,” said Craig, “to go fetch us the P. K.!”
“Oh, Tommy!”