A Woman at Bay: or, A Fiend in Skirts

He remembered then that Grinnel and his men must have come out of the dive by the front door or by the hall-door entrance, in order to have reached the laundry when they did, and he figured in that instant that it was more than likely that in doing so they had not thought to fasten the door behind them, or had purposely, perhaps, left it unlocked in order that they might be able to return with all the more speed to the safety and seclusion of the dive.

He heard them pounding against the door against which he had pulled the heavy bench, and he knew that at least three or four minutes must elapse before they could make their escape; and in that moment he decided to return to the saloon at whatever cost, if it were possible for him to get there.

A few quick bounds brought him to the front door of the dive – that door which swung so ceaselessly to and fro during the legal hours of its business. He knew, although he tried it softly, that it was securely locked against him, and he passed on to the hall door of the house, which was just beyond it. This, as he had guessed might be the case, was not fastened, and he pushed it open and passed beyond it.

He found himself in a hallway in black darkness, and while he paused for a moment to listen, not a sound of any kind came to his ears, a fact which led him to determine that either Chick had already been done for by the frequenters of the dive, or else that he had been made a prisoner, and was lying somewhere, bound and gagged, awaiting the return of Grinnel.

Nick now crept along the hall until his hand came in contact with a balustrade; and here he paused, uncertain whether to proceed through the hall to the rear of the building, which he knew should give an entrance to the saloon, or to ascend the stairs and temporarily hide himself in the neighborhood of the house. Everything considered, this latter course was distinctly the best one, since, doubtless, it would never occur to Mike Grinnel or to any of those who were concerned with him in this incident, that Nick Carter would have the temerity to return to the same house from which he had just escaped.

Therefore, if safety were the only incentive for Nick Carter, to act upon this was the very best course he could have adopted. But Nick was ever one who considered his own safety last. His whole impulse now was to do the best that could be done to get Chick out of the predicament into which he had been thrust; and he considered that to be the very method he had adopted.

Nick knew the characteristics of the people against whom he was pitted well enough to understand that the moment they realized that he had escaped them they would simply return to the saloon of the dive to discuss it – and doubtless, also, to call to severe account those who were responsible for the affair.

Such a discussion would not take place until two things had happened – until they were satisfied utterly that Nick Carter had escaped them, and also that they had Chick so thoroughly in their power that he could not hope to escape.

And so the detective ascended the stairs softly, and as silently as a shadow. He had no means of knowing, of course, the character of the rooms on those floors, or their location; but, nevertheless, the circumstances were such that he had to take desperate chances, and therefore when he reached the landing he felt with his hands silently along the wall until he came to a door, which he felt slowly down until he touched the knob. This he turned, trying to open the door which resisted him, showing that it was locked.

There is a way to force a door – that is, an ordinary door – and at the same time make very little noise. It is done – if the door opens inward – by seizing the knob firmly with both hands, having turned it, and then by bracing the body with one knee pressed firmly against the door directly under the knob. In this position, if it is assumed by a strong man, every effort may be centred upon one sudden impulse forward, which, while there is no visible or perceptible impact, will place all of the muscular force and weight of the man directly upon the point where the latch or lock of the door is located; and it is a very substantial lock which will not give way under this sort of pressure when it is correctly applied. Nor is there any perceptible noise, more than that of the tearing out of the slot which holds the bolt of the lock.

When this door gave way before the detective it admitted him to a square room at the rear of the house – a room in which a lamp, turned low, was burning; and as he closed the door behind him and pulled a chair in front of it to hold it shut, he saw a figure of a man, who had been sleeping fully clothed on a bed in one corner of the room, start to an upright posture, staring and apparently alarmed.

"Who – " the man started to exclaim, but the detective interrupted him with a sharp command.

"Shut up," he ordered, "if you let out a peep you will be the worse for it."

Without a word, the man sank back upon the pillow, apparently not in the least alarmed now, and evidently believing that the person who had entered his room was only another like himself, who, having gotten into some sort of trouble, was fleeing from his pursuers; and by all precedents, if the man was pursued to that room, it would be infinitely better for its permanent occupant to appear to be still sleeping soundly, than to have any of the aspect of a confederate, and so he closed his eyes again as if he were still alone.

Nick waited a moment at the door, listening for sounds outside, and while he stood there he heard the hall door from the street open, and presently close again, and he could distinguish the tramping of feet along the hall as several persons passed to the rear of the house, evidently on their way to the saloon again.

As soon as these noises had ceased, he knew that he was for the moment at least safe from pursuit. He piled other things against the door, and then deliberately crossed the room to the lamp and turned it up, after which he strode over to the bedside.

"Now, my friend," he said to its occupant, "I'll have to ask you to wake up for about three minutes."

"All right," was the simple response. "What do you want? Who are you, anyway? And what in blazes do you mean by bursting into my room in this way?"

"First," said Nick, "I want to know who you are, and whether you belong here or not?"

"Oh, you make me tired," grunted the man on the bed. "I'm Phil, the head day bartender downstairs."

"All right, Phil," said Nick, smiling. "Get up on your feet, where I can look at you, and where you can answer a few questions for me."

"Oh, what's eating you?" growled the bartender. "I ain't been to bed more than an hour. Let me sleep."

Instead of replying, the detective reached out his hand, and, seizing Phil by the shoulder, jerked him from the bed to the floor, stood him on his feet, and then seated him forcibly upon one of the wooden chairs near at hand – so forcibly that his jaws snapped together like the cracking of a nut.

"Now, will you be good?" asked Nick, smiling grimly.

"Yes, curse you," was the surly reply. "What do you want?"

"I want to talk to you."

"Well, talk on, can't you? I'm listening. Who are you, anyhow?"

"I'll tell you who I am," answered the detective, "and after I have done so, perhaps you will consent to listen to me. I am Nick Carter, the detective, and I want to make a little bit of use of you right now, Philip."

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE CRIMINAL'S COMPACT

"How long have you been here in this room?" asked the detective sharply.

"I told you about a minute ago," was the surly reply. "About an hour."

"Where were you before you came here?"

"That's none of your infernal business."

"I want to know if you were downstairs in the saloon?"

"No, I wasn't, if that will satisfy you."

"Have you been there at all to-night?"

"Yes, I was there about three hours ago."

"Was Black Madge there when you were there?"

A cunning leer came into the fellow's face before he answered, and then he replied by asking another question.

"Who's Black Madge?" he demanded.

"You know well enough who Black Madge is," insisted the detective; "and, Phil, if you keep a civil tongue in your head and answer my questions as I ask them, it will be all the better for you. If you do not – "

"Well, what then?"

"If you do not, there are several little things connected with your career which will make it unpleasant to have the inspector up at headquarters question you about."

"Well, I ain't a-goin' to give away anybody downstairs, no matter what happens," said the bartender.

"I'm not asking you to give anybody away. I merely asked you to answer my questions."

"Well, go ahead and ask them. I will answer them if I can."

"Was Black Madge in the saloon downstairs when you were there?"

"Yes. She was."

"Has she been in the habit of coming here frequently of late?"

"I can't tell you for certain about that. You know, I'm on duty in the daytime, and people of her kind come only at night."

"Answer my question," said the detective sternly. "You know the answer to it, and you understand that I know you do."

"Well, I guess she's been in most every night for the last week."

"Do you know where she lives?"

"No."

"Do you know any of the gang that is traveling with her?"

"Yes; I guess I know most of that bunch."

"Well, Phil, I want you to tell me their names; every one of them. That is, every one that you are certain forms one of her gang."

"There ain't anything certain about it, Carter. I'll tell you that on the level. All I know about her and her gang is guesswork. But if I was asked to mention them I should say that, judging from appearance, there is about eight of them. Besides, Madge has got something up her sleeve, but what it is I haven't an idea. It looks to me, though, as if they were getting ready to crack some pretty big crib, and make the haul of their lives. Now, if you're on to that lay, and your only purpose is to prevent them doing it, so that I ain't telling you anything that will go for putting them behind the bars, I will be on the level and tell you all I know."

"You will have to tell me, anyhow, Phil," returned Nick quietly. "If you don't do it willingly, I know of more than one way to compel you to do it. However, you may rest easy upon the point you have made. I am not at the present moment seeking to put any of them behind the bars; only Black Madge herself. She has got to go there, whether you talk to me or not."

"Well," said the bartender, "she don't cut any ice with me, anyhow. She's too stuck up for my kind."

"All right," said Nick; "tell me the names of those eight men."

"There's Slippery Al, Surly Bob, Gentleman Jim, Fly Cummings, Joe Cuthbert, Eugene Maxwell, and The Parson. Oh, and there's Scar-faced Johnny; I forgot him. Now, I'll leave it to you, Carter, if that ain't a likely bunch."

"And they were all in the room downstairs to-night," murmured the detective meditatively.

"What!" exclaimed the bartender in astonishment, "do you mean to say that you have been inside that saloon to-night?"

"Certainly."

"Would you mind telling me how you got there?"

"Never mind all that, Phil. That is not what I am here for – to explain things to you. Do you know where Black Madge lives, or where she can be found besides in this saloon?"

"I don't know anything about her more than I've told you."

The detective looked around the room for a moment, and discovered that one of its articles of furniture was a tall, old-fashioned pier glass, which reflected the full length of a person who stood before it. Then he turned around and commanded the bartender to stand on his feet, studied his appearance carefully, and then he shook his head.

"It won't do," he muttered.

"What won't do?" asked Phil.

"I was considering the possibility of making myself up in your likeness, and of venturing in that disguise to go to the saloon," replied the detective.

"What! right now?" asked Phil.

"Yes."

"And you don't think you could do it, eh?"

"No, Phil. You're too tall and too big. I never could make myself up to look like you in the world. I will have to think of some other way."

Phil was thoughtful for a moment, while the detective was absorbed in his own study of the situation, and then he looked up suddenly and exclaimed:

"Why don't you send me downstairs for you?"

"Because," replied Nick, "the moment you got there you would call up the whole gang, and have them up here after me inside of a minute."

"I wouldn't, either, Carter. Not if I agreed not to."

"I can't trust you, Phil."

Again that cunning leer came into the dissipated face of the bartender, and he said quickly:

"You can trust me, if you pay me enough for it."

"A bribed man is usually the first to betray," said Nick.

"Not if the bribe is big enough, Carter."

"Do you mean to say that I can trust you to go down into the saloon and to come back here presently and tell me exactly what the situation is?"

"You can, if you pay me enough. I told you that before."

"It isn't the question of pay, Phil; that is, the amount of pay. I would be willing to give you almost anything if I thought you would perform exactly what I want done, and return to me with the information I desire, without saying or doing anything to betray my presence here."

"Well, I'm your huckleberry, if you want me to do it. All you've got to do on your part is to cough up the dough."

The detective, who always went well supplied with funds, took a roll of bills from his pocket, and slowly counted out one hundred dollars, which, without a word, he handed to the bartender.

"I am going to take you at your word, Phil," he said slowly, "and that is the first installment only of what I shall give you if you perform the service well and thoroughly, and do exactly as I instruct you to do, no more, and no less."

"And if I do it all as you tell me to do, how much more do I get?"

"Listen, and I will tell you."

"I'm listening, you bet your life."

"I came here to-night, Phil, with my first assistant, Chick; he is downstairs somewhere now, probably bound and gagged and thrown under a table, or behind the bar, or locked up in a closet. I want you to go down there, and find out exactly what has become of Chick, and what has happened to him. I want you to pick up all the information you can about what has happened there to-night – that is, what they are saying about it. You will have to remain there perhaps half an hour to accomplish this, and all of that time you must be extremely careful not to let it appear that you know anything about me at all."

"Well, and after that, what am I to do?"

"When you know what has become of Chick, and where he is now, figure out the best way in which we can set him at liberty at once, or, if you can manage to do it before you return to me, do it. If you succeed in setting him at liberty yourself within the next half hour, I will, before the sun goes down to-morrow, give you nine hundred dollars more, and that will be a pretty good nest egg for you, Phil."

"I'll do the job, you needn't fret."

"Wait, there is another thing."

"Well, sir?"

"If you find that you cannot liberate him yourself without assistance, you are to return to me at once, and we will plan together how it can best be accomplished. When we have done that, if through your aid I succeed in getting Chick safely away from here, you shall have the nine hundred plunks extra just the same."

"On the level, Carter?"

"Yes, on the level, Phil. I mean every word I say."

"Well, I'm the huckleberry that can do it."

"Wait, Phil, before you start, there is one more thing still."

"What! another?"

"Yes. This. After we have gotten safely out of this pickle, and the place has quieted down, it will be up to you to find out for me where Black Madge hangs up her clothes. It is important, Phil, that I should get that woman back into the prison where she belongs."

"I ain't no stool pigeon," grumbled the bartender.

"Neither am I asking you to be a stool pigeon," said the detective. "What I want you to do is simple enough. I am not laying any plans against any of the regular frequenters of this place. It's only Black Madge I want, and you have confessed already that you don't like her. Now, it's up to you if you want to go through this whole job, and do it right. And, Phil, if you will stick to me and see the whole game through the way I have outlined it to you, another thousand goes with the first one."

"Geewhiz! do you mean that?"

"I certainly do."

"Well, then, I'm game for the whole layout, and I will see it through to the end, but I don't want you to forget, Carter, that, if anything ever comes of it so that my part in this business is found out by any one of that crowd down there now, male or female, I wouldn't give a snap for my chances of being alive twenty-four hours afterward."

"They won't find it out through me," said the detective. "If they find it out at all it will be through you. And there's one thing more you must remember, Phil, and that is if you betray me you will be in a whole lot worse fix than you would be if your friends downstairs discover your treachery. For if you do betray me, I will never let up on you, Phil, until I see you behind the bars for a term of years that will make you an old man before you come out again."

CHAPTER XXVII.

THE GLARE OF A MATCH

When the bartender had taken his departure, Nick found a cigar in one of his pockets, and seated himself to smoke quietly until Phil should return. But when more than half an hour later the cigar was consumed, and he had thrown it aside, he began to feel a sense of uneasiness that the man should be gone so long a time.

However, he realized that it was no easy task that Phil had undertaken, and that he might well occupy an hour or more in accomplishing it.

He had no more cigars to smoke, but he seated himself resolutely in a chair, determined to wait with patience until his messenger should return.

There was a small clock, ticking away merrily on the mantel, at the far end of the room, and the detective watched it while the minute hand worked its way slowly around the dial, until an hour, then an hour and a quarter, and, finally, an hour and twenty minutes had elapsed since the departure of the bartender.

His impatience was now so great, and his natural distrust of the confederate he had employed was so prominent in his mind that he left his chair, having first extinguished the light, and, going to the door, opened it softly and peered outside.

The hallway was in utter darkness, the same as when he was there last, and, although he listened intently, he could not hear the suggestion of a sound from the lower regions of the house. After waiting a few moments longer, he tiptoed forward cautiously to the stairs, and descended them, being careful to step as closely as possible to the spindles of the balustrade, in order that they might not creak beneath his weight, and thus alarm others in the house. In this way he gained the lower floor.

Nick was somewhat handicapped without his flash light, but he remembered quite distinctly the location of the sound he had heard two hours earlier, when the party from the laundry had followed him in, and passed through the hallway to a rear door. Now he sought that door by following carefully along the wall until he came to it.

But, although he searched diligently for many minutes, he could not find so much as a suggestion of a door anywhere.

He remembered then that in all probability there was no perceptible door at all; that the door which was there somewhere was concealed in the wainscoting in some way, or otherwise hidden from casual observation. To have maintained a door of entrance to the saloon from that hallway would have rendered it entirely unnecessary for Grinnel to keep up his private entrance to the saloon from the other street. Nick's only method of finding it now was to light a match, and this he hesitated to do, not knowing what warning its glare might convey to others.

But there was no alternative, and presently he began his search by lighting matches one after another, permitting them to flare up sufficiently for a moment's vision, and then throwing them quickly to the floor, after the manner adopted by burglars when they were engaged in robbing a house before the pocket flash light was invented.

He was not long in discovering the entrance he sought. The walls along the hallway were not plastered; they were merely built up with matched boards, which had stood there unpainted for so long a time that they had achieved a veneer of filth and dirt which made them look, in the flare of the match, like mahogany.

But he could easily see where there was a keyhole cut into one of these boards, and, although around it there was no other evidence of a door, he knew that if he could turn the tumblers in that lock it would be revealed to him.

He went to work with his picklock, and, as he supposed, the instant the bolt of the lock was shot back the door opened easily and noiselessly in his grasp, and from beyond it he could at once hear the murmur of distant voices; also very far ahead of him, and beneath what was evidently another door, he could perceive a gleam of light.

He stepped through, and closed it after him, but, realizing that it was more than likely that he might wish to leave in a hurry, he left it unlocked.

And now he tiptoed forward to the door beneath which the light shone, and, getting upon his hands and knees, held his ear down where he could hear with more distinctness.

The effect was almost the same as if he were inside the saloon. Strangely enough, also, it was Madge's voice that came to him first, for it appeared that she was seated near that very door, and by the answers that were returned to her, Nick knew that no less a person than Mike Grinnel himself was her companion. And they were speaking in low tones, but, nevertheless, every word they uttered could be heard distinctly by the detective.

It was in the midst of their conversation, evidently, that Nick began to listen, and Madge was saying:

"I swore then, Mike, that I would be even with him, and that if I ever succeeded in getting out of that prison where he put me I would never rest another minute until Nick Carter was placed beyond the power of injuring anybody."

"You bit off a little more than you could chew, didn't you, Madge?" asked Mike Grinnel, in his slow, even voice, in which he never permitted a sign of emotion.

"No, I didn't," she retorted. "I made some mistakes, maybe. I shouldn't, for instance, have written him the letter I did."

"What was the letter, Madge?"

"Like a fool I wrote him a threatening letter, in which I told him to look out for me. That was my vanity, I suppose. I wanted him to know that I was on his track. I wanted to worry him; to give him something to think of, and a lot of things to look out for."

"Well, what then, Madge?"

"It was then, Mike, that I began to get the guns together, Slippery Al, and Gentleman Jim, and the others, and, of course, I made this place our headquarters."

"That, Madge, is just what you shouldn't have done. That's what I'm finding fault with you about now.

"Well," she said, "it's done, and it can't be helped; and Nick Carter has been here, and he's gotten away again; but, all the same, we've got Chick in our power, and if I do to him as I feel like doing now, he will regret the day that he ever took my trail."

"If you leave him where he is now, Madge, he'll do that," said Grinnel, laughing softly.

"Why, what would happen to him there?" she demanded quickly.

"For one thing the rats would probably eat him up before very long, and it wouldn't be the first meal of that kind they've had down there, either."

"You didn't tell me where you put him," said Madge.

"I don't tell anybody exactly where that place is, Madge. It's a little hole that I've dug out underneath the cellar of this house; if it was anywhere in the old country it would be called a dungeon; as it is, I call it the grave – people who go there have a habit of never coming out again."

The detective was anxious to know what had become of Phil, the bartender. It was evident that the man had done nothing to betray the detective, since these two were talking so quietly just inside the door where Nick was listening.