Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 118, No. 2, March 19, 1938
- Автор: Clark Dale, 12627 Convict
- Год: 1938
- Язык: английский
- Год: The Red Star News Company
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 118, No. 2, March 19, 1938». Краткое содержание книги:
The other man crouched in a corner of the cave, almost hidden in shadow. Knees were drawn almost level with his tropic-skinned features.
Danny muttered, “Torres!”
The big brown man stared but said nothing.
Danny growled, “So it was an inside job!”
The pug-nosed one turned the lantern, aimed its beam squarely onto Danny. “Never mind him — I’ll do the talking for the outfit,” he said harshly. “Listen, young fella. You want to get out of here alive, don’t you?”
The question required no answer, and Danny gave none.
“Sure, you do,” Pug Nose said. “And you can — if you obey orders.”
He paused, while the other two came crawling into the dugout. Their bodies ringed Danny into an uncomfortably small space. Pug Nose drew a slip of yellow paper from his pocket, and a small pencil.
“You write what I tell you,” he said. “Put it in your own words. Just say that a gang has got the vaccine. We want twenty thousand for it. When they come across with the dough, we’ll turn you loose to tell them where the stuff is hidden. They’ll know it’s on the level, having your name signed on the note.”
Danny nodded, said, “Sure, I’ll do that.” Because, by this time the brakeman would be phoning in the message—
“In old five dollar bills,” Pug Nose said. “Tell ’em to send one man in a rowboat along the south shore until he sees a blue shirt waved on a stick. Tell ’em—”
Danny didn’t hear the rest. He was staring at the yellow slip of paper. A bank check, it had Mutual Savings & Trust printed in big letters across its face. At the stub side was pictured a tree; smaller letters said, Big Oaks from Tiny Acorns Grow.
Then Danny Lane knew what he’d been trying to remember. And the knowledge of it leaped like flame in his brain. A crazy flame, burning reason clean out of him. He forgot that he was one against four — and that the four were armed. Forgot that he was weakened by exposure, that his skull was a thing of torture.
Danny Lane snarled — and smashed his fist into the pug-nosed one’s face.
He didn’t knock the man flat. Far from it. The blow was only a gesture, no more hurtful than a woman’s slap.
But it brought them all down on him. Pug Nose’s backhanded punch knocked Danny to the wall. The rifle’s butt crashed into his groin as he staggered.
And Torres came plunging out of his corner of the cave.
Torres brought plenty of noise with him. There was baling wire around the big brown man’s waist, wire firmly twisted onto the boards at that end of the dug-out. Along with the noise, the big man brought the whole boarded-up wall, ripping the timbers right out of the earth.
A shower of dirt cascaded onto Danny Lane’s head. The dugout was full of falling dirt.
Danny heard a scream: “She’s a-cavin’!”
In fact, the whole roof tottered and groaned. A cloud of dust obscured the lantern. In the gray half-light, Danny saw the three hijackers simultaneously leap for the tile’s mouth.
What followed wasn’t pretty. There were two men wedged and struggling in the tile, screaming and cursing as they fought. And there was the pugnosed man standing over them, whipping that bayoneted revolver into the squirming flesh of his partners.
Torres stood watching, twisting his big arms out of the wire. He didn’t say a word.
This lasted perhaps fifteen seconds. And then Torres had his arms free. His hand shot out. caught the pug-nosed one by the neck. Shook him, as a terrier would shake a rat, and threw him aside. He reached down and dragged the other two out of the tile, one in each hand, and smashed their heads together. Then he threw them on top of Pug Nose.
A bad hombre. that Torres.
But, quite gently, he took Danny’s shoulder and pushed him to the hole’s opening. He still hadn’t said a word.
“Because he couldn’t say anything,” Danny Lane explained. This was later, of course. Danny rested on a cot in the refugee camp, with his head swathed in a great many bandages, and talked a good deal more to Lucy Orr than any nurse ought to let her patient talk.
“They had tape inside his mouth, across his teeth,” said Danny. “So he couldn’t warn me. You see, they’d wanted him to write the note and he wouldn’t — figured they’d kill him after they got the money, rather than leave a witness alive. He’d seen a lot too much. He got off the train just before it pulled away, and saw the last of the robbery. Being unarmed, he ran up to the Barker farmhouse to give the alarm.”
Lucy said, “But Barker was in it, too?”
“Not in the hold-up itself. He had a team hitched to the hay baler, so they could hide the loot. An old trick that gang had used. They used to ship out booze from Barker’s still that way. Anyhow, Barker saw Torres go up to the house. He followed with a gun. And stood guard over him. But Torres made a break, and in the fight over the gun, killed Barker. But when he came out of the house, the rest of the gang were there and had him covered.”
Danny thought a minute. “So they baled the vaccine into the hay. That was the ker-thunk sound I heard. Then, by the time I got to the farmhouse, they were loading those bales into the car. They ran the car down to the bridge and threw out part of the hay in it, and substituted the contraband. And used a trainman’s spud to push the boxcar back up the siding, leaving the marks on the rails I saw. That’s why there weren’t any footprints around the siding in the mud.”
Lucy frowned. “But if the car was being shipped to Randall’s farm—?”
“They knew it wouldn’t go in a hurry. Common freight like that would stand on a siding somewhere while the relief food trains came through. The car wouldn’t be opened for weeks,” said Danny, “no matter who’d bought the hay from Barker. Randall being in it was just coincidence.”
The blonde girl shook her head and said, “But what possessed you to try to fight all those men when you even thought Torres was one of the hijack gang?”
“I know,” muttered Danny, apologetically. “I didn’t have a chance. But I lost my head when I realized the brakeman was the gang’s inside man — that my message would never be delivered by him. Because he was the one who pulled the cord to stop the Special for the robbery — and tipped off the gang in the dugout to nab me this morning, too.”
Her blue eyes were surprised, dubious. “How could you know that?”
“The check reminded me. The picture of a tree on it. That’s what I was trying to remember,” said Danny. “The brakeman claimed to know the quarry spur so well. But when the Special stopped, I overheard him tell Torres there was probably a tree blown onto the track.”
A slow grin spread over most of Danny Lane’s face, the part of his face which wasn’t hidden in bandages.
“You see, honey, I had looked up and down that track both ways. There were plenty of weeds — but not one single tree in sight!”
Big House Cats
by Convict 12627
The inside story of convicts who trade in the trust of their fellow men.
“Whenever three prisoners group together, one of them belongs to me.”
This remark was once made by a well-known official when queried as to his success in keeping down trouble in the prison. While his words may seem cryptical, they are easily understandable to any convict. This man meant that if any three prisoners gathered together to discuss an escape or a proposed rule violation of any kind, one of them could be depended upon to bring him advance news of the plan. In short, it was his claim that one of three prisoners in the institution was a stoolpigeon.