IV—THE MANTLE OF ONE IGNACE FERRONI

UP and down the small, ill-furnished room Dave Henderson paced back and forward, as, not so very long ago, he had paced by the hour from the rear wall of his cell to the barred door that opened on an iron gallery without. And he paced the distance now with the old nervous, pent-up energy that rebelled and mutinied and would not take passively to restraint, even when that restraint, as now, was self-imposed.

It had just grown dark. The window shade was tightly drawn. On the table, beside the remains of the supper that Emmanuel had brought him some little time before, a small lamp furnished a meager light, and threw the corners of the room into shadow.

He had seen no one save Emmanuel since last night, when he had left Nicolo Capriano's. He had not heard from Nicolo Capriano. It was the sense of personal impotency, the sense of personal inactivity that filled him with a sort of savage, tigerish impatience now. There were many things to do outside in that world beyond the drawn window shade—and he could only wait! There was the pigeon-cote in Tooler's shed, for instance. All during the day the pigeon-cote had been almost an obsession with him. There was a chance—one chance in perhaps a million—that for some reason or other Millman had not been able to get there. It was a gambling chance—no more, no less—with the odds so heavily against Millman permitting anything to keep him from getting his hands on a fortune in ready cash that, from a material standpoint, there was hardly any use in his, Dave Henderson, going there. But that did not remove the ever present, and, as opposed to the material, the intangible sense of uncertainty that possessed him. He expected to find the money gone; he would be a fool a thousand times over to expect anything else. But he had to satisfy himself, and he would—if that keen old brain of Nicolo Capriano only succeeded in devising some means of throwing the police definitely off the trail.

But it was not so easy to throw the police definitely off the trail, as Nicolo Capriano himself had said. He, Dave Henderson, was ready to agree in that with the crafty old Italian; and, even after these few hours, cooped up in here, he was even more ready to agree with the other that the mere hiding of himself away from the police was utterly abortive as far as the accomplishment of any conclusive end was concerned.

It was far from easy; though, acting somewhat as a panacea to his impatience, the old Italian had inspired him with faith as being more than a match for the police, and yet——

He gnawed at his lips. He, too, had not been idle through the day; he, too, had tried to find some way, some loophole that would enable him, once he went out into the open again, to throw Barjan, and all that Barjan stood for, conclusively and forever off his track. And the more he had thought of it, the more insurmountable the difficulty and seeming impossibility of doing so had become. It had even shaken his faith a little in Nicolo Capriano's fox-like cunning proving equal to the occasion. He couldn't, for instance, live all his life in disguise. That did very well perhaps as a piece of fiction, but practically it offered very little attraction!

He frowned—and laughed a little harshly at himself. He was illogical again. He had asked only for three or four days, for a fighting chance, just time enough to get on Millman's trail, hadn't he? And now he was greedy for a permanent and enduring safe-conduct from the police, and his brain mulled and toiled with that objective alone in view, and he stood here now employed in gnawing his lips because he could not see the way, or see how Nicolo Capriano could find it, either. He shrugged his shoulders. As well dismiss that! If he could but reach Millman—and, after Millman, Bookie Skarvan—just to pay the debts he owed, then——

His hand that had curled into a clenched fist, with knuckles showing like white knobs under the tight-stretched skin, relaxed, as, following a low, quick knock at the door, Emmanuel stepped into the room.

“I gotta da message for you from Nicolo,” Emmanuel announced; “an' I gotta da letter for you from Nicolo, too. You get-a damn sick staying in here, eh? Well, Nicolo say you go to his place see him tonight. We take-a da car by-an'-by, an' go.”

“That's the talk, Emmanuel!” said Dave Henderson, with terse heartiness. “You're all right, Emmanuel, and so is your room and your grub, but a little fresh air is what I am looking for, and the sooner the better!”

He took the envelope that Emmanuel extended, crossed over to the lamp, and turned his back on the other, as he ripped the envelope open. Nicolo Capriano's injunction had been to say nothing to Emmanuel, and—— He was staring blankly at the front page of the evening newspaper, all that the envelope contained, and which he had now unfolded before him. And then he caught his breath sharply. He was either crazy, or his eyes were playing him tricks. A thrill that he suppressed by an almost superhuman effort of will, a thrill that tore and fought at the restraint he put upon it, because he was afraid that the mad, insane uplift that it promised was but some fantastic hallucination, swept over him. There was a lead pencil circle drawn around the captions of one of the columns; and three written words, connected to the circle by another pencil stroke, leaped up at him from the margin of the paper:

“You are dead.”

He felt the blood surging upward in his veins to beat like the blows of a trip-hammer at his temples. The words were not blurred and running together any more, the captions, instead, inside that circle, seemed to stand out in such huge startling type that they dominated the entire page: