XIX—BIRDS OF A FEATHER

IT took twenty minutes for the run to the Junction. And at the Junction, as far as the Hawk could tell, since, yielding to what had become a sort of habit with him, he descended to the ground on the opposite side from the station, he was the only passenger for that stop. It was dark here; strangely silent, and strangely lonely. Barne's Junction owed its existence neither to a town site, nor to commercial importance—it existed simply as a junction, and for purely railroad operating purposes only. It was, in fact, the other extreme as compared to Selkirk with its lighted and busy platform, its extensive yard, and its ubiquitous and, perhaps, too inquisitive yardmen!

The Hawk dropped on all fours and began to creep along the side of the smoker toward the forward end of the train, his eyes strained warily through the darkness against the possibility of one or other of the engine crew descending from the cab. He passed the smoker and kept on along the length of the baggage car, still crawling, moving without a sound. When he rose from his knees finally, he was crouched down in between the tender and the forward end of the baggage car; and a moment later, as the train jerked forward into motion, he was crouched again—this time on the end beam of the baggage car which, in lieu of platform, served as a sort of wide threshold for the door.

The train was beginning to gain momentum now, and against the jolt and swing of the increasing speed the Hawk steadied himself by clinging with one hand to the iron handrail at the side of the door—with the other hand he tried the door cautiously, and found it locked.

From the pocket in the back lining of his coat he produced his mask, fingered it speculatively for an instant, then slipped it over his face. True, this was to be his last venture in the Wire Devils' preserves, but he had always worn a mask, and—there came a twisted grin—they perhaps would not recognise him without it. And it was quite necessary that they should recognise the Hawk—if he was to keep that promise to the Butcher! It might be a farewell, as far as he was concerned, but he intended that it should be a memorable one, and that no doubt should be permitted to linger in their minds as to the identity of the parting guest they had so lavishly, if ungraciously, entertained!

From the same pocket came his skeleton keys. The Hawk now felt tentatively with his finger over the keyhole, nodded his head briskly, and from the bunch of keys, still by the sense of touch, selected one without hesitation. The Hawk, however, for the moment, made no effort to open the door. The rush of the wind was in his face now; like some black, monstrous, uncanny wall confronting him, the tender clashed and clattered, and swayed in dizzy lurches before his eyes; while heavenward the sky was tinged with a deep red glow, and the cab was ablaze with light from the wide-flung fire-box door, and the top of the baggage car door, and the individual particles of coal on the top of the tender's heap stood out in sharp relief against the background of the night.

And then the darkness fell again.

The Hawk's hand shot forward to the keyhole, lingered there an instant, as he crouched again swaying with the lurch of the train, then the skeleton keys were returned to the pocket in the back lining of his coat—and the Hawk was in action. In a flash he had opened and closed the door behind him, and, with his back against it, his automatic flung significantly forward in his hand, he stood staring down the length of the car.

There was a hoarse, startled yell, that was lost in the roar of the flying train, and the baggageman, from his chair at one side of the car and in front of a shelf-like desk topped with a rack of pigeonholes, leaped to his feet.

“Sit down!” invited the Hawk coldly.

The man hesitated, but the next instant dropped back into his chair, as the Hawk moved suddenly forward to his side.

“What do you want?” he demanded sullenly.

“This—to begin with!” The Hawk's voice was an insolent drawl now, as his deft fingers, like a streak of lightning, were into the other's pocket and out again with the man's revolver. “How long since they've been arming the baggagemen on this road? You needn't answer—I'm only talking to myself. Those are the cases up there by the forward door, aren't they? And the big one's got the green boys—eh?” He was backing away from the man now. “Don't move, my bucko—understand? That chair you're sitting in is the only health resort in this car!”

The man's hands clenched, as his eyes narrowed on the Hawk.

“You damned thief!” he rasped out. “I—I'd like to——”

“Quite so!” said the Hawk softly. “I know how you feel about it, and if it helps any to get it off your chest, go to it! Nobody'll hear you but me, and I'll try and make the best of it!”

Piled along the side of the car from the doorway were a number of solidly made, heavy-looking cases that obviously contained the gold shipment. In front of these, between them and where the baggageman sat, and acting too perhaps as a screen when the rear sliding door was open, as, for instance, it had been at Selkirk, was a large, innocent-appearing, flimsily-constructed packing case. The Hawk, beside this now, moved it slightly. It was very light, so light as to warrant the presumption that it might even be empty.

The baggageman had relapsed into a scowling silence, his eyes still on the Hawk. The Hawk took his steel jimmy from his pocket, shifted his automatic to his left hand, and inserted the jimmy under the cover of the case. There was a rip and tear of rending wood; the operation was twice repeated—and the Hawk threw the shattered cover on the floor. He glanced inside. At the bottom of the case lay a large paper package, strongly tied, and heavily sealed with red wax.

Under his mask, the Hawk's lips parted in a smile, as, his eyes on the baggageman again, he noted that the other was watching his every movement now with a sort of intense expectancy. The Hawk, however, made no effort to reach down into the four-foot depth of the packing case; he canted the box over, and picked up the package from the floor of the car. With the point of his jimmy he tore a rent in the paper wrapper—and his smile broadened.

“I apologise,” said the Hawk, with an engaging nod to the sullen figure in the chair. “They're not green boys—they're yellow backs!”

“You damned thief!” said the man, in a choked voice.

The roar and sway of the train seemed suddenly to increase, as the wheel trucks, jolting and beating at a siding switch, set up a sort of infernal tattoo. They were passing the first station after the Junction—Conmore.

The smile left the Hawk's face. A little further along, and they would stop the train. There came a sort of dare-devil set to the Hawk's clamped jaws.

He was taking chances, but he had already weighed those chances well. The Wire Devils, the Butcher and his crowd, would be on the alert; but equally so would be MacVightie—and the posse that must far outnumber the gang. And there was that promise to the Butcher! With their plans awry, and taken by surprise, instead of profiting by surprise themselves, their chances, rather than of securing a half million in gold, were most excellent of securing quite as generous a reward, though of another nature—at the hands of MacVightie!

“I'm going to get off here,” said the Hawk coolly to the figure in the chair. “And the only way to get off without cracking my bean is to let that guy there in the engine know that he's infringing the speed laws! You remember what I told you—the only healthy place in this car for you is where you're sitting now. Something may crack loose around here—keep out of the wet!”

The Hawk reached above his head for the bell cord, and pulled it sharply. The engine crew, too, were evidently on the alert! The shrill blast of the whistle answered the signal instantly. There was a sudden jerk that almost threw the Hawk from his feet, the pound and slam of buffer plates, and the vicious shriek of the “air.” The Hawk recovered himself, and, cool and quick in every movement now, thrust his jimmy into his pocket to free his hands, flung the package of banknotes up the aisle made by trunks and boxes behind him, and began to retreat toward the forward door, pulling the empty case along as a shield between himself and the other end of the car.

The rear door of the car smashed inward. The Hawk caught a blurred glimpse of faces and forms surging through the doorway, and streaming across the platform from the smoker behind—and, in the lead, the Butcher's crafty face, with its little black, restless, ferret eyes fixed down the trunk-made aisle of the car on him!

“The Hawk!”—it came in a scream of abandoned fury from the Butcher—then a headlong rush—a flash, the roar of the report, as the Butcher fired—another, as the Hawk's automatic answered—and the spat of a bullet splitting the panel of the forward door.

The Hawk, stooped low behind the packing case now, still edged backward toward the door, still dragging the case after him. A smile that was deadly grim and far removed from mirth curved his lips downward in hard, merciless lines. He had, at least, attained his object! There was no doubt concerning their recognition of him as the Hawk! Well, he had weighed the chances. They would be on him now, but only one at a time; there was not room for more, with the packing case blocking the way—and it would be the Butcher first. After that—well, after that, he counted on MacVightie creating a diversion from the rear, and——

The Butcher had flung himself against the packing case. It toppled to one side, and the Hawk, like a crouched tiger, sprang and closed, making of the Butcher's body, as a substitute for the packing case now, a shield from the onrush behind. There was a furious oath from the Butcher; a lurch, a stagger, as the train jerked and jerked again—and both men, gripped and locked together, went to the floor.

For an instant they rolled over and over, the Butcher snarling like a mad beast, wrenching and twisting for an opening at the Hawk's throat—and then suddenly the car was in an inferno. A voice, MacVightie's, rang out sternly from the rear door. It was echoed by a yell from one of the Hawk's companions, then a shot, another, a fusillade of them—and then a voice above the uproar:

“It's MacVightie, an' de bulls!”

There was a scurrying of feet, a stampede for cover behind trunks and boxes by the Butcher's men—and the Butcher's grip was tense upon the Hawk.

“Cut it out!” he whispered hoarsely. “My God, we're trapped—the lot of us! Make a break for the door—get me? Crawl—that's the only chance!” Blue eddies of smoke hung in queer, wavering, hesitant suspension up and down the length of the car; the air was full of the acrid smell of powder. The firing broke out again. The Hawk released his hold.

“All right!” he panted. “I'm with you!”

The Butcher was right, it was the only chance—and a chance that was theirs alone, for, as they lay on the floor, the packing case hid them, and it was barely two yards to the door. The train was almost at a standstill now. MacVightie's men had gained an entrance and a position for themselves behind the trunks at the lower end, firing as they crept forward, while back on the smoker's platform, through the baggage car's open door, others commanded the sweep down the center of the car.

The Hawk snatched at the package of banknotes, snuggled it under his coat, and, with the Butcher beside him, began to wriggle toward the door.

MacVightie's voice rang out again from the rear of the car:

“Marston, take ten men, and surround the car! And——” His voice rose suddenly in a bull-like roar. “The forward door, there—two of them! Watch which way they jump—not a man of them gets away to-night! Quick!”

The Hawk had wrenched the door open, and, with the Butcher behind him, flung himself out, and leaped to the ground. With the Hawk leading, running like hares, the two men dashed down the embankment, and hurled themselves over the barbed-wire fence that enclosed the right of way. Shouts, the crackle of shots, echoed from behind them—the short, vicious tongue-flames of the revolvers, a myriad of them, it seemed, stabbed yellow through the blackness.

The Hawk glanced back over his shoulder. He could just make out perhaps a half dozen dark forms in pursuit—and perhaps fifty yards away. The darkness and the distance made the shooting at best uncertain. It was only a chance shot that would get either the Butcher or himself, and ahead, unless he was mistaken, for the train must have come to a stop at just about that distance from Conmore, must be the wooded tract of land that surrounded the old farmhouse. Yes—there it was! The old dare-devil set clamped his jaws again. Yes, and so was the Ladybird—there! Well, it was obvious enough that there was no other cover! He glanced at the Butcher's face that he could just discern in the darkness. The Butcher might decide against it, but the Butcher evidently had not recognised his surroundings. The man's lips were working, and he was cursing in abandon as he ran.

The Hawk spoke in short, gasping breaths: “There's some trees over there—to the right—a little—make for them—cover!”

The Butcher swerved automatically in the direction indicated.

“Curse you!” he wheezed out. “This is all your infernal, nosey work! What did you want to butt in for to-night—you fool—you couldn't have got that gold, anyway!”

“You close your face!” snapped back the Hawk. “I'm running my own show! There was a little cash—forty thousand bucks along with that gold, that maybe you didn't know about. That's what I was after—see? And that's what I got—see?”

“Yes”—the Butcher's voice broke in infuriated passion—“yes, and you got them all pinched, every last one of them—blast you! I——”

“You save your breath, and put it into running,” retorted the Hawk savagely, “or else maybe you'll get pinched yourself! It's their lookout! I don't owe any of you any candy, do I!”

MacVightie himself was evidently one of those in pursuit behind, for again the Hawk recognised the other's voice:

“Spread out there to the right! And try and shoot a little straighter—before they get into that belt of trees!”

A renewed outburst of firing came in response—and the Hawk measured grimly the few yards that still separated him from the trees, as a bullet, drumming the air venomously, seemed to miss his cheek by but the fraction of an inch. MacVightie's presence was evidence that the detective was so well satisfied that the gang penned up in the car could not escape, that he obviously counted his temporary absence from the scene well warranted if thereby the clean-up were made complete in the capture of——-The Hawk's mental soliloquy came to an abrupt end. There was a low cry from the Butcher, and the man, as they ran shoulder to shoulder, lurched against him.

“What's wrong?” flung out the Hawk sharply.

“They got me!” gasped the Butcher—and lurched again. “They got me—in the leg.”

The Hawk glanced backward again. They were still those fifty yards behind, those dark, flitting, oncoming forms, those vicious yellow stabs of flame in the blackness—it had been a dead heat so far, here to the fringe of the trees.

The Butcher stumbled. The Hawk swung his free arm around the other's waist, and plunged in amongst the trees. It was slower work now, desperately slow. He clutched at the package of banknotes beneath his coat, and with his other hand tightened his grip upon the Butcher. The man was evidently badly hit, and was beginning to sag limply. Came the thrashing and branches, and the rush of feet behind them. The fifty yards was ten now—the Hawk, with his burden, struggled on—and then there came a cry again from the Butcher—they had gained the edge of the clearing, and the old farmhouse and its outbuildings loomed up before them.

“It's—it's——” the Butcher's voice choked weakly.

“I—I know where we are—my God, quick! They'll search the house! I got to warn him now—quick!” The man, as though under a stimulant, with new strength, had sprung forward alone into the clear, making for the farmhouse door. It was only a few yards, but halfway there he stumbled again—and again the Hawk pulled him to his feet.

A yell went up behind them. MacVightie and his men, too, were now in the clearing, and the ten yards' lead was cut to five, to three—and then the door before them was flung suddenly open, and a voice challenged hoarsely from within:

“Who's there? What's——”

The Butcher pitched across the threshold, dragging the Hawk down with him in his fall.

“The door, Jim—quick—slam it!” screamed the Butcher. “We're done—the cellar!”

The Hawk had leaped to his feet. The room was dark, unlighted, but from across it came, as there had come that other night, the faint glow from the open door of the cellarway. The Butcher had staggered up again, and was making in that direction—and then the Hawk, too, was across the room—but the next instant, turning to meet the rush from without, as the front door, evidently before the man whom the Butcher had addressed as Jim could fasten it, burst inward and crashed against the wall, he was borne backward, and, losing his balance, half pitched, half rolled down the cellar stairs.

The fall must have stunned him for a moment. He realised that as he struggled to his feet—to find himself staring into the muzzle of MacVightie's revolver, and to find that the bulging package of banknotes was gone from under his coat, as, too, were his automatic, his jimmy and the baggageman's revolver that had been in the side pockets of his coat. He raised his hand dazedly toward his eyes—and MacVightie, reaching out, knocked his hand away.

“I'll do that for you—we were just getting around to it!” said MacVightie roughly—and jerked the Hawk's mask from his face. And then MacVightie leaned sharply forward. “O-ho!” he exclaimed grimly. “So it's you—is it? I guess you put it over me the night that ten thousand was lifted at the station—but I've got you now!”

The Hawk made no answer. He was staring, still in an apparently dazed way, about him. The cellar was a veritable maze of work benches and elaborate equipment—for counterfeiting work. A printing press stood over in one corner; on the benches, plates and engravers' tools of all descriptions were scattered about; and, near the wall by the stairway, he made out a telegraph set. But the Hawk's glance did not linger on any of these things—it fastened on a bent and twisted form that craned its neck forward from a rubber-tired wheel chair; on a livid face, out of which the coal-black eyes, narrowed to slits, smouldered in deadly menace, and from whose thin lips, that scarcely moved, there poured forth now a torrent of hideous blasphemy in that soft, silken voice that had earned the Ladybird his name; on the hand, crooked into a claw, that, pushing away the man who stood guard over him, reached out toward where the Butcher lay upon the floor.

“You ape, you gnat, you brainless pig! And you led them here—here—here!”

“I didn't know where I was until I was right on the house,” mumbled the Butcher miserably.

“I——”

“Shut up—both of you!” ordered MacVightie gruffly. “What do you say, Lanson? Is this the Hawk?”

The Hawk had not seen the superintendent, and he turned now quickly. Lanson's steel-grey eyes were boring into him coldly.

“Yes,” said Lanson evenly, “I think I could swear he was the man who held us up in the private car the other night—but it's easily proved. If he is the Hawk, he has got a wound in his right side. I saw him clap his hand there when the pistol went off in his fight with Meridan.”

“Well, we'll soon see!” snapped MacVightie.

The Hawk licked his lips.

“You needn't look,” he said morosely. “It's there.”

“So you admit it, do you?” MacVightie's smile was unpleasant. “Well, then, since you seem to be so thick with that pack of curs back there in the train, perhaps you'll admit to a hand in this little counterfeiting plant as well?”

“No; I won't!” said the Hawk shortly. “I never had anything to do with this! I don't admit anything of the kind! Ask him!”—the Hawk jerked his hand toward the Ladybird.

“Oh, all right!” MacVightie smiled unpleasantly again. “Let it go at that for now, if you like it that way. It doesn't much matter. You're birds of a feather, anyway, and there's enough on all of you to go around!” He reached behind him, and picked up the package of banknotes from where he had evidently laid it on the nearest bench. “How did you know this was on the train, and how did you know where it was in the car—and tell the truth about it!”

“I heard you and Mr. Lanson talking about it tonight,” said the Hawk.

“Where?”

“In the roundhouse. I was outside the window. And”—the Hawk's voice thinned in a sudden snarl—“you go to the devil with your questions!”

The Ladybird was craned forward again in the wheel chair listening intently, he sank back now and scowled murderously at the Hawk. MacVightie shrugged his shoulders, handed the package to one of his three men who were with him in the cellar, and drew a pair of handcuffs from his pocket.

“Get that cash down to the train, and put it back with the gold where it will be under guard, MacGregor!” he ordered brusquely. “And you two carry this fellow”—he rattled his handcuffs in the Butcher's direction—“down there, too. Tell Marston to let you have three or four more men. The chap that Williams has got upstairs there will have to be carried, too, I guess; and our friend here, in the invalid buggy, with the thanksgiving expression on his face, will have to have somebody to push him along over the ruts. Yes, and I'll want a couple to put in the night here—tell Marston to make it four. And now, beat it! You run ahead, MacGregor, and get back as soon as you can—we don't want to tie up the traffic all night!”

The two men picked up the Butcher, and, preceded by their companion with the package of banknotes, went up the stairs. MacVightie caught the Hawk's arm roughly, snapped one link of the steel cuffs over the Hawk's right wrist, and yanked the Hawk ungently over to a position beside the wheel chair.

He snapped the other link over the Ladybird's left wrist, and smiled menacingly.

“I guess there's dead weight enough there to anchor you for a few minutes while I take a look around here!” he said curtly—and turned to Lan-son.

The Hawk was licking at his lips again. Upstairs, the tramp of feet was dying away: There would be no one there now but the other member of the gang who, it seemed, had been hurt when the house was rushed, and the one man who was guarding the prisoner. The Ladybird's cultured voice at the Hawk's side poured out an uninterrupted stream of abandoned oaths that were like a shudder in the nonchalant, conversational tones in which they fell from the twitching lips. MacVightie and Lanson were moving here and there about the place. Snatches of their conversation reached the Hawk:

...Well, I reckon I called the turn, all right, when I said it was the same crowd that was turning out the phony stuff, eh?... Yes, the telegraph set.

... Can't trace the wires until daylight, of course.

... Sure, a clean-up....”

The Hawk's eyes travelled furtively around the cellar. They rested hungrily on a spot in front of him, where, in the centre of the floor, but partially hidden by one of the workbenches, was the bolted trapdoor of the underground passage that led out to the wagon shed. He circled his lips with his tongue again, and furtively again, his glance travelled on—to the door at the head of the cellar stairs that had a massive bolt, and that, evidently swinging back of its own accord after the men had passed through, now hung just ajar—to a long, narrow window, most tantalising of all because it was wide open, that was shoulder high, just above the stonework of the cellar and evidently on a level with the ground outside.

And then suddenly the Hawk's lids drooped—to hide a quick flash and gleam that lighted the dark eyes. MacVightie had stooped, and throwing back the bolt, had lifted up the trapdoor.

“Hello!” he ejaculated. “What's this? Here, Lanson! It looks like a passage of some sort.” He was leaning down into the opening. “Yes, so help me, that's what it is!” He lowered himself hurriedly through the trapdoor, and his voice came back muffled into the cellar. “Come down here a minute, Lanson; they certainly had things worked out to a fine point!”

Lanson's back, as, following MacVightie, he lowered himself through the opening, was turned to the Hawk—and in a flash the Hawk's free hand had swept behind him under his coat to the concealed pocket in the back lining, and his eyes were thrust within an inch of the Ladybird's as he lowered his head.

“You understand?”—the Hawk's lips did not move, he was breathing his words, while a skeleton key worked swiftly at the handcuff on his wrist—“you understand? It's you or me! You make a sound to queer me, and I'll get you—first!”

The livid face was contorted, working with impotent fury, but, perhaps for the first time that it had ever been there, there was fear In the Ladybird's burning eyes. The Hawk's hand was free now. Lanson's shoulders were just disappearing through the opening, and with a lightning spring the Hawk reached the trapdoor, swung it down, bolted it, and, running without a sound, gained the head of the cellar stairs, pulled the door gently shut, slid the bolt silently into place—and the next moment the Hawk, returning, darted to the window, swung himself up to the ledge, and vanished.