# The Door of Dread/Chapter 15

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MISS MABEL POOLE both by training and temperament was not given to excitability. But two days later, as Sadie Wimpel sat in her upper room like a spider at the center of its web, the young trained nurse began to grow into a realization of the dramatic values of the situation about her. She could not quite understand the game, but she was openly interested in its movements. And they were movements all new to her eyes. She saw, for instance, that by means of the little dark object so like a gunmetal watch with a couple of shoe-strings dangling from it, her alert-minded companion was able to overhear any word spoken in the room below them. And the adventure was already under way.
She had been infected with an echo of Sadie's excitement as the latter, listening intently with the microphone at her ear, suddenly leaned forward, turned a switch and began slowly revolving the polished white dial which stood on the small table at the center of the room. She had caught the ​other woman's faint gasp of satisfaction as two diminished figures, clear in outline for all the prismatic tints which haloed their images, crossed the face of the dial.
"That's Andelman!" said Sadie under her breath. Then she added: "Andelman and a bell-boy. He's puttin' the hand-bag at the foot o' the bed and openin' the window. And that's Andelman takin' the key from the outside o' the door and puttin' it on the inside. Which is the fit and proper thing for any crook to do. The boy is askin' him if he wants ice-water. . . . So he wants a highball, does he, to steady his nerves a bit! Which same isn't to be wondered at, Mister Andelman!"
Sadie, leaning intently forward, continued to turn the dial slowly about.
"He's given the boy a quarter—which oughtta be quite a handsome tip for the Tecumseh! And that's a cigarette he's lightin'." The dial became empty of all movement. "And now he's out o' reach."
Sadie, with the watch-case receiver still at her ear, turned suddenly to the other woman.
"Mabel, I want yuh to scoot down to the office and ask if there's any mail for me. And when ​yuh're at the desk I want yuh to look at the register and find out what name that man put down there, and where he pretends to come from. And lock that door when yuh go out and take the key with yuh."
The young nurse started on her errand without comment, for during the last forty-eight hours she had learned not to be too inquisitive as to the meaning of things. There had been too many movements to puzzle her, even to being sent to Cowan's hardware store for a Colt automatic and to the house engineer in the basement with a ten-dollar bill sealed up in an envelope.
When she returned to the room with the information that the newcomer had signed himself as "Adolph Weininger," of Milwaukee, she found Sadie once more leaning intently over the glazed dial.
"That's Heinold who's just come in," was the staring woman's whispered comment. Then she no longer watched the dial, but sat with inclined head, all her attention directed toward the microphone at her ear. "Hully gee, they're talkin' Magyar!" she muttered, and there was disappointment in her voice.
​Yet as she sat there, in a sort of expectant crouch, she reminded the younger woman of a house cat seated close over a mouse-hole. But still the watch continued. The manipulator of the strange instruments even called for paper and pencil and from time to time on a telegraph pad made notes in a sprawling and all but illegible script. Then she divided her attention between the dial and the dictaphone receiver. But still the watch continued. An hour passed away.
The girl in the uniform, tired of suspended action, tried to bury herself in a book. She had given up the book and turned to needlework when Sadie looked up and asked the time.
"They'll come in on the night train, those other ginks," she finally asserted. "Yes, on the night train—I'll bet my hat!" And she consulted her time-table to make sure of the hour of its arrival. And after again turning to her instruments she announced with a sigh that the room was once more empty.
So they took advantage of the lull to eat their meal together. Then the trays were carried away and the cat once more crouched over its mouse-hole. As the time for the night train from the West drew ​nearer Sadie grew more restless. But still nothing happened.
"Gee, I wisht I could get outta this hole for half an hour! I'd sure do some sloothin' round this town that'd make those wops walk light!"
"Is there anything I can do for you?" asked the young nurse. She was too restless to read. The air was too thick with a sense of hidden drama to think of more needlework. She felt the same stir and tingle in things that had marked her first big operation.
"Yuh can ring up the chief," was Sadie's sudden response, "and tell him to hold his men for that call!"
"What chief?" asked the girl.
"The chief of police. That's his number written on the wall-paper next to the phone. He'll understand."
Then Sadie's attention went back to her dictaphone, for the repeated sound of a closing door had come up to her over the wires. She saw, as she revolved her camera obscura dial, that Heinold and Andelman had returned to their room. But what startled her was the fact that they had brought a third man back with them.
​She leaned closer over the dial, staring intently at the foreshortened image of this man as he took off his hat and wiped his forehead. She noticed the low receding line of that forehead as it ran back into the delta of the bald head, the square and bony jaw, the wide slope of the loose-hung shoulders. And her study of that simian figure did not leave her long in doubt. She knew it was Canby, the same Canby who had acted as Breitman's butler in New York at the time of the coast-gun thefts.
"That's three of them!" she said under her breath.
Then she looked and listened again, for the three men had ranged themselves about the table directly under her lens, and Andelman had produced a pack of cards and a pocket case of chips. They were about to mask their conference, she saw, by pretending that it was a friendly game of poker.
Heinold was indolently counting out the chips when a knock sounded on the door. It was Andelman, Sadie saw, who rose to answer that knock.
She waited, breathless, until she saw Andelman's figure again move across the dial. Then close behind this figure moved another, a shorter and stouter figure, a figure that walked with a bird-like waddle, looking in diminuendo more than ever like ​a blithe and rubicund old robin. She could see the checkered silk handkerchief as he blew his nose and the keen cockiness of his eye as he turned his thick-necked body slowly about and made a silent yet careful inspection of the room. Then he sat down.
"That's Wallaby Sam! And that makes four o' them!" said the woman watching the dial, sotto voce.
"Should there be more than four?" asked Miss Poole.
"There should be five o' them!"
"Then who is the other?"
"It's Keudell," she whispered back.
"Do you—do you have to wait for him?"
Sadie snorted.
"He's the big wagon!"
"I don't quite understand."
"In plain United States, he's the main squeeze, the whole push! And he's the one I gotta get!"
The situation still seemed to perplex Miss Mabel Poole.
"Then why don't you have the officers step in and arrest these four men, and get the missing one when he comes?"
For the second time Sadie emitted a hoot.
​"And throw a scare into that big crook that'd keep him rollin' till the heavenly cows came home! Not on your life, dearie! That's not the way to—" She suddenly broke off and sat with inclined head, listening to the sounds that trickled into her ear over the wire.
"That's Andelman telephonin', and that's the same old password they used on Dorgan in the gun-map deal—polkadot. And no gink who ain't a counter-jumper says polkadot into a phone transmitter for nothin', do they, Mabel? From which even a pinhead like me can argue that he's talkin' to one o' the bunch. And that one's gotta be Keudell. And that means our friend Keudell ain't more'n a thousand miles away from this hotel, at any rate."
She sighed with satisfaction, thoughtfully pursing up her deep-cut lips as she weighed the situation. Then she suddenly rose to her feet.
"I guess, Mabel, yuh can mosey up the street to that telegraph office and wire for them two specialists. For things look as though I was goin' to be taken bad before to-morrow. And I sure want Doctor Wilsnach to see the end o' this case before he loses his chanct. And when yuh sign that wire, ​sign it 'Cherry'—and see that it goes straight to the man poundin' the key!"
The young trained nurse slipped into a raincoat and with a wayward and by no means repugnant sense of excitement hurried down through the hotel to the street.
When she returned, twenty minutes later, she found her patient still intently watching the dial of the camera ohscura in the center of the room.
But that somewhat weary-limbed young nurse, keen as was her interest in the only half-decipherable drama being enacted about her, was even more interested in balancing the inexorable ledger of vital energy. The strain of many over-novel contingencies had, in fact, tired her out. Nothing but a miracle, she acknowledged, could keep her longer out of bed. So, as everything below stairs was quiet, she followed Sadie Wimpel's advice and turned in. Yet she did so reluctantly, secretly lamenting the lull in the drama which had secretly disappointed her. It was, after all, strangely different to the moving pictures she had witnessed, where action crowds on the heels of action and no tedious interregnum of waiting tires the nerves.
She fell asleep, a trifle guiltily, with a vision of ​the more patient-eyed woman sitting alert and intent before a glazed white dial, with a dictaphone receiver clamped over her ear. She reminded the heavy-eyed girl of a crystal-gazer sitting above her globe, with her thoughts on the incomprehensible. Then, as her brain grew drowsier, it made her think of the huddled figure in one corner of Michelangelo's Last Judgment—a figure that was both tragic and brooding and had haunted her mind from an art print in her childhood home.
Then the watcher, with her utter absence of movement, seemed to become something grotesque, merging into a gargoyle on a lonely tower, crouching silent and cynic, over a world wrapped in darkness. Then the attenuated chain of thought melted into sleep itself, and the picture became a blank.
The girl was wakened from that sleep by a shake from Sadie Wimpel's hand. She sat up at once, for she was used to sudden calls.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Where'd yuh go to send that telegram?" demanded the other woman. It was plain to see that something had happened to disturb her.
"Why?"
​"Because I've just picked up a point or two from that bunch underneath us."
"I went to the telegraph office a couple of blocks up Richmond Street. That's the same street this hotel is on."
"Did any one tail yuh when yuh went to that office?"
"Tail me?"
"Yes, shadow yuh? Follow yuh there?"
The girl on the bed sat thinking it over.
"No, nobody followed me. I'm quite sure of that."
"But did yuh see anybody? Or pipe anything suspicious?"
"No, nothing in any way suspicious."
"And yuh're dead sure nobody followed yuh to that office?" persisted the other.
"Not a soul. The only person I saw, outside of the operator, was an old man already there. He was asking about a message. He said he was expecting a wire from his wife, on her way back from Mount Clements. He explained that he didn't know which train to meet."
"What did that old man look like? Think, dearie, ​think, for I sure've got to get this thing straight. What was he like?"
"He was a big man and he wore big glasses with blue lenses. And he was rather old, I should say."
"And there was nothin' else yuh noticed about him?"
The girl was silent for a moment or two.
"I remember one thing, now. There were a number of crisscross marks on his cheek. I remember wondering what could have caused them."
Sadie Wimpel heaved a sigh. The girl could not tell whether it was one of relief or of resignation.
"Was he fair or dark?"
"He was fair, I think. Yes, he must have been fair, for I noticed that his eyebrows were a yellowish gray."
Sadie sat down on the side of the bed.
"That man was Keudell!" she quietly announced. But the Arctic feet of uncounted mice, for all the older woman's quietness, ran up and down the young nurse's spine.
"But that man didn't even look at me," protested the girl. "He didn't know why I went there, or what I brought."
​"Trust Keudell for that!"
"But he didn't see my message—he couldn't have seen it. I even folded it before I handed it over to the operator. And I watched him take it back to his desk. There wasn't a moment when that old man could have seen or read a word of it."
"And he was still in the office when yuh left?"
"Yes, he was still there. I remember that."
Sadie's laugh was not altogether a happy one.
"And he sat there, of course, waitin' for his own message from Mount Clements. And bein' able to read Morse, he sat there until the operator sent out our message. And that means he sat and read ev'ry word of it as it went on the wire."
Sadie got up from the bed and went listlessly back to her seat at the center of the room.
"I thought something had stirred up that bunch o' rubbernecks. They're hep to the fact that things aren't quite right. The Lord only knows how much they've got wise to. But there's one thing we've gotta face. And that's the fact that Keudell knows I'm in this burg!"
"Will that make—any difference?"
"That's up to me to find out. But there's times when it don't pay to advertise. They don't know; ​I'm in this hotel. That's certain, or they wouldn't still be smokin' down there in that room. And Keudell himself doesn't know it yet, or he'd have tipped 'em off and had 'em duck for the open."
She sat deep in thought for a moment or two. The younger woman, who had slipped out of bed, began to dress.
"But this man you call Keudell wouldn't come here, to this room, would he?"
"Keudell'd do anything. And I guess we'll know his limit before the night is over." She rose to her feet and hurried across the room to make sure that the door was locked. Then, after further safeguarding this door by sliding to the heavy brass bolt screwed against it, she stood, with ruminative eyes, regarding the room.
"Is that 'Knock softly' sign still hangin' on the outside o' this door?"
"Yes," answered the, girl, as she thrust her white arms up through a petticoat.
"Well, go to the phone, please, and send a message down to the office. I see I'm goin' to be pretty low to-night, and I want yuh to warn 'em that your patient's not to be disturbed, not to be disturbed on any account."
​She stood with her back against the door, collected and authoritative, as the operator was called and the message was duly delivered.
"But supposing that man should come here?" inquired the practical-minded Miss Poole. The newer complexion of things was plainly disturbing her. She had relished excitement, but there were times when excitement could come too close for comfort.
"Oh, I guess worse things could happen," was Sadie's casual retort, as she crossed the room and once more took up her dictaphone receiver. "That'd at least put me hep to where he was," she continued, as she applied the instrument to her ear. "And knowin' where Keudell is oughtta be me first aim in life!"
She wheeled suddenly about, and bent over her dial.
"They're goin' out again, the whole bunch o' them!"
She sat frowning over the empty white surface. The girl stood patiently watching her.
"But how can the man you call Keudell know you're in this room, or even in this hotel?" she finally demanded.
Sadie, after nodding affirmatively over her dial ​and putting down her receiver, sat pondering this question.
"Don't yuh s'pose Keudell saw yuh beat it back here?"
"I don't think he could have. In the first place, you yourself said he had to wait to overhear our message. And in the second place, there was a crowd at the corner of Yorke Street when I came back, a crowd right north of the hotel here, for a policeman had stopped a man for speeding."
"How'd that ever hide yuh from Keudell? That guy could tail yuh a thousand miles and yuh'd never know it."
"But I had to push through this crowd, right into it, and at first I couldn't get away again. And I would surely have noticed a huge man like Keudell if he had been anywhere about. The crowd had closed in so thick that I edged toward the policeman, for I intended to tell him I was a trained nurse and ask him to help me through, as I was in a hurry."
"And did he?"
"He was too busy talking with the man he had stopped to notice me. I heard some one say that his car had made the eighteen miles from St. Thomas in a little under twenty-seven minutes, and ​didn't even slow up at the city limits. Then I heard some one else say they thought he was a doctor. That interested me, and I waited a while to see what would happen. But the man wasn't a doctor, after all, for I saw him take a paper out of his pocket and show it to the policeman and then lift the edge of his coat where he had a little silver shield pinned."
"A what?" snapped Sadie Wimpel, swinging sharply about.
"A little shield made of silver, a good deal like some of our class pins, only not so small."
"And what did the cop do then?"
"I saw him point back toward the American Consulate office on Yorke Street. Then he pushed the crowd back and let the man slip into the side entrance of the hotel. I knew that was my chance, so I followed close after them."
"What did that man look like?"
The girl was silent for a moment or two, apparently struggling to visualize her memory of the stranger's face.
"He had a motor-cap pulled down over his forehead and he wore a pair of those big mica goggles, so I couldn't see much of his face. But he was a nice-looking man, and rather professional-looking, ​I should say. I don't think he could have been more than thirty-five."
Sadie was on her feet by this time. The younger girl seemed quite unable to comprehend the source of her excitement.
"But, hully gee, what was he like? Fat or thin? Tall or short? Fair or dark?"
Again the girl patiently tried to retrace the uncertain footprints of memory.
"I think he was a little above medium height. And he was rather thin."
"And a little gray over the ears?"
"Yes, his hair was dark, but gray about the temples. I remember that. And I remember his jaw-line, now that I come to think of it. It was hard and clean-cut, and from the casual manner in which he viewed the crowd and from the way he talked to the officer I thought he must be a man of affairs, a man who was in some way used to power."
"And yet he came from St. Thomas! What and Where's St. Thomas?"
"That's a city nearly twenty miles south of here. It's—oh, I remember now, he explained to the officer that he wasn't the owner of the car, but had wired to have it waiting for him."
​"Wired from where?"
"From aboard a New York Central train."
"But what train?"
"It must have been the Wolverine—that's the flier that cuts through western Ontario between Niagara Falls and the tunnel at the Detroit River."
"From Noo Yawk?" suddenly demanded Sadie.
"Yes," was the girl's answer.
"And he came into this hotel?"
"Yes; but I don't think he took a room, for I feel sure he didn't register. Instead of stopping at the desk, he said a word or two to the clerk, who came out and hurried with him to the elevator. Then they were both whisked off up-stairs."
"To which floor?"
"I don't know, because I came up by the stairs."
"What'd yuh do that for, at a time like this?"
The younger girl stared at her older companion. The strain, she saw, was beginning to tell on her patient's nerves.
"Because yesterday you said that would always be the safest way."
"And yuh saw nobody in the halls, after that, or around any o' the doors? Yuh didn't pipe anything suspicious?"
​"Not a thing. I remembered what you had already told me about keeping my eyes open. And if there had been a sign of anything out of the ordinary I should have remembered it."
"Any thing out o' the ordinary!" gasped Sadie. She smiled a little as she stared into the young nurse's wondering face. Then she looked at the disordered bed. "And there yuh were, sleepin' like a babe, with all this stowed away in your innocent young nut!"
"All what?" asked the amazed girl.
"Why, child, don't yuh realize what this means? That man who came into this hotel is the man we wired for last night. That man was Wilsnach himself!"
"But he couldn't have got our message, if—"
"Of course he couldn't. But bein' in the Secret Service himself, and workin' on this case, he must've bumped into a tip on his own hook. Then, naturally, he just made a runnin' broad jump for where he knew this gang was holdin' out!"
The young woman looked relieved.
"Then he can step in and take this case off your hands? He can get you away from all this danger?"
​Sadie laughed.
"I gotta keep him away from all this danger! I gotta put him wise to the ropes that've been laid around here. For I sure don't want that man takin' risks, if I can help it !"
"But why should you worry about him?" asked the nurse, as she adjusted her cap on mahogany brown hair which Sadie regarded as altogether too primly coiffured.
"Because there ain't another man like him in all the world," was Sadie's quite unexpected answer. Her capacity for surprising her younger companion seemed without limit.
"Then you know him?"
"In a kind of a way," was Sadie's ironic retort. Then she once more became studious. "But the stunt we gotta face is how to get in touch with him. It's ten to one he's told that night clerk to keep his trap shut. But the first thing we can do is see if he'll talk or not!"
"What shall I ask him?" inquired the girl as she crossed to the telephone in answer to the older woman's gesture.
"Ask him for the room number o' that specialist who just blew in from Noo Yawk to-night, the ​one he took up-stairs without waitin' to register—and give him to understand that man's business is also yours!"
Sadie, who from time to time had been applying the dictaphone receiver to her ear, suddenly turned about and bent over the dial again.
"The bunch is back!" she announced with obvious relief.
But the girl at the telephone did not hear her, for her attention was centered on the words coming to her over the wire. She suddenly turned about to her companion.
"He's in the office now. They caught him on his way down-stairs, and the night clerk wants to know if he'll put him on the wire."
Sadie started toward the telephone. Then she hesitated.
"No," she concluded. "Ask that clerk to send him up to this room as soon as he can come."
Sadie, as this message was being delivered, crossed to her dresser mirror, viewed the face in it with open disapproval and promptly proceeded to rearrange her hair. Then she with equal promptness powdered her nose, rubbed a moistened finger-end along her eyebrows, and again studied herself in the glass.
​"I gotta face like a Dutch cheese!" she announced. The confinement and anxieties of the last few days had left it tired and colorless. So she discreetly switched out all the lights except the small bulb beside the dresser. But even that did not quite satisfy her. She was fumbling through her dresser drawer for a rouge-tube when a knock sounded on the door.
Even the younger girl, as Sadie motioned for her to answer that knock, was not unconscious of the momentary exaltation which shone in her companion's tired eyes.
Sadie sank into a chair at the end of the shadowy room. It astonished her that the mere thought of seeing Wilsnach again could so upset her. As she watched the door and told herself that with its opening all her world would surely change, she was conscious not only of quickened pulses and equally quickened breathing, but also of a vague yet vast weight being lifted away from her spirit. Thereafter, she knew, everything would be different. Wilsnach would be with her.
She leaned forward, listening for his voice. She watched the striped blue and white back of the girl in the doorway, vaguely wondering why the familiar ​accents had failed to reach her ear. Then an even greater surprise took possession of her.
For, although she heard a. voice, it was the voice of the girl alone. And it rose shrill and expostulatory and was punctuated by the thump of the door as it was flung back and swung flat against the papered wall. She saw then that for a brief second or two a struggle had taken place, that the trained nurse had been tossed to one side, and was now running with little sobs of terror down the full length of the red-carpeted hallway.
But Sadie Wimpel's thoughts no longer centered on the nurse. It was the towering figure which stood just inside the door that held her attention.
The discovery that it was Keudell facing her left her passive, with a shadowy wonder in her eyes. That passivity was not due to fear. It was based more on the reluctance of her mind to accept the totally unexpected. She required time to digest her shock. She found herself compelled to reiterate, as she stared at the approaching figure, that this man was not Wilsnach, but Keudell. And Keudell was her enemy. And her enemy was advancing upon her.
She could see the smile of triumph which showed ​his white teeth. But instead of depicting merriment, that sinister contraction of the buccinatory muscles seemed more like the unmasking of a battery, seemed more menacing than even the wink of the polished metal of the revolver in his hand as that hand moved upward.
She was not crafty, now, for there seemed to be no time for craftiness. In that austere moment of finalities she came austerely to the point. For she knew exactly what he intended to do.
"Yuh can't do it!" she quietly announced. "Yuh can't do it and get away!"
This warning, she saw, meant nothing to Keudell, for Keudell was no longer a sentient and reasoning being. He was a blind accumulation of instincts harrying him to strike before he himself could be struck. His will was a city with all its wires down. There was no way by which she could send a message into its storm-stricken central offices. No voice could reach him; no word could strike home to the still judicial vaults of reason. It would be like trying to argue with a tiger. He would act, and act at once.
Yet even tigers, she remembered, had been held back by mystery, by a mirror in daylight or a ​firebrand at night. And the elapse of even a minute, she next poignantly remembered, might be the means of her salvation—must be the means of her salvation, something indomitable in her cowering body suddenly called up to her. And with that rebound of mortal hope came a return of guile, a forlorn knowledge that life was good and something to be fought for to the end.
"Yuh're goin' to croak me," she said, staring across the shadowy room into the face which she could not distinctly see. "But before yuh do it I'm tellin' yuh where your codes and gun charts are. They're lyin' there in that bureau drawer, And the submarine plans—"
It was both forlorn and foolish, and the truth of this she realized as her dry lips failed in uttering the words themselves. She came to a stop, for Keudell's eye had fallen on her instruments of espionage in the center of the room. And that discovery, she knew, sealed her fate. There was much bitterness in his guttural bark of a laugh, for it took only a glance for him to realize the meaning of the microphone and its wires.
"So you got that far!" he said. And again his eye wavered, caught as a child's might be by the ​movements of an automaton, held by the strange sight of the diminutive figures moving about on the glazed white dial.
This, apparently, was something new to him. And the mystery deepened as he took a step or two forward and beheld the figures of his own colleagues from the periscopic mirrors of the apparatus. It took on a touch of the uncanny, of black arts that defied explanation. For one vital moment it arrested and held his attention.
There before him he could see the moving, breathing, gesticulating images of his own fellow conspirators. There were the four of them, Heinold, Andelman, Breitman and Canby. And even as he stared down at them the drama on that diminutive stage of mystery shifted and changed. He could see the four figures erupt into sudden activity. Heinold caught at a chair-back and swung it above his head. Andelman dropped low behind the table. Canby, wheeling sharply about, whipped a revolver from his pocket and thrust it in front of him with a slight stabbing motion. At the same instant, from below stairs, came the sound of a shot, thick and muffled, synchronizing with the movement of the diminutive figure as neatly as the off-stage "business" ​of a melodrama. Keudell could see the thin cloud of smoke drift across the dial-face, for a moment obscuring the figures. But he realized, as he watched, that those figures were contending with other figures, that a circle of men with poised revolvers were closing in about his four startled colleagues, that Heinold, who tried to break through this agitated yet constricting circle, was clubbed back and clapped into handcuffs the moment he fell sprawling across the table-legs.
Keudell did not fail to comprehend the final meaning of that spectacle. It meant defeat and capture for the men on whom he had depended. It meant the end of everything. But in comprehending this there was one thing that escaped his attention.
That was the movement of Sadie Wimpel, who had sat bent forward in her chair, with her earnest eyes on his face as he advanced into the room. It was as his own eyes widened with wonder at the pantoscopic vision confronting him from the illuminated dial that Sadie, in the shadowy background, slipped from her chair, bending low like a track runner awaiting the starting signal, with the tips of her fingers almost touching the carpeted ​floor. But in reality she awaited no signal. She saw the still open door and bolted for it.
She felt, all along, that it was absurd, as absurd and hopeless as her only too obvious lie about the stolen gun charts being in the bureau drawer. But any movement, however foolish and futile, was now; better than mere passivity. To remain longer quiescent was out of the question. Even a rat, she reminded herself, would not die meekly in its corner.
She braced herself, mentally, for some indeterminate sense of bodily shock, for she knew that before she could reach and round that open door the leveled revolver in Keudell's hand would be following her movements. Yet the mere leap of mind from one plane of thought to another, the mere act of directing that revolver barrel on her body, involved at least a ponderable space of time. There would be a precious second or two, she knew, before Keudell could cover her. And no street-cat could have been more agile than that white-faced girl who knew she was running for her life.
She did not reach the door before the shot rang out. But she knew, as she caught at the frame-work and swung about into the hall, that the bullet had failed to reach her, firmly as her body had been ​braced to meet its impact. She realized, with an exultation which expressed itself in an unwilled and atavistic scream of triumph, that Keudell's first shot had missed.
That shout was still on her lips when she awakened to the fact that her path along the hall was already blocked. She saw, even before she realized it was Wilsnach himself, that a hurrying body, running toward the door, was confronting her own as it staggered away from that portal of perils. She thought, as she collided with this figure, that it was one of her enemies from below stairs. Then, as she realized it was indeed Wilsnach, a new terror swept through her. She swung about and caught at his arm as he stumbled past her, reaching for his revolver as he went. For she knew that he must be stopped.
She clutched at him, clung to him, choking in her breathless efforts to warn him back. And he ignored her articulate struggles, plainly thinking her a little mad, for he shook her off, almost impatiently. She was still holding him back by his right arm, swung somewhat behind him in his effort to reach his hip pocket, when Keudell's huge figure blocked the doorway.
​She did not actually see the revolver still in their enemy's hand. She was no more conscious of it than she was of the figures that crowded close at Wilsnach's heels. All she saw was the malignity of Keudell's heavy and colorless face. In its slightly vacuous and foolish-looking eyes she beheld only venom. It was the venom of ultimate and unreasoning hate. And she knew only too well what it meant.
At the same moment that she wondered why Keudell did not raise his weapon higher, she flung her body against the barrel-end that had wavered and wheeled until it centered on Wilsnach.
The shot did not seem loud to her. Her one fear was that it would be repeated and that with the second shot she might not be able to act as a shield for the man behind her. But there was no chance for a second shot, for a night-stick of seasoned ash, stained to look like cherry wood, reached fantastically over the head of Wilsnach and smote Keudell's fingers clustered on the metal revolver-stock.
It was wielded by a policeman, Sadie vaguely realized, a policeman even bigger than Keudell himself, a policeman who seemed unnaturally long of ​arm as he brought the night-stick down for the second time, this time flat against Keudell's pink-fleshed skull. The sound was not a pleasant one, but all thought of it was swept away by the dull glory of the knowledge that Keudell had fallen, that he was on the floor, prostrate, grotesquely huddled, so pathetically inert that without movement or protest he could be jerked over on his back and a pair of handcuffs could be snapped clicking over his great wrists.
Yet her triumph seemed overshadowed by a vague worry which she could not define, a worry keen but incomprehensible, which brought her appealing eyes back to Wilsnach's face.
"This woman's shot!" she heard him call out in a voice husky with alarm.
She was about to contradict this, and contradict it with vigor, when she found that the words seemed unwilling to frame themselves for utterance. She also found, to her mild surprise, that Wilsnach was holding her up with one arm about her waist.
"This woman's shot . . ."
Her wistful gaze was still on his face as he lifted her in his arms and carried her into the room. There with awkward gentleness he placed her on the disordered bed. She thought, for a moment, that he was alone with her. But she could hear the girl in the nurse's uniform, at the telephone, making patiently frantic efforts to get Doctor Wilson on the wire. Then, as Wilsnach ran to the door and shouted out an order or two to the men grouped there, the white-faced girl in the uniform came to the bedside. She carried a pair of scissors in her hand. She began cutting, recklessly, ruinously, at the clothing encompassing Sadie's body. The latter noticed with languid wonder that the girl was crying softly to herself as she worked. She also noticed for the first time that the clothing being cut away from her was warm and wet, as though drenched in hot tea. She still wondered why they felt sorry for her. Even the last of the coerced ​professional calmness went from the girl with the scissors as Wilsnach closed the door and stepped back to the bedside.
"It's no use!" she was saying in teary little gasps. "It's no use! I know it's no use! It's gone right through—"
She did not finish, for Sadie, like a sleeper awakening to midnight alarms, called out with a clearness and strength of voice that was startling: "What has happened to me?"
Wilsnach, tight-lipped, turned to the girl with the scissors. He seemed to find something dependable and consolatory in her uniform. He did not actually speak, but his eyes said, as plainly as words: "Is there nothing we can do?"
The girl shook her head. Then she backed slowly away from the bedside, in obedience to Sadie's languid gesture. Wilsnach's gaze followed her.
"But Doctor Wilson—" began the tragic-eyed man.
For the second time the girl shook her head. "It's no use," she whispered, staring at her ensanguined fingers.
Wilsnach turned back to the bed. Then he made a sign for the nurse to withdraw.
​"I'd like to be alone with her," he said quite simply. And Sadie's gray face brightened like a sick child's whose broken toy has been glued together. She did not speak for a minute or two as Wilsnach bent over her, pushing back the tumbled hair from her white forehead.
"Have we got 'em?" she finally asked in a whisper.
"Yes, yes—all of them!" was his bitterly impatient reply. His hands dropped, in tragic helplessness, on the stained bedding. "But see what it's cost us!"
Sadie remained silent again, for she could feel the tears that fell so foolishly from Wilsnach's eyes. They puzzled her a little, for he was a man, not given to crying over trifles.
"Then the case is ended?" she said with a great sigh. He could feel the tremor that sped through her body.
"Yes, it's ended," he acknowledged. The thin ghost of a smile played about her lips.
"And I guess I wasn't such a hum-dinger as I thought I was goin' to be!"
He turned his head away, for that wintry smile stabbed him to the heart.
​"I tried to be a three-bagger, wit' bells on. And I turned out to be only an also-ran!"
"You're the bravest woman I ever knew," Wilsnach tried to tell her. "And instead of me saving your life, you—"
He could not finish. She smiled again as she stared mistily up at him. Her fingers were clinging to his arm, hungrily, and she seemed to be following her own lonely furrow of thought.
"I ain't goin' to lose yuh, anyhow. I might've done that, yuh know, tryin' to make good and not bein' able to. And that would've been far worse than—than this!"
A look of contentment crept into her face at Wilsnach's impassioned little cry of "You could never have lost me!" Then it merged into a look of wisdom touched with pity, for she felt in her secret soul of souls that he was wrong. And her fingers still clutched at him, as though seeking in the misty dissolution of all life some final tangibility which might remain stable.
"Will yuh kiss me?" she asked, as simply as a child.
He kissed her. As he did so he struggled to ​control the shaking of his body. He could see that she had closed her eyes. . . .
"You must come away now," he heard a voice say to him. It was the young nurse speaking, once more efficient and dry-eyed and armored in the impersonality of her profession.
Wilsnach's stricken eyes, as he looked up at her, were an interrogation. The girl in the uniform did not answer in words. But the slowly affirmative movement of her head as she crossed to the door and opened it was answer enough to his question.
THE END