The House Of Cain Read online

  “What does Goodhart think?” was his next question.

  “He can give us little hope. He says the fever has paralysed the optic nerves. To-morrow he is bringing an eye specialist to see him.”

  He sighed deeply and was silent. If only Martin’s blindness and Austiline’s misfortunes were clothed in flesh and were men, what happiness it would have been to have flung off his coat, rolled up his shirt-sleeves, and punched them into nothingness! But they were like imps of sulphuratted vapour from the nether world who jeered at him and his strength. He heard her say, with more composure:

  “What is your news, Monty?”

  “Rather startling,” he replied. “Austiline has broken gaol.”

  “Escaped!” she breathed. “Are you sure, Monty?”

  “Dead sure. When they counted the prisoners this morning, Austiline was reported missing.”

  “Tell me––all you know.”

  “That’s what I came for,” he assured her, fumbling in his pockets abstractedly. “Would––”

  “Of course you may smoke,” Mary told him, guessing his wants.

  “Thanks, Mary! I kinda feel I want steadying.” Adding, when he had lit his venerable pipe: “Oakes came to me when I was still in bed this morning. I was duly surprised at his early visit, and offered him breakfast. Lord! the man’s inhuman. To see his face, empty of expression like a colander of water when he had such momentous tidings, was wonderful. Quite casually he let out that the gaol had been raided: three wardresses drugged, a warder on a watch-tower almost strangled to death, Austiline lowered out of a window, the prison-wall partly demolished with explosives to assure an easy get-away, and a powerful car ready to drive up to the breach, pick her and a man up, and whirl them away.”

  With traces of tears still evident on her fresh young face, her eyes fixed on him, and her lips parted, Mary Webster remained wordless. Not for anything would she have interrupted him.

  “I would have engineered the raid myself if I had had the brains of the feller who did,” he went on. “Not having the brains, it was left to him to carry out without a hitch the most daring goal-raid ever attempted. And the feller who had the brains to do it will have enough brains left to keep Austiline out of goal for ever.

  “Can you guess what the detective-sergeant said? He said, as calmly as though he asked me to pass him the salt: ‘I am really very pleased that the raid was successful. It will give me much pleasure to lay my hands on the perpetrators in one way, and much pleasure also in another way if Miss Thorpe is never recaptured. Officially I am against murder, but privately my sympathy is entirely with killers of blackmailers. Blackmail should be made a capital offence.’

  “I don’t understand Oakes,” Monty went on. “He is the very first man to baffle me. One minute he gives you the impression that he likes getting people hanged, and the next that he likes having people murdered. Quite a casual sort of feller, Oakes, and I think I shall end up by liking him.”

  “It is extraordinary!” she said, her mind engrossed with Austiline’s rescue. “Whoever could have done it, do you think?”

  “I have no more idea than Oakes,” Monty admitted. “I told him, though, that if he were successful, I should pay for their defence, just to give him some idea how pleased I was.

  Things were looking very black against Austiline, and I had given up hope that she would be acquitted. I think Martin loves her very much.”

  “So do I,” she said more brightly. “Do you know, I have never seen two people more wonderfully in love than she and Martin. I feel sick with sorrow for them.”

  “Well, I don’t feel exactly in heaven,” was his seriously meant comment. “I only hope Austiline isn’t rash enough to try to see Martin. If she does she will be caught for sure. This house is being watched.”

  “Watched! By whom?”

  “There is absolutely no need for worry, Mary. Naturally the police think it quite probable that Austiline will visit her sick lover, and they daren’t leave any loophole unguarded. However, I do not think she will come. The people who helped her to escape will point out to her the danger.”

  “Yes; but, on the other hand, Austiline knows that Martin is very ill. She might dare anything to reach the side of the man she loves. I know I would. If only we could get word to her that he is recovering––just that and no more!”

  For several moments the big man smoked without speaking, wondering how such knowledge could be conveyed to Austiline Thorpe. Then suddenly the frown between his half-closed eyes lifted, and he said:

  “I think I’ll go and see Sir Victor Lawrence. Perhaps he would have a notice published in the Tribune to the effect that Martin was on the high road to health.”

  “That’s an idea, Monty! And let them say that Martin’s friends have no longer any cause for anxiety. Austiline will see that, or some of her friends will show it to her.”

  “Mary, you can see farther beyond a brick wall than any woman I know,” the bushman said, rising to his feet. “I’ll go along right away and fix that little business. I’ll ’phone you every half-hour to hear if Martin has wakened. I must talk to him as soon as possible afterwards.”

  They parted outside the summer-house, she watching him stride to the gate where, turning, he waved his hat. The curtains of her mind were held back at that moment, and, had the big man seen the expression in Mary’s eyes, he would have––

  But, not having seen, he hurried to the city, and in the Tribune Building he saw Sir Victor, to whom he made the suggestion formulated by Mary and himself. Sir Victor chuckled.

  “Sherwood,” he said, “I believe you’d make a very fine pirate.”

  “Like the Irishman, I’m agin the law when it’s up against my friends,” Monty admitted.

  “I admire Miss Thorpe,” the knight said emphatically. “I have met her on several occasions. I should feel very much annoyed if she fell into this booby-trap arranged by our perspicacious police. The news of your brother’s recovery shall be broadcast, and as plain a hint as possible given that Mrs. Montrose’s house is watched.”

  “Thanks!”

  “No need. What do you think of this gaol-raiding stunt?”

  “It’s beyond me. Never dreamed Austiline had so many friends.”

  “Nor I. Like yourself I am a good pirate at heart,” remarked the little man, lighting a cigar and closing an eye. “If we can only delay Austiline’s capture, something may turn up in her favour.”

  “Then you think she will be caught?”

  “Most certainly. I hear they have sent for Johns, the crack Sydney detective. When he and friend Oakes run in double harness things generally happen.”

  “Then I shall have to take a hand in the game myself,” Monty said lightly. “Have the police got a clue yet, do you know?”

  “I don’t think so. If you call again about six I may have something to say. We’ve got some smart men on our staff. So long!”

  Leaving the Building, the big man telephoned Mary Webster from a public call-office, and, learning that Martin still slept, sauntered along to Elizabeth Street and thence to Little Burke Street, where he entered a shooting-gallery. The “shadow” was puzzled at Monty’s choice of recreation. He did not know of the bushman’s passion for firearms, the one surviving enthusiasm of boyhood, nor had he ever before witnessed a display of skill such as he observed when he pushed open a little way the street door of the shooting-gallery.

  The proprietor of the gallery greeted Monty effusively, recognizing in the big man his very best patron. It was a fairly large place. On one side was the usual array of bottles on wires and tiny coloured balls poised on the tips of little fountains of water. There was also what looked like a cannon, through which the marksman fired at a target at the further end, a small bell ringing when the bull’s-eye was hit.

  But these methods of sport were ignored by Monty, who often shot a fast-flying crow with a revolver, or brought down an eagle-hawk with a high-powered rifle. With the further end of the gallery as a p
rotective background he had induced the proprietor to hang a bottle from the ceiling by a string. Standing on one side, the man swung the bottle in a descending and upward curve whilst Monty, standing back some twenty paces, broke it with a revolver. This he did gradually. His first shot smashed the lower half of the bottle, the second left only a portion of the neck. The next six shots were spent in severing the twine just above the bottle-neck. The seventh shot was successful. Turning to the admiring proprietor, he said:

  “I’m getting old, Jacobs. Soon I’ll be taking to carpet-slippers and a smoking-cap. Tie on another bottle and swing it faster.”

  This done, and the bottle swung till Monty had severed the string above the neck at his second try, enabled the big man to say: “That’s better.” He went on to ask Jacobs, a little lithe man of forty, rat-eyed, and with every action of feline quickness, to find him two pieces of cardboard, each one foot square. Neither of them observed the “shadow” peering at them through the narrow slit between door and frame.

  The cardboard produced, Monty fashioned one piece with his tobacco-knife into a rough outline of a human head, seen from the front, and the other into a profile-shaped head. With a stub of pencil he marked in eyes, nose and mouth. Then, with hammer and nail he affixed the full-faced head against the wall.

  Jacobs looked on curiously. The second piece of cardboard, representing a head in profile, Monty affixed to the top of a long broom-handle, and the handle he stuck into a bucket containing some of the sand with which the floor was covered.

  He was careful to place the profile head about four feet in front of the full-faced one nailed to the wall, and then, stepping back, took up a position some sixteen paces distant, at which, looking at the heads, he saw the nose of that nearest him almost in line with the left cheek of that attached to the wall.

  “Come here, Jacobs,” he ordered, “and look under my arm at those heads.”

  “Yus; I see ’em.”

  “Now Jacobs, if you felt like corpsing a man with a gun,” the big man drawled, “would you fire at him from here, with a second person almost directly in the way, as that profile-shaped head is there?”

  “Well, being as ’ow I’m streets behind you in shooting, I don’t think I’d risk it.”

  “What would you do, then, if you thought your enemy had a gun also, and could use it?”

  “I ’ardly know. Perhaps I’d ’ave to risk ’itting the other bloke,” opined the accommodating Mr. Jacobs.

  “But as the other feller didn’t have a gun and was not expecting anyone who did have one, what would you say about the marksmanship of a man who would risk shooting the person in line and place a bullet very neatly through the forehead of the person beyond. Like this!”

  Monty’s weapon rose and cracked, and they saw a faintly discernible hole in the centre of the forehead of the head against the wall.

  “I’d say ’e is the kinda bloke I don’t like seeing in ’ere. ’E breaks too many bottles,” Jacobs replied with emphasis. Whereupon Monty grinned, gave the little man a one-pound note, and gained the street.

  At five o’clock the boys with the evening papers were rushing through the streets, yelling like maniacs. Monty secured a paper in Collins Street, and read it while drinking tea in the Café Australia. There was no friendly little woman to interrupt. His paper was issued from the Tribune Building, and when he found a half-column devoted to Martin’s illness he chuckled; for there, almost in plain English, Austiline was warned not to attempt any visit to her lover, who was now almost quite recovered.

  “It is evident that something amuses you, Mr. Sherwood,” said a softly bland voice, and Detective-Sergeant Oakes dropped into a vacant chair beside the bushman.

  “Hullo! you here?” exclaimed Monty, smiling broadly.

  “Yes, I followed you in,” was the unabashed admission. “I think you owe me a tea.”

  “You may be right.”

  “I am sure I am. Tea and muffins, please.” Again the big man chuckled; and when, having beckoned a waitress, he gave the order, he said, giving the detective-sergeant the paper:

  “Read that, my dear Sherlock!”

  Detective Oakes sighed on returning the news-sheet, and thoughtfully poured himself a cup of strong tea.

  “You have crushed but one of a fair number of hopes,” he said without a smile, without a frown, as though he had said: “I always take two lumps of sugar with my tea.”

  “I’m going to crush a few more in the natural course of events,” he was told with superb confidence.

  “Ah! I am informed that you are trying to establish the possibility of Peterson being shot from the doorway, with Miss Thorpe almost within direct line.”

  “Were you now? What do you think of my shooting?”

  “I am informed also that you are a very excellent shot.”

  “Too right. I could have murdered Peterson with the utmost ease. What a pity I was outside the locked door and in company when the shot was fired. What joy would you have found in having me hanged! My poor old immaculate sleuth! I am quite sorry for you.”

  “You have need to be,” murmured the detective-sergeant. “How is your brother to-day?”

  “Better, much better,” Monty said soberly. “The fever has left him, and at present he is sleeping, a good healthy sleep. But––the fever has left him quite blind, so Mrs. Webster tells me.”

  “Blind! Good God!” For the first time Monty saw the vacuous mask drawn aside, and the real Oakes regarding him with genuine dismay. “What a dreadful thing! But surely there is a possibility of the sight being recovered?”

  “Goodhart doesn’t think so. He is getting an eye specialist to see Martin to-morrow.”

  “We will hope that Goodhart is wrong,” the detective said, the mask once more in place. Then: “I have had to have your friend with the bent nose arrested.”

  “What for?”

  “Suspicion of being implicated in the gaol-raid last night. I suppose he told you about it in his written message yesterday?”

  Monty regarded his friend-enemy with twinkling eyes. He said in his inimitable drawl:

  “If you were to drink your tea without milk you wouldn’t get such queer ideas. Believe me, cow’s milk is a braindestroyer. I never drink milk, which is why I play poker rather well––bluff-poker, I mean.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHRISTMAS DAY

  AT seven o’clock the big man learned from Mary Webster that Martin had just wakened: he promptly jumped into a car, and less than half an hour later was deposited at the garden-gate. Mary met him in the hall, looked up at him mistily with her hand laid encouragingly on his arm, and, without speaking, motioned him to the open door of Martin’s room.

  When Monty entered, the nurse rose from a chair and softly withdrew, closing the door after her. A lamp on a table beside the bed shed soft radiance on the sick man’s wasted face and dark-ringed eyes gazing upwards with a terrible blankness. The bushman, inured to the rough and granite-hard corners of life, who all his days had fought because it was his nature to revel in fighting and overcoming men and material difficulties, bent over Martin and kissed him on the white brow. Then, sinking into a chair beside the bed, he grasped the thin white hands.

  For nearly ten minutes they remained without speaking. Then with, to Monty, surprising calmness, Martin said:

  “What was the Dad’s favourite Biblical character, Monty?”

  “Job,” promptly replied the big man.

  “I am a reincarnation of Job.”

  “Maybe, but you know why the Dad liked Job, don’t you, old lad?” Monty said gently. “No matter what trials the Lord put on Job, Job kept on smiling. So did the Dad. When the blacks speared his cattle, when the bush-fires destroyed them and miles of fencing with ’em, when drought and disease came, the old Dad kept on smiling. What’s good enough for Job and the old Dad is good enough for us, eh, Martin?”

  “It is going to be very hard,” almost whispered the patient.

  “It is
,” the big man agreed. “The clouds have gathered and the sky is black, but the sky won’t be black for long. It never is. Have they told you Austiline has broken gaol?”

  “You mean escaped?”

  “That’s so.”

  “That looks like the first rift in your stormy sky, Monty. How did it happen? They say I’ve been unconscious for weeks. Tell me all that has happened since that awful afternoon.”

  The big man did so with a flow of quaint bush dialect that helped to lift Martin’s despairing spirit out of the Slough of Despond.

  “This evening’s papers describe the raid as the most audacious in the annals of crime,” Monty concluded. “It appears that the wardresses in the women’s wing of the gaol were permitted to take in coffee and cakes from a near-by restaurant for a meal they had at midnight. No one can say how the drug was got into the coffee––the feller who took it to the ladies swears he knows nothing about it––but he’s been arrested all the same.

  “We don’t know by whom, but Austiline was aroused in her cell, dressed, and lowered out on a landing-window by a rope into the courtyard surrounding the building. As the only main entrance is guarded by half a dozen warders, and as the outer wall is twenty feet high, with four feet of unmortared bricks on top of it so that to scale it means bringing down a ton of bricks, the gentry on the raid blew a part of the wall down. The warder on guard in the look-out tower was scientifically dealt with by a feller with strong arms and hands; but, even while being squeezed into insensibility, he saw the wall blown down, a man and a woman run across the yard, out through the breach, and enter a powerful car which drew up for just enough time.

  “If ever I meet the feller who engineered that little picture-play, I am going to ask him to shake hands. If there is one thing I admire more than any other, it is Brains with a capital B.”

  “Publicly I should denounce the scoundrel, but privately, Monty, I should––I should take his other hand. What does friend Oakes think about it?” inquired Martin.