Ambrotox and Limping Dick

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"Rather not," he replied. "I've something much better for this guy."

With intense pleasure, while his observation-slit gave him sight of her,
he watched the girl returning to her post.

Then he shot a fresh order at the prisoner.

"Turn round," he said.

Melchard obeyed.

"If you move a foot or lift a hand before I speak again, it's a bullet
between the shoulders."

Judging this to be the position most demoralizing, Dick descended with
more haste than precaution. Melchard, his entrails shaking, stood, to
all appearance, firm as a rock. When Dick tapped his shoulder, he
turned, showing a face white and drawn.

"The man Bunce!" he exclaimed.

"Silly liar!" said Dick. "You knew who I was the moment you saw my
cheek--guessed I was the man who was queering your game. I have queered
it, and I'm going to queer you. Walk in front of me, and don't forget,
that, if I have to disappoint myself by killing you, I shan't lose any
sleep about it."

Melchard walked silent and erect, with the unseen pistol-barrel behind
him.

Dick could see even in the shoulders before him the ripple of fear
controlled, but not conquered.

And the sight brought, not indeed compassion, but a separated measure of
respect.

When they had almost reached the car, he called a halt.

"I shan't keep on threatening you," he said "You're down and out.
Understand, once for all, that, on the least movement, I shoot to kill."

He pointed to the coat spread over what had been Mut-mut.

"That's yours," he said. "Put it on."

The man was reeking with sweat, exhausted and in mortal fear. A chill
might endanger the success of Dick's design.

Melchard, guessing well what it covered, lifted the fawn-coloured
overcoat with resolution; but the earless side of that frightful head,
with another and bloody hole making a pair of dead eyes to stare up at
him, was too much for the shaken nerve, and Alban Melchard collapsed on
his face in the road.

Dick turned him over, lifted an eyelid, and, convinced that the man was
unconscious, fetched from the car his bottle of the strange device, and
poured a stream from its neck into Melchard's half-open mouth.

For some moment's after, he was afraid that the fit of choked coughing
his rough remedy had caused would compel him to leave a second corpse by
the roadside.

When it was over, however, it appeared that the stimulant had been
partly assimilated, for Melchard was able to stand. When he had got his
arms into the overcoat, Dick led him to the car.

From the locker under the seat he produced a thick tumbler.

"Get in," he said, and half-filled the glass from the bottle.

Melchard lay back exhausted in the near-side corner, examining with dull
eyes the havoc made by Mut-mut's claw.

"Drink that," said Dick.

Melchard shook his head.

"I hate spirits," he objected feebly. "That's his stuff--Mut-mut's."

"You'll hate it worse soon," was all the answer he got; and drank,
gasping between gulps.

Knowing that the man had not a kick left in him, Dick ventured, rather
than fetch Amaryllis into sight of the uncovered corpse, to mount the
front seat and drive the car to the place where she sat waiting.

When she was beside him, he asked if she were fit to drive.

"Yes," she answered. "But I nearly went to sleep waiting for you, Dick."

"I don't think either of us is fit to drive her to town," he said,
looking at his watch. "I'm pretty tough, but I'm nearly all in. How
you've stuck it as you have, I can't understand. So we'll have a shot at
that five-fifteen. We've about seven miles to go. Thirty m.p.h.--that's
fourteen minutes. Bar hold-ups, that's good enough. It's just five to
five now, but I must fix up my passenger."

Amaryllis looked round at Melchard.

"What are you going to do with him?" she asked, turning back upon Dick a
face of disgust.

"Take him up to town," said Dick.

"How beastly!" said Amaryllis.

"Doped, my child--most royally doped--with a kindly poison that he
loathes."

He left her and took his seat beside the prisoner. Amaryllis, not a
little vexed by the addition to their party, started the car.

As they glided down the wide bends of the descent, Dick plied the
wretched Melchard with dose after dose of throat-rasping spirit. After
the second half-tumbler the man wept, sobbing out entreaties for mercy.
And Amaryllis felt a wave of cold fear run down her spine when she heard
the voice and words of her lover's reply--words not meant for her
hearing she knew for the voice was so low that it was only the precision
of the speaker's passion which carried them, against the wind, to her
ears.

"Pity! Pity on a filthy creature that never felt it--not even for his
own filthy servants! Pity for a lickspittle parasite that battens on the
passions and vices of hopeless gaol-birds, abandoned women, jaded
pleasure-hunters and terrified neurasthenics! Pity on a speculator
calculating huge revenues from the festering putrefaction of human
disease! I haven't hit you yet, because your flesh is foul to
me--but--drink that down, or, by God! I'll smash every bone in your
face."

A gasp, a spasmodic sound of gulping, another gasp--and silence.

Two-thirds of the bottle's contents was down the man's throat. Dick
poured the remnant into his flask and sat watching the effects.

Satisfied at last that he had induced complete alcoholic coma, he
touched Amaryllis on the shoulder.

"Stop her as soon as you can," he said. "I'll drive now."

When they were off again, she asked, in a voice none too steady, what he
had been doing to the wretched man behind her.

"Made him absolutely blind--blotto," he answered.

"You sounded rather dreadful, Dick," she said; adding, after a
hesitation, "Cruel--almost."

His face was set on the road ahead of him, and his profile, she thought,
though not definitely vindictive in expression, was hard as stone.

"Cruel?" he asked.

"You said awful things in a very dreadful voice."

"The awful thoughts I had account for the voice, beloved," he explained.
"They couldn't be said to him. I thought of his hands touching you--his
voice speaking to you--you, young as an angel, as beautiful as the
goddess that floated in upon the world in a mother-of-pearl dinghy! As
clever as that other one with the fireman's tin hat, as game as Jimmy
Wilde, and as kind as Heaven. Spoke to _you_--touched you--looked at
you--blasphemy, profanation and sacrilege! And barged into your bedroom,
when--. My God! woman," cried poor Dick, as if a flame came from the
marble lips of him, "I could have watched him through an hour of rack
and thumbscrew, when I thought of you up in that room of his. It's the
cruelty I haven't done that's my claim to the next vacancy in halos.
Cruel? Just for pouring down him a few tumblerfuls of a mixture of
arrack and spud-spirit that he'd bought for his damned Caliban! And I
only did that because there weren't any handcuffs handy."

Uttered in a voice wonderfully soft, yet vibrating with a quality which
thrilled him like some tone of a celestial violin, her answering
question reached him through the rush of their speed.

"Do you love me like that?" she asked.

To the short nod of his white silhouette he added curtly:

"Be quiet, please. I'm driving."

She chuckled softly to herself, thinking how well already she began to
understand his ways--ways so odd and dear, she told herself, that never,
she was sure, would she tire of them.

CHAPTER XXII.

LORD LABRADOR.

The Roman causeway ran into the macadam high road from Harthborough to
Timsdale-Horton almost on the level, with still a slight fall towards
Harthborough, the smoke of whose chimneys was already visible.

Half a mile ahead of them was a knot of men, gathered about what might
have been a wheelbarrow. A quarter of a mile further,

"Three men," said Dick.

"Motor-cycle and side-car," said Amaryllis. "Is it another picket?"

Instead of answering, Dick replied with a command:

"Hold tight. Don't turn to look at 'em. You're talking to me by the yard
as we go by. We go right through. Shan't give 'em an inch."

The car darted forward. The road ran between stone dykes, bordering
pasture and arable enclosures. The pace, close upon fifty miles an hour,
took them up to and past the suspected group so swiftly that it was
impossible to note the faces of the men who formed it while their
movements of recoil and surprise might have been due to the unusual
speed alone.

But a little later, Amaryllis, turning in her seat, thought she saw a
small cloud of dust start up from the road; and Dick, on the assumption
of a pursuit almost as swift as his flight, found himself involved in
the solution of complex chances.

The road he followed, as he had been able to determine from the higher
ground, led directly to the railway station in the centre of
Harthborough. It was now five minutes past five o'clock--ten minutes
before the train's scheduled time of departure; which, allowing two
minutes for reaching the station, would mean eight minutes to spend on
the platform, even if the train were up to time.

Eight minutes for the men with the side-car to reach the station and----

And what?

Even the intoxicated Melchard, should it come to gun-play on platform or
in railway carriage, would be no protection to Amaryllis. If the picket
had been able to distinguish their leader in his car as it flashed by
them, they must have guessed him a prisoner, and, as such, the probable
King's evidence to hang them.

For his satellites, Melchard was safer dead than captive.

Just ahead the road branched. Resolved to shorten his time of waiting,
and hoping to mislead the chase, Dick took the right line of the fork,
which bent to hide him, if only for a moment, from the side-car.

"The station's down the other road," said Amaryllis.

"Yes," said Dick. "Don't want more than three minutes there before the
train pulls out."

He slowed suddenly, having seen his expected by-road a little way ahead.

"I'm turning back to the left here," he explained. "Look back as I
swing, and see if they're in sight."

"Not a sign," said Amaryllis.

But as she spoke they heard the detonations of a back-fire, and
pictured, though they could not see, Melchard's avengers plunging away
southward, past the end of the lane into which Dick had turned.

This lane between two rows of blunt cottage-fronts soon proved itself
not merely a refuge, but an avenue.

At eleven minutes past five Dick Bellamy stopped Melchard's car outside
the booking-office of somnolent Harthborough's dead-alive station--the
junction of the single-line track to Whitebay and its bathing machines
with the double-track branch of the G.N.R. from York to Caterscliff.

A hopeless porter languished against the hot bricks of the doorway. Dick
came round between him and Melchard, peering down upon that sordid wreck
of smartness. He turned to Amaryllis, who had followed him.

"Pore old guv'nor!" he said tenderly; and Amaryllis with difficulty
restrained her surprise at his change from the local dialect to that of
the London cab-rank. "They 'aven't arf filled 'im up proper this time."
Then, to the porter, despondently interested in this queer company, "Hi,
chum! Give us a 'and," he said, pulling from his pocket a confusion of
silver, and crumpled Treasury notes. "Is the London trine up yet?"

"Signalled, she be," said the porter, peering at Melchard.

"Keep yer eyes off wot's no blinkin' good to 'em" said Dick. Then,
lowering his voice to oily confidence, he went on: "It's young Lord
Labrador--Marquis of Toronto's 'opeful. Put 'im through the mill, they
'ave, at yer three-legged race meetin' at Timsdale-'Orton. Made me larf
shockin', it did. 'E's got to meet 'is lovin' pa, ten o'clock a.m.
ter-morrer mornin', an' I said as I'd see 'im through, and get 'm a wash
an' brush up. I train a bit for 'im--the young un, yer know."

"Well, 'tain't noah business o' mine," said the porter.

"'Ow much to make it yourn, sonny?"

"Ah doan't rightly knaw."

"Won't be less'n a dollar, mate--see?"

The porter saw.

Dick thrust notes into his hand.

"Get us three firsts to King's Crawss, and 'ave a label ready to smudge
on the winder, w'ile me an' my girl gets 'im through to the platform,
nice and cushy."

Supported on each side, with flaccid legs just able to move in turn,
Melchard was guided to a bench some way down the platform, and seated
between two bolstering forms to which the contact was disgusting.

Fortunately they had the up-platform to themselves.

The train was late, and the long minutes held each more of anxiety than
the last.

The porter came with the tickets.

"'Eere's 'opeless 'Arry," said Dick, going to meet him.

"Wi't'yoong spark in thot trim," said the porter, pocketing a tip of
weight to gratify without astounding, "Ah'd'a' pushed onto Lunnon wi'
'im in t'car."

"Not if you'd borrered it, Mr. 'Opeless. She belongs to a Mr. Mills o'
Melborough--Na-ow! _Melchard_ o' Millsborough. 'E's one o' them there
painful dentisters."

A sound like a smothered sneeze, followed by a syncopated gurgle, coming
from behind him, warned Dick to tone down the comic relief.

"You get the car run into cover, and keep an eye on 'er till that there
Pluck-'em-W'ile-yer-Wait comes a sorrowing arter 'er. Tell 'im my
address is No. 5, John Street, London, and I'll settle for the bit o'
damage. There's no need to bring 'is young lordship in. There's plenty
o' wailin' an' gnashin' comin' to 'im, any'ow."

In a sad-coloured notebook, with a stump of dirty pencil, the porter
solemnly noted that classic address.

"An' that's more trouble for _you_, so 'ere's a few more bits o' wot we
takes it for."

Four minutes late, the train rumbled in.

With less difficulty than it had taken to extract him from the car, Dick
and the porter got Melchard into the corner of a first-class compartment
of the last carriage on the train--behind the guard's van even, being
the London "slip," the porter told them as he slapped his "engaged"
label on the window.

The guard was on the point of waving his flag when the staccato rush of
a motor-cycle sounded hideously outside the little station.

"Get in," said Dick to Amaryllis.

The guard called to the porter:

"Can't keep 'er. Five minutes behind already," and let his green signal
flutter.

Dick followed Amaryllis and closed the door.

And even as the engine made its first slow movement, there came a rush
of heavy feet on the wooden flooring of the booking-office, and two men
in motor-cycling rig made a determined dash at the train.

The station-master, eager for unpleasing duty, emerged shouting:

"Stand back!"

But the porter would not see nor hear him, and opened the door of the
compartment immediately in front of that which his label had reserved.
The runners scrambled in.

Dick had been careful not to show his face until the door--the next, it
seemed--was banged shut. But a rapid glance at that very moment showed
him that it was indeed from the next compartment that came the
half-crown which the porter caught as it fell.

Dick settled back into his seat with the consciousness that the
partition against which he leaned was poor protection from a
revolver-bullet.

CHAPTER XXIII.

FALLING OUT.

"Is it they?" asked Amaryllis

"Two to one on," he answered.

"Next compartment?"

"Yes."

"Did they see us get in?"

"No."

"Then how can they know?"

"They saw the car outside, and the porter shutting this door. If they
hadn't, they'd have bundled in right opposite the entrance, instead of
running down the train," reasoned Dick.

"Will they try to come in here, then?" she asked.

"There's no corridor," said Dick.

"But outside? There was a murder--I read about it----"

"Take it easy, little wonder," he answered, with a smile which made of
his patronage a tribute. "I haven't got this far to crack in the last
lap. I'm thinking out a pretty story for the _Sunday Magazine_; so no
murders, please. They make me nervous. We're all right for a bit--next
station's fifteen miles ahead. They're getting their wind next door, and
talking it over."

He rose, and lifting Melchard's legs, made him lie at full length along
the seat farthest from the engine and the motor-cyclists. Next, he drew
down the little corner-blinds of each window, leaving the door-blinds
up; then sat down again resuming his attitude of abstraction.

In the silence which followed Amaryllis watched him until confidence
crept into her unawares, and she found herself becoming sleepily
interested in smaller matters than life and death. She did not believe
any longer that anyone could prevail against "Limping Dick."

She smiled to herself over the strange figure he cut, forgetting her
own.

His bulging pockets amused her into trying to remember all the things he
had stowed away in them.

The newest seemed to be an oily piece of cotton rag, sticking out from
the side pocket of his Norfolk jacket, which looked already, since she
had seen it first, three years older.

At last she spoke.

"Is the little plot finished?" she asked.

"Very nearly," he replied

"And is it decorous in episode, cheerful in tone, and forcible in moral
tendency?"

"All these it is, and more."

"Then--please, sir, I have a question to ask."

"Ask, maiden," said Dick.

"I want to know why you keep that filthy cloth in your pocket."

"And why this sudden curiosity about a trifle?" His hand felt the thing
as if he had forgotten it.

"Because," said Amaryllis, "I can't possibly sit closer to you if you
don't throw it away."

Dick rose, taking the bundle carefully from his pocket.

"It's a curio--a relic. I'll show it you some day," he said, laying it
in a corner of the rack.

"Not now?"

"Not now."

And then there came over his face an expression of mixed humour and
triumph.

"By the bloomin' idol made of mud!" he cried, "you've given me the
climax. It makes the story more moral than ever."

And he murmured, as if only for himself: "Which side, O Bud! Which
side?"

A little later he put up both windows.

"It'll be awfully hot," said Amaryllis.

"Let's be absolutely silent for a bit," said Dick. "With our ears to the
partition, we might hear something."

With intense concentration, they listened for several minutes.

"It's no good," said Dick at last. "Talking, talking all the time, but
the train makes too much row, and the padding's too thick."

"I heard something," said the girl. "Not words--but the different tones
of two voices, arguing. One wants to do something, and the other
doesn't. He's afraid, I think."

"M'm!" grunted Dick.

"The brave one's here--with his back to me. He's strong and heavy, I
think, because his voice is growly, and he sits back hard now and then,
and I can feel the partition bulge a little. And then--he keeps fiddling
with something that clicks."

"Clicks? How? Like the hammer of an empty gun?" asked Dick, puzzled.

The girl leaned forward and touched the spring lock of the carriage
door.

"No. Heavier than a pistol. Clicky and thumpy, like this lock if you
pull it and let go."

Dick's face beamed with satisfaction.

"Don't touch it--I know," he said. "I suppose you'll be wanting half the
proceeds, and your name as part author."

"What on earth d'you mean, Dick?"

"Collaboration. You've completed the plot."

He changed his seat to face her from the opposite corner; looked at his
watch, and thereafter gazed steadily from the window with down-bent eyes
for so long that Amaryllis grew bored and nervous.

"Two minutes to do a mile," he said at last, having again looked at his
watch. "It's fifteen minutes since we left Harthborough--seven miles and
a half. That's another seven and a half to go--Todsmoor's the station, I
think. They'll try it on within five minutes, or give it up. What did
you do with that snoring beast's automatic?"

Amaryllis thrust her hand deep into the Brundage pocket, rummaging.

"What an awful pouch!" he exclaimed.

"It is a bottomless pit, certainly. But it's much discreeter than yours
are, Dick. They bulge so interestingly, and make you an awfuller sight
than all the rest of your funny things together," she replied, laughing
at him.

Successful at last, she produced the Browning pistol which Melchard had
surrendered on the Roman road. "But it bumped horribly when I
walked--and it _would_ always knock the same place on my knee. Oh, Dick,
shall we ever get into clothes that'll feel nice again?"

"To-night, damsel, shalt thou sleep in fine linen, and to-morrow, so it
please you, shalt fare homeward in thy father's chariot, leaving in that
progress a ravaged Marshall and Snelgrove, an eviscerated Lewis, and the
house of Harrod but a warehouse of mourning."

Softly he let down both windows, fearing glass little less than bullets.

"Sit there," he said, pointing to the corner opposite to Melchard's
head; and, when she was seated, gave her back the pistol.

"If anything comes, cover it with that."

"But, Dick--," she faltered, "I know I'm silly, but I--I don't want to
kill anybody. I'm afraid."

"P'r'aps they'll funk it. But I've an idea they're more afraid of
him--if they know we've got him--than of us." He glanced at Melchard,
and then out of the window.

The train was running on an embankment with steep, grassy sides--not a
house nor a highway in sight.

"This side would be safer to fall from," said Dick. "On yours it's the
down-line rails. Tails up, dear! In three minutes it'll be over or off.
Don't shoot--only show you're heeled, and look fierce."

He reached for the oily cloth in the rack. Catching her fascinated eyes
fixed on him:

"Watch the window, will you," he snapped; and a sting of indignation at
being so addressed gave Amaryllis the stimulant she needed.

It should be obedience now, but a royal exhibition of displeasure
afterwards!

So, with the mouth and eyes of a goddess incensed, Amaryllis watched, in
lofty silence, her rectangle of sunlight.

But from the preparations of Dick Bellamy dignity was altogether absent.

From the dirty cloth he unwrapped Mut-mut's baag-nouk, slipped his right
hand into its straps and rings, and sank to his knees on the floor of
the carriage, facing the door and its open, unblinded window.

Leaning to his right, he lifted the corner blind away, bringing his left
cheek against the glass; and from this spy-hole kept that eye on the
point where the door of the next compartment should just show itself,
were it opened at right-angles to the train in letting a man creep out
upon the footboard.

And then, as he waited, came a dreadful thought: the door on this side
of the compartment, the train running on the left-hand track, was
hinged, of course, upon its forward jamb, and must therefore be passed,
by one creeping from the direction of the engine, before it could be
opened so as to give entrance. On the other side the position was
reversed.

Might not this advantage of the door defended only by the girl have been
noted by the men on the other side of that partition?

And she? Her back was to the engine and her corner blind pulled down.
She would see nothing till her door began to open; and even had she
nerve for killing, she could not shoot; for, in pity of her white hands,
he had fixed the safety-catch of Melchard's gun.

He pictured the moment's wavering, and a struggle, ending, perhaps, in a
double fall from the train.

While still his eye was steady at the loophole, his mind reached the
decision to change his dispositions. But before he could move to rise
the black, upright line of the enemy's door swung slowly into his field
of vision. His position at the window gave him a bare inch to see it in,
but the sight lifted his fighting soul into the heaven of certain
success.

Still watching, he saw that the door's edge remained steady, fixed, he
argued, by the hand of the man that watched his companion, too low for
Dick's line of sight, handing himself along by the brass rail, nearer
and nearer.

While that door was held, Amaryllis was safe.

Dick sank back upon his haunches, bowing his bare head to bring it below
the level of the open window.

There followed a stillness of waiting--stillness wrapped in the roar of
the train.

A brushing sound on the door's window-ledge!

Throwing his head backwards, Dick saw, without raising his head, thick,
dirty fingers on the split sill.

Lightly he touched them with his left hand. A head came in sight, rising
diagonally across the frame it entered; and as it rose, so rose Dick's
right hand, showing the steel blades of the Tiger's Claw.

The white face was jerked backward, the black-nailed fingers lost hold,
and with a choked scream the whole body fell outward from the train,
describing a curve towards the rear which just carried it free of the
ballast, to land sideways on the turf of the slope, and roll.

The bank was high and steep, and the body was still rolling, when Dick
turned his head to the sound of a door closing. His remaining enemy had
shut himself in.

"Got 'em both," he said, facing Amaryllis, and dropping his greasy
parcel once more in the rack.

"What's happened? Oh, that horrid scream!" she said, shaking.

"Your brave villain's taken a toss, darling," said Dick, sitting with an
arm round her. "And the white-livered accomplice is dithering with funk
in there." And he thumped the cushion of the partition. "We shall pull
up at Todsmoor in a few minutes. Let's compose ourselves. You must be
asleep in your corner----"

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