Ambrotox and Limping Dick

O >> Oliver Fleming >> Ambrotox and Limping Dick

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14

And Dutch Fridji came slowly towards Amaryllis.

"You make love with my Alban," she said, "an' I stop it." Lifting her
skirt, she fetched from a sheath in her stocking a sharp-pointed knife.
"I have enough of you. Two months I must say 'ma'am'! And now, it is
Alban!"

"You mean to kill me?" asked Amaryllis.

Dutch Fridji was like the nightmare vision of a Fury.

For a moment Amaryllis was paralyzed. But Fridji liked the clatter of
her own tongue.

"It is that I mean," she said. "To kill you very slow. Your beautiful
frock, it burn now. Soon your shoes, your stockings, your long
petticoat, the corset shall burn, till there shall not be a shred they
can say was yours. And then the body shall be burned--but first carve
and chopped like meat at table."

Amaryllis gasped and shuddered, giving fuel to the blaze, so that it
crackled once more into fierce indiscretion.

"I tell you things. Oh, yes, I tell. For the last one that died--it was
a pity. He did not know before--knew not ever what was coming to him and
to each part of him. That spoil the flavour of my dish, do you see?"

A flourish of the knife put expressive finish to the words.

Amaryllis backed into the corner between bed and door, speaking any word
that came. On equal terms she would have fought for life like a cat, but
the knife----

"Mr. Melchard doesn't want me to be killed," she said.

For a moment Fridji's rage choked her.

"I'll scream, and he'll come with his men."

"With this I have sent him running from your door," cried Fridji. "It is
locked this side, and you will bleed to die before they break it."

Not rushing, but creeping, Dutch Fridji approached.

Amaryllis raised her eyes towards the window and the strip of sky it
framed, in silent supplication. And already, half through the window,
she saw her answer.

And Fridji saw her victim's face flush with hope, and turned to see its
cause.

Through the opening which Amaryllis had left between sill and sash, his
hands on the floor, his chin almost touching it, while his legs from
knee to feet were still outside the window, she saw Dick Bellamy.

Fridji, with blood in her mind, knife in her hand, and the proof of
Amaryllis' face that this was an enemy, sprang to deal with the
defenceless intruder.

Amaryllis had seen the lank black hair, no longer sleek, and had
received one gleam from the uplifted blue eyes; and now knew terror such
as she had not felt even for herself.

Nothing, it seemed, could come between the knife and Dick Bellamy--Dick
who had come to her. And then she saw his left arm dart forward--an arm
that seemed, on the floor, to shoot out to twice its natural length--and
its fingers gripped Fridji's left ankle, jerking it towards him.

The woman fell backwards, and Amaryllis caught her from behind.

"Stop her mouth," said Dick from the floor.

And the girl, her long hands almost meeting round Fridji's slender neck,
squeezed with all her strength, forcing the head and shoulders to the
ground.

Fridji gaped for breath.

"Stuff her mouth--blanket," said Dick, with his feet almost clear of the
window-sill, yet keeping his hold on the ankle.

Amaryllis forced the corner of the coverlet between Fridji's teeth and
held it there, keeping up the pressure of the other hand on the throat.

"That's what they did to me," she thought.

Dick stood beside her.

"Change with me," he whispered, and slid his left hand round the front
of Dutch Fridji's neck. Amaryllis stood up.

By the hold of his left, Dick raised the woman almost to her feet and,
measuring his distance, struck her with his right fist on the left side
of the neck directly below the ear--a short, sharp blow, the sound of
which affected the watching girl with a pang of physical sickness.

It might have been the noise made by a butcher flinging a slab of raw
steak upon his block.

Dick let the woman's body gently back to the floor, and Amaryllis saw
that she was unconscious as a corpse.

"Is she dead?" she said softly.

"For five minutes--p'r'aps ten," he answered. "Where's the key?"

Amaryllis picked it up from the floor.

"Melchard said he'd got four men downstairs--armed," she whispered.

"Heard him--but it's the only way--they've fixed that window. Just
scraped in head first and we can't get out like that. Come on," said
Dick, and put the key in the lock.

"I've--I haven't got--haven't got any clothes." And there was no other
expression of shame in her face than the two large tears that gathered
slowly in her eyes.

But Dick Bellamy ignored them, looking her up and down like a man
considering the harness needed for a horse.

"Take off her skirt," he said; then added: "Shoes might do." And with
his back turned to the girl, he knelt and quickly unshod Dutch Fridji
while Amaryllis unfastened the waistband of the skirt.

"Yours wouldn't last a mile," said Dick, going to the window and looking
out. "Put 'em on quick--say when."

In a time wonderfully short, he thought, for a girl, she spoke.

"I'm ready," said the small voice; and he turned to face a quaint figure
in a skirt too short, and too wide on the hips. The brogue shoes would
have looked better if the stockings had been of anything but green silk.

But the pathos of sentiment and custom was in the bare arms and the two
hands crossed on the chest and throat, with fingers spread in vain
attempt to cover the whole; and in the plaintive simplicity of the voice
which said:

"But, oh, my neck! I can't possibly get into her blouse, and a blanket's
too conspicuous."

Dick stripped off his Norfolk jacket, holding it for her arms. As she
hesitated, glancing at him, he frowned.

"Please obey orders," he said, and she meekly slipped on the loose coat.
He took from its pocket a folded white handkerchief, and tied it round
her neck by two adjacent corners, so that it hung like a child's bib.
Amaryllis pulled the collar up over the knot at the back, and began to
button the coat over the linen.

"Don't button it," he said, pulling off his necktie. "Cross the edges.
Lift your arms."

And he tied the dark green strip round her waist, knotting it in front.

"Come on," he said; and, stooping, picked up Fridji's knife. "Where's
the sheath?"

"In her stocking," said Amaryllis.

"Get it," said Dick, and unlocked the door.

Amaryllis behind him whispered: "She moved a little," and brought him
the leather sheath.

They stepped silently into the passage. Dick locked the door and
pocketed the key.

"Quietly," he said, and as they crept towards the stairhead, he slid the
sheathed knife into the pocket of the tweed jacket.

CHAPTER XII.

THE STAIRS.

The passage ended in an arch, beyond which appeared a balustrade.

The corridor was wider than the archway; and Dick, having made the girl
hide behind its projection, stepped delicately out upon the square
landing, and looked over the rails.

The staircase mounted in a single broad flight from the floor of an
entrance hall larger and more pretentious than he had expected. The
attempt at an appearance of comfort was a failure, but money had been
spent, and a sort of bad harmony between furniture and decoration forced
itself upon the eye.

Across the hall, to the left, the front door stood open to the sunlight.
In the wall facing him and the stair's foot were two closed doors, and
others, doubtless, to match them, beneath the gallery on which he stood.

He had already made up his mind to lead the girl noiselessly down the
stair and through the open door, and thence to make, if necessary, a
running fight for it, with the chance of taking his pursuers in detail,
when he heard a man's steps, accompanied by a faint tinkle of china,
coming towards the hall, he judged, along the corridor immediately
beneath that which he and Amaryllis had used.

Something, he remembered, had been said of breakfast, to be sent up, and
he waited until there appeared, first the tray and then the man that
carried it; a thick-set fellow, with heavy boots, shabby clothes, and a
bald spot among the rough sandy hair of his crown.

It was plain that he was making for the stair, and Dick drew back behind
the projection of the arch, opposite to Amaryllis. He saw the questions
in her eyes and knew she could hear the approaching footsteps.

He made a gesture for silence; a silence which seemed to Amaryllis to
last immeasurable time, while tea-cup tinkled against milk-jug, ever
nearer and nearer.

She saw him take a swift glance through the arch at the comer she could
not see, draw back three steps up the passage, and start forward again
with a face that made her heart jump, and a terrific limping rush of
three or four strides to the stairhead. And she craned forward just in
time to see the man with the tray, two steps from the top, receive in
his stomach a kick which lifted, it seemed, the wretched creature and
all that he carried in a single flight to the bottom of the stair.

After a little clash of plates and cups on the impact of the kick, there
was a sensible silence before the appalling crash and thud at the
stair's foot. Amaryllis held back a scream, but reeled as if fainting.

Dick caught her by the shoulders and shook her, as women will shake a
child.

"Buck up," he said; and she clung to his hands a moment. Then,

"I'm all right," she murmured, and stood alone.

Even as she spoke it seemed that in the hall below three doors opened at
once, and that from each rushed a man, clamouring questions; and then,
having seen the clutter of tray and crockery, stood aghast.

Dick, after one glimpse of the three so standing, took cover again,
drawing the girl with him.

"Looks as if he fell backwards right from the top," said a bass voice,
which Dick ascribed to the big man with the black beard who had seemed
to carry himself somewhat above the others.

"Slipped 'is foot and pitched backwards, and 'e ain't 'arf copped it."

"But why backwards?" asked Black Beard. And Dick imagined a suspicious
glance at the stairhead.

"I guess 'e try save tray and lose _balanza_ of 'eemself," said a third,
whose exotic voice and uneasy English affected Dick with an undefined
reminiscence.

"Carry the fool to his kennel, you two," said Black Beard. And Dick
heard the crushing under foot and the kicking aside of broken china, and
a shuffling of two pairs of feet.

But they had not gone many yards with their burden, when he heard a
fourth man enter the hall, and a voice in which langour strove in vain
against asperity--Melchard's voice, which he had heard for the first
time while he clung with his fingers to the window-sill of the bedroom
and with his shoe-tips to the string-course below it, sinking his head
even below his defenceless knuckles.

At the sound of this voice Dick now stretched himself prone, and
wriggled, Amaryllis thought, like some horrid worm, laying his left
cheek to the floor until he reached a point where his right eye got its
line of sight, between the uprights of the gallery's balustrade, on the
four live men and the inert, midway between the door out of sight
beneath him, and the place where the broken tea-pot had spilt its
contents in an ugly pool near the lowest tread of the stair.

"What's that?" Melchard had said. "Oh, put it down." And they laid the
body on the floor.

Melchard looked from Black Beard to the cockney, and back.

"Is it beer again? I said not more than a tumbler of whisky before
lunch. Beer always plays hell with him."

"Then you should give 'im 'arshish, sir," said the cockney. "It's the
Injin 'emp 'e needs. But 'e ain't smelt beer since we left Millsborough.
Somethin's just appeared to 'im, and 'e ain't 'arf copped it."

"Appeared? Tell me what happened," said Melchard, querulously.

"Fell right down the stair, tray and all," said Black Beard, "just as if
he'd been pushed."

Melchard was stooping over the scarce breathing body.

"He's not dead," he declared.

"He will be," said Black Beard, "unless you 'phone to Millsborough for a
doctor damn quick."

"Don't be a fool, Ockley. Better let him die than bring a sharp-witted
medical practitioner to _my_ house, to-day of all days."

"If we have a death here in _your_ house," Ockley retorted, "they'll
want to know _how_ and _why_ and _when_. And 'no doctor called'--and
'this shady Mr. Melchard'--and all the damned things that always happen.
Will that be good for your health--with the whole game in your hands,
too?"

Melchard was hit, and Dick thought that he saw his face lose colour.

"Well?" he said nervously.

"Either fetch medical aid," replied Ockley, "or bury him under the
ash-heap. And that's going a bit far for an accident."

"Was he pushed? I wonder," said Melchard; and the pair, with heads
together, spoke in whispers inaudible to Dick, who writhed himself six
inches back from the baluster, in fear of the upward glance which might
come at any moment.

He had heard enough, and his usual policy came into play.

Amaryllis was able to watch him without exposing herself to the eyes of
the enemy; for they had gathered round the injured tray-bearer so near
to her side of the hall that the floor of the gallery shut off their
view of anything below the top of the arch round whose side she peered,
crouching low.

Dick, then, she saw moving snake-wise to the stair; and she marvelled
that, even in the hush of the voices below, no slightest sound of his
movement reached her ear. Chin first, his head disappeared over the
first step, the long body dragging after it, half-inch by half-inch,
until all of him that she could see was the thick soles of his boots,
clinging, as it appeared, by their toes to the edge of the highest step.

Her heart shook for his danger, which now so closely embraced her own
that she forgot its separate significance.

The voices rose again.

"But you're a qualified man yourself," said Melchard. "You'll be
responsible."

"Fat lot of good that'll do you," replied Black Beard. "Qualified, by
God! When I can't prove it without proving also that I'm off the
register, and that my name's not Ockley!" He broke off with an ugly
laugh, then added: "Let's go up and see."

And now Amaryllis saw her serpent shoot up to a great rod of vengeance.
Before she could ask herself, "What is he going to do?" Dick Bellamy had
done it; vaulting, even as he rose, over the rail of the stair, and,
with an appalling scream which might have come from a maniac in frenzy,
or the mortal agony of a wounded beast, literally falling upon his
enemies.

His right foot caught Melchard between jaw and shoulder, shooting him
supine and headlong upon the polished floor until his head hit the
corner of the stone kerb about the hearth; while the left knee
simultaneously struck the cockney, who fell, with Dick's crouching
weight full upon him, heavily to the ground; and Amaryllis, fear
forgotten, leaning over the rail, heard at the same moment, but as
separate sounds, the blow of the under man's head upon the boards and
that of Dick's right fist on its left jaw.

Then Dick was on his feet again, but barely in time. For in the clamour
and rushing fall of this wild figure, clad in grey flannel trousers and
blue shirt, with lank black hair flying stiffly up and away from the
savage mouth and blazing blue eyes, Ockley had leapt back out of reach.
But the little Spaniard, standing apart, was astonished; his dark eyes
showed wide rings of white eyeball, and the open mouth teeth even
whiter, as he stared, aghast yet curious, at the living thunderbolt
which had fallen so near to him.

Ockley, however, directly his eyes had taken in what he had leapt back
from, had begun what even Amaryllis could see was the rush of an expert.
He did not, indeed, catch Dick upon his knees, as she had feared, but
left him little time to steady himself. She could see that the big man
was brave, and as strong as a bull, so that hers looked slender by
comparison.

But Dick was less unprepared than he seemed. Arms hanging and face
vacuous, he side-stepped smartly to the left, escaping a swinging right
aimed at his head, and, as the great body passed, drove a short, heavy
left punch under the still raised right arm, which shook Ockley severely
and, increasing the impetus of his attack, sent him staggering against
the balustrade of the stair.

And now the Spaniard found what he had been looking for.

"Por Dios!" he wailed, "it iss Limping Deek!" and so fled.

Dick followed up his advantage, forcing the pace, but Ockley would have
none of it until he had worked himself into the middle of the floor;
then suddenly coming again, got home with a tremendous right which Dick
failed to stop with anything better than his left cheek-bone.

The blow was well timed and delivered with the full force of a strong
man fighting scientifically, perhaps for his life; and Dick Bellamy knew
that, hard as he kept himself, he could not afford to take another of
its kind.

Crouching, he watched Black Beard between his fists which protected his
face, the perpendicular fore-arms guarding his body; and in the moment
while his sight was clearing, he heard, from somewhere above him, a
little agonized moan, and found himself again.

Ockley, elated, pursued his advantage with a savage left drive which
might have proved worse for Dick than the right which had just split his
cheek, had he not, ducking to his right in perfect time, met the big man
with a heavy left jolt in the mouth, and, simultaneously advancing his
right foot and straightening his body, followed it up with a right to
the jaw that knocked his opponent full length. He fell and lay beyond
the projection of the hearth on the other side of which was Melchard,
still as death.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE KNIFE-THROWER.

With the sleeve of his shirt Dick wiped the blood from his cheek, looked
down at Ockley, and then up at Amaryllis, half-way down the stair.

"That's four. Where's the fifth?" he asked.

"He ran out there," she answered. "You frightened him."

"Come down," said Dick; and when she reached the floor, she found him
kneeling by Melchard, searching his pockets.

She came close and touched him on the shoulder.

"Let's get out of the house--now, now!" she pleaded, lowering her voice
in the presence of so much that looked like death.

"Pocket these," said Dick, handing behind him some letters and a
pocket-book.

With a sharp tug he disengaged the side-pocket wedged between Melchard's
body and the floor, and from it took out a small parcel wrapped in white
paper. Of its two seals one had been broken. He peered into the opened
end.

"Small bottle--white powder," he said.

"That's it," replied Amaryllis. "Do let's go--please."

"Was there anything else?" he asked.

"Oh, do come away. I'm frightened," said the girl, imploring.

"So'm I--badly," said Dick, and rose to his feet.

The letters from Melchard's pocket were still in her hand. He took them,
and picked out a white envelope with no writing on it. The wax seal had
been broken.

He drew from it a sheet of paper, and unfolded it before her.

"That's the formula--it must be," said Amaryllis.

"Let's hook it, then," said Dick, buttoning the package and envelope
into his hip-pocket, and slipping the rest of Melchard's papers into the
side pocket of his own jacket, hanging loosely on Amaryllis.

As they crossed the hall he missed Ockley.

"My God!" he cried. "The black bloke's gone. Did you see him go--or hear
him?"

Amaryllis shook her head.

"I thought I'd given him a five-minute dose at least," said Dick on the
threshold, and taking her left elbow in his hand, began to run. "We've
got to grease like hell. It's a mile and a half to my car."

They were half-way to the pretentious gate, and Amaryllis was already
distressed by the pace, when they heard behind them the thud of a
revolver. A twig with two leaves, cut from a branch above and beyond
them, fell into the road. Dick increased his pace, so that Amaryllis was
only kept from falling by his firm hold of her arm.

A second shot hit the drive behind them, spraying their backs with
gravel.

"High. Low, to left--jump!" yelled Dick, swinging the girl leftward past
his body with a force so sudden that she fell on the grass at the
roadside, in the shelter of an artificial knoll covered with shrubs; and
this time Dick heard the bullet close on his right.

He threw himself on the grass, sharing her cover.

"All right?" he asked.

Speechless for lack of breath, Amaryllis nodded, trying to smile.

"You can't run to the gate," he said, rather as if speaking to himself
than to her. "Wind's gone already, and it's a hundred yards without
cover. To the bank of the road's only about twenty-five. Breathe deep.
Is my cap in that pocket still?"

Amaryllis found and gave it to him. Dick, unrolling it, rose slowly to
his knees, facing the rhododendron bush.

"Oh, don't!" exclaimed the girl.

"Wouldn't, if I'd got a stick. Listen; he's using an Army Webley, I
think. Six shots. He's fired three. If I can draw the second three
before he fills up, it gives us a start while he reloads."

On his knees, he peered through the bush.

"Still at the door," he said. "Breathe deep. On the third shot we go for
the embankment. I'll get you up it. Then over the road. There's timber
that side as well as this."

Again Amaryllis nodded, and Dick, rising a little higher, disposed the
cap between two clumps of leaves, where he hoped it would seem supported
by his head.

"Real G. A. Henty stunt, ain't it?" he said. "But I've shaken him up a
bit, and it's worth trying."

He raised the cap slightly, let it drop back again on the rhododendron
leaves, and laid himself full length on the ground.

"Third shot--if it comes. Breathe deep," he repeated.

There was a pause, agonizing to the girl; and then it came.

Three shots, thumping in rapid succession, the last of them depositing
the cap almost in her hands. Clutching it, she scrambled to her feet,
and Dick, catching her by the arm beneath the shoulder, forced her into
a thirty yards' sprint, in which, while her heart beat as if it would
burst, her feet seemed to touch the ground barely half a dozen times
before the grey stones of the embankment rushed to meet them almost in
the face.

How he managed to force her to the top and bundle her over the parapet,
she could never remember, any more than she could forget Ockley's next
shot, which was discharged as their figures showed against his sky-line
for the two seconds which it took them to cross the road and fling
themselves recklessly down the slope of its other side.

"Brace up," said Dick at the bottom. "You've got some guts, anyhow; and
once we're well into that undergrowth, your hairy friend may come after
us with a Vickers and be damned to him."

To get to it he had to lift her over a swampy patch in a hollow to a
stony place beyond it; whereafter they were soon as well hidden from the
road as its outline lay exposed to the search of their eyes.

But Amaryllis at first left the watching to his, closing her own and
lying still, in sheer womanly terror of being sick. Somewhere within was
a doubt as to whether she did not already adore him, and a pitiable
anxiety that "nothing horrid" should be associated in his mind with her
person.

Dick, lying at full length, turned his eyes every now and again from his
watch on the road to look at the girl's face; and saw, with anxiety as
well as pity, how pale it was, and how wasted already by hunger, fear
and running--and perhaps by the drug they had given her the night
before. He must ask no further exertion of her until she was fed and
rested.

His object was to make his way as quickly as possible to "The Coach and
Horses," his car, and safety.

But he dared not move from this shelter, nor even stand upright, until
he knew what Ockley intended. Already he had tasted the man's quality,
and, with the girl on his hands, held him in healthy fear.

"They've gone too far," he reflected, "to back out."

Had Black Beard been playing 'possum when he ought to have been laid
out? He must, it would seem, have been pretty fit all the time to get
away without making a sound.

Then a thought which sent fear through him like a knife:

"If he saw or heard what we took from that scented swine, no wonder he's
shooting to kill. It's God's judgment on me for a fool--a fool that
believed in peace and policemen. Limping Dick on a gaff like this
without a gun!"

And then he saw a figure, clear against the sky, standing on the road,
at the head of the path by which, three-quarters of an hour ago, he
himself had gone up to get his first view of "The Myrtles."

It was Ockley; even at three hundred yards Dick could distinguish the
black beard and heavy shoulders of the enemy, who was gazing from his
high point, not in the direction of the fugitives, but along the
moorland path to "The Coach and Horses"--the path which lay open to his
eye for its whole length.

"Easy to guess the way I want to go," Dick calculated, "and easier to
see that I haven't dared take it." Then, as Ockley turned his head
towards the trees, "and easiest of all," he added aloud, "to spot the
only cover."

Amaryllis opened her eyes, and he saw that her face was less grey.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14