Linked in Silence

CHAPTER I. Invisible Chains

Loafing along the east side of Water Street as he made his rounds, the night watchman flashed his lamp down the tinker's pot blackness of Ram Alley. Forewarned by some tutelar power, Singleton had flattened himself against the sagging wall of the nearest building. The ten-inch projection of a building a yard to his right shielded him from detection. For a moment or two the ash cans and refuse heaps of the alley were illumined by the white ray, and then the narrow channel that crooked down to the water front was choked again with inky darkness. When the unsuspecting watchman shuffled onward Singleton drew a breath of relief. Had he been discovered it would have forced him to abandon his resolution to kill Bronson to-night, and perhaps to-morrow he would have been too sick to put the miserable scoundrel out of the way.

This narrow escape left him shaking a little and cursing himself for his weakness. Almost at once, however, he began chuckling softly because he was so strong. At this very moment he was supposed to be in his room a mile away and chained, helpless, to his bed by malarial fever. He had fooled the overtasked nurse who had undertaken to care for him night and day when the attending doctor had found it impossible to supply a substitute. Doubtless she was sound asleep now, after having grown confident that he was sleeping and would sleep for several hours, following the cessation of an attack. If he could complete his deadly job and get back unseen to his bed before the nurse awoke no finger of accusation could ever be turned in his direction.

He listened a moment. It was well past midnight, and the town was quite still, save for a faint and faraway throbbing of music and distant sounds made by a night crew discharging coal from a barge at one of the docks. He was still burdened by the feeling that somebody or something had been following him, and again he attempted to cast it off or to accept it as an illusionary conceit of his fever-taxed brain.

Even in that dense darkness he had not much trouble in treading the twisting path along the alley, for he had followed it on many another dark night of other years when seeking a chance to “set in” with the gang of poker sharks that gathered often in the quiet room over McCurdy's speak-easy.

McCurdy's was closed now, thanks to the dry law, but there was a way to reach the room under the roof without going through the old saloon. Singleton found a narrow passage between two of the shabby buildings and slipped quietly along it until he came to the end and the door he sought. Then he used the key McCurdy had let him have six years ago; the key that had made him one of the trusted and favored few who hadn't been compelled to pass each time beneath the inspecting eyes of old McCurdy.

The lock clicked and the dry hinges whined. Inside, with the door closed behind him, Singleton stood at the foot of the first flight of steep and narrow stairs and feared that the drumlike beating of his heart would be heard by the faithless wretch above. Then, reassured by conviction that Bronson would be entranced by the potent spell of the poppy, Singleton boldly felt his way upward over the complaining stairs.

He had his pistol in his hand now, and he was glad that he had become quite cool and steady, for he wished to do the trick with a single shot. One shot, fired in the topmost room of that wretched building, supposed to be empty—who, if he heard it, could say whence the sound had come? Swift, sure work; that was the idea.

Beneath the old cardroom door there was a faint, yellowish streak of light. Singleton almost laughed aloud at sight of it. The man was there; there in his secret den, in the hide-out to which he had stolen away in answer to the irresistible call of a shameful soul-and-body-destroying vice. Faintly Singleton could smell the drug.

Unhesitatingly he slipped his key into the lock and flung the door open before him, ready to do the deed.

A suspended oil lamp—the old shaded lamp that had formerly hung above the card table—cast an impotent, smoke-filtered light over the room. A faint bluish haze filled the place. A sickening odor, heavy and cloying, slapped Singleton in the face.

Against the wall at the far side of the room was a crude bunk on which a man was stretched. His coat and vest were off and his white shirt was open, baring a lean and bony chest. He lay on his curved arm, sleeping fitfully and jabbering now and then at the fantastic visions conjured by the opium pipe that had fallen from his lips with his final pull at the last pill.

His jaws locked, Singleton stood with the pistol half lifted. The job promised to be far simpler and easier than he had hoped. With Bronson in this condition there would be no scene, no disturbance, no noise save that of the single death-dealing shot; and his imagination had pictured the doomed wretch, frightened and cringing, begging for mercy with his last breath.

Keeping his gaze upon the unconscious man, Singleton reached behind him and thrust the door shut. Then, vexed as he perceived that the hand holding the pistol was quivering, he strode toward the bunk. Not until his foot struck against the low stand on which were the needle dipper and lamp for cooking the poppy gum, the blaze wavering within the open-topped glass bell, did he stop. Now, by stooping a little, he could place the muzzle of the pistol against his intended victim.

But suddenly he found himself restrained by invisible chains. Before him lay a lying scoundrel, a degraded wretch who encumbered the earth and polluted it, yet Singleton now found to his surprise that he could not slay the unconscious man. Not even after he had sought to steel himself by thinking of Estelle—poor girl!—in an asylum for the demented.

Angered because of his seeming weakness, he bent, seized Bronson by the shoulder, shook him savagely. “Wake up, you dog!” he cried.

Awakening, Bronson squinted dully through contracted pupils at the disturbing figure looming over the bunk. “Don't do that,” he complained thickly. “Lemme 'lone. Go 'way.”

“Wake up here!” insisted Singleton, refusing to let the drugged man relax. “Look at me. Well, do you know who I am?”

“Sure—sure I know,” was the answer, as Bronson struggled against the spell of the drug. “You're Jim—Jim Singleton. What you want? What—what you doing here?”

Singleton held the pistol before the heavy-lidded eyes of the man on the bunk. “I came to kill you, Bronson,” he replied.

Even this failed to arouse the fellow at once. Mouth agape, he stared waveringly from beneath those leaden lids. He had changed greatly, most of that change having become apparent in the last year, during which the habit over which he had previously maintained some control had asserted its mastery more powerfully. His cheeks were thin and sunken and his whole body emaciated. There was a sickly leaden tone to his skin. He was little more than a pitiful wreck of the handsome chap he had once been.

Sudden revulsion smote Singleton. Was it possible he had even dreamed of slaying a human creature so weak and degraded? Why, he couldn't do it! In spite of the fellow's treachery, in spite of his beastly brutality to Estelle, who had been driven mad by such treatment, Singleton couldn't do it. He drew back, glowering sullenly at the wretch.

Bronson had lifted himself to his elbow. The words last spoken by Singleton were beginning to arouse the drug-dazed man to a hazy understanding of the situation. His gaze laboriously roved round the room and came back to the intruder with the pistol. Then, with an effort, he swung his stocking-clad feet to the floor and sat up.

“How'd you get in?” he demanded.

Singleton shook his head. “No, I can't do it,” he said, speaking to himself. “I didn't think I'd hesitate an instant, but now I can't do it. He ought to die, but I can't put him out of the way.”

Then Bronson laughed contemptuously in Singleton's face. “Didn't really expect a call from you to-night, Jim,” he said jeeringly. “Anyway, didn't suppose you'd know where to find me. Quite natural, this being a quiet, place I've fitted up for use when I want to get away from people and play with the pipe a while. Oh, they all know I hit the pipe—everybody in this one-horse hick town knows it now and is talking about it. What do I care? None of their business now, is it? I leave it to you,”

“No,” said Singleton, shaking his head again, “I don't have to do it. At this rate, he'll finish himself before long. He's little better than a dead man now.”

“You're a liar!” said Bronson. “I was never stronger and better in all my life. Who told you where to find me? And how did you get in? Oh, you've got a gat in your hand, have you? What you trying to do, frighten me? Why, you couldn't frighten me, not if you were a whole regiment instead of just one man. I won something while you were down in South America—oh, yes!”

“Poor girl!” said Singleton. “You stole my letters, kept them from reaching her, lied to her.”

Bronson sneered. “Lied! Why, I only told her about little Babette; little Babette, who nursed you when you caught malaria. You didn't keep your promise to marry her, did you?”

Sitting there and grinning in that derisively triumphant way, the fellow looked like a dead man already, with his leaden skin drawn tightly over his skull bones. And the fever, beginning to rise again, caused odd fancies to flicker through Singleton's hot brain. It was a remarkable experience, this coming into the old cardroom over MecCurdy's and finding a dead man there who could move and talk and laugh!

“Lie down and be still, Bronson,” he said. “You're not behaving right for a dead man.”

The hideous grin faded from Bronson's face. His eyes, with the pinpoint pupils, turned again to the pistol in Singleton's hand, became warning semaphores.

“Oh-ho!” he said. “I guess you do really mean to kill me. I thought at first you were just trying to scare me, but2 Well, I won't lie down! I'm as good a man as you are—yes, better, better! I've proved it. Get out of here or I'll lay your head open!”

With a tinkle of broken glass the spirit lamp went to the floor as he grabbed a leg of the small stand and leaped up, swinging it above his head. Singleton dodged aside to avoid the blow needlessly. The stand fell from Bronson's suddenly relaxed fingers, thudding down near the broken lamp, the small flame of which still flickered bluely. An expression of surprise came over Bronson's face. His legs seemed to melt beneath him, letting him down beside the bunk in a sprawling, grotesque huddle.

CHAPTER II. Delirium or Reality

After standing like a statue for a few long moments, Singleton dragged his gaze from the fallen figure of Bronson and stared at the pistol, which he held gripped tightly and lifted, Although he believed he hadn't fired a shot, he would not have been greatly surprised had he perceived a wisp of smoke curling upward from the muzzle of the weapon.

His next action was to extinguish the flame of the broken spirit lamp before it could set the place afire. That done, he turned again to the twisted figure beside the bunk. Once more grasping Bronson's shoulder, he rolled him over until the hanging lamp showered its yellow light upon his face. The expression of questioning surprise was already congealing on the man's features and in his staring eyes. In the very center of his forehead was a hole from which the life fluid was oozing.

Kneeling there beside the body, Singleton stared unbelievingly at that hole. Not only had he assured himself that he hadn't fired, he had heard no sound of a shot. Yet here before him lay this man with a bullet in his brain!

Once more Singleton was chained by a spell. Astonishment benumbing him, he remained some seconds in that kneeling posture, gazing in utter incredulity at that death wound in the center of the man's forehead. “This is a delusion of the fever,” he whispered presently. He put out his hand and touched the body again, then he stood up, shivering. He gazed wildly around the room, asking himself whence the death-dealing lead had come. There were shadows in the corners, but nowhere amid them could the slayer of Bronson be hiding. There was likewise a closet, as Singleton remembered, and in a moment, still with the pistol in his hand, he had it open. Save for the old collapsible stepladder, provided by McCurdy for the escape of the card players to the roof by way of the skylight in case of a police raid, the closet was empty. He made himself absolutely sure of this before reclosing the door.

Leaning against that door, he tried to steady himself, to think clearly, to hold at bay the panic that was seeking to grapple with him. The man he had meant to kill when he came there had been slain before his eyes and almost within reach of his outstretched hand in a manner astounding and unaccountable. Either that, Singleton told himself, or he was due to awaken and find that the whole affair from beginning to end was mere calenture.

Dizziness crept upon him, accompanied by a threat of weakness such as had chained him to his bed, attended by a physician and a nurse. Fear that he would succumb before he could get back to that bed caused him to pull himself together and stagger hastily toward the door by which he had gained admission to that room. When he had swung the door open again and stepped over the sill he turned, before fully shutting it behind him, and took one more look at the dead man.

While he had come almost to believe that he was again in the net of a tormenting, fever-born dream, still all was so distinct, so realistic, so clear cut, that the sense of actuality predominated. Nevertheless, he seemed to remember other dreams of an equally vivid nature in which everything beheld had stood forth with cameo distinctness; in which he had looked upon strange faces whose features he afterward was able to recall more clearly than he could the features of well-known persons whom he met daily. Yet in the strange experiences of this night there was one thing which all his dreams had lacked—continuity. From the moment that, spurred by sharp desire to kill Bronson, he had risen surreptitiously from his bed—from that moment to this, as he paused in retreat upon the threshold of that room of tragedy, turning to take another look at the dead man, there had been nothing but sequential action. No skips and breaks, no magical transitions, no blank spots.

And there lay Bronson, dead, a dark ooze trickling down over his left eyebrow and temple. Dropping the pistol into his pocket, Singleton shut off the spectacle and the yellowish light of the suspended lamp by closing the door. In pitch darkness he began to descend the stairs.

He stopped, every nerve in his body wrenched still more taut as though by the brutal twist of a thumb screw. Mouth open, he listened, and heard a hand fumbling at the lower door, the door by which he had entered from the narrow passage leading to Ram Alley. Somebody was trying to open that door!

For a moment Singleton felt an impulse to plunge blindly downward and fling his strength against the door to hold the unknown back. Or, if the person had gained admittance by the time the descent could be accomplished, to attack him, strike him down, and rush onward to safety. Otherwise would he not be caught in a deadly trap?

Refusing to yield to panic, he remembered McCurdy's provision for the escape of the card players in case the place should be raided. Turning on the stairs, he hurried back to the room he had left only a few moments ago.

There were two heavy inside bolts on the door to that room, but neither of them had been used in a long time, and they were almost immovable in rust. Yet Singleton succeeded in forcing both of them into their sockets. Together with the spring lock, they would resist until the thick door itself should be battered down.

Panting, he brought the collapsible stepladder out of the closet, opened it, and placed it beneath the skylight, which was raised some eighteen inches above the level of the roof in which it was set. There was a great hammering in his head as he mounted the ladder, to which he was compelled to cling tightly to prevent himself from being toppled from it by the swiftly growing giddiness. He was afraid he wouldn't have sufficient strength to hoist himself out upon the roof after the skylight was opened.

When he could stand up and release the iron hooks, he managed to raise the window and fasten it open with the attached rachet iron. After a few moments he found himself kneeling beside the skylight on the tin-covered roof, greedily gulping the night air into his heaving lungs.

In that position he could look down into the room and see the door by which he had entered, and he vainly listened a moment for some sound which would denote that the unknown from whom he had fled was outside that door. What he heard were the noises made by the hoisting engine and the night laborers engaged in unloading a coal barge at a distant dock, and faint, faraway strains of dance music, coming from the opposite direction.

By leaning forward, he could see the feet and legs of the dead man, but not the upper part of his body. The bunk at that side of the room was shut off from view by the eighteen-inch rise of the skylight well.

Releasing the notched iron, Singleton lowered the window. But when he had closed it he took a last squint through the dirt-incrusted panes at the locked and bolted door to the room of silent death. There was still no indication that anybody was trying to obtain admission that way.

From the roof of the building to which he had mounted Singleton was now compelled to climb some four feet to reach the roof of another building that thrust a corner against it, and over that higher roof he must pass to still another before he could descend. He knew the way, but it was necessary to proceed with care in that intense blackness. He was obliged to muster the last particle of his wasted strength to perform that climb, and when he was on the higher roof he went reeling blindly through the darkness, not at all sure he was going in the right direction.

“I'll never be able to make it,” he muttered through his set teeth, thinking of his bed a mile away.

Then, stumbling, he pitched headlong over the coping, flinging out his arms in a desperate effort to save himself. He did not cry out as he fell. One short gasp of fright was all that came from his lips. He felt a crashing shock and beheld a bursting flare of bright light, which faded immediately into darkness.

CHAPTER III. By the Great White Beam

Soft, cool hands touched Singleton's face, and the voice of a woman, choked and trembling with alarm, sounded in his ears. He was lying prone upon his back and gazing uncomprehendingly at a huge moving bar of white light that swung across the pall-black sky as though striving to sweep the inky shadows away. Although the light was incomprehensible to him in his dazed condition, he was certain there was something familiar about the voice of the woman, and he weakly tried to remember when and where he had heard it before. In spite of the darkness he seemed to see a white form kneeling beside him.

“Who—who are you?” It cost him a tremendous effort to whisper the question.

With a startled exclamation, in which, however, there was undoubted relief, the dim white figure drew back.

“Oh, he isn't dead!”

Then Singleton heard another voice, a man's, harsh and tense. “Of course not,” it said. “A little three-foot fall like that wouldn't do him much damage. Come on away before you get mixed up in this miserable affair.”

“Oh, we can't beat it and leave him here like this. He must be hurt some.”

“You're coming away right now!”

A scuffle followed.

By a great effort Singleton managed to turn and lift himself upon one elbow. Then the huge beam of white light came down from the upper blackness and played full upon two struggling figures only a few feet from him. And there he saw a fairylike creature, whose garments of gauzy white shimmered with silver and gold, battling desperately with a scarlet-clad figure who was trying to drag her away.

In the fleeting moment or two that the light lingered on those figures Singleton was impressed by the ridiculous fancy that he was looking upon a combat for his soul: a contention between good and bad, between an angel and Satan himself, for the immortal soul of the helpless human spectator of the encounter, And, being stronger, the Evil One was winning. This he saw ere the white beam fled away, leaving darkness triumphant.

In that darkness Singleton lay prone again, striving to regain his strength and collect his scattered wits in spite of the beating of a massive hammer in his brain. When, by another effort, he had succeeded in rising to a sitting posture he saw what appeared to be countless fallen stars which seemed to stand on sentry duty in long rows extending into dim distances, where they waned and faded from view. After a time, however, he concluded that those stars were rows of lamps glowing along the branching streets of the silent town; and, that being true, he knew he had fallen no farther than a few feet from the higher roof to the roof of the building he had been trying to reach.

His extended hand found the wall of that higher building. He managed to get upon his feet and lean against the coping of that wall, again asking himself what portion of his strange experiences had been phantom and what reality. Having been stunned by his recent fall and rendered unconscious for a time more or less protracted, he was willing to accept the struggle between Satan and the angel as pure delusion. And then the roaming searchlight from a large yacht in the harbor smote him blindingly in the eyes and passed on, leaving him still further perplexed.

“That,” he told himself, “was the light by which I saw them tussling, and if that is real why not they?”

This, however, was no time or place for him to linger over such speculations. As soon as he felt he had regained sufficient strength he sought cautiously in the darkness for the scuttle through which he meant to descend. In the old days the gamblers trusted by “Spider” McCurdy knew the secret of opening that scuttle from the roof as well as from the lower side. But now, when Singleton finally found it by creeping about on all fours, after being again dazzled and blinded by the persistent searchlight, the scuttle had been left wide open, as though the last to use it had been in too great hurry to close it again.

Singleton went down the steep and narrow steps beneath the scuttle and felt for the upper flight of stairs. Fortunately he knew where to find them, for not even the faintest light burned in the halls of the cheap tenement building through which he must make his descent. He could hear the snoring of sleepers, and from some room came the feeble fretting of a baby, but no person save Singleton seemed to be astir in the building.

Like the scuttle, the entrance door at the foot of the lower stairs stood wide open, an apparent sign of haste or carelessness by the last person who had used it.

The street was poorly lighted, and Singleton willingly hugged the shadows. He made a detour that enabled him to avoid that portion of the town that was well illumined. By following side streets and back ways without being observed, he came at last to the street on which he lived. In his head the hammer was still beating, but he was not a little elated because his strength had sustained him, and precautions and good fortune had made it possible for him to traverse those streets without encountering a human soul. And then, forty feet from his own door and in the full flood of a lamp that couldn't be avoided, he came face to face with his most rancorous enemy, who was the special friend of Tom Bronson.

Dave Mygart came out from beneath a tree against which he had been leaning in such a position that he was hidden by the shadow of the tree trunk. He stepped directly into Singleton's path. “I beg pardon,” he said. “Could you give me a match?” He had a cigarette in his fingers, and his manner and speech seemed to pronounce him somewhat intoxicated.

Singleton stopped in his tracks, holding himself as steady as possible, endeavoring to look Mygart in the eyes without flinching. Against this man Singleton had been compelled to give testimony once that had brought upon Mygart the infliction of severe punishment, which was something the fellow had never forgotten or forgiven. He had made a vow to pay Singleton back some day with interest.

A yard or two away, Mygart became rooted, staring at Singleton as though he couldn't quite accept the evidence of his eyes. “Why,” he said, “I thought you were down flat with a bad attack of malaria fever, Singleton. Well, now, what are you doing, roaming around town at this hour of the night?”

Aware of his weakness and fearing his voice would betray it, Singleton did not answer. Instead, standing straight and steady, he continued to drill Mygart with his stare. He wasn't aware that his face was frightfully transformed by the fever flush and the effect of his almost superhuman exertions. Nor did he know that there was a fearsome glitter in his eyes and a wolfish expression in the way his lips were curled back from his white teeth.

As the two men stood thus for a few moments in dead silence, a light breeze, coming from afar, brought a faint sound of dance music on its bosom and set the leaves of the tree rustling like the frightened, fleeing patter o phantom feet.

“Well, what are you trying to do?” queried Mygart presently. “Got a notion you can scare me by glaring like that?”

But when Singleton continued speechless and stony Mygart began to fly signals of linked anger and alarm. Apparently without realizing he was doing so, he started to draw back. Not even the false courage that comes from drink could steady his nerve so that he could stand up to Jim Singleton when the man looked as he did now. For Mygart was in truth a swaggering coward, dangerous as a copperhead, but dangerous only when he struck without warning.

So presently, flinging a snarled curse at Singleton, he wheeled about and went striding away like a person on the verge of breaking into a run.

Singleton's latchkey let him into the house where he lived. It was a heart-breaking task to climb to his chamber, and as he dragged himself upward he was compelled to stop on each stair to rest. His heaving lungs made his breath whistle in his throat until he feared the sound would awaken every deeper beneath that roof. The hinges of his chamber door gave a mouselike squeak, but at last he was in the room. One shaded bulb was burning dimly, and the door to the room in which he had left his sleeping nurse was still ajar barely an inch or two. Through an open window came the sound of a distant clock, striking two.

Praying for a little more strength, he managed to undress and put his clothes away carefully in his wardrobe, His pistol was returned to its leather holster and tucked into the dresser drawer from which he had taken it. Getting into his pajamas, he crawled between the sheets, smothering a groan of triumphant relief.

CHAPTER IV. Deception and Fear

Again he awoke with the touch of a soft, cool hand upon his face. The white-capped nurse drew back quietly as he opened his eyes and looked up at her. She had the features of a saint. Her eyes were like limpid pools which a sad autumn sky was reflected.

The night had passed and the morning sun was sifting its gold in beneath loww-drawn window shades.

“I saw you struggling to save my soul,” said Singleton, “but the devil dragged you away. How did you escape from his clutches?”

“You've been dreaming,” she told him soothingly.

“I saw you when the great white beam swept the black sky,” he insisted. “You were all in white and your garments gleamed with spots of silver and gold. But the devil came and dragged you away.”