THE INNOCENT BYSTANDER
There was not a sound.That stillness, weird, unnerving, that permeated, as it were, everywhere through that mysterious house, was, if that were possible, accentuated now.The four masked men in evening dress, five including their leader, for the man who had appeared in that other room with the rabbit was not here, were as silent, as motionless, as the dead man who was lashed there in the chair.And to Jimmie Dale it seemed at first as though his brain, stunned and stupefied at the shock, refused its functions, and left him groping blindly, vaguely, with only a sort of dull, subconscious realisation of menace and a deadly peril, imminent, hanging over him.
He tried to rouse himself mentally, to prod his brain to action, to pit it in a fight for life against these self-confessed criminals and murderers with their mask of culture, who surrounded him now.
Was there a way out? What was it the Tocsin had said--"the most powerful and pitiless organisation of criminals the world has ever known--the stake a fortune of millions--her life!" There had, indeed, been no overemphasis in the words she had used! They had taken pains themselves to make that ominously clear, these men!
Every detail of the strange house, with its luxurious furnishings, its cleverly contrived appointments, breathed a horribly suggestive degree of power, a deadly purpose, and an organisation swayed by a master mind; and, grim evidence of the merciless, inexorable length to which they would go, was the ghastly white face of the dead chauffeur, bound hand and foot, in the chair before him!
That EMPTY glass in the hand of one of the men! He could not take his eyes from it--except as his eyes were drawn magnetically to that FULL glass in the hand of one of the others.What height of sardonic irony! He was to drink that other glass, to die because he refused to answer questions that for years, with every resource at his command, risking his liberty, his wealth, his name, his life, with everything that he cared for thrown into the scales, he had struggled to solve--and failed!
And then the leader spoke.
"Mr.Dale," he said, with cold significance, "I regret to admit that your pseudo taxicab driver was so ill-advised as to refuse to answer the SAME questions that I have put to you."Five to one! That was the only way out--and it was hopeless.It was the only way out, because, convinced that he could answer those questions if he wanted to, these men were in deadly earnest; it was hopeless, because they were--five to one! And probably there were as many more, twice or three times as many more within call.But what did it matter how many more there were! He could fight until he was overpowered, that was all he could do, and the five could accomplish that.Still, if he could knock the full glass out of that man's hand, and gain the door, then perhaps--he turned quickly, as the door opened.It was as though they had read his thoughts.Anumber of men were grouped outside in the corridor, then the door closed again with a cordon ranged against it inside the room; and at the same instant his arms and wrists were caught in a powerful grasp by the two men immediately behind him, who all along had enacted the role of guards.
Again the leader spoke.
"I will repeat the questions," he said sharply."Where is the woman whose ring was found on that man there in the chair? And where is the package that you two men had with you in the taxicab to-night?"Jimmie Dale glanced from the tall, straight, immaculately clothed figure of the speaker, from the threatening smile on the set lips that just showed under the edge of the mask, to the dead man in the chair.He had faced the prospect of death before many times, but it had come with the heat of passion accompanying it, it had come quickly, abruptly, with every faculty called into action to combat it, without time to dwell upon it, to sift, weigh, or measure its meaning, and if there had been fear it had been subordinate to other emotions.But it was different now.He could not, of course, answer those questions; nor, he was doggedly conscious, would he have answered them if he could--and there was no middle course.
Death, within the next few moments, stared him in the face; and it seemed curiously irrelevant that, in a sort of unnatural calmness, he should be attempting to analyse his feelings and emotions concerning it.All his life it had seemed to him that the acme of human mental torture was the cell of a condemned criminal, with the horror of its hopelessness, with the time to dwell upon it; and that the acme of that torture itself must be that awful moment immediately preceding execution, when anticipation at last was to merge into soul-sickening reality.
Strange that thought should come! Strange that he should be framing a brain picture of such a scene, vivid, minute in detail! No--not strange.He was picturing himself.The analogy was not perfect, it was true, he had not had the months, weeks, days and hours of suspense; but it was perfect enough to bring home to him with appalling force the realisation of his position.He was standing as a condemned man might stand in those last, final moments, those moments which he had imagined must be the most terrible that could exist in life; but that dismay of soul, the horror, the terror were not his--there was, instead, a smouldering fury, a passionate amazement that it was his own life that was threatened.It seemed impossible that it could be his voice that was speaking now in such quiet, measured tones.
"Is it worth while, will it convince you now, any more than before, to repeat that there is some mistake here? I am no more able to answer your questions than you are yourselves.I never saw that man in the chair there in my life until the moment that I hailed him in his cab to-night.I do not know who the woman is to whom that ring belongs, much less do I know where she is.And if there was a package of any sort in the taxicab, as you state, I never saw it."The lips under the mask curved into a lupine smile.