THE RESCUE

Precisely at the hour of eight that night, a huge six-cylinder limousine drew up at the gate of Number Twenty-six Maple Avenue. Half-way down the block, well in the shadow of the trees which gave to the avenue its name, two more cars and a motor ambulance had halted.

Doctor Alwyn, who had been excitedly awaiting the arrival of the detective, was out of his door and down the path almost before the car had pulled up at his gate. Within it were three men Blaine himself and two others whom the Doctor did not know. Henry Blaine greeted him, introduced his operatives, Ross and Suraci, and they started swiftly upon their journey.

The doctor was plainly nervous, but something in the grim, silent, determined air of his companions imparted itself to him. The lights in the interior of the car had not been turned on, nor the shades lowered, and after a few tentative remarks which were not encouraged, Doctor Alwyn turned to the window and watched the brightly lighted cross streets dart by with ever-increasing speed. Once he glanced back, and started, casting a perturbed glance at the immovable face of the detective, as he remarked:

“Mr. Blaine, are you aware that we are being followed?”

“Oh, yes. Give yourself no uneasiness on that score, Doctor. They are two of my machines, filled with my men, and a Walton ambulance for Mr. Hamilton. We will reach Mac Alarney’s retreat in an hour, now. There will be a show of trouble, of course, and we may have to use force, but I do not anticipate any very strenuous opposition to our removal of your patient, when Mac is convinced that the game is up. No harm will come to you, at any rate; you will be well guarded.”

The Doctor drew himself up with simple dignity, quite free from bombast or arrogance.

“I am not afraid,” he replied, quietly. “I am armed, and am fully prepared to help protect my patient.”

“Armed?” the detective asked, sharply.

For answer, Doctor Alwyn drew from his capacious coat pocket a huge, old-fashioned pistol, and held it out to Blaine. The latter took it from him without ceremony.

“A grave mistake, Doctor. I am glad you told me, in time. Fire-arms are unnecessary for your own protection, and would be a positive menace to our plans for getting your patient safely away. Gun-play is the last thing we must think of; my men will attend to all that, if it comes to a show-down.”

The Doctor watched him in silence as he slipped the pistol under one of the side seats. If his confidence in the great man beside him faltered for the moment, he gave no sign, but turned his attention again to the window. They were now rapidly traversing the suburbs, where the houses were widely separated by stretches of vacant lots, and the streets deserted and but dimly lighted. Soon they rattled over a narrow railroad bridge, and Doctor Alwyn exclaimed:

“By George! This is the way we went last night! With all my careful thought, I forgot about that bridge until this moment!”

Minutes passed, long minutes which seemed like hours to the overstrained nerves of the Doctor, while they speeded through the open country.

All at once, from just behind them came a hideous, wailing cry, which swelled in volume to a screech and ended abruptly.

Doctor Alwyn grasped Blaine’s arm.

“The motor-horn!” he gasped. “The car I was in last night!”

The detective nodded shortly, without speaking, and leaning forward, stared fixedly out of the window. A long, low-bodied limousine appeared, creeping slowly up, inch by inch, until it was fairly abreast of them. The curtain at the window was lowered, and the chauffeur sat immovable, with his face turned from them, as the two cars whirled side by side along the hard, glistening road. Blaine leaned forward, and pressed the electric bell rapidly twice, and there began a curious game. The other car put on extra speed and darted ahead their own shot forward and kept abreast of it. It slowed suddenly, and made as if to swerve in behind; Blaine’s driver slowed also, until both cars almost came to a grinding halt. Three times these maneuvers were repeated, and then there occurred what the detective had evidently anticipated.

The curtain in the other car shot up; the window descended with a bang and a huge, burly figure leaned half-way out. Henry Blaine noiselessly lowered their own window, and suddenly flashed an electric pocket light full in the heavy-jowled face, empurpled with inarticulate rage.

“Is that your man?” he asked, quickly.

“The one with the three fingers! Yes! That’s the man!” whispered the Doctor, hoarsely.

“That’s Mac Alarney.” Blaine pressed the electric bell again, and their own car lunged forward in a spurt of speed which left the other hopelessly behind, although it was manifestly making desperate efforts to overtake and pass them.

“Do you suppose he suspected our errand?” the Doctor asked.

“Suspected? Lord bless you, man, he knows! He had already passed the two open cars full of my men, and the ambulance. He’d give ten years of his life to beat us out and reach his place ahead of us to-night, but he hasn’t a chance in the world unless we blow out a tire, and if we do we’ll all go back in the ambulance together, what’s left of us!”

Even as he spoke, there came a swift change in the even drone of their engine, a jarring, discordant note, slight but unmistakable, and a series of irregular thudding knocks.

“One of the cylinder’s missing, sir.” Ross turned to the detective, and spoke with eager anxiety.

“We’ll make it on five.” The quiet confidence in Blaine’s voice, with its underlying note of grim, indomitable determination, seemed to communicate itself to the other men, and no further word was said, although they all heard the thunder of the approaching car behind.

The Doctor restrained with difficulty the impulse to look backward, and instead kept his eyes sternly fixed upon the trees and hedge-rows flying past, more sharply defined shadows in the lesser dark.

Then, all at once, the shriek of a locomotive burst upon his ears, and the roar and rattle of a train going over a trestle.

“The railroad bridge!” he cried, excitedly. “We’re there, Mr. Blaine!”

The noise of the passing train had scarcely died away, when from just behind them the hideous shriek of Mac Alarney’s motor-horn rose blastingly three times upon the night air, the last fainter than the others, as if the pursuing car had dropped back.

“He’s beaten! He couldn’t keep up the pace, much less better it,” Blaine remarked. “Those three blasts sounded a warning to the guards of the retreat. It was probably a signal agreed upon in case of danger. We’re in for it now!”

They swerved abruptly, between two high stone gateposts, and up a broad sweep of graveled driveway. Lights gleamed suddenly in the windows of the hitherto darkened house, which loomed up gaunt and squarely defined against the sullen sky.

“Your men, in the other cars ” Doctor Alwyn stammered, as they came to a crunching stop before the door. “Will they arrive in time to be of service? Mac Alarney will reach here first

“My men will be at his heels,” returned Blaine, shortly. “They held back purposely, acting under my instructions. Come on now.”

He sprang from the car and up the steps, and the Doctor found himself following, with Ross and Suraci on either side. The driver turned their car around and ran it upon the lawn, its searchlight trained on the circling drive, its engine throbbing like the throat of an impatient horse.

In response to the detective’s vigorous ring, the door was opened by a short, stocky man, at sight of whom the Doctor gave a start of surprise, but did not falter. The man was clad in the white coat of a hospital attendant, beneath which the great, bunchy muscles of his shoulders and upper arms were plainly visible.

“Hello, Al!” exclaimed Blaine, briskly.

The veins on the thick bull neck seemed to swell, but there was no sign of recognition in the stolid jaw. Only the lower lip protruded as the man set his jaw, and the little, close-set, porcine eyes narrowed.

“You were a rubber at the Hoffmeister Baths the last time I saw you,” went on the detective, smoothly, as he deftly inserted his foot between the door and jamb. “You remember me, of course. I’m Henry Blaine. My friends and I have come here to-night on a confidential errand, and I’d like a word in private with you.”

The man he called “Al” muttered something which sounded like a disclaimer. Then he caught sight of the Doctor’s face over Blaine’s shoulder, and a spasm of black rage seized him.

“Oh, it’s you, is it? You’ve snitched, d n you! I’ll do for you, for this!”

He lunged forward, but Blaine, with a strength of which the Doctor would not a moment before have thought him possessed, grasped the ex-rubber and flung him backward, advancing into the hall at the same time, while his two operatives and the Doctor crowded in behind him.

“Al” staggered, regained his balance, and came on in a blind rush, bull neck lowered, long, monkey-like arms taut and rigid for the first blow. Blaine set himself to meet it, but it was never delivered. At that instant the whirring roar of a high-powered car, unmuffled, sounded in all their ears, and a second machine drew up at the steps.

Its single passenger flung himself out and bounded up to the door.

“What in h l does this mean?” he bellowed. “Didn’t you hear my horn?”

He stopped abruptly in sheer amazement, for Blaine had turned, with beaming face and outstretched hand.

“Mac Alarney!” he exclaimed. “Thank the Lord you’ve come! This thick-skulled boob wouldn’t give me time for a word, and every minute is precious! Come where I can talk to you, quick!”

Then, as if catching sight of the car in which Mac Alarney had come, for the first time his eyes widened and he seemed struggling to suppress an outburst of mirth.

“Great guns! Is that your car, yours? Do you mean to tell me it was you I was playing with, back there on the road? When I flashed the light in your face I was sure you were Donnelley!”

As he uttered the name of the Chief of Police, Mac Alarney involuntarily stepped backward, and a wave of startled apprehension swept the amazement from his face, to be succeeded in turn by the primitive craftiness of the brute instinct on guard.

“And what may you be wanting here, Mr. Blaine?” he demanded, warily.

“To beat the police to it!” Blaine replied in a gruff whisper, adding as he jerked his thumb in the direction of the waiting Al. “Get rid of him! We haven’t got a minute, I tell you!”

“The police!” repeated the other man, sharply. “Sure, I passed two cars full of plain-clothes bulls, with an ambulance trailing them! You can go now, Al.”

Without giving the burly proprietor of the retreat time to discover him for himself, Blaine pulled the astonished Doctor forward.

“Here’s Doctor Alwyn, whom you brought here last night. The police trailed you, and got his number, but fortunately when they began to question him, he smelled a rat in the whole business and came to me. They told him a man named Paddington had double-crossed you, but of course I knew that was all rot, the minute I’d doped it out. You’ve got a fortune under your roof this minute, and you don’t know it, Mac! That’s the best joke of all! You’re entertaining an angel unawares!”

“Say, what’re you gettin’ at, Mr. Blaine?” Mac Alarney’s brows drew close together, and he stared levelly from beneath them at the detective’s exultant face.

“That young man with the fractured skull in the corner room upstairs the one you brought Doctor Alwyn to attend last night when you know who he is you’re going up in the air! I don’t know who brought him here, or what flim-flam line of talk they gave you, but it’s a wonder you haven’t guessed from the start who he was, with the papers full of it for days! Of course they must have given you a lot of money to get him well, and hush it all up, when you were able to pay the Doctor, here, five thousand dollars, but whatever they paid, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the reward they expected to get. Mac, it’s Ramon Hamilton you’ve got upstairs!”

Blaine stepped back himself, as if the better to observe the effect of what he manifestly seemed to believe would be astounding news, and clumsily and cautiously the other tried to play up to his lead.

“Ramon Hamilton!” he echoed. “You’re crazy, Blaine! You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“You’d better believe I do! See this photograph?” He held the tiny thumbnail picture before Mac Alarney’s amazed eyes. “The Doctor took it last night, at the bedside of the young man upstairs, when you thought he was feeling his pulse. That watch of his was in reality a camera.”

With a roar, the burly man turned upon the erect, unshrinking figure of the gray-haired doctor, but Blaine halted him.

“Not so fast, Mac. If it hadn’t been for him, you’d be in the hands of the police now, remember, and they’ve only been waiting to get something on you, as you know. You can’t blame Doctor Alwyn for being suspicious, after all the mysterious fuss you made bringing him here. I know Ramon Hamilton well, and I recognized his face the instant it was handed to me! I’m on the case, myself Miss Lawton, the girl he’s going to marry, engaged me. I might have come and tried to take him away from you, so as to cop all the reward myself, but as it is, we’ll split fifty-fifty unless the police get here while we’re wasting time talking! Man, don’t you see how you’ve been done?”

“You can bet your life I do that is, if the young man I’ve got upstairs is the guy you think he is,” he added, in an afterthought of cautious self-protection. The acid of the hint that Paddington had betrayed him to the police had burned deep, however, as Blaine had anticipated, and he walked blindly into the snare laid for him. “I’ll tell you all about how he come to be here, later, and I’ll fix them that tried to pull the wool over my eyes! Now, for the love of Heaven, Mr. Blaine, tell me what to do with him before the bulls come! Thank God, they can search the rest of the place, and welcome I’ve got nothin’ here but a half-dozen souses, and two light-weights, training.”

“That’s all right! You’re safe if we can get him away without loss of time. That ambulance you saw don’t belong to the police; it’s mine. I saw them first, away back in the outskirts of the city, and I ordered it to drop behind and take the short cut up through Wheelbarrow Lane. It’s waiting now under the clump of elms by the brook, up the road a little you know the spot! Bring him down and we’ll take him there in my car. You come too, of course, and Al, and help load him into the ambulance. Then Al can come back, if you don’t want to trust him, and you go on with us, back to the city.”

“Where you goin’ to take him?” asked Mac Alarney, warily. “You can’t hide him from them in town.”

“Who’s talking about hiding him!” Blaine demanded, with contemptuous impatience. “Your brain must be taking a rest cure, Mac! We’ll go straight to Miss Lawton, deliver the goods and get the reward, before they beat us to it! It’ll be easy to explain matters to her; she won’t care much about the story as long as she’s got him again alive, and at that you’ve only got to stick to the truth, and I’m right there to back you up in it. Any fool could realize that you’d have produced him and claimed the reward, if you had known who he actually was. Whoever brought him here gave you the wrong dope and you fell for it, that’s all For the Lord’s sake, hurry!”

“You’re right, Mr. Blaine. It’s the only thing to do now. I fell for their dope, all right, but they’ll fall harder before I’m through with them! Lend me your two men, here. There’s no use having any of mine except Al get wise. You and the Doctor wait in the car, and we’ll bring him out.”

Henry Blaine motioned to his operatives, with a curt wave of his hand, to follow Mac Alarney, and turning, he went out of the door and down the steps to his car, with the Doctor at his heels.

“You don’t suppose that he saw through your story, do you, Mr. Blaine?” the latter queried in an anxious whisper, as they settled themselves to wait with what patience they could muster. “Could that suggestion of his have been merely a ruse to separate your assistants from you?”

The detective smiled.

“Hardly, Doctor. It’s part of my profession to have made a study of human nature, and Mac Alarney’s type is an open book to me. Added to that, I’ve known the man himself for years, in an offhand way. I’ve got his confidence, and now that he realizes he is in a hole, he’s a child in my hands, even if he thinks for the moment that as a detective I’m about the poorest specimen in captivity. Steady now, here they come!”

The large double doors had been thrown wide open and Mac Alarney, the burly Al, and the two operatives appeared, bearing between them a limp, unconscious, blanket-swathed form. As they eased it into the back seat of the limousine, Blaine flashed his electric pocket light upon the sleeping face.

“I knew I wasn’t mistaken!” he whispered exultantly to Mac Alarney and the Doctor. “It’s young Hamilton, all right. Now, let’s be off!”

The others crowded in, and they whirled down the drive and out once more upon the wide State road, in the opposite direction to that in which they had come. A bare half-mile away, and they came abruptly upon the ambulance, screened by the clump of naked elms at the side of the road.

“You get in first, Doctor,” ordered Blaine, significantly. “You’ve got to look after your patient now.”

As the Doctor obeyed, Mac Alarney, with a shrewd gleam in his eyes, turned to the detective.

“I think I’d better ride with him, too, Mr. Blaine,” he observed. “You don’t know who you can trust these days. Your ambulance driver may give you the slip.”

“All right, Mac!” Blaine assented, with bluff heartiness. “We’ll both ride with him! Did you think I’d try to double-cross you, too? I can’t blame you, after the rotten deal that’s been handed to you, but we won’t waste time arguing. Here’s the stretcher. Come on, shove him in!”

The Doctor had been wondering when the denouement of this adventure would be. Now it came without warning, with a startling suddenness which left him dazed and agape.

The inert body of his patient was laid carefully beside him, and he glanced out of the ambulance door in time to see Mac Alarney dismiss his burly assistant, and turn to enter the vehicle. His foot was already upon the lowest step, when the Doctor saw Blaine raise his hand to his lips. A short, sharp blast of a whistle pierced the air, and in an instant a dozen men had sprung out of the darkness and leaped upon the two surprised miscreants. Then ensued a struggle, brief but awful to the onlooker in its silent, grim ferocity, as the two separate knots of men battled each about their central orbit. The scuffle of many feet on the hard-packed road, the mutter of curses, the dull thud of blows, the hoarse, strangulated breathing of men fighting against odds to the last ounce of their strength, came to the Doctor’s startled ears in a confused babel of half-suppressed sound, with the purring drone of the two engines as an undertone.

A minute, and it was all over. The thick-set Al went down like a felled ox, and Mac Alarney wavered under an avalanche of blows and crumpled to his knees. Handcuffed and securely bound, the two were bundled into Blaine’s waiting car.

“Paddington never double-crossed me!” groaned Mac Alarney, before the door closed upon him. “But you did, Blaine! Just as I meant to get him, I’ll get you! I fell for your d d scheme, and since you’ve got the goods on me, I suppose I’ll go up, but God help you when I come out! I can wait it’ll be the better when it comes!”

“But the others ” queried the Doctor, as he and Blaine, with the injured man between them, settled down in the ambulance for the slow, careful journey back to the city. “That third man who came for me last night the one with the French accent and the cough and the rest who are in this kidnaping plot? Will you get them, too?”

“Ross and Suraci are enough to guard Mac Alarney and Al on their way to the lock-up,” the detective responded quietly. “The others will go on up to the sanitarium and clean the place out. They’ll get French Louis, all right. And as for the rest who are concerned in this, Doctor Alwyn, be sure that I intend to see that they get their just deserts.”

“And it is said that you have never lost a case!” the Doctor remarked.

“I shall not lose this one.” Blaine spoke with quiet confidence, unmixed with any boastfulness. “I cannot lose; there is too much at stake.”

Late that night, Anita Lawton was awakened from a tortured, feverish dream by the violent ringing of the telephone bell at her bedside. The voice of Henry Blaine, fraught with a latent tension of suppressed elation, came to her over the wire.

“Miss Lawton, I shall come to you in twenty minutes. Please be prepared to go out with me in my car. No, don’t ask me any questions now. I will explain when I reach you.”

His arrival found her dressed and restlessly pacing the floor of the reception-room, in a fever of mingled hope and anxiety.

“What is it, Mr. Blaine?” she cried, seizing his hand and pressing it convulsively in both of hers. “You have news for me! I can read it in your face! Ramon

“Is safe!” he responded. “Can you bear a sudden shock now, Miss Lawton? After all that has gone before, can you withstand one more blow?”

“Oh, tell me! Tell me quickly! I can endure everything, if only Ramon is safe!”

“I found him to-night, and brought him back to the city. I have come to take you to him.”

“But why why did he not come with you? Does he not realize what I have suffered that every moment of suspense, of waiting for him, is an added torture?”

“He realizes nothing.” Blaine hesitated, and then went on: “It is best for you to know the truth at once. Mr. Hamilton has suffered a severe injury. He is lying almost at the point of death, but the physicians say he has a chance, a good chance, for recovery, now that he is where he can receive expert care and attention. How he came by his shattered skull he has a fracture at the base of the brain we shall not know until he recovers sufficient consciousness to tell us. At present, he is in a state of coma, recognizing no one, nothing that goes on about him. He will not rouse to hear your voice; he will not know of your presence; but I thought that it would comfort you to see him, to feel that everything is being done for him that can be done.”

“Ah, yes!” she sobbed. “Take me to him, Mr. Blaine! Thank God, thank God that you have found him! Just to look upon his dear face again, to touch him, to know that at least he still lives! He must not die, now; he cannot die! The God who has permitted you to restore him to me, would not allow that! Take me to him!”

So it was that a few short minutes later, Henry Blaine tasted the first real fruit of his victory, as he stood aside in the quiet hospital room, and with dimmed eyes beheld the scene before him. The wide, white bed, the silent, motionless, bandage-swathed figure upon it, the slender, dark-robed, kneeling girl only that, and the echo of her low-breathed sob of love and gratitude. His own great, fatherly heart swelled with the joy of work well done, of the happiness he had brought to a spirit all but broken, and a sure, triumphant premonition that the struggle still before him would be crowned with victory.