The Victorian Villains Megapack (44 page)

“Shouts, señor, and many screaming above the loud rattling of the shots. Men and muskets tossed like rags in a wind as they pitched into the chasm. I have met death in the face many a time, señor, but not like that!” the young fellow shuddered.

“By midday the Governor drew off his troops from the desperate encounter, and sat down to wait until his ally starvation should begin to tell upon the courage of the besieged. But though only one of them was wounded, the brigands began to grumble among themselves, and concoct plans for betraying their Chief.

“But one cannot deceive him, señor,” remarked Robledo, confidently. “When night fell he called them to him from the trenches, and read their hearts as a priest reads his book. They denied their treachery with oaths. Then my lord said if any would still follow him and fight, let them stand out on his side.” Isabelilla, crouched by the young robber, gazed up at him with blazing eyes.

“How many stood on his side? Tell me,” she said.

“But one only.”

“And that one? I know him! It was you, my Robledo!” exclaimed the girl.

He nodded, and she flung her arms round him in a fierce caress.

“My lord laughed,” Robledo crossed himself. “He laughed, but I feared his laughter. He drove those others from the cave, and bade them live or die as they would. For a while he sat silent, señor, and then he told me to follow him. We crept in the darkness over the peak, and down upon the other side, and my lord led me by goat tracks for a long time, and we came at length to a hole, and he made me enter. In truth, I feared to enter—but also I feared my lord.

“In a little time my lord lit a lantern. Señor, we were in a tunnel under the bridge of rock, and it grew smaller, till we were obliged to crawl as a wild cat crawls through the underbrush, and my breathing came hard. I know not how long we crept through the heart of the mountains; my head was bursting, and I vowed an offering to the patron saint of hunters, if I ever escaped to the free air again. At the last I found myself lying in a hollow of deep grass with the wind blowing over me.

“The moon was out, and through a screen of bushes we could see the bridge and the peak. The soldiers were flying a white flag and taking their wounded from the bridge, and a white flag came up out of the trenches on the Punta de Lanza. I feared for the anger of my lord. But he only laughed very softly, and pointed to one who lay on his face beside the end of the path and held talk with some of the civil guard.”

“They were betraying the peak—your own men?”

“Yes, señor. But the people of the Governor feared treachery, and would not pass over. In the end the civil guards rushed across—there are men of spirit in the civil guard,” Robledo remarked generously—“and by degrees nearly all the troops passed over and swarmed upon the Punta de Lanza, searching for my lord. Then I found that my lord was gone from beside me.

“Listen, señor. Don Hugo himself passed over, for I saw him. Indeed, when they knew the surrender was complete all would have gone to look at the cave of Don Q., for never before in all the history of the sierra have the expeditions found a dwelling of my lord’s. So I thought of these things within myself and wondered what my lord would do, when I was shaken by a horrible noise that deafened me. And the mountain vomited a leaping flame and shook with the pain of its torment. Great stones and rocks hurled upward, and for many minutes the voices that my lord of the mountains called to his aid, rang and roared in the sierra that is his.”

Lalor felt his own face pale.

“Go on!” he cried.

“I could hear men stumbling and groaning and crying on the saints. And then, señor, I think I slept, for I was weary. When the sun rose I wakened, and my lord was standing beside me in the thicket and bade me look down. I looked. Señor, it was a wonderful sight! The bridge was gone, and there upon the Punta de Lanza, upon the crags we had defended only yesterday, half an army was clinging, able neither to go forward, because of the precipices, nor to return because of the broken path across the chasm.

“After I had looked a long time, my lord spoke. ‘Robledo,’ he said, ‘you see that none may ever triumph over me. Tell that to thy friends. But many will say I am dead. You alone know I am not. Go to Castelleno and tell but two only—the Señor Lalor, and your Isabelilla. If you tell the secret to any other in Spain, I will know.’”

“And your lord, where is he?” questioned Lalor after a pause.

Robledo shook his head obstinately.

“I will tell my story to the end,” he answered, “My lord and I sat together in the hollow to rest, and my lord said I should not see him again for a long time. ‘Go you and marry your Isabelilla, and be happy if you can,’ he said. ‘But I do not think you will be so, for that woman has a fierce heart. And you had better sell your guitar or bury it, Robledo, for men do not serenade their wives, and such a wife as yours will not allow you to serenade others.’ So spoke my lord.”

Isabelilla sighed in the silence.

“My lord was the wisest of men,” she murmured.

“And have you no message whatever for me?” asked Lalor in some disappointment.

“Yes, señor,” Robledo took up a package from a corner. “My lord said, ‘Tell the señor that, though for the time men think me dead, I live still. Tell him that I have bequeathed to him a little autobiography of my life, which—if none hear of me again within a year—he will, for my sake, offer to the consideration of a publisher, in order that the world may know a little more of one of its greatest and most blameless men.’”

McALLISTER’S CHRISTMAS, by Arthur Train

Taken from
McAllister and His Double
(1905).

I

McAllister was out of sorts. All the afternoon he had sat in the club window and watched the Christmas shoppers hurrying by with their bundles. He thanked God he had no brats to buy moo-cows and bow-wows for. The very nonchalance of these victims of a fate that had given them families irritated him. McAllister was a clubman, pure and simple; that is to say though neither simple nor pure, he was a clubman and nothing more. He had occupied the same seat by the same window during the greater part of his earthly existence, and they were the same seat and window that his father had filled before him. His select and exclusive circle called him “Chubby,” and his five-and-forty years of terrapin and cocktails had given him a graceful rotundity of person that did not belie the name. They had also endowed him with a cheerful though somewhat florid countenance, and a permanent sense of well-being.

As the afternoon wore on and the pedestrians became fewer, McAllister sank deeper and deeper into gloom. The club was deserted. Everybody had gone out of town to spend Christmas with someone else, and the Winthrops, on whom he had counted for a certainty, had failed for some reason to invite him. He had waited confidently until the last minute, and now he was stranded, alone.

It began to snow softly, gently. McAllister threw himself disconsolately into a leathern armchair by the smouldering logs on the six-foot hearth. A servant in livery entered, pulled down the shades, and after touching a button that threw a subdued radiance over the room, withdrew noiselessly.

“Come back here, Peter!” growled McAllister. “Anybody in the club?”

“Only Mr. Tomlinson, sir.”

McAllister swore under his breath.

“Yes, sir,” replied Peter.

McAllister shot a quick glance at him.

“I didn’t say anything. You may go.”

This time Peter got almost to the door.

“Er—Peter; ask Mr. Tomlinson if he will dine with me.”

Peter presently returned with the intelligence that Mr. Tomlinson would be delighted.

“Of course,” grumbled McAllister to himself. “No one ever knew Tomlinson to refuse anything.”

He ordered dinner, and then took up an evening paper in which an effort had been made to conceal the absence of news by summarizing the achievements of the past year. Staring head-lines invited his notice to:

A YEAR OF PROGRESS.

What the Tenement-House Commission Has Accomplished
.

FURTHER NEED OF PRISON REFORM.

He threw down the paper in disgust. This reform made him sick. Tenements and prisons! Why were the papers always talking about tenements and prisons? They were a great deal better than the people who lived in them deserved. He recalled Wilkins, his valet, who had stolen his black pearl scarf-pin. It increased his ill-humor. Hang Wilkins! The thief was probably out by this time and wearing the pin. It had been a matter of jest among his friends that the servant had looked not unlike his master. McAllister winced at the thought.

“Dinner is served,” said Peter.

An hour and a half later, Tomlinson and McAllister, having finished a sumptuous repast, stared stupidly at each other across their liqueurs. They were stuffed and bored. Tomlinson was a thin man who knew everything positively. McAllister hated him. He always felt when in his company like the woman who invariably answered her husband’s remarks by “’Tain’t so! It’s just the opposite!” Tomlinson was trying to make conversation by repeating assertively what he had read in the evening press.

“Now, our prisons,” he announced authoritatively. “Why, it is outrageous! The people are crowded in like cattle; the food is loathsome. It’s a disgrace to a civilized city!”

This was the last straw to McAllister.

“Look here,” he snapped back at Tomlinson, who shrank behind his cigar at the vehemence of the attack, “what do you know about it? I tell you it’s all rot! It’s all politics! Our tenements are all right, and so are our prisons. The law of supply and demand regulates the tenements; and who pays for the prisons, I’d like to know? We pay for ’em, and the scamps that rob us live in ’em for nothing. The Tombs is a great deal better than most second-class hotels on the Continent. I
know
! I had a valet once that— Oh, what’s the use! I’d be glad to spend Christmas in no worse place. Reform! Stuff! Don’t tell me!” He sank back purple in the face.

“Oh, of course—if you know!” Tomlinson hesitated politely, remembering that McAllister had signed for the dinner.

“Well, I
do
know,” affirmed McAllister.

II

“No-el! No-el! No-el! No-el!” rang out the bells, as McAllister left the club at twelve o’clock and started down the avenue.

“No-el! No-el!” hummed McAllister. “Pretty old air!” he thought. He had almost forgotten that it was Christmas morning. As he felt his way gingerly over the stone sidewalks, the bells were ringing all around him. First one chime, then another. “No-el! No-el! No-el! No-el!” They ceased, leaving the melody floating on the moist night air.

The snow began to fall irregularly in patchy flakes, then gradually turned to rain. First a soft, wet mist, that dimmed the electric lights and shrouded the hotel windows; then a fine sprinkle; at last the chill rain of a winter’s night. McAllister turned up his coat-collar and looked about for a cab. It was too late. He hurried hastily down the avenue. Soon a welcome sight met his eye—a coupé, a night-hawk, crawling slowly down the block, on the lookout, no doubt, for belated Christmas revellers. Without superfluous introduction McAllister made a dive for the door, shouted his address, and jumped inside. The driver, but half-roused from his lethargy, muttered something unintelligible and pulled in his horse. At the same moment the dark figure of a man swiftly emerged from a side street, ran up to the cab, opened the door, threw in a heavy object upon McAllister’s feet, and followed it with himself.

“Let her go!” he cried, slamming the door. The driver, without hesitation, lashed his horse and started at a furious gallop down the slippery avenue.

Then for the first time the stranger perceived McAllister. There was a muttered curse, a gleam of steel as they flashed by a street-lamp, and the clubman felt the cold muzzle of a revolver against his cheek.

“Speak, and I’ll blow yer head off!”

The cab swayed and swerved in all directions, and the driver retained his seat with difficulty. McAllister, clinging to the sides of the rocking vehicle, expected every moment to be either shot or thrown out and killed.

“Don’t move!” hissed his companion.

McAllister tried with difficulty not to move.

Suddenly there came a shrill whistle, followed by the clatter of hoofs. A figure on horseback dashed by. The driver, endeavoring to rein in his now maddened beast, lost his balance and pitched overboard. There was a confusion of shouts, a blue flash, a loud report. The horse sprang into the air and fell, kicking, upon the pavement; the cab crashed upon its side; amid a shower of glass the door parted company with its hinges, and the stranger, placing his heel on McAllister’s stomach, leaped quickly into the darkness. A moment later, having recovered a part of his scattered senses, our hero, thrusting himself through the shattered framework of the cab, staggered to his feet. He remembered dimly afterward having expected to create a mild sensation among the spectators by announcing, in response to their polite inquiries as to his safety, that he was “quite uninjured.” Instead, however, the glare of a policeman’s lantern was turned upon his dishevelled countenance, and a hoarse voice shouted:

“Throw up your hands!”

He threw them up. Like the Phœnix rising from its ashes, McAllister emerged from the débris which surrounded him. On either side of the cab he beheld a policeman with a levelled revolver. A mounted officer stood sentinel beside the smoking body of the horse.

“No tricks, now!” continued the voice. “Pull your feet out of that mess, and keep your hands up! Slip on the nippers, Tom. Better go through him here. They always manage to lose somethin’ goin’ over.”

McAllister wondered where “Over” was. Before he could protest, he was unceremoniously seated upon the body of the dead horse and the officers were going rapidly through his clothes.

“Thought so!” muttered Tom, as he drew out of McAllister’s coat-pocket a revolver and a jimmy. “Just as well to unballast ’em at the start.” A black calico mask and a small bottle filled with a colorless liquid followed.

Tom drew a quick breath.

“So you’re one of those, are ye?” he added with an oath.

The victim of this astounding adventure had not yet spoken. Now he stammered:

“Look here! Who do you think I am? This is all a mistake.”

Tom did not deign to reply.

The officer on horseback had dismounted and was poking among the pieces of cab.

“What’s this here?” he inquired, as he dragged a large bundle covered with black cloth into the circle of light, and, untying a bit of cord, poured its contents upon the pavement. A glittering sil
ver service rolled out upon the asphalt and reflected the glow of the lanterns.

“Gee! Look at all the swag!” cried Tom. “I wonder where he melts it up.”

Faintly at first, then nearer and nearer, came the harsh clanging of the “hurry up” wagon.

“Get up!” directed Tom, punctuating his order with mild kicks. Then, as the driver reined up the panting horses alongside, the officer grabbed his prisoner by the coat-collar and yanked him to his feet.

“Jump in,” he said roughly.

“My God!” exclaimed our friend half-aloud, “where are they going to take me?”

“To the Tombs—for Christmas!” answered Tom.

III

McAllister, hatless, stumbled into the wagon and was thrust forcibly into a corner. Above the steady drum of the rain upon the waterproof cover he could hear the officers outside packing up the silverware and discussing their capture.

The hot japanned tin of the wagon-lamps smelled abominably. The heavy breathing of the horses, together with the sickening odor of rubber and damp straw, told him that this was no dream, but a frightful reality.

“
He’s a bad un!” came Tom’s voice in tones of caution. “You can see his lay is the gentleman racket. Wait till he gets to the precinct and hear the steer he’ll give the sergeant. He’s a wise un, and don’t you forget it!”

As the wagon started, the officers swung on to the steps behind. McAllister, crouching in the straw by the driver’s seat, tried to understand what had happened. Apart from a few bruises and a cut on his forehead he had escaped injury, and, while considerably shaken up, was physically little the worse for his adventure. His head, however, ached badly. What he suffered from most was a new and strange sensation of helplessness. It was as if he had stepped into another world, in which he—McAllister, of the Colophon Club—did not belong and the language of which he did not speak. The ignominy of his position crushed him. Never again, should this disgrace become known, could he bring himself to enter the portals of the club. To be the hero of an exciting adventure with a burglar in a runaway cab was one matter, but to be arrested, haled to prison and locked up, was quite another. Once before the proper authorities, it would be simple enough to explain who and what he was, but the question that troubled him was how to avoid publicity. He remembered the bills in his pocket. Fortunately they were still th
ere. In spite of the handcuffs, he wormed them out and surreptitiously held up the roll. The guard started visibly, and, turning away his head, allowed McAllister to thrust the wad into his hand.

“Can’t I square this, somehow?” whispered our hero, hesitatingly.

The guard broke into a loud guffaw. “Get on to him!” he laughed. “He’s at it already, Tom. Look at the dough he took out of his pants! You’re right about his lay.” He turned fiercely upon McAllister, who, dazed by this sudden turn of affairs, once more retreated into his corner.

The three officers counted the money ostentatiously by the light of a lantern.

“Eighty plunks! Thought we was cheap, didn’t he?” remarked the guard scornfully. “No; eighty plunks won’t square this job for you! It’ll take nearer eight years. No more monkey business, now! You’ve struck the wrong combine!”

McAllister saw that he had been guilty of a terrible
faux pas
. Any explanation to these officers was clearly impossible. With an official it would be different. He had once met a police commissioner at dinner, and remembered that he had seemed really almost like a gentleman.

The wagon drew up at a police station, and present
ly McAllister found himself in a small room, at one end of which iron bars ran from floor to ceiling. A kerosene lamp cast a dim light over a weather-beaten desk, behind which, half-asleep, reclined an officer on night duty. A single other chair and four large octagonal stone receptacles were the only remaining furniture.

The man behind the desk opened his eyes, yawned, and stared stupidly at the officers. A clock directly overhead struck “one” with harsh, vibrant clang.

“Wot yer got?” inquired the sergeant.

“A second-story man,” answered the guard.

“He took to a cab,” explained Tom, “and him and his partner give us a fierce chase down the avenoo. O’Halloran shot the horse, and the cab was all knocked to hell. The other fellow clawed out before we could nab him. But we got this one all right.”

“Hi, there, McCarthy!” shouted the sergeant to someone in the dim vast beyond. “Come and open up.” He examined McAllister with a degree of interest. “Quite a swell guy!” he commented. “Them dress clothes must have been real pretty onc’t.”

McAllister stood with soaked and rumpled hair, hatless and collarless, his coat torn and splashed, and his shirt-bosom bloody and covered with mud. He
wanted to cry, for the first time in thirty-five years.

“Wot’s yer name?” asked the sergeant.

The prisoner remained stiffly mute. He would have suffered anything rather than disclose himself.

“Where do yer live?”

Still no answer. The sergeant gave vent to a grim laugh.