CHAPTER

SO FAR AS GARFIELD and the other Criminal Investigation Department men who were watching the place were concerned, Eston had estimated the situation well when he had turned loose a score of people for them to deal with. The Chief Inspector had too great a respect for the capacity of his antagonist to do anything hastily or to jump to any assumptions.

      Among the scattered crew emerging from the house might be Eston himself. He had had experience of the crook's histrionic ability. Therefore he played safety. Men and women alike were questioned, scrutinized, and, despite their protests, hurried off to the nearest police station. The provision of escorts woefully skeletonized Garfield's meager force, but he calculated that he could well afford to wait. There were just enough men to watch the place but not enough to raid it. No one puts a ferret in a rabbit-hole, until the bolt holes are safely watched.

      The inspector was, perhaps, a little, concerned about Silverdale whose continued absence without giving the signal was, to say the least of it, disconcerting. For the time, however, Jimmie must look after himself. Garfield was not going to lose his quarry by pouncing too hastily.

      One by one his men trickled back to their posts, accompanied by other detectives from the divisional staffs of local police stations. Garfield took a turn up Cello Street keenly alert to discover any signs behind the closely curtained windows of the gambling house. There was nothing. From outside, at least, the place was dead. Garfield returned to his post at the corner.

      ""II not wait any longer for Silverdale, he told Wade. "We'll make a move. You take some men and try the back street."

      Accompanied by the divisional detective inspector of the district and a couple of other officers, he passed quickly back along the street and mounted the steps of the house. The signal that had secured Silverdale's admission produced no reply. Garfield had scarcely expected that it would. The wholesale migration of staff and of patrons of the gambling house had been clear proof that the inmates had taken alarm. Nevertheless, formalities had to be complied with. Garfield thundered with the knocker and gave repeated rings. Then he lifted his heavily shod foot and kicked at the solid door.

      "Look!" said the divisional man suddenly and Garfield stepped back to follow the finger that pointed upwards. A thin trickle of smoke was emerging from an open second-floor window. Garfield ripped out a swear word. He realized instantly that Eston had frustrated him again. Criminals of that type will fight against heavy odds but they do not willingly die in the last ditch. If Eston had fired the house, he had done so not to die in its ashes but to cover his retreat.

      One of the detectives without waiting for orders was already running full pelt down the road towards a fire alarm. Another had climbed the railings and clinging like a fly to what in similar houses in the neighborhood would have been the dining-room window, protected his hand with a cap and smashing a pane, inserted his arm and pulled back the fastening. A wave of thick, black smoke gushed out and, choking and gasping, he leapt clear.

      "Smoke bombs," observed one of the other men.

      Garfield slipped his arm through that of the divisional detective inspector and pulled him back into the street.

      "You take charge here," he said. "I've got half an idea and I'm going to chance it."

      It had been a matter of seconds since the alarm was given, but already the street, which had seemed asleep up to now, save for the detectives, was waking up. Heads were appearing at windows and half-dressed figures at open doors.

      Garfield accosted a pajama-clad man two doors away. "Who's the owner or agent for this property?" he demanded, and as the man gave him the information he desired, he capped his question by another. "Where's the nearest telephone?" He accepted it as an interposition of Providence that there was one in that very house and expressing a word of thanks, he was soon feverishly turning over the leaves of a telephone directory.

      Meanwhile, Jimmie Silverdale lay wondering what was going to happen. Since Eston had left him for the second time, the silence that had bothered him before bad not been quite so obvious. There were muffled noises which he could not always interpret. Presently a smell of burning came to him.

      Jimmie Silverdale was a brave man but a shiver shook him from head to foot. Eston was carrying out his threat, then.

      It is given to few people to face the slow approach of inevitable and painful death with stoicism. Jimmie was no stoic. He wrenched frenziedly at his bonds until his heart felt that it would burst but still the bonds held. By some inadvertence Eston had omitted to replace the gag and Jimmie raised his voice in loud, but what he instinctively knew, must be futile cries. If he could only have met his fate fighting, he would have been happier. But to die like this—roasted to death—appalled him. For the time, he was a trapped, unreasoning, frantic animal.

      He called wildly on Eston, cursing him like a madman. Once or twice he found himself imploring Hilary to come and save him. Then exhaustion brought him back to sanity. He regained something of that philosophy which every man who has served in the trenches knows. A bullet either had one's name on it or it didn't. If he was going to be saved, be was going to be saved. If not—well, lie would die in possession of his own self-respect, not as a screaming coward. He set his lips grimly.

      The smoke was increasing now and eddying in under the crack of the door. He began to cough. He regretted now that the gag had been removed. It would at least have protected him to some extent from this blinding, choking torment. He rolled over and tried to hold his mouth and nostrils close to the bare boards. It was a feeble expedient but it failed in its purpose.

      His nerves were beginning to fail him. He saw visions. There were people around him people who were slipping a knife under the cords that held him. There were voices—dim, far-away voices calling him. Why couldn't they, let him alone? He was just going to drop into a pleasant doze—and now!

      Packing pains affected the muscles of his limbs and brought back his fleeting senses.

      "Oh, Jimmie, Jimmie! if you don't pull yourself together, what shall I do?"

      He sat up, shakily. The room was full of swirling wreaths of heavy smoke. Dimly in the darkness, he made out a figure, gaunt and spectral, with something round its head that gave it a singularly weird and fantastic effect. The figure was kneeling near him with one arm round his shoulders. He sensed, rather than recognized, her identity.

      "Hilary!" he gasped.

      "Yes, it is Hilary. Can you stand, Jimmie? Here—let me wind this round your head." She twisted something round his face so that the intolerable smoke pangs were minimized. "Now, don't talk. Try to stand."

      Hilary Sloane was a good type of the modern athletic girl. She did not believe that femininity implied weakness and she had need of all her strength now, for Jimmie was as weak as a kitten. Half-supporting, half-carrying him, she groped her way towards the door. At the stairs, he stumbled and only a superhuman effort on her part saved them both from disaster. Smoke was rolling up from below in thick, oily wreaths, with weird effects, as in the far distance little flashes of blue and yellow flame appeared.

      Staggering, choking, gasping, they descended the stairs, a feat only to be achieved with infinite slowness. As they neared the ground floor, the heat became more intense and the smoke hung more closely. Jimmie swayed and would have fallen but for the pressure of that slim arm against him.

      "Holdup! Oh, Jimmie, holdup! Only a few steps more and we shall be safe."

      He felt that they were passing into the basement and the air grew a trifle clearer. She stooped and fumbled on the ground until she felt a ring-bolt and flung back a trapdoor. Then came her supreme task. A steep ladder led to the depths. It was out of the question that they could descend side by side, as they had down the stairs. It was clear that Jimmie could not make the trip unaided, and though he was a comparatively lightly built man, Hilary doubted if she was equal to the task of carrying him down. The dilemma, however, had to be solved. There was no time for hesitation.

      "You must slide down, Jimmie," she urged.. "Understand?" She shook him slightly, as if that would make her meaning clear. "You will probably bruise yourself but that cannot be helped. It is better than remaining here."

      "I'll try, Hilary," he gasped.

      She supported him to the opening, and getting a firm grip of his collar, lot him down till she could bear the strain no longer. Then she let go and he slid to a heap at the bottom of the ladder. Hilary followed, closing the trapdoor behind her. They were in a cellar as dark as a pit but comparatively free from the suffocation and heat of the house itself. Silverdale had fainted in good earnest.

      When he came to, feeling very weak and sore, they were still in impenetrable darkness. He felt his own hand clasped in a soft, warm one and heard the sound of gentle sobs. Hilary—the girl who had no nerves—was crying. She ceased instantly as she felt the pressure of her hand returned.

      "Are you all right, old boy?"

      "Fit as a fiddle, dear," he lied brazenly, though he ached all over and felt as weak as a rat. "What are you crying for?"

      "I wasn't crying," she declared indignantly. "At least—Jimmie—I suppose I was a bit overdone."

      He sat up. "I don't wonder at that. You've been through more than most men could stand. Where are we?"

      She struck a match and by its glimmer, he saw that they were in a small, low-pitched bricked tunnel, the damp oozing from the walls. "I don't know exactly," she admitted. "This is the secret way out, according to Eston, but where it leads to, I haven't the faintest idea."

      Silverdale was a man who possessed wonderful powers of recuperation. He felt his strength returning to him with every breath he took and he remembered with a shudder the nightmare horror they had passed through. He retained only a shadowy notion of what had happened since he had lain in that garret, waiting for death.

      "It occurs to me, Hilary, he said, that you have saved my life."

      She smoothed his face with her free hand. "Don't be silly, Jimmie," she said.

      "It's true," he insisted. "I'd be a pretty cheap sort of a corpse just now if it hadn't been for you. I'm afraid my legs are a bit wobbly yet, so if you don't mind we'll wait a bit before we begin to explore this private tunnel of Mr. Eston's. Meanwhile, you might tell me how it all happened."

      She laughed—a merry, musical, happy laugh, that echoed strangely among their dismal surroundings. "You got my note?" she asked.

      "The note you left on the house-boat—sure!"

      "And you don't think that I murdered Sir Harold Saxon now?"

      He lifted the hand that was clasped in his own to his lips. "That's your answer," he said. "Now, how did you get away from Eston?"

      "Ohl there was nothing in that. He knew a great deal and guessed more after you and he met on the stairs. He told us—Nora and myself—that the place was surrounded and that we had a back way out through which he proposed to take us if the police tried to force an entrance. 'A private emergency exit'—he described it. I asked what he had done about you. He laughed—he can be diabolical at times, you know, Jimmie—and said that he had you safely stowed away in a lumber room. 'He's a bright lad,' he said, 'and I take rather a paternal interest in him. Since you won't marry me, I thought that it wouldn't be a bad plan to elect him to the office of bridegroom. What do you think '?"

      She fell silent and Jimmie, though he couldn It see her face, knew that she was blushing. "Very kind of Mr. Eston," he said dryly. "Go on, Hilary."

      "Well, after that, he went away. Of course I didn't know what to think, except that he had some black scheme at the back of his mind. Then he returned, told me that you had refused point-blank to marry me and that he had turned you loose, as he phrased it, to 'stew in your own juice.' We were hustled downstairs and through the trapdoor down here. I smelt the smoke and demanded to know what he had done with you. He protested that you were quite all right —that he had set you loose and that you would be able to take care of yourself. I knew that he was lying and though he had hold of my arm, I tore myself from him and dashed back and somehow got through the trapdoor in front of him. He followed me no farther though I could hear him swearing.

      "The place was full of smoke. He had told me that they had used a combination of smoke-bombs and petrol. The smoke was meant to hold back the police till the place got well alight and so prevent them from discovering our retreat too soon. I tore my skirt off and bound a piece of it round my face. So at last I found you."

      "I know men who have won the V.C. for less," said Silverdale. "Now our immediate problem seems to be where are we and how do we get out? Eston seems to have wriggled out of his difficulties once again. Have you any matches?"

      "I have got one left," said the girl.

      "And I have none. Well, I should save yours in case we want it. Meanwhile, we'll grope our way along and see what happens."

      He pulled himself stiffly to his feet and, arm in arm, they began to grope their way along the tunnel.