The box from japan, p.66
The Box from Japan, page 66
And it was then, and not until then, that he heard Baxter’s voice at his very ear.
“I think we’ve ended all communication with ‘Bloody Juan’ for tonight,” he said with a nasty laugh, and no pretense whatever now of concealment of his voice. “So let’s get out of here—while the gettin’s good! Thank God I put the power plant on the blink with those last shots. Come on, now! Run rightward, for the fence, when you wiggle out. And let’s—hold!—damn! Damn, Halse, lights are coming on. Hell-fire! I’m—I’m afraid we’re in for it now. Hell’s bells! They’re—they’re coming on—all over the grounds. And Jumping Jupiter—look—look at our friend—in the window!”
Halsey was indeed looking. For, although the badly dismantled radio operating chamber was itself still dark, there was, as Baxter had said, plenty of light now by which to look! For the man with the goatee had, in the blackness, gotten to his switchboard, and had doubtlessly not only thrown off some main switch which connected the damaged machinery in the cellar to all the possible circuits in the place, but had closed some other switch which threw in the tiers and tiers of cellar storage batteries in its stead. Yard lights, stationed on short poles here and there about the entire front of the house, were blazing into being; flaring up, moreover, on several more poles on the side where the garage was, poles which up to now, in the gloom, had resembled only innocent clothesline anchors. And not only from the tops of poles were house and garage becoming rapidly illuminated on all sides, but from the outermost fence, as well, for one of its fence posts, strategically, held atop itself, too, a cunning, powerful light, framed in a great tin reflecting bonnet; and Halsey, mouth agape, his breath coming fast, saw that two lights additional even to all of these, two pivoted, reflecting lights situated under the very eaves of the house itself, were also coming definitely on, rising slowly in intensity of glow like the others, denoting that like those others they too had within them sluggish, but powerful filaments of some sort, and filaments whose torpidness of response suggested, in fact, they they were loath to heat up—loath to reveal by their incandescence the two intruders on the place. But loath or not, the filaments of all, in less than no time, seemingly, had become incandescently brilliant; and now a dozen powerful sources of illumination existed where none, a moment or two before, had been! And though they were not tru-sun lamps, to be sure, they might just as well have been, for they brought back almost daylight itself in spots. So much effulgence, indeed, did they bring to that expanse of dark grounds about the house, that the huge radiant area of turf, stretching to the back of the house, and far beyond that, revealed that the two men who had, a brief while before, been far over in the distant part of that rearmost field, were now almost on to these very grounds. They must, beyond all doubt, have started running, both of them, at the sound of Baxter’s first shot. Now, in fact, they were swinging onto the very outermost edge of that lighted-up penumbra of lawn. The sombreroed, mahogany-hued, pockmarked fellow was ahead, but the Jap, strange to relate, in spite of the fact that he was minus his cane, was lumbering not far behind. Now they came—top speed!—into and onto the very lighted-up scene itself. And each, as he emerged from out the half light into the full light, could be seen to be carrying a revolver clutched in his hand. The Mexican’s gun was a stubby black automatic. The Jap’s an old-fashioned gleaming Colt. And by the glare reflecting up from the green lawn, the man with the goatee was himself visible, fairly so, at least, still in the room—in the dark window, in fact—fumbling at a ledge somewhere beneath it. A moment later he had brought forth a rifle, which he raised to his shoulder.
“Kogo—Miguel!” he screamed, in a voice that was a strange admixture of rage and terror. “There iss a spy on the place. Anda un espia en el campo, Miguel! A spy, Kogo! The shots came from—from this side. Don’d let him escape. Surrount the yard. Kogo—get to the road. Miguel, forvart—forvart arount to the frond uf der house. Cut him off—dot side. Shoot to kill. Shoot to kill—bod’ of you!”
And Halsey, viewing, in the narrow band of nebulous luminance which filtered from those yard lights a scant foot or so into the deep darkness which lay beneath that protecting garage floor, the empty rifle-revolver that Baxter had just tossed down in front of them, suddenly awoke to the realization that he and his friend were in the most ticklish position of their lives, and that he might have been a thousand times better off if he were right now opening his front door on Tower Court, with six Mexican gangsters, hands on guns, waiting both inside and outside!
CHAPTER LIII
Smoked Out
Flattened out on his stomach, thoroughly frightened now for the first time in the last couple of minutes, Halsey saw both the overalled pockmarked Mexican helper and the Jap come stupidly to a standstill in front of the window of the dismantled radio-operating chamber, their revolvers in their hands, their gaze turned upward, blinking a bit in the lights, several of which seemed to converge a bit at that point.
“Forvart, Miguel—to the frond uf the house, you fool!” came the snarl of the window’s lone occupant, forgetting momentarily in his excitement to talk Mexican to the one person on the place, no doubt, who could understand it. “Don’d let him cut agross that way. Quick, Miguel! He may shood you down. Quitate de la luz! Kogo, get by the fence. Don’d let him get by you—to the roat. He iss in that clump uf lilic bushes ofer there.” He waved his rifle indicatingly toward a thick cluster of bushes at some distance, diagonally, from both house and garage, and it was plain from his words that he did not consider for a single second that any self-appointed marksman-investigator about the place would ever conduct his drastic operations imbecilically from a point like the thin layer of space beneath the garage floor, where the latter could not even emerge in time to make a run for things, but must assuredly be hopelessly trapped like a rat in a wire cage. The bushes where he pointed were in a more or less shadowed area, escaping by a slight margin the crossing beams of two lights. “Shood him deat—on sight!”
As though electrified by a sudden realization of what the whole thing meant—or might come to mean—the man Miguel leaped forward with a mighty bound, and within but a few seconds, shoulders well forward, was rounding the corner of the house; and but a few seconds later the sound of his thick hobnailed shoes was audible as he clambered hastily up on the porch. And even Halsey, glancing desperately along the ground in that direction, was not in such an impossible position with respect to that piazza, its projecting left edge, at least, but that he could see the Mexican mounting clumsily to the railing of that side, then drawing out of sight entirely towards one of the rear pillars, where no doubt he was flattening himself close to the very front wall of the house, able to survey from this elevated point the whole lighted front yard, yet shadowed entirely no doubt by the porch roof itself. Miguel was not altogether a stupid fool, that was plain. He had obtained a perfect vantage point. Kogo, the Jap, was in the meantime dodging with meticulous cautiousness, at least with respect to that suspicious clump of bushes, from yard-light post to yard-light post, acting more like a Sioux Indian than an Oriental, but he was nevertheless making the outer fence in a hurry. And more and more Halsey, with sinking heart, could see now that he and Baxter, beautifully cut off from all possible help, stranded out here in the wilds far, far from the city, their escape, their very flight, blocked by three armed men, all desperate no doubt, and only too ready to seal a pair of lips or even two pairs of such, with a few well-directed shots, with not a single cartridge left in the rifle revolver thanks to Baxter’s orgy of sharpshooting, were confronting a problem of life and death that held forth little promise of solution. And other things came back to him too now—of which one was the bearded spy-chief’s assurance of his possession of the full description of one, Carr Halsey—and another, the hot iron treatment the big man had outlined a brief few minutes ago, the hot iron treatment practiced by some Zoque tribe of Central American Indians; a hot iron treatment which was to include not only the feet of its victim, but in this case, the victim’s two eyes as well! A strange sensation gnawed sickeningly at the pit of Halsey’s stomach. A crawling sensation, in a sense. He wanted badly, fearfully, to speak, but he dared not now as he dared not even move, lest his voice, like a single motion, betray the whereabouts of himself and Baxter to these wolves on the outside.
With the Jap evidently over back of the fence where he no doubt took up a position in the darkness on the other side of the road, or else crouched behind one of the fence posts, for it was from just about there that his voice eventually added itself to the drama, a sudden silence fell over the whole scene, only the low chugging cough at the gasoline engine in the cellar, and the purr of a single whirring generator close to it, whirring uselessly now, in all probability, adding their sounds to the buzz emanating from the thousands of crickets in the grass, in the surrounding fields, everywhere. The man in the window pirouetted slowly right, then left, his rifle barrel swinging with each movement of his body. Suddenly cautious, he drew back a slight ways—a foot or so—concluding evidently that even the mere glare from the illuminated grass below made him a little too much of a possible target. A considerable pause followed. Then suddenly came a vicious spat! And, as though each man below the garage floor realized instinctively that that spat indicated the shooter in the window was focussing with all his attention on some objective distant from the garage itself—for no thud of bullet against garage had sounded forth—Halsey and Baxter, actuated seemingly by one subconscious mechanism, scrambled in unison back several feet from the dangerous edge of that open space, and lay rigid, unmoving. For an instant, that is. For in the much deeper darkness here, Halsey essayed cautiously to turn his head—and he rolled his eyes leftward with all his muscle power—toward that clump of bushes. Which proved to be exactly the point where the big man had fired. For Halsey could see a cut branch, heavy with foliage, bending slowly over graundward, followed by a shower of leaves and flower petals. They were quite visible as such as they drifted leisurely downward in the greater light that lay slightly in front of the bushes.
The big man had taken a frightened—or else experimental—shot. Nothing had resulted, nor would result.
What would be his next move?
Baxter leaned over in the dark and placed his lips close to the younger man’s ear. “Lie low,” he whispered. “Don’t get excited and try to scram out. They have no way of knowing where those shots of ours came from. We might have been in that distant woods—shooting with a telescope gun—for all they know. They’re all up in the air. They’re not sure of their ground. They—”
He stopped. And almost as though corroborating his whispered statement, two shots from the Mexican helper’s revolver struck the barn, possibly even its floor, on the other side of the house, in close succession, as though he too were shooting in utter ignorance of where to aim. “No estoy tirandole a nadie, Senor,” he yelled, and the assuring tone of his voice indicated that he was asserting that he, too, was merely trying a couple of experimental shots. But the hollow thud of his bullets, burying themselves in the wooden walls of the barn, each echoing back a full second after the shot which propelled it, seemed to convey an idea to the goateed man in the nearby window, for another vicious “spat” came from that gloom-filled oblong aperture, and this time a bullet crashed into the cement garage wall, somewhere vertically above Halsey, for the shower of broken bits of stucco and pulverized plaster-of-Paris spattering, drifting down, made a momentary curtain between his vision and the scene without. It seemed, beyond all doubt, that they—Mexican and half-Mexican, both—were trying wildly to draw forth just one spurt of flame from the gun of that mysterious assailant, the spy on the place; one single spurt against whose exact location either Kogo and Miguel, in command of the front, or Kogo and Frantzius-McCollum, covering the side, could concentrate their fire together, in a pair.
After that last shot, however, another tense silence filled the air. It was quite plain now that the rifle in the window was no old-fashioned rabbit-hunting weapon that might have gone with this rented house, but was a repeating rifle, and held probably a dozen more shots. The silence of helplessness, bafflement, continued. And then suddenly the voice of the Jap sounded forth excitedly from the other side of the garage—but well the other side and well to the right, too, as though he were safely ensconced on the road itself.
“Sair, sair,” he shrieked, “try undair garage floor! Undair! I theenk he hidden under there, sair. I theenk I see som’theeng moof. Som’theeng I theenk eez a rock. It mos’ be. Heez shots were cloze to houze.”
A spurt of flame came immediately from the dark window, revealing only for the thousandth of a second a long gun barrel at the back of which was a hard face, the pursy lips and teeth set in a grim line, the goatee and mustache below and above them. The shot dug harmlessly into the ground at the far left end of the space where Halsey and Baxter lay motionless on their stomachs, for this time there was no impact of bullet against the structure above their heads, and a tiny rift of dust, moreover, rose—then settled—at that leftmost point.
Another pause. Only the crickets, and the muffled chug-chug-chug of the gasoline engine, were audible. Baxter edged imperceptibly closer to the younger man, He must have turned his head cautiously, using his neck almost like a pivotal axis, for his lips grazed Halsey’s ear. “Getting damned dangerous here,” he whispered. “What do you sugg—”
A fourth shot spurted from the darkened window up ahead. It hit a rock beneath the garage floor, and Halsey felt the sting of spattering lead peppering the left half of his face. It was now plain that the man in the big house was going to train his shots over the entire space below the garage floor, if necessary, to determine whether his enemy was hiding there or not. And the younger man realized with a heart that continued to drop lower and lower that something—something—must be done.
The next shot struck the dirt some four feet to the left of Halsey’s side. As before, by the silhouetted geyser of dust it created, he could see where it struck, plainly. The only rock, on the other hand, of marked size, was five feet or thereabouts to his left. So the gradual sidewise travel of the bullets rightward, or at least their points of impingement, was plainly evident. The man of the goatee was going to direct a shot at two or three foot intervals over the whole space below the floor. Nor was his window so high above ground level, much less so close to the little building, that he would not be able to cover with his shots practically the whole space beneath the garage—all, perhaps, but a slight margin on the opposite side. And if, Halsey saw with sinking heart, he and Baxter attempted to crawl back to that one possibly safe margin, or even wriggle out backwards entirely from the shallow space in which they were now trapped, they would attract the attention of the watching Jap on that side, if not draw his fire immediately.
