Chapter 21. The Siege Of The Bandits

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_ CHAPTER XXI. THE SIEGE OF THE BANDITS

As we watched from the top of the hill, I wondered what Garrick's next move was to be. Surely he would not attempt to investigate the place yet. In fact, there seemed to be nothing that could be done now, as long as it was day-light, for any movement in this half-open country would have been viewed with suspicion by the occupants of the little house in the valley, whoever they might be.

We could not help viewing the place with a sort of awe. What secrets did the cottage hide, nestled down there in the valley among these green hills? Often I had heard that the gunmen of New York, when hard pressed, sought refuge in the country districts and mountains within a few miles of the city. There was something incongruous about it. Nature seemed so perfectly peaceful here that it was the very antithesis of those sections of the city in which he had found the gunman, whoever he was, indulging in practically every crime and vice of decadent civilization.

"So--the one they call the Boss has led up to the refuge of the Chief, the scientific gunman, at last," Garrick exclaimed, with marked satisfaction, as we turned and walked slowly back again to our car.

"Yes," I assented, "and now that we have found them--what are we to do with them?"

"It is still early in the day," Garrick remarked, looking at his watch. "They suspect no trouble up here. Here they evidently feel safe. No doubt they think we are still hunting for them fruitlessly in New York. I think we can afford to leave them here for a few hours. At any rate, I feel that I must return to the city. I must see Dillon, and then drop into my office, if we are to accomplish anything against them."

He had turned the car around and we made our way back to the main road, and then southward again, taking up in earnest the long return trip to the city and covering the distance in Warrington's racer in a much shorter time, now that we had not to follow another car and keep under cover. It was late in the afternoon, however, when we arrived and Garrick went directly to police headquarters where he held a hasty conference with Dillon.

Dillon was even more excited than we were when he learned how far we had gone in tracing out the scant clews that we had uncovered. As Garrick unfolded his plan, the commissioner immediately began to make arrangements to accompany us out into the country that night.

I did not hear all that was said, as Garrick and Dillon laid out their plans, but I could see that they were in perfect accord.

"Very well," I overheard Garrick, as we parted. "I shall go out in the car again. You will be up on the train?"

"Yes--on the seven-fifty," returned Dillon. "You needn't worry about my end of it. I'll be there with the goods--just the thing that you want. I have it."

"Fine," exclaimed Garrick, "I have to make a call at the office. I'll start as soon as I can, and try to beat you out."

They parted in good humour, for Dillon's passion for adventure was now thoroughly aroused and I doubt if we could have driven him off with a club, figuratively speaking.

At the office Garrick tarried only long enough to load the car with some paraphernalia which he had there, much of which, I knew, he had brought back with him after his study of police methods abroad. There were three coats of a peculiar texture, which he took from a wardrobe, a huge arrangement which looked like a reflector, a little thing that looked merely like the mouthpiece of a telephone transmitter, and a large heavy package which might have been anything from a field gun to a battering ram.

It was twilight when we arrived at the nearest railroad station to the little cottage in the valley, after another run up into the country in the car. Dillon who had come up by train to meet us, according to the arrangement with Garrick, was already waiting, and with him was one of the most trustworthy and experienced of the police department chauffeurs. Garrick looked about at the few loungers curiously, but there did not seem to be any of them who took any suspicious interest in new arrivals.

We four managed to crowd into a car built only for two, and Garrick started off. A few minutes later we arrived at the top of the hill from which we had already viewed the mysterious house earlier in the day. It was now quite dark. We had met no one since turning off into the crossroad, and could hear no sound except the continuous music of the night insects.

Just before crossing the brow of the last hill, we halted and Garrick turned out all the lights on the car. He was risking nothing that might lead to discovery yet. With the engine muffled down, we coasted slowly down the other side of the hill into the shadowy valley. There was no moon yet and we had to move cautiously, for there was only the faint light of the sky and stars to guide us.

What was the secret of that unpretentious little house below us? We peered out in the gathering blackness eagerly in the direction where we knew it must be, nestled among the trees. Whoever it sheltered was still there, and we could locate the place by a single gleam that came from an upper window. Whether there were lights below, we could not tell. If there were they must have been effectively concealed by blinds and shades.

"We'll stop here," announced Garrick at last when we had reached a point on the road a few hundred yards from the house.

He ran the car carefully off the road and into a little clearing in a clump of dark trees. We got out and pushed stealthily forward through the underbrush to the edge of the woods. There, on the slope, just a little way below us, stood the house of mystery.

Garrick and Dillon were busily conferring in an undertone, as I helped them bring the packages one after another from the car to the edge of the woods. Garrick had slipped the little telephone mouthpiece into his pocket, and was carrying the huge reflector carefully, so that it might not be injured in the darkness. I had the heavy coats of the peculiar texture over my arm, while Dillon and his man struggled along over the uncertain pathway, carrying between them the heavy, long, cylindrical package, which must have weighed some sixty pounds or so.

Garrick had selected as the site of our operations a corner of the grove where a very large tree raised itself as a landmark, silhouetted in black against a dark sky. We deposited the stuff there as he directed.

"Now, Jim," ordered Dillon, walking back to the car with his man, "I want you to take the car and go back along this road until you reach the top of the hill."

I could not hear the rest of the order, but it seemed that he was to meet someone who had preceded us on foot from the railway station and who must be about due to arrive. I did not know who or what it might be, but even the thought of someone else made me feel safer, for in so ticklish a piece of business as this, in dealing with at least a pair of desperate men such as we knew them to be in the ominously quiet little house, a second and even a third line of re-enforcements was not, I felt, amiss.

Garrick in the meantime had set to work putting into position the huge reflector. At first I thought it might be some method of throwing a powerful light on the house. But on closer examination I saw that it could not be a light. The reflector seemed to have been constructed so that in the focus was a peculiar coil of something, and to the ends of this coil, Garrick attached two wires which he fastened to an instrument, cylindrical, with a broadened end, like a telephone receiver.

Dillon, who had returned by this time, after sending his chauffeur back on his errand, appeared very much interested in what Garrick was doing.

"Now, Tom," said Garrick, "while I am fixing this thing, I wish you would help me by undoing that large package carefully."

While I was thus engaged, he continued talking with Dillon in a low voice, evidently explaining to him the use to which he wished the large reflector put.

I was working quickly to undo the large package, and as the wrappings finally came off, I could see that it was some bulky instrument that looked like a huge gun, or almost a mortar. It had a sort of barrel that might have been, say, forty inches in length, and where the breechlock should have been on an ordinary gun was a great hemispherical cavity. There was also a peculiar arrangement of springs and wheels in the butt.

"The coats?" he asked, as he took from the wrappings of the package several rather fragile looking tubes.

I had laid them down near us and handed them over to him. They were quite heavy, and had a rough feel.

"So-called bullet-proof cloth," explained Garrick. "At close range, quite powerful lunges of a dagger or knife recoil from it, and at a distance ordinary bullets rebound from it, flattened. We'll try it, anyway. It will do no harm, and it may do good. Now we are ready, Dillon."

"Wait just a minute," cautioned Dillon. "Let me see first whether that chauffeur has returned. He can run that engine so quietly that I myself can't hear it."

He had disappeared into the darkness toward the road, where he had despatched the car a few minutes before. Evidently the chauffeur had been successful in his mission, for Dillon was back directly with a hasty, "Yes, all right. He's backing the car around so that he can run it out on the road instantly in either direction. He'll be here in a moment."

Garrick had in the meantime been roughly sketching on the back of an old envelope taken from his pocket. Evidently he had been estimating the distance of the house from the tree back of which he stood, and worked with the light of a shaded pocket flashlight.

"Ready, then," he cried, jumping up and advancing to the peculiar instrument which I had unwrapped. He was in his element now. After all the weary hours of watching and preparation, here was action at last, and Garrick went to it like a starved man at food.

First he elevated the clumsy looking instrument pointed in the general direction of the house. He had fixed the angle at approximately that which he had hastily figured out on the envelope. Then he took a cylinder about twelve inches long, and almost half as much in diameter, a huge thing, constructed, it seemed, of a substance that was almost as brittle as an eggshell. Into the large hemispherical cavity in the breech of the gun he shoved it. He took another quick look at the light gleaming from the house in the darkness ahead of us.

"What is it?" I asked, indicating the "gun."

"This is what is known as the Mathiot gun," he explained as he brought it into action, "invented by a French scientist for the purpose, expressly, of giving the police a weapon to use against the automobile bandits who entrench themselves, when cornered, in houses and garages, as they have done in the outskirts of Paris, and as some anarchists did once in a house in London."

"What does it do?" asked Dillon, who had taken a great interest in the thing.

"It throws a bomb which emits suffocating gases without risking the lives of the police," answered Garrick. "In spite of the fragility of the bombs that I have here, it has been found that they will penetrate a wooden door or even a thin brick partition before the fuse explodes them. One bomb will render a room three hundred feet off uninhabitable in thirty seconds. Now--watch!"

He had exploded the gun by hand, striking the flat head of a hammer against the fulminating cap. The gun gave a bark. A low, whistling noise and a crash followed.

"Too short," muttered Garrick, elevating the angle of the gun a trifle.

Quite evidently someone was moving in the house. There was a shadow, as of someone passing between the light in the upper story and the window on our side of the house.

Again the gun barked, and another bomb went hurtling through the air. This time it hit the house squarely. Another followed in rapid succession, and the crash of glass told that it had struck a window. Garrick was sending them now as fast as he could. They had taken effect, too, for the light was out, whether extinguished by gases or by the hand of someone who realized that it afforded an excellent mark to shoot at. Still, it made no difference, now, for we had the range.

"The house must be full of the stifling gases," panted Garrick, as he stopped to wipe the perspiration from his face, after his rapid work, clad in the heavy coat. "No man could stand up against that. I wonder how our friend of the garage likes it, Tom? It is some of his own medicine--the Chief, I mean. He tried it on us on a small scale very successfully that night with his stupefying gun."

"I hope one of them hit him," ground out Dillon, who had no relish even for the recollection of that night. "What next? Do you have to wait until the gases clear away before we can make a break and go in there?"

Garrick had anticipated the question. Already he was buttoning up his long coat. We did the same, mechanically.

"No, Dillon. You and Jim stay here," ordered Garrick. "You will get the signal from us what to do next. Tom, come on."

He had already dashed ahead into the darkness, and I followed blindly, stumbling over a ploughed field, then a fence over which we climbed quickly, and found ourselves in the enclosure where was the house. I had no idea what we were running up against, but a dog which had been chained in the rear broke away from his fastening at sight of us, and ran at us with a lusty and savage growl. Garrick planted a shot squarely in his head.

Without wasting time on any formalities, such as ringing the bell, we kicked and battered in the back door. We paused a moment, not from fear but because the odor inside was terrific. No one could have stayed in that house and retained his senses. One by one, Garrick flung open the windows, and we were forced to stick our heads out every few minutes in order to keep our own breath.

From one room to another we proceeded, without finding anyone. Then we mounted to the second floor. The odour was worse there, but still we found no one.

The light on the third floor had been extinguished, as I have said. We made our way toward the corner where it had been. Room after room we entered, but still found no one. At last we came to a door that was locked. Together we wrenched it open.

There was surely nothing for us to fear in this room, for a bomb had penetrated it, and had filled it completely. As we rushed in, Garrick saw a figure sprawled on the floor, near the bed, in the corner.

"Quick, Tom!" he shouted, "Open that other window. I'll attend to this man. He's groggy, anyhow."

Garrick had dropped down on his knees and had deftly slipped a pair of handcuffs on the unresisting wrists of the man. Then he staggered to my side at the open window, for air.

"Heavens--this is awful!" he gasped and sputtered. "I wonder where they all went?"

"Who is this fellow?" I asked.

"I don't know yet. I couldn't see."

A moment later, together, we had dragged the unconscious man to the window with us, while I fanned him with my hat and Garrick was wetting his face with water from a pitcher of ice on the table.

"Good Lord!" Garrick exclaimed suddenly, as in the fitful light he bent over the figure. "Do you see who it is?"

I bent down too and peered more closely.

It was Angus Forbes.

Strange to say, here was the young gambler whom we had seen at the gambling joint before it was raided, the long-lost and long-sought Forbes who had disappeared after the raid, and from whom no one had yet heard a word.

I did not know his story, but I knew enough to be sure that he had been in love with Violet himself, and, although Warrington had once come to his rescue and settled thousands of dollars of his gambling debts, was sore at Warrington for closing the gambling joint where he hoped ultimately to recoup his losses. More than that, he was probably equally sore at Warrington for winning the favour of the girl whose fortune might have settled his own debts, if he had had a free field to court her.

Why was Forbes here, I asked myself. The fumes of the bombs from the Mathiot gun may have got into my head but, at least as far as I could see, they had not made my mind any the less active. I felt that his presence here, apparently as one of the gang, explained many things.

Who, I reasoned, would have been more eager to "get" Warrington at any cost than he? I never had any love for the fellow, who had allowed his faults and his temptations so far to get the upper hand of him. I had felt a sort of pity at first, but the incident of the cancelled markers in the gambling joint and now the discovery of him here had changed that original feeling into one that was purely of disgust.

These thoughts were coursing through my fevered brain while Garrick was working hard to bring him around.

Suddenly a mocking voice came from the hall.

"Yes, it's Forbes, all right, and much good may it do you to have him!"

The door to the room, which opened outward, banged shut. The lock had been broken by us in forcing an entrance. There must have been two of them out in the hall, for we heard the noise and scraping of feet, as they piled up heavy furniture against the door, dragging it from the next room before we could do anything. Piece after piece was wedged in between our door and the opposite wall.

We could hear them taunt us as they worked, and I thought I recognised at once the voice of the stocky keeper of the garage, the Boss, whom I had heard so often before over our detectaphone. The other voice, which seemed to me to be disguised, I found somewhat familiar, yet I could not place it. It must have been, I thought, that of the man whom we had come to know and fear under the appellation of the Chief.

We could hear them laugh, now, as they cursed us and wished us luck with our capture. It was galling.

Evidently, too, they had not much use for Forbes, and, indeed, at such a crisis I do not think he would have been much more than an additional piece of animated impedimenta. Dissipation had not added anything to the physical prowess of Forbes.

With a parting volley of profanity, they stamped down the narrow stairs to the ground floor, and a few seconds afterward we could hear them back of the house, working over the machine which we had followed up from New York earlier in the day. Evidently there were several machines in the barn which served them as garage, but this was the handiest.

They had cranked it up, and were debating which way they should go.

"The shots came from the direction of the main road," the Boss said. "We had better go in the opposite direction. There may be more of them coming. Hurry up!"

At least, it seemed, there had been only three of them in this refuge which they had sought up in the hills and valleys of the Ramapos. Of that we could now be reasonably certain. One of them we had captured--and had ourselves been captured into the bargain.

I stuck my head out of the window to look at the other two down below, only to feel myself dragged unceremoniously back by Garrick.

"What's the use of taking that risk, Tom?" he expostulated. "One shot from them and you would be a dead one."

Fortunately they had not seen me, so intent were they on getting away. They had now seated themselves in the car and, as Garrick had suspected, could not resist delivering a parting shot at us, emptying the contents of an automatic blindly up at our window. Garrick and I were, as it. happened, busy on the opposite side of the room.

All thought of Forbes was dropped for the present. Garrick said not a word but continued at work in the corner of the room by the other broken window.

"Either they must have succeeded in getting out after the first shot and so escaped the fumes," muttered Garrick finally, "and hid in the stable, or, perhaps, they were out there at work anyhow. Still that makes little difference now. They must have seen us go in, have followed us quietly, and then caught us here."

With a hasty final imprecation, the car below started forward with a jerk and was swallowed up in the darkness. _

Read next: Chapter 22. The Man Hunt

Read previous: Chapter 20. The Speaking Arc

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