“He was standing right where you are now,” Hulsey whispered hoarsely. “Pointing his finger at me, he was, when I opened my eyes and saw him. Smiling, too. I--I”--a violent shudder--“I could _see through him_, Mr. Hill; could see the bars on that window beyond him. I--”
“Who? See who?” the guard interrupted.
Hulsey seemed to realize, then, that he was talking too much; that he was not conducting himself as the hardest convict in the prison should.
“Why,” he stammered. “I saw--I _thought_ I saw--an old pal o’ mine. He’s been dead a long time. Nerves, I guess. Thinking too much about my old pal and the good old days. Nightmare, I guess.”
“Yeah--nightmare is right!” the unsympathetic guard growled. “But don’t let another blat like that out of you, or we’ll throw you into a padded cell. Got the whole wing stirred up. Get to bed now and forget that good old pal of yours.”
“If I only could!” Hulsey whispered huskily to himself, as he got back into the bunk.
* * * * *
Two weeks passed.
There were no more outbursts from cell twenty-one. The “ghost tower” on the wall was silent, cold.
Then, at two o’clock one morning, Captain Dunlap saw the indicator move. It sickened him, made him wish ardently that he was a thousand miles from Granite River Prison.
The indicator moved slowly, hesitantly, to the left and the bell tinkled weakly. The captain placed the receiver to his ear, but no sound came; the line was dead. The indicator fell back to its original position as the captain replaced the receiver on the crotch.
A few minutes later the yard guard entered the lookout. Bill Wilton, the regular yard guard on the graveyard shift, was away on leave and the substitute guard was new at the prison.
“Didn’t I understand you to say, Mr. Dunlap,” the new guard said, “that there was no one on Old Tower Number Three?”
“You sure did,” Dunlap answered.
The guard pulled his left ear and looked puzzled.
“Funny,” he finally remarked. “Was sure I heard somebody in that tower, singing soft and low like, when I passed under it a few minutes ago.”
“What was he singing?” the captain asked, bending forward and fixing a penetrating gaze on the recent arrival at the prison.
“Let me see now,” said the guard meditatively. “Couldn’t make out much of the song. Something about ‘when I die in the ocean deep,’--No, that wasn’t it. ‘When I die and am buried deep’--that’s it. Then there was something in it about this dead guy coming back to ha’nt people, and a lot of bunk like that.”
“I see,” said Dunlap, as he eased himself out of the chair. “I’m going up and have a look around in that tower. You stay in here until I return.”
Dunlap went outside the walls and up through New Tower Number Three, where he questioned Guard Jim Humphrey. Humphrey had not seen or heard anything unusual in or about Old Tower Number Three.
Captain Dunlap, as he walked over the wall toward the ghost tower, admitted frankly to himself that he was “scared stiff.” Pausing at the door, he glanced nervously through the window.
The yard lights lit up the interior of the tower sufficiently to assure him that no one--or “thing”--was inside. He unlocked the door and entered.
With a flashlight, he thoroughly examined the telephone. Dust had settled on the instrument. The receiver and the transmitter had apparently not been touched since Asa Shores left the tower. Dust had settled on the doorknobs inside. That the knobs had not been touched since Shores’ death was obvious. The one chair, the window-sills, the small washstand and wash basin, all were covered with a thin, undisturbed film of fine dust.
There on the telephone battery box reposed Asa’s old corncob pipe and, near it, a small box of matches. The window latches were just as Dunlap had left them when he closed and securely locked the tower a month before.
It was a puzzled and nervous prison official that left the tower, relocked the doors and returned to the inside lookout.
Next day Malcolm Hulsey, the “lifer” was admitted to the hospital. The doctor’s diagnosis was “nervous breakdown.”
* * * * *
But Hulsey, though his nerves were all shot to pieces, was still capable of shrewd plotting.
His admittance to the hospital had been hastened by a diet of soap. Hulsey was so anxious to get far away from Granite River Prison, and was so certain of his ability to do so if he could only be admitted to the hospital, that he had resorted to the old but effective expedient of soap eating.
Soap, taken internally in small doses, will produce various baffling and apparently serious physiological changes in the body. Hulsey looked sick and felt sick, but he was not dangerously ill.
For many months Malcolm Hulsey had been watching closely the movements of the night guards. During his stay in the hospital, while recovering from the gunshot wound in his shoulder he had “doped out” a possible means of escape, and he was on the point of making the attempt when the doctor pronounced him sufficiently recovered to be returned to the cell house.
The “lifer’s” plan of escape was simply this: At midnight, while Captain Dunlap and his crew were on duty, the yard guard made his round, counted the patients in the hospital and left the yard through the guards’ gate to eat his lunch in the guards’ dining-room outside the walls. When the yard guard returned to the inside lookout he carried with him a hot lunch for Captain Dunlap.
In counting the men in the hospital, the yard guard did not as a rule enter the building. He merely turned on the lights in the one large ward and looked through the window. The convict hospital nurse on night duty stood ready, and when the lights were turned on, proceeded from bed to bed and partly uncovered each patient so that the yard guard outside could see and count them.
There were several factors in Hulsey’s favor now, one being that a new substitute guard was on duty over the guards’ entrance gate during the absence of the regular guard who was away on vacation. There was only one patient in the hospital besides Hulsey. The yard guard must be lured into the hospital, overpowered, his uniform stripped from him, then Hulsey, garbed in the uniform, would attempt to deceive the guard at the gate and be given the keys.
At fifteen minutes to midnight, on Hulsey’s first day in the hospital, the “lifer” quietly rose from his bed while the white-clad convict nurse’s back was turned. Three minutes later the unsuspecting nurse had been neatly laid out from a well-directed blow behind the ear, bound with sheets, gagged, stripped of his white suit and tenderly tucked in the bed recently occupied by Mr. Malcolm Hulsey.
The other patient, a feeble old convict, was gagged and tied down in his bed with sheets. Hulsey then donned the nurse’s white suit and, after arranging the nurse and the old convict in their beds so that they appeared to be sleeping peacefully, the “lifer” lay face down on the floor and awaited developments.
At twelve o’clock the new guard appeared at the hospital window and switched on the lights. Having counted the men in the hospital every hour since eight o’clock, the guard intended now to give the patients a hasty glance and proceed to the gate. There were his two patients, apparently sleeping peacefully. But where was the nurse?
Hulsey’s heart pounded like a riveting hammer as he lay sprawled on the floor. Would the ruse work? Would the guard enter the hospital to investigate, or would he report to Captain Dunlap when he saw the white-clad figure on the floor?
The guard’s eyes then rested on the man on the floor.
“Huh!” he ejaculated. “Funny place for nursie to be sleeping!”
But the nurse’s sprawled form did not indicate slumber. The guard was puzzled. Perhaps the nurse had fainted, or fallen and hurt himself. The guard tapped on the window with a key. No answer, no movement of nurse or patients.
Then the unsuspecting “screw” unlocked the door and entered. An older guard would have reported to the Captain. He was in the act of bending over to turn the pseudo-nurse upon his back when his ankles were suddenly seized and his feet perked from under him.
The guard’s head struck an iron bedstead as he fell, thus relieving Hulsey of the unpleasant job of beating him into unconsciousness.
Several minutes later the “lifer,” wearing the guard’s uniform, boldly approached the gate.
“What’s on the menu tonight, Frank?” Hulsey casually asked, pulling his hat further down over his eyes.
“Same old thing--hash,” the gate guard answered, as he lowered the keys.
Though the suspense, anxiety and uncertainty were terrible, Hulsey whistled calmly as he unlocked the first gate. The large bull lock on the outside gate was not so easily unlocked. Hulsey fumbled, his hands shook, his whistling, in spite of all he could do to keep it up, wheezed, went off key, then died in a discordant wail.
“Say!” the gate guard suddenly blurted. “Look up here! By cracky, your actions don’t look good to me.”
* * * * *