Childers would have had his wire long since; but by the time that help could come it would be—too late. Annister, fatalistic after a fashion, felt this to be the fact even as he hoped against hope.
But they were many, and he was but one. Tomorrow—it would be too late.
Head bowed in his hands, oblivious, at first he had heard it as a thin whisper, like a knife blade against the silence; it penetrated inward now, with the dull rasp of metal upon metal from without:
“_Sit tight, old-timer; I’m comin’ through!_”
There came a muffled thud, a twist; Annister, reaching forth a hand, found it clasped in thick groping fingers. Then, as he thrust head and shoulders through the sundered bars, a Shadow uprose, gigantic, against the stars; the voice came again, in a quick, rumbling whisper:
“It’s me, old-timer—_Bull_.”
Annister, crawling through the opening, alighted upon soft turf. He heard Ellison’s low chuckle as, following the giant, he passed along the lee of the building to where, showing merely as a black blot against the night, there stood an automobile, its engine just turning over, with the low, even purr of harnessed power; at twenty paces it was scarcely audible above the rising of the wind.
“Tank’s full,” said Ellison. “Now—”
He turned abruptly as a dim figure rose upward just beyond. For a moment Annister set himself for the onslaught; then his hand went out; it gripped the hard hand of Del Kane.
“Ellison done told me, Mr. Annister,” he said. “An’ so I come a-fannin’ an’ a-foggin’ thisaway from Mojave; certain-sure I don’t aim to leave no friend of mine hog-tied in no calaboose!”
Annister, his heart warming to these friends, debated with himself; then turned to Ellison with a sudden movement.
“Bull,” he said. “I’m putting my cards on the table with you and Del, here.”
He told them briefly of the message from Mary, the need of haste; then, of his mission, and of the help that was even now due, or would be, with the morning. If they were coming with him, northward along that road of peril, word must be left behind.
Kane thought a moment; then, wheeling swiftly, with muttered word, he disappeared in the darkness, to return presently with the good news that he had fixed it with the station-agent. The latter had just come on; he was a friend of Kane’s, and no friend of Rook and Company; he would see to it, Kane said, that the reinforcements would be warned.
Boarding the car, they swung out cautiously along the silent street, under the pale stars, northward along that shadowy road. Presently there would be a moon, but just now they went onward in a thick darkness, with, just ahead, the dim loom of the road, flowing backward under the wheels, which presently ran like a ribbon of pale flame under the bright beam of the lights.
A half mile from the town, and Bull, who was driving, opened up, and the car leaped forward with the rising drone of the powerful motor, thirty, forty, fifty miles an hour; the wind of their passage drove backward like a wall as the giant’s voice came now in a rumbling laugh:
“Some little speed-wagon, Mr. Annister, ha?” he said. “An’ that’s whatever! It ought to be. The man who owns it—who _did_ own it half an hour ago—he’s some particular, I’ll say! Because—it’s Mister Hamilton Rook’s!”
Annister laughed grimly in answer, speaking a low word of caution as, after perhaps a half hour of their racing onrush the lights glimmered on dark trees to right and left.
“Somewhere about here, I think,” he said, low. “Three outside guards, I understand. We’d better stop a little way this side, Bull ... that’s it. Now, look!”
As the big car slid slowly to a halt, the moon, rising above the trees, showed them, perhaps a hundred yards just ahead, a low, rambling, stone house, its windows like blind eyes to the night. Upon its roof the moonlight lay like snow, and even at that distance it was sinister, forbidding, as if the evil that was within had seeped through those stones, outward, in a creeping tide.
“Looks like a morgue,” offered Ellison, with a shrug of his great shoulders, as the three, alighting, pushed the car before them into the wood.
Then, guns out, they went forward slowly among the trees.
Annister had formed no definite plan of attack. The red ribbon at that window-bar might or might not be visible under the moon, but, the guards eliminated, it seemed to him that, after all, they would have to make it an assault in force. Pondering this matter, of a sudden he leaped sidewise as a dim figure rose upward almost in his face.
Spread-eagled like a bat against the dimness, the figure bulked, huge, against the moon as Annister, bending to one side, brought up his fist in a lifting punch, from his shoe-tops.
It was a savage blow; it landed with the sound of a butcher’s cleaver on the chopping-block; there came a gasping grunt; the thud of a heavy body, as the guard went downward without a sound.
“One!” breathed Ellison, as, trussing their victim with a length of stout line brought from the car, they left him, going forward carefully, keeping together, circling the house.
But it was not until they were half way round it, with, so far, no sign of that signal for which he looked, that they encountered the second guard.
He came upon them with a swift, silent onrush, leaping among the trees, a great, dun shape, spectral under the moon, fangs bared, as, without a sound, the hound drove straight for the giant’s throat.
A shot would bring discovery; they dared not risk it. Annister could see the great head, the wide ruff at the neck, the grinning jaws.... Then, the giant’s hands had gone up and out; there came a straining heave, a wrench, a queer, whistling croak; Ellison, rising from his knees, looked downward a moment to where the beast, its jaw broken by that mighty strength, lay stretched, lifeless, at his feet.
By now they had come full circle, when, all at once, Annister, peering under his hand, sucked in his breath with a whispered oath.
Fair against the bars of a window, low down at their right, there was a dark smudge; the ribbon, black under the moon. Annister’s heart leaped up in answer, as, with a quick word, he halted his companions in the shadow of a tree. A moment they conferred; then Ellison—and Annister could almost see his grin in the darkness—spoke beneath his hand:
“Why, that’ll be easy! I’ve got m’ tools; they’re right here in my pocket, Mr. Annister! Those bars ought to be easy! For a fair journeyman sledge-swinger, it’ll be easy an’ you can lay to that!”
“Good!” whispered Annister in answer. “But—hurry!”
The moonlight lay in a molten flood between them and the house. But it was no time now for deliberation. Crossing that bright strip at a crouching run, the three were at the window; Annister’s harsh whisper hissed in the silence, through those iron bars:
“_Mary!_”
For a heart-beat silence answered him; then, faint and thin, in a faint, tremulous, sobbing breath, there came the answer:
“Steve—thank God!”
Annister had spoken the girl’s name without thought. At that high moment forms had been futile; that whisper had been wrung from him, deep-down, as had her answer. And then the soft rasp of steel on steel told that Ellison was at work.
But the giant was working against time. At any moment now might come the alarm; they had no means of knowing the number of those within those walls; perhaps even now peril, just behind, might be stalking them, out of the dark.
And still that soft rasp went on, until, at a low word from the girl, the giant, laying down his file, bent, heaved, putting his shoulder into it; and the bars sprang outward, bent and twisted in that iron grasp.
Annister, his hand reaching for the hand of the girl, went inward silently, to stand a moment, without speech, in the thick darkness of the little cell. But it was no time for dalliance.
Kane and Ellison behind him now, he set his shoulder against the door, as, Ellison aiding, it splintered outward with a soft, carrying crash. Ahead of them, along a dark, narrow corridor, there had come on a sudden sound of voices, murmurs; Annister, going toward that sound, saw suddenly an open door; light streamed from it as the murmur of voices rose:
“My friend, I bring you—forgetfulness....”
The words came in a sort of hissing sibilance as Annister, reaching that doorway, halted a moment as the tableau was burned into his brain:
He saw his father, helpless, his face gray with the hideous terror of that which was upon him, in the grasp of two cloaked and hooded figures, their dark faces grinning with a bestial mirth.
And before him, hand upraised and holding a curious, funnel-shaped object at which the man in the corner shrank backward even as he looked, he saw a tall man with a black, forking beard—the same that he had seen that evening at the corner of the street; the same that he had seen in that dim backwater of Rangoon, the Unspeakable—the man with the dark, foreign visage, and the eyes of death.
_CHAPTER THIRTEEN_
THE JAILER OF SOULS
Annister’s gun went up and out as the black-bearded man, turning, saw him where he stood.