The Kiss of The Enemy,

Lake County Press, Issue 2166, 25 April 1907, Page 2

The Kiss of The Enemy,

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

By HEADON HILL.

Author of 'The Oaean King Mystery,' 'The Sentence of the Oouri,' &a.

COPYRIGHT.

CHAPTER XXllL—(Continued.) ' Yes,' he said,' there was something of the sort, bub I was never in any real danger.' T 'Then I have done right, and 1 shall continue to do right. I cannot answer your question or explain my conduct,' replied Patricia, beginning to sob again. ' It isn't fair, Fred, to press me so ; I am not very strong, she added pathetically. Blakesly took a couple of turns up the room, and came and stood over the couch again. The deadliest of a weapons—a woman's tears—had well nigh unmanned him, but he steel 3d himself, knowing that he was only ■' cruel to be kind.' 'Patricia,' he began, brusquely oi Bet purpose,'you don't want the next attempt on my life to succeed, do you ? Listen, I am not brutal without good reason. You' have been conspiring with the man who tried to make away with me, and who will very likely try with better luck, if you play into his hands. If Vcnv'ood informed you of the attempt on me he must have been the assailant, for no one lias ever heard of the occurrence through me. ' Indeed, but it wasn't Mr Verwood ; it was that old man, Ezekiel, who was down at Mulgrave in the spring. Air Verwood warned me against him—both on your behalf and on Arnold s. I have not conspired against you, Fred, however base you may deem me, Patricia retorted, stung by his accusafcl°Blakesly amazed her by breaking into a hearty laugh, partly because he was really pleased, and partly to usher in with due dramatic effect, the coup which should force her to final capitulation And all the time he hated himself for having to vanquish the woman beloved. 'Pat,' he said with a complete change of maimer, ' it's a good thing you've got an Old Bailey lawyer to look after you. You are a recalcitrant witness, but my cross-examination has drawn you neatly. Would you be surprised to hear that I have long suspected that Mr Ezekiel was none other than Mr Ralph Verwood in a very clever make-up? Now I am quite certain of it.' ♦ Oh, Fred !' cried the girl, sitting up and staring at him wildly. ' Exactly. I am Fred now, but I shan't be anybody long if you don't

put it in my power to meet this masquerading scoundrel on fair terms.' He had gained his point, he saw, but before hearing the confession he stepped out into the hall. ' She'll be all right now,' he reassured Mrs Payne, who was hovering anxiously. Then he went out and paid the flyman, with whom Uavc was chatting. ' Dave,' he whispered, ' this chap will give you a lift down to the inn at Postbridge. Find out if the man you have just spoken to on the moor is staying there. Don't let him see you if you can help it, bub come straight back and report.' A minute later he was by the couch in the drawing-room, listening to the story which Patricia had to tell. It all hinged on the letter which she had received at Mrs Payne's house at Mulgrave on the day when Blakesly had brought Polly and Dave and had rummaged the sexton's cottage. The letter, which Patricia handed to him, spoke for itself. It said that the writer, who signed himself Ralpu Verwood, had reason to know that a person named Ezekiel was working to bring home to Sir Arnold the charge of having murdered Mercy Gilbody. This person was a crank and a fanatic, but he was aware of evidence which would surely convict Sir Arnold if the case were re-opened. So set had been Ezekiel, the letter averred, on procuring the young baronet's conviction for forgery with a view to holding him for a graver charge, that he had gone to the length of trying to deprive him of the • assistance of his counsel by murdering the latter before the trial. ' f do not conceal,' proceeded the writer, ' that it is my evidence which this ruthless antagonist relies on to convict your brother—evidence which my regard for him led me to withhold at the inquest. Li self-defence I shall have to produce it now, most unwillingly, unless Mr Blakesly abandons tlie persistent attempts he has made, and is still making, to connect me with the crime of which I know tht your brother alone was guilty. I cannot fully explain to you, the case being very complicated, but I can assure you that on Mr Blakesly's activity being checked the grave personal peril to that gentleman from Mr Ezekiel will immediately cease, ' Now, Miss Mulgrave, you know as

well as I do that to inform Mr Blnkcsly of the true position will be equivalent to spurring him to a renewed outburst of mistaken zeal. The only way to detach him from the case is to detach him from you, and I am therefore putting it in your power to save him from his secret adversary, and your brother from my evidence, by terminating your engagement with him. Believe me, it is °tho only road to security for both Mr Blakesly and Sir Arnold.' Blakesly handed the letter back with a grim smile. ' And so to save my life from ' Mr Ezekiel,' and Arnold from hanging, you gave me my discharge that same afternoon, lie said. ' Well, Pat, my dear, if you head went astry your heart was all right, and that's what I care most about.' He could not npbraid her. for believing the precious concoction, knowing as he did how she had been unnerved by the events of the year. But there was more to learn, and now that the ice was broken he had no difficulty in drawing from her how she came to meet Verwood on the moor. Somehow, probably through the eavesdropper in the convervatory at Fernbank, Lc had learned of the trip to Devonshire and its object. On the day after her arrival at the bungalow she had received another letter from him, bearing the London postmark, and demanding an interview on pain of disclosing to tho prison authorities the presence in the neighbourhood of Sir Arnold's friends.

Terrified by the threat, she hail gone oat in the storm to meet him, and he had then insisted on her keeping him apprised of whatever happened at the bungalow - who came and went, and so on. Ho did not profess to be hostile to Arnold's escape from prison, but asserted that ho must know all about it. ' In order to thwart the machinations of 'Mr Ezekiel,' eh? Ah, I thought so,' murmured Blakcsly. 'Mr Ezokiel Verwood Lezzard is a veritable chameleon. Well, go on, Pat. I am not sure that your temporary defection has not made you the strongest weapon 1 hold Tor defeating this accomplished person.' But there was little more to tell. On the next day Patricia had been taken ill, and had been unable to keep the subsequent appointments on the moor which Verwood made by letter. As he had refused to give her his address she was unable to write an explanation, and that night ho would warn the Governor of the prison of Arnold's projected escape. In her despair she had induced Dave "Western to go and tell her persecutor why she had not kept the appointments. Blakcsly, who had drawn a ehair to the couch, rose and shook himself, as if awakening from a bad dream. ' You will hear from your friend again before many hours are over, and next time you must keep the appointment,' he said, stooping to kiss the eager lips. 'Be quick and get well, dearest, for we have an ugly erew to fight, and the battle is far from won yet.' '-And you are sure that there was nothing in that about Arnold and Mercy Gilbody ?' ' A pack of lies—a red herring on the track—to bluff you into choking me off,' her lover assured her. Hearing a step on the verandah he left the room and went to the front door just as it was opened by Dave. 'No,' said the latter. 'Lczzard is not at the inn. He'd cleared out in the carriage that brought him from Princeton shortly before I got there. But just look here, sir.' Dave held the door wide and showed a white blank —a denso wall of woolly fog that had arisen in the last halfhour, obliterating earth and sky. Eight up to the verandah surged the ghostly mist, curtailing the shaft of light from the lamp-lit hall only a foot away. "With a full intelligence of his meaning Blakcsly stepped back and tapped the barometer, ' Glass very high, and risingsteadily,' he pronounced. ' Under those conditions we ought to be in for a long spell of quiet weather, and with the wind in the north-east that means that this fog will hang about for clays. Dave, my boy, the time has come to give Chrymes the tip that we are ready.' ' Bight you are, sir,' was the reply. ' I'll drop him a line, and if I pop back with it to the inn at once I'll just catch the mail cart. Then he'll have it in the morning first thing. You ain't afraid that that scallywag has queered the pitch ?' ' No,' responded Blakcsly, with decision. 'lb will be after Sir Arnold is free that we sball have that gentleman to reckon with. At present, unless I am very much mistaken, he is hoping thafe the attempt at escape will be made, and that the poor boy will be shot in making it. Yon have done what you can to minimise that risk, of coiuse ?' 'Chrymes says it will be all right, but there's bound to be the oil' chance when bullets are Hying in a fog,' said Dave, cautiously. CHAPTER XXIV.—BALL CARTRIDGE. Having slung his hammock and swept his cell, Arnold Mulgrave sat on j the bare wooden bench, waiting : moodily for his breakfast. The hope raised by Chrymes's advice, which had resulted in his exile from the shop to the hard labour of the Held gang, was | dying out. Day by day he had searched j the warder's expressionless face for a : sign of further comfort, but none had been forthcoming. Apparently those unspecified 'friends' who had desired outdoor employment ! for him were satisfied with having l emancipated him from cobbling the I boots of his fellow convicts. Pleasant though he had found the change, he

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was beginning to realise that be had built vague castles on that foundation —airy fabrics which he feared had no substance. .Suddenly the door of his cell opened and Chrymes slipped in. Arnold rose scowling, for it was time for the routine inspection of his kit and bedding by the warder, and all he expected was the usually chilly silence, or possibly a reprimand. But a second glance at the hairless, pock-marked face of his custodian thrilled him with expectation, which was fulfilled when Chrymes passed to him a folded paper. ' Read it while you have your breakfast ; then chew and swallow it,' whispered the warder. ' You can take it as the straight griffin. And here's something else you'll want.' The ' something else' was a pocket compass, upon which Arnold's fingers closed greedily. The mere possession of an instrument so useless to a prisoner seemed significant of liberty. And sure enough when Chrymes had left him the slip of paper told him how that liberty was to be obtained. 'The first time that a fog rises whilo you are out with the gang, cut and run for it,' began this absorbing screed. 'Make for the bridge over Blackbrook, and then s'.rike north-east across the moor, keeping the road on your right. People will be out looking for you to guide you to safety, but if you miss them you will find friends at a bungalow five miles due north-east of the bridge. The guard on the bridge will probably shoot at you, but he won't hit. It is hoped that your escape will result in the clearance of your name.' With painfully beating heart Arnold committed the instructions to memory and then destroyed them in the manner indicated by Chrymes. The handwriting was unknown to him, being that of Dave Western, but the exquisite joy of hope told him it was genuine, and the promised restoration of his good name elinched his resolve. The attempt should be made that very day, if only the blessed fog would come.

fugitive rushed by. Then oub on to the moor away from the road, and, a hurried glance at the compass having given him his bearings, he settled down into a steady stride for the refuge five miles ahead. The airy firing of the guard on the bridge, 'squared' by the venial Chrymes, filled him with confidence, for he knew that the guards with the gang could not pursue till they had shcplicrded their charges back to barracks. Then the real hue and cry would commence, but by that time he would be out of sight even if the fog lifted, of which there was no sign. In that dreary waste of hedgelcss, treeless upland the rugged ground proved his greatest difficulty. Several times he was within an ace of being ' bogged ' in peat-hags, and more than once he barked his shins on the outlying boulders of some solitary tor. Never seeing beyond a few yards, but stumbling cm with the help of the compass always in a straight line, he had traversed four good miles, when suddenly a voice came out of the mist, close at hand, yet sounding strangely thin in the wet blanket of the air : ' Mulgravc-I say, Mulgravc, is that you ?' To the prison authorities he was 'Number 48,' so arguing that this must be one of the friends expecting him, he had no hesitation in answering. The voice seemed to come from unseen heights above, and he shouted upwards : * Yes, it's me. Where arc you ?' 'lt's all right, but you'll have to climb to get to me,' replied the invisible speaker in tones muffled by the clinging mist. 'I cannot find my way down in this infernal fog.' Even as the words reached him Arnold nearly fell against the rugged scarp of a pHo of rock, but in his eagerness to touch a friendly hand he scrambled up and reached the summit of a minor but precipitous tor, whero the atmosphere was a little less dense than on the level of tho plain. From the white vapour-bath emerged a tall man, whose features grew gradually clear.

Bub, on his inarching out with tlio gang for his daily struggle with the peat-bogs,disappointment claimed him. The dense white mist that had swooped on the moor tho night before had vanished, leaving tho atmosphere cold and grey, but perfectly clear. Only here and there over tho reedy tarns in the lower ground lurked little patches of haze which to one more learned in moods of the moor would have held out a promise. So thought at least a veteran criminal with a silver stubbed chin ! who marched next him in the ranks. I '"We shan't do a full day's graft toJ day, unite,' the old lag whispered. ' There's fog browing in those splotchos down by the pools.' Arnold strove hard to keep his face under control, and to study with a new interest tho lay of the country without exciting the attention of warders and guards. The work of reclamation was going on in the fork where the two roads from Tavistock and Yolverton converge just beyond Princeton, and it was to the former, where it spanned the Blackbrook river, that his eyes turned longingly. Five miles in a beo line north-east from that bridge lay succour and safety, and a fair name to bo regained. But the day wore on to afternoon without any change of weather, and Arnold ceased to take furtive glances at the guard who with sloped rifle paced to and fro on the bridg2. Then, suddenly, as he drove his spade into the black peat a jarring jangle broke on his ears from the barracks —the sound of the prison bell recalling the held gangs. Instantly there followed the hoarse commands of the warders to cease woik and fall in, and Arnold gazed round for the cause. A wall of white vapour was wreathing and eddying up from tlio south, obscuring even as ho looked tho prison buildings, and muffling tho sound of the bell as though its clapper had been suddenly swathed in flannel. ' Close up there ! Pours right ! Quick march !' rang out the voice of the senior warder, and Arnold, who had mechanically taken his place in the ranks, stepped out prison wards. But he set his teeth for the supreme ! moment that must come when the I advancing fog met the column, and j that could not be long delayed. He : noted with Jicrco joy that the warders ; were anxious, for tho wreathing mist is the chance of the desperate convict I who prefers to break the monotony of , his life by wandering hungry and friendless on the moor till he is brought j back ail ignominious failure. But Arnold had been told that ho j was not friendless, and that there was j no need for him to rob lonely habita- ! tions of food and clothes. If ho could only win to the bungalow whore welcome waited him he would be what the newspapers called ' a hunted wretch ' for no more than Jive-and-i'orty ! minutes. That was the time he j allowed himself to cover the distance across unknown country in a fo fr . And here came the fog at last, swal- | lowing the head of the column and ! rolling along the line of sullen faces tramping steadily into it. Arnold waited till the whole of the gang was enveloped, and then, quietly dropping from his place in the ranks, raced in j the direction of the now hidden bridge. ; lie had not run lifty yards when the shouting of the warders told him that i he was missed, and a moment Liter the j rifles of the hall-dozen guards at the j rear of the column cracked. But he I sped on unhurt, for the trained marks- : men could not see him to aim. Probably they only fired to warn the sentry on the bridge and to scare the other convicts from a general stampede. The bridge at hist, and on it at the far end a phantom figure, unseen till he was within three feet, which raised a rifle and lined skyward as the

'llalph Vcrwood!' cried Arnold, starting back amazed. 'ls it to you then that I owe my escape ?' 'Why not?' replied the sexton's lodger, picking his way nearor along tho dangerous foothold. Something iu tho tone of his voice jarred somehow. There was a sneering hollowness in it which put Arnold on his guard, and ho watchod every movement of tho slow advance towards him with tho instinct of the pursued for a natural foe. There flashed into his memory a picture which had held his fancy yoars ago in the old nursery at Mulgrave—the picture of a jaguar stealing on its prey. Ilalph Yerwood reminded him of tho jaguar.

Anyhow ho would not bo taken unawares. Ho would bring this man to book as friend or enemy before ho camo to close quarters. ' Why not?' ho ropeatod scornfully. ' Well, after all, thoro is good reason why you should wish to sot mo free—as an atonement for your traitorous evidence at my trial.' Treading the jagged surface gingerly, Vorwood still camo on. ' My dear fellow there was nothing in my evidence that wasn't strictly truo,' he laughed. ' I challenge you to find a flaw in the statement that no ono but you and I had access to the cheque. I don't mind admitting now, however, hero without witnesses, that the jury saddled the wrong horse with tho alteration of tho figures. I had to get you put away, you see.'

All tlio time ho was creeping nearer and nearer along- tlie slippery cornice, and this barefaced confession of treachery, which would never have been inado to one ablo to repeat it, convinced Arnold of his imminent peril. None too soon, for the parley designed to gain time had sorved his purpose, and swift as lightning Ycrwood drew a pistol and fired point blank, tho bullet grazing the young baronet's prison-cropped temple. Before he could pull trigger again Arnold was on him like an avalanche, wresting the pistol from his grasp and hurling it behind him to explode harmlessly among the rocks. Then, the fury of indignation aiding his toilbraced muscles, the intended victim seized his assailant and flung him over the brink, to fall with a horrid scrunch on the i'oofc-rocks forty feet below. Arnold began to descend slowly, caring little whether or no he haddcilled his adversary, but sick at heart now as to the prospect of ultimate oscape. (To bo continued.)