Chapter Nine The Battle in the “Club”
The time was nearly ripe. The clue of those newspaper items; the canceled check; the somewhat repellant evidence of the battered piece of goldwork picked up in the corridor of the Mansion House—Annister had been able to put two and two together, to find a sum as strange, as odd, say, as five, or seven, or even one.
But that name that had trembled on the lips of Rook’s secretary remained a secret; with it, Annister was convinced, he would be able to pull those threads together with a single jerk, to find them—one.
He had had news from Mojave: the dentist had identified the insane man as his patient by means of his chart, but, with that face, the man could not be Banker Axworthy—it simply could not be. And yet he was!
It was something of a riddle, and more, even, than that, for the thing savored of the supernatural, of necromancy, of a black art that might, say, have had for its practitioner a certain personage with the eyes of a damned soul and a black, forking beard, curled, like Mephisto’s; Annister thought that it might.
Further, the conductor of that train had been able to describe, somewhat in detail, the man who had jostled the derelict and his companion; the man had been a stranger to the conductor; he had been tall and thin, with a small, sandy moustache, and a high-arched, broken nose, and he had been wearing the conventional Stetson. The fellow might have been disguised, of course, but if Annister could find the black-bearded man, discover his identity, he was reasonably certain that he would not draw blank.
It was no certainty, of course, but it was worth the risk, he told himself. It would be a desperate hazard that he was about to face, he knew. Thinking of his father, together with the remembrance of that unholy and unspeakable horror that he had witnessed, born of the stinking shadows of that dark street in a city foul and old, its people furtive worshipers of strange gods, Annister felt again that crawling chill which had assailed him with the passing of the tall man with the eyes of death.
With Annister, to decide was to act. Dispatching a brief telegram in code to a certain office in a certain building in Washington, he went now to keep his rendezvous with Rook and the rest. It was yet early, scarce eight in the evening, and the street was full of life and movement, before him, and behind.
And before him and behind, as he went onward, he was conscious that those who walked there walked with him, stride for stride; they kept their distance, moving without speech, as he turned the corner of the dusty street.
If he had had any doubt about it, the doubt became certainty as, wheeling sharply to the left, they kept him company now, still with that grim, daunting silence: a bodyguard, indeed, but a bodyguard that held him prisoner as certainly as if the manacles were on his wrists.
It was not yet dark, but with a rising wind there had come a sky overcast and lowering; low down, upon the horizon’s rim to the eastward, the violet blaze of the lightning came and went, with, after a little, the heavy salvos of the thunder, like the marching of an armed host.
But Annister, his gaze set straight ahead, turned inward at the entrance of the saddler’s shop, mounting the stairs, as, behind him he heard the heavy door slam shut.
Perhaps it had been the wind, but as Annister went upward he heard, just beyond that door, the murmur of voices; they reached him in a sing-song mutter against the rising of the wind, in a quick, growling chorus.
There had been something in that snarling speech to daunt a man less brave than the man on that narrow stair, but Annister went upward, lightly now, to meet whatever waited behind the door set with its narrow panel that he could see merely as a dark smudge of shadow in the encircling gloom.
He rapped, twice, and the door fell open silently, disclosing the long room in which, as he remembered, he had sat, but a few nights in the past, to listen as the lawyer and his crowd had waited for the man called “Bull.”
The room was brightly lighted. At a long table, midway between door and windows, five men were seated: Lunn, his fat face gray with a sort of eager pallor, was chewing nervously at an unlighted cigar; he glanced up now at Annister’s entrance, turning to a big man on his right. At the head of the table, his veiled glance like the stare of a falcon, sat Rook, but it was upon the big man next to Lunn that Annister’s glance rested with an abrupt interest as the lawyer spoke:
“Welcome to our city, Mr. Annister!” he said, in a voice that reminded Annister of molasses dripping from a barrel. “I want you to meet—Mr. Bull Ellison; he’s been right anxious to meet you, haven’t you, Bull?”
Annister, in the passage of an eye-flash, understood. This was the man whom he had encountered in the vestibule of the smoker, and, of a sudden, memory rose up out of the past, and, with it, a picture: a padded ring under twin, blazing arcs; the thud and shuffle of sliding feet; a man, huge, brutish, broad, fists like stone mauls, yet, for all his bulk, a very cat for quickness.
“Bruiser” Ellison, they had called him then; a heavyweight whose very brute strength had kept him from the championship; that, and a certain easy good nature which was not apparent now in the bleak staring of the eyes turned now upon Annister, remorseless, under lowered brows.
Now, as if at a signal, the men about the table rose; the table was hauled backward to the wall, leaving a wide, sanded space under the lights.
And then, even as Rook spoke, Annister abruptly understood: this gang of thieves, as he knew now—“Plunder, Limited,” as Cleo Ridgley had called them—Annister knew them now, under the leadership of Rook, for an outfit which would stop short of nothing to attain its ends. His eyes, roving the long room up and down, searched now for that dark face, with its black, forking beard, but he was not really expecting to see it, but that, if Rook was the actual leader, Black Beard was “the man higher up,” Annister was, somehow, convinced.
They had failed with Westervelt and his segundo; now, as the man called “Bull” came forward across the floor, Rook spoke:
“Ellison hasn’t forgotten his meeting with you, Annister; he says you played him a dirty trick; hit him when he wasn’t looking; that right, Bull?” he asked, with a certain sly malice directed at the giant with the cauliflower ear.
“And now,” Rook’s purring tones continued, “he wants satisfaction; he’ll get it, won’t he, Mister Annister?”
For a moment, as Annister’s eyes bored into his, the lawyer’s face showed, like an animal’s, in a Rembrandtesque shading of high light and shadow beneath the lights. Stripped of its mask, it was like the face of a devil; now the mouth grinned, but without mirth, the lips drawn backward from the teeth in a soundless snarl. He laughed suddenly, and there was nothing human in it, as Annister, his back to the wall, smiled grimly now in answer.
He had been somewhat less than discreet, he reflected; Rook’s purpose had shown in his eyes; he, Annister, had walked into a trap from which, this time, there could be no escape. He had meant to beard them to their faces, wring from Rook an admission as to his father, perhaps more; then shoot his way out, if need be.
But now—he would have to fight this giant, a ring veteran of a hundred battles, with bare fists, surrounded by an encircling, hostile cordon, who, if by any chance he might prove the victor, would see to it that he paid for that victory with his life.
Annister knew that it was on the cards that Rook, for instance, would shoot him down as remorselessly as a man would squeeze a mosquito, say, out of life between thumb and finger. But it was the lawyer’s humor, doubtless, to see him manhandled, perhaps killed beneath the drumming impact of those iron fists.
Calmly, he removed his coat, bestowing his automatic in the pocket of his trousers. He did it openly, turning to face Ellison, who, stripped to an athletic undershirt and trousers, regarded Annister with a grinning assurance.
He was big; perhaps twenty pounds heavier than Annister, with wide shoulders and a deep arching chest; with his forward-thrusting jaw and bullet head, with its stiff fell of pig’s-bristles, the long arms like a gorilla’s, he towered over his antagonist like a cave bear, a grizzly waiting for the kill, and like a cave bear, at Rook’s snarling call of “Time!” he was upon the lesser man like a thunderbolt, fists going like flails.
Annister, in his day and generation, had absorbed the science of hit, stop, and getaway under masters of the art who pronounced him, as an amateur, the equal of many a professional performer of the squared circle; he was lean and hard, whereas Ellison’s waistline showed, under the thin shirt, in folds of fat.
If the onlookers expected to see Annister annihilated by that first, furious rush, they were mistaken. Crouching, lightly, on the balls of his feet, he drove forward a lightning straight left, full on the point. Ellison, coming in, took it, grunting; the blow had traveled a scant six inches, but there had been power in it.
It set him back upon his heels, from which, as he rose, raging, he dove in with a ripping one-two punch, which, partly blocked by his antagonist, yet crashing through the latter’s guard, landed high upon his cheek-bone with a spanking thud.
It had been a grazing blow; otherwise, the fight might have ended then and there. Annister, backing nimbly before the giant’s rush, realized that he must avoid a clinch; at in-fighting the giant would have the edge: those mast-like arms and massive shoulders, the huge bulk—they would, at close quarters, with the drumming impact of the great fists, have spelled a quick ending with the sheer, slugging power of the attack.
He heard Rook snarl as, side-stepping like a sliding ghost, he countered with a long, curving left.
So far, he had been holding his own. If he could keep the giant at his distance, he might wear him out. For this was not a fight by rounds; a professional pugilist, fighting in the pink, would have had bellows to mend at the end, say, of five minutes of a give-and-take encounter moving at high speed.
Circling, feinting, ducking, Annister kept that long left in his adversary’s face, forcing the pace, yet keeping out of harm’s way save for an overhand swing, which, landing high up upon his cheek-bone, turned him half round with the impact, throwing him off balance to a slumping fall.
Up like a flash, however, he ducked, dodged, evading those mighty arms that strove desperately to reach him through that impenetrable guard.
A fight with four-ounce gloves can be a bloody affair enough, but with nature’s weapons, under London Prize Ring rules, it can be a shambles. Armed with the cestus or the mailed fist, Ellison might have wreaked havoc as a gladiator of old Rome punished his adversary to the death. As it was, Annister, his face a bloody mask, where that socking punch had landed, gave Rook and his supporters heart of grace.
“Take him, Bull!”
The screaming advice was in the high voice of Lunn; the others echoed it. But if Annister was in desperate case, the giant, sobbing now with the fury of his spent strength, was weaving on his feet.
Legs like iron columns upbore that mighty strength, but a pile-driving right, behind it the full weight of Annister’s two hundred pounds of iron-hard muscle, sinking with an audible “plop!” in his adversary’s midriff, brought from the giant a quick, gasping grunt.
Ellison’s endurance was almost done. He could “take it,” but, hog-fat from a protracted period of easy living, professional fighter as he had been, this amateur, with the arching chest of a greyhound and the stamina of a lucivee of the long trail, was wearing him down.
Trading punch for punch now, Annister abruptly cut loose with pile-driving right and lefts; they volleyed in from every angle; there was a cold grin on his lips now as he went round the giant like a cooper round a barrel, bombarding him with a bewildering crossfire of hooks and swings, jabs and uppercuts.
Annister, at the beginning of the fight, had expected the usual tricks of the professional: holding in the clinches; butting; the elbow; the heel of the hand against the face; but Ellison had fought fair.
Now, as the giant, boring in against that relentless attack, faltered, mouth open, labored breath sucked inward through clenched teeth, Annister stepped backward, hands dropping at his sides.
Ellison, almost out, stood, weaving on his feet, fronting his adversary, a queer look of surprise in his face, and a something more. Annister, strangely enough, as has been mentioned, had, in spite of his encounter with Ellison in the smoker, conceived something for the man that had been close to liking. Somehow, rough as the man was; crooked, by all the signs; the tool of Rook and of his minions, he had the blue eye of a fighter—the straight, level look of a man who, though an enemy, would yet fight fair.
Annister, breathing heavily, thrust out his hand.
“A draw, ha?” he said. “Well—suppose we let it go at that.”
For a moment Ellison appeared to hesitate; there came again the queer look in his eyes, as of surprise, wonder, and a something more. There came a grating curse from Lunn; a sudden movement from the onlookers roundabout.
Ellison’s great paw closed on the extended hand with a grip of iron, as Rook’s voice rose, strident, under the lights:
“Bull—are you crazy? This man—he’s just—a dam’ dick!”