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An instant later the man was past and continuing his way along the sidewalk. Maggie Shane glared after him for a minute, then she ran quickly down the stairs and into a grocery store a few doors west, where she asked if she might use the telephone. "Gimme West 2063," she demanded of the operator, and a moment later: "Is this Lake Street?" "Well say, Billy Byrne's back. I just see him."
Anthony Harding stood with white face and clinched hands during Byrne's recital of his identity. At its close he took a threatening step toward the prostrate man, raising his long sword, with a muffled oath. Billy Mallory sprang before him, catching his upraised arm. "Don't!" he whispered. "Think what we owe him now.
These two unspeakable frights must be that man's aunts affiliated to the devil. Whatever they had been once it was impossible to imagine what use such feeble creatures could be to the devil, now, in the world of the living. Which was Lucilla and which was Erminia? They were now things without a name. A moment of suspended animation followed Byrne's words.
Pinckney was talking of the States; he might just as well have been talking about Timbuctoo for all the impression he made on her with her unfortunate head filled with cracked dishes, chickens' black legs, Byrne's awkwardness and the suddenly remembered crumb-brush.
For three weeks they never left the little island except to gather fruit which grew hard by on the adjacent mainland. Byrne's wounds had troubled him considerably at times he had been threatened with blood poisoning.
Sergeant Flannagan saw Byrne's companion turn and look back just as Flannagan stepped from the doorway to cross the street after them. That was the last Sergeant Flannagan had seen either of Billy Byrne or his companion. The trail had ceased at the open window of the washroom at the rear of the restaurant, and search as he would be had been unable to pick it up again.
The light revealed on the clothing no stain, no trace, no spot of blood anywhere. Byrne's hands began to shake so that he had to set the lamp on the floor and turn away his head in order to recover from this agitation. Then he began to explore that cold, still, and rigid body for a stab, a gunshot wound, for the trace of some killing blow. He felt all over the skull anxiously. It was whole.
He was standing with his shoulder against the door trying to secure it against the detective without; but there was neither bolt nor bar. Flannagan hurtling against the opposite side exerted his noblest efforts to force an entrance to the room; but Billy Byrne's great weight held firm as Gibraltar.
The train bearing Billy Byrne and the deputy sheriff toward Joliet had covered perhaps half the distance between Chicago and Billy's permanent destination when it occurred to the deputy sheriff that he should like to go into the smoker and enjoy a cigar. Now, from the moment that he had been sentenced Billy Byrne's mind had been centered upon one thought escape.
These times were usually coincident with an acute financial depression in Billy's change pocket, and then he would fare forth in the still watches of the night, with a couple of boon companions and roll a souse, or stick up a saloon. It was upon an occasion of this nature that an event occurred which was fated later to change the entire course of Billy Byrne's life.
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