"Oh, it's you, is it? You've snitched, d--n you! I'll do for you, for this!"

He lunged forward, but Blaine, with a strength of which the Doctor would not a moment before have thought him possessed, grasped the ex-rubber and flung him backward, advancing into the hall at the same time, while his two operatives and the Doctor crowded in behind him.

"Al" staggered, regained his balance, and came on in a blind rush, bull neck lowered, long, monkey-like arms taut and rigid for the first blow. Blaine set himself to meet it, but it was never delivered. At that instant the whirring roar of a high-powered car, unm.u.f.fled, sounded in all their ears, and a second machine drew up at the steps.

Its single pa.s.senger flung himself out and bounded up to the door.

"What in h--l does this mean?" he bellowed. "Didn't you hear my horn?"

He stopped abruptly in sheer amazement, for Blaine had turned, with beaming face and outstretched hand.

"Mac Alarney!" he exclaimed. "Thank the Lord you've come! This thick-skulled b.o.o.b wouldn't give me time for a word, and every minute is precious! Come where I can talk to you, quick!"

Then, as if catching sight of the car in which Mac Alarney had come, for the first time his eyes widened and he seemed struggling to suppress an outburst of mirth.

"Great guns! Is that _your_ car, yours? Do you mean to tell me it was you I was playing with, back there on the road? When I flashed the light in your face I was sure you were Donnelley!"

As he uttered the name of the Chief of Police, Mac Alarney involuntarily stepped backward, and a wave of startled apprehension swept the amazement from his face, to be succeeded in turn by the primitive craftiness of the brute instinct on guard.

"And what may you be wanting here, Mr. Blaine?" he demanded, warily.

"To beat the police to it!" Blaine replied in a gruff whisper, adding as he jerked his thumb in the direction of the waiting Al. "Get rid of him! We haven't got a minute, I tell you!"

"The police!" repeated the other man, sharply. "Sure, I pa.s.sed two cars full of plain-clothes bulls, with an ambulance trailing them!--You can go now, Al."

Without giving the burly proprietor of the retreat time to discover him for himself, Blaine pulled the astonished Doctor forward.

"Here's Doctor Alwyn, whom you brought here last night. The police trailed you, and got his number, but fortunately when they began to question him, he smelled a rat in the whole business and came to me.

They told him a man named Paddington had double-crossed you, but of course I knew that was all rot, the minute I'd doped it out. You've got a fortune under your roof this minute, and you don't know it, Mac!

That's the best joke of all! You're entertaining an angel unawares!"

"Say, what're you gettin' at, Mr. Blaine?" Mac Alarney's brows drew close together, and he stared levelly from beneath them at the detective's exultant face.

"That young man with the fractured skull in the corner room upstairs--the one you brought Doctor Alwyn to attend last night--when you know who he is you're going up in the air! I don't know who brought him here, or what flim-flam line of talk they gave you, but it's a wonder you haven't guessed from the start who he was, with the papers full of it for days! Of course they must have given you a lot of money to get him well, and hush it all up, when you were able to pay the Doctor, here, five thousand dollars, but whatever they paid, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the reward they expected to get.

Mac, it's Ramon Hamilton you've got upstairs!"

Blaine stepped back himself, as if the better to observe the effect of what he manifestly seemed to believe would be astounding news, and clumsily and cautiously the other tried to play up to his lead.

"Ramon Hamilton!" he echoed. "You're crazy, Blaine! You don't know what you're talking about!"

"You'd better believe I do! See this photograph?" He held the tiny thumbnail picture before Mac Alarney's amazed eyes. "The Doctor took it last night, at the bedside of the young man upstairs, when you thought he was feeling his pulse. That watch of his was in reality a camera."

With a roar, the burly man turned upon the erect, unshrinking figure of the gray-haired doctor, but Blaine halted him.

"Not so fast, Mac. If it hadn't been for him, you'd be in the hands of the police now, remember, and they've only been waiting to get something on you, as you know. You can't blame Doctor Alwyn for being suspicious, after all the mysterious fuss you made bringing him here.

I know Ramon Hamilton well, and I recognized his face the instant it was handed to me! I'm on the case, myself--Miss Lawton, the girl he's going to marry, engaged me. I might have come and tried to take him away from you, so as to cop all the reward myself, but as it is, we'll split fifty-fifty--unless the police get here while we're wasting time talking! Man, don't you see how you've been done?"

"You can bet your life I do--that is, if the young man I've got upstairs is the guy you think he is," he added, in an afterthought of cautious self-protection. The acid of the hint that Paddington had betrayed him to the police had burned deep, however, as Blaine had antic.i.p.ated, and he walked blindly into the snare laid for him. "I'll tell you all about how he come to be here, later, and I'll fix them that tried to pull the wool over my eyes! Now, for the love of Heaven, Mr. Blaine, tell me what to do with him before the bulls come! Thank G.o.d, they can search the rest of the place, and welcome--I've got nothin' here but a half-dozen souses, and two light-weights, training."

"That's all right! You're safe if we can get him away without loss of time. That ambulance you saw don't belong to the police; it's mine. I saw them first, away back in the outskirts of the city, and I ordered it to drop behind and take the short cut up through Wheelbarrow Lane.

It's waiting now under the clump of elms by the brook, up the road a little--you know the spot! Bring him down and we'll take him there in my car. You come too, of course, and Al, and help load him into the ambulance. Then Al can come back, if you don't want to trust him, and you go on with us, back to the city."

"Where you goin' to take him?" asked Mac Alarney, warily. "You can't hide him from them in town."

"Who's talking about hiding him!" Blaine demanded, with contemptuous impatience. "Your brain must be taking a rest cure, Mac! We'll go straight to Miss Lawton, deliver the goods and get the reward, before they beat us to it! It'll be easy to explain matters to her; she won't care much about the story as long as she's got him again alive, and at that you've only got to stick to the truth, and I'm right there to back you up in it. Any fool could realize that you'd have produced him and claimed the reward, if you had known who he actually was. Whoever brought him here gave you the wrong dope and you fell for it, that's all--For the Lord's sake, hurry!"

"You're right, Mr. Blaine. It's the only thing to do now. I fell for their dope, all right, but they'll fall harder before I'm through with them! Lend me your two men, here. There's no use having any of mine except Al get wise. You and the Doctor wait in the car, and we'll bring him out."

Henry Blaine motioned to his operatives, with a curt wave of his hand, to follow Mac Alarney, and turning, he went out of the door and down the steps to his car, with the Doctor at his heels.

"You don't suppose that he saw through your story, do you, Mr.

Blaine?" the latter queried in an anxious whisper, as they settled themselves to wait with what patience they could muster. "Could that suggestion of his have been merely a ruse to separate your a.s.sistants from you?"

The detective smiled.

"Hardly, Doctor. It's part of my profession to have made a study of human nature, and Mac Alarney's type is an open book to me. Added to that, I've known the man himself for years, in an offhand way. I've got his confidence, and now that he realizes he is in a hole, he's a child in my hands, even if he thinks for the moment that as a detective I'm about the poorest specimen in captivity. Steady now, here they come!"

The large double doors had been thrown wide open and Mac Alarney, the burly Al, and the two operatives appeared, bearing between them a limp, unconscious, blanket-swathed form. As they eased it into the back seat of the limousine, Blaine flashed his electric pocket light upon the sleeping face.

"I knew I wasn't mistaken!" he whispered exultantly to Mac Alarney and the Doctor. "It's young Hamilton, all right. Now, let's be off!"

The others crowded in, and they whirled down the drive and out once more upon the wide State road, in the opposite direction to that in which they had come. A bare half-mile away, and they came abruptly upon the ambulance, screened by the clump of naked elms at the side of the road.

"You get in first, Doctor," ordered Blaine, significantly. "You've got to look after your patient now."

As the Doctor obeyed, Mac Alarney, with a shrewd gleam in his eyes, turned to the detective.

"I think I'd better ride with him, too, Mr. Blaine," he observed. "You don't know who you can trust these days. Your ambulance driver may give you the slip."

"All right, Mac!" Blaine a.s.sented, with bluff heartiness. "We'll both ride with him! Did you think I'd try to double-cross you, too? I can't blame you, after the rotten deal that's been handed to you, but we won't waste time arguing. Here's the stretcher. Come on, shove him in!"

The Doctor had been wondering when the denouement of this adventure would be. Now it came without warning, with a startling suddenness which left him dazed and agape.

The inert body of his patient was laid carefully beside him, and he glanced out of the ambulance door in time to see Mac Alarney dismiss his burly a.s.sistant, and turn to enter the vehicle. His foot was already upon the lowest step, when the Doctor saw Blaine raise his hand to his lips. A short, sharp blast of a whistle pierced the air, and in an instant a dozen men had sprung out of the darkness and leaped upon the two surprised miscreants. Then ensued a struggle, brief but awful to the onlooker in its silent, grim ferocity, as the two separate knots of men battled each about their central orbit. The scuffle of many feet on the hard-packed road, the mutter of curses, the dull thud of blows, the hoa.r.s.e, strangulated breathing of men fighting against odds to the last ounce of their strength, came to the Doctor's startled ears in a confused babel of half-suppressed sound, with the purring drone of the two engines as an undertone.

A minute, and it was all over. The thick-set Al went down like a felled ox, and Mac Alarney wavered under an avalanche of blows and crumpled to his knees. Handcuffed and securely bound, the two were bundled into Blaine's waiting car.

"Paddington never double-crossed me!" groaned Mac Alarney, before the door closed upon him. "But you did, Blaine! Just as I meant to get him, I'll get you! I fell for your d--d scheme, and since you've got the goods on me, I suppose I'll go up, but G.o.d help you when I come out! I can wait--it'll be the better when it comes!"

"But the others--" queried the Doctor, as he and Blaine, with the injured man between them, settled down in the ambulance for the slow, careful journey back to the city. "That third man who came for me last night--the one with the French accent and the cough--and the rest who are in this kidnaping plot? Will you get them, too?"

"Ross and Suraci are enough to guard Mac Alarney and Al on their way to the lock-up," the detective responded quietly. "The others will go on up to the sanitarium and clean the place out. They'll get French Louis, all right. And as for the rest who are concerned in this, Doctor Alwyn, be sure that I intend to see that they get their just deserts."

"And it is said that you have never lost a case!" the Doctor remarked.

"I shall not lose this one." Blaine spoke with quiet confidence, unmixed with any boastfulness. "I cannot lose; there is too much at stake."

Late that night, Anita Lawton was awakened from a tortured, feverish dream by the violent ringing of the telephone bell at her bedside. The voice of Henry Blaine, fraught with a latent tension of suppressed elation, came to her over the wire.