The Wire Devils. Frank L. Packard

against the wall, and upon a large safe in the corner, near the window, whose polished nickel dial sent back an answering flash under the darting ray; but the Hawk, for the moment, appeared to be interested in neither desk nor safe. The flashlight was holding in a kind of dogged inquisitiveness upon another door close to the window, and directly opposite the safe.

      He stepped without a sound across the room, and, reaching this door, snapped off his flashlight. He tried the door cautiously, found it unlocked, and very softly opened it the space of an inch. He listened attentively. There was no sound. He pushed the door open, switched on his flashlight again, and stepped through the doorway. It appeared to be a clerks’ office—for the paymaster’s staff, presumably. The Hawk seemed to possess a peculiar penchant for doors. The only thing in the room that apparently held any interest for him now was the door that opened, like the paymaster’s, upon the corridor. He slipped quickly across the room, and, as before, examined the lock. Like the other, it was a spring lock; and, like the other, he tested it to make sure it was locked on the outside.

      “Ten thousand dollars,” confided the Hawk to the lock, “isn’t to be picked up every night; and we can’t afford to take any chances, you know.”

      He began to retrace his steps toward the paymaster’s office, but now, obviously, with more attention to the details of his surroundings, for his flashlight kept dancing quick, jerky flashes in all directions about him.

      “Ah!” The exclamation, low-breathed, came suddenly. “I thought there ought to be something like this around here!”

      From, beside a desk, he stooped and picked up an empty pay satchel; then, returning at once to the other office, but leaving the connecting door just ajar, he dropped the pay bag in front of the safe, and went silently over to the desk—a mouse running across the floor would have made more commotion than the Hawk had made since his entry into the station.

      “... Upper drawer, left side,” he muttered, “Locked, of course—ah!” A tiny key, selected from its fellow outlaws, was inserted in the lock—and the Hawk pulled out the drawer, and began to rummage through its contents.

      From the back of the drawer, after perhaps a minute’s search, he picked up a card, and with a nod of satisfaction began to study it.

      “‘Left—two right; eighty-seven, one quarter—left; three... ‘” The Hawk’s eyes travelled swiftly over the combination. He read it over again, “Thank you!” murmured the Hawk whimsically—and dropped the card back in the drawer, and locked the drawer.

      A moment more, and the white beam of the flashlight was playing on the face of the safe, and the silence of the room was broken by the faint, musical, metallic whirring of the dial. Bent forward, a crouching form in the darkness, the Hawk worked swiftly, a sure, deft accuracy in every movement of his fingers. With a low thud, as he turned the handle, the heavy bolt shot back in its grooves, and the ponderous door swung open. And now the flashlight’s ray flooded the interior of the safe, and the Hawk laughed low—before him, lying on the bottom of the safe, neatly banded as they had come from the bank, were a dozen or fifteen little packages of banknotes.

      The Hawk dropped on his knees, and reached for the pay bag. Ten thousand dollars was not so bulky, after all—if the denominations of the notes were large enough. He riffled one package through his fingers—twenties! Gold, yellow-back twenties!

      There was a sort of beatific smile on the Hawk’s lips. He dropped the package into the bag.

      Tens, and twenties, and fives—the light, in a curiously caressing way, was lingering on the little fortune as it lay there on the bottom of the safe. There was only a pile or two of ones, and the rest was—what was that!

      The smile vanished from the Hawk’s lips, and, in a rigid, tense, strained attitude, he hung there, motionless. What was that—that dull, rasping, sound! It was like some one clawing at the wall outside. The window!

      With a single motion, as though stirred to life by some galvanic shock, the Hawk’s hand shot out and swept the packages of banknotes into the bag. He snapped off his flashlight. The room was in darkness.

      That sound again! And now a creak! The window was being opened. Something black was bulking there on the sill outside—and something queerly white, a man’s face, was pressed against the pane, peering in.

      The Hawk glanced sharply around him. Inch by inch he was pushing the safe door shut. He could not reach the door leading to the clerks’ office, for he would have to pass by the window, and—he shrank back quickly, the safe door closed but still unlocked, and crouched low in the corner against the wall. The window slid up to the top, and with a soft pad, like some animal alighting on the floor, the man had sprung into the room.

      The Hawk’s fingers crept into his pocket and out again, tight-closed now upon an automatic pistol. The other’s flashlight winked, went out, then shot across the room, locating the desk—and once more all was darkness.

      There was not a sound now, save the short, hurried breathing of the other, panting from the exertion of his climb. Then the man’s step squeaked faintly crossing the room—and the Hawk, a few inches at a time, began to edge along the wall away from the neighbourhood of the safe.

      Then the man’s flashlight gleamed again, lighting up the top of the desk. There was a sharp, ripping sound, as of the tearing of wood under pressure, and the upper drawer, forced open by a steel jimmy, was pulled out.

      “Birds of a feather!” said the Hawk grimly to himself. “Number One, of the Wire Devils! I didn’t beat him to it by as much margin as I thought I would!”

      The Hawk shifted his automatic to the hand that was clutching the pay bag, and, with the other hand, began to feel in wide sweeps over the wall above his head. The electric-light switch, he had noticed in that first quick glance when he had entered the room, a glance that had seemed to notice nothing, and yet in which nothing had escaped the sharp, trained eyes, was somewhere about here.

      “Dangerous—for both of us—if it’s seen outside,” communed the Hawk with himself again. “But when he finds the safe unlocked, and the goods gone, there’ll be trouble. If he gets a flashlight on me, he’s got me where he wants me. Ah—here it is!” The Hawk’s fingers touched the switch. He lowered the pay bag cautiously to the floor between his feet, his automatic free in his hand again.

      There was a rustling of papers in the drawer; then the man’s hand, holding a card, was outlined as though thrown upon a screen, as, with his other hand, he focused his flashlight upon it. Then the flashlight swung an arc over the opposite wall, and pointed a pathway to the safe, as the man turned abruptly and stepped back across the room.

      The Hawk, one hand raised to the switch on the wall, his automatic outflung a little in the other, tense, like an animal in leash, watched the other’s movements.

      The dark-outlined form was in shadowy relief against the light, that played now upon the glistening knob and dial of the safe. The man gave a preliminary, tentative twist at the handle. Came a quick, dismayed, hissing sound, like the sharp intake of ‘breath. The safe door was wrenched open with a jerk. There was a low, angry cry now. The man sprang back, and as though involuntarily, in a sort of uncertain, panic-struck search, his flashlight shot along the wall—and fell full upon the Hawk.

      The Hawk’s finger pressed the switch. The room was ablaze with light. With a startled, furious oath, the man’s hand was sweeping significantly toward his pocket.

      “No, you don’t!” snarled the Hawk, covering the other. “No, you don’t! Cut that out!” His eyes, behind the mask, narrowed suddenly. “Hello!” he sneered. “It’s ‘Butcher’ Rose—I might have known from the way you opened that drawer!”

      It was a moment before the man answered.

      “Blast you!” he whispered finally. “You gave me a bit of a start, you did! I thought at first you were a ‘bull’.” His eyes fastened on the pay bag at the Hawk’s feet. The top gaped open, disclosing the banknotes inside. The man raised his eyes to the Hawk’s, and a cunning look came over his