The Greatest Crime Novels of Frank L. Packard (14 Titles in One Edition). Frank L. Packard

your hands up over your head!” he breathed grimly—and, as the other obeyed, his own hand fell away from the man’s throat, and in a quick, deft sweep over the other’s clothing located the bulge of a revolver, and whipped it from the man’s pocket. He pushed the man with his automatic’s muzzle back against the wall, closer to the electric-light switch. Was it Reddy Mull—or English Dick? And then Jimmie Dale laughed low, unpleasantly, as he switched on the light. He was staring into a face that was white and colourless—the face of a man with a heavy black moustache, and whose slouch hat was jammed far down over his eyes. The process of elimination made it very simple—it was English Dick.

      The man blinked, and wet his lips with his tongue, and at sight of Jimmie Dale’s mask, perhaps because it suggested a community of interest, tried to force a smirk.

      “What’s—what’s the game?” he stammered.

      “This—to begin with!” said Jimmie Dale grimly—and, stooping, picked up from the floor a small black satchel, the object that English Dick had dropped on entering the room. “Go over to that table!” ordered Jimmie Dale curtly.

      The man obeyed.

      “Sit down!” Jimmie Dale was clipping off his words in cold menace.

      Again the man obeyed.

      Jimmie Dale, his back to the door as he faced the other across the table, snapped open the bag. It was full to the top with banknotes and securities. Under his mask his lips curled in a hard, forbidding smile. He took from his pocket the package of the bank’s securities he had found in the drawer of Forrester’s desk, and laid it in silence on the table beside the satchel; beside this again, still in silence, he placed the bottle that had contained the hydrocyanic acid, and—after an instant’s pause—spread out the sheet of note paper bearing Forrester’s forged signature.

      The man’s face, white before, had gone a livid gray.

      “W-what do you want?” he whispered.

      “I want you to write another confession.” There was a deadly monotony in Jimmie Dale’s voice, as he tapped the paper with the muzzle of his automatic. “This one is out of date.”

      “I don’t know what you mean,” faltered English Dick. “So help me, honest to God, I don’t!”

      “Don’t you!” There was a curious drawl in Jimmie Dale’s voice—and then in a flash his free hand swept across the table, jerked away the other’s moustache, and pushed the slouch hat up from the man’s eyes. “I mean that the game is up—Dryden.”

      There was a low cry; and the man, with working lips, shrank back in his chair.

      “You cur!” The words were coming fast and hot from Jimmie Dale’s lips now. “English Dick, alias Dryden, the bank teller! So, you don’t know what I mean! Listen, then, and I’ll tell you! Six months ago you got a position in the bank. Since then you’ve forged names right and left on securities, falsified the books, and stolen cash and securities. Day by day, working in with your gang, you’ve brought the loot here, coming in disguise of course, as you’ve come to-night, for it wouldn’t do for ‘Dryden’ to be seen in this neighbourhood! And you turned the loot over to Reddy Mull—by leaving it, if he didn’t happen to be around, under that loose board there in the corner.”

      “My God!” The man’s face was ghastly. “Who—who are you?”

      “To-day,” went on Jimmie Dale, as though he had not heard the other, “you came to the climax of the plan you had been working on for those six months—the bank was wrecked—and what little there was left you took”—he jerked his hand toward the open satchel—“replacing it at the last moment with previously prepared dummy packages. And you took it, you cur”—Jimmie Dale’s voice choked suddenly—“not only at the expense of a man’s life, but of his good name and reputation. You might have known, I do not know whether you did or not, that Forrester had some private trouble with a money lender, but I do not imagine that had anything to do with your having selected Forrester’s bank. Your object was to exploit a small bank where, with only one man from whom to hide your work, you could loot it thoroughly; and a forged confession clever enough to deceive any one in its handwriting and signature, and the man found dead from a dose of prussic acid, the empty bottle on the floor beside him, needed no other evidence to stamp him as the guilty man.”

      English Dick was struggling to his feet; his eyes, in a sort of horrible fascination, on Jimmie Dale.

      Jimmie Dale, pushed him savagely back into his seat. “Yes—you cur!” he said again. “You got your first fright when you found those evidences of suicide were gone—you even lost your nerve a little in your bluff with the bank examiners—and you hurried here the moment you could get away from the preliminary police investigation that followed—I was even afraid you might get here a little sooner than you did. Shall I give you the details of this afternoon and to-night? The plant was ready. You had sent for the bank examiners. You had already prepared the forged confession, and had a small package of securities ready. Forrester had gone to New York. You turned over the confession and the package of securities to your accomplice, or accomplices, to be left in Forrester’s room. I imagine that you telephoned, or sent a message, to New York to Forrester telling him that the bank examiners were in the bank, that there was something the matter, and for him to go to his rooms, and, say, meet you there before going to the bank. Your accomplice, for you established an alibi by remaining with the bank examiners, stole in after him, or even in the dark hallway stunned him with a black-jack, then forced the poison down his throat, laid him on the floor, placed the empty bottle beside him, and left the confession on the desk. The plan was very cunningly worked out. The bruise on Forrester’s head was most obviously accounted for—his head had struck, of course, against the leg of the couch—he was found lying in that position! It is strange, though, isn’t it, how sometimes the most cunning of plans go astray in the simplest and yet the most perverse of ways? Who, under the circumstances, would have thought of it! Your accomplice had simply to place a document already prepared upon the desk. Even you did not think to warn him yourself. It did not enter his head to see if there were pen and ink there with which it might have been written, or, failing that, a fountain pen in Forrester’s pocket—and there was neither the one nor the other. That’s all—except the name of the man who killed Forrester.” Jimmie Dale leaned forward sharply. “Who was it?”

      English Dick wet his lips again.

      “I—they—they’d kill me like—like a dog if I told,” he mumbled.

      “They?” The monosyllable came curt and hard.

      “I don’t know,” said English Dick. “That’s God’s truth—I never knew—there’s a big gang—none of us know.”.

      “But you know who worked with you in this.” Jimmie Dale was speaking through clenched teeth. “You know who killed Forrester.”

      “Yes.” The man’s whisper was scarcely audible.

      “Who?”

      “Reddy—Reddy Mull.”

      “Yes,” said Jimmie Dale in his grim monotone, “I thought so.”

      He reached into the satchel where a small package of securities were wrapped up in a sheet of the bank’s stationery, removed the sheet of paper, and spread it out before English Dick. “Write it down!” he commanded—and the muzzle of his automatic jerked forward to touch the fountain pen in the other’s vest pocket. “Write it—all of it—your own share—Reddy Mull’s—the whole story!”

      The man’s lips seemed to have gone dry again, and again and again his tongue circled them.

      “I can’t!” he said hoarsely. “I daren’t—they’d kill me. And—and if they didn’t, it would send me up, and perhaps—perhaps to the chair.”

      “You take your chances on that”—Jimmie Dale’s voice was low and even—“but you take no chances here—for there are none.” The automatic in Jimmie Dale’s