Sentenced to Death.

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 32, 30 April 1927, Page 16

Sentenced to Death.

By

Louis Jracy.

Author of “ The Long Lane of Many Windings,” " One Wonderful Night,” “ Love and the Aces,” “ The &c., &c.

(Copyright for the Author in the United States and Canada by Edward J. Clcde, Inc., New York. All other rights reserved.)

SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS. CHAPTER I.—A young officer learns from a skilled physician and an equally clever surgeon that lie has not many months to live. An operation is out of the question. One of the valves of the heiirt is clogged and nothing less than a miracle can save him. The patient, Antony Blake, leaves the house in Harley Street and wends his way to Regent's Park. He experiments on his heart by stepping into the roadway at a critical moment, but survives various vituperations and receives warning from a policeman. He arrives at that part of the park where the pony and governess car are stationed which had passed through Harley Street during his interview. The stout driver has vanished. The threatening thunderstorm breaks just as Blake enters the park proper. A vivid flash of lightning causes the pony to bolt. As Antony is walking, in a drenched condition, two men overtake and rush past him. one tall and thin, the other short and fat. The rotund runner falls. The other continues his pace. The fat man picks himself up and tears along. Arriving at the place where the man had fallen Antony notices a sharp-pointed riagge. shining in the grass. He picks up and examines it, finally flinging it into the long grass fringing the shrubbery. He reaches a small wooden hut. A girl is sheltering there. Another thunder-clap drives her further back. He shelters there also. Another vivid flash reveals each to the other. He sees a slender, pretty girl; she sees the fine type of British officer, her senior by a few years. She has also seen the two men. He tells her that the fat n.an is coming back again. He feels sure that the man is seeking for his dagger. The girl tells him she was to meet her uncle, who was driving a pony in a governess car. Antony tells her it has gone, but not that the pony bolted. The two leave the hut, turning to the left instead of to the right. Had they turned in the opposite direction they would have been seen by the one man fated to become their deadly enemy, though known to neither.

CHAPTER I.—(Continued). He picked up , the sinister-looking weapon. The steel was oily, so the rain hardly lodged on itl For nearly two inches from the point the metal had a greenish tinge. Grip and crosspiece were of du’l bronze. The design showed no artistry. It was plainly intended to serve no other purpose than a wicked one. “Now, what in the world am I to do with you?” came the obvious question. This viperous object could not be carried in a pocket. It demanded a leather sheath, lfeing fully 12 inches in -length. Suddenlv. during a vivid and sustained flash of lightning. Blake was aware of a slight electric shock travelling up his right arm to the shoulder He condemned the dagger to the infernal regions, and threw it from him. As he had walked on while examining

his queer trover, it fell in a patch of lung grass fringing the shrubbery. ‘ I’m interested in you,” he said, “but I’ll come back when this storm is over, and bring something to wrap you in, too. I don’t like your looks, but I think you ought to be inquired into. If it wasn’t for those dashed doctors and their warning. I’d leg it after your owner and see where he goes to. Yet that would be simply silly, I suppose, in view of the reminder I had a few minutes ago.” lie trudged on. The elemental strife was; rather exhilarating. It seemed to soothe his perturbed mood. He had intended to take a bath before going' to it service club for dinner, but streams of fresh rain-water were now coursing from his neck to his heels, for the shower was of tropical intensity. He could Have got no wetter had he plunged into the neighbouring lake. A few yards within the clump of trees and evergreens concealing the bridge stood a small wooden hut—the park gardener’s store for spades and rakes and other odds and ends. The door stood ajar. As Blake approached it was opened a little more, and the white, frightened face of a girl appeared. “Please ” she began, but a furious thunderclap right overhead rendered her next words inaudible. She shrank into the interior gloom, evidently finding some degree of safety there. “What is it?” inquired Blake, peer“l am so sorry for troubling you,” came the faltering reply, “but I must ask someone—should one remain here?” “You are out of the rain, anyhow,”

he grinned cheerfully. “I hope you took shelter in time?” “It is not that. I’m not very wet, but I have missed an appointment, and my uncle will hardly wait with a pony and cart in this weather. What 1 am thinking of is the lightning. Is it wise to be under these tr.ll trees?” “Let’s discuss the point. May I come in?” “Why, of course. Two men ran past just now, and I fully expected they would join me. But they didn’t, and I was glad, because they looked rather horrid.” “A tall thin man and a short fat one?” “Yes. 00-ah!” The exclamation was caused by an overwhelming flood of lightning which laid bare every chink and cranny of the hut, and incidentally revealed the two to each other's scrutiny with an extraordinary precision all the more definite because every vestige of colour | in features and eyes and garments was killed. It was as though they were depicted in the sharpest and clearest of photographs. The man saw a girl of medium height and slender figure, neatly—perhaps expensively—dressed, with a face that was undeniably pretty even when distorted by terror. Her hands were clasped on a Japanese sunshade. Clusters of curls peeped over her ears from

beneath a cloche hat. Round her neck she wore a tiny silver chain, which carried a Breton cross of crystals and silver, a veritable antique quite as valuable as any similar ornament fashioned of diamonds and platinum. The girl looked m at a man fully ten years her senior, one on whom an officer’s rank in the British Army had set its indelible seal. She took comfort in his quiet smile, which mouth and eyes shared alike, and although the hut was promptly steeped in darkness, and he did not speak until the thunder had rolled away, she awaited his next words with the ready confidence which nearly every woman and all children extend to the male of his type. “Perhaps it would be obeying the rules if you went out and stood in the centre of the biggest available grass plot,” he said, “but it is not in human nature to do anything of the kind when it’s raining cats and dogs. And I have a sort of suspicion, too, that people who behave according to the book not only lead miserable lives, but get into all sorts of trouble. More than that, I believe the victim never sees the prong of lightning which fuses him or her into a cinder. If you accept that theory, you can bring yourself to enjoy this sort of thing,” and again they were given that photographic glimpse of one another. “As for the thunder it is quite harmless—” Crash! It would seem that London must have been laid in ruins this time. But Blake continued , blithely: “The storm is passing. I’d sooner be here now that in one of the glasshouses of the botanical gardens. Suppose we take a peep at the display?” He had his hand on the door, then he closed it almost immediately. “That fat chap is coming back,” he said. “You don’t want him in here, do you ?” “N —no!” “Don’t be afraid. We’ll have plenty of light in a couple of seconds. He’s worried. He has lost something, and is quite certain it is not in this hut, though he might easily have been mistaken. Quiet, now. Here he is!” Blake seized the opportunity to memorise certain details of the clothing and physical appearance of the obese person who had thought it necessary to carry that murderouslooking’dagger during a summer afternoon’s stroll in Regent’s Park. The man. breathless and pallid, though his heavy parchment-coloured face was streaming with nerspiration as well as rain, evidently could run no more. Indeed, he was so nearly spent that he waddled rather than -walked, and

his greenish-blue eyes held a fixed stare of fear or excitement. His mind, too, travelled well ahead of his misshapen body. It was clear that his thoughts were centred on that spot in the park where he had fallen; there could be no doubt whatsoever that he was desperately anxious to retrieve the dropped knife, else he would not have ventured again into the exposed ground from which he had retreated so ignominously. There was a chance that the tall man might have returned with him, so Blake waited and listened. The rain was ceasing as abruptly as it began, but tiny rivulets were gurgling along the gravelled paths, and miniature cascades were pouring noisily from the trees. Hearing no footsteps on the bridge. he threw wide the door, and went out. “I think we can risk it now,” he said. “Are you making, for the Hanover Gate?” “Well, no. I came in that way. My uncle arranged to meet me on the Inner Circle, where this path enters it. I was just a little late, but dare not face the downpour. It would have simply meant going home Again to change.” The girl was now standing beside

him. To avoid getting wet by the heavy drops from the leaves, she put up that ridiculously small sunshade. Blake refused to alarm her by his story of the bolting pony, yet he wanted to ask for a description of “uncle” and his turnout. And, for some indefinite reason, he did not want her to take the lonely path on which a certain stout and undersized ruffian was searching for a lost dagger, since it might half an hour or more before people began to move about the park freely. “You sought my advice about the lightning,” he said, looking straight into a pair of adorably blue eyes, “and I dodged the issue disgracefully, though both of us knew we ought not to have risked the chance of a tree being struck 1 while we were beneath it and standing in a small shack full of iron and steel implements. This time I’ll be straightforward. If your uncle is a red-faced, determinedlooking old boy in a fawn dustcoat, and Homb.urg hat, driving a bay pony with black points, in a blue governess car picked out with red, he is not at the gate. That rig was there when I passed that very place, but it vanished at once when the storm broke.” “Oh. I’m so glad you told me,’ said the girl. “I’ll hurry off now and phone him.”

Blake felt he could not explain that the pony had bolted. The instant she heard that she would insist on a wildgoose chase around the Inner Circle. Far better she should hear the actual facts later from an irate uncle! So the two turned to the left instead of to the right, and that is just the easy way in which the major crises of life are determined. Had they gone in the opposite direction the whole course of events must have swung into a different groove. Then they could not fail to be seen by the one man living, though known to neither of them, who was fated to become their deadly enemy. Surely it was well for both that such a dangerous meeting should be deferred. CHAPTER lI.—A CRIME AND AH ARREST. The girl admitted afterwards that she regarded her chance companion of the thunderstorm as “a rather shy man.” Woman-like, she forgot his volubility in the hut, a flow of commonplace remarks intended to divert

her thoughts from the elemental war then frightening her. But she was calm now and the sun was shining again, and it was quite a new experience to walk a good 50 yards by the side of any average male and not hear a word from his lips. She saw, too, that his glance was keen enough for every human being in sight except her attractive self. They crossed the Outer Circle and entered the approach to Hanover Gate, yet this strange fellow seemed more interested than ever in other people. At last feminine human nature could stand such self-centredness no longer. “I do hope I am not taking you out of your way?” she said, with a cold precision of utterance that would have been eloquent enough in any other young man’s ears. “Ho,” he replied, blissfully unaware of any offending. “I have a small flat in St. John’s Wood Road. Where do you live? I’ll hail the first taxi and one of us can drop the other.” She stole a look at him. His eyes were still fixed on everything but her attractive self. She would have liked to dismiss him instantly, but some wholly feminine instinct forbade. Moreover, had he not been most friendly and helpful when she really needed assistance? “I have got to go only as far as Sutherland Avenue,” she said. “It is no distance. I think I would prefer to walk, thank you.” An empty taxi came down Park Road

from the right. He stopped it. “Here we are,” he said. “Jump in! I’ll take you' to your place, if I may. What’s the number?” “You’re not deaf, by any chance, are you?”

This time the. tartness in her voice penetrated the mantle of abstraction which had fallen over him so suddenly. He laughed cheerfully. (To be Continued.)