The Midnight Passenger | Page 9

Sundays and vacations. I'll give you a third twenty for the two keys. I may want to take a look at his rooms some Sunday when you are sporting out of town.
"And watch the spotters, too! You might do a good turn in pocket money by posting him, but only as I tell you, mind that! Now, don't go to the devil too fast. Do you ever give your mother any money?"
Einstein's vicious leer was a silent answer. "Tell her she shall have a new silk dress from me, if you keep your wits about you. Remember, Monday!"
The lad sped away at a curt nod of dismissal, and was soon lost in the devil's whirlpool of the Bowery.
But, as Mr. Fritz Braun sedately finished his cosy dinner, he saw strange golden gleams in the blue, wreathing smoke mists of his Perfectos.
"Two hundred thousand; that would be a stake. And July, too; this lawyer fellow gone. What a chance! There must be no mistake now! He must lead himself on, now. One prick of the hidden hook and this fat trout would be off forever I must see Irma and coach her. Donnerwetter! It's too good to be true. After all this waiting. And now I've got to keep my eyes on both the spider and the fly. Irma is such a tempestuous devil. If Leah only had her years and looks and dash, she would twist any man in the world around her finger. But I can never teach this Hungarian madcap, Leah's velvet softness and never-tiring patience."
The prosperous pharmacist gleefully paid for his dinner and nimbly chased an East-side ferry-bound car. He laughed in spite of himself at Emil's unflagging deviltry. "He is a credit to Leah's Polish blood and my Austrian nurture," mused Braun. "The young wretch might be dangerous, too. He must know nothing of my deep game."
"If this Clayton will only break into the flirtation in the right way, the victory is assured. But, if he were to show her off around town, or try and dodge these spotter fellows in New York, then I should lose a year's time, my expenses, and this heavy money stake. It's the one chance of a life time."
In half an hour, Fitz Braun, crossing on the Tenth Street Ferry to Greenpoint, was soon lost, as was his wont, in the human hive of Brooklyn toilers. Men had seen him go over for years invariably on this ferry, his burly figure was always seen on the Fulton Ferry daily at half-past eight each morning, but not a soul among the thousand clients of Magdal's Pharmacy knew where the human fox, Fritz Braun, laid his head to rest at night.
From nine till four he lurked behind the high dispensing screen of Magdal's Pharmacy, his inner life and antecedents a sealed book to all the sleuth-eyed votaries of vice on Sixth Avenue.
And yet, for all his craft, on this balmy night of spring, the man who had buried Hugo Landor's stormy past forever under staid Fritz Braun's impenetrable mask, shivered while plotting his new iniquities lest the panther-footed pursuer might even now demand at his hand a life in return for those victims who had lain, staring eyed, cold in death, mute witness against him in far away Vienna. The terrible record of his past evil days haunted his every footstep now. He saw these avenging eyes even in his dreams.
There was but one who could lift the veil of the awful past. On this eventful night Fritz Braun hid, within his heart, an awful resolve, born of the fear of the disguised felon, floating uneasily in the maelstrom of a great city. "If she should betray me, and women are women, after all," he mused in his cowardly ferocity. "If she pulls this off for me, I'll"--he ceased, with an inward shudder, for he dared not give the awful thought its fitting frame.
"Only at the last," he murmured, as he sped along in Brooklyn's dingy water streets to take on another mask to veil his wolfishly evil life.
While snares and pitfalls were being laid for Randall Clayton's careless feet, that gentleman sat in a wrathful mood, pondering over Arthur Ferris' half-hearted disclosures. Clayton's face had frankly disclosed his displeasure at the false attitude of his chum, when Ferris reluctantly disclosed the fact of the secret financial espionage.
The three years of their past intimacy now took on a different color, at once, to the jaundiced eyes of the young cashier.
He had almost abruptly declined Ferris' invitation to spend Sunday at Seneca Lake, with the prosperous lawyer's mother and two sisters.
A feeling of bitter envy gnawed at Clayton's heart as he counted up the rapid rise of his quondam friend.
"So, he has been playing this double game for years; it must have been