The Wire Devils

Chapter XI: The Lead Capsule

-XITHE LEAD CAPSULE 'THE Hawk yawned. He had been almost forty-eight hours without sleep. He had slept all day after he had regained his room, following the night at "Five-Mile Crossing," but after that~ He frowned in a perturbed and puzzled way. Ensconced now in a wicker lounging chair :n the observation car of the Coast Limited, he was apparently engrossed in the financial page of his newspaper, and apparently quite oblivious of his fellow travellers , some four or five of whom lounged and smoked in their own respective wicker chairs arotmd him. On a little pad of paper, which he held in his left hand, he might even, without serious tax upon the imagination, have appeared to be calculating the effect of the market's fluctuations upon personal, and perhaps narrowly held, margins-for again he scowled unhappily. The Hawk, however, at the moment , was engrossed solely with a few curiously assorted letters of the alphabet, which were scrawled across the top of the pad. They ran: pzudlkmlqpb. 155 156 THE WIRE DEVILS Beneath this his pencil had already been at work, and he had transformed the line as follows: He was staring at this result now in a bewildered way. Then his pencil picked out the remaining five unscored letters, and mechanically set them down as a third line: ramy. "Rainy"-there was one word, just one word- "rainy." What did it mean? vVhat was the significance of the word? No message in the Wire Devils ' cipher, once the message was decoded, but had been at once clear and unmistakable in its meaning before. Had they resorted now to code words as well, to a cipher within a cipher? Into the grimness of the Hawk's smile there crept a hint of weariness , as he slipped the pad into his pocket, allowed the newspaper to drop to his knees, and, edging his chair around, gazed out of the window. For once his knowledge of their cipher was obviously useless to him-and useless when a foreknowledge of their plans at that moment meant scarcely less than a matter of life and death to him in a very unpleasantly real and literal sense. Not a word had come from them; not a message had gone over the wires on either of the two preceding nights; not a sign of existence had they given since three nights ago when, with an empty safe as the sale re- THE LEAD CAPSULE 157 ward for their elaborately laid plans, he, the Hawk, had enriched himself with the twenty thousand dol. lars' worth of diamonds it had once contained. There had been something sinister, something ominous in their silence, as compared with the almost insane ravings of MacVightie, the police, and the pressyes , and the railroad men as well, who were particularly incensed over the "murder" of the young messenger found dead at his post in the express car with his revolver partially emptied on the floor beside him. The Hawk drummed abstractedly with his finger tips upon the window pane. MacVightie, the police, and the press made no doubt but that he, the Hawk, was the leader of the desperadoes who were terrorising that particular section of the country; on the other hand, the gang itself had already had occasions enough and in plenty to be painfully aware that he, the Hawk, played always a lone hand-and won! A smile, grim and ironical, parted the firm, set lips. The police and the Wire Devils had a common interest -the Hawk. He was the storm centre. The smile faded, the strong jaws clamped, and the dark eyes narrowed on the flying landscape. It was not the police who concerned him, it was not the impotent frothings of the press-it was the silence that the Wire Devils had not broken since that night until they had broken it this morning with the single word that, now that he had deciphered it, still meant nothing to him. A dozen times, stealing their cipher messages, he had turned all their carefully prepared 158 THE WIRE DEVILS plans to his own account, and snatched away the prize, even as they were in the act of reaching for it. But he was not a fool to close his eyes to the inevitable result. He was pitted against the cleverest brains in the criminal world; all the cunning that they knew would be...