Billy Kane’s eyes were apparently blinking in the abrupt transition from darkness to the glare of light; but with the knowledge that it might literally mean the difference between life and death to him—and her—no single detail of his surroundings was escaping him. The door ahead of him, a heavy, cumbersome affair, opened inwards toward him, and was now swung full back against the wall, but if the evidence of that iron loop on the door jamb could be trusted, the door was equipped with a massive bolt. Gypsy Joe was still to a large extent blocking the doorway, but he could see that the huge, lighted space beyond was a sort of storage warehouse, windowless, of course, or else he would have seen a light from outside. And the switches, the electric-light switches—the one for the bulb over his head in this passage here, and the one for the light in that room ahead of him! They were vital too! He could not see any in the position where he might naturally expect to find them—by the door where Gypsy Joe stood. He glanced back over his shoulder. Yes, there was one there at the side of the front door, a switch for the passage light undoubtedly; but Gypsy Joe had certainly not used that one, so there must be another then, as well, inside the storage room.

He had been perhaps the matter of a bare few seconds in traversing the length of the passage, and now as he stepped across the threshold into the warehouse itself, the Cherub and Clarkie Munn had joined Gypsy Joe, and were staring at him with scowling, startled, uncertain faces—but Billy Kane’s eyes were not on the three men. The blood seemed to leap through his veins in a great surging tide, and upon him was the sense of a mighty uplift. It was not too late! It was not too late! His brain seemed to seize upon those words and reiterate them in a sing-song way. A woman’s form lay upon the floor, and she was bound and gagged; but dark eyes met his, and in the eyes was a softer light than he had ever seen there before when they had been fixed on him. “For once,” they seemed to say, “you have not failed. I told you to watch Gypsy Joe and Clarkie Munn, and you are just in time.”

The Cherub laughed suddenly and a little noisily, as from unstrung nerves.

“Say, youse gave us a jolt!” he said. “Wot’s de idea? I suppose youse came along to make sure dat we earned yer money, eh, an’ dat dere wouldn’t be no fluke about her bein’ bumped off fer keeps? Well, if youse had been about a minute an’ a half later youse’d have missed de trap-door scene, ’cause it’d have been all over.”

Billy Kane’s eyes had met the girl’s again. The soft light in them had gone, and in its place had come a horror, and sudden accusation, and a bitter misery; and her face, already deathly white as she lay there, seemed now to tinge with gray.

Billy Kane shook his head in response to the Cherub, as he turned and faced the three men. They were edging a little closer to him. He caught a surreptitious nudge that passed between Gypsy Joe and Clarkie Munn. He moved back a step—but it was a step that brought him nearer to the girl. If he could hold them in a state of puzzled suspense with its consequent indecision for a moment, that was all he asked. And he was counting on a sort of frank audaciousness for that.

“Well?” prompted the Cherub, a sudden, curious silkiness in his tones. “Did I call de turn?”

“Maybe he’s come down to pay us off,” suggested Gypsy Joe smoothly. “Dere’s nothin’ slow about de Rat.”

“I’ll tell you,” said Billy Kane quietly. He took his knife from his pocket, and coolly opened it; then nonchalantly, but with a swift, lithe movement, stooped and cut the cords that bound the girl’s wrists. He pressed the knife into her hand—she needed no further hint that she could free her own ankles—and, as he straightened up again, his eyes swept the wall by the door. Yes, they were there—two electric-light switches. He faced the trio again.

“Well, wot do youse know about dat!” observed Clarkie Munn, with an unpleasant grin.

“I’ll tell you, Clarkie,” Billy Kane lied calmly. “I’m leery that somebody’s split, and I’m afraid the police know too much. Understand? I’m not taking any chances, and the game’s off—that’s all.”

The Cherub’s bland, blue eyes seemed to shade a darker hue.

“Dat’s all right, den,” said the Cherub sweetly. “But wot about us? Mabbe youse can call de game off if youse likes, ’cause it’s yer game, but where does we come in? ’Tain’t our fault de job’s crimped—dat’s up to youse. Does we get paid or not?”

“Dat’s de talk, Cherub!” applauded Clarkie Munn, an undisguised snarl in his voice.

Billy Kane shrugged his shoulders.

“Who said you wouldn’t get paid?” he demanded roughly. “We’ll attend to that when we get out of here. Do you want to hang around and get pinched?”

“No,” said the Cherub, and smiled. “No, we don’t want to get pinched—an’ we ain’t worryin’ none about it either, not about gettin’ pinched down here. It’s a cinch youse wouldn’t have risked comin’ here if de bulls had been followin’ a yard behind. We knows youse too well fer dat, Bundy! Get me? An’ youse ain’t comin’ across when youse gets out of here, youse are comin’ across right now! An’ youse”—he whirled suddenly on the girl, who had risen to her feet and was backing toward the door—“youse stand where youse are! I ain’t sure we are through wid youse yet, no matter wot Bundy says—see?” He jerked his head at his two companions, though his eyes never for an instant left Billy Kane’s face. “Wot about it, fellers? If she gets out of here she knows too much, an’ we got to fade away outer New York anyway, whether de bulls are on now or not. An’ dat takes de coin—all de coin we can get. Well, de Rat always carries a wad, but if we pinches it an’ lets de Rat loose afterwards he’s got a bunch behind him dat’ll nose us out where de bulls couldn’t, an’ we’ll get ours. Dat’s de size of it. Do we play fer table stakes, or hedge de bets?”

It was coming now, as Billy Kane had known inevitably that it would come. There was no answer needed from either Clarkie Munn or Gypsy Joe. It was written in the ugly menace in their faces, and had been from the moment they had recovered their startled surprise at his entry into the place.

Billy Kane flung a quick glance around him. The girl was a little behind him, close to those electric-light switches, her way clear to the front door, save for the peril of that lighted passage down which she must run. In front of him, just out of arm’s reach, the Cherub’s bland eyes smiled into his with a sort of hideous serenity; while over the Cherub’s shoulders, one on each side, showed the vicious faces of the other two—and, under cover of the Cherub’s body, Clarkie Munn’s hand seemed to be stealing in the direction of his hip pocket.

Billy Kane seemed suddenly to go to pieces and to lose his nerve. His tongue circled his lips with nervous repetition. He put out his hands in an imploring attitude, and stumbled a step forward toward the Cherub, and caught a glint of light on a revolver barrel in Clarkie Munn’s hand, as it came stealing now from the latter’s pocket.

“Wait—wait a minute, Cherub!” Billy Kane whispered thickly, and licked at his lips again, and stumbled forward another step. “Wait!” he whispered—and then, swift as the winking of an eye, Billy Kane flung his body forward with all his weight upon the Cherub, hurling the Cherub back upon Clarkie Munn, and whirling, whipped a lightning left full into Gypsy Joe’s face on the other side. There was a flash, the deafening roar of a report, as the Cherub reeled into Clarkie Munn’s revolver; then a scream of agony, and the Cherub, grasping at his leg with both hands, went to the floor.

“The switches there—beside you!” Billy Kane shouted at the girl. “Put out the lights—both switches! Quick! Run for it!”

Gypsy Joe, recovering his balance, and with a bellow like a maddened bull was charging forward; Clarkie Munn’s hand had swung upward again—and then the place was in darkness. A second late, Clarkie Munn’s revolver cut a vicious flame-tongue through the black, but Billy Kane had flattened himself out on the floor, and was wriggling rapidly backward toward the door and the now dark passageway.

There was a moan, then a shrill scream in the Cherub’s voice, and coincidentally a torrent of blasphemy from Gypsy Joe, as the latter, quite obviously, in his rush and in the blackness now, had stumbled none too gently into the wounded man.

“Youse fool! Curse youse, youse fool!” shrieked the Cherub. “Ain’t youse got a pocket torch? Ain’t either of youse got a torch? Flash a torch on him, an’——”

Billy Kane was across the threshold now; and now, rising to his knees, he groped out for the edge of the door, found it, and, as he slammed it shut, it seemed to cut in two, as a knife might cut it, the sudden, white, piercing ray of a flashlight that leaped out from the interior of the warehouse. And then in another second he had shot the bolt home in its grooves, and, in the darkness, leaning heavily for an instant against the door to recover himself, he stared down the black passage for the girl, and could see nothing.

There came an abortive rush against the door; snarls and oaths came muffled from within. He moved a step forward along the passage. They were a negligible quantity in there now. The door would hold, and when they succeeded in getting out and making their way along the side of the dock perhaps, they would be more concerned in getting to cover themselves than anything else; and besides they would have a wounded man to hamper their movements. It was she now, the Woman in Black, that concerned him.

“Where are you?” he called quickly. “Where are you?”

A draft of air touched his face. The front door at the farther end of the passage was being opened.

“I am here, Bundy.”

It was her voice, but there was something of cold, merciless forbidding in it. He halted instinctively. He did not quite understand.

“Bundy, are you listening?” came the level tones again. “This is the end, absolutely and finally the end to-night. You have saved my life, but I owe you no thanks for that. You saved it, after hiring thugs to take it, you thing of loathing, because you dared do nothing else, since you say you believe the police got wind enough of this thing tonight to scare you off. Very well, Bundy—but there is more, isn’t there, that the police do not know? Well, they will know it, and certain secrets in that den of yours, the moment I can reach them. I have warned you often enough. I am through, Bundy, this is the end of the Rat to-night, nothing shall stop that—but I am still a fool. I am still giving you warning of what I mean to do now. I am still giving you a chance to save yourself if you can; the rather slim chance that the police will not be able to run the man who was known as the Rat to earth! And I am giving you that chance because—well because, even in spite of yourself, I am still alive.”

“No!” he cried. “You do not understand. Wait!” He was groping down the black passage, as he heard the front door shut quickly, and heard a footstep running, receding, outside. “Wait!” he cried again. “For God’s sake, wait!”

There was no answer. He knew there would be none. He had heard her running away out there, hadn’t he? He reached the door, and looked out—and hung there hesitant—and called again—and there was no answer. He listened. He could not hear her footsteps any more. There was no sound from anywhere, not even from that warehouse door behind him. They weren’t hammering on that any more.

And then Billy Kane laughed in a short, bitter, mirthless way, and started, running at top speed, in the direction in which he had left his purloined and dilapidated car. The end! The end of the Rat! He laughed again in the same bitter mirth, as he ran. It was the end of more than that! It was the end of hope—of her—of that love that had come to him upon the thresholds of these strange doors of the night. It was the end of Billy Kane! And whether as the Rat now, or as Billy Kane, the police would be equally hard upon his trail. He stood in far worse case now than on the night of David Ellsworth’s murder, for now the underworld, that would be combed for the Rat, and where the Rat was too well known to have it offer the slightest hope of escaping detection, was closed to him as a refuge. He knew what she meant to do—to tell her story to the police, to expose all the criminal acts and affiliations of the bona fide Rat, and to lead them to the Rat’s den, and expose the secrets that she had so often hinted were hidden there.

He clenched his hands as he ran. The end! No! Not yet! Not until they had him, and they had not got him yet! He did not know which way to turn; but while he still had his freedom there was still the hope of running down the murderer of David Ellsworth—and there were the proceeds of that robbery now, most of them, in the Rat’s den. That was what seemed to stand out as immediately vital now—to get those things—that money and those rubies. He had staked everything on the hope that some day he could hand over to justice both the proceeds of that crime and the murderer as well—hand them over together, as a complete vindication of his own name—and even now, in this hour that seemed blackest of all, he still dared to cling to that hope. He knew who the murderer was, and he had already recovered a large share of what had been stolen. He still hoped to find the murderer, and he still hoped to find the remainder of those rubies, and so carry out his original plan. His jaws locked. His mind was made up. He would go! And, yes, he had far better than an even chance of getting there in time. She would take longer to reach the police and lead them to the den than it would take him to reach it—thanks to the car that, grim irony! he had stolen on her account. Afterward his position would be desperate enough; but now, without an instant’s loss of time, he had to gain the den and get away again before they trapped him there.

He reached the car. The old night watchman had evidently retired inside the building again, for there was no sign of the man. He experienced a certain sense of relief at this, as he cranked the obsolete machine; and then he was in the driver’s seat again, and the car was roaring along the road. He drove fast, with mad haste, with reckless disregard for the ill-lighted road. There could be no accident comparable in disaster to his failure to put the miles behind him swiftly enough to insure him the few minutes leeway he asked for in the den.

He bent over the wheel, tense, rigid, strained. The minutes sped away. A glimmer of hope came to him for that “afterward.” He could use the car again; get out of the city again before the chase got too hot. He could certainly hide in that way during the night, and that would give him the night in which to think. He had not time to think now—only that as he drew in toward the centre of the city he must keep as much as possible to the unfrequented streets, both because he must ignore such a thing as speed laws, and because he was driving a stolen car.