Alias-the-Blackbird-Chapter-11

VOICES came from the forested slopes, booming across the night. Here, there, on every side of the narrow glade men shouted, answering one another.

“Hi, Cedar! Hi, Cedar! Which way’d he go?”

Electric torches began to flash. A posse of twenty or more police officers, after beating for hours through the forest in a tightening circle, had converged on the Blackbird, had hemmed him in at last.

From the far end of the glade into which he had disappeared, swift as a wolf on the track of the Blackbird, came Cedar Rudd’s warning shout:

“Damn you, put out them lights, boys! He’ll pot us all!”

There sounded five or six racketing shots, followed instantly by a single report.

“Get him, Cedar?” some one bawled.

Cedar Rudd did not reply.

Cautiously and invisibly the men in the woods came down, for the Blackbird was not caught yet, and there was murder in him. Shadows drifted back and forth across the black glade. Voices mumbled. Where was Cedar, where the Blackbird? It was a deathly game being played in the dark night; and which was the stalker, which the prey, no man could know.

Two shapes came crawling up to Hammer, from right and left. They were police officers. They moved him farther from the fiery cabin, now only a thin shell of flaming bark slabs.

“Get the Blackbird! Don’t bother about me,” Hammer whispered, as the men tried to make him comfortable on a pile of coats.

They held their rifles half poised. All the time their wrinkled eyes roved about them, seeking the invisible killer.

“We got him penned. He can’t break through,” one of the officers growled.

“Tell Sergeant Rudd to watch out,” Hammer whispered.

“I reckon he’ll do that.”

Hammer didn’t know why he whispered. It seemed that the Blackbird must be listening for him in a tense and awful silence even yet.

“In God’s name, where are you, Cedar?” shouted some one in a hoarse, empty bellow.

The echoes of that cry rolled away. The forest swayed, soughed, whispered. The cold wind was freshening. Abruptly from the night silence there came the clear shout of Cedar Rudd:

“Here he is! Quick!”

A rifle’s rapid barking silenced his surprised cry. Men were running. Hammer dragged himself over the ground.

“Watch yourselves! Lie low!”

Again the rifle rattled. Other guns replied.

Inch by inch Hammer dragged himself over the ground. Above the Ridge peeked a gibbous lemon moon, flooding the glade with light as pale as water. He crouched back into shadows. The Blackbird was still abroad. No man was to be seen in the clearing.

A spring trickled near Hammer. In the middle of the moonlit glade he saw the Blackbird’s little monoplane, with its coffin of a cockpit, its wings folded back upon its fuselage so that it could be stowed in a small space. A new trick of the German designers—Hammer had heard of it. You could tuck a ship like that away in a garage, or in a hole in the ground. Small wonder Cedar Rudd had never found it, with all his searching.

Still no man appeared; but there were the rifle shots down at the end of the clearing; and the great ghastly form of Cedar Rudd’s mule galloped across the moonlight.

A man crept with soft tread along the shadows to Hammer, squatting by the brink of the spring. With cupped hand he drank copious draughts. It was Cedar Rudd, breathing hard, a spreading wet stain on his arm.

“Blackbird Amsel is cornered in the old mine hole, where he’s been a-hiding that airplane of his,” Cedar panted. “It’s going to cost a man’s life to get him out. He’s made a stand; he won’t surrender.”

“There’s no other exit he could come crawling out of?” asked Hammer with sudden dread.

“It’s the end of him,” said Cedar in low tones, shaking his head. “I know what them places are. There’s hungry, crawling things in the slime and rotten earth, Mr. Hammer, that’d make you sick to look at or feel. And when you’re buried in there, with the ooze at your nose, and all in the darkness, them things come creeping—”

Hammer shivered a little, as the cold wind blew.

“It’s cold,” said Cedar.

“Yes, it’s cold,” said Hammer.

“God help him, I wish I’d drilled him clean!” cried Cedar in a breaking voice. “He was my brother officer, and I’ve eaten meat and shared my drink with him. He was a fellowman, say all you can against him, and it ain’t right. Why didn’t I let him die easy?”