“That will be all right,” said the warder, anxious to get away.
The horses went clopping from the place of servitude, there was a snap of locks as the gates were closed, and then silence.
So far all was well from one man’s point of view. A roaring southwester was blowing down from Dartmoor round the angles of the prison, and wailing through the dark, deserted yard.
Suddenly there was a gentle crack, and the door of the Black Maria opened. Leon had discovered that his key could not open yet another door. He had slipped into the prison van when the warders were searching the train, and had found some difficulty in getting out again. No men were coming from London, as he knew, but he was desperately in need of that Black Maria. It had piloted him to the very spot he wished to go. He listened. There was no sound save the wind, and he walked cautiously to a little glass covered building, and plied his master key. The lock turned, and he was inside a small recess where the prisoners were photographed. Through another door and he was in a storeroom. Beyond that lay the prison wards. He had questioned wisely and knew where the remand cells were to be found.
A patrol would pass soon, he thought, looking at his watch, and he waited till he heard footsteps go by the door. The patrol would now be traversing a wing at right angles to the ward, and he opened the door and stepped into the deserted hall. He heard the feet of the patrol man receding and went softly up a flight of iron stairs to the floor above and along the cell doors. Presently he saw the man he wanted. His key went noiselessly into the cell door and turned. Doctor Twenden blinked up at him from his wooden bed.
“Get up,” whispered Gonsalez, “and turn round.”
Numbly the doctor obeyed.
Leon strapped his hands behind him and took him by the arm, stopping to lock the cell door. Out through the storeroom into the little glass place, then before the doctor knew what had happened, he slipped a large silk handkerchief over his mouth.
“Can you hear me?”
The man nodded.
“Can you feel that?”
“That” was a something sharp that stabbed his left arm. He tried to wriggle his arm away.
“You will recognise the value of a hypodermic syringe, you better than any,” said the voice of Gonsalez in his ear. “You murdered an innocent woman, and you evaded the law. A few days ago you spoke of the Four Just Men. I am one of them!”
The man stared into the darkness at a face he could not see.
“The law missed you, but we have not missed you. Can you understand?”
The head nodded more slowly now.
Leon released his grip of the man’s arm, and felt him slipping to the floor. There he lay whilst Gonsalez went into the shed, pulled up the two traps that hung straightly in the pit until they clicked together, and slipped the end of the rope he had worn round his waist over the beam …
Then he went back to the unconscious man.
In the morning when the warders came to the coach house, which was also the execution shed, they saw a taut rope. The track was open, and a man was at the end of the rope, very still. A man who had escaped the gallows of the law, but had died at the hands of justice.
Colophon
The Law of the Four Just Men
was published in 1921 by
Edgar Wallace.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Norman C. Walz,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2016
Roy Glashan
for
Project Gutenberg Australia
and on digital scans from
Google Books.
The cover page is adapted from
Ludgate Hill,
a painting completed in 1884 by
Wilhelm Trübner.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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