ON the following Saturday I made what ultimately turned out to be my last attempt at crime, and never before had I been in such great and deadly peril. At one time it was any odds on my being captured, and it was only by the most fortunate combination of circumstances that I escaped at all.

I had partly got over my fear of Meadows, and in an evil humor that evening had even boldly carried my bar of iron with me up to the police head-quarters.

I had long since bound it well round with string at the handle end, to give a better grip, and I found it fairly easy to carry, suspended to my side just under my left arm.

They were all down in the dumps again at Victoria Square, where the police head-quarters were situated. The paragraph in the ‘Journal’ about Policeman Sullivan’s snake bite had made the Chief Commissioner wild with rage, and for the last few days he had hardly spoken to me, although he had seen me several times.

I neither knew nor cared whether he was aware that the information had come through me. He should have treated me with more confidence, I argued, and it served him right.

About nine o’clock I got on the tram for Prospect, with no particular definite object in my mind. I felt the lust of blood upon me, however, and was quite reckless of any danger I might run.

I went the full tram journey, and for quite half an hour wandered aimlessly about the roads. I kept a good eye out for my patrols, and dodged three of them when I saw them coming.

Presently I turned off into a small side road, and almost immediately came upon what thrilled me with a terrible joy.

A man was sleeping on an outside verandah, and he had left the small glow-worm electric light burning directly over his head. I could see his face quite plainly.

He had evidently been reading, and had apparently read himself to sleep. He was a fat-faced, jovial-looking man, and somehow reminded me of Waller.

I looked round. Everything was quiet, and there was not a soul in sight. I gently opened the gate.

I pulled my cap hard down over my eyes, and, holding my deadly weapon handy, crept stealthily up the path.

Then three totally unexpected things happened.

A bulldog rushed at me from under the bed, the man sprang up instantly and covered me with a revolver, and I heard a motor coming up the road.

The dog I downed with one furious and fortunate blow that crashed his head in, even before he had touched me, but the man on the verandah was a very different type of customer.

He blazed twice at me with his revolver before I had bounded into the shadows, and then it seemed all hell was loose.

A woman screamed inside the house — the door snapped open and three men burst out — the motor ground its brakes and pulled up dead against where I had just come in-and the man with the revolver called out “Hell!” and shouted to everyone the way I had gone.

I was round the house and down the back garden in a trice, only to butt against a high wooden fence that was too high and would have taken me too long to scale.

I doubled back, escaping one of my stumbling pursuers only by about a foot. He made a grab at me, but I struck him on the chest. He lurched over backwards and brought down someone else in his fall.

Then, before they could recover themselves I was back in the front garden again, but this time on the other side and right away from the gate.

A man was standing at the gate, holding it closed, and the staring headlights from the car showed up everything and made the road as light as day.

I crouched behind a clump of bushes, not knowing what to do. My escape was apparently cut off in all directions. The fence was too high to get over anywhere — behind me were the three or four men I had just evaded. In front stood the other man blocking the only sure way of getting back into the road. Luckily for me, and it was the only piece of good fortune so far, the clump of bushes behind which I crouched was in the deepest shadow, and I was quite invisible to the man standing by the gate.

I waited, however, without any sense of fear — only in a cold, fierce rage at being trapped. Round came my pursuers from the back of the house.

“Where is he?” shouted the man with the revolver excitedly. “He can’t have got away. I heard him yell; I must have winged him anyhow.”

The man at the gate was rather confused. He was dressed as a chauffeur. He replied that he didn’t think anyone had come out — they certainly hadn’t come out since he had been there, but he didn’t exactly know what it was all about.

“It’s the MAN we’ve got here, you silly ass — the murderer,” the shooter yelled. “He was going to bash me, just as he’s bashed poor Boxer here. But he can’t have got away — he’s in the bushes somewhere — spread out, boys, quick — look out for his iron, though.”

It was all up with me, I thought, and only the matter of a short and bloody fight before the end.

Then an idea struck me. If only I could divert their attention for even half a minute I might stand a chance of getting out into the road.

I grasped my bit of iron firmly by the end, and, swinging it furiously twice round my head, hurled it fiercely in the direction of the house right on the other side of the road.

There was a second’s silence, and then a resounding crash of splintered glass. I had hit a window somewhere.

“There he is,” shouted someone hoarsely. “He’s got over the road into Mr. Webber’s — after him, all of you, quick.”

They rushed pell-mell through the gate, and I was about to follow them when two other men came running out of the house next door, and planted themselves deliberately right in front of where I should have to pass.

“Don’t all of you go in,” called out one of them sharply. “Someone stop in the road. He may double back, and we shall see in which direction he’s gone.”

“Damn them!” I swore. “Someone’s got some sense at last.” I ran softly round, intending to try the back garden again, but whistles began sounding in all directions, and I heard voices on the other side of the fence.

I stood hesitating for quite half a minute and then, hearing footsteps coming up the gravel in both directions, in sheer desperation shinned up one of the verandah posts and got softly on to the roof of the house.

For a moment I thought it was absolutely the very worst place for hiding I could have chosen, and then — I realised it might perhaps be the very best.

At first sight there was apparently no cover for even a cat to hide. The corrugated iron roof just sloped up one side and down the other. All the way round, at the foot of the sloping roof there was a flat lead-sheeted gutter about a foot wide. This gutter was quite unprotected and open, and a sparrow even could not have found a hiding place there. Just over the front door, however, there was a piece of ornamental wood lintel, at the most ten inches high.

I wondered instantly if, by squeezing myself flat upon the lead guttering, this piece of wood lintel would hide me from the observation of anyone on the ground. At any rate, it was my only hope, and, stretched out at full length, I breathlessly regarded the operations below through a crack in the wood.

There was tremendous excitement going on and, in the short time that had elapsed since the first alarm had been given, all the neighborhood seemed to have gathered in the road.

A second motor-car had arrived, and they were detaching the supplementary oil lamps to search thoroughly through all the gardens round.

Several of my armletted patrols were in the crowd, and even in my dreadful plight, I felt proud that we had beaten the regular police.

I heard the telephone going inside the house. It was the man with the revolver speaking to the police station. I was startled to hear how close his voice sounded. He was just underneath me in the hall. He told a very bumptious tale.

He had got the murderer for sure, if they came quick. Mr. Sam Podsley, he was, and number eight, Angas Terrace, was his address. No, they hadn’t actually got hold of the man, but they had taken his weapon and he was surrounded somewhere in the block of houses. He couldn’t possibly get away, and he couldn’t run far in any case for he had winged him with his revolver. He was a dead shot.

I heard the telephone ring off sharply, and then there was a perfect babel of voices in the garden. They were handing round my iron bar for inspection, and everyone wanted to see it close.

“Now, you fellows,” shouted the revolver man truculently, “don’t waste time looking at that thing now. We’ll have plenty of time to examine that when we’ve got the handcuffs on our man. The police will be here in two shakes, but let’s truss him up before they come. He must be somewhere in the block, and he’s not got a dog’s chance of getting away. Flash all the lights round now, quick.”

Round and round came the detached lamps, flashing in every direction. The bushes were trampled through most thoroughly, and I thanked my stars gratefully that my footprints must have been very effectually blotted out.

Everyone who passed flashed his lamp for a second on the roof, but my strip of lintel seemed so hopelessly small and low that no one for a second gave a thought as to whether it could hide a man. Lying flat up there, I thought what asses they all were, but when, a couple of days later, I came to examine the house in clear and broad daylight, I quite understood the mistake they had made.

From the ground the woodwork didn’t look six inches high, and I marvelled to myself how it could have hid me there.

Presently a great white light came in the sky, and two big long police cars discharged quite a score of uniformed and ununiformed members of the force.

Inspector Wedlake was in charge and, quickly put in possession of all the facts, he began to swear in true policeman fashion.

“Come out of the garden, all of you blank ninnies standing there. Haven’t any of you got any more sense than that? How the devil do you think we’re going to find that man’s tracks out of all the footmarks there? Come out, I say.”

The crowd filed out quickly and the policemen were soon the only ones in possession of the scene.

The man with the revolver was cross-examined sharply by the Inspector. He was most voluble and most minute in all his details.

“This is where I was lying,” he explained delightedly, “and this is where Boxer was killed. He saw the man first and growled. He ran at him at once. I caught sight of him just as he hit Boxer on the head. I let fly at him on the second, and winged him somewhere, for I heard the beggar yell. He jumped quite a foot into the air. Then he tore round the house. We ran after him but he dodged back and somehow got over the road. He broke in the window there, with his iron. Then we couldn’t find him, but he can’t have got away for there is no escape on either side at the back. The walls are too high there — and not a mouse has crossed the road. For certain, he’s now in the gardens somewhere.”

The chauffeur was next quickly handled. He looked a fool and the Inspector was soon glaring angrily at him. The tale, he told was very muddled. Yes — he had been standing by the gate all the time, almost from the very first second when the revolver had been fired. The murderer must have run very quickly across the road. No — he didn’t actually see him run. In fact, he hadn’t seen anyone run. What he meant was — that if he had really run he didn’t know how he could have done it at all, for he had been watching the road all the time. No — he wasn’t drunk and he wasn’t making anything up. He didn’t care who asked him anything if they asked him politely, and he didn’t mind now who heard him say —“Blast the police!” He was disgusted.

All this took place exactly below me, and right before the front door. I heard all the instructions given to the policemen, and for three hours they hunted incessantly in and out and all about the gardens of the adjoining houses.

The police were puzzled and frankly said so. The cordon had been drawn so quickly and so closely round the entire terrace that they couldn’t possibly make out how I had got away.

“Wait till morning,” at last snarled Inspector Wedlake, “and we’ll go through every bally inch of the whole place with a tooth-comb. Meanwhile, everyone’s to keep his place and not a living soul’s to cross out over the cordon.”

Soon after midnight Meadows himself arrived, and it made me shudder to see his cold set face under the half light. His eyes glared with vicious determination.

“If we lose him this time, Inspector,” he whispered hoarsely, “the Chief will never forgive us. It’s the right man now, if it never was before; that string-bound iron’s an eye opener at last.”

There were few people about Angas Terrace that night who could have slept a wink.

To begin with there were the people in the house. Save for two little boys, who I gathered from the conversation going on inside — and I could plainly hear every word that was said — had gone off to sleep again almost at once — no one could have taken their clothes off, even if they had lain down at all.

In the dining-room below, there was a continual noise of rattling glasses and drawing corks all night long. All the police in turn must have come in for a ‘wad,’ and the talk — oh, the talk! The fat brute with the revolver was boasting and yapping from midnight until dawn. He told his beastly rotten tale over and over again until every word of it was as familiar to me as my own name. He had been sleeping on his right side. Boxer’s growl had awakened him in a sweat — he had seized his revolver and fired twice — he had winged me once for sure — I had yelled like hell, and I had jumped a good foot in the air, &c. Thank goodness, someone else got sick of it besides me, and at last he was told to shut up.

“Oh, curse you — Podsley,” I heard a sleepy voice say, “we’re damn sick of your rotten yarn. I don’t believe you hit him at all. How the devil did the blighter get away if you put all the lead in him that you say you did? I believe it was Boxer you hit after all. You killed your own bally dog, old man — that’s what you did — so shut up.”

Then followed a long and bitter argument that, in the end, was almost as boring as the shooting episode itself.

The police, too, could have had no sort of rest at all. All night long numbers were pacing the road — never more than a dozen yards from one another. They talked in gruff voices and repeatedly wished for the morning, when everything wonderful was going to happen, and I should be taken, without doubt. They cursed the people in the house for a lot of muddlers to have let me get away at all, and gave it as their opinion that it would be a hanging matter for half the police if I weren’t caught this time.

Then there was myself. I know I never slept. I was listening and listening the whole night long. I was in a bitter agony of mortification, and fear, too, was now creeping like a cold palsy over my mind. What chance of escape had I now, and when I was taken what would it all mean? I should be hanged for certain, and what would become of Lucy then? She would be branded for ever because of my love, and every kiss I had given her would leave its dark memory of dreadful shame. Why — oh, why had I ever touched the paste. I had never dreamed of things like this. It was Fate that had turned my steps this awful way. I was only a pawn in her dreadful game.

The night was long and terrible for me, and yet in contrast such a perfect night it was, too. Starry and beautiful, in such a wondrous sky. The air was warm and mild and everything spoke of peace and quiet, with the tired world resting in its dreams.

Just as the dawn came I believe I must have been almost on the point of dropping asleep. At any rate, I know I had got my eyes shut, and had partly forgotten my surroundings. Suddenly — so suddenly that I remember jerking myself upon my elbow to listen — I heard a sound that froze the very marrow in my spine. It was the baying of a dog. A deep-throated hollow sound like a dog moaning in a cave. All my faculties were alive in an instant. Then it came again — mournful and hollow, but with dreadful menace in its tone.

A policeman in the road called out briskly:—

“Here they are, mates — the bloodhounds at last.”

The bloodhounds — of course! The terror of it struck me like a blow — I had not thought of them. The police were bringing them up to put them on my trail. They had got my iron bar now, and that would give them for the first time the scent they were needing to follow.

I lay back in a muck sweat, with my teeth chattering horribly. Dawn comes very quickly in Australia, and within five minutes of first hearing the hounds I saw the two of them brought up in leash to the other side of the road, just in front of the house.

They were terrible looking beasts, with huge flopping ears and large bloodshot eyes. Two men were in charge of them and holding them back with thick leathern straps.

Early as it was, a little half-dressed crowd had already collected from the adjoining houses.

“Everybody keep away from the hounds,” shouted one of the keepers angrily. “This isn’t a picture stunt, and we don’t want any help either. We want perfect quiet, too, please.” The crowd obediently edged a little away and stopped talking among themselves.

A milk cart came clattering up and stopped noisily, right in front of the gate. There was a little fox terrier on the seat, and catching sight of the bloodhounds, it started to bark furiously.

“Stop that dog,” roared one of the men; “take it away. It’ll spoil everything. Take it off — do you hear?”

The flustered milkman leaned over savagely to seize the animal, but losing his balance he banged up against one of his large milk cans and, in a second, a generous torrent of milk was pouring into the road.

“Oh, you damned fool,” shrieked the keeper, now wild with rage. “If that milk gets on them, all the scent will be lost. Get out of it — you idiot — take your horse away.”

A dozen willing pairs of hands quickly bundled the milkman and his cart away, but the bloodhounds had smelt the milk and were anxious for a closer acquaintance with it.

“Come on, Pluto, you brute,” swore the keeper. “Now then,” to the other man, “keep Jezebel away. Pull her back, right over.”

There was a lot of shouting and expostulating and, finally, the two big animals were given my iron bar to smell, and encouraged to pick up the trail.

“Good boy, Pluto — find it now,” coaxed the keeper. “Nose it, Jezebel — nose it now.”

Pluto lifted his great muzzle interestedly and was making strenuous efforts to come across the road. He pulled and tugged, but his keeper wouldn’t let him go, and kept drawing him back to the footpath, in front of the broken window.

“It’s that damned milk he’s after,” he explained savagely; “once he’s lapped it, we may as well take him home. Oh, good girl, Jezebel — good girl.”

Jezebel had smelt something, for with her head low down, she was running backwards and forwards on the path by the side of the road. I remembered, with a pang of fear, that it was there I had stood for a few seconds before I had crossed the road to slink up the garden after the man asleep on the verandah.

It was an agonising moment for me — which way would the great beast go? Would she try, like her mate had done, to cross the road, or would she follow my trail back along the way I had come from the Prospect tram?

I could see everything so plainly through the crack in the wood. She ran backwards and forwards for about a minute and then, to my great joy, with a deep throated bay, started pulling hard in the direction away from the house.

The crowd gave a little encouraging cheer, and Pluto now shambling contentedly after her, they both disappeared out of my sight up the road.

Most of the crowd followed excitedly after them, and, for a moment, I hoped that I might get down and escape in the confusion.

But no, to my dismay not a policeman had moved, and all down the road I could see them keeping their allotted stations just as they had done through out the entire night.

The Inspector was taking no chances, I thought.

For two hours I lay wondering what had happened, and then news began to filter through. From the remarks I picked up from the policemen and the people standing about, the bloodhounds were not proving quite a success.

They had got to the shelter from where the trams started — they had lost the scent altogether — they had followed a milk cart — they wouldn’t leave a butcher’s shop, and so on, and so on.

In the meantime, a big crowd had gathered in the road in front of the house. Somehow the news had quickly got about, and on foot and in all sorts of conveyances they had hurried to the spot. Bicycles, motor cars and carts had all been pressed into service, and soon spectators were standing ten and twelve deep on the footpath gaping curiously at the house.

The police were furious, but the crowd was too great to handle easily, and they had to be content with keeping them out of the garden in front.

Presently I heard the baying of the dogs again. They were being brought back to pick up another trail. In a scene of intense excitement, a way was opened through the crowd and they were brought straight into the garden, just under where I lay.

My heart was thumping terribly in my chest, and I could hardly breathe. The great beasts smelt something at once. They tore excitedly round and round the house, and sniffed about in every place where I had been. Time after time they nosed to the verandah post, up which I had climbed to get on the roof, but every time, directly they came there, they were immediately pulled roughly back.

I had killed the bulldog just under there and his blood was still dark and red upon the gravel.

“For the Lord’s sake they mustn’t lick that blood,” implored the head keeper; “if they touch it once, they’ll never scent anything again. Some of you men stand round it, please. Pull them back hard now.”

A little sheltering group stood round the post, and, my confidence now returning, I smiled amusedly to myself at the protection I was receiving.

The dogs had a long stay near the bushes where I had hid, and then nosed off to the gate. The road had been entirely cleared of sight-seers now, just in front of the house, and the beasts ambled out to and fro over the path. But they were always at fault at once, and returned inside. Again and again they went from the verandah post to the gate, but the milk — trodden all over the place by then — evidently fogged them, and they only bayed hoarsely and turned round.

For quite half an hour they were kept smelling round the house but nothing happened, except that they invariably made straight for the verandah post.

“Curse that blood,” said the head bloodhound man at last, “and curse the milk, too. Everything’s against us. If it hadn’t been for that milk, we should have been straight on him by now. It’s no good going on. The scent in this garden’s as strong as hell, I’m dead sure of that. But what’s the good if it leads nowhere? Directly they get into the road the scent’s gone.”

In great disappointment, the bloodhounds were at length led away, and a few minutes later a sort of conference was held just by the front door. Six or seven of the heads of the police were there.

Inspector Wedlake looked tired, white, and angry. “What are we to tell the Chief when he comes back tonight?” he asked savagely. “Same old tale he’ll say — had him actually in your hands and you let him go. He’ll be jolly pleasant, I can see.”

“Well, it isn’t our fault, Inspector,” said another voice. “We can’t catch him if he isn’t here, can we?”

“But he must be here,” replied the Inspector irritably. “If there’s any truth in what these men say, he never got out of the garden of these two houses. I don’t understand it. We’ve gone through every inch of the place.”

“Well, we’ve got his weapon now,” said the other shortly. “He’s lost his mascot, anyhow.”

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