Chapter XXIII: The Murderer Escapes

It lacked but a few moments of the time when the train that was to convey Rogers to Sing Sing would pull out of the Grand Central Station.

A closed carriage was driven hurriedly under the glass canopy which stretches between the station proper and the annex. There were two men on the box--the driver and a special officer in citizen’s clothes; and there were two men inside the hack.

One of these latter was also an officer; the other, Paul Rogers, who was to meet the fate that had been allotted to him, by passing through the “little door” into the room where that terrible chair is located, in which so many persons are compelled to seat themselves never to rise again.

But fate, and the careful plotting and planning of numerous friends of Rogers, had already determined that he was not, on this particular occasion, to arrive at the selected destination. Fate, assisted and directed somewhat by the aforesaid friends, had arranged a most dramatic rescue, which, by reason of its boldness and originality, was destined to succeed.

And this is how it happened:

When the hack drew up against the curb inside the station, the officer on the box leaped down and opened the door.

As he did so, he made a signal which, although almost imperceptible to many who were spectators of the scene, was yet visible to the police officers who were near, and they gathered closely around the hack.

In the meantime, the spectators, many of them ignorant of the identity of the passenger in the hack, but, nevertheless, attracted by an indefinable feeling that was in the air, suggestive of the presence of a convicted criminal, and many of whom--as it appeared later--who were thoroughly posted regarding that trifling circumstance, gathered closely around the hack, and the two men who presently descended from it.

It was somewhat remarkable how quickly that crowd gathered, seemingly from nowhere, but which, almost in a moment, became absolutely dense.

To the three policemen in uniform and the two officers who were not in uniform, in the center of the crowd, it never occurred that the throng of men who were crushing slowly but surely forward were acting in concert, and upon a perfectly defined schedule.

There was no noise--no violence--no disturbance of any sort--nothing, in fact, to give the officers in charge on the occasion the idea that a rescue was in progress.

Each one of those officers had had experience with rescues before that; each one of them would have known how to meet an emergency of that sort with a front that would have disabled its intentions then and there, had they or any one of them realized that an emergency existed.

And that was the point of the whole rescue.

That was the very thing which rendered it a success.

The very unostentatiousness of it! The utter and entire absence of noise or excitement! The steady and unrelenting pressure which the officers strove so quietly and so vainly to thrust back again! The quiet which the officers themselves maintained, fearing that any noise might reveal the identity of their prisoner!

Remember, it never once occurred to them that a rescue was in progress! Had one of them suspected that, revolvers would have been drawn, clubs would have been in evidence, an alarm would have been sounded and the attempt at rescue would have been defeated almost as soon as it began.

But there was nothing in the action of that crowd which so steadily pressed forward to indicate even that they knew who the prisoner was. There was nothing about the personnel of the crowd to suggest that it was not the ordinary miscellaneous collection of humanity which gathers at and departs from the Grand Central Station a hundred times every day of the year.

There was, in fact, nothing about the incident which was observable to the officers, which was at all out of the ordinary, save that the crowd was more dense than usual, and that the men who composed it seemed to be more than ordinarily determined to see for themselves what was going on.

Later, when explanations were demanded, there was really not one that was worthy of the name of explanation that could be offered.

There was the crowd, steadily and relentlessly pressing forward. There were big men--well-dressed men--business men, from their appearance, in the van of the crowd; and in the center of it all there were the two officers with their prisoner, who was handcuffed to one of them, and the three policemen in uniform.

Five officers of the law, surrounded by two hundred and fifty determined rescuers.

Just at the instant when the officers became convinced that assistance was necessary--just at the moment, in fact, when one of them was on the point of calling for it, somebody in the distance, and from a point higher up, as if its owner was so situated that he could overlook the conditions, whistled shrilly and peculiarly.

It was evident that the crowd was awaiting that signal, for with almost the mechanical precision of machinery, it acted.

The five officers were seized as one man might have been--and they were seized by many pairs of hands at once.

It was the same with each of the five, so we need only know the experience of one of them, as he afterward described it at the investigation that was ordered.

“Two hands, bigger than my own, went across my mouth, and the fingers locked together so that I couldn’t have opened my jaws to utter a word if my life had depended upon it. My head was pulled back with a jerk by those same two hands, for their owner was directly behind me, and I am willing to swear that he was a giant, although I did not see him. Then, at the same second, two more hands grabbed me by the throat and squeezed, not hard enough to choke me exactly, but near enough to that to keep my attention fixed for the moment on the desire to get my breath. Then, and also at the same instant, each one of my legs was seized by more hands, and I was lifted off my feet, and laid, face down, on the pavement. Then, a moment later there wasn’t a hand touching me, and I leaped to my feet ready for fight, only to find myself facing a crowd of a hundred or more innocent-looking men who were vieing with each other in asking what had happened and offering their assistance.

“Sure, I couldn’t arrest the whole crowd of them for attacking me, for I was not certain that a single one of them had been concerned in the attack.”

That finished his testimony, and that was, in fact, all that he or any one of the officers of the law knew about the occurrence--save, perhaps, one other--the officer to whom the prisoner was handcuffed.

His story given at the investigation was almost the same.

“I had two hands over my mouth, two more at my throat, and I don’t know how many more at my legs,” he said. “I could not call out, and I couldn’t do a thing to defend myself. When I got on my feet again the chain between the two nippers had been cut and my prisoner was gone. That’s all I know about it. I didn’t hear a word said--not one. There wasn’t a blow struck. Nobody was hurt that I have heard about. They didn’t even choke me hard enough to hurt.”

And the fact, so far as Paul Rogers was concerned, was this:

When the crowd became dense around him and the officer to whom he was handcuffed was dragged down beside him, a pair of steel nippers quickly severed the chain between the manacles, and then the manacle itself, that surrounded his own wrist.

He was a free man, and before him there was a niche in the crowd into which he stepped; and as he pressed forward the niche proceeded in front of him and as rapidly closed up behind him, something after the manner in which a ripple will travel across a stretch of smooth water when a pebble has disturbed it.

It is all smooth and clear in front of the ripple, and all smooth and clear behind it, but the ripple goes on continuously and regularly, until it strikes against the shore and disappears.

And so, Paul Rogers went ahead, slowly, continuously and regularly, until he struck against the pavement of Forty-second Street, when he, too, disappeared--was swallowed up in the ebbing and flowing of that sea of humanity which sucks through Forty-second Street, between the hours of four and six o’clock, almost every week-day in the year.

He had disappeared from Forty-second Street before it was known inside the station that a prisoner had escaped. He was gone before it was known on the outskirts of the crowd that had surrounded him that he was there at all.

The death chair at Sing Sing was cheated of its prey--or, at least, the journey to Sing Sing was indefinitely postponed.

Paul Rogers, conspirator, murderer, but more than all, a mystery, had made good his escape and was again at large--and he was at large for a well-defined and dastardly purpose.