“Better telephone me just before you come.  Something may have happened to change our plans.”

“All right—­I’ll telephone.  Just keep your nerve.”

With that he hurried out.  At about the time he left, Larry was leaving Cedar Crest in handcuffs beside the burly and triumphant Gavegan, and believing that the power he had sought to exercise was now effectually at an end.  He was out of it.  In his despondency it was not granted him to see that the greatest thing which he could do was already done; that he had set in motion all the machinery of what had taken place and what was about to take place; that all the figures in the action of the further drama of that night were to act as they were to do primarily because of promptings which came from him.

CHAPTER XXXIII

Dick’s departure left Maggie to think alone upon an intricate and possibly dangerous interplay of characters in which she had cast herself for the chief role, which might prove a sacrificial role for her.  She quickly perceived that Dick’s plan, clever as it might be, would bring about, in the dubious event of its success, only one of the several happenings which had to come to pass if she were to clear her slate before her disappearance.

Dick’s plan was good; but it would only get rid of Barney and Old Jimmie.  It would only rid Larry of such danger as they represented; it would only be revenge upon them for the evil they had done.  And, after all, revenge helped a man forward but very little.  There would still remain, even in the event of the success of Dick’s plan, the constant danger to Larry from the police hunt, instigated by Chief Barlow’s vindictive determination to send Larry back to prison for his refusal to be a stool-pigeon; and the constant danger from his one-time friends who were hunting him down with deadly hatred as a squealer.

Somehow, if she were to set things right for Larry, she had to maneuver that night’s happenings in such a way as to eliminate forever Barlow’s persecutions, and eliminate forever the danger to Larry from his friends’ and their hirelings’ desire for vengeance upon a supposed traitor.

Maggie thought rapidly, elaborating on Dick’s plan.  But what Maggie did was not so much the result of sober thought as of the inspiration of a desperate, hardly pressed young woman; but then, after all, what we call inspiration is only thought geared to an incredibly high speed.  First of all, she got rid of that slow-witted, awesome supernumerary, Miss Grierson, who might completely upset the delicate action of the stage by a dignified entrance at the wrong moment and with the wrong cue.  Next she called up Chief Barlow at Police Headquarters.  Fortunately for her Barlow was still in; for an acrimonious dispute, then in progress and taking much space in the public prints, between him and the District Attorney’s office was keeping him late at his desk despite the most autocratic and pleasant of all demands, those of his dinner hour.  To him Maggie gave a false name, and told him that she had most important information to communicate at once; to which he growled back that she could give it if she came down at once.