Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 104, No. 4, August 22, 1936

There was an exclamation from the man and the sound of a key grating in a lock. The door swung open and Vivian slipped through it into the courtyard of the prison.

“But you did not tell me you were going away today,” Manuel told her as she slipped into his arms and nestled there.

“I did not know it until an hour ago, when I received a message,” she said. “I could not go without seeing you.”

“I will not let you go,” he man said. “You must stay.”

“I must go,” Vivian told him. She disengaged herself gently from his arms and lit a cigarette, shielding the tiny glow from chance observation of some other guard about the great stone building towering above them in the darkness. “I can stay only so long as this cigarette lasts. That is all the time we have.” She extended the case to him. “Smoke one with me.”

There was only one cigarette left in the case. The guard took it, lit it and then launched volubly into a torrent of reasons why she should not leave. Never a shadow quivered on the face of the Lady from Hell as she watched the cigarette smoke trickle from the guard’s nostrils, but in her eyes a flash came and went like unsuspected summer lighting, leaving no sign but only a memory of its passing.

She listened, interjecting a word now and then. The cigarette was half consumed when her keen ears caught the first faint hint of a hesitancy in the guard’s speech; a hesitancy that grew until it seemed that the man was fighting against an overpowering sleep... as indeed he was. The single cigarette left in the Lady from Hell’s case had been drugged and now, the man’s eyes closed and he leaned against the wall, crumpled toward the flagging. Vivian caught him, lowered him gently, so that his equipment would make no noise as he struck.

Satisfying herself that he was out and not likely to recover for some time, Vivian opened the gate. Wylie, watching from his shadowy corner saw her, saw the gesture with which she beckoned, and crossed stealthily to her side.

Together they searched along the brick wall until they found the spot they sought... a space where scarred and pitted bricks told their own story. This was the execution courtyard, and the spot they had found was the place where prisoners invariably stood to face a firing squad. The wall there was marked with the grooves of countless bullets.

Working in the purple darkness where each little distance isolated itself absolutely, like a man in a black cloak turning his back, Vivian carefully measured off the distance from the execution spot in the corner of the courtyard to the gateway in the wall, and then, in the narrow street outside, measured the distance again. With a piece of chalk she made a mark on the wall.

“Here,” she told Wylie, “I think one row of bricks will be sufficient. Take them out, and then the bricks behind them, and I think you will have sufficient space. When you are through replace the outer bricks. No need to be careful about the replacement. It will be too dark in this Street for anyone passing to notice anything out of the way.”

Nodding understanding, Wylie placed the large leather bag he carried on the pavement and began at the old bricks of the wall with a chisel, as Vivian turned back toward the courtyard again.

And then fate, which had been dogging their heels ever since they left Monteverde, threatened to wreck the whole elaborate structure she had created.

She stepped into the courtyard just in time to see a figure bending over the form of the guard on the flagstones. The newcomer raised his head, sprang to his feet as the sound of the opening gateway came to his ears.

“Who is it?” he demanded sharply. “Stand where you are, or I shall shoot.”

Vivian halted, under her quiet all her muscles and nerves gathered together like a cat, bunched for a spring. Her own gun was in readiness. She could have shot the man down, but that would have been fatal to her plans. A shot would bring the other prison guards swarming into the courtyard. Powerful lights would be turned on... and their plans would be shattered, ruined irrevocably.

She saw the man, an officer by the shining bits of metal on his uniform, raising a hand toward his mouth. In another moment, she knew, he would blow his whistle, giving the alarm.

She had scarcely a split second in which to act to prevent their whole scheme from being ruined. And in that split second she acted. Her right hand, which had crept stealthily toward the neckline of her dress, was flung up and forward. The starshine touched a streak of silver in the darkness, and the knife that the Lady from Hell had flung struck its target. Even in the darkness her aim had been true. The knife plunged into the base of the man’s throat, the keen blade slicing into the flesh like soft butter. The officer gurgled chokingly, his hand groped toward the deadly weapon in his throat, and he sank to the pavement.