MAY I see Hicks?”
The stout, bearded jailor nearly-filled the doorway. He puffed his short pipe deliberately, and stared at Aidee. The smoke floated up and around the gas jet over his head.
“Ain't you the Preacher?”
“So they call me.”
The jailor stepped back, either in surprise or consent. Aidee walked into the opening and passed on. The jailor followed him.
“Where is his cell?”
“Spiritual consolation! That's it. That's the word,” said the jailor thoughtfully. “Some folks has the gift of it. Oils a chap up, don't it, so he'll slip out'n his corpse, like he was greased. Well, there's som'p'n in it. But I seen in thePressthis mornin'—say, you ain't goin' to instigate him again?”
Aidee laughed, and said:
“They have to be lively.”
“That's right, Preacher. Folks say a thing, but what they got in their heads is the thing they don't say, ain't it?”
“You're a philosopher.”
“Oh, I do a pile of thinkin',” said the jailor complacently.
He mounted slowly to the upper corridor, knocked at a door, and unlocked it.
“Hicks, gentleman to see you.”
Hicks looked up, blinking and shading his eyes.
The jailor locked the door noisily behind Aidee, and walked away. At the end of the corridor he stopped and listened, and heard the murmur of low voices. He sat down and tipped his chair against the wall and meditated.
“Spiritual consolation! That's the word.”
Alcott leaned his back against the wall, and stared at Allen, who ran to his side and grasped his arm and whispered, “Don't you yell out!” while Sweeney was locking the door noisily. Sweeney's steps receded in the corridor.
“What do you come here for? Keep quiet!”
“Lolly!”
“Who told you it was me?”
He pulled him over to the table. They sat down and gripped hands across and looked dumbly at each other. Allen broke down first. He dropped his head on the table and gave soft, dry sobs.
“Lolly, boy!”
“Did he tell you it was me?”
“Who?”
“Hennion!”
“Nobody told me it was you.”
“You came to see Hicks!”
He looked up suddenly with an impish grin. “Hey! I know! You wanted to ask me what I shot Wood for? That's what they all want to know.”
It was the same twisted smile that Alcott knew so well, two-thirds on one side of his face, the same shy, freakish look in the eyes as of a cornered animal. They used to laugh at home over Lolly's queer smile—Lolly the original, the unexpected, the sudden and fierce in his small resentments, yet how passionately loving, and how lovable and clever! They used to think so at home. Here he was, then, with his twisted smile, and hot, black eyes and jerking, vivid speech. His thin, straggling beard had changed his looks. He had aged fast in the six years. Alcott thought he would hardly have recognised him at a little distance. So—why, Hicks!—Carroll said Hicks used to drink down Alcott's own speeches like brandy! Hicks had killed Wood!
“What else have you been up to, Lolly? That's the worst job yet.”
The eyes of each regarded the other's hungrily. Allen chattered on in a low, excited voice.
“Old Al, I love you so! Forgive me seventy times seven. Hey! I heard every speech you made, pretty near. What do you think? Say! What'll they do to me?” he whispered, turning to the window. “I wished I could get out. Say, Al, when you were in Nevada at Beekman's, where do you suppose I was? Over the divide at Secor's Lode, Number Two, and you came near spotting me once! I ain't a fool, anyway. I dodged you neat. I lived on the east side with Jimmy Shays. Say, he's a fool. I can sole two shoes to his one. But sometimes I don't remember, Al. I tried to remember how Mummy looked, and I couldn't. But I used to remember. But, Al, what'd you come for? Say, I cleared the track of Wood all right. Say, they'd never have caught me, if I'd got away then. They were too many. I kept out of your way all right. I wasn't going to mess you again, and that suited me all right, that way. I pegged shoes along with old Shays. Damn greasy Irishman, there, Coglan. I'll knife him some day. No! No! I won't, Al! Forgive me seventy times. I got something in me that burns me up. I ain't going to last long. Let 'em kill me. God, I was proud of you! I used to go home like dynamite, and collar old Shays, and yell, 'Down with 'em! Where's justice?' 'Wha's matter?' says Shays. 'Where is 't?' and goes hunting for justice at the bottom of a jug of forty-rod whiskey. Oh, Al! Al! Ain't we a sad story, you and I?”
He broke down again, chattering, sobbing with soft, small sobs, and hid his face on the table. The gas jet leaped and fell, feebly, fitfully. The noises of the city, the roll of wheels and clang of street-car gongs, came in through the barred window.
“I was running myself, too, Al, and that made me feel better. I been happy sometimes.”
“Aren't you glad to see me, Lolly?”
“Yes. But you ain't going to hold me down. Now, say, Al,” he pleaded, “don't you give it away! Folks'd be down on you. I ain't like I used to be. I'm proud of you, now. I ain't going to mess you any more, but I've done something myself, ain't I? Done for myself too, ain't I?”
“I've got to think this out. That was all wrong, boy. That old man, Wood, had a right to his life.”
“He hadnoright!”
Allen was on his feet, two fingers shaking in the air.
“Quiet, Lolly! Sweeney's in the corridor. I'm not blaming you. Why didn't you come to me? I'd have let you live as you liked. I'm going away to think it out. Never mind. I say, drop it, Lolly! We'll sled together again. I've said it, and you can quit talking.”
Allen clung to his hand.
“You're coming again, Al.”
He felt Alcott's old mastery gripping him again, the same thing that had always been to him the foundation of his existence, and yet always intolerable and smothering. Not being able to live without Alcott, nor yet with him, the four years in Port Argent had seemed a clever solution—not with Alcott, nor yet without him; free of his smothering control, but seeing his face and hearing his voice.
He rattled on half hysterically, while Alcott gripped his hand across the table, and said little.
Gradually the picture took shape in Alcott's mind, and his mental image of the last four years changed form and line of the new demand. He saw Allen going home nights from the Assembly Hall, with his light, jerky step, exulting, hugging himself gleefully. How he had hated Al's enemies! How he had longed to kill Carroll for sneering at Al in choppy paragraphs! How he had hated Marve Wood, whom Al called a “disease”! How he had lurked in the shadow under the gallery of the Assembly Hall! How he had pegged shoes and poured his excitement, in vivid language, into the ears of the east-side loafers in the shoe-shop! How flitted back and forth over the Maple Street bridge, where the drays and trolley cars jangled, where the Muscadine flowed, muddy and muttering, below!
“You've been in Port Argent all this time!” Alcott said at last. “I wouldn't have talked that way if I'd known you were there.”
“Say! You'd have been afraid? No! Why, you ain't afraid of anything, Al!”
“I was always afraid of you.”
“What for? You're coming again, Al!”
“You don't think I'm going to let you alone now!”
“I ain't going to mess you over again! No!” he whispered, twisting his fingers.
Alcott knitted his black brows and held his hand over the nervous fingers.
“Drop it, Lolly!”
“What you going to do? You're coming again?” His voice was thin and plaintive.
“Yes.”
“How soon?”
“To-morrow. I've got to think it over. I can't stay now, Lolly.”
He rose and went to the door and rattled it. Sweeney's steps came slowly down the corridor. Allen sat still while the jailor opened the door.
“I'll see you again, then, Mr. Hicks.”
Allen looked up suddenly with an impish grin.
“Pretty cool, ain't he?” said Sweeney presently. “I didn't hear much noise. Now, when Mr. Hennion came here—look here, I told Mr. Hennion—why, you look at it, now! There ought to be a new jail.”
“I see. Not very creditable.”
“Why, no.” Sweeney argued in an injured tone. “Look at it!”
“I want to bring Hicks a book or two. May I?”
“Why, I guess so.”
Aidee went home, hurrying, not knowing why he hurried. His hands felt cold, his head hot and dizzy. He longed to hide and not see the faces on the street, faces which all judged that Lolly should die.
“Brotherhood of man!” He had a brother, one whom the rest of the brotherhood wanted to hang, a small man, with a queer smile and wriggling fingers, sitting under the dim gas jet.
Even in his familiar rooms he could not think or sleep. He saw before him days upon days, courts and lawyers, preparations for the trial, the long doubt, and what then? Only a black pit full of things intolerable, not to be looked at. Yet it stood there stolidly, in front.
The Assembly? He would rather have Wood than the Assembly to help him here, or Hennion, or Secor. But neither Hennion nor Secor would help him here. They were men of the crowd in the street, who all preferred to hang Lolly.
At daybreak he rose, dressed, and went out. It was Friday morning. The air was fresh and damp. He looked at the Assembly building opposite, and fancied himself speaking from the familiar wide platform within, saying: “I am the brother of Hicks, the murderer, in your jail—I who lied to you, calling you my brethren, protesting one universal bond, who have but one brother and one bond of blood,—to you who are my enemies. His name is Allen Aidee, and your name is Legion.”
People called him abrupt and sensational. It would be a relief to speak so, sharp and harsh, like the breaking of a window glass with one's fist in a stifling room.
He thought of the scores of times he had looked on the crowd of faces from the platform there, and he tried now to put into each picture one more item, namely, Allen sitting far back in the shadow under the gallery. When he had put this item in, it covered up the rest of the picture.
Probably Allen used to go across the river by following the side streets over to Maple Street, and so to the bridge. Alcott left Seton Avenue and walked toward Maple Street through that still sleeping section of the city. On Maple Street, the trolley cars were beginning to run, milk waggons clattered over the rough pavement.
“Poor boy!”
Lolly claimed to have been happy during those four years. After all, the arrangement he had made was characteristic, the very kind of thing he would be apt to do. Alcott wondered why he had never suspected that Allen was lurking near him.
Down Maple Street, then, Allen's regular road must have lain. How often he must have gone over the bridge, his nerves twitching and his head blazing with Alcott's last words! Here was the hurrying muddy river, running high now with the spring floods, mad, headlong, and unclean. Not an inch beyond its surface could one see. A drowned body might float, and if an inch of water covered it, no man would know.
Doctrines and theories! Do this, and think thus, and believe that which I tell you, and take my medicine for a world diseased! What notional, unsteady things were these, floating things, only on the surface of this muddy stream of life. They had no other foundation than the stream, and the stream drowned them all, in course of time. It drowned all interpretations of itself, in course of time.
In East Argent he turned to the right, into Muscadine Street. On one side of the street stretched the P. and N. freight yards by the river, on the other shabby and flimsy fronts, some of wood, some of brick, with shops in most of the ground floors, an inhabited story or two over each. Already Muscadine Street was awake. The freight yards were noisy with cars and hooting engines. The stream whistles of the down-river factories began to blow.
The harsh, pitiless iron clangour tortured him and he hurried through a street that seemed to lead away into the country back from the river. He stopped at a discarded horse car, that was propped up in an empty lot, and bore the sign “Night lunches,” and went up the shaky step, through the narrow door. The occupant was a grimy-aproned man, asleep with his head on the counter. Alcott drank a cup of coffee and ate something, he hardly noticed what. It tasted unpleasantly.
One corner succeeded another in the long street. Then came empty lots, cornfields, clumps of woods, scores of trestle pyramids of the oil wells.
“Lolly! Lolly!”
Men and their societies, and all the structures they built, and the ideas that governed them, were monstrous, implacable, harsh, and hard, iron beating on iron in freight yards and factories. Justice! What was justice? One knew the sense of injustice. It was like a scald. It was a clamour and cry, “He has done me wrong, a wrong!” But justice? An even balance? There was no such balance. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? It was revenge. There was no justice but perfect pardon. You must know that uttermost love was justice, and not one iota less than that was justice.
Alcott's old doctrines, these. Doctrines only, “floating things on muddy stream.” They seemed to mean to him now only, “I must have Lolly! I must have him!”
All that Alcott had built up about himself in four years now seemed suddenly wiped out of his desires. He wanted to take Allen and go away. It seemed a simple thing, not so complicated as the Seton Avenue Assembly, and the Brotherhood of Man. But bars and bricks, metal and stone, and the iron refusal of society, were in the way of this simple thing. Their stolid refusal faced him as well in the woods as in the city.
The woods were wet and cool. No sound reached the centre of the grove from without, except the far-off thudding of an oil well. Shy wood birds flitted and twittered. Fragments of twigs and bark dropped from heights where the squirrels were at their thriving enterprises, and the new leaves were growing.
ALCOTT came back to the city in the afternoon. At four o'clock he was on Lower Bank Street, knocking at Henry Champney's door.
“Is Miss Camilla Champney in?”
The startled maid stared at him and showed him into the library, where Henry Champney's shelves of massive books covered the lower walls, and over them hung the portraits of Webster, Clay, and Quincy Adams with solemn, shining foreheads.
He walked up and down, twisting his fingers, stopping now and then to listen for Camilla's steps. She came soon.
“I'm so glad you're here! I want to ask——” She stopped, caught a quick breath, and put her hand to her throat.
“What is it?”
Alcott's face was white and damp, and his black eyes stared at her. He stood very still.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Do I look like that? Do I show what I am, gone blind and mad? Do I look it? I could only think of this, of you—I must tell someone. There must be some way. Help me!” He moved about jerkily, talking half incoherently. “He's been here four years. Allen, you know! If I'd known, I could have handled him somehow. But—he's—Hicks—he called himself—Hicks. He killed Wood. I saw him last night, but he's changed, but—my boy, Lolly! Four years he's been in Port Argent—watching me! He called himself Hicks. Don't you see, Camilla! It's my boy! Don't you see! Wait. I'll get buckled down. I can tell you better in a moment.”
Camilla leaned back against Henry Champney's big desk, and stared with wide grey eyes. Alcott walked away breathing heavily, and returned. He sat down in the desk chair and dropped his head on his arm.
“It's your brother!”
“I must save him! Don't you understand? No one shall touch him! He's mine!” He sprang up, walked away, and came again.
Camilla thought of many confused things. The bluebird's note was gone from her heart, but the current of the tumult that was there ran in one direction. It poured into Alcott's passion and point of view. Her new pillar of fire and cloud, the man with the halo of her own construction was begging for help, a demigod suddenly become human and suffering, stammering, calling himself blind and mad.
“Why, we must get him out!” she cried.
She thought of Dick. Another instinct warned her that he would not understand. It was a case where Dick would be a rock in the way, instead of one to anchor to. But thinking of him served to remind her of what he had said the night before.
“Listen!” She went on. “He must get out. Listen! Somebody told Dick—what was it? Something about a crowbar or pair of—nonsense! He said a prisoner might get out if he had a chisel. Now we must think about it. Could he get out?”
She sat down too. Alcott stared at her in a kind of dull confusion.
“Now, this is what I'm thinking,” she hurried on. “What is the place like?”
“The place?”
“When do you go to him again?”
“When I leave here. Perhaps. I hadn't thought.”
They leaned closer together across the desk.
Miss Eunice came in that moment and startled them. She disapproved of their startled expression, he gave Alcott a gloomy greeting and went away.
“There's a chest of tools in the storeroom,” Camilla said. “We'll go up there.”
They mounted to that high-perched room above the mansards, whose windows looked eastward to the river, whose walls were ranged about with boxes, trunks, chests, bits of aged furniture.
Here Richard the Second and Camilla, the little maid, used to sit the long rainy afternoons at their labor. He made bridges, houses, and ships, his artistry running no further than scroll and square patterns, while Camilla aspired to the human face divine. Her soul was creative at ten years. She cut ominous faces on pine shingles, sorrowful shapes—tombstone cherubs in execution, symbolic in intention—and her solemn exaltation of mood was commonly followed by anger and tears because Dick would not admire them.
It was a room full of memories for Camilla. Here and in her father's library she still passed her happiest hours. Here was the trunk that held her retired dolls and baby relics. Another was full of her mother's blue-ribboned gowns. Here was the tool chest, close to the window.
She flung it open, making a great noise and business.
“See! Will this do?”
It was a heavy carpenter's chisel with a scroll design on one side of the battered handle, and on the other the crude semblance or intention of a woful face. “I don't know whether it's Dick's or mine. We both used to make messes here.” She chattered on, and thought the while, “He called me Camilla—I wish—I wonder if he will again.”
He thrust it into an inner pocket, ripping through the lining of his coat. She closed the lid, and turned about to the low-silled window, clasped her hands about her knees, and stared away into the tree tops, flushed and smiling.
“You needn't go yet?”
“It's three o'clock.”
“You'll come and tell me to-morrow? When?”.
Alcott did not seem to hear her.
“I'm sure I could take care of him now,” he said.
“But you'll remember that I helped!”
“Does anyone ever forget you?”
Both were silent, and then he started up nervously.
“It isn't done yet. Lolly is clever. He lived here four years and kept out of my sight. But, afterwards, granted he succeeds—but the law is a great octopus. Its arms are everywhere. But he'll have me with him. I suppose we must go out of the country.”
“You! Do you mean—do you—you'll go too!”
“Go! Could I stay?”
“Oh! I don't know! I don't know!”
She shivered and leaned against the friendly old chest.
“But could I do it without that? How could I? I couldn't do less than that.”
He came and sat beside her again, clasping his knees in the same way, looking off into the tree tops, talking slowly and sadly.
“To be with him always, and give up my life to that, and see that he doesn't do any more harm. That would be the debt I would owe to the rest of the world. You see, I know him so well. I shall know how to manage him better than I used to. I used to irritate him. Do you know, I think he's better off in places where things are rough and simple. He has an odd mind or temperament, not what people call balanced or healthy, but it's hot and sensitive; oh, but loving and hating so suddenly, one never knows! You understand. I don't know how you do, but you do understand, somehow, about Lolly and me. You're wholly healthy, too, but Lolly and I, we're morbid of course. Yes, we're morbid. I don't know that there's any cure for us. We'll smash up altogether by and by.”
“When will you go?” she asked only just audibly.
“He ought to try it to-night. To-night or to-morrow night. He ought to be away on one of the early freight trains, to St. Louis, and meet me there. We know our bearings there.”
Camilla sat very still.
“I must be going,” he said.
“Don't go! You'll come before—when?”
“To-morrow we'll know. To-morrow then.”
After he was gone, she lifted the window and peered over the mansards to watch him going down the street. The tree tops were thick with busy sparrows, the railroad yards clamorous, and there was the rattle of the travelling crane, and the clug-chug of steamers on the river.
She drew back, and leaned against the old chest, and sobbed with her face against the hard, worn edge of it.
“I didn't suppose it would be like this,” she thought. “I thought people were happy.”
Meanwhile Miss Eunice sat below in the parlour knitting. Hennion came in later and found her there. She said that Camilla, she thought, was upstairs, and added primly:
“I think it will be as well if you talk with me.”
He smothered his surprise.
“Why, of course, Miss Eunice!”
“I think you need advice.”
He sat down beside her, and felt humble.
“That's just what I need. But, Miss Eunice, do you like me well enough to give it?”
“I like you more than some people.”
“You might do better than that.”
“I like you well enough to give it,” she admitted.
Tick, tick, tick, continued the knitting needles.
“I'm stumped, you know, about Camilla,” Dick went on bluntly. “I don't get ahead. She has changed lately. Hasn't she changed?”
“She has changed.”
“Well, then, she has! I thought so.”
The knitting needles ticked on, and both Dick and Miss Eunice studied their vibrating points, criss-crossing, clicking dry comments over the mystery of the web.
“It is my constant prayer that Camilla may be happy,” said Miss Eunice at last. “I have felt—I have examined the feeling with great care—I have felt, that, if she saw her happiness in your happiness, it would be wise to believe her instinct had guided her well. My brother's thoughts, his hopes, are all in Camilla. He could not live without her. He depends upon her to such an extent,—as you know, of course.”
“Of course, Miss Eunice.”
“I have grieved that she seemed so wayward. I have wished to see this anxious question settled. You have been almost of the family since she was a child, and if she saw her happiness in—in you, I should feel quite contented, quite secure—of her finding it there, and of my brother's satisfaction, in the end. He must not be separated from her. He could not—I think he could not outlive it. And in this way I should feel secure that—that you would understand.”
“I hope I should deserve your tribute. I'm more than glad to have it.”
“Perhaps this long intimacy, which makes me feel secure, is, at the same time, the trouble with her?”
“But why, Miss Eunice? I don't understand that. It has struck me so. And yet I love Camilla the more for all I know of her, and the better for the time. How can it be so different with her?”
“That is true. I don't doubt it, Richard.”
“Well, then, is it because I don't wear well?”
“No. It is true, I think, that we don't understand this difference always—perhaps, not often. But I think,”—knitting a trifle more slowly, speaking with a shade of embarrassment—“I think, with women, it must be strange in order to be at all. It must not be customary. It must always be strange.”
Hennion looked puzzled and frowning.
“Please go on.”
“Lately then, very lately, I have grown more anxious still, seeing an influence creeping into her life, against which I could not openly object, and which yet gave me great uneasiness. It—he was here an hour ago. I should not perhaps have spoken in this way, but I thought there was something unusual between them, some secrecy or confusion. I was distressed. I feared something might have occurred already. I wished to take some step. You know to whom I refer?”
“I think so.”
“A gentleman, in appearance at least. One does not know anything about his past. He is admired by some, by many, and disliked or distrusted by others. He has great gifts, as my brother thinks. But he thinks him also 'heady,' 'fantastic.' He has used these words. My brother thinks that this society called 'The Assembly' is a mere fashion in Port Argent, depending for financial support, even now, on Mr. Secor, and he thinks this gentleman, whom I am describing, is not likely to continue to be successful in our society, in Port Argent, but more likely to have a chequered career, probably unfortunate, unhappy. My brother regards—he calls him—'a spasmodic phenomenon.' My own disapproval goes further than my brother's in this respect. Yet he does not approve of this influence on Camilla. It causes him uneasiness. I have not thought wise to speak to her about it, for I am afraid of—of some mistake, but I think my brother has spoken, has said something. This—this person arouses my distrust, my dislike. I look at this subject with great distress.”
Tick, tick, tick, the knitting needles, and their prim, dry comment.
Hennion said gravely:
“I have nothing to say about the gentleman you've been speaking of. I will win Camilla if I can, but I've come to the point of confessing that I don't know how.”
Tick, tick, the not uneloquent knitting needles.
“Will you tell me, Miss Eunice? You said something about love as it comes to women, as it seems to them. I had never thought about it, about that side of it, from that side.”
“I dare say not.”
Tick, tick, tick.
“You said it must always be strange. I suppose, that is, it's like a discovery, as if nobody ever made it before. Well, but, Miss Eunice, they never did make it before, not that one!”
“Oh, indeed!”
“Don't you think I'm coming on?”
“You are progressing.”
Miss Eunice's lips were compressed a little grimly, but there was a red spot in either cheek.
“I ought to act as if I didn't see how she was possible, ought I?”
“You are progressing.”
“Whether I did see, or didn't?”
“Of course!” Miss Eunice was almost snappish.
“Well, I don't think I do see.”
“You'd better not.”
Hennion went away without seeing Camilla. Going up Bank Street he thought of Camilla. At the corner of Franklin Street he thought of Miss Eunice.
“There's another one I was off about. I don't see how she's possible, either.”
ALLEN AIDEE lay on his back across the bed in his whitewashed cell, and smoked, swinging one foot swiftly, incessantly, like a pendulum, arguing with Sol Sweeney, and gesticulating with loose fingers. The bed was a wooden cot with a mattress on it.
Sweeney sat at the table under the gas jet, and smoked too. He had a large friendly acquaintance with jailbirds, and his placid philosophy was composed out of his knowledge of them.
“I seen folks like you, Hicks,” he said, “two or three. Trouble is you gets hold of one end of a string. Any old string 'll do. All the same to you. 'Hullo!' you says, 'this is a valyble string. Fact, there ain't any other string, not any other real string. This the only genwine. Follow it, and you gets wherever you like. It's that kind of a string,' says you. 'God A'mighty, what a string!' says you. Then you rolls yourself up in it, and there you are! Ball up! Ain't no more use! For you take a solid man like me, and he talks to you and he shows you reason, but you don't see it. Why? 'Cause you're balled up in the string, that's why.”
Allen snapped out his answer.
“I'll tell you the trouble with you.”
“Ain't any trouble with me.”
“Ain't! Well, I know this, I can stand your kind about half an hour at a stretch. Give me two hours of you—damn! I'd drink rat poison to get cooled down.”
“That's the trouble with you,” said the complacent jailor. “Ain't me.”
“Trouble! No! You ain't equal to that. You ain't capable of that! You've got no more consistency or organisation than a barrel of oil. You're all fat and hair. Solid! So's a brick solid. Damn! You're solid, but are you alive? You'll be dead before anybody sees the difference. Ain't any real difference!”
Sweeney puffed his pipe contentedly, but thoughtfully, and shook his heavy beard.
“Well, well! But now, I'll say this for you, Hicks. You're an entertainin' man. I'll say that to anybody that asks. I'll say, 'Hicks is a man that's got language, if I know what's what.'”
The jailor rose. Allen swung his foot swiftly.
“I wish you'd do something for me, Sweeney.”
“What's that?”
“Let me have the gas at night. I don't sleep good. If I had the gas I could get up and read. You heavy men, you sleep all night. You don't know what it is.”
“Why, I'll see, Hicks. I'll ask about that to-morrow.”
“Oh, let me have it to-night!” he pleaded.
“I ain't going to sleep good to-night. I can feel it. It'll be eternity before morning. I swear I'll be dead before morning. I'll turn it low.”
“Well—I don't see no harm in that. It ain't in me to rough a man.”
He went out, locking the door noisily behind him.
Allan lay still. His foot swung steadily, but more slowly. After a time Sweeney came down the corridor, making his ten o'clock round. He went to the end, and back again, and then downstairs. The corridor was quiet.
Half an hour later Allen got up and filled his pipe, lit it at the gas jet, turned the jet low, and lay down again across his mattress. He smoked with quick, sharp puffs, but not fast. He swung his foot slowly, and stared at a point on the blank wall over the gas jet. Eleven o'clock struck.
After the theatre crowds were gone past, the noise of the city grew less. There were fewer cars, and only now and then footsteps on the neighbouring pavement. Twelve o'clock struck.
He got up again, slipped off his shoes, and went to his window.
A maple tree grew directly in front, some twenty feet away. Its leaves were thick, but he could see the glitter of the electric light through them. The sidewalk was high as the lower windows of the jail, for the Court House Square was on sunken land. The black shadow of the maple covered the front of the jail down to the ground.
The grating of the window had its bars set at both sides, and at the top and bottom. There were two rows of bricks from the bars to the inner edge of the window, and the wooden framework that held the panes of glass was set close to the grating. The outside of the sill was stone.
Allen went back and lifted his mattress. There was a rent in the seam of the lower edge. He thrust in his hand, drew out a black cloth cap and put it on his head. Then he drew out a heavy chisel with a battered wooden handle, and returned to the window.
The woodwork came away, cracking slightly as the nails drew out. He leaned the boards and frame carefully against the wall. He tried one crack after another between the bricks at the bottom of the window, pushing and pressing. Presently one became loose, then another. He laid them one by one in a neat row on the floor.
The work at the sides and top was slower, because it was difficult to get a purchase, and to prevent fragments from falling. He dug till he got the purchase, and then held the brick up with one hand and pried with the other. Once a fragment of cement fell with a smart slap on the sill. He got down suddenly and sat on the floor, and listened, wiping his wet hands and forehead with his cap. Either Sweeney or his assistant was always around at night, and would have heard, if he had happened to be in the upper corridor.
He carried the mattress to the window and laid it underneath to catch and deaden the noise, if anything more fell.
It was half-past one by the striking of the city clocks when he finished stripping off the first thickness of bricks. If the ends of the bars were buried more than two layers downward, there would not be time to strip them all before daylight. He forced up those on the sill, which were opposite one of the bars, and felt with his fingers. He felt the end of the bar, and knew that at that rate he would be out by three o'clock.
He worked on. His black hair hung wet against his forehead. He watched intensely for the loosened fragments of cement. He grew more skilful, more noiseless. The loudest sound in the cell was his own breathing, and except for that, only little rasps and clicks.
When the last brick was out and laid in its place, he moved the grating, which came out easily with a little scraping noise. It was heavy, and he rested a corner of it on the mattress, so that the ends of the bars caught in the sides of the window. Then he brought his blanket. In lifting the blanket he noticed the short iron braces on the cot bed. They suggested an idea. He took out the screws of one of them with the chisel, carried it to the window, and scratched it on the bricks until its black enamel was rubbed off one end; then laid it on the floor. Whether possible to do so or not, people would think he must have loosened the bricks with the brace. He wasn't going to mess “old Al” again, he thought, no, nor meet him in St. Louis for that matter, nor be led around the rest of his life by a string.
“Not me, like a damn squealing little pig”
He slit one end of the blanket into strips with his chisel, tied each strip to the bars of the grating and dropped the other end of the blanket through the window. Leaning out, he looked down and saw that it reached the grating of the window below. He put his shoes into his side coat pockets, the chisel into an inner coat pocket, and felt in his vest for the money Alcott had left him. He pulled his cap on hard, turned off the gas jet, and climbed over the grating.
He gripped with both hands the corner of it which projected into the window, opposite the corner which rested on the mattress within the cell, and let himself down till his feet caught on the grating of the window below, slipping his hands alternately along the edges of the blanket, and so down step by step, feeling for the bars with his feet. When his feet reached the stone sill below he felt the top bars under his hands. He stopped to catch the lower bars in order to lower himself to the ground, and his face came opposite the upper half of a partly dropped window. The lower half of it was curtained. A gas jet burned inside.
The room was like the cell overhead, whitewashed, but larger and furnished with ordinary bedroom furniture. The gas jet was fixed in the same place as in his own cell. The light fell flickering across the wide bed. A man lay there asleep on his back, his thick beard thrust up and in the air, his feet toward the window, where Allen clung like a spider. The sleeper was Sweeney. Allen slipped to the ground, sat down, and covered his face with his hands, and shivered. He had not known that Sweeney slept underneath him.
He pulled on his shoes, stood up, and went out under the maple tree to the sidewalk. He was glad he had not known that Sweeney slept underneath him. The sky was nearly covered by clouds, a few sparkling spaces here and there.
The blanket hung from the dismantled upper window, and flapped in the night wind against the wall.
As he climbed the bank to the sidewalk the clock in the church tower across the street struck three. It frightened him. It seemed too spectacular a place to be in, there under the great arc light that poured its glare down upon him, while the bells above the light were pealing, shouting in their high tower, clamouring alarm over the Court House Square, over the little old jail, the grim, small, dingy jail, low down in the sunken land, jail of the one ungrated window and flapping blanket, jail of the sleeping Sweeney.
He hurried along the sidewalk toward Maple Street. At the corner of the square was a drug store with gas jets flaring behind two glass globes—one red, the other blue—the two dragonish eyes of the monstrous long shape of the block looming behind and over them. All the blocks around seemed unnaturally huge. They crowded close to the street, and stared down at him with their ghastly blank windows—nervous, startled fronts of buildings that shivered and echoed to the sound of his steps. There were no other sounds now but a small whispering wind, and his own steps and their pursuing echoes. The red and blue globes in the corner drug store glared intolerably. As he passed they began suddenly to flow and whirl all over their glassy slopes.
He turned to the right, past the great brick Ward School building, out of Easter Street into Buckeye Street, which was only an unpaved road; and here his feet made no noise in the dust; neither were there any lights; so that he went softly in the darkness. A row of little wooden shanties were on the right, and on the left the mass of the Ward School building. Still higher, the roof of a steepleless church, whose apse overhung the empty lot behind the school, rose up, splitting the sky with its black wedge. In front of him were the buildings of the Beck Carriage Factory, bigger than church and school together. The vacant spaces between them, these buildings and shanties, were by day overflowed with light, overrun by school children and factory hands, over-roared by the tumult of the nearby thoroughfares of Bank and Maple Streets. By night they were the darkest and stillest places in Port Argent. One man might pass another, walking in the thick dust of the cart road and hardly be aware of him. It was too dark to see the rickety fence about the schoolyard, or make out the small sickly maples.
He came to a sidewalk with a curb, and saw up the hill to the left the dim glow from the lights of Maple Street, and went toward them. At the corner of Maple Street he stopped and thrust his head cautiously around the angle of the building.
A block below, a policeman stood in the glare of the arc light, swinging his club slowly by its cord, and looking around for objects of interest, not apparently finding anything of the kind. Allen drew back his head.
It might be better to go back and cross Bank Street at another point and so come to the bridge along the docks by the river. It would take some time. He would have to pass an electric light in any case.
Footsteps were approaching on Maple Street from the other direction. Presently four men appeared on the other corner and crossed to the corner where he stood flattened against the wall, and in the shadow. All walked unsteadily, with elaborate care. Two of them maintained a third between them. The fourth followed a few paces in the rear.
As they passed, Allen pulled his cap over his eyes, and dropped in behind them, and so they approached Bank Street, and he drew close to the three in front.
“Hullo!” said the policeman calmly; “jagged?”
“Say!” exclaimed the maintainer on the left, stopping; “tha's mistake. Smooth as silk. Ain't it?”
“You're out late, anyhow,” said the policeman.
“It's a weddin'. Ain't it? Wa'n't us. 'Nother feller did it.”
“Well, get along, then.”
“All ri'! All ri'!”
He watched the five men as far as the next electric light, and then dropped them as objects of interest.
“Hoi' on!” exclaimed the man walking beside Allen, turning suddenly upon him. “That ain't right. There's five of us. Two, three, four, five. Bet your life! That ain't right.”
They all stopped and looked at Allen. He started and his breath came harsh in his throat.
“'Nother weddin'?” said the middleman thickly. “Wa'n't him. 'Nother feller did it. You didn', did you?”
Allen shook his head “No.”
“Tha's so! Well, tha's right. 'Sh good thing. If 'nother feller does it, 'sh good thing.”
They shambled on amiably across the drawbridge. Allen fell behind, stopped, and leaned against the guard rail.
In a few moments he could hear their footsteps no more, but he could hear the mutter of the river against the stone piers. Leaning over the rail, he could see here and there a dull glint, though the night was dark; and across the wide spaces over the river he could see the buildings on each side, low, heavy masses, only saved from the smothering night and made sullenly visible by the general glow of the street lamps beyond them. There a few red lights along shore, some in the freight yards, some belonging to anchored or moored vessels, small sail-boats, and long black lumber and coal barges from the northern lakes. He could remember looking down at other times in the night at the dull glint of water, and being shaken as now by the jar of fighting things in his own mind, angry things fighting furiously. At those times it seemed as if some cord within him were strained almost to snapping, but always some passing excitement, some new glittering idea, something to happen on the morrow, had drawn him away. But those moments of despair were associated mainly with the glinting and mutter of dusky water. “I been a fool,” he muttered, and a little later, “What's the use!”
He decided to go to the shoe-shop and change his clothes, shave his beard, and pick up a few things, and then hide himself on some outgoing freight train, the other side of Muscadine Street, before the morning came. The morning could not be far off now. Shays would keep quiet, maybe, for a while. He would take Shays' razor.
He roused himself and moved on. He began to have glimpses of schemes, tricks, and plans. There were little spots of light in his brain, which for a while had seemed numb, dull, and unstirring. But he carried away with him the impression of the glints of the gloomy river and the mutter of its hurrying.
His feet dragged with his weariness. He turned into Muscadine Street and crept along the sidewalk on the right.
Suddenly a switch engine in the freight yards glared him in the face with its one blinding eye, yelled and hissed through its steam whistle, and came charging toward him. He leaped aside and fell into a doorway, and lay there crouching. Then he sat up and whimpered, “I ain't fit. I'm all gone away. I ain't fit.”
He rubbed his face and hands, peered around the corner to see the harmless engine withdrawing in the distance then got up and crossed the street. The nearness of the familiar shop windows, as he passed them one after another, comforted him not a little. On the next corner was the grocer's, the butcher's shop this side of it, and the shoemaker's shop was over the rear of the grocery. The mingled butcher-shop and grocery smell pervaded the corner, comforting, too, with its associations.
He turned the corner and climbed slowly the outside wooden stairway, with the signboard at the top, “James Shays,” and leaning over the railing, he saw a faint light in the windows of the shop. He entered the hall, turned the knob of the door softly, opened the door part way, and peered in.
The table stood in its ordinary central place, on it were a bottle, a tin cup, and a small lit lamp with a smoky chimney. The work bench was unchanged in place. The door of the inner room beyond stood open, but that room was dark. On the pile of hides in the corner some clothes, taken from the hooks overhead, had been thrown, and on the clothes lay Coglan, face downward and asleep.
Allen thought, “He's sleeping on my clothes,” and stepped in, closing the door softly behind him.