SHAUGHNESSY stirred uneasily in his chair. Then, with a convulsive shudder, he sat erect, one hand instinctively pressed against his left side. His head reeled, his bewildered eyes strove to pierce the gloom. With a swift intake of breath the deathly smell of the drug crept into his nostrils. Then he remembered.
With a snarling curse he sprang to his feet, drawing a match from his vest pocket with shaking fingers. He lighted the gas and glanced toward the safe, expecting to find it forced open. All seemed to be in order. The boss was perplexed. What had they wanted, those mysterious visitors?
With a sudden apprehension he thrust his hand swiftly into an inner pocket and found it empty. Then Shaughnessy, momentarily beyond oaths, collapsed helplessly into his chair. There was expression enough in his white face now, and it was of fear.
The papers were gone, filched from him in open assault, in a way of which the boss had never dreamed. He could have groaned in bitterness of spirit as he remembered what zealous care he had taken of those damning documents, veritable blood pacts of dark, unprincipled deeds, through which Shaughnessy held the wretchedsigners in the hollow of his hand. Though cunningly giving the impression that they were kept in his office, Shaughnessy generally had them in safe keeping elsewhere and disturbed them only when it was expedient that they serve some purpose like the cruel intimidation to which Judge Boynton had been subjected. And now they were gone. Shaughnessy cursed in his heart the fatal weakness for melodramatic effect, in which he was prone to indulge, that had exposed him to this fatal risk.
But who had them? Shaughnessy sprang up and paced the floor. He clenched his fists as he thought of Judge Boynton. Was it a plot of his? He dismissed the thought with a sneer. Such a desperate expedient was beyond the nerveless old jurist.
He felt mechanically for his keys and started to find them gone. What new deviltry was this? Then, for a moment, the impassive mask was utterly discarded. The white face of the baited boss grew absolutely diabolical, and he cursed as best he knew, and he was not an indifferent expert. Finally, with a weary shrug, he ceased and walked to a drawer in the bookkeeper's desk. He wrenched it open and took out two keys he kept there for emergency's sake. One was for the office door and the other would admit him to his lodgings.
Shaughnessy picked up his hat, which had fallen off in the recent melee, dusted it and replaced it. He kicked the cigar, from whose enjoyment he had been riotously debarred, into a corner and drew a fresh one from his case. Reaching into his vest pocket for a match, his fingers encountered something. Drawing it forth, hiseyes rested upon the card which O'Byrn, on a recent evening, had with easy insolence handed him.
The boss' eyes, indifferent at first, stared fixedly at the card. Slowly kindling into the interest born of sudden recollection of the incident, the sparks deepened till they glowed like the orbs of an angry cat. Shaughnessy pondered, his face an evil thing to see.
"Damn you!" muttered Shaughnessy, at last, still staring balefully at the card, "I believe one of 'em was you, God help you!"
* * * * * * * *
Micky went straight from Shaughnessy's to the Courier office that night, and, after his brief communication with Harkins, he repaired to his lodgings. He lighted his heater, and, with a fresh cigar between his teeth, sat down to peruse at leisure the documents he had previously glanced over sufficiently to warrant him in making his triumphant prediction to the city editor. A damning array of evidence was marshaled in them, illustrating at once Shaughnessy's ruthless manner of binding a cabal to his interests and his weakness in recording in black and white such condemnatory proofs of the infamy of the forces of which he was the leader, and for whose deeds he was responsible. It was a quixotic idea of the boss', effective to bend his tools to his desires, but fatal if the accredited proofs ever became public property. Perhaps, Micky reflected, he had intended them for use if treachery ever compelled him to leave in a hurry, in which case the traitors would suffer while the arch-conspirator went scot-free. If this was the intent, events had anticipated it.
The most important exposure, for O'Byrn's purpose,was the one, duly fortified with proof in the papers before him, that Judge Boynton was a hypocrite. He could only conjecture how the Judge had placed himself in Shaughnessy's power, but that he had long since done so, through some official act of weakness or worse, was evident. For the papers proved that the old jurist, supposed to be a power for good, had been for years a power for evil. It was as a secret instigator of lobbies at the State House that he had shone, while the world remained in ignorance. Not alone notorious Consolidated Gas, but many another nefarious movement had owed its progress in no small degree to his secret machinations, and he had been well aided. Micky opened his eyes at some names which appeared in that damning record, as well he might, for they were those of the elect. Indeed, the evidence utterly condemned one of the pillars of the present Fusion movement. Oh, it would be a slaughter, in very truth; one of whose extent the optimistic Micky had not dreamed.
As he read the record, O'Byrn marvelled at one salient fact. These men, of brains and influence, of power and standing, were after all but the tools of Shaughnessy, the liquor dealer, the local boss. Local boss! Micky could have laughed. Why, this genius of the slums had his pallid hand at the throat of the State, and his snaky eyes were even now fixed on victims in higher places, even beyond its too-confined borders. O'Byrn was lost in admiration of the man whose power was the greater because unsuspected by the great public. He moved with much sinuous subtlety, like a serpent wriggling through the grass. He tempted through the cupidity of men worth while, and when they were inhis coils they were held there irrevocably. He was a Napoleon of graft, and his ambition was as boundless as that of the Corsican.
There were in the record, too, the hints of several matters that would bear amplifying; stupendous election frauds, fraudulent registration lists and corrupt local deals. Micky knew where to get them, but it would be a strenuous day. It was with a mingled thrill and a sigh that he finally tumbled into bed for a little sleep before the deluge to come.
He awoke unrefreshed, his sleep having been disturbed by wild dreams of conflict with Shaughnessy in which the boss was invariably the victor. Despite the reassuring presence of the materials for a sensation, Micky felt depressed while dressing. There was still much to do, there were some hard propositions to solve during the day, and there might yet be a fatal slip somewhere. Besides, he felt physically wretched. He had caught cold in some way and his head ached miserably. Then, too, in the depths of his heart there was a sick, unacknowledged apprehension; for the old enemy, after too brief a period ofquiescencewas returning.
Micky finished dressing, and left the house for the restaurant, at which he was accustomed to obtain his meals. On the way he passed an attractive door. He hesitated, halted and turned back. "One won't hurt," he muttered, as he disappeared inside. "Just for an appetizer."
Breakfast finished, Micky, with a renewed sparkle in his eyes, plunged headlong into his self-appointed task, and it was a formidable one. There were sundry peculiar documents to scan. Obstacles in getting atthem had to be surmounted, either through subtlety or a bluff, and O'Byrn was a past master in both departments. There were some men to see. Some could be handled with a convenient disguising of the real intention. Others, made to admit damaging matters through cowardly fears, were left in the hope that they had secured immunity for themselves. There was also the omnipresent danger, most dreaded by newspaper men on the track of a big story, of competitors who must be sedulously avoided. O'Byrn dodged them all, though with some narrow escapes, and it became evident that the story, in every detail, was to be his and his alone.
As Micky pursued his perilous though fascinating task, the story grew, gathering black force and sinister proportions. As the busy hours swept on, crowded with strained effort, the Irishman felt to the full the strange, breathless zest felt only by the veteran newsgetter; hot on the trail of a big story, warned constantly by the remorseless ticks of his watch of fast slipping time that waits for no man. The hungry presses must be fed at the appointed hour. Brain, hand, resource and tireless effort must combine to furnish the monster's food. So O'Byrn rushed through the teeming hours. He cut out luncheon, gulping down a glass of whisky in place of it. He had been dramming at intervals since breakfast, and he no longer approached the bar with hesitancy. The excitement of his quest made him reckless and the stuff served as an exhilarant, though he had not yet begun to seriously feel its effects.
He was completely engrossed in his story. He scurried here and there, as need required, gathering force likea machine under the quickening beat of the controlling engine. He was driven resistlessly on by that steadiest, most unfaltering of human impulses, the quickened news instinct. It was a task before which many a veteran would have quailed, but O'Byrn did not know how to lie down. He had, too, a distinct advantage in his wonderful memory. It enabled him to carry away valuable material gained in conversations where the producing of a notebook would have been fatal.
It was well toward evening that Slade met him unostentatiously in a quiet place. "What luck?" he inquired eagerly.
"Got the whole business," answered Micky, in a low tone. "I'm just finished, and I'm all in. Knees jackin' some and nerves gone up. But anyone that's worth doin' at all is worth doin' well, and Shaughnessy's well done. Now I'll tell you what, let's have a cocktail or two, and then some supper. Time enough to grind this out after that."
Slade glanced at him sharply, noting the flushed cheeks and unnaturally bright eyes. "Haven't you had enough?" he inquired.
"Enough?" echoed Micky, with a reckless laugh. "Why, I haven't begun yet. But I'll cut it out for tonight, after supper, and tomorrow, when the job's done, I'll celebrate." He led the way to the bar, and Slade, with a little head-shake, followed. He recollected an episode in Shaughnessy's place, the night before, with distinct regret.
Neither of them had noticed a man sitting at a small table, in a dark corner, not far from where they had been talking. He slipped quietly out as the two orderedtheir drinks. It was Shaughnessy's lieutenant, Dick Peterson.
Slade succeeded in inducing Micky to content himself with a couple of rounds and lured him away to supper. Much to his disgust, O'Byrn insisted upon going to a place with which a saloon was connected. There was another appetizer, and O'Byrn ate heartily, the food apparently serving to restore him to sense. All might have been well, but on passing out through the saloon, O'Byrn intending to go directly to the Courier office, he met a party of friends. Despite Slade's protestations he decided that he had time for "one or two more."
A few more draughts of the stuff produced the result that was usual with him when indulging. Clear-headed at the first, the stimulant suddenly fired his brain, rendering him deaf to protests or the voice of reason. It was the way in which many a debauch of days or even weeks had been ushered in. He sought only to quench a fiendish thirst, to indulge a mad, grotesque merriment. He was hazily conscious of Slade's pleadings for him to come away, of his attempts several times to do so, of dimly hearing the imperious call of duty; of being dragged back for another round by his boisterous companions. After a time he missed Slade, and forgot about him for a while.
Some time afterward, while gazing blankly at the clock in some saloon or other, he did not know where, a swift terror seized him. There was grim accusation in the clock's face. Micky took advantage of the momentarily diverted attention of his companions to slip quietly out. His story; yes, he must surely get to writingit. Ought to have started it before, he reflected confusedly.
Well, here was luck. A carriage stood near the cafe. Micky advanced toward it, and the driver jumped down and flung open the door. O'Byrn entered, with a drowsy order to drive to the Courier office. Then, ere the door closed, he felt a vague curiosity as two additional passengers followed him into the vehicle. The door was slammed shut, the driver mounted his box and the rolling wheels lulled Micky into drowsiness that was not disturbed by his silent companions.
COLONEL WESTLAKE, the principal owner of the Courier and the man who actively dictated its policy, sat in the library of his home that night with a look upon his face different than he had worn of late. As the leader of the Fusion movement, for which he had expended much labor and time, things had looked black to him until today, and his face had worn the expression that belongs to him who is fighting a grim, losing battle. He saw the opposition forging ahead with a resistless sweep which he and his co-workers could not stop, and it had been maddening.
But tonight a bright gleam of hope had dispelled the gloom of the Colonel's face. He had visited the office that afternoon and had a talk with the managing editor, who had told him of the effort that was in progress to checkmate the plans of the ring. He could tell the Colonel but few particulars, for Micky had not confided many of them to his superiors as yet. Indeed, he had had no time to do so. But the information was cheering enough to cause the Colonel to smoke his cigar that evening with an easier mind. "That fellow can get it if anybody can," he had been told, and the assurance fanned his dying hope into renewed flame.
The Courier's editorial rooms were unusually repleteof life that night. To be sure, it was an old story, that record of life and death and the things that go between, called news; ground out there three hundred and sixty-five nights in the year. One night, generally speaking, was very like another to the various cogs in the human machine. Most of them were past cubhood, and the shifts of scene entailed by succeeding assignments, that once held a fresh charm of novelty, now spelled grim duty. Most men have illusions, but the jaded newsgetter loses them first of all. Most men may dream of what they may become; the newsgetter only of what he did not become. However, there is a compensation. The newsgetter has acquired philosophy, the real salt of the earth. It is better to watch one's Rome burning with philosophy than to collect the insurance thereon without it.
However, on this night there was a brooding excitement in the air. The big room fairly throbbed with it; the sense of an impending something whose significance but few of the force divined, but which they all felt. The harassed, anxious expressions on the faces of Harkins and a few others of the editorial force; their frequent glances at the big clock, their nervous onslaughts upon the mass of work, for it was a teeming night, revealed to every rushed reporter in the great room that there was something on and that it was something big. They stole covert glances at their chiefs and at each other, wondering what it was.
Time wore on while the tension grew. The big calm clock reeled off the flying minutes with exasperating insistence. The clock is the merciless monitor of the newspaper office. Men watch it, fear it, serve it as theymust. They hurl the forces of head and hand, when the need calls, in a desperate fight against it, till its tickings are drowned in the roar of the presses that hold the dearly bought triumph; while the toiler sits spent and worn, body and brain full of the numb weariness of the reaction. Even as the roar of the presses dies in silence, there is again audible the eternal ticking of the clock, unresting through it all; registering in one breath the death of a day of labor, the birth of another in the next. Always the grim spectre with the scythe stands at the elbows of the men who write the news.
So the Courier's clock ticked on, while the hidden undercurrent of unrest, so patent even to those ignorant of the reason for it, grew in a fierce, irritating tug that was made manifest in disagreeable ways. Harkins' nerves were worn to shreds. His usual urbanity withered like dry grass in the fire of his hot impatience. The office fairly throbbed now, for it was an extraordinarily busy night. Election was close at hand, the entire city was wrought up over it, everything else had seemingly happened and was all coming in at once. Still there was that hungry gap, waiting to be filled with the story of a lifetime. Where was the story?
It was exasperating. Everywhere men were rushing like mad and Harkins helped them rush the more. His orders were snapped with the venom of a cracking whip lash, accompanied by black frowns that caused backs to bend and fingers to fly the more, or legs to hurry the faster, as his behest might be. It became a drive, a dizzy whirl of effort, torn with conflicting sights and sounds. There materialized hurrying figures, sharp orders, the jingle of telephone bells, the slamming ofdoors, the sleet-like rattle of typewriters, the soft rush of many pencils and the crackle of paper; the hundred and one distractions that contribute in the compilation of the record of a day of news. And constantly, as the whirl gained in volume like a rising wind, Harkins' tortured eyes re-sought the clock, and they held all the miserable apprehension of a miser for precious, fleeting gold.
"Gee!" exclaimed Kirk to Peters, as he passed that worthy at the end of the room, and paused a moment to wipe his moist forehead, "it's fierce, ain't it? Harkins is getting crazy. There's something up. What is it?"
"No," replied Peters, with an apprehensive glance toward Harkins, "there's nothing up, I guess. I think there's something ought to be up that isn't. That's the rub. Never saw Hark' so worked up in my life."
"Yes, but what is it?" reiterated Kirk. "It's something big, that's sure."
"I don't know anything more about it than you do, but I've noticed one thing. O'Byrn hasn't shown up tonight. I think Hark' expected him, and with something." He nodded meaningly and they separated.
Suddenly Harkins summoned Glenwood, who had the week previous been made his assistant. Dick had been also growing nervous for the last half-hour, his eyes constantly seeking the door, hopeful of a desired arrival which was strangely delayed. The story should have been well under way by then. Dick guessed how formidable an undertaking it had undoubtedly proved and had at first explained Micky's delay in appearing bythe assumed magnitude of the little Irishman's task. But now Dick had grown painfully anxious.
He hurried to Harkins' desk. The city editor looked up with a black scowl, viciously chewing a cigar stub. His uneasy fingers drummed a tattoo upon his desk.
"For God's sake, Glenwood," he burst out, "what's the matter? It's ten o'clock. Have you heard anything?"
"Only that telephone message he sent me early this afternoon," replied Dick. "It was short but significant. You know I told you."
Harkins groaned. "Yes," he assented, "he said he'd need the whole paper tomorrow and a few extras. And now where the devil is he, anyway? Where was he when he sent you that message?"
"I don't know," Dick answered. "Richards called me to the 'phone, said someone wanted me. I recognized Micky's voice. He just blurted out that information and broke away before I could reply. I tried to get him to ask him if he needed any help and when he would get here, but he had gone."
Harkins' eyes contracted. "Dick, do you think—" he began meaningly.
"No!" interrupted Dick vehemently, "not at a time like this! Still—Oh, the poor devil!" he broke off, for the remembrance swept over him of a certain shamed admission to him of O'Byrn's own, the acknowledgment of the reason for a bootless career.
There was a brief silence, broken by Harkins' voice, raised in loud summons. "Has anyone seen O'Byrn tonight?" he asked.
Peters glanced significantly at Kirk. There was noimmediate answer, but a fat figure, waddling on its way from the elevator to the desk, hesitated and finally halted. An odd breathless voice broke the sudden silence, the voice of Fatty Stearns.
"O'Byrn?" he queried, "did you say O'Byrn, Mr. Harkins?"
"Yes," exploded Harkins, frowning heavily upon the quailing Stearns. "Have you seen him?"
"Why, yes," assented Fatty faintly, while fidgeting upon his chubby feet. "That is, I did," explosively, "about eight o'clock."
"Well," fairly shouted his irritated chief, "where was he? What's the matter with you?"
"Why, nothin'," ejaculated Fatty desperately. "I wasn't with him! I kept out of sight so he and the gang wouldn't see me. They were heading for O'Sullivan's saloon."
There was a moment's silence. "Stearns," said Harkins finally, his tone now one of quiet resignation, "why didn't you tell me this before?"
"You didn't ask me," Fatty answered in an injured way, sidling toward his desk. "And besides," as an afterthought, "you couldn't, for I wasn't here. You'd sent me out on that armory business, don't you know?"
Harkins and Glenwood looked hopelessly at each other. "No telling where he is now," said the city editor wearily, "or the shape he's in. It's all up, I guess."
Dick's fist rapped his desk smartly, his lips met in a grim line. "Not yet!" he exclaimed. "It's worth a try, anyway. I'm going to see if I can find him."
He turned away, nearly colliding with a meagre littleman who was hurrying toward him from the elevator. "You're Mr. Glenwood?" asked this worthy.
"Yes," assented Dick, with a glance of inquiry.
"I know you by sight," rapidly pursued the visitor. "I was mixed up once in a little deal at Goldberg's with a friend of yours, Micky O'Byrn. You came on after I slid," with a dry grin. "But that's nothin' to do with this. You fellows are waitin' for somethin'," with a shrewd glance at Harkins' worried face, "and the man who's got it is gettin' drunker every minute. I thought you ought to know."
"Do you know where he is?" exclaimed Dick, grasping Slade's arm in his eagerness. The ex-heeler winced.
"Sure," he assented. "I've got a pal watchin' 'em so as to cop whether they do a duck into another joint."
"What shape is he in?" asked Glenwood.
"Bad," replied Slade dubiously. Then, with a ready grasp of the situation, "I know a medicine cove that I'll bet could put him right in short order, that is for while you'd need him. Makes a regular specialty of it, one of his own patients in fact. But you'd have to hurry. I'm with you on the deal, for between us I've got a bone to pick with Shaughnessy myself and I want to see that story in tomorrow's paper. Why, I put O'Byrn onto it."
Dick turned sharply to Harkins. "Get everything ready, I'll have him here," he said confidently. "We'll fix him up some way. Hang it, we've got to! Of course, it'll have to be dictation. I'll 'phone you outlook just as soon as I can," he added, seizing coat and hat, "and you clear the decks. Now, Slade," and the two hurried to the elevator.
Dick hailed a cab. "To Lawrence's saloon, on Forty-Fifth, and be quick about it!" directed Slade, and the two sprang in.
"I had supper with him," explained Slade, as the cab rolled rapidly northward, "and he insisted on a couple of drinks. He'd had several then, I guess. Then he was going to start for the office, but a gang blew along. Then it was all off," with an expressive shrug. "Stuff seemed to go to his head all in a flash, and he wouldn't listen to anything. I kept along for a while and tried to sneak him away. He'd start all right, but the gang would drag him back and play rough-house with me and chuck me out. About eight we came near running into some parties I didn't want to see and I simply had to duck for a while. He was in a gin-mill near the City Hall then, and I lost him some way. It was two hours, pretty near, before I copped him again, this time in Lawrence's. I got a friend o' mine to watch the place, then I caught a car for your office."
The cab stopped before a brilliantly lighted cafe and the men tumbled out. A young fellow, loitering about, approached Slade. "Well, he's gone," said he.
"Gone!" echoed Slade. "Where?"
"I dunno. No call for me buttin' in. He got in a carriage with Dick Peterson and another fellow and they drove off."
"Shaughnessy!" exclaimed Slade, with a livid oath. "Come on, there's no time to lose!" He dragged Dick toward the cab. "Shaughnessy's rooms, you know 'em—drive like hell!" he told the driver, and they were off like the wind.
THE carriage stopped, unheeded by O'Byrn, who drowsed, huddled in a corner. "Come on," said a gruff voice,"we'rethere." An ungentle hand shook the Irishman rudely.
Confused and dazed, Micky stumbled out. With a man at each arm, he was whisked through a doorway and up a flight of stairs that led to a suite of rooms over a corner grocery. Shaughnessy was unostentatious in his manner of living, as he was in matters of political procedure.
Before the befuddled O'Byrn had gathered his deadened wits sufficiently to decide that his would-be friends had mistaken his intended destination, the trio halted before a door which opened without any preliminary formality of knocking. "Ah, come in, gentlemen," said a remembered voice, which brought Micky to wavering attention. Then he was pushed inside, into the presence of Shaughnessy. He stared for a moment about the plainly but comfortably furnished room, then into the black eyes of his host. Just now they were alight with triumphant gleams. Micky sat down in sudden hopeless, though rather hazy, despair.
"All right, boys; a good job," said Shaughnessy, a certain insistence in his tone. Peterson took the hint.He plucked his companion by the sleeve and the two withdrew. Their footsteps died in silence down the stairs, followed in a moment by the diminishing roll of wheels.
"Well, Mr. O'Byrn," said Shaughnessy, suavely, "I'd like my keys if you're through with them, and I rather guess you are."
"Keys?" echoed Micky, a vague and rueful grin reluctantly visiting his face, "yes, I guess so. Took 'em for a joke. You can have 'em and be hanged!" He threw them violently on the floor and continued to stare rather helplessly about the room. Shaughnessy, unruffled, bent to pick up his property, stepped for a moment to the door, then seated himself on a chair, facing Micky, who sprawled supinely on a sofa.
"Who was with you in my office last night?" he inquired casually. "You know—when you got these?"
"Don't you know?" Micky's utterance was rather thick, but there was a cunning gleam in his eye. No amount of intoxicants, that the Irishman had ever taken at any time in his checkered career, had even temporarily robbed him of his sharp wits. Even though he might not be able to remember it afterward, the busy brain was in evidence throughout the spree; and the sub-conscious intelligence of the fellow, even when he was nearly physically helpless from over-indulgence, had often staggered his associates.
Shaughnessy was now to have a taste of this. "Don't you know?" O'Byrn had asked innocently and very thickly. Shaughnessy smiled dryly. The fellow was sufficiently drunk to be as wax in the boss' hands.
"No, I don't," mildly replied Shaughnessy, and waited for the desired information.
"Well," answered Micky, with a tipsy laugh, "I'm mighty glad you don't. And now see here, let me out of here. I've got business—business to attend to."
"Yes," assented Shaughnessy softly, "you want to go to the Courier office. But hold on a minute first, I want to have a little chat with you, and it will be to your advantage to listen to reason. I suppose you're wondering why you're here. Well, when I got out from the influence of your dope last night, I happened to pull out of my pocket the card you gave me. Without bothering to ask just why, I knew I had you to thank for that little job. I don't know who was with you, but I'll find out. Anyway, there've been good sharp eyes lookin' for you all day, but, as the cursed luck would have it, they didn't cop you till tonight. You were getting drunk then, making it easier for us. Much obliged to you. Now, where are those papers?"
O'Byrn leered with impish eyes. "Gimme a cigar," he suggested. The boss handed him one with a scowl. O'Byrn lighted it uncertainly and began unevenly to puff at it.
The boss waited silently a moment, then a smouldering fire crept into his eyes. He brought his fist down upon the arm of his chair with an oath. O'Byrn's wandering glance shifted lazily to Shaughnessy.
"Aha! my smart young rooster," growled the boss, "I know who was with you last night. I'm getting dippy, or I'd have thought of it sooner. I forgot who Peterson said was with you when he first set eyes on you tonight. So it's Nick Slade, is it, that helped you with your little job last night?"
"Lemme out and I'll ask him for you," suggested the Irishman. "I haven't got time to talk to you."
"Now see here," urged Shaughnessy, "I want those papers. I suppose you've got 'em on you." Micky made a mock gesture of alarm which the boss evidently believed was genuine, for he permitted himself a slight, sneering smile of triumph. "Well," he continued, "I'm on the level, I am. I'm not playing any dirty stab-in-the-back games like that little one of yours last night. If you'd used those papers as you meant to do, why, there wouldn't have been any use in talking things over now. But I know well enough, for I've been fairly busy today, that you haven't done anything yet and tonight's pretty near your last chance to scribble. Scribble? You're in good shape for the job, ain't you? Why, I'll bet you don't get the sense of twenty words I've said. But listen, you can get this." Shaughnessy bent toward him. "Turn those papers over to me, and do a quiet sneak out of town for good, and I'll make it worth your while."
"Yes," muttered O'Byrn, "I get that." His body swayed a moment, then straightened. His head wagged slowly from side to side, for the heat of the apartment was oppressive and the room began to whirl uncannily. Micky leaned his throbbing head upon his clasped hands. Shaughnessy smiled sardonically, believing him to be thinking it over.
O'Byrn lifted his head. "Say, is your name Shaughnessy?" he suddenly inquired. The question went home like a shot. Even through the mists that obscured his vision, the little Irishman chuckled as he saw Shaughnessy start violently, saw his white face go whiter. "No," pursued O'Byrn, with a momentary rally of his faculties,"I don't know what your name used to be, and I don't care. I was just guessin', somehow. But I'll tell you somethin'. My name ain't O'Byrn any more than yours is Shaughnessy. Here's the difference. I took the name of an honest man, an old fellow that was a friend to me after my mother died. I took it because it was an honest name, and my father's wasn't. I was only a kid, but I was old enough to hate the old man right, and try to change my luck by shedding his rotten name like a snake's skin. Since then I've rubbed along, but I've managed to keep honest, thank God, for I was born that way. Now I'll tell you the difference between you and me. I changed my name to get rid of one that wasn't honest, but someone else was to blame. You changed from one rascal's name to another, that's all, and you're gettin' worse every minute. No, old man, we won't make a deal for any papers, not this evening."
The fire faded in his eyes. With a spasmodic hiccough he fell back upon the sofa. The whirling room, which he had conveniently forgotten during his flat statement to Shaughnessy, swung once more in rhythmic, disconcerting circles before his swollen eyes. "Open a window!" he demanded. "It's roasting in here!"
Shaughnessy had remained silent since O'Byrn's outburst, regarding him balefully. "The window can wait," he said deliberately, "and so can you, unless you listen to reason. Now, you produce those papers, agreeing to keep your mouth shut and get out of town, for value received, of course. Either that or I'll promise you you'll be kept quiet till after election, anyway, and maybe longer. Things are ripe now and we can't afford to have you loose."
The fire was rekindled in O'Byrn's eyes. Clenching his hands he half rose from the sofa, only to again fall back helplessly upon it, with a curse, anathematizing his unsteady legs while he pressed his palms against his whirling head. Shaughnessy watched him with malicious satisfaction.
Suddenly the recurrent hazy thought disturbed Micky, the accusing whisper of duty unperformed. Where it had lain dormant with faint stirrings, it was now imperious. O'Byrn sat bolt upright, groping for his watch. Snapping the timepiece open, he stared at the dial. Even through the mists, which he could not blink away, the significance of the hour smote him like a lash. For a moment he sat inert, a growing horror in his eyes that stared straight ahead. The open watch slipped unheeded from his nerveless hand to the floor, striking the rug with a muffled thud.
The sound roused O'Byrn. He pitched forward, gaining his feet, and reeled toward the door, which he shook impotently. He turned to confront Shaughnessy's sneer.
"The key—give me the key!" O'Byrn's steps toward Shaughnessy were unsteady but his face was eloquent with settled purpose. The boss thoughtfully moved so as to put a heavy table, standing in the center of the room, between him and the angry Irishman. His sneer faded, his look spoke of uneasy apprehension. Shaughnessy was not a coward, but he was not over-strong; and, to do him justice, his fear came more from the possibility that the strangely rallied Irishman might, after all, escape, than from any worry over possible damage to himself in the process.
Now O'Byrn was opposite him, his hands resting onthe table, his blue eyes staring straight into the uneasy black ones of the boss. For the present at least, O'Byrn's will, intent upon a definite object, would control his wavering limbs. "Give me the key!" he repeated softly. The tone was clear, the freckled face grim with determination, the glaze of the eyes had been burned away in flame. It was an uncanny transformation.
Shaughnessy, watching the other warily, tried to temporize. "Those papers," he suggested, "they're all I want. Give them to me and—"
O'Byrn hurled the table to one side, where it fell with a crash. He leaped forward, extended arms hungry for Shaughnessy. Now they were reeling about the room, locked together in desperate, voiceless struggle for the mastery. A chair fell heavily. Now they fell against the prostrate table, but recovered themselves with an effort and fought on.
Shaughnessy had been no stranger to either physical science or rough-and-tumble, in the days before ill-health assailed him; but older muscles, further handicapped by acquired weakness and long disuse, were not a match for those of the wiry young man, even in his present intoxicated condition. Shaughnessy, his breath coming in gasps and his face grown ghastly, tried by every recollected trick to trip O'Byrn, but the latter wriggled instinctively out of every snare. Now he forced Shaughnessy once more toward the fallen table, the boss resisting doggedly. But he was weakening, and Micky, with a sudden twist, threw him backward over one of the protruding legs of the table and fell heavily upon him.
The Irishman's breath, heavy with whisky, smote the fallen boss full in the face. Shaughnessy, gasping andnearly senseless, lay with his hand gripped hard at his left side. As though he had dreamed it in his agony, he felt his opponent's hand groping in a lower pocket of his coat. There was a faint jingle—the keys! O'Byrn rose with a tipsy laugh, swayed a moment and turned toward the door. Then, with a supreme effort, Shaughnessy threw himself to one side, reaching out a hand and catching Micky about the right ankle. A sharp wrench jerked him from his feet and he fell heavily, striking his head against the table leg which had previously served for the downfall of the boss.
After a few moments, Shaughnessy struggled weakly to his feet and stood grimly regarding the Irishman, who lay unconscious, with closed eyes, the freckles staring strangely from his pallid face. After a time Shaughnessy bent down and examined the reporter's hurt. "Nothing serious," he muttered, noting a crimson abrasion at the right side of the scalp. Then he thrust his hand confidently into the inner pocket of O'Byrn's coat. His look of complacency changed to concern. He made a thorough examination of the pockets, then rose with a bitter oath.
"Bluffed me!" he muttered furiously. "He hasn't got 'em." He felt strangely weak, as the result of the late encounter, and moved languidly over to the sofa whereon Micky had lately been. Shaughnessy sat down, with a heavy sigh, to think.
His moody eyes noted an object lying on the rug. Leaning over, he picked up Micky's watch. The back cover swung open in his hands, owing to the defective spring, which Micky had never had repaired.
Shaughnessy turned over the timepiece idly, noting onthe inner cover a woman's picture. And in that moment the dead-white face, ordinarily an inscrutable mask, became startling to see. His black eyes, in which there grew a slow, consuming horror, stared at the picture as if hypnotized by it, and on his face was the look which the living might wear if confronted, without warning, by the resurrected dead.
After a time Shaughnessy withdrew his gaze, and, with a convulsive movement, snapped the watch shut. Slowly, fearfully, he approached the prostrate young fellow on the floor, afraid of what he should see. Now he bent on one knee over the senseless O'Byrn, peering strangely into his face. He thrust the watch into the little Irishman's pocket, as if anxious to hide it from his own vision. Then, timidly, he raised the inert right arm of his victim and slipped the sleeve up from the wrist. There was the scar.
A deep groan burst from Shaughnessy's lips; in his eyes gloomed, with added intensity, the horror that was the heritage of the past.
IN the breadth and the depth of evil in the man whom the world had long known as John Shaughnessy there was one wicked act whose memory was torment. Unprincipled, ruthless, cruel as he was, this thing, perhaps in inevitable reprisal for outraged higher laws, had long haunted him; disturbing his sleep, embittering his waking hours. For it was only just that a man base enough to leave, in far worse case than the widow and the orphan, those he was morally and legally bound to protect, should be disturbed by ghosts. It was remorse, it had long been remorse, from which this calloused devil was suffering. His evil, white face was a mask to hide much that the masquerader would have given all at times to have forgotten.
For a long time Shaughnessy bent over the silent figure on the floor; crouching, motionless as if cut in stone. His eyes, unnaturally brilliant, repellent in their fixed glare, rested long on the reporter's unconscious face. That face—how freckled, how grotesquely homely! Why, he had been a handsome baby! Still, the same mop of red, curly hair; and, after all, did he but open his eyes Shaughnessy thought there would be a definite resemblance to another. Shaughnessy recollected having been vaguely troubled once or twice before by this half-sensedsimilitude of the young fellow to someone he had known. He knew now. Why, the boy looked like his mother, of course; though there was only a pathetic hint of it, for his mother had been very pretty. This Shaughnessy could vouch for. Poor unfortunate, had she not been his wife?
And his son, lying on the floor; the son Shaughnessy had thought dead; was it not a joyful reunion? Shaughnessy groaned aloud, for he had long writhed under the lash of conscience for this one thing. The rest of his ill-doing did not trouble him; it was for the blackest crime of all, alone, that he paid the penalty. And a bitter penalty he paid, for, whatever the seeming, outraged nature generally exacts her due. This man had heartlessly deserted a wife who had been devoted to him, despite his deviltry, and his helpless baby; deserted them more indifferently than most men would leave a dog. It was slow in coming, the time of reckoning, but the day came when the black heart and soul of Shaughnessy quivered under the lash. And the lash bit the deeper because of the need for repression, for the man writhed in secret. It was Shaughnessy who lived; the other man was dead; yet his foul ghost, with the memory of the foul deed he wrought, would not be laid.
Shaughnessy, with a haggard glance at the motionless form on the floor, rose and walked uncertainly to an easy chair. He sat limply, a thin, white hand shading his eyes. He was oblivious to his surroundings, for the tumult of the past pounded in his brain.
The tumult of the past! What a record had been his, this white-faced man with hunted eyes that now stared with a weird, fixed horror back into the past. They sawagain another man than the Shaughnessy of vile political power; a younger man, in whom was no repression; the slave of wayward passions which marred lives other than his own. But what were wife and child? Merely incumbrances then, and, toward the last, hardly to be borne.
And at the beginning? Why, the young man had once been respectable, and of the type to be pointed out as one destined to make his mark. Starting at the lowest round of a big business house, in a far-off city, it had not taken him long to prove his rare mettle, and at twenty-five he had reached a point further than most men attain in a lifetime. He had married a girl who believed in him as she believed in God—and she had been his dupe almost from the first.
Supremely selfish, treacherous by nature and with a stealthy leaning toward the fleshpots, he began early to betray her trust in cold blood. She did not know of this; she knew only of his indulgence in liquor, increasing alarmingly, and his growing taste for cards. He had drammed moderately from a very early age; now he had a fiend's appetite, while his passion for the gaming table grew accordingly. She used to plead pitifully with him to eschew the practices. At first he laughed; later he sneered. Meanwhile his dissipation had not affected his business prospects as yet. Often rioting through a sleepless night, he was invariably at his desk in the morning, and his house was glad to command his services, for he was a veritable business genius.
His wife, poor soul, hoped that the baby's coming would influence him to better things. It grew worse. His appetite for liquor, which was evidently inherited from some bibulous ancestor, grew tyrannous, and he wasa willing slave. Lucky at cards, ordinary gambling became too tame for him. He fell to speculating, cannily at first, but with success and increasing indulgence in liquor came recklessness. The man's naturally cool business judgment was clouded, for he was never wholly sober now. Yet his business prospects were still of the best, for he succeeded marvellously in retaining his strong hold on affairs. The dawn was more than likely to find him reeling, but the opening of the day's business invariably found him at his desk, alert, coldly inscrutable, his wits more than a match for the sharpest ones that might oppose him. Dissipated as he was in those days, he engineered some brilliant _coups_ which benefited his concern and increased his own prestige, to his material advantage. He was already pointed out as a man of power. He could have figured as a Napoleon of honorable business, as he later figured as a Napoleon of graft. Of splendid intellectual endowment, he chose to mar himself.
Their home-life, because of his course, had grown unspeakably wretched. They lived simply; the bulk of the man's income was expended away from home. The wife did not reproach him and she had ceased to plead, but she was pale and silent and sad-eyed. She knew all now, and she lived only for her baby.
Like many an infinitely better man, the husband's worst side was reserved for his family. The inevitable reaction of tippling, in a nature like his, rendered him fairly diabolic at times in his home; and the cruel spirit was the fiercer by reason of the need for its repression elsewhere. He remembered one morning when he stood shaving before his mirror, shaking from the effect of adebauch. It was several months after his son was born. His wife, in pitiful appeal to his better side, of whose existence she still dreamed, had softly entered the room, carrying the baby. She thoughtlessly approached from the side, and he neither heard nor saw her. A soft little hand, the baby's, crept into his neck. Shaken as he was, it startled him; his razor slipped and the blood spurted from a gash in his cheek. Blind with swift, unreasoning rage, he whirled with a curse and a murderous, involuntary swoop of his razor. She had sprung back with a sharp cry, but just too late. He heard again the sudden, shrill cry of the baby; saw the swift blood rimming an ugly gash above its little wrist; saw himself shriveling, before the horror in his wife's eyes, into a loathsome thing.
"My God!" he had stammered, "I—I didn't mean—"
She had recoiled, the flame in her eyes repelling him. Ever afterward her burning eyes, accusing him in memory, had caused his own to close spasmodically in swift desire to escape her gaze; had caused him to dig his nails into his palms in temporary agonized abasement. The grim mills of the gods, indeed!
The poor woman annoyed him no more after that, but she grew like a voiceless, accusing ghost. She was thin and pale now and her beauty was fading pathetically. As for him, his course grew madder, he plunged into dissipation as it had been an enveloping sea. By and by things began to go wrong with him; wild speculations turned out poorly, his resources began seriously to dwindle. With his old, clear head he could have repaired his fortunes, but now he saw things through a red haze, and in endeavoring to right himself with one reckless stroke, he lost everything.
Well, it was time to leave. But he would not go alone, he sullenly decided. There was a siren to whom he had long been devoted, a creature of sensuous mould designed to hold enmeshed such evil souls as his. Nor, he fiercely told himself, would they go empty-handed. And he fortified his nerve with more whisky.
The newspapers accordingly had a sensation. One of the city's most brilliant and most trusted young business men was a defaulter to the extent of thousands of dollars, and he was gone. This startling fact, coupled with the simultaneous departure of the siren and the revelations of the defaulter's double life, made an attractive tit-bit. The wife and child, being of minor importance in this sensational tale, were quickly forgotten. The memory of the defaulter remained, and men confidently believed at first that one day they would welcome his return, shackled to an officer of the law. But it was not to be, though once the man, driven by the lash of belated remorse, had ventured to cross a continent and steal furtively into the scene of his early crime, on a bootless quest.
It seemed to him later that, following his flight with his siren, he had been drunk for years. The furtive sting was at work; he drank to deaden it. At times he would shiver and the cold perspiration would bead his forehead, for he saw again the horror in her eyes as she sought to stanch the blood that flowed from her baby's arm. More, he saw himself again, with hideous humor, repeatedly when he was in his cups, tearing her baby from her arms and plying it with toddy. The boy would take it like milk, he remembered; and the father was wont to laugh, with all the sardonic mirth of a hyena, at the anguish in the mother's eyes, and finally to hand back the infant withironical courtesy and the observation "that he was a chipoffthe old block."
Yes, pleasant memories had the fugitive, while drifting from place to place with his paramour. The money was soon gone and he had recourse to the gaming table, with fluctuating luck. Quarrels were frequent now, and finally, after an exceptionally fierce one, in which two calloused, coarsened natures revealed themselves in all their hideousness, the precious pair parted. That particular weakness disturbed the current of the man's life no more, for Shaughnessy was done with sirens and their influence. With a revival of his old calculation, shrewd and cold, he decided that it didn't pay.
At the same time, too, he decided that whisky didn't pay. He had a will like iron, whether toward evil or against it. Returning reason bade him to be against anything that marred his self-interest, so Shaughnessy—which name he adopted after his flight of years before—said one day, "I'm done," and suffered ensuing torments of thirst like an imperturbable Indian. It was years before he again tasted liquor, though he never lost the craving for it; and even then, he severely confined himself to its use as a medicine, necessitated by his failing health.
After the siren had gone her way, and Shaughnessy took occasion to survey the situation with something of his old-time critical analysis, he resolved upon his future campaign. His honest name he had forfeited; it could not be resumed. Moreover, his natural cynicism had deepened with the years. It was the dishonest who prospered most, thought he. He had the brains, so let him scheme to prosper. Politics attracted him. He studied it for the science that it is, and he also studied men. He chosean excellent field in which to operate; he established his small liquor store, which was destined to grow larger; he made his modest entry into the political arena which he was to dominate. With infinite subtlety, by the power of a remarkable brain, he had grown into the sinister force he was today; nor did his evil success trouble him. It was the memory of his wife and child that haunted him; a memory that bit deep as a sword.
It was years before he risked detection by a visit to his old city to ascertain regarding them, for of course he dared not write. Time was generous and changed him much, however, in appearance, so finally he traversed the continent and furtively, fearfully, entered his old haunts. He did not stay long; there was no need. His wife was dead; he found her humble grave in an old cemetery. The boy had been entirely lost sight of; he had drifted away and might be dead for all that anybody knew or apparently cared. We poor worldlings might perchance be more sympathetic, more solicitous one of the other, if we had more time. But self-interest in the grim old world demands and receives the initial consideration of self. Shaughnessy turned back with a heart none the lighter because of the fruitlessness of his quest; back to the old search in dark places for pelf and power. There was nothing else left, and, as his ideals had never been high, his course suited him and satisfied his ambition.
The boss rose, swaying, from his chair; a strange weakness was upon him. He made his way toward the spot where his unconscious son lay prone on the floor, and he tottered like an old man. He stood looking down upon the boy, and for his most monstrous sin of all there was grim reprisal visible in his eyes. The boy was as he hadmade him—as he himself had been—a drunkard. Of brilliant mental endowment, as the father knew to his cost, the son's career was clouded by this bitter heritage; would be clouded to the end, for he lacked his father's iron will. And the agency through which the boss' black course had been menaced; that menaced it still; the son against the sire, unknowing and till now unknown! What a hell-born irony it was, matter for mirth of gibbering fiends. Truly, at last Shaughnessy drank the bitter lees.
He stood there, swaying slightly, his gaunt face bloodless, his eyes horrible. Mechanically he pulled out his watch, starting violently. Why, it could be no more than five minutes since the struggle. Five minutes—and in them Shaughnessy had lived long and bitter years! And now—
"_For God's sake! For—God's—sake!_"
The old, old prayer of agony, of deadly fear, wrung at the last from lips which perhaps had long ceased to frame that Awful Name except in blasphemy; the cry of the ages; the wail of the wicked as it is the hope of the blessed; the cry of despair which rends the throat of the pariah when face to face with Death.
What was it? Ah! Shaughnessy knew; while his face went gray, while he gasped for breath, while his hands sought and pressed convulsively his breast, through which throbbed swift, keen stabs of exquisite pain. The mists swam before his staring eyes as he reeled blindly, now with outstretched hands, toward the door of his den. It was the ancient enemy returned—and this time not to be denied.
Shaughnessy lurched through the door, and with groping hands, grasped the bottle. The fiery draught ofbrandy seared his throat; he strangled and the bottle fell from his nerveless fingers and broke upon the floor. The strong smell of the spilled contents oppressed the heated air.
No use—no use! Shaughnessy collapsed in the chair before his desk, his breast afire with suffocating pain. The gray pallor deepened; the eyes glazed. For a moment he lay inert, his form twitching. Then a sudden torturing thought brought him instinctively erect in his chair. It was like a dead man rising from his grave.
The money—the property! Why, who would get it? How had _he_ gotten it? Never mind, it was his; they could not take it away. It should be his son's—who had tried to destroy him. Would he take it? Perhaps not, he might be that kind of a fool. Well, if not, why he could give it to charity. Charity! Shaughnessy laughed horribly, deep in his throat.
There might—there might yet be time. He made as if to brush away the mists that deepened before his eyes. He groped for paper—a pen, and drew them toward him. He plunged the pen into the ink well, overturning it, but he did not heed. He was going blind; there was a strange, rhythmic thudding in his ears.
"I—"
The single letter, grotesquely lonely, sprawled crazily, black and ugly, upon the sheet. The world would remember Shaughnessy as—Shaughnessy.
* * * * * * * *
O'Byrn stirred uneasily, for the noise of resounding blows was in his ears. He struggled to a sitting posture, and as he did so the door crashed in. Dick and Slade bounded into the room.
"Ah! there you are," exclaimed Glenwood, striding over to Micky and pulling him to his feet. "There's been a rough-house. But where's Shaughnessy?" His eyes swept the apartment vengefully.
"Must have gone out," returned Slade. Neither he nor Dick noticed the partially open door of the den. "Better be gettin' out. He may be back, with more like him, and we ain't got no time to lose."
Between them they guided the stupefied O'Byrn outside and to the waiting carriage. Inside the den, crumpled horridly in his chair, with gaunt, ghastly jaw agape and with a look of terror frozen in his staring eyes, rested Shaughnessy; as he would sit through the night, as he would be sitting when they should seek him on the morrow.
A HALF-HOUR later a telephone bell pealed in the office of the Courier. "You're wanted, Mr. Harkins," called an assistant. The city editor hurried to the instrument. "Hello!" he called.
"Hello! That you, Harkins? All right, this is Glenwood. Well, we've got him. Working on him now. Be there by twelve, sooner if possible. Have everything ready. Good-by."
The office of Dr. Erastus Wentworth was a scene of animation. By rare good luck, Slade had found the medical gentleman in an adjacent restaurant immediately after the cab drew up at the building which contained his office. Dick and Slade had assisted the dazed O'Byrn upstairs, when Slade, fuming with impatience, set out on a search for the physician, which was fortunately soon rewarded.
They placed O'Byrn on a sofa and he immediately lapsed into dreamland. "Doctor," said Dick, "this man has a job to turn out tonight that would feaze many a fellow in his sober senses. He's simply got to do it tonight. It will take an hour, perhaps a half or so more. It must be started at midnight. I know it looks hopeless, but you don't know the man. If you only start his brain half-working it's worth a couple of normal onesunder full head. What do you think?" He was pacing the floor in keen excitement. Slade stood near, silent, with burning eyes.
"Bad!" commented the doctor, dryly. "How much has he had?"
"Not so much," returned Slade. "He got a nasty bump; it helped."
"Well, we'll try," said the doctor, and was soon busy. Micky was sufficiently oblivious not to wince at the sting of the hypodermic needle, piercing his bared arm, forcing into his system the powerful solution ofstrychnine, the influence of which must be invoked to reinforce the mechanism of the numbed brain. Dick looked at the Irishman, sprawled supine upon the office sofa, still with closed eyes. It looked hopeless enough and Dick despaired.
A little later the physician was preparing with infinite care a mixture which he finally seemed to have ready to his satisfaction. He approached the prostrate man.
"Rank poison," he said grimly to Glenwood, "but desperate cases require desperate remedies. I fancy this will complete the job of galvanizing your friend for the time you require. Probably he won't exactly scintillate, but I think he will do." He administered the stuff to O'Byrn, who, half-conscious already despite his relaxed attitude, swallowed it obediently.
"Now in a few minutes," said the doctor, "you can start with him. But remember one thing," he cautioned Glenwood, "this brace is wholly artificial. It won't last. A little later and I couldn't have done much for you anyway. He'll run along like a machine for a while, that'sall. Get all you can from him while you can, for there'll be a reaction."
"That's what we've got to do anyway," replied Dick grimly. "It's a case of racing the clock with us from now on."
A little later they descended the stairs, O'Byrn stumbling heedlessly down, assisted by Glenwood. The cabman had waited under instructions. "The Courier office in a hurry," Dick ordered, and assisted Micky inside. Slade followed. He had resolved to be in at the death.
As the cab rolled rapidly south, Dick spoke to the man opposite him, now rousing to a dull consciousness of his surroundings.
"Micky," he demanded, "have you got that story, all of it?" There was an assenting nod.
"Now listen to me, Micky," continued Dick, leaning forward in the dimness, fixing the other's stolid eyes with his own dominant ones, "you're going to turn out that story and it's going to be the story of your life. You won't feel like it, but you're going to do it and it's going to be a dandy. Now get your brain working. Think of that story, every stage of it, from the time you first started out for it till you finished. Fix it in your head, and when the time comes, just spout it. _Don't-think-of-anything-but-that-story!_ Do you understand?"
There was but a single word of response, a little thick, but inspiring of confidence. "Sure."
Dick sat back with a long sigh. His hands were trembling with excitement. A moment later the cab drew up in front of the Courier office.
The elevator sprang upward. As its door was flung back for the trio to emerge, the big editorial clock chimedthe hour of midnight. Harkins met them with white face and eyes that revealed the strain of the long hours of suspense. Behind him stared many other eyes, in which shone an overwrought glitter that came of the infectious tension of the situation.
"Well, O'Byrn!" Harkins' voice crackled with acrid authority. "Where's your story?"
The tone had the effect of a whip lash, awakening the habit of swift obedience born of long training. Micky had stood dumb with blank eyes, to which the scene and the actors seemed strangely remote, like a vague dream. But his chief's question pierced his numbed brain like sharp steel. There was an instinctive attempt to gather his deadened forces. His hand swiftly sought an outer pocket and produced a few penciled fragments which he threw upon a table. "There," he said.
"These!" exclaimed Harkins, hastily scanning them. "Well, where are the rest? Did you lose them?"
Dick interposed. "You forget, Mr. Harkins," he suggested. "He doesn't have to carry a notebook. Micky, where's the rest of it?"
"Why," he answered confusedly, "I remembered it."
"Well, do you remember it now?" persisted Harkins.
"No," wearily, "not just now." Then, again with that strange gathering of struggling forces, though the words came as if he talked in his sleep, "I'll remember it—after I get started." And he walked straight to his desk, eyes dead ahead like a somnambulist's, unheedful of the men who watched him silently with drawn, anxious faces. It is doubtful if he saw them. Dropping limply into his chair he reached mechanically for his copy paper.
"Not that way, Micky," said Dick softly, interposinghis hand. "There isn't time. You must dictate it. Here's a man waiting for you."
Micky turned dull eyes toward the stenographer who sat nearby in readiness, pencil in hand. An expression of helplessness replaced the apathy in O'Byrn's face, as his gaze shifted to Dick. In his trance-like state he could not comprehend. They wanted the story, yet would not let him write it. There was a pathetic questioning in his look.
"Listen, Micky," said Dick very distinctly, bending over him. "It's not far from press-time. We've got to hurry. There's a relay of stenographers waiting for you. Now you go ahead and dictate your story just as if you were writing it yourself. Get your mind right on it. Talk your introduction, covering the main points, then start at the beginning and go through to the finish. Get everything in and talk it as it comes to you, but have it right. Don't be afraid of going too fast. They'll get it all. Talk it just as you'd talk it to me and get it all. You understand? Now, boy, _get into it_!" He placed the packet of Shaughnessy's papers, which O'Byrn had entrusted to him, in his hand.
Dick stepped back, raising his hand to quiet them all as they crowded around, staring at the motionless man in the chair. "Get back!" Dick whispered fiercely. "Get him rattled now and it's all up. Can't you see?" They softly moved aside and intense quiet fell, in which the measured ticking of the big clock sounded unbelievably loud. They watched the meagre figure in the chair with an odd fascination. O'Byrn, as if fairly hypnotized by Glenwood's words, was bending forward, hands pressed tightly against his temples, eyes closed and brow contractedin the supreme effort to marshal the dormant resources of his brain. So he sat, without word or motion, while the moments crawled by and the suspense grew into actual pain for every watcher in that great room. Once Harkins, with an expression of keen torture, slowly lifted a clenched hand and let it fall silently, an impetuous word restrained by a warning gesture from Glenwood, who had not once taken his piercing eyes from O'Byrn's face. Even as he gazed, the face of the other seemed curiously to change, as if a dead thing were stirring into life. It was as if Glenwood's iron will reinforced O'Byrn's weaker one, infusing into it the power of concentration, helping it to rise superior to deadening influences, to assert itself in a hard-won triumph of mind over matter.
At last Micky raised his head, looking straight into Dick's eyes, which shone with satisfaction, for they read coherence in O'Byrn's own. The day was saved and there was a universal sigh of relief. O'Byrn extended his hand. Reading the gesture aright, Dick placed in it the notes which shortly before had been produced for Harkins' inspection. Micky looked them over briefly, scanned the damning packet a moment, and turned to the waiting stenographer.
Then came the story which swept the town that morning in a mighty wind that drove a monstrous tidal wave of public indignation thundering over an illicit crew and blotted out a corrupt municipal history. Yes and more, for the waters encroached even to foul halls in the capitol and washed them clean. It was a story involving so scathing an arraignment of those in high places that hardened veterans in the great room, listening to its steadyflow from the lips of the drowsy man in the chair, gasped and looked at each other in momentary incredulity; momentary, because every astounding disclosure was fortified by the most incontrovertible of proofs. Micky had been a veritable sleuth hound on the track of that story. His scent had been unerring and in the marshaling of his verified facts he had shown positive genius. There was nothing asserted that collected statements and figures did not prove; no man arraigned, from Judge Boynton down, who was not pilloried in the proof. Noisome legislative deals, heretofore blanketed by respectability, were laid bare in exposed horror. The city government was savagely assailed. The vesture of fair seeming in the present campaign was torn away and there was revealed rottenness. The growth of graft, in repulsive forms, under the sinister genius of Shaughnessy, was claimed and proved and the telling ruined some flourishing careers. So on to the end, the arraignment transcending the expectation of all in its ugly features, as indeed it had Micky's own. It left no doubt of the swift dynamic effect upon the election, now close at hand. Truly it was the story of a lifetime.
He told it from beginning to end always in that strange, monotonous voice, as if he were muttering in his sleep, his eyes at times fixed absently on the stenographer, at others half-closed or turning blankly toward the ceiling. He seemed wholly unconscious of his surroundings after his task was begun, being absorbed in dreamy contemplation of his theme. As the physician had said, his brain was working like an insensate machine, driven for a while by the force of powerful stimulants. Yet always his wonderful memory, an instinctive force with him, was apotent line that led his groping mind unerringly through the gloomy labyrinth of the brain. At times he would falter for a moment, but once more grasping the thread was off again. So, unmindful of anything save the task he was mechanically pursuing, he swept on toward the end. Stenographers quietly relieved one another, typewriters rattled madly at the other end of the room, Harkins and an assistant fairly flew in the preparation of the copy; boys hurried by with it, take by take, everywhere was the sharp hum of the belated machinery, at last in motion. O'Byrn never noticed, but went serenely, logically, sleepily on, dictating as he would have written it. One might imagine he saw himself, as one detached, writing as he proceeded.
But now the fuel had spent its force. He was growing horribly drowsy, yet struggled on, impelled by a latent sense of duty. At last he faltered in the middle of a sentence and stopped short. His chin sank on his breast.
Someone was shaking him, he numbly felt a dash of something cold and wet in his face and opened his eyes. He tried to wipe away the water that trickled down his cheeks, when somebody's handkerchief was passed over them and he heard a voice, familiar yet far away.
"Wake up, Micky!" it appealed. "You can't give up now, you're almost through!"
"All right, Dick," he sighed wearily. "Where was I?"
Dick prompted him and he resumed at the break, still in the same even, expressionless monotone, and continued until the dark shadows again gathered before his eyes and he swayed in his chair. Dick's voice again rang its sharp rally in his ears and he braced desperately, dictatingthe closing paragraphs. "That's all," he murmured. The receding footfalls of the stenographer sounded. Then came Dick's voice, a ghost of a voice from the other side of the world.
"Now you can sleep," it said.
Then returned again the shadows and silence.