One morning some three weeks later Stacey received a night letter from Omaha. It was addressed “Honorable Stacey Carroll” and read:
“My husband Jim is awfully sick with flu and I am afraid he is going to die. He keeps asking for you though he is out of his head and does not know what he says. Please, Captain Carroll, come if you can because then he might get well. Gertrude Burnham.”
Stacey wasted no time. He sent a telegram to say that he was starting immediately, telephoned for a lower berth on the evening train, and pulled a suitcase from a closet. But in the midst of his neat methodical packing he suddenly paused and gazed abstractedly away. It had occurred to him that perhaps if Burnham could see him as he had been in France the sick man might be more likely to recognize him and might even—who could tell?—draw a little strength from the old revived relationship of command and protectiveness. Stacey took out the things he had already packed, chose a larger bag, and put in his uniform at the bottom.
He arrived in Omaha early the next morning, drove to a hotel, unpacked his bag, put on his uniform, and took a taxi to Burnham’s address.
The taxi stopped in front of a small dilapidated wooden house in a shabby quarter surprisingly near the centre of town. Stacey descended and paid the chauffeur.
But before he had time to reach the door of the house it opened and a woman hurried out to meet him. She was thin, haggard, dishevelled, though not slovenly, with a worn face and worn eyes about which strayed limp locks of black hair, but there were faded traces of fineness in her. Stacey remembered that Burnham had always spoken of his wife with pride. She had, he often said, had a high-school education.
“Oh, Captain Carroll,” she cried, “it’s awful good of you to come, sir! I knew I oughtn’t to’ve asked you, but I didn’t knowwhatto do!”
“Of course you ought,” Stacey returned briefly, shaking her hand.
“And you wore your uniform, too,” she added, with a pale half-smile. “That was just right. I wouldn’t have thought you’d have thought of that.”
They entered the house, in which the Burnhams occupied one-half of the second floor. Three small children, shabby and not very clean, with frightened faces, were waiting for them just inside, and stared at Stacey.
“I keep them looking better than this, Captain Carroll, when everything’s all right,” Mrs. Burnham explained apologetically, and they all climbed the stairs in silence.
As they went, Stacey reflected swiftly on a number of things,—that what life did to Burnham was very like what it did to Phil, and that a lot of criminal rubbish was being talked about the prosperous workingman. Why, thought Stacey, even his father, who was a kindly man, declared bitterly that workmen were buying silk shirts to-day and denounced them as profiteers! Well, suppose a man did earn six dollars a day for manual labor, suppose he even earned it regularly for six days in every week (which he didn’t), how much was that a year? Let’s see. Eighteen hundred and some dollars, on which, with the price of everything gone wild, he was supposed to raise a family and live in luxury. What rot! Stacey himself, who lived at home, had a car that his father had given him, and cared little for luxuries, felt pinched with two hundred dollars a month. Oh, damn money!
They reached the top of the stairs and paused before a door through which came a strange murmuring voice.
“Jim won’t know you, sir,—not now,” said Mrs. Burnham, “but if you’d be willing just to sit there a while, maybe—”
“Of course,” said Stacey. “You have a good doctor?”
“Yes, sir. At least, I guess he’s good. They don’t any of them seem much help. He’ll be here at ten o’clock.”
They went in, Stacey and Mrs. Burnham; the children were left outside the door. Burnham, flushed with fever, lay tossing and muttering on a narrow bed. Stacey looked down at him and lifted his hot hand, but there was no recognition in the man’s eyes.
“I’ll sit here,” said Stacey after a moment, drawing up a chair beside the bed.
The woman silently took another chair, and they remained so for an hour and a half, neither of them speaking, she rising at regular intervals to press a spoonful of medicine between her husband’s teeth, until the doctor arrived.
He was brusque, had keen eyes, and appeared competent. Stacey drew him aside at the conclusion of the visit.
“Any chance?”
“Yes,” said the doctor, “fifty-fifty. He’s as likely to recover as not. Splendid physique! There’s nothing much I can do except to give stimulants in case of sudden collapse. We don’t know anything about flu really, you know, and this pneumonia that follows on flu. I’ve seen hundreds die of it—I was in France, too,—and hundreds get well,—both without any reason. Served under you?”
“My first sergeant. Good man,—no better! Do your best for him.”
“It’s a strong bond, isn’t it?”
Stacey nodded. “Oughtn’t he to have a nurse?”
“It would be a great deal better. He’d have more of a chance.”
“Then send one around, will you please? At my expense, of course.”
“All right,” said the doctor, shook hands with Stacey, and departed.
The conversation had taken place in the hallway outside the door. When Stacey reëntered the sick room Mrs. Burnham gazed at him wistfully.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Jim’s got a good chance. The doctor’s going to send a nurse.”
Her eyes filled with tears, and she opened her mouth as though to speak, but closed it again, with only a strangled: “Thanks,” and turned her head away. After a time she got up.
“I’ll go down and cook some dinner,” she said. “You’ll excuse me, sir, if it isn’t much, won’t you? I haven’t had time to—”
“No,” he broke in, “you’re too tired to cook. Please go out and get some lunch for yourself and the children if you know of some delicatessen place,—and for me, too.” And he drew out his purse.
But at this her face colored. “No sir,” she said, with just a hint of resentment, “I couldn’t.”
He thrust a five-dollar bill upon her. “Do as I tell you,” he said imperiously. “This is no time for silly pride. Go on, and mind you get good things and plenty of them.”
She cowered beneath his sternness and went meekly. And Stacey reflected grimly that pride was a decorative handsome emotion that flourished ornamentally, a highly esteemed orchid, in luxury. It couldn’t grow well in poverty, came up sickly and scrawny,—the soil was too weak.
Half an hour later he heard her climb the stairs again and move quietly about the next room. Presently she returned to the bedroom.
“Will you go in there now, sir?” she said. “Everything’s ready for you. Here’s your change—two dollars and sixty-four cents.”
“No, no, please!” he replied. “Keep it for to-morrow.”
He wanted to insist on her eating first, but thought best not to try, so he went, without comment, through the door she indicated into another bedroom—the only other, he supposed,—that obviously also served as dining-room and parlor. Dishes were disposed neatly on a table, with sandwiches, Bologna sausage, eggs, coffee, and doughnuts.
He sat down, then looked up, listening, with a smile, and suddenly rose, crossed the room, and flung open another door. The kitchenette. And there, as he had thought, were the three children, sitting, very terrified at his discovery of them, close together on a small bench.
“Hello,” he said, “you’re out here, are you? Well, come on! Let’s eat together. Only I think we’d better do it in this room or your mother will hear us.”
“She said we was to wait and not make a noise,” observed the oldest girl in a small voice.
“Well, we won’t wait,” Stacey remarked. “There are doughnuts, you know. You come on in with me,” he said to the girl who had spoken, “on your tip-toes, and help fix the plates.”
She obeyed timidly.
“First we’ll fix one for your mother,” he whispered, and she nodded, her lips pressed together.
He and the three children ate gravely in the kitchenette. Then Stacey rose. “I’ll go back to your father now,” he said, “and send your mother out.”
“Your plate is ready for you, Mrs. Burnham. And the children have eaten,” he announced in a triumphant whisper.
She gasped, then suddenly her mouth curved prettily into a smile—the first he had seen her give. Stacey sat down again by the bedside.
Burnham seemed a little calmer now, and his incoherent muttering had ceased, but he looked very exhausted, and Stacey was relieved when about one o’clock the nurse arrived.
The three of them sat there silently all the hot afternoon, with only short intervals of release when Stacey stretched his legs in the hall or Mrs. Burnham went out to keep an eye on the children. There was no change in the sick man. The nurse said that the crisis would probably be reached next day.
At six o’clock Stacey left the house, asking the nurse to telephone him in case of a serious change. He walked back to his hotel.
He was abstracted, an isolated personality, growing more isolated with every month that passed in his life; so that now he saw little of his surroundings and glanced but carelessly both at the depressing quarter from which he had set out and at the prosperous business section he presently entered. He merely thought, idly, that the city seemed a characterless place, like all other middle-western cities. And the imposing court-house, of white marble, that he passed shortly before reaching his hotel, did not impress him. It did, indeed, occur to him once that there was a certain tensity in the air, like that which characterizes a city in boom times, but the observation, purely involuntary, did not particularly interest him. It interested him not at all when later, glancing through the front page of a local paper, he learned the cause of the tensity—trouble with the negroes, “Another Dastardly Assault!”
Early the next morning he was back at Burnham’s house. The man seemed worse, Stacey thought with a touch of real sadness,—more feverish, more restless. There was no capacity for smiling, even faintly, left in Mrs. Burnham. The nurse, cool, professional, would express no opinion; and the doctor, too, when he came, was noncommittal.
“Before to-night there ought to be a decision one way or the other,” he said to Stacey. “I’ll come again at four. Call me up earlier if necessary.”
There was nothing to do but wait, and Stacey again settled himself in a chair near the foot of the bed.
The crisis came early in the afternoon. Burnham tossed and kicked furiously, and his incoherent muttering grew louder. Suddenly he raised himself on the palms of his hands into a half-sitting posture and stared directly at Stacey—or not really at him, through him.
“By God, Captain!” he cried wildly, in a high unnatural voice, “you’ve got nerve! Might’ve been shot . . . shot . . . shot! What hell you care? You wouldn’t do it!” He panted. “Not you, Captain! Said I’d follow you to hell. Nerve . . . nerve . . . nerve. . . .” His voice trailed away to silence, while the nurse leaned over him, pressing his shoulders down firmly.
Stacey had started at the words. They were spoken, he knew, in delirium, not to him but to a shadow vanished eleven months since, but Stacey understood them. Burnham knew, then, did he, about that Argonne attack? Good! Probably no other kind of approbation from any source would have touched Stacey, even faintly. This, for an instant, made him thrill with a fierce proud happiness. The next moment there was nothing left in his consciousness but concern for his friend.
But Burnham lay quiet now, his color less vivid, his breath coming and going easily, and the nurse looked at Stacey and Mrs. Burnham with a smile.
“I think he’ll get along all right now,” she said pleasantly.
Stacey wiped his forehead, and Mrs. Burnham, collapsing into a chair, laid her head on a table and wept softly.
“Fine!” said the doctor, when he came. “He’ll get well now. Just a question of time.”
The next morning, when Mrs. Burnham opened the door to Stacey, he observed that she was wearing a clean dress and had done her hair quite prettily.
“Then Jim’s a lot better, isn’t he?” he asked, with a smile.
She flushed. “Yes,” she said. “He slept right through the night. Only woke up once for just a minute, then went back to sleep again. Oh, I’m so glad, Captain Carroll!” Her eyes filled. “And so grateful to you, sir!”
“Oh, please!” said Stacey, embarrassed.
Late in the morning Burnham opened his eyes slowly and let them wander curiously about the room. They rested on Stacey, and a puzzled expression came into them, then, after a moment, recognition, and the man tried to raise his hand in salute.
“Where’s the devil, sir?” he asked, in a thin voice. Then he smiled. “Funny!” he said. “I thought I was in hell.” And he began to laugh weakly.
“Shut up, Burnham!” Stacey commanded sternly, “and lie still!”
“Oh, all right, Captain, all right!” Burnham returned, still laughing, and went to sleep again at once.
Stacey was rather tired in the evenings now from sitting so monotonously still all day. He resented the excitement that he felt throbbing in the streets and the nervous buzz of the groups through which he had to elbow his way in the hotel lobby. His one recreation consisted in changing to civilian clothes for dinner; for he always wore his uniform when he went to the Burnhams’. It happened that the regiment in which he had commanded a battalion had been recruited from this part of the country, so that there were perhaps twenty-five of his men living right here in Omaha, among them a first lieutenant whom he had sincerely liked. And, ignorant though he was and knew himself to be of these men’s real personalities, he was bound to each of them—worst as well as best—by a closer bond than that which held him to Philip Blair or to Marian or to Mrs. Latimer. He would have given lavishly of his money or his time—nonsense! of something real! his freedom or his strength!—to any of these men who needed it; and not in the least from a sense of duty,—inevitably, as a matter of course. Yet he had no companionable desire to see them. He made no attempt to look them up. He spent his evenings in bed, reading “War and Peace,” which in former days he had not cared for but now found singularly satisfying—more satisfying than any book by his old idol, Dostoieffsky.
Burnham’s recovery was extraordinary. On the third day after the crisis the doctor refused jovially to waste more time in visiting him—the nurse had been dismissed the day before—and told him to eat, talk and do as he pleased, short of getting up.
“I think,” observed Stacey that afternoon, “that I’ll pull out to-night on the midnight. You’re as fit as ever, Burnham.”
He was, indeed, restless and anxious to go. Here, sitting near Burnham, chatting casually of trivial things, he was strangely at peace; but an increasing turmoil that he felt in the city each evening exasperated him.
The man looked at him wistfully, then across at his wife. “Gerty,” he said, “you go out with the kids for a little while, will you? I got to talk to the Captain.”
She obeyed, but her face had flushed and her eyes were resentful.
“Now you’ve done it!” said Stacey cheerfully. “Fat lot of popularity I’ll have with Gertrude from now on!”
Burnham laughed. “Funny thing, ain’t it, Captain?” he observed. “They can’t seem to get onto it at all, women can’t. They go and get jealous, like Gerty now.”
“Can’t get onto what?”
“Why, this—this here what-do-you-call-it.”
“Relationship?”
“Uh-huh, I guess that’s the word. It ain’t got a thing to do with them.” He paused. “Maybe that’s why they don’t like it,” he concluded.
“Philosopher!” said Stacey. “Analyzing the female heart. You’ll be writing for the magazines next.”
“Sure!” Burnham grinned, then frowned. “All the same, I don’t get onto it very well myself,” he continued. “Now you’d think that I ought to be feeling all upset with gratitude to you, the way Gerty is, and worried about you wasting so much of your time and money. Well, I don’t feel that way at all. Damned if I do! I just feel friendly and pleasant and—natural-like. And of course some day I’m going to pay you back the money you spent on the nurse ’n’ doctor, but it don’t seem important, somehow, like it does to Gerty. If it was something you cared about, Captain, I’d get up now, the way I am, and work all day to get it for you, but Christ! you don’t care a damn for money!”
“Oh, shut up, Burnham!” said Stacey, laughing. “How you do run on!” Nevertheless, the man’s words were pleasant to him, and reënforced his own strangely peaceful mood.
“Seems sort of noisy out-doors to-day,” Burnham remarked suddenly. “What’s the row, I wonder?”
And, indeed, through the window a dull and sullen murmur, that was like a deep note held steadily in an organ, did enter and penetrate the room.
“Oh,” replied Stacey quickly, “I don’t know! It’s a noisy city.”
Burnham lay silent for a long time. Then he turned his eyes slowly to Stacey. And in them and in his voice when he spoke again was apparent a timidity which his huge bulk and rough unshaven face made somehow touching.
“Captain,” he said hesitantly, “there was something I wanted to say to you, only I don’t know if I’ve got the nerve. We boys was always kind of scared of you, you know,—oh, not because you was a captain!—fat lot of respect we had for captainsascaptains!—but just because—oh, I dunno! And it’s kind of hard to say anything to you that’s kind of personal, as you might say. All the same, I’ll take a chance.” He rushed on with his words to get it over. “What I want to say is that some of us know all about that attack that—didn’t come off.” He paused apprehensively, but with a sigh of relief.
However, Stacey was as friendly as before. “Yes,” he said quietly, “I know you do. You let that out Wednesday in a lot of wild talk you were spouting.”
“Well, what do you know about that?” Burnham exclaimed. “And me who wouldn’t have told even Gerty! Did any one—”
“No, no, it’s all right! No one else understood. And I’m glad you know.”
“ ’N’ that’s why I said what I did about going with you to hell or anywhere else. I ain’t the only one, Captain. There’s Morgan and Jones and Petitvalle and Isaacs and all the rest of C Company that knows, who’d fight to go along, too. Oh, it would be a nice little family party!” And Burnham laughed gaily.
Well, Stacey had said to Phil months ago that this was the one exploit of which he was proud, but he had said so haughtily, with his heart full of bitterness. Just now his heart was calm, as though cleansed. He was almost happy. Yet he could hardly have accounted for his state of mind, even had he cared to try. It was not, certainly, that his vanity was flattered. Perhaps it was, in part, that when Stacey had related the episode to Philip Blair his defiance of the machine was first in his thoughts, while now the stress was on the human results of that defiance. Perhaps Burnham’s simple assertion of loyalty released Stacey from his obsessing perception of greed, greed everywhere.
But the noise outside had increased. Rolling waves of sound entered.
“What in hell is going on?” Burnham exclaimed. “Tell me, Captain! You know all right.”
“Well,” said Stacey doubtfully, but thinking it on the whole better not to have the invalid aggravated by unsatisfied curiosity, “there’s been a lot of race trouble here lately. Just now it seems to be mostly about some negro—name of Brown—said to have assaulted a woman. He’s shut up in the court-house jail, I believe. Sounds as though some sort of demonstration—”
But at this moment a scattered crackling sound broke out in the distance. Burnham sat up quickly, and Stacey crossed to the window and looked out.
“Some sort of demonstration?” said Burnham. “Some sort of riot! That’s shooting.”
Stacey nodded, pulled down the window sash, and came back to his chair.
Mrs. Burnham entered the room hurriedly, but, though frightened, she had not forgotten her grievance. “I suppose I can come in now,” she said, “since there’s a war or something going on.”
“Sure!” returned her husband, laughing. “It’s nothing, Gerty.”
Darkness fell while they sat there together, Mrs. Burnham soon ashamed of her pettishness and trying to think up little things she could do for Stacey, Burnham stretching his arms and legs to feel their returning strength, all three chatting about the most casual matters. A lamp sputtered alight in the street and shone in upon them.
Oddly, Stacey thought of that afternoon with Phil and Catherine in New York five years ago. He had the same sense of calm now as then.
But this sea of sound that roared dully in the distance, at times swelling for a moment so that Mrs. Burnham turned her eyes apprehensively to Stacey,—it had been absent then. Had it, though? What else was the war? Stacey thought fancifully.
“Well, I’ve really got to go now,” he remarked, and rose.
Mrs. Burnham tried stammeringly to express her gratitude, but Burnham only gripped Stacey’s hand and smiled.
“May I say good-bye to the children?” asked Stacey, and Mrs. Burnham, too, smiled at this and went in search of them.
“Now look here, Captain!” said her husband anxiously in a low voice as soon as she had left the room, “you won’t get mixed up in that mess in the streets, will you?”
Stacey shook his head. “No, no, I’ll be all right,” he replied reassuringly.
The noise outside continued.
Stacey glanced up and down the street, but it lay quiet and empty in the brightness of its regularly spaced arc-lights. The noise came from the direction of the centre of town, and as this was also the direction of his hotel he sighed and set off toward it. He sighed because he felt himself stepping back into the old shadow from the rare brightness of his recent mood. It occurred to him that life was like that, some one had said,—a handful of peaceful islands scattered stingily over a tumultuous sea. Which figure reveals how little he knew himself—what he was and what he wanted. For at heart he did not crave repose.
He turned a corner, the rumble of sound became a roar, and he was on the edge of the crowd. Some distance down the street into which he had emerged, on the left at its intersection by another wider thoroughfare, he could make out a corner of the white marble court-house that had left him unimpressed. And one side of this building—the east, it must be—stretched along flush with the street that Stacey followed. But all about and obscuring such part of the structure as lay within his vision there was now a black howling throng, while, over all, smoke hung. And even here, where Stacey stood, the crowd was dense. Traffic had ceased. Motor cars stood motionless. Men had scrambled up the sides of them and clung there, all staring in one direction; and from the windows of the houses flanking the street more people leaned and gazed.
Here the crowd was not yet a mass—groups only; but as Stacey went forward toward the court-house, which was perhaps an eighth of a mile away, it thickened, so that to traverse it became increasingly difficult. And as it thickened its temper grew manifestly warmer. A confusion of cries agitated it. Sometimes they burst into a refrain—“Nigger! Nigger! We want that nigger!” Arms were thrown up, gesticulating wildly. And there were little centres of local interest—a man suddenly hauling himself up to the shoulders of another for a view and thrown down again fiercely, snarling contests over invaded personal rights, animal-like squeals of women at the crushing pressure upon them. The sweating faces had a bestial look beneath the arc-lights, and a sourish human odor tainted the warm air. Noise! Noise!
Stacey was not feeling anger—only a deep disgust, disgust of crowds, sick disgust of all humanity. His emotion was the more acute for its contrast with the mood he had felt in Burnham’s house. He was like a man who has made a longer jump by taking a running start. So this was the kind of thing on which perpetual peace and leagues of nations were to be founded, was it? he thought coldly. He would have gone back out of its contamination, having certainly no desire to witness the spectacle it clamored for, save that he had some desperate idea of perhaps being able to assist the few who must somewhere be standing off the multitude. So he fought his way forward, inch by inch, helped perhaps a very little by the fact that he was in uniform, using his shoulders and elbows mercilessly in cold contempt of his victims, shrieked at, cursed at, struck at even, but making progress, until at last he came, panting, to the corner of his own street and that other wider avenue. He could get no farther, either ahead or to the left. The crowd was a solid wall. And to return was equally impossible. He could only stay where he was and hope that something might happen, some movement in the mob, that would make it possible for him to push through suddenly and reach the court-house.
He stood on tip-toe and looked about him. He was almost at the corner, close to the right hand edge of the street, and he perceived that here the latter was flanked by the side wall of what he took to be a theatre. In the wall, some two or three feet above the ground, were embrasures, vantage points held with difficulty by tightly wedged groups. As Stacey looked, a sudden backward surge of the crowd swept down and away two such members of one group, and Stacey, diving desperately in, himself struggled up to the place and held it against all contestants.
All events were submerged beneath a roar of voices, a sea of noise that broke in echoing waves against the sides of the buildings. It was an emotion in itself, irrespective of its cause. It hypnotized the crowd, produced a singular wild stare in men’s eyes, made their movements jerky, their own involuntary addition to the noise raucous. It did not hypnotize Stacey, because he was aloof, remote, and also because he was too familiar with noise. Yet, he, too, had undergone its terrible spell—early in the war, before he had grown hard enough to bear the unbearable. He knew bitterly well what Siegfried Sassoon meant by: “I’m going stark, staring mad because of the guns.”
Stacey threw one last contemptuous glance at the mob beneath him, then gazed off over their heads at the court-house.
The first thing he noted was that it was on fire, smoke creeping dully from its ground-floor windows; the second, that fighting was going on inside it, since the south door, that opening on the wide cross-street, was shattered, while through it rushed in or were driven back mad struggling clusters of men.
“Good for the police!” thought Stacey. “Oh, by God! I wish I were there!”
Two firemen appeared at a third-floor window, and from the nozzle of the hose they held a stream shot down upon the crowd. There was a wild surging movement that swept to the crowd even here, pushing it back upon itself tumultuously. Snarls of anger rose. There were struggles, shrieks, fists striking out, mad efforts of individuals to keep from being crushed. And up ahead on the left the lighted air was shadowed by the bricks and stones hurled through it against the court-house. The court-house windows shattered in fragments. Stacey could not hear them crash—the noise of voices submerged all other sounds, as it was submerging thought—but he could see the jagged black gaps appear and the shining rain of glass. He held his place in the embrasure with difficulty, clinging to an iron ring in the wall and to his nearest companion.
Then suddenly a vast exultant roar shook the crowd. The stream of water had ceased.
“Cut it! We’ve cut their damned hose! Cut! Cut it!”
The crowd was wilder now, frenzied. Stacey, looking down, saw faces convulsed, venomous, filthy with ugliness. He felt a shudder of loathing and recollected with passionate assent what Anatole France had called life—“a sickness, a leprosy, a mold on the face of the earth.”
“Nigger! Give us that nigger!”
Time passed. Stacey, knowing mobs, thought that perhaps eventually this one would wear itself out on its own emotion, begin to break up into individuals sick with fatigue, and little by little disperse. But he soon perceived that it had too varied a spectacle to witness, an immense vicious vaudeville, something new every few minutes,—a ladder thrown against the court-house wall, half scaled by eight or ten youths, pushed slowly back by the defenders, and crashing over at last to earth, the scalers leaping off wildly as it fell; a rush through the door; fighting; shots.
Even so, the mob had sullen moments when its roar sank to a rumble, but again it occurred to Stacey that it was being lashed up afresh by leaders. There was a young man on a white horse there in the street before the besieged building. Twice he wheeled his horse about and harangued the crowd. His voice was inaudible here, but the emotion he created immediately around him swept on, like something tangible, beyond the reach of his words, and his gestures stirred men to renewed frenzy. Also it struck Stacey that, while here at the corner the crowd was jammed beyond hope of penetration, there on the left, just before the south side of the court-house, where the fight was sharpest, was room to move. There were rushes, assaults. The fighting part of the mob was relatively small. Oh, they all wanted the negro, damn them! They wanted blood and torture. But as spectators. If only he could get there!
And at this thought, that there were deliberate leaders, anger began to rise in Stacey, who till now had felt only disgust and scorn.
But a sudden whirling streamer of red light curved into a broken window of the court-house and a dull explosion made the air throb. A red glare flamed up inside the building, and a great “Ah-h-h!” came from the crowd.
“By God! look at it!”—“A bomb! Oh,Christ! a bomb!”—“Oh,lookat her burn!”—“Nigger, we’ll get him now!”—“Oh,nigger!”—“A-e-e-e!” Shouts, leaps, struggles, madness.
The crowd could afford to wait now, thought Stacey, looking on grimly, as black smoke poured from windows and rose in clouds, begriming the marble walls.
It was late. How long had he been here in this filth? Two hours? Three? Stacey looked at his watch. Ten-thirty. He gazed back wearily down the street, in a sullen despair beneath which anger smoldered. An outrage to be born into such a world! And he could not take refuge in himself. He hated himself as he hated this mob. Oh, he did not, of course, feel with them now! What was a black man’s life or a white man’s—any man’s—his own—Philip Blair’s, even—to deserve such clamor? He was hard, crusted over with bitterness. But there had been times in France when . . .
A sudden frenzied shriek from the mob made him start and turn his eyes back to the court-house. On the steps at its entrance, that opening on the street which Stacey had followed, alone in the lurid smoky light stood a man—rather stout, not tall, but impressive in his solitude.
“The mayor!”—“It’s the mayor!”—“Smith!”—“Mayor!” came in a shattered volley of cries from all about.
Then in one fierce burst of sound: “Nigger! Give us that nigger! Nigger! Nigger!”
And, after this, dwindling sound, save from the storm centre at the south entrance where the news could not be known; finally a semblance of silence. Stacey could not hear the man’s voice when he spoke—“I can’t do that, boys!” he learned later the words had been—but he could see him shake his head and could see the firm negative gesture he made with both extended hands.
An immense insane howl of anger burst out. A crowd surged up the east steps, and the solitary figure disappeared among them, dragged down in a chaotic black mass of assailants.
A thrill of exultation and anger ran through Stacey. By God! he’d stood them off! One living man with a soul of his own against the mob! And he was to be dragged down like that? killed for it? Beside himself, Stacey leaped to the ground and fought madly to break through to the one man on the scene. Impossible! Far from pushing forward, he was caught in a sudden retreating surge of the throng and swept back, back, raging, down the street, to the edge of a narrow roofed-in alley that led out of it behind the theatre building. Here he held his own once more.
Mad cries of wrath against the mayor came from all about him. “Nigger lover!”—“Getthe nigger lover!”—“Lynch him!”
Close to Stacey a heavy red-faced man was shaking his clenched fists high in the air. “Oh,lynchhim! The God-damnsonof a bitch! Oh, nigger lover! Oh,killhim!Lynchhim!” he shrieked, his voice hoarse, his face purple, convulsed, incredibly bestial.
And suddenly a white ungovernable rage flared up in Stacey. There was nothing left of his personality but rage. He seized the man about the waist, and, helped by a new surge of the crowd, half flung him, half was swept with him, back into the narrow dark entrance of the alley and down it.
The momentum gathered from the crowd hurled both forward, staggering, and separated them. But Stacey was upon his man again instantly. They were perhaps thirty yards down the alley in a semi-obscurity.
“Here! You! What d’you—?”
Stacey merely dived, in hot silence, for the man’s throat, and fastened his hands upon it tensely.
The victim struck out wildly, gasped, kicked, but Stacey bent him back and leaned over, sinking his thumbs deeper and deeper with every ounce of his great strength into the fleshy throat. And, as he pressed, he had the delirious exultant delusion that he was strangling all humanity. His teeth were set. His eyes were terrible with hatred.
The man’s face grew violet, his eyes protruded loathsomely, his gurgling mouth opened to press out a swollen tongue. Then all at once he relaxed weakly, his whole body limp. Stacey flung him off, and he fell in a sprawled motionless heap to the ground.
Stacey looked down for a moment and pushed the body with the toe of his shoe, then turned away, wiping his hands on his handkerchief. He was quite calm again, fierce, but with no further impulse to kill.
He did not go back and fight his way into the crowd once more. Where was the use? He could not break through. Instead, he followed the alley in, leaving the roar of the crowd behind him, and came out eventually into another street, parallel with the one he had left. It, too, was crowded, but not densely like the first. Stacey made his way off from it swiftly, and before long reached still another street, empty, silent.
But from back over there behind the intervening house-walls came yet wilder noise and crackling volleys of shots. They had got the negro, Stacey supposed.
He strode on for a long, long time—half an hour? an hour?—heedless of direction, turning corners aimlessly, until at last he was walking up a street down which, toward him, people were flowing in groups, talking loudly. The show was over, no doubt, the audience dispersing.
He heard excited comments. “The nigger got his, all right!”—“Damn shame about the mayor!”—“Oh, I dunno! Too damn fresh!”
Stacey whirled about and caught the man who had said it was a shame. “Did they kill the mayor?” he demanded.
The man addressed stared, open-mouthed, with frightened eyes at Stacey’s stern face. “N-no!” he stammered. “They hung him up tw-twice, but he was—was cut down. He’s all right, I guess. Th-they got him away. I said it was a damned shame,” he added weakly, trying to release himself from Stacey’s grasp.
Stacey did not reply, but withdrew his hand and strode on, his teeth set.
Again he walked aimlessly for a long while, but at last, making a wide curve, he turned back toward the noise that still came in broken waves from the riot centre.
Finally, led by the glow of the fire, he approached the court-house once more, but now from the north. On this side it was not flush with the street but set in some fifty yards behind an ornamental grass-plot.
Street, grass-plot and curving walks were covered with a howling throng, not so thick as to prevent passage, but rushing wildly this way and that under the red light from the burning building.
The centre of the confusion Stacey presently made out to be a motor car careering about through the crowd, that shouted exultantly and stumbled back out of its path.
All at once it bore down on Stacey. He sprang aside to avoid it, then, looking back, saw that after it, at the end of a rope, trailed a shapeless bumping object.
The rope that towed this curious object caught for a moment on an electric light pole, the car came to a temporary halt, and Stacey, bending over to look at the thing more closely, perceived that it was the charred, naked and limbless torso of a man.
Three hysterical girls, their hats awry, their arms linked, pushed him out of the way and kicked, squealing, at the dead flesh.
Stacey left the scene.
He found a small lunch-room open in a neighboring street. It was crowded with genial exulting ex-rioters. But Stacey pressed up to the counter, ordered sandwiches and coffee, and gulped them down ravenously. He was frankly famished. This did not shock him. He was too familiar with the physical effects of emotion even to give it a thought. And, indeed, so far as emotion went, he had, despite his almost impassive bearing, gone through more of it than the mob itself. For the mob had hated the negro and the mayor; Stacey had been consumed with hatred of the colossal mob itself—and of all men, all human life.
He left the lunch-room and went to his hotel. As he reached its doorway there was an echoing tramp of steady feet, and he turned to see a company of infantry march past. He saluted, and the officer marching beside the men saluted in return, gravely.
“It’s time!” thought Stacey bitterly. “If I’d had two men and a machine-gun I could have cleared the street.”
He had thought he was done with all sympathy for armies. Error! He would have given his right hand to-night to be in command of his battalion. Not because he cared for law and order. He didn’t givethatfor law and order! But because he could have saved the mayor—one brave man, a living individual—from the collective beast. And because he could have saved the negro. But mostly because he could have killed! killed!
He entered the hotel. Here, too, though the hour was late, were excited groups. Stacey pushed through them and up to the desk.
“The key to four hundred and twelve,” he demanded peremptorily.
But the clerk, his elbows on the desk, was listening to the voluble conversation of a group of commercial travellers and paid no attention.
Stacey seized a paper-weight, lifted it, and flung it down with a crash. “Damn you! The key to four-twelve, I said! And be quick about it!”
The clerk jumped. “Y-yes, sir,” he stammered, and reached a trembling hand for the key.
Probably at a normal moment he would have asserted his right to respect as a free American citizen. To-night things were rather strange.
The next morning, after Stacey had bathed, he stood for a moment, reflecting, then again put on his uniform. In the midst of dressing he paused to look in the telephone directory for the name of the lieutenant whom he had especially liked in his first company and who, he remembered, lived in Omaha. He called up the number.
“Curtis Traile’s house? . . . Oh, this Traile? Good! Stacey Carroll talking.”
He heard a joyful exclamation. “It is! What are you doing here? Where are you?”
Stacey told him.
“Then you—you saw all that mess last night?”
“Yes,” said Stacey drily. “Listen, Traile! Can I see you this morning? If you’ll tell me how to get to where you live I’ll—”
“Youwillnot! I’ll be around at the hotel for you inside of twenty minutes.”
“All right. Thanks. You’ll find me in the dining-room. ’Bye!”
Stacey went down into the dining-room and ordered breakfast. Then he unfolded a newspaper. Outwardly he appeared as unmoved as ever. It was only when he came upon the one piece of news he cared about—“Mayor’s Condition Serious! Still Unconscious at Three This Morning! Doctors Hopeful!”—that a ripple of emotion passed over his face. He ate his breakfast calmly.
But on page four he happened upon a small item cursorily recorded which he read with interest.
“At twelve-thirty this morning after the termination ofthe riot Sergeant of Police Bassett, who was patrolling Seventeenth Street, heard groans issuing from the covered alley leading in behind the Boyd Theatre. On investigating he discovered that they came from a man lying in the alley in a semi-unconscious condition and apparently suffering from attempted strangulation. When able to speak he at first gave his name as John Smith and claimed to have been assaulted, at what time he could not say, by a man wearing U. S. Army uniform. Later he admitted he was Adolph Kraft of 1102 Chicago Street and withdrew his first story, declaring that he was attacked by an unknown man while endeavoring to restrain the rioters from further violence. He was taken to Ford Hospital, where his condition was said to be serious but not critical. The police attach little credence to either story told by Kraft, believing his injury to be the result of some personal vengeance carried out during the confusion of the riot. Kraft was formerly a bar-tender and so far as known has no present occupation. He has been twice convicted of petty offences.”
“So I didn’t kill him, after all,” thought Stacey. “Doesn’t appear that he’d have been much of a loss.” But he reflected dispassionately, merely as noting a fact, that in his assault he had shown the same overwhelming desire to kill that had possessed the mob. That the cause was different on his part did not matter a straw. His intense will to murder had been the same as theirs. Too bad! Not detached enough! Not detached enough! He should have slain the man coldly.
A cordial voice interrupted his meditations. “Well,Captain!—I say! You’re in uniform! You of all people! How come?”
“Hello, Traile,” said Stacey, looking up and shaking hands.
The lieutenant was young and had a fresh pleasant expression when, as now, he was smiling. When, as a moment later, his face grew sober again there was a certain gravity in it, as though a curtain had been dropped,—a hint of the same shadow that hung about Stacey. And this odd contrast in the young man’s face between buoyant youthfulness and weary knowledge impressed Stacey, since he had not seen Traile for many months, and was therefore now seeing him freshly.
“This is fine!” Traile continued swiftly. “But it was pretty rotten of you to be here so long and never let me know. Oh, I know all about it now, you see! Dropped around at Burnham’s on the way here.”
“How is he?”
“Fine! He told me about your coming and staying with him. Confound it! he might have letmeknow he was sick! But no! his wife had to go and wire you!” Traile concluded ruefully, pausing for breath. He sat down.
“Have some breakfast?”
“Thanks, no. I’ve eaten. Then you—you saw all that last night?”
Stacey nodded. “Have you read the estimable comment in the morning paper?” he asked. “Listen!—‘Whatever the provocation it does not warrant any band of men taking the law into their own hands unless they are prepared to face the judgment of their fellow citizens for such an act.’ Seems sufficiently moderate, don’t you think?”
Traile flushed. “Isn’t that damnable!” he blurted out boyishly. “You must think I live in a rotten town!”
“No,” said Stacey somberly, “I wish I did think so. If that were all there was to it we could band together cheerfully to blow up Omaha.”
“I tell you what, Captain!” Traile cried, his face stern. “We’re going after the leaders if we can get them—going after them hard! There are scores of names listed already; there’ll be twice as many by to-night. General Wood’s been ordered here. Arriving to-morrow morning. And meanwhile we’re organizing the Legion men.”
Stacey nodded. “I thought you would be. That’s what I particularly wanted to see you about. I’m not from here, of course, but I want you to let me in on it.”
Traile’s face radiated a sudden joyful surprise. “You, Captain?” he exclaimed.
“Why not?” asked Stacey coolly, lighting a cigarette.
“Well,” stammered the other, “I—of course we’ll take you in with a rush. You’re in uniform, too. How come?”
Stacey looked at him thoughtfully. “You needn’t be embarrassed, Traile,” he said. “You’re quite right. Idon’tlike army stuff and Idon’tcare a fig about helping maintain law and order in this pleasant world. Butif,” he said, his eyes and voice hard, “I can do any fighting against a thousand beasts that tortured one lone individual, and especially that mauled and half killed the one man who stood up to them”—his teeth snapped together—“why, then, I’d like to; that’s all,” he concluded in his normal voice.
Traile stared at him for a moment in silence. “Come home with me,” he said, and rose.
“Sure!” remarked Stacey calmly. “Just give me time to sign my check.”
Traile’s car was outside. They entered it and drove swiftly off.
“Just to show you the way some of us feel about this,” the lieutenant remarked presently, “I’ll tell you that I’ve been ’phoning steadily ever since six-thirty this morning. That’s why you got me so promptly when you called up.”
“To our boys?”
Traile nodded.
“What results?”
The lieutenant frowned, gave the car a sudden exasperated burst of speed, then slowed down somewhat. “Unsatisfactory. Hang it, they won’t come! Only two of ’em, Mills and Jackson, who’re at my house now.”
“Did you really think they’d volunteer?”
“No,” said Traile shortly, “I didn’t. The ones who’ll jump at the job will be the sweet lads who drilled in safe camps and never so much as saw a transport.”
“Oh, well,” Stacey replied coolly, “that wasn’t their fault, and no more’s their point of view. You’re a funny cuss, Traile! Here you are, wanting men to show up, yet I’m blessed if you aren’t railing at the ones who do and praising your men because they don’t!”
“That’s right,” admitted the other, laughing sheepishly. “But then, aren’t we all that—funny cusses, I mean—we chaps who saw the real show?” he added meditatively. “Anyhow, willyoutry them, Captain? Maybe,” he concluded diffidently, “they’ll come for you.”
Stacey nodded. “I’ll try,” he assented. “How many enlisted men of C Company, your company, live here?”
“Twelve,” said Traile promptly.
“And how many of D Company—do you happen to know?”
“Ten. Here we are.”
They turned into a curved driveway leading up to a handsome residence. Traile hurried Stacey out of the car and down the hall of the house to the library.
“Here’s who I made you wait for, boys!” he cried. “You didn’t know—eh?”
The two men in the room sprang to salute, surprise and unmistakable pleasure in their faces.
Stacey felt a sudden touch of gratitude, that was like the warm trickle of a brook into an ice-bound lake. Yet he said little enough to the men in the way of greeting—only a word or two, and shook their hands. Then he plunged at once into business.
“Mills,” he said, “can you and Jackson corral all the men of your company and of D Company too, and get them around here to see me, without obligation to anything—say at noon sharp—that all right, Lieutenant?” Traile nodded.
“Yes, sir,” they replied in unison.
“All right. Let’s make out a list, Lieutenant.”
“Now what’s to do?” Traile remarked impatiently when the men had departed. He was walking nervously about the room.
“Do?” said Stacey. “Nothing,—unless you can give me a drink.”
“You bet I can!” the other cried boyishly, and pushed a bell in the wall. “Leagues and leagues of wine-cellar. Family away in Maine. Whole house to myself. Great! Come in, Blake. Scotch, please,—V.O.P.—and glasses and ice and all that sort of thing.” He flung himself down in a chair. “Funny! Ever since I got back I feel as though I had to be doing something all the time, and yet there isn’t a damned thing I really want to do.Youfeel that way at all, Captain?”
“Yes,” said Stacey, smoking moodily. “Now let’s see,” he added in a different tone. “Where do we stand? What’s the state of affairs in town?”
Traile sat up, alert again. “Two companies of troops from Fort Crook patrolling the city—couldn’t get here last night in time to do any good,” he added bitterly, “because permission had to be granted from Washington first.”
“I recognize the well-loved system.”
“Uh-huh. General Wood arriving to-morrow morning. No definite plan of action to be adopted till he gets here. Listing of names of suspects going on rapidly, however.”
Stacey nodded. “Do you think,” he asked meditatively, “that we’ll have a chance to be in on the arresting part of the game? That’s what I want. Patrolling streets is no use.”
“Sure I do! The colonel from the fort said as much. ’T’s just what they will use us of the Legion for, because we know the town. Here are our drinks. Now when we’ve drunk them what in hellshallwe do? I know!” he cried triumphantly. “We’ll drive around to the hotel and bring your things over here, where they ought to have been all the time.”
Stacey smiled. “All right,” he assented. “I don’t care much for the night clerk at that hotel.”
At five minutes to twelve the library all at once overflowed with men. There was pride in Stacey’s look as he greeted them.
“How many, Mills?” he demanded, after a moment.
“Twenty out of twenty-two, sir. Burnham’s sick—as you know better’n any one else, Captain. Monahan, he—he couldn’t come.”
“He couldn’t?” Stacey’s voice was regretful. “That’s too bad.” He paused for a moment, reflecting. Then he drew himself up very straight and gazed at the men, looking keenly from one to another.
“Now look here, men,” he said. “You’re fed up on army stuff and so am I. You know as well as I do that I haven’t got a bit of authority over you. I can’ttellyou to go and do anything you don’t want to do. But last night some things were done in this town that I happened to see. And one of them was that a brave man stood out in front of a mob of beasts and said ‘no’ to them. And what happened to him because he said ‘no,’ as any one of you would have said, was—oh, God damn it! you know what it was!”
Stacey’s face was white now, and his voice shook with anger.
“He was your mayor,” he continued after a moment, “but it isn’t that I care about. What I care about is that he was aman. You fought the Germans and no one knows better than Ihowyou fought them. Well, there weremenamong the Germans, decent men, whatever we think about what they fought for. In this mob last night there weren’t any men—just beasts. And Iaskyou—justaskyou, mind!—if you’ll turn in with Lieutenant Traile and me and go after them. That’s all,” he concluded, and shut his teeth with a snap.
There was an instant’s pause. Then: “I guess you know, Captain,” said one of the men awkwardly, “that we’ll all of us do whatever you say—and do itquick!” he added sharply.
“Thanks, Sergeant. Is that the way you all feel about it? . . . Thanks again.”
“Now then,” he went on, in a brisker, matter-of-fact tone. “Lieutenant Traile tells me that we’ll be able to make arrests. Well, that’s what we want. I wouldn’t have called you across the block for the sake of patrolling streets. That’s a Boy Scout job. This is the way it’ll be, I suppose. Officers will get lists given them and go out with a patrol of men to get the animals listed. I don’t know how many men they’ll assign to each officer, but two will be enough. Now listen to me. I only want four of you to show up in uniform. Let’s see—er—Morgan and Isaacs for me, Mills and Jackson for Lieutenant Traile. The rest of you, all sixteen, keep out of uniform. Don’t show up at any Legion meeting. Report to me through Sergeant Peters and Corporals Petitvalle, Blaine and Swanson. You’re to find out where the men are whose names we’ll have given us. They won’t be at their homes, of course, most of them. Then the six of us in uniform will go get them. D’you see? Dirty work! Spies’ work! Informing!” He paused questioningly, but the laughter that greeted his warning was reassuring. “All right, then,” he said easily. “You won’t be very popular, of course, but who wants to be popular with skunks? That’s all for now. Nothing doing till General Wood arrives. The sergeant and the three corporals will come here at nine to-morrow morning—in civilian clothes, mind!—and await instructions. Morgan, Isaacs, Mills, and Jackson show up, in uniform, at the Legion meeting to-morrow after General Wood’s arrival.”
When the men had gone Traile looked at Stacey oddly. “Gee whiz, Captain!” he cried finally, “you’re stronger than ever on love for military discipline, aren’t you? Here you’ve gone and organized a civilian detective service right in the bosom of the army! Oh, cripey!” And he burst out laughing.
“Well,” said Stacey coolly, “what we want is to get those men, isn’t it?”
But Blake appeared at the door.
“Good!” Traile exclaimed. “Lunch is ready. We’ll go down. And this afternoon there’s a Legion meeting. I’ll take you over. Not for the joy of it, but just because I’ll have to present you to the officers—and to the colonel from Fort Crook. He’ll be there.”
The next morning, while the two men were at breakfast, Traile was called to the telephone. He returned after five minutes, his face radiant.
“ ’T’s all right,” he said. “Commander of Legion called me up. General got in two hours ago. Already conferred with governor, city commissioner, police department, everything else conferrable. Police department transferred to the colonel, commanding officer at Fort Crook. Already taken control. All arrests to be military arrests—oh, boy! that means us! General to see Legion members at ten this morning.”
“And the mayor?”
“Damned if I didn’t forget to ask!” Traile looked at Stacey remorsefully. “You really do feel badly about the mayor, don’t you?” he said. “You’re a—a good sort, Captain, if you don’t mind my impertinence in saying so,” he concluded impetuously.
“No,” said Stacey quietly, “I’m not a good sort. I’m only mad,—that’s all; and I’m not forgetting why. You’re ten years younger than I, Traile. You’re rather enjoying the lark.”
“All the same,” the other insisted soberly, “youaresorry about the mayor, as well as mad. I’ll go call up the hospital.”
“Better,” he said, when he came back. “Improving slowly.”
Stacey nodded.
When they set out for the Legion meeting they left behind them the four N. C. O.’s, in civilian dress, sitting placidly in the library.
“You know,” observed Traile exultantly, as he set his car plunging down the driveway, “it’s not at all a bad thing the general couldn’t get here till to-day. Because all the conglomerate skunks of this town didn’t get on to the fact that we meant business. They’ve had one whole joyful day with nothing doing but a few troops marching around, and they’ve fairly laid themselves open with bragging about what they did Sunday night. One long bright day of practically handing out their names on a platter. Scores and scores of ’em on the lists.”
There were perhaps three hundred Legion members in the large room they entered. General Wood appeared almost at once, the colonel from Fort Crook beside him.
Stacey gazed at the general with interest. A clear honest face, he thought swiftly, with no appearance either of bitterness or the autocratic spirit. A good soldier from his record—not a doubt of it; but why in the world had such a man chosen to be a soldier, and how had he come through it looking like that?
The general wasted no time. “There are long lists of men implicated in this business,” he said to the three hundred. “Your job will be to go out and get them. When you go to make an arrest use no more force than is necessary and use all the force that is necessary. Remember you are sent for a certain man. Come back with him. Bring him in alive if possible. But bring him in. Officers will now report to Colonel M——.” And the general left the room abruptly.
Presently Stacey and Traile received their lists—ten names apiece.
“We’d like just four men for escort—two each, sir, if it’s all the same to you. May we pick the four?” Traile asked.
“Certainly,” said the colonel. “Get service revolvers for yourselves and rifles for your men of the ordnance officer. Bring your prisoners here to police headquarters as you get them.”
“Pshaw!” the lieutenant remarked in disgust, as they were speeding swiftly homeward, with, in the tonneau behind them, the four men, armed now and in uniform, whom Stacey had chosen as escort the day before. “Pshaw! What’s twenty names?”
They left their guard in the hall of Traile’s house, went into the library, and copied their lists for the other four men who were waiting there.
“All right,” Stacey remarked. “Start at it. As soon as any one’s located send one of your men around to report to us. And you’d better detail some one to see that he doesn’t get away in the meantime.”
“Yes, sir,” said Peters. “I guess you’ll find that all right, Captain. We’ve worked out a plan.”
“I thought you would have, Sergeant.”
The men saluted, for all that they were in civilian clothes, and went out.
There was nothing to do but wait. Traile fidgeted, but Stacey was impassive. Suddenly he smiled. It had occurred to him that, having learned from the newspaper item the name of the man he had attempted to strangle Sunday night, he could easily lay an information against him and proceed to arrest him—supposing he was sufficiently recovered to permit of arrest. Stacey smiled (he had a rather grisly sense of humor) because he could picture the horror on—what was his name?—Kraft’s brutish face when he saw his assailant himself come for him. But it was only a diverting fancy. Stacey did not follow it up. In the matter of retribution he thought Kraft had had his share.
“You’ll take my car, Captain—you can drive a Cadillac, can’t you?—and I’ll use my father’s,” Traile suggested.
“All right.”
In less than an hour a man reported with an address.
“You go after him, Lieutenant,” said Stacey calmly. “You’re more in a hurry than I am.”
Traile went joyfully.
Fifteen minutes later two more were announced to be located, and, as Stacey was on the point of getting into Traile’s car with Morgan and Isaacs (his escort), and the two men who had reported, still another name was brought in.
Stacey went after them. Two he got without difficulty, disregarding their cringing protestations of innocence with the same impassive disgust he had shown—except for one moment—toward the mob on Sunday night. The third, who was hiding in the back room of a saloon and was encouraged by the presence of companions, showed fight, until Stacey rapped him dispassionately on the head with the butt of his revolver. Stacey took his prisoners to the police station and returned to the house.
Traile had already been there and gone again. Two other men were waiting, and Stacey set off once more.
“Beautiful system! Works like a charm. Good man, Peters! Too bad Burnham can’t be in on it!” he thought to himself. He wondered once or twice why Monahan couldn’t come. He felt a little sorry. He had always liked Monahan.
At four o’clock he and Traile had brought the last men on their lists to the police station.
“Pshaw!” said the lieutenant, “it’s too easy!—though two of the ones I got livened things up for a while. Come on! Let’s ask for more.”
They reported to the colonel.
“We’ve got all our men, sir,” said Traile, who was spokesman because he knew the officer personally.
“What!” the colonel exclaimed. “All twenty! Why, no one else has got a third through his list yet! Complain they can’t find their men.”
“We were lucky, I guess, sir,” Traile returned. “May we have some more names?”
“Sure! Coming in all the time.”
They received two further lists, dropped them in their pockets, and set off once more.
But when in the library each read his own paper through, Stacey started slightly. There were only nine names on the copied list that he handed to Peters.
At ten that evening they reported once more to the colonel.
“I’ve brought in all but two on my list, sir,” said Traile, “and Captain Carroll all but three on his. They’re beginning to get wise and skip out of town.”
The colonel considered the two men curiously. “How on earth do you do it?” he asked.
Traile grinned. He had always been irrepressibly unmilitary; it was why Stacey had liked him. “Just system, sir,” he replied. “Can you give us some more names?”
The colonel reflected. “Well, I’ll tell you,” he said finally. “I’ll make you out a list—one list, since it’s clear you two work together—of twenty men the others couldn’t get, but who aren’t supposed to have left the city. Go after them and see what you can do, but not till to-morrow morning. Mind! That’s an order! These are a bad lot—crooks, nearly all of them, the chief of police says. I don’t want any midnight casualties among Legion men.”
The two took their escort to their homes, then drove back to the house. But as they got out of the car Stacey paused.
“Traile,” he said, “will you let me have your car for a little while? There’s some one I want to see. I’ll be back inside of an hour.”
“Sure! You know you don’t have to ask.” But Traile could not conceal his boyish curiosity.