"There is a name which the press of America no longer prints. Let every true American, in public or in private, cease hereafter from uttering that name."
"There is a name which the press of America no longer prints. Let every true American, in public or in private, cease hereafter from uttering that name."
Invariably the caption over this paragraph was the one word:
SILENCE!
One week later, to the day, the wife of one of the richest men in America died of acute pneumonia at her home in Chicago. Practically all the daily papers in America carried notices of this lady's death; the wealth of her husband and her own prominence in social and philanthropic affairs justified this. At greater or at less length it was variously set forth that she was the niece of a former ambassador to the Court of St. James; that she was the national head of a great patriotic organisation; that she was said to have dispensed upward of fiftythousand dollars a year in charities; that she was born in such and such a year at such and such a place; that she left, besides a husband, three children and one grandchild; and so forth and so on.
But not a single paper in the United States stated that she was the only sister of Congressman Jason Mallard.
The remainder of this account must necessarily be in the nature of a description of episodes occurring at intervals during a period of about six weeks; these episodes, though separated by lapses of time, are nevertheless related.
Three days after the burial of his sister Congressman Mallard took part in a debate on a matter of war-tax legislation upon the floor of the House. As usual he voiced the sentiments of a minority of one, his vote being the only vote cast in the negative on the passage of the measure. His speech was quite brief. To his colleagues, listening in dead silence without sign of dissent or approval, it seemed exceedingly brief, seeing that nearly always before Mallard, when he spoke at all upon any question, spoke atlength. While he spoke the men in the press gallery took no notes, and when he had finished and was leaving the chamber it was noted that the venerable Congressman Boulder, a man of nearly eighty, drew himself well into his seat, as though he feared Mallard in passing along the aisle might brush against him.
He May or May Not Keep FaithHE MAY OR MAY NOT KEEP FAITH,BUT YOU CAN BET HE ALWAYS KEEPS A SCRAP-BOOK.ToList
HE MAY OR MAY NOT KEEP FAITH,BUT YOU CAN BET HE ALWAYS KEEPS A SCRAP-BOOK.ToList
The only publication in America that carried a transcript of Congressman Mallard's remarks on this occasion was the Congressional Record.
At the next day's session Congressman Mallard's seat was vacant; the next day likewise, and the next it was vacant. It was rumoured that he had left Washington, his exact whereabouts being unknown. However, no one in Washington, so far as was known, in speaking of his disappearance, mentioned him by name. One man addressing another would merely say that he understood a certain person had left town or that he understood a certain person was still missing from town; the second man in all likelihood would merely nodunderstandingly and then by tacit agreement the subject would be changed.
Just outside one of the lunch rooms in the Union Station at St. Louis late one night in the latter part of January an altercation occurred between two men. One was a tall, distinguished-looking man of middle age. The other was a railroad employé—a sweeper and cleaner.
It seemed that the tall man, coming out of the lunch room, and carrying a travelling bag and a cane, stumbled over the broom which the sweeper was using on the floor just beyond the doorway. The traveller, who appeared to have but poor control over his temper, or rather no control at all over it, accused the station hand of carelessness and cursed him. The station hand made an indignant and impertinent denial. At that the other flung down his bag, swung aloft his heavy walking stick and struck the sweeper across the head with force sufficient to lay open the victim's scalp in a two-inch gash, which bled freely.
For once a policeman was on the spot when trouble occurred. This particularpoliceman was passing through the train shed and he saw the blow delivered. He ran up and, to be on the safe side, put both men under technical arrest. The sweeper, who had been bowled over by the clout he had got, made a charge of unprovoked assault against the stranger; the latter expressed a blasphemous regret that he had not succeeded in cracking the sweeper's skull. He appeared to be in a highly nervous, highly irritable state. At any rate such was the interpretation which the patrolman put upon his aggressive prisoner's behaviour.
Walking between the pair to prevent further hostilities the policeman took both men into the station master's office, his intention being to telephone from there for a patrol wagon. The night station master accompanied them. Inside the room, while the station master was binding up the wound in the sweeper's forehead with a pocket handkerchief, it occurred to the policeman that in the flurry of excitement he had not found out the name of the tall and still excited belligerent. The sweeper he alreadyknew. He asked the tall man for his name and business.
"My name," said the prisoner, "is Jason C. Mallard. I am a member of Congress."
The station master forgot to make the knot in the bandage he was tying about the sweeper's head. The sweeper forgot the pain of his new headache and the blood which trickled down his face and fell upon the front of his overalls. As though governed by the same set of wires these two swung about, and with the officer they stared at the stranger. And as they stared, recognition came into the eyes of all three, and they marvelled that before now none of them had discerned the identity of the owner of that splendid tousled head of hair and those clean-cut features, now swollen and red with an unreasonable choler. The policeman was the first to get his shocked and jostled senses back, and the first to speak. He proved himself a quick-witted person that night, this policeman did; and perhaps this helps to explain why his superior, the head of the St. Louis police department,on the very next day promoted him to be a sergeant.
But when he spoke it was not to Mallard but to the sweeper.
"Look here, Mel Harris," he said; "you call yourself a purty good Amurican, don't you?"
"You bet your life I do!" was the answer. "Ain't I got a boy in camp soldierin'?"
"Well, I got two there myself," said the policeman; "but that ain't the question now. I see you've got a kind of a little bruised place there on your head. Now then, as a good Amurican tryin' to do your duty to your country at all times, I want you to tell me how you come by that there bruise. Did somebody mebbe hit you, or as a matter of fact ain't it the truth that you jest slipped on a piece of banana peelin' or something of that nature, and fell up against the door jamb of that lunch room out yonder?"
For a moment the sweeper stared at his interrogator, dazed. Then a grin of appreciation bisected his homely red-streaked face.
"Why, it was an accident, officer," heanswered. "I slipped down and hit my own self a wallop, jest like you said. Anyway, it don't amount to nothin'."
"You seen what happened, didn't you?" went on the policeman, addressing the station master. "It was a pure accident, wasn't it?"
"That's what it was—a pure accident," stated the station master.
"Then, to your knowledge, there wasn't no row of any sort occurring round here to-night?" went on the policeman.
"Not that I heard of."
"Well, if there had a-been you'd a-heard of it, wouldn't you?"
"Sure I would!"
"That's good," said the policeman. He jabbed a gloved thumb toward the two witnesses. "Then, see here, Harris! Bein' as it was an accident pure and simple and your own fault besides, nobody—no outsider—couldn't a-had nothin' to do with your gettin' hurt, could he?"
"Not a thing in the world," replied Harris.
"Not a thing in the world," echoed the station master.
"And you ain't got any charge to make against anybody for what was due to your own personal awkwardness, have you?" suggested the blue-coated prompter.
"Certainly I ain't!" disclaimed Harris almost indignantly.
Mallard broke in: "You can't do this—you men," he declared hoarsely. "I struck that man and I'm glad I did strike him—damn him! I wish I'd killed him. I'm willing to take the consequences. I demand that you make a report of this case to your superior officer."
As though he had not heard him—as though he did not know a fourth person was present—the policeman, looking right past Mallard with a levelled, steady, contemptuous gaze, addressed the other two. His tone was quite casual, and yet somehow he managed to freight his words with a scorn too heavy to be expressed in mere words:
"Boys," he said, "it seems-like to me the air in this room is so kind of foul that itain't fitten for good Amuricans to be breathin' it. So I'm goin' to open up this here door and see if it don't purify itself—of its own accord."
He stepped back and swung the door wide open; then stepped over and joined the station master and the sweeper. And there together they all three stood without a word from any one of them as the fourth man, with his face deadly white now where before it had been a passionate red, and his head lolling on his breast, though he strove to hold it rigidly erect, passed silently out of the little office. Through the opened door the trio with their eyes followed him while he crossed the concrete floor of the concourse and passed through a gate. They continued to watch until he had disappeared in the murk, going toward where a row of parked sleepers stood at the far end of the train shed.
Yet another policeman is to figure in this recital of events. This policeman's name is Caleb Waggoner and this Caleb Waggoner was and still is the night marshal in a smalltown in Iowa on the Missouri River. He is one-half the police force of the town, the other half being a constable who does duty in the daytime. Waggoner suffers from an affection which in a large community might prevent him from holding such a job as the one he does hold. He has an impediment of the speech which at all times causes him to stammer badly. When he is excited it is only by a tremendous mental and physical effort and after repeated endeavours that he can form the words at all. In other regards he is a first-rate officer, sober, trustworthy and kindly.
On the night of the eighteenth of February, at about half past eleven o'clock, Marshal Waggoner was completing his regular before-midnight round of the business district. The weather was nasty, with a raw wet wind blowing and half-melted slush underfoot. In his tour he had encountered not a single person. That dead dumb quiet which falls upon a sleeping town on a winter's night was all about him. But as he turned out of Main Street, which is the principal thoroughfare, into SycamoreStreet, a short byway running down between scattered buildings and vacant lots to the river bank a short block away, he saw a man standing at the side door of the Eagle House, the town's second-best hotel. A gas lamp flaring raggedly above the doorway brought out the figure with distinctness. The man was not moving—he was just standing there, with the collar of a heavy overcoat turned up about his throat and a soft black hat with a wide brim drawn well down upon his head.
Drawing nearer, Waggoner, who by name or by sight knew every resident of the town, made up his mind that the loiterer was a stranger. Now a stranger abroad at such an hour and apparently with no business to mind would at once be mentally catalogued by the vigilant night marshal as a suspicious person. So when he had come close up to the other, padding noiselessly in his heavy rubber boots, the officer halted and from a distance of six feet or so stared steadfastly at the suspect. The suspect returned the look.
What Waggoner saw was a thin, haggardface covered to the upper bulge of the jaw-bones with a disfiguring growth of reddish whiskers and inclosed at the temples by shaggy, unkempt strands of red hair which protruded from beneath the black hat. Evidently the man had not been shaved for weeks; certainly his hair needed trimming and combing. But what at the moment impressed Waggoner more even than the general unkemptness of the stranger's aspect was the look out of his eyes. They were widespread eyes and bloodshot as though from lack of sleep, and they glared into Waggoner's with a peculiar, strained, hearkening expression. There was agony in them—misery unutterable.
Thrusting his head forward then, the stranger cried out, and his voice, which in his first words was deep and musical, suddenly, before he had uttered a full sentence, turned to a sharp, half-hysterical falsetto:
"Why don't you say something to me, man?" he cried at the startled Waggoner. "For God's sake, why don't you speak to me? Even if you do know me, why don'tyou speak? Why don't you call me by my name? I can't stand it—I can't stand it any longer, I tell you. You've got to speak."
Astounded, Waggoner strove to answer. But, because he was startled and a bit apprehensive as well, his throat locked down on his faulty vocal cords. His face moved and his lips twisted convulsively, but no sound issued from his mouth.
The stranger, glaring into Waggoner's face with those two goggling eyes of his, which were all eyeballs, threw up both arms at full length and gave a great gagging outcry.
"It's come!" he shrieked; "it's come! The silence has done it at last. It deafens me—I'm deaf! I can't hear you! I can't hear you!"
He turned and ran south—toward the river—and Waggoner, recovering himself, ran after him full bent. It was a strangely silent race these two ran through the empty little street, for in the half-melted snow their feet made no sounds at all. Waggoner, for obvious reasons, could utter no words; the other man did not.
A scant ten feet in the lead the fugitive reached the high clay bank of the river. Without a backward glance at his pursuer, without checking his speed, he went off and over the edge and down out of sight into the darkness. Even at the end of the twenty-foot plunge the body in striking made almost no sound at all, for, as Waggoner afterward figured, it must have struck against a mass of shore ice, then instantly to slide off, with scarcely a splash, into the roiled yellow waters beyond.
The policeman checked his own speed barely in time to save himself from following over the brink. He crouched on the verge of the frozen clay bluff, peering downward into the blackness and the quiet. He saw nothing and he heard nothing except his own laboured breathing.
The body was never recovered. But at daylight a black soft hat was found on a half-rotted ice floe, where it had lodged close up against the bank. A name was stamped in the sweatband, and by this the identity of the suicide was established as that of Congressman Jason Mallard.