The next day, and the next, and the next,--for seven days,--Archie hung in the bull rings. In the middle of the eighth day, after his head had been rolling and lolling about on his shoulders between his cold, swollen, naked arms, he suddenly became frantic, put forth a mighty effort, lifted himself, and began to bite his hands and his wrists, gnashing his teeth on the steel handcuffs, yammering like a maniac.That evening, the evening of the eighth day, when the guard came and flashed his lamp on him, Archie's body was hanging there, still, his chin on his breast. Down his arms the blood was trickling from the wounds he had made with his teeth. The guard set down his lantern, ran down the corridor, returned presently with Ball, and Jeffries, the doctor.They lowered his body. The doctor bent his head to the white breast and listened."Take him to the hospital," he said. "I guess he's had about all he can stand.""God, he had nerve!" said Ball, looking at the body. "He wouldn't give in."He shambled away, his head bent. He was perplexed. He had not failed since--when was it?--since number 13993 had--died of heart failure, in the hospital, five years before.XXIIt was at Bradford Ford's that night of the wedding that Eades made his proposal of marriage to Elizabeth Ward. It was June, court had adjourned, his work was done, the time seemed to him auspicious; he had thought it all out, arranged the details in his mind. The great country house, open to the summer night, was thronged, the occasion, just as the newspapers had predicted in their hackneyed phrase, was a brilliant one, as befitted the marriage of Ford's youngest daughter, Hazel, to Mr. Henry Wilmington Dodge, of Philadelphia. Eades moved about, greeting his friends, smiling automatically, but his eyes were discreetly seeking their one object. At last he had a glimpse of her, through smilax and ribbons; it was during the ceremony; she was in white, and her lips were drawn as she repressed the emotions weddings inspire in women. He waited, in what patience he could, until the service was pronounced; then he must take his place in the line that moved through the crowd like a current through the sea; the bestowal of the felicitations took a long time. Then the supper; Elizabeth was at the bride's table, and still he must wait. He went up-stairs finally, and there he encountered Ford alone in a room where, in some desolate sense of neglect, he had retired to hide the sorrow he felt at this parting with his child, and to combat the annoying feeling the wedding had thrust on him--the feeling that he was growing old. Ford sat by an open window, gazing out into the moonlight that lay on the river by which he had built his colossal house. He was smoking, in the habit which neither age nor sorrow could break."Come in, come in," said Ford. "I'm glad to see you. I want some one to talk to. Have a cigar."But Eades declined, and Ford glanced at him in the suspicion which was part of the bereaved and jealous feeling that was poisoning this evening of happiness for him. He knew that Eades smoked, and he wondered why he now refused. "He declines because I'm getting old; he wishes to shun my society; he feels that if he accepts the cigar, he will have to stay long enough to smoke it. It will be that way now. Yes, I'm getting old. I'm out of it." So ran Ford's thoughts.Eades had gone to the window and stood looking out across the dark trees to the river, swimming in the moonlight. Below him were the pretty lights of Japanese lanterns, beyond, at the road, the two lamps on the gate-posts. The odors of the June night came to him and, from below, the laughter of the wedding-guests and the strains of an orchestra."What a beautiful place you have here, Mr. Ford!" Eades exclaimed."Well, it'll do for an old--for a man to spend his declining years.""Yes, indeed," mused Eades.Ford winced at this immediate acquiescence."And what a night!" Eades went on, "Ideal for a wedding."Ford looked at him a moment, then decided to change the subject."Well, I see you struck pay-dirt in the grand jury," he said."Yes," replied Eades, turning away from night and nature when such subjects were introduced."You're doing a good work there," said Ford; "a good work for law and order."He used the stereotyped phrase in the old belief that "law" and "order" are synonyms, though he was not thinking of law or of order just then; he was thinking of the radiant girl in the drawing-room below.Eades turned to the window again. The night attracted him. He did not care to talk. He, too, was thinking of a girl in the drawing-room below; thinking how she had looked in that moment during the ceremony when he had had the glimpse of her. He must go at once and find her. He succeeded presently in getting away from Ford, and left in a manner that deepened Ford's conviction that he was out of it.He met her at the foot of the staircase, and they went out of doors."Oh," exclaimed Elizabeth, "how delicious it is out here!"In silence they descended the wide steps from the veranda and went down the walk. The sky was purple, the stars trembled in it, and the moon filled all the heavens with a light that fell to the river, flowing silently below them. They went on to the narrow strip of sward that sloped to the water. On the dim farther shore they could see the light in some farm-house; far down the river was the city, a blur of light."What a beautiful place the Fords have here!" said Eades."Yes," said Elizabeth, "it's ideal.""It's my ideal of a home," said Eades, and then after a silence he went on. "I've been thinking a good deal of home lately."He glanced at the girl; she had become still almost to rigidity."I am so glad our people are beginning to appreciate our beautiful river," she said, and her voice had a peculiar note of haste and fear in it. "I'm so glad. People travel to other lands and rave over scenery, when they have this right at home." She waved her hand in a little gesture to include the river and its dark shores. She realized that she was speaking unnaturally, as she always did with him. The realization irritated her. "The Country Club is just above us, isn't it?" she hurriedly continued, consciously struggling to appear unconscious. "Have you--"He interrupted her. "I've been thinking of you a good deal lately," he said. His voice had mastery in it. "A good deal," he repeated, "for more than a year now. But I've waited until I had something to offer you, some achievement, however small, and now--I begin to feel that I need help and--sympathy in the work that is laid on me. Elizabeth--""Don't," she said, "please don't." She had turned from him now and taken a step backward."Just a minute, Elizabeth," he insisted. "I have waited to tell you--that I love you, to ask you to be my wife. I have loved you a long, long time. Don't deny me now--don't decide until you can think--I can wait. Will you think it over? Will you consider it--carefully--will you?"He tried to look into her face, which she had turned away. Her hands were clasped before her, her fingers interlocked tightly. He heard her sigh. Then with an effort she looked up at him."No," she began, "I can not; I--"He stopped her."Don't say no," he said. "You have not considered, I am sure. Won't you at least think before deciding definitely?"She had found more than the usual difficulty there is in saying no to anything, or to any one; now she had strength only to shake her head."You must not decide hastily," he insisted."We must go in." She turned back toward the house."I can wait to know," Eades assured her.They retraced their steps silently. As they went up the walk she said:"Of course, I am not insensible of the honor, Mr. Eades."The phrase instantly seemed inadequate, even silly, to her. Why was it she never could be at ease with him?"Don't decide, I beg," he said, "until you have considered the matter carefully. Promise me.""You must leave me now," she said.He bowed and stood looking after her as she went up the steps and ran across the veranda in her eagerness to lose herself in the throng within the house. And Eades remained outside, walking under the trees.Half an hour later Elizabeth stood with Marriott in the drawing-room. Her face was pale; the joy, the spirit that had been in it earlier in the evening had gone from it."Ah," said Marriott suddenly, "there goes John Eades. I hadn't seen him before."Elizabeth glanced hurriedly at Eades and then curiously at Marriott. His face wore the peculiar smile she had seen so often. Now it seemed remote, to belong to other days, days that she had lost."He's making a great name for himself just now," said Marriott. "He's bound to win. He'll go to Congress, or be elected governor or something, sure."She longed for his opinion and yet just then she felt it impossible to ask it."He's a--""What?" She could not forbear to ask, but she put the question with a little note of challenge that made Marriott turn his head."One of those young civilians.""One of what young civilians?""That Emerson writes about.""He's not so very young, is he?" Elizabeth tried to smile."The young civilians are often very old; I have known them to be octogenarians."He looked at her and was suddenly struck by her pallor and the drawn expression about her eyes. She had met his gaze, and he realized instantly that he had made some mistake. They were standing there in the drawing-room, the canvas-covered floor was littered with rose-leaves. It was the moment when the guests had begun to feel the first traces of weariness, when the laughter had begun to lose its spirit and the talk its spontaneity, when the older people were beginning to say good night, leaving the younger behind to shower the bride and groom with rice and confetti. Perplexed, excited, self-conscious after Eades's declaration, feeling a little fear and some secret pride, suddenly Elizabeth saw the old, good-humored, friendly expression fade from Marriott's eyes, and there came a new look, one she had never seen before, an expression of sudden, illuminative intelligence, followed by a shade of pain and regret, perhaps a little reproach."Where does Emerson say--that?" she asked."You look it up and see," he said presently.She looked at him steadily, though it was with a great effort, tried to smile, and the smile made her utterly sick at heart."I--must look up father," she said, "it's time--"She left him abruptly, and he stood there, the smile gone from his face, his hands plunged deep in his pockets. A moment he bit his lips, then he turned and dashed up the stairs."I'm a fool," he said to himself.Elizabeth had thought of love, she had imagined its coming to her in some poetic way, but this--somehow, this was not poetic. She recalled distinctly every word Eades had spoken, but even more vividly she recalled Marriott's glance. It meant that he thought she loved Eades! It had all become irrevocable in a moment; she could not, of course, undertake to explain; it was all ridiculous, too ridiculous for anything but tears.Looking back on her intimacy with Marriott, she realized now that what she would miss most was the good fellowship there had been between them. With him, though without realizing it at the time, she had found expression easy, her thoughts had been clear, she could find words for them which he could understand and appreciate. Whenever she came across anything in a book or in a poem or in a situation there was always the satisfying sense that she could share it with Marriott; he would apprehend instantly. There was no one else who could do this; with her mother, with her father, with Dick, no such thing was possible; with them she spoke a different language, lived in another world. And so it was with her friends; she moved as an alien being in the conventional circle of that existence to which she had been born. One by one, her friends had ceased to be friends, they had begun to shrink away, not consciously, perhaps, but certainly, into the limbo of mere acquaintance. She thought of all this as she rode home that night, and after she had got home; and when it all seemed clear, she shrank from the clarity; she would not, after all, have it too clear; she must not push to any conclusion all these thoughts about Gordon Marriott. She chose to decide that he had been stupid, and his stupidity offended her; it was not pleasant to have him sneer at a man who had just told her he loved her, no matter who the man was, and she felt, with an inconsistency that she clung to out of a sense of self-preservation, that Marriott should have known this; he might have let her enjoy her triumph for a little, and then--but this was dangerous; was he to conclude that she loved him?What was it, she wondered, that made her weak and impotent in the presence of Eades? She did not like to own a fear of him, yet she felt a fear; would she some day succumb? The fear crept on her and distressed her; she knew very well that he would pursue her, never waver or give up or lose sight of his purpose. In some way he typified for her all that was fixed, impersonal, irrefragable--society on its solid rocks. He had no doubts about anything, his opinions were all made, tested, tried and proved. Any uncertainty, any fluidity, any inconsistency was impossible. And she felt more and more inadequate herself; she felt that she had nothing to oppose to all this.BOOK IIIIFour miles from town, where a white pike crosses a mud road, is Lulu Corners. There is little at this cross-roads to inspire a name less frivolous, nothing indeed but a weather-beaten store, where the people of the neighborhood wait for the big yellow trolley-cars that sweep across the country hourly, sounding their musical air-whistles over the fields. Half a mile from the Corners two unmarried sisters, Bridget and Margaret Flanagan, for twenty years had lived alone in a hovel that was invaded by pigs and chickens and geese. Together, these aged women, tall, bony and masculine, lived their graceless, squalid lives, untouched by romance or tragedy, working their few acres and selling their pork, and eggs and feathers in the city. The nearest dwelling was a quarter of a mile away, and the neighbors were still farther removed by prejudices, religious and social. Thus the old women were left to themselves. The report was that they were misers, and the miserable manner of their lives supported rather than belied this theory; there was a romantic impression in a country-side that knew so little romance, that a large amount of money was hidden somewhere about the ugly premises.On an evening in late October, Bridget Flanagan was getting supper. The meal was meager, and when she had made it ready she placed a lamp on the table and waited for Margaret, who had gone out to fasten the shanty in which the barn-yard animals slept. Margaret came in presently, locked the door, and the sisters sat down to their supper. They had just crossed themselves and heaped their plates with potatoes, when they heard a knock at the door."Who can that be, sister?" said Bridget, looking up."I wonder now!" said Margaret in a surprise that was almost an alarm.The knocking was repeated."Mary help us!" said Bridget, again making the sign of the cross. "No one ever came at this hour before."The knocking sounded again, louder, more insistent."You go on to the door, sister," said Bridget, "and let them in,--whoever they may be, I dunno."Margaret went to the door, shot back the bolt, and pulled on the knob. And then she turned and cast a look of terror at her sister. Some one was holding the door on the other side. The strange resistance of this late and unknown visitor, who but a moment before had wanted to come in, appalled her. She pressed her knee against the door, and tried to lock it again. But now the door held against her; she strained and pushed, then turned and beckoned her sister with frightened eyes. Bridget came, and the two women, throwing their weight against the door, tried to close it; but the unknown, silent and determined one was holding it on the other side. This strange conflict continued. Presently the two old women glanced up; in the crack, between the door and the jamb, they saw a club. Slowly, slowly, it made way against them, twisting, turning, pushing, forcing its way into the room. They looked in awful fascination. The club grew, presently a foot of it was in the room; then a hand appeared, a man's hand, gripping the club. They watched; presently a wrist with a leather strap around it; then slowly and by degrees, a forearm, bare, enormous, hard as the club, corded with heavy muscles and covered with a thick fell of black hair, came after it. Then there was a final push, an oath, the door flew open, and two masked men burst into the room.Three hours later, Perkins, a farmer who lived a quarter of a mile away, hearing an unusual sound in his front yard, took a lantern and went out. In the grass heavy with dew, just inside his gate, he saw a woman's body, and going to it, he shed the rays of his lantern into the face of Bridget Flanagan. Her gray hair was matted, and her face was stained with blood; her clothes were torn and covered with the mud through which she had dragged herself along the roadside from her home. Perkins called and his wife came to the door, holding a lamp above her head, shading her eyes with her hand, afraid to go out. When he had borne Bridget indoors, Perkins took his two sons, his lantern and his shot-gun, and went across the fields to the Flanagans'. In the kitchen, bound and gagged, Margaret lay quite dead, her head beaten in by a club. The two old women must have fought desperately for their lives. The robbers, for all their work, as Perkins learned when Bridget almost miraculously recovered, had secured twenty-three silver dollars, which the sisters had kept hidden in a tin can--the fatal fortune which rumor had swelled to such a size.Perkins roused the neighborhood, and all night long men were riding to and fro between Lulu Corners and the city. A calm Sunday morning followed, and then came the coroner, the reporters and the crowds. While the bell of the little Methodist church a mile away on the Gilboa Pike was ringing, Mark Bentley, the sheriff, dashed up behind a team of lean horses, sweating and splashed with mud from their mad gallop. Behind him came his deputies and the special deputies he had sworn in, and, sitting in his buggy, holding his whip in a gloved hand, waving and flourishing it like a baton, Bentley divided into posses the farmers who had gathered with shot-guns, rifles, pitchforks, axes, clubs, anything, placed a deputy at the head of each posse and sent them forth. Detectives and policemen came, and all that Sunday mobs of angry men were beating up the whole country for miles. Some were mounted, and these flew down the roads, spreading the alarm, leaving women standing horror-stricken in doorways with children whimpering in their skirts; others went in buggies, others plodded on foot. And all day long crowds of women and children pressed about the little house, peering into the kitchen with morbid curiosity. The crowd swelled, then shrank, then swelled again. The newspapers made the most of the tragedy, and under head-lines of bold type, in black ink and in red, they told the story of the crime with all the details the boyish imaginations of their reporters could invent; they printed pictures of the shanty, and diagrams of the kitchen, with crosses to indicate where Margaret had fallen, where Bridget had been left for dead, where the table and the stove had stood, where the door was; and by the time the world had begun a new week, the whole city was in the same state of horror and fear, and breathed the same rage and lust of vengeance that had fallen on Lulu Corners.IIFour days before the Sunday of the tragedy Archie Koerner finished his year's imprisonment and passed from the prison within the walls to the larger prison that awaited him in the world outside. The same day was released another convict, a man aged at fifty, who had entered the prison twenty years before. The judge who had sentenced him was a young man, just elevated to the bench, and, intoxicated by the power that had come to him so early in life, had read the words, "twenty years," in the statute book, and, assuming as axiomatic that the words were the atonement for the crime the man had committed, without thinking, had pronounced these words aloud, and then written them in a large book. From there a clerk copied them on to a blank form, sealed it with a gilt seal, and, like the young judge, forgot the incident. The day the man was released he could no longer remember what crime he had committed. He was old and shattered, and had looked forward to freedom with terror. Time and again he had asked his guard to report him, so that he might be deprived of his good time and have the day of release postponed. The guard, however, knowing that the man's mind was gone, had refused to do this, and the man was forced out into the world. Having no family, no friends and no home, he clung to Archie as to the last tie that bound him to the only life he knew. Archie, of course, considered him an incubus, but he pitied him, and when they had sold their railroad tickets to a scalper, they beat their way back to the city on a freight-train, Archie showing the old man how it was done.At eleven o'clock on Friday morning they entered Danny Gibbs's saloon. Archie was glad to find the place unchanged--the same whisky barrels along the wall, the opium pipe above the bar, the old gray cat sleeping in the sun. All was familiar, save the bartender, who, in fresh white jacket, leaned against the bar, a newspaper spread before him, and studied the form sheets that were published daily to instruct men how to gamble on the races."Where's Dan?" asked Archie.The bartender looked at him superciliously, and then concluded to say:"He's not here.""Not down yet, heh?" said Archie. "Do you know a certain party called--" Archie glanced about cautiously and leaned over the bar, "--called Curly?"The bartender looked at him blankly."He's a friend of mine--it's all right. If he comes in, just tell him a certain party was asking for him. Tell Dan, too. I've just got home--just done my bit."But even this distinction, all he had to show for his year in prison, did not impress the bartender as Archie thought it should. He drew from his waistcoat pocket a dollar bill, carefully smoothed it out, and tossed it on to the bar."Give us a little drink. Here, Dad," he said to the old convict, "have one." The old man grinned and approached the bar. "Never mind him," said Archie in a confidential undertone, "he's an old-timer."The old convict had lost the middle finger of his right hand in a machine in the prison years before, and now, in his imbecility, he claimed the one compensation imaginable; he used this mutilation for the entertainment of his fellows. If any one looked at him, he would spread the fingers of his right hand over his face, the stub of the middle finger held against his nose, his first and third fingers drawing down the lower lids of his eyes until their whites showed, and then wiggle his thumb and little finger and look, now gravely, now with a grin, into the eyes of the observer. The old convict, across whose sodden brain must have glimmered a vague notion that something was required of him, was practising his one accomplishment, his silly gaze fixed on the bartender.When the bartender saw this his face set in a kind of superstitious terror."Don't mind him," said Archie; "He's stir simple."The bartender, as he set out the whisky, was reassured, not so much by the patronage as by Archie's explanation that he had just come from prison. He had been at Danny Gibbs's long enough to know that a man is not to be judged solely by his clothes, and Archie, as a man reduced to the extremity of the garb the state supplied, might still be of importance in their world. While they were drinking, another man entered the saloon, a short, heavy man, and, standing across the room, looked, not at Archie and Dad, but at their reflections in the mirror behind the bar. Archie, recognizing a trick of detectives, turned slightly away. The man went out."Elbow, eh?" said Archie."Yep," said the bartender. "Cunningham.""A new one on me. Kouka here yet?""Oh, yes.""Flyin'?""Yep.""Well," said Archie, "give 's another. I got a thirst in the big house anyway--and these rum turns." He smiled an apology for his clothes. They drank again; then Archie said:"Tell Dan I was here.""Who shall I say?" inquired the bartender."Dutch.""Oh, yes! All right. He'll be down about one o'clock.""All right. Come on, Dad," said Archie, and he went out, towing his battered hulk of humanity behind him. At the corner he saw Cunningham with another man, whom he recognized as Quinn. When they met, as was inevitable, Quinn smiled and said:"Hello, Archie! Back again?""Yes," said Archie. He would have kept on, but Quinn laid a hand on his arm."Hold on a minute," he said."What's the rap?" asked Archie."Well, you'd better come down to the front office a minute."Cunningham had seized the old man, and the two were taken to the Central Police Station. They were charged with being "suspicious persons," and spent the night in prison. The next morning, when they were arraigned before Bostwick, the old man surprised every one by pleading guilty, and Bostwick sentenced him to the workhouse for thirty days. But Archie demanded a jury and asked that word be sent to his attorney."Your attorney!" sneered Bostwick, "and who's your attorney?""Mr. Marriott," said Archie.The suggestion of a jury trial maddened Bostwick. He seemed, indeed, to take it almost as a personal insult. He whispered with Quinn, and then said:"I'll give you till evening to get out of town--you hear?"Archie, standing at attention in the old military way, said:"Yes, sir.""You've got to clear out; we don't want you around, you understand?""I understand, sir.""All right," said Bostwick.After Archie had bidden good-by to the old convict, who was relieved to get back to prison again, and after he had been photographed for the rogues' gallery--for his confinement and his torture had made him thin and so changed his appearance and his figure that his Bertillon measurements were even more worthless than ever--he was turned out.Archie, thus officially ordered on, was afraid to go back to Gibbs's, and when he went out of the Central Station that Saturday morning he turned southward into the tenderloin. He thought it possible that he might find Curly at some of the old haunts; at any rate, he might get some word of him.The morning was brilliant, the autumnal sun lay hot and comforting on his back, and there was a friendliness in the hazy mellow air that was like a welcome to Archie, the first the world had had for him. Though man had cast him out, nature still owned him, and a kind of joy filled his breast. This feeling was intensified by the friendly, familiar faces of the low, decrepit buildings. Two blocks away, he was glad to see the old sign of Cliff Decker's saloon, with the name painted on the window in crude blue letters, and, pictured above it, a preposterous glass of beer foaming like the sea. More familiar than ever, was old man Pepper, the one-eyed, sitting on the doorstep as if it were summer, his lame leg flung aside, as it were, on the walk before him, his square wrinkled face presenting a horrid aspect, with its red and empty socket scarcely less sinister than the remaining eye that swept three quarters of the world in its fierce glance. On another step two doors away, before a house of indulgence frequented only by white men, sat a mulatto girl, in a clean white muslin dress, her kinky hair revealing a wide part from its careful combing. The girl was showing her perfect teeth in her laugh and playing with a white poodle that had a great bow of pink ribbon at its neck. Across the street was Wing Tu's chop-suey joint, deserted thus early in the day, suggesting oriental calm and serenity.On the other corner was Eva Clason's place, and thither Archie went. He had some vague notion of finding Curly there, for it was Eva who, on that morning, now more than a year ago, in some impotent, puny human effort to stay the fate that had decreed him as the slayer of Benny Moon, had tried to give Curly a refuge.The place wore its morning quiet. The young bartender, with a stupid, pimpled face, was moping sleepily at the end of the bar; at Archie's step, he looked up. The step was heard also in the "parlor" behind the bar, revealing through chenille portières its cheap and gaudy rugs and its coarse-grained oaken furniture, upholstered in plush of brilliant reds and blues. One of the two girls who now appeared had yellow hair and wore a skirt of solid pink gingham that came to her knees; her thin legs wore open-work stockings, her feet bulged in high-heeled, much-worn shoes. She wore a blouse of the same pink stuff, cut low, with a sailor collar, baring her scrawny neck and the deep hollows behind her collar bones. In her yellow fingers, with a slip of rice paper, she was rolling a cigarette. The other girl, who wore a dress of the same fashion, but of solid blue gingham, splotched here and there with starch, was dark and buxom, and her low collar displayed the coarse skin of full breasts and round, firm neck. The thin blonde came languidly, pasting her cigarette with her tongue and lighting it; but the buxom brunette came forward with a perfunctory smile of welcome."Where's Miss Clason?" Archie asked."She's gone out to Steve's," said the brunette. The thin girl sank into a chair beside the portières and smoked her cigarette. The brunette, divining that there was no significance in Archie's visit, and feeling a temporary self-respect, dismissed her professional smile and became simple, natural and human."Did you want to see her?" she asked."Yes, I'm looking for a certain party.""Who?""Well, you know him, maybe--they call him Curly; Jackson's his name."The girl looked at Archie, exchanged glances with the bartender; and then asked:"You a friend o' hisn?""Yes, I just got home, and I must find him.""Oh," said the girl, wholly satisfied. She turned to the bartender. "Was Mr. Jackson in to-day, Lew? He's around, in and out, you know. Comes in to use the telephone now and then."Archie was relieved."Tell him Dutch was in, will you?" he said."Sure," replied the girl."Maybe he's in at Hunt's," said the thin girl, speaking for the first time."I was going there," said Archie."I can run in and ask for you," said the brunette, in the kindly willingness of the helpless to help others. "Or, hold on,--maybe Teddy would know.""Never mind," said Archie, "I'll go in to Hunt's myself.""I'll tell Mr. Jackson when he comes in," said the brunette, going to the door with Archie. "Who did you say?"--she looked up into Archie's face with her feminine curiosity all alive."Dutch.""Dutch who?""Oh, just Dutch," said Archie, smiling at her insistence. "He'll know.""Oh, hell!" said the girl, "what's your name?"Archie looked down into her brown eyes and smiled mockingly; then he relented."Well, it's Archie Koerner. Ever hear of me before?"The girl's black brows, which already met across her nose, thickened in the effort to recall him."You're no more wiser than you was; are you, little one?" said Archie, and walked away.He had reserved Hunt's as a last resort, for there, in a saloon which was a meeting place for yeggs, Hunt himself being an old yegg man who had stolen enough to retire on, Archie was sure of a welcome and of a refuge where he could hide from the police for a day, at least, or until he could form some plan for the future.Hunt was not in, but Archie found King's wife, Bertha Shanteaux, in the back room. She was a woman of thirty-five, very fleshy, and it seemed that she must crush the low lounge on which she sat, her legs far apart, the calico wrapper she wore for comfort stretching between her knees. She was smoking a cigar, and she breathed heavily with asthma, and, when she welcomed Archie, she spoke in a voice so hoarse and of so deep a bass that she might well have been taken for a man in woman's attire."Why, Dutch!" she said, taking her cigar from her lips in surprise. "When did you get home?""Yesterday morning," said Archie. "I landed in with an old con, went up to Dan's--then I got pinched, and this morning Bostwick gave me the run.""Who made the pinch?""Quinn and some new gendy.""Suspicion?""Yes.""Huh," said Bertha, beginning to pull at her cigar again."Where's John?""Oh, he went up town a while ago.""Is Curly here?""Yes, he's around. Just got in the other day. What you goin' to do?""Oh, I'm waiting to see Curly. I've got to get to work and see if I can't make a dollar or two. I want to frame in with some good tribe.""Well, Curly hasn't been out for a while. He'll be glad to see you.""Is Gus with him?""Oh, no. Gus got settled over in Illinois somewhere--didn't you hear? The boys say he's in wrong. But wait! Curly'll show up after a while.""Well, I'm hipped, and I don't want to get you in trouble, Mrs. Shanteaux, but if Kouka gets a flash at me, it's all off.""Oh, you plant here, my boy," she said in a motherly way, "till Curly comes."The tenderloin awoke earlier than usual that day, for it was Saturday, and the farmers were in town. In the morning they would be busy in Market Place, but by afternoon, their work done, their money in their pockets, they would be free, and beginning at the cheap music halls, they, especially the younger ones, would drift gradually down the line, and by night they would be drinking and carousing in the dives.Children, pale and hollow-eyed, coming with pitchers and tin buckets to get beer for their awaking elders, seemed to be the first heralds of the day; then a thin woman, clutching her dirty calico wrapper to her shrunken breast, and trying to hide a bruised, blue and swollen eye behind a shawl, came shuffling into the saloon in unbuttoned shoes, and hoarsely asked for some gin. A little later another woman came in to borrow enough oil to fill the lamp she carried without its chimney, and immediately after, a man, ragged, dirty, stepping in old worn shoes as soft as moccasins, flung himself down in a chair and fell into a stupor, his bloodless lips but a shade darker than his yellow face, his jaws set in the rigidity of the opium smoker. Archie looked at him suspiciously and shot a questioning glance at Bertha."The long draw?" he said in a low tone, as she passed him to go to the woman who had the lamp."Umph huh," said Bertha."I thought maybe he might be--""No," she said readily. "He's right--he's been hanging around for a month.--Some oil?" she was saying to the woman. "Certainly, my dear." She took the lamp."Where's your husband now?" she asked."Oh, he's gone," the woman said simply. "When the coppers put the Silver Moon Café"--she pronounced it "kafe"--"out of business and he lost his job slinging beer, he dug out."Archie, beginning to fear the publicity of midday, had gone into the back room again. Presently Bertha joined him."Thought it was up to me to plant back here," he said, explaining his withdrawal. "There might be an elbow.""Oh, no," said Bertha, in her hoarse voice, picking up the cigar she had laid on a clock-shelf and resuming her smoking, "we're running under protection now. That dope fiend in there showed up two months ago with his woman. They had a room in at Eva's for a while, but they stunk up the place so with their hops that she cleaned 'em out--she had to have the room papered again, but she says you can still smell it. They left about five hundred paper-back novels behind 'em. My God! they were readers! Nothing but read and suck the bamboo all the time; they were fiends both ways. One's 'bout as bad as the other, I guess."She smoked her cigar and ruminated on this excessive love of romanticistic literature."When Eva gave 'em the run," she went on later, "the coppers flopped the moll--she got thirty-sixty, and Bostwick copped the pipe to give to a friend, who wanted a ornament for his den. Since then her husband comes in here now and then--and--why, hello there! Here's some one to see you, Curly!"Archie sprang to his feet to greet Curly, who, checking the nervous impulse that always bore him so energetically onward, suddenly halted in the doorway. The low-crowned felt hat he wore shaded his eyes; he wore it, as always, a little to one side; his curls, in the mortification they had caused him since the mates of his school-days had teased him about them, were cropped closely; his cheeks were pink from the razor, and Archie, looking at him, felt an obscure envy of that air of Curly's which always attracted. Curly looked a moment, and then, with a smile, strode across the room and took Archie's hand. Archie was embarrassed, and his face, white with the prison pallor, flushed--he thought of his clothes, quite as degrading as the hideous stripes he had exchanged for them, and of his hair, a yellow stubble, from the shaving that had been part of his punishment. But the grip in which Curly held his hand while he wrung his greeting into it, made him glad, and Bertha, going out of the room, left them alone. The strangeness there is in all meetings after absence wore away. Curly sat there, his hat tilted back from his brow, leaned forward, and said:"Well, how are you, anyway? When did you land in?""Yesterday morning.""Been out home yet?"Archie's eyes fell."No," he said, his eyes fixed on the cigarette he had just rolled with Curly's tobacco and paper. "I was pinched the minute I got here; Quinn and some flatty--and I fed the crummers all last night in the boob. This morning Bostwick give me orders.""Well, you can't stay here," said Curly."No, I was waiting to see you. I've got to get to work. Got anything now?""Well, Ted and me have a couple of marks--a jug and a p. o.""Where?""Oh, out in the jungle--several of the tribes have filled it out.""Well, I'm ready.""Not now," Curly said, shaking his head; "the old stool-pigeon's out--she's a mile high these nights."A reminiscent smile passed lightly over Curly's face, and he flecked the ash from his cigarette."Phillie Dave's out,"--and then he remembered that Archie had never known the thief who had been proselyted by the police and been one of a numerous company of such men to turn detective, and so had bequeathed his name as a synonym for the moon. "But you never knew him, did you?""Who?""Dave--Phillie Dave we call him; he really belonged to the cat--he's become a copper. He was before your time."They chatted a little while, and as the noise in the bar-room increased, Curly said:"You can't hang out here. Those hoosiers are likely to start something any minute--we'll have to lam.""Where to?""We'll go over to old Sam Gray's."They did not show themselves in the bar-room again. Some young smart Alecks from the country were there, flushed with beer and showing off. Curly and Archie left by a side door, walked hurriedly to the canal, dodged along its edges to the river, then along the wharves to the long bridge up stream, and over to the west side, and at four o'clock, after a wide detour through quiet streets, they gained Sam Gray's at last.Sam Gray kept a quiet saloon, with a few rooms upstairs for lodgers. Gray was a member of a family noted in the under world; his brothers kept similar places in other cities. His wife was a Rawson, a famous family of thieves, at the head of which was old Scott Rawson, who owned a farm and was then in hiding somewhere with an enormous reward hanging over his head. Gray's wife was a sister of Rawson; and the sister, too, of Nan Rawson, whom Snuffer Wilson had in mind when, on the scaffold, he said, "Tell Nan good-by for me." And in these saloons, kept by the Rawsons and the Grays, and at the Rawson farm, thieves in good standing were always welcome; many a hunted man had found refuge there; the Rawsons would have care of him, and nurse him back to health of the wounds inflicted by official bullets.When Curly and Archie entered, a man of sixty years with thick white hair above a wide white brow, in shirt-sleeves, his waistcoat unbuttoned, and his trousers girded tightly into the fat at his waist, came out, treading softly in slippers."A friend of mine, Mr. Gray," said Curly. "He's right. He's just done his bit; got home last night, and the bulls pinched him. He's got orders and I'm going to take him out with me. But we can't go yet--Phillie Dave's out."The old man smiled vaguely at the mention of the old thief."All right," he said, taking Archie's hand.Archie felt a glow of pride when Curly mentioned his having done his bit; he was already conscious, now that he had a record, of improved standing."Who's back there?" asked Curly, jerking his head toward a partition from behind which voices came."A couple of the girls," said old Sam. "You know 'em, I guess."The two women who sat at a table in the rear room looked up hastily when the men appeared."Hello, Curly," they said, in surprise and relief.They had passed thirty, were well dressed in street gowns, wore gloves, and carried small shopping-bags. They had put their veils up over their hats. Archie, thinking of his appearance, was more self-conscious than ever, and his embarrassment did not diminish when one of the women, after Curly had told them something of their plans, looked at the black mark rubbed into Archie's neck by the prison clothes and said:"You can't do nothin' in them stir clothes." Before he could reply, she got up impulsively."Just wait here," she said. She was gone an hour. When she returned, her cheeks were flushed, and with a smile she walked into the room with a peculiar mincing gait that might have passed as some mode of fashion, went to a corner, shook herself, and then, stepping aside, picked from the floor a suit of clothes she had stolen in a store across the bridge and carried in her skirts all the way back. Curly laughed, and the other woman laughed, and they praised her, and then she said to Archie:"Here, kid, these'll do. I don't know as they'll fit, but you can have 'em altered. They'll beat them stir rags, anyhow."Archie tried to thank her, but she laughed his platitudes aside and said:"Come on, Sadie, we must get to work."When they were away Archie looked at Curly in surprise. There were things, evidently, he had not yet learned."The best lifter in the business," Curly said, but he added a qualification that expressed a tardy loyalty, "except Jane."Archie found he could wear the clothes, and he felt better when he had them on."If I only had a rod now," he remarked. "I'll have to go out and boost one, I guess.""You can't show for a day," said Curly."I wish I had that gat of mine. I wouldn't mind doing time if I had that to show for it!""I told you that gat would get you in trouble," said Curly, and then he added peremptorily: "You'll stay here till to-morrow night; then you'll go home and see your mother. Then you'll go to work."They remained at Gray's all that Saturday night and all the following day, spending the Sunday in reading such meager account of the murder of the Flanagan sisters as the morning papers were able to get into extra editions.
The next day, and the next, and the next,--for seven days,--Archie hung in the bull rings. In the middle of the eighth day, after his head had been rolling and lolling about on his shoulders between his cold, swollen, naked arms, he suddenly became frantic, put forth a mighty effort, lifted himself, and began to bite his hands and his wrists, gnashing his teeth on the steel handcuffs, yammering like a maniac.
That evening, the evening of the eighth day, when the guard came and flashed his lamp on him, Archie's body was hanging there, still, his chin on his breast. Down his arms the blood was trickling from the wounds he had made with his teeth. The guard set down his lantern, ran down the corridor, returned presently with Ball, and Jeffries, the doctor.
They lowered his body. The doctor bent his head to the white breast and listened.
"Take him to the hospital," he said. "I guess he's had about all he can stand."
"God, he had nerve!" said Ball, looking at the body. "He wouldn't give in."
He shambled away, his head bent. He was perplexed. He had not failed since--when was it?--since number 13993 had--died of heart failure, in the hospital, five years before.
XXI
It was at Bradford Ford's that night of the wedding that Eades made his proposal of marriage to Elizabeth Ward. It was June, court had adjourned, his work was done, the time seemed to him auspicious; he had thought it all out, arranged the details in his mind. The great country house, open to the summer night, was thronged, the occasion, just as the newspapers had predicted in their hackneyed phrase, was a brilliant one, as befitted the marriage of Ford's youngest daughter, Hazel, to Mr. Henry Wilmington Dodge, of Philadelphia. Eades moved about, greeting his friends, smiling automatically, but his eyes were discreetly seeking their one object. At last he had a glimpse of her, through smilax and ribbons; it was during the ceremony; she was in white, and her lips were drawn as she repressed the emotions weddings inspire in women. He waited, in what patience he could, until the service was pronounced; then he must take his place in the line that moved through the crowd like a current through the sea; the bestowal of the felicitations took a long time. Then the supper; Elizabeth was at the bride's table, and still he must wait. He went up-stairs finally, and there he encountered Ford alone in a room where, in some desolate sense of neglect, he had retired to hide the sorrow he felt at this parting with his child, and to combat the annoying feeling the wedding had thrust on him--the feeling that he was growing old. Ford sat by an open window, gazing out into the moonlight that lay on the river by which he had built his colossal house. He was smoking, in the habit which neither age nor sorrow could break.
"Come in, come in," said Ford. "I'm glad to see you. I want some one to talk to. Have a cigar."
But Eades declined, and Ford glanced at him in the suspicion which was part of the bereaved and jealous feeling that was poisoning this evening of happiness for him. He knew that Eades smoked, and he wondered why he now refused. "He declines because I'm getting old; he wishes to shun my society; he feels that if he accepts the cigar, he will have to stay long enough to smoke it. It will be that way now. Yes, I'm getting old. I'm out of it." So ran Ford's thoughts.
Eades had gone to the window and stood looking out across the dark trees to the river, swimming in the moonlight. Below him were the pretty lights of Japanese lanterns, beyond, at the road, the two lamps on the gate-posts. The odors of the June night came to him and, from below, the laughter of the wedding-guests and the strains of an orchestra.
"What a beautiful place you have here, Mr. Ford!" Eades exclaimed.
"Well, it'll do for an old--for a man to spend his declining years."
"Yes, indeed," mused Eades.
Ford winced at this immediate acquiescence.
"And what a night!" Eades went on, "Ideal for a wedding."
Ford looked at him a moment, then decided to change the subject.
"Well, I see you struck pay-dirt in the grand jury," he said.
"Yes," replied Eades, turning away from night and nature when such subjects were introduced.
"You're doing a good work there," said Ford; "a good work for law and order."
He used the stereotyped phrase in the old belief that "law" and "order" are synonyms, though he was not thinking of law or of order just then; he was thinking of the radiant girl in the drawing-room below.
Eades turned to the window again. The night attracted him. He did not care to talk. He, too, was thinking of a girl in the drawing-room below; thinking how she had looked in that moment during the ceremony when he had had the glimpse of her. He must go at once and find her. He succeeded presently in getting away from Ford, and left in a manner that deepened Ford's conviction that he was out of it.
He met her at the foot of the staircase, and they went out of doors.
"Oh," exclaimed Elizabeth, "how delicious it is out here!"
In silence they descended the wide steps from the veranda and went down the walk. The sky was purple, the stars trembled in it, and the moon filled all the heavens with a light that fell to the river, flowing silently below them. They went on to the narrow strip of sward that sloped to the water. On the dim farther shore they could see the light in some farm-house; far down the river was the city, a blur of light.
"What a beautiful place the Fords have here!" said Eades.
"Yes," said Elizabeth, "it's ideal."
"It's my ideal of a home," said Eades, and then after a silence he went on. "I've been thinking a good deal of home lately."
He glanced at the girl; she had become still almost to rigidity.
"I am so glad our people are beginning to appreciate our beautiful river," she said, and her voice had a peculiar note of haste and fear in it. "I'm so glad. People travel to other lands and rave over scenery, when they have this right at home." She waved her hand in a little gesture to include the river and its dark shores. She realized that she was speaking unnaturally, as she always did with him. The realization irritated her. "The Country Club is just above us, isn't it?" she hurriedly continued, consciously struggling to appear unconscious. "Have you--"
He interrupted her. "I've been thinking of you a good deal lately," he said. His voice had mastery in it. "A good deal," he repeated, "for more than a year now. But I've waited until I had something to offer you, some achievement, however small, and now--I begin to feel that I need help and--sympathy in the work that is laid on me. Elizabeth--"
"Don't," she said, "please don't." She had turned from him now and taken a step backward.
"Just a minute, Elizabeth," he insisted. "I have waited to tell you--that I love you, to ask you to be my wife. I have loved you a long, long time. Don't deny me now--don't decide until you can think--I can wait. Will you think it over? Will you consider it--carefully--will you?"
He tried to look into her face, which she had turned away. Her hands were clasped before her, her fingers interlocked tightly. He heard her sigh. Then with an effort she looked up at him.
"No," she began, "I can not; I--"
He stopped her.
"Don't say no," he said. "You have not considered, I am sure. Won't you at least think before deciding definitely?"
She had found more than the usual difficulty there is in saying no to anything, or to any one; now she had strength only to shake her head.
"You must not decide hastily," he insisted.
"We must go in." She turned back toward the house.
"I can wait to know," Eades assured her.
They retraced their steps silently. As they went up the walk she said:
"Of course, I am not insensible of the honor, Mr. Eades."
The phrase instantly seemed inadequate, even silly, to her. Why was it she never could be at ease with him?
"Don't decide, I beg," he said, "until you have considered the matter carefully. Promise me."
"You must leave me now," she said.
He bowed and stood looking after her as she went up the steps and ran across the veranda in her eagerness to lose herself in the throng within the house. And Eades remained outside, walking under the trees.
Half an hour later Elizabeth stood with Marriott in the drawing-room. Her face was pale; the joy, the spirit that had been in it earlier in the evening had gone from it.
"Ah," said Marriott suddenly, "there goes John Eades. I hadn't seen him before."
Elizabeth glanced hurriedly at Eades and then curiously at Marriott. His face wore the peculiar smile she had seen so often. Now it seemed remote, to belong to other days, days that she had lost.
"He's making a great name for himself just now," said Marriott. "He's bound to win. He'll go to Congress, or be elected governor or something, sure."
She longed for his opinion and yet just then she felt it impossible to ask it.
"He's a--"
"What?" She could not forbear to ask, but she put the question with a little note of challenge that made Marriott turn his head.
"One of those young civilians."
"One of what young civilians?"
"That Emerson writes about."
"He's not so very young, is he?" Elizabeth tried to smile.
"The young civilians are often very old; I have known them to be octogenarians."
He looked at her and was suddenly struck by her pallor and the drawn expression about her eyes. She had met his gaze, and he realized instantly that he had made some mistake. They were standing there in the drawing-room, the canvas-covered floor was littered with rose-leaves. It was the moment when the guests had begun to feel the first traces of weariness, when the laughter had begun to lose its spirit and the talk its spontaneity, when the older people were beginning to say good night, leaving the younger behind to shower the bride and groom with rice and confetti. Perplexed, excited, self-conscious after Eades's declaration, feeling a little fear and some secret pride, suddenly Elizabeth saw the old, good-humored, friendly expression fade from Marriott's eyes, and there came a new look, one she had never seen before, an expression of sudden, illuminative intelligence, followed by a shade of pain and regret, perhaps a little reproach.
"Where does Emerson say--that?" she asked.
"You look it up and see," he said presently.
She looked at him steadily, though it was with a great effort, tried to smile, and the smile made her utterly sick at heart.
"I--must look up father," she said, "it's time--"
She left him abruptly, and he stood there, the smile gone from his face, his hands plunged deep in his pockets. A moment he bit his lips, then he turned and dashed up the stairs.
"I'm a fool," he said to himself.
Elizabeth had thought of love, she had imagined its coming to her in some poetic way, but this--somehow, this was not poetic. She recalled distinctly every word Eades had spoken, but even more vividly she recalled Marriott's glance. It meant that he thought she loved Eades! It had all become irrevocable in a moment; she could not, of course, undertake to explain; it was all ridiculous, too ridiculous for anything but tears.
Looking back on her intimacy with Marriott, she realized now that what she would miss most was the good fellowship there had been between them. With him, though without realizing it at the time, she had found expression easy, her thoughts had been clear, she could find words for them which he could understand and appreciate. Whenever she came across anything in a book or in a poem or in a situation there was always the satisfying sense that she could share it with Marriott; he would apprehend instantly. There was no one else who could do this; with her mother, with her father, with Dick, no such thing was possible; with them she spoke a different language, lived in another world. And so it was with her friends; she moved as an alien being in the conventional circle of that existence to which she had been born. One by one, her friends had ceased to be friends, they had begun to shrink away, not consciously, perhaps, but certainly, into the limbo of mere acquaintance. She thought of all this as she rode home that night, and after she had got home; and when it all seemed clear, she shrank from the clarity; she would not, after all, have it too clear; she must not push to any conclusion all these thoughts about Gordon Marriott. She chose to decide that he had been stupid, and his stupidity offended her; it was not pleasant to have him sneer at a man who had just told her he loved her, no matter who the man was, and she felt, with an inconsistency that she clung to out of a sense of self-preservation, that Marriott should have known this; he might have let her enjoy her triumph for a little, and then--but this was dangerous; was he to conclude that she loved him?
What was it, she wondered, that made her weak and impotent in the presence of Eades? She did not like to own a fear of him, yet she felt a fear; would she some day succumb? The fear crept on her and distressed her; she knew very well that he would pursue her, never waver or give up or lose sight of his purpose. In some way he typified for her all that was fixed, impersonal, irrefragable--society on its solid rocks. He had no doubts about anything, his opinions were all made, tested, tried and proved. Any uncertainty, any fluidity, any inconsistency was impossible. And she felt more and more inadequate herself; she felt that she had nothing to oppose to all this.
BOOK III
I
Four miles from town, where a white pike crosses a mud road, is Lulu Corners. There is little at this cross-roads to inspire a name less frivolous, nothing indeed but a weather-beaten store, where the people of the neighborhood wait for the big yellow trolley-cars that sweep across the country hourly, sounding their musical air-whistles over the fields. Half a mile from the Corners two unmarried sisters, Bridget and Margaret Flanagan, for twenty years had lived alone in a hovel that was invaded by pigs and chickens and geese. Together, these aged women, tall, bony and masculine, lived their graceless, squalid lives, untouched by romance or tragedy, working their few acres and selling their pork, and eggs and feathers in the city. The nearest dwelling was a quarter of a mile away, and the neighbors were still farther removed by prejudices, religious and social. Thus the old women were left to themselves. The report was that they were misers, and the miserable manner of their lives supported rather than belied this theory; there was a romantic impression in a country-side that knew so little romance, that a large amount of money was hidden somewhere about the ugly premises.
On an evening in late October, Bridget Flanagan was getting supper. The meal was meager, and when she had made it ready she placed a lamp on the table and waited for Margaret, who had gone out to fasten the shanty in which the barn-yard animals slept. Margaret came in presently, locked the door, and the sisters sat down to their supper. They had just crossed themselves and heaped their plates with potatoes, when they heard a knock at the door.
"Who can that be, sister?" said Bridget, looking up.
"I wonder now!" said Margaret in a surprise that was almost an alarm.
The knocking was repeated.
"Mary help us!" said Bridget, again making the sign of the cross. "No one ever came at this hour before."
The knocking sounded again, louder, more insistent.
"You go on to the door, sister," said Bridget, "and let them in,--whoever they may be, I dunno."
Margaret went to the door, shot back the bolt, and pulled on the knob. And then she turned and cast a look of terror at her sister. Some one was holding the door on the other side. The strange resistance of this late and unknown visitor, who but a moment before had wanted to come in, appalled her. She pressed her knee against the door, and tried to lock it again. But now the door held against her; she strained and pushed, then turned and beckoned her sister with frightened eyes. Bridget came, and the two women, throwing their weight against the door, tried to close it; but the unknown, silent and determined one was holding it on the other side. This strange conflict continued. Presently the two old women glanced up; in the crack, between the door and the jamb, they saw a club. Slowly, slowly, it made way against them, twisting, turning, pushing, forcing its way into the room. They looked in awful fascination. The club grew, presently a foot of it was in the room; then a hand appeared, a man's hand, gripping the club. They watched; presently a wrist with a leather strap around it; then slowly and by degrees, a forearm, bare, enormous, hard as the club, corded with heavy muscles and covered with a thick fell of black hair, came after it. Then there was a final push, an oath, the door flew open, and two masked men burst into the room.
Three hours later, Perkins, a farmer who lived a quarter of a mile away, hearing an unusual sound in his front yard, took a lantern and went out. In the grass heavy with dew, just inside his gate, he saw a woman's body, and going to it, he shed the rays of his lantern into the face of Bridget Flanagan. Her gray hair was matted, and her face was stained with blood; her clothes were torn and covered with the mud through which she had dragged herself along the roadside from her home. Perkins called and his wife came to the door, holding a lamp above her head, shading her eyes with her hand, afraid to go out. When he had borne Bridget indoors, Perkins took his two sons, his lantern and his shot-gun, and went across the fields to the Flanagans'. In the kitchen, bound and gagged, Margaret lay quite dead, her head beaten in by a club. The two old women must have fought desperately for their lives. The robbers, for all their work, as Perkins learned when Bridget almost miraculously recovered, had secured twenty-three silver dollars, which the sisters had kept hidden in a tin can--the fatal fortune which rumor had swelled to such a size.
Perkins roused the neighborhood, and all night long men were riding to and fro between Lulu Corners and the city. A calm Sunday morning followed, and then came the coroner, the reporters and the crowds. While the bell of the little Methodist church a mile away on the Gilboa Pike was ringing, Mark Bentley, the sheriff, dashed up behind a team of lean horses, sweating and splashed with mud from their mad gallop. Behind him came his deputies and the special deputies he had sworn in, and, sitting in his buggy, holding his whip in a gloved hand, waving and flourishing it like a baton, Bentley divided into posses the farmers who had gathered with shot-guns, rifles, pitchforks, axes, clubs, anything, placed a deputy at the head of each posse and sent them forth. Detectives and policemen came, and all that Sunday mobs of angry men were beating up the whole country for miles. Some were mounted, and these flew down the roads, spreading the alarm, leaving women standing horror-stricken in doorways with children whimpering in their skirts; others went in buggies, others plodded on foot. And all day long crowds of women and children pressed about the little house, peering into the kitchen with morbid curiosity. The crowd swelled, then shrank, then swelled again. The newspapers made the most of the tragedy, and under head-lines of bold type, in black ink and in red, they told the story of the crime with all the details the boyish imaginations of their reporters could invent; they printed pictures of the shanty, and diagrams of the kitchen, with crosses to indicate where Margaret had fallen, where Bridget had been left for dead, where the table and the stove had stood, where the door was; and by the time the world had begun a new week, the whole city was in the same state of horror and fear, and breathed the same rage and lust of vengeance that had fallen on Lulu Corners.
II
Four days before the Sunday of the tragedy Archie Koerner finished his year's imprisonment and passed from the prison within the walls to the larger prison that awaited him in the world outside. The same day was released another convict, a man aged at fifty, who had entered the prison twenty years before. The judge who had sentenced him was a young man, just elevated to the bench, and, intoxicated by the power that had come to him so early in life, had read the words, "twenty years," in the statute book, and, assuming as axiomatic that the words were the atonement for the crime the man had committed, without thinking, had pronounced these words aloud, and then written them in a large book. From there a clerk copied them on to a blank form, sealed it with a gilt seal, and, like the young judge, forgot the incident. The day the man was released he could no longer remember what crime he had committed. He was old and shattered, and had looked forward to freedom with terror. Time and again he had asked his guard to report him, so that he might be deprived of his good time and have the day of release postponed. The guard, however, knowing that the man's mind was gone, had refused to do this, and the man was forced out into the world. Having no family, no friends and no home, he clung to Archie as to the last tie that bound him to the only life he knew. Archie, of course, considered him an incubus, but he pitied him, and when they had sold their railroad tickets to a scalper, they beat their way back to the city on a freight-train, Archie showing the old man how it was done.
At eleven o'clock on Friday morning they entered Danny Gibbs's saloon. Archie was glad to find the place unchanged--the same whisky barrels along the wall, the opium pipe above the bar, the old gray cat sleeping in the sun. All was familiar, save the bartender, who, in fresh white jacket, leaned against the bar, a newspaper spread before him, and studied the form sheets that were published daily to instruct men how to gamble on the races.
"Where's Dan?" asked Archie.
The bartender looked at him superciliously, and then concluded to say:
"He's not here."
"Not down yet, heh?" said Archie. "Do you know a certain party called--" Archie glanced about cautiously and leaned over the bar, "--called Curly?"
The bartender looked at him blankly.
"He's a friend of mine--it's all right. If he comes in, just tell him a certain party was asking for him. Tell Dan, too. I've just got home--just done my bit."
But even this distinction, all he had to show for his year in prison, did not impress the bartender as Archie thought it should. He drew from his waistcoat pocket a dollar bill, carefully smoothed it out, and tossed it on to the bar.
"Give us a little drink. Here, Dad," he said to the old convict, "have one." The old man grinned and approached the bar. "Never mind him," said Archie in a confidential undertone, "he's an old-timer."
The old convict had lost the middle finger of his right hand in a machine in the prison years before, and now, in his imbecility, he claimed the one compensation imaginable; he used this mutilation for the entertainment of his fellows. If any one looked at him, he would spread the fingers of his right hand over his face, the stub of the middle finger held against his nose, his first and third fingers drawing down the lower lids of his eyes until their whites showed, and then wiggle his thumb and little finger and look, now gravely, now with a grin, into the eyes of the observer. The old convict, across whose sodden brain must have glimmered a vague notion that something was required of him, was practising his one accomplishment, his silly gaze fixed on the bartender.
When the bartender saw this his face set in a kind of superstitious terror.
"Don't mind him," said Archie; "He's stir simple."
The bartender, as he set out the whisky, was reassured, not so much by the patronage as by Archie's explanation that he had just come from prison. He had been at Danny Gibbs's long enough to know that a man is not to be judged solely by his clothes, and Archie, as a man reduced to the extremity of the garb the state supplied, might still be of importance in their world. While they were drinking, another man entered the saloon, a short, heavy man, and, standing across the room, looked, not at Archie and Dad, but at their reflections in the mirror behind the bar. Archie, recognizing a trick of detectives, turned slightly away. The man went out.
"Elbow, eh?" said Archie.
"Yep," said the bartender. "Cunningham."
"A new one on me. Kouka here yet?"
"Oh, yes."
"Flyin'?"
"Yep."
"Well," said Archie, "give 's another. I got a thirst in the big house anyway--and these rum turns." He smiled an apology for his clothes. They drank again; then Archie said:
"Tell Dan I was here."
"Who shall I say?" inquired the bartender.
"Dutch."
"Oh, yes! All right. He'll be down about one o'clock."
"All right. Come on, Dad," said Archie, and he went out, towing his battered hulk of humanity behind him. At the corner he saw Cunningham with another man, whom he recognized as Quinn. When they met, as was inevitable, Quinn smiled and said:
"Hello, Archie! Back again?"
"Yes," said Archie. He would have kept on, but Quinn laid a hand on his arm.
"Hold on a minute," he said.
"What's the rap?" asked Archie.
"Well, you'd better come down to the front office a minute."
Cunningham had seized the old man, and the two were taken to the Central Police Station. They were charged with being "suspicious persons," and spent the night in prison. The next morning, when they were arraigned before Bostwick, the old man surprised every one by pleading guilty, and Bostwick sentenced him to the workhouse for thirty days. But Archie demanded a jury and asked that word be sent to his attorney.
"Your attorney!" sneered Bostwick, "and who's your attorney?"
"Mr. Marriott," said Archie.
The suggestion of a jury trial maddened Bostwick. He seemed, indeed, to take it almost as a personal insult. He whispered with Quinn, and then said:
"I'll give you till evening to get out of town--you hear?"
Archie, standing at attention in the old military way, said:
"Yes, sir."
"You've got to clear out; we don't want you around, you understand?"
"I understand, sir."
"All right," said Bostwick.
After Archie had bidden good-by to the old convict, who was relieved to get back to prison again, and after he had been photographed for the rogues' gallery--for his confinement and his torture had made him thin and so changed his appearance and his figure that his Bertillon measurements were even more worthless than ever--he was turned out.
Archie, thus officially ordered on, was afraid to go back to Gibbs's, and when he went out of the Central Station that Saturday morning he turned southward into the tenderloin. He thought it possible that he might find Curly at some of the old haunts; at any rate, he might get some word of him.
The morning was brilliant, the autumnal sun lay hot and comforting on his back, and there was a friendliness in the hazy mellow air that was like a welcome to Archie, the first the world had had for him. Though man had cast him out, nature still owned him, and a kind of joy filled his breast. This feeling was intensified by the friendly, familiar faces of the low, decrepit buildings. Two blocks away, he was glad to see the old sign of Cliff Decker's saloon, with the name painted on the window in crude blue letters, and, pictured above it, a preposterous glass of beer foaming like the sea. More familiar than ever, was old man Pepper, the one-eyed, sitting on the doorstep as if it were summer, his lame leg flung aside, as it were, on the walk before him, his square wrinkled face presenting a horrid aspect, with its red and empty socket scarcely less sinister than the remaining eye that swept three quarters of the world in its fierce glance. On another step two doors away, before a house of indulgence frequented only by white men, sat a mulatto girl, in a clean white muslin dress, her kinky hair revealing a wide part from its careful combing. The girl was showing her perfect teeth in her laugh and playing with a white poodle that had a great bow of pink ribbon at its neck. Across the street was Wing Tu's chop-suey joint, deserted thus early in the day, suggesting oriental calm and serenity.
On the other corner was Eva Clason's place, and thither Archie went. He had some vague notion of finding Curly there, for it was Eva who, on that morning, now more than a year ago, in some impotent, puny human effort to stay the fate that had decreed him as the slayer of Benny Moon, had tried to give Curly a refuge.
The place wore its morning quiet. The young bartender, with a stupid, pimpled face, was moping sleepily at the end of the bar; at Archie's step, he looked up. The step was heard also in the "parlor" behind the bar, revealing through chenille portières its cheap and gaudy rugs and its coarse-grained oaken furniture, upholstered in plush of brilliant reds and blues. One of the two girls who now appeared had yellow hair and wore a skirt of solid pink gingham that came to her knees; her thin legs wore open-work stockings, her feet bulged in high-heeled, much-worn shoes. She wore a blouse of the same pink stuff, cut low, with a sailor collar, baring her scrawny neck and the deep hollows behind her collar bones. In her yellow fingers, with a slip of rice paper, she was rolling a cigarette. The other girl, who wore a dress of the same fashion, but of solid blue gingham, splotched here and there with starch, was dark and buxom, and her low collar displayed the coarse skin of full breasts and round, firm neck. The thin blonde came languidly, pasting her cigarette with her tongue and lighting it; but the buxom brunette came forward with a perfunctory smile of welcome.
"Where's Miss Clason?" Archie asked.
"She's gone out to Steve's," said the brunette. The thin girl sank into a chair beside the portières and smoked her cigarette. The brunette, divining that there was no significance in Archie's visit, and feeling a temporary self-respect, dismissed her professional smile and became simple, natural and human.
"Did you want to see her?" she asked.
"Yes, I'm looking for a certain party."
"Who?"
"Well, you know him, maybe--they call him Curly; Jackson's his name."
The girl looked at Archie, exchanged glances with the bartender; and then asked:
"You a friend o' hisn?"
"Yes, I just got home, and I must find him."
"Oh," said the girl, wholly satisfied. She turned to the bartender. "Was Mr. Jackson in to-day, Lew? He's around, in and out, you know. Comes in to use the telephone now and then."
Archie was relieved.
"Tell him Dutch was in, will you?" he said.
"Sure," replied the girl.
"Maybe he's in at Hunt's," said the thin girl, speaking for the first time.
"I was going there," said Archie.
"I can run in and ask for you," said the brunette, in the kindly willingness of the helpless to help others. "Or, hold on,--maybe Teddy would know."
"Never mind," said Archie, "I'll go in to Hunt's myself."
"I'll tell Mr. Jackson when he comes in," said the brunette, going to the door with Archie. "Who did you say?"--she looked up into Archie's face with her feminine curiosity all alive.
"Dutch."
"Dutch who?"
"Oh, just Dutch," said Archie, smiling at her insistence. "He'll know."
"Oh, hell!" said the girl, "what's your name?"
Archie looked down into her brown eyes and smiled mockingly; then he relented.
"Well, it's Archie Koerner. Ever hear of me before?"
The girl's black brows, which already met across her nose, thickened in the effort to recall him.
"You're no more wiser than you was; are you, little one?" said Archie, and walked away.
He had reserved Hunt's as a last resort, for there, in a saloon which was a meeting place for yeggs, Hunt himself being an old yegg man who had stolen enough to retire on, Archie was sure of a welcome and of a refuge where he could hide from the police for a day, at least, or until he could form some plan for the future.
Hunt was not in, but Archie found King's wife, Bertha Shanteaux, in the back room. She was a woman of thirty-five, very fleshy, and it seemed that she must crush the low lounge on which she sat, her legs far apart, the calico wrapper she wore for comfort stretching between her knees. She was smoking a cigar, and she breathed heavily with asthma, and, when she welcomed Archie, she spoke in a voice so hoarse and of so deep a bass that she might well have been taken for a man in woman's attire.
"Why, Dutch!" she said, taking her cigar from her lips in surprise. "When did you get home?"
"Yesterday morning," said Archie. "I landed in with an old con, went up to Dan's--then I got pinched, and this morning Bostwick gave me the run."
"Who made the pinch?"
"Quinn and some new gendy."
"Suspicion?"
"Yes."
"Huh," said Bertha, beginning to pull at her cigar again.
"Where's John?"
"Oh, he went up town a while ago."
"Is Curly here?"
"Yes, he's around. Just got in the other day. What you goin' to do?"
"Oh, I'm waiting to see Curly. I've got to get to work and see if I can't make a dollar or two. I want to frame in with some good tribe."
"Well, Curly hasn't been out for a while. He'll be glad to see you."
"Is Gus with him?"
"Oh, no. Gus got settled over in Illinois somewhere--didn't you hear? The boys say he's in wrong. But wait! Curly'll show up after a while."
"Well, I'm hipped, and I don't want to get you in trouble, Mrs. Shanteaux, but if Kouka gets a flash at me, it's all off."
"Oh, you plant here, my boy," she said in a motherly way, "till Curly comes."
The tenderloin awoke earlier than usual that day, for it was Saturday, and the farmers were in town. In the morning they would be busy in Market Place, but by afternoon, their work done, their money in their pockets, they would be free, and beginning at the cheap music halls, they, especially the younger ones, would drift gradually down the line, and by night they would be drinking and carousing in the dives.
Children, pale and hollow-eyed, coming with pitchers and tin buckets to get beer for their awaking elders, seemed to be the first heralds of the day; then a thin woman, clutching her dirty calico wrapper to her shrunken breast, and trying to hide a bruised, blue and swollen eye behind a shawl, came shuffling into the saloon in unbuttoned shoes, and hoarsely asked for some gin. A little later another woman came in to borrow enough oil to fill the lamp she carried without its chimney, and immediately after, a man, ragged, dirty, stepping in old worn shoes as soft as moccasins, flung himself down in a chair and fell into a stupor, his bloodless lips but a shade darker than his yellow face, his jaws set in the rigidity of the opium smoker. Archie looked at him suspiciously and shot a questioning glance at Bertha.
"The long draw?" he said in a low tone, as she passed him to go to the woman who had the lamp.
"Umph huh," said Bertha.
"I thought maybe he might be--"
"No," she said readily. "He's right--he's been hanging around for a month.--Some oil?" she was saying to the woman. "Certainly, my dear." She took the lamp.
"Where's your husband now?" she asked.
"Oh, he's gone," the woman said simply. "When the coppers put the Silver Moon Café"--she pronounced it "kafe"--"out of business and he lost his job slinging beer, he dug out."
Archie, beginning to fear the publicity of midday, had gone into the back room again. Presently Bertha joined him.
"Thought it was up to me to plant back here," he said, explaining his withdrawal. "There might be an elbow."
"Oh, no," said Bertha, in her hoarse voice, picking up the cigar she had laid on a clock-shelf and resuming her smoking, "we're running under protection now. That dope fiend in there showed up two months ago with his woman. They had a room in at Eva's for a while, but they stunk up the place so with their hops that she cleaned 'em out--she had to have the room papered again, but she says you can still smell it. They left about five hundred paper-back novels behind 'em. My God! they were readers! Nothing but read and suck the bamboo all the time; they were fiends both ways. One's 'bout as bad as the other, I guess."
She smoked her cigar and ruminated on this excessive love of romanticistic literature.
"When Eva gave 'em the run," she went on later, "the coppers flopped the moll--she got thirty-sixty, and Bostwick copped the pipe to give to a friend, who wanted a ornament for his den. Since then her husband comes in here now and then--and--why, hello there! Here's some one to see you, Curly!"
Archie sprang to his feet to greet Curly, who, checking the nervous impulse that always bore him so energetically onward, suddenly halted in the doorway. The low-crowned felt hat he wore shaded his eyes; he wore it, as always, a little to one side; his curls, in the mortification they had caused him since the mates of his school-days had teased him about them, were cropped closely; his cheeks were pink from the razor, and Archie, looking at him, felt an obscure envy of that air of Curly's which always attracted. Curly looked a moment, and then, with a smile, strode across the room and took Archie's hand. Archie was embarrassed, and his face, white with the prison pallor, flushed--he thought of his clothes, quite as degrading as the hideous stripes he had exchanged for them, and of his hair, a yellow stubble, from the shaving that had been part of his punishment. But the grip in which Curly held his hand while he wrung his greeting into it, made him glad, and Bertha, going out of the room, left them alone. The strangeness there is in all meetings after absence wore away. Curly sat there, his hat tilted back from his brow, leaned forward, and said:
"Well, how are you, anyway? When did you land in?"
"Yesterday morning."
"Been out home yet?"
Archie's eyes fell.
"No," he said, his eyes fixed on the cigarette he had just rolled with Curly's tobacco and paper. "I was pinched the minute I got here; Quinn and some flatty--and I fed the crummers all last night in the boob. This morning Bostwick give me orders."
"Well, you can't stay here," said Curly.
"No, I was waiting to see you. I've got to get to work. Got anything now?"
"Well, Ted and me have a couple of marks--a jug and a p. o."
"Where?"
"Oh, out in the jungle--several of the tribes have filled it out."
"Well, I'm ready."
"Not now," Curly said, shaking his head; "the old stool-pigeon's out--she's a mile high these nights."
A reminiscent smile passed lightly over Curly's face, and he flecked the ash from his cigarette.
"Phillie Dave's out,"--and then he remembered that Archie had never known the thief who had been proselyted by the police and been one of a numerous company of such men to turn detective, and so had bequeathed his name as a synonym for the moon. "But you never knew him, did you?"
"Who?"
"Dave--Phillie Dave we call him; he really belonged to the cat--he's become a copper. He was before your time."
They chatted a little while, and as the noise in the bar-room increased, Curly said:
"You can't hang out here. Those hoosiers are likely to start something any minute--we'll have to lam."
"Where to?"
"We'll go over to old Sam Gray's."
They did not show themselves in the bar-room again. Some young smart Alecks from the country were there, flushed with beer and showing off. Curly and Archie left by a side door, walked hurriedly to the canal, dodged along its edges to the river, then along the wharves to the long bridge up stream, and over to the west side, and at four o'clock, after a wide detour through quiet streets, they gained Sam Gray's at last.
Sam Gray kept a quiet saloon, with a few rooms upstairs for lodgers. Gray was a member of a family noted in the under world; his brothers kept similar places in other cities. His wife was a Rawson, a famous family of thieves, at the head of which was old Scott Rawson, who owned a farm and was then in hiding somewhere with an enormous reward hanging over his head. Gray's wife was a sister of Rawson; and the sister, too, of Nan Rawson, whom Snuffer Wilson had in mind when, on the scaffold, he said, "Tell Nan good-by for me." And in these saloons, kept by the Rawsons and the Grays, and at the Rawson farm, thieves in good standing were always welcome; many a hunted man had found refuge there; the Rawsons would have care of him, and nurse him back to health of the wounds inflicted by official bullets.
When Curly and Archie entered, a man of sixty years with thick white hair above a wide white brow, in shirt-sleeves, his waistcoat unbuttoned, and his trousers girded tightly into the fat at his waist, came out, treading softly in slippers.
"A friend of mine, Mr. Gray," said Curly. "He's right. He's just done his bit; got home last night, and the bulls pinched him. He's got orders and I'm going to take him out with me. But we can't go yet--Phillie Dave's out."
The old man smiled vaguely at the mention of the old thief.
"All right," he said, taking Archie's hand.
Archie felt a glow of pride when Curly mentioned his having done his bit; he was already conscious, now that he had a record, of improved standing.
"Who's back there?" asked Curly, jerking his head toward a partition from behind which voices came.
"A couple of the girls," said old Sam. "You know 'em, I guess."
The two women who sat at a table in the rear room looked up hastily when the men appeared.
"Hello, Curly," they said, in surprise and relief.
They had passed thirty, were well dressed in street gowns, wore gloves, and carried small shopping-bags. They had put their veils up over their hats. Archie, thinking of his appearance, was more self-conscious than ever, and his embarrassment did not diminish when one of the women, after Curly had told them something of their plans, looked at the black mark rubbed into Archie's neck by the prison clothes and said:
"You can't do nothin' in them stir clothes." Before he could reply, she got up impulsively.
"Just wait here," she said. She was gone an hour. When she returned, her cheeks were flushed, and with a smile she walked into the room with a peculiar mincing gait that might have passed as some mode of fashion, went to a corner, shook herself, and then, stepping aside, picked from the floor a suit of clothes she had stolen in a store across the bridge and carried in her skirts all the way back. Curly laughed, and the other woman laughed, and they praised her, and then she said to Archie:
"Here, kid, these'll do. I don't know as they'll fit, but you can have 'em altered. They'll beat them stir rags, anyhow."
Archie tried to thank her, but she laughed his platitudes aside and said:
"Come on, Sadie, we must get to work."
When they were away Archie looked at Curly in surprise. There were things, evidently, he had not yet learned.
"The best lifter in the business," Curly said, but he added a qualification that expressed a tardy loyalty, "except Jane."
Archie found he could wear the clothes, and he felt better when he had them on.
"If I only had a rod now," he remarked. "I'll have to go out and boost one, I guess."
"You can't show for a day," said Curly.
"I wish I had that gat of mine. I wouldn't mind doing time if I had that to show for it!"
"I told you that gat would get you in trouble," said Curly, and then he added peremptorily: "You'll stay here till to-morrow night; then you'll go home and see your mother. Then you'll go to work."
They remained at Gray's all that Saturday night and all the following day, spending the Sunday in reading such meager account of the murder of the Flanagan sisters as the morning papers were able to get into extra editions.