Pete was still dubious, but flattered. He rose, flung away the cigar stump, and took account with his shaken stomach to ascertain if it could stand a beer at Sim Gray's expense.
They proceeded down several side streets to a low saloon. There were gaudy immoral pictures on the walls; the floor was filthy with "tobacco juice;" the glasses were sadly smeared when Sim Gray undertook to "set 'em up." Pete was most cordially entreated. He had not one beer only, but several. Sim Gray, aided and abetted by the others, hospitably insisted that Pete should "smile" again and yet once more. Pete grew immensely important and pleased. It never occurred to him that they were systematically fuddling him, so that they might enjoy the spectacle of his degradation. When his silly antics proclaimed him fairly on his first "drunk" a howl of delight went up from the young hoodlums; the older besotted habitués of the saloon chuckled over their glasses; even the saturnine bar-tender was in high glee, and offered another beer at the expense of the institution.
The hubbub at last attracted the attention of a policeman in the vicinity. It was well, perhaps, that it was he on this beat, for this man was a teetotaler and a member of a temperance society. The sound of "drunk and disorderly" was to him like the trumpet to the war-horse, and "running them in" he accounted the chief of his duties and his dearest pleasure. He appeared suddenly in the doorway with a countenance as stern and fixed as if it were carved in stone.
"Wh-wh-why—I wuz jes' goin' ter the station ter see you!" exclaimed Pete, springing up at the sight of the glitter of the buttons on the blue uniform, and with an abrupt realization of the purpose with which he had quitted the theatre.
A wild yell of coarse laughter from the crowd greeted Pete's announcement.
"You can't go none too soon," said the policeman, collaring Pete.
Then he looked about him severely. "I'd love to lock you all up," he exclaimed fervently.
Nobody laughed now. He was known to construe the law very strictly.
"When you teach a boy to drink you teach him to lie, to thieve, and worse, for here"—he struck the bar with his clenched fist—"is the place where a man puts the rope around his own neck."
So he went out and left silence behind him. Pete's drunken mood shifted to gravity as he was propelled along the street by the policeman's strong hand on his collar. Being now in trouble himself, he became all the more anxious to report Ned. He told his story, incoherently enough, however, hampered by the wanderings of his fevered brain, the tricks of his thickened tongue, and much interrupted by the sarcastic and incredulous comments of the policeman.
"He—he—he is a-stealin'! He—he's a-a-a-a-stealin' star's di'monds—right now—outer dressin'-room"—expounded Pete eagerly.
"Mighty likely," exclaimed the policeman in irony.
"Gorham's Theaytre,—got in by back window," spluttered Pete.
"I believe you!" The policeman gave a gruff laugh.
Pete soon ceased to care that his captor seemed to regard this but as a drunken vagary. Before they reached the lock-up he was growing very ill. He was barely conscious of being thrust into a tiny darkened room where there was a narrow bunk. He fell upon it, and there he lay sleeping the sleep of the very drunk until late the next day.
He woke with a splitting headache. For a time he was conscious of nothing but this fact. It was suddenly aggravated by a harsh, grating noise. The key was turning reluctantly in the lock. He frowned sullenly and looked over his shoulder. The policeman who had arrested him was standing in the doorway.
Then Pete realized where he was and recollected all that had happened. He had never imagined that he could be so disgraced. Everybody whom he knew would find it out, for his name would be printed in the police reports in the daily papers,—in Ned's paper too. Ned himself would read it. He remembered the threats he had made against Ned,—that he would give information against Ned to the police, forsooth,—that he would compass Ned's arrest! These threats were not fulfilled as he had promised himself. It would be but natural that Ned should gloat over his coarse, foolish degradation. Because he could not remain sober till he reached the station he must spend the night in the lock-up while Ned was enjoying the play. "An' the gump would never have drempt o' gittin' in the theaytre if it hadn't a-been fur me," he thought.
His mortification and self-reproach gave way at once to a surly jealousy and malignity, for it is more characteristic of such a boy as Pete Bateman, when forced by circumstances to recognize his faults, to seek to blame and injure others and find parallel misdeeds in their conduct, rather than to repent and amend.
"A cheatin' scamp,—I wisht I had Ned 'ere now," he thought virulently.
These feelings were in his heart when the policeman spoke.
"Boy," he said gravely, "now that ye're sorter sober I want ye ter tell that story again that ye told las' night about that burned theatre."
Pete started up in his bunk,—his headache forgotten. He had not before thought of this chance. Although Ned could not be caught in the active perpetration of the misdeed, he could still be accused of having climbed into the window of the theatre with nefarious designs.
"Maybe I'll make it lively fur him yet," Pete reflected with satisfaction.
Then he drawled with an affectation of indifference, "I never said nothin' 'bout noburnedtheaytre sence I wuz born."
As he thus corrected the policeman his broad face was ornamented with an expression of importance and extreme rectitude. His narrow eyes were downcast as if in reflection, and his manner intimated that he was willing, but did not seek to impart information. He noticed, however, that a man in citizen's dress, a thin, genteel, unobtrusive person, had entered too, and closed the door, but he did not see that upon the mention of the burned theatre this man slyly touched with the toe of his boot the broad, burly foot of the tall policeman, as an admonition not to put that clumsy member into Pete's explanation.
"Well,—whatdidyou say, then?" the policeman asked.
"I said that a boy had clomb inter the back winder o' Gorham's Theaytre. An' I begged an' plead with him ter come out, 'cause I knowed he wuz goin' ter steal outer the star's dressin'-room."
"What was he going to steal?" demanded the man in citizen's dress.
Pete hesitated. He was not quite sure as to what kind of portable property was most likely to be found in the orbit of "stars."
"Di'monds wuz what he had set his head fur," he replied at last, quite recklessly.
He wanted to disgrace Ned by preferring a criminal charge against him. He did not suppose that it could be sustained, for he did not imagine that the star had lost anything. But it gave the minor fraud of surreptitiously entering at the back window a heinous aspect, which would insure to Ned some unpleasant experiences as a sequel for the pleasure which Pete's suggestion had given to him, and which Pete could not share. He was acute enough to realize that if he merely reported Ned's adventure and success in seeing the play without paying his way, the management could scarcely be expected to take the trouble necessary to punish this offense, already a matter of the past. That window sash would be securely closed hereafter, and a stricter watch maintained. He noticed with satisfaction, therefore, that at the mention of the word "diamonds" the big policeman opened his eyes very wide, and cast a significant glance at the man in citizen's dress, as who should say, "I told you so."
The other man seemed to refuse to respond to the policeman's openly expressed excitement.
"Did the boy have any accomplices?" he asked coolly. "Was he helping anybody,—or was anybody helping him?"
"Not as I knows on," replied Pete.
There was so deep a disappointment in the policeman's honest face that Pete was moved to detail the story all over again, not perceiving wherein was the lack so evidently regretted.
"Whether he actially stole anything or not I dunno," he remarked virtuously in conclusion; "I fairly wrastled in prayer with him ter git him ter come down outer that window."
"And how are we to know that you did not go in with him and help steal?" suddenly asked the man dressed in black.
Pete looked up with a galvanic start. He fairly gasped. Then his breath and logic returned together.
"Because," he cried with a voice singularly like the voice of innocence, "I guv the alarm ter the police straight off. I wuz locked up 'ere an' fas' asleep 'fore ten o'clock."
"Fur a fac'." The policeman nodded regretfully. "I never believed a word that he said, the kid was that drunk. Ye never seen a kid so drunk."
Somehow Pete began to feel a trifle proud of his achievement.
"Oh, I'm a gay bird when I git started," he said with a callow chirp that was meant for a laugh; but his voice was as weak as his stomach.
The man in citizen's dress was visibly impressed. He no longer strove to pretend indifference. He and the policeman consulted earnestly, but in a very low and guarded tone for a few moments. Then they both went out, locking the door, and leaving Pete lying on the bed and holding his splitting head in both his hands. His pride was no panacea for these pangs.
The policeman came back presently, hurried and peremptory. Pete was hustled up. Very dubious and slow was Pete. His reluctance was noticed by his captor.
"Shake it up, boy," he exclaimed impatiently. "Ye ain't goin' in fur a drunk an' disorderlynow. Ye're jus' goin' before a magistrate for a private examination 'bout them di'monds an' that burned theatre."
"Is the theaytre burned?" faltered Pete, astounded. "Burned?—fur a fac'?"
"Ter the ground. But stir yer stumps, boy. I can't wait here all day."
It never occurred to Pete until he was in the presence of the magistrate and in the act of swearing to the statement which he had already made to the policeman that the affairs of this great world are not regulated after the haphazard fashion of boys and their puerile feuds and follies. Pete had involved himself in the tremendous machinery of the law, and in its inexorable course what might not befall such an atom! He dared not vary a word, for there beside him stood the policeman and the man in citizen's dress, whom he now understood to be a detective. They were both listening attentively. Any change, any faltering, might implicate him in he knew not what crimes perpetrated at the theatre last night, with which he was sure, too, Ned had naught to do.
Pete roused his memory to repeat the story exactly as he had told it at first. He had never before exerted so great a strain on his faculties. He tried to gauge the impression it produced, and he observed the gravity with which the subject was treated. This filled him with the wildest apprehensions. He had heretofore thought that Ned might be arrested and might have to appear in the police court, which would mortify him within an inch of his life, but he had anticipated nothing more serious. Now he understood that there was an investigation on foot, instituted by the manager-owner of the theatre, the manager and actors of the traveling company, the merchants who had had stocks of goods in the adjoining stores, and others who had sustained losses by the fire, all of whom would unite in the prosecution of the criminals when captured. There was no prophesying what might happen,—what Ned when arrested would say and perhaps swear to against him.
Pete was a moral quicksand. There was nothing stable in his character. Even his duplicity could not be counted on. Although quaking in the very clutches of the law, he was revolving in his mind such double-dealing as should protect him against the problematic lies which Ned might tell, when he in his turn should be arrested. For none is so quick to suspect others of falsehood as a liar. Pete made his scheme, and watched events, and waited.
The warrant for Ned's arrest was already issued. Pete thought the men were talking in a strangely unguarded manner, considering his presence. They had forgotten him, he concluded sagely. His sly eyes glittered through their narrow slits as he reflected how he could take advantage of their imprudence. Ned was not to be arrested immediately, he understood. The detective was to "shadow" him in the hope of seeing him communicate with some of the gang of thieves and incendiaries who had robbed and burned the theatre, for they naturally concluded that he was only an accomplice of others, as a boy alone could hardly have plotted and executed a crime of such magnitude.
"Shadder him as ye may, ye'll never arrest him. I'll tip him the wink ter skedaddle outer town," Pete thought triumphantly.
For he was ready to undo all he had done, since his malignity was likely to rebound upon himself. He did not doubt his ability to recall the irrevocable. Pete perhaps likened himself to that "man in our town—
Who was so wondrous wise,He jumped into a brier-bushAnd scratched out both his eyes.And when he found his eyes were out,With all his might and mainHe jumped into another bush,Andscratched them inagain."
Who was so wondrous wise,He jumped into a brier-bushAnd scratched out both his eyes.And when he found his eyes were out,With all his might and mainHe jumped into another bush,Andscratched them inagain."
Who was so wondrous wise,He jumped into a brier-bushAnd scratched out both his eyes.And when he found his eyes were out,With all his might and mainHe jumped into another bush,Andscratched them inagain."
Who was so wondrous wise,
He jumped into a brier-bush
And scratched out both his eyes.
And when he found his eyes were out,
With all his might and main
He jumped into another bush,
Andscratched them inagain."
Now the law of the land is not that kind of a bush. Pete, metaphorically speaking, was still stone blind.
He had a vague realization of this fact when the policeman said agreeably, "Come, youngster, we've got to go back. Ye'll get some breakfast then—if ye're able ter eat it."
Pete was amazed and half frightened. Then he straightened himself up like a man.
"I've got a right ter my trialnow,—like other drunk an' disorderlies," he protested. "I wanter go home."
"Cheese it!" the policeman succinctly admonished him. "Ye're ter be held fur a witness against they arrest that other boy."
"But they ain't got no right ter lockmeup—an' me jes' a witness," blustered Pete.
The policeman laughed lazily, languidly turning his quid of tobacco between his teeth. "A boy is never such a fool as when he undertakes ter know everything! I've seen a magistrate commit a slippery witness terjailin default o' bond fur safe-keeping against a trial. But it's just the lock-up ye're goin' ter,—you ain't hadyourtrial yet,—an' 't ain't fur long. Come on. Stir yer stumps."
So all the rest of that day Pete lay upon his narrow bunk, bemoaning his luck that he had ever seen Ned, groaning because of his aching head and flimsy stomach, wondering what had really happened at the theatre, what part Ned could have borne in it, what Ned would say when confronted with his false and perjured friend, and how the familiar building looked lying low and in ruins.
Dreary enough, to be sure,—with the charred heaps of timber and bricks, the smouldering embers and ashes, and the smoke still curling up into the May sunshine. The east wall, although tottering and with great blackened gaps, still stood. Against one of the frescoed panels and close to the ruins of a proscenium box was a gilded mask of Folly in alto-rilievo. The decorator had substituted for the more usual delineations of comedy and tragedy a jester's head and bauble and, on the opposite side of the proscenium, as the antithesis of frivolity, the type of heroism, a knight's helmet with closed visor and the point of a lance. This mask had fallen with the west wall, but the smirched face of Folly, surmounted by the smoke-grimed cap and bells, still leered fantastically down upon the ruins. It was not without sarcastic suggestions. Where so much of worth had perished Folly yet remained. It was a prominent object and attracted much attention. As Ned, who was out on an errand, paused among a knot of idlers and shading his eyes with his hand looked up, its grimace seemed to him less jocose than sinister. He thought of all that he and it had witnessed last night. This was a secret between them. He resolved that he would be as dumb as the dumb image. Neither had made a sign as yet—save—all at once a grotesque fancy crossed him! In the flicker of the sunshine and the shimmering undulations of the smoke the face looked at him—and winked!
He knew that this was only a fancy, but it frightened him. Was he going to be ill? he asked himself. Was he losing his self-control, his hold on his sharp wits? He turned away hastily. He felt that he could not maintain his self-possession in the presence of the crowd if Folly should again mysteriously, fraternally, sign to him.
He turned away so very hastily that he ran against a man—a thin, genteel, unobtrusive person—in citizen's dress, who was standing just behind him. As Ned made a rough boyish gesture of apology he lifted his pale agitated face. The man's keen gray eyes scanned it closely.
CHAPTER V
Ned gave scant heed to his work that day, so absorbed was he in reviewing the last night's scenes, in considering his position, and in anxious forebodings. Now and then he sought to comfort himself by reflecting that doubtless the worst was over,—only Pete knew that he had been to the theatre, and how could Pete, how could any one, imagine that he had not come out with the other people behind the scenes—employees, actors, and the many various supernumeraries—by way of the side door?
After a time he became alarmed lest his manner betray the trouble that beset him. Once when he opened the door of one of the editorial rooms and called out "Copee!" to apprise the magnate presiding at the desk that the printers were waiting, he was dismayed to hear, instead of his wonted peremptory chirp, such a strained, sharp cry that he hardly recognized his own voice.
A young man, trying to sustain the heavy draught upon the imagination which writing a book-notice without reading the book must always impose, turned from his work with a growl.
"That confounded boy's throat needs oiling! He is just one all-fired creak!" he cried irritably.
The little rebuff wounded Ned as an intentional cruelty might have done. His anxiety had made him sensitive and sore. Generally he felt amply able to take care of himself, and his mental attitude toward others might be described in the simple phrase, "Look out!" He was usually ready and efficient in any work entrusted to him, but to-day he was awkward, under foot, out of time and place, and very inattentive and slow to understand. His pallid face wore a hunted, pleading look, of which he was unconscious; and he was on the point of bursting into tears when a momentary notice of it elicited a word of sympathy.
He had been sent to the "funny man's" desk in the adjoining room to hurry him up. The "funny man," as the junior compositors called the wit of the staff, did not mind being hurried. There was a laugh still in his eyes as his pencil traced the final words. His face was so ruddy as to accent the light tint of his blond hair as it blowsed over his forehead. He was a robust man with a fine digestion, and the sight of unhappiness was abhorrent to him.
"Hungry?" he asked with a comical intonation as the little devil waited.
Ned's face mantled with a sickly smile,—very readily, indeed, for the "funny man's" reputation for wit was so well established that everybody laughed at everything he said, and he did not have to crack abona fidejoke more than once or twice a year to sustain it. Thus he became chary of his good things.
Ned's face was more pitiful with the sickly smile upon it than in anxious gravity.
The good-natured man's finger and thumb were inserted in the pocket of his waistcoat.
"Methinks," he said with mock seriousness, "methinks the goodly goober is the fruit of the earth in which thy soul most delighteth."
He twirled a silver quarter of a dollar across the desk, and the devil caught it.
"With best wishes for your digestion," said the "funny man" politely.
And the devil laughed again.
Little did either foresee the damage that coin was to do—even though diverted from the purchase of peanuts.
For the devil felt the need of a change of air.
A proofreader and his copyholder, engaged in their trying exercises hard by, had shown some impatience of this puerile dialogue carried on at full voice. Being silently motioned out by the "funny man" with a facetious air of mock mystery, Ned had nothing to do for a time after rendering up his copy in the composing-room, but to lean on the sill of the high window in the hall of the fifth story and await orders.
As he looked out he saw that the sun was tending toward the west, the mansard roofs and domes and steeples defined sharply against the dazzling cumulus clouds. The city stretched out so far beneath it that one might fancy it must come to the ground within the corporate limits. Ned loved to imagine that its fiery cresset, falling and falling, was caught at last on the distant tower of the water-works, for always as it disappeared behind those huge timbers the white effulgence of the electric light burst suddenly forth and blazed there, the Sun of Science, through all the dark midnights. It was, however, too early as yet for this illusion. The golden lustre of the afternoon still dominated the lengthening shadows; the church spires glinted; the points of the myriads of lightning-rods burned as if tipped with living fire; that fat, prosperous exile, the English sparrow, was yet up and about, busy in the accomplishment of his equivocal mission here; the cloud of smoke, rollicking out of the chimneys of a furniture factory over the way, was white and gold and fawn-colored, and gleamed iridescent against the azure sky; the shadow of this ethereal thing, that itself had no substance, chased it hilariously down the street, leaving, truant-like, the fires and the toiling men and the clanking machinery below.
Perhaps the motion roused a sort of emulation in the jaded boy; perhaps only the wind suggested the idea as it dipped over the tall chimneys and softly touched his cheek with a cinder, and tossed his slightly curling red hair.
"I ought ter go to the Pawk an' git some fresh air," he said. "That's jes' what's the matter with me."
He fingered the coin in his pocket. It seemed singularly opportune that it should have been given to him, for in conscience he could not spend his small wages on car-fare, and the park was out of walking distance unless he had plenty of time at his disposal.
In that interval between the day's work and the rush which precedes going to press at night he made his way out, and was soon whizzing swiftly along in the cable car toward the southern terminus of the road.
He sat quite undisturbed for a time, lulled by the monotonous motion, finding the sunshine warm and cheery, and all forgetful of the fire and last night's scenes. He was on the point of falling asleep in his corner when he roused himself with a sudden start. Perhaps it was only his guilty conscience that kept his fears alert, or perhaps it was that odd, mesmeric sensation which one experiences when becoming the subject of a steady, stealthy gaze. It has been described as a feeling as if there were a cobweb on one's cheek. At any rate, Ned, sitting bolt upright, knew, although he did not see, that a tall, thin man on the opposite seat had just been keenly staring at him; but now this stranger was gazing pensively out of the window.
Somehow his face seemed singularly familiar,—yet Ned could not at once recollect having seen it before. Oddly enough, it brought back the thought of last night's terrible scenes, of his heavy, felonious secrets, the dismal black walls of the burned theatre, the distress of many men thrown suddenly out of employment, the imagined despair of the ruined owner. Where had he ever seen this man? Ned wondered. Why should his face be thus associated with these suggestions?
Suddenly he remembered the gilded mask of Folly, the silly wink, the knowing grimace! This was the man against whom he had run as he fled from his own foolish fancy.
It seemed strange to him that he should meet this man at the scene of the fire, and now again on the way to the park; but in a moment he was arguing within himself that the encounter had no significance,—every idler in the town had been that day to the burned theatre, and the park was of course a public resort. It was only an accident. For what could the man have to do with him?
"I'm so full o' secrets," he said to himself, "that I feel like a pack o' dynamite,—ef anybody was ter tech me I believe I'd bust!"
The renewal of all his anxieties had destroyed the pleasure and the expected benefits of the jaunt. In vain for Ned the trees, in their fresh May verdure, leaned over the broad drives and walks, while the young birds in the branches discussed with their parents the propriety of postponing bed-time for half an hour longer. All the children were still up, they argued,—and that was very true, for the park swarmed with small specimens of humanity, and the perennial perambulator was on the march. In vain the fountains tossed up their spray of rainbows. In vain refreshing sounds came from the lake, where water-fowl splashed in and out of the ripples, and the beat of oars sent a skiff skimming about, and a swan, resting motionless on the reflection of the evening sky, suggested the starry Swan whose element is the sky itself.
From the greensward and in the midst of beds of coleus, that gleamed like huge jewels of garnet or topaz, rose a great pedestal of polished granite, surmounted by a statue in bronze. It had been erected in honor of some great man. Ned did not know of whom, and he had never cared to ask. Now he looked at it speculatively as he sat down on a bench opposite.
"An' what did he ever do to make him great?" he demanded of himself.
The answer came promptly from his sharp common sense, "Did right!"
There was the secret of greatness in a nutshell. For those great men who were not good as well are certainly not honored for that wherein they failed. Always what was done right predominated. And those men who do right in the small details of the simplest daily life, although the result may be inconspicuous, are as great as any who leave their memory in bronze. Ned knew this,—that a printer's devil has as fine an opportunity for heroism as he "who taketh a city." And he had been ambitious morally as well as mentally.
"But what can I do now?" he thought. How could he tell his story, and make reparation, and quiet his conscience without danger of being believed the accomplice of the men who had stolen the money and the star's diamonds, and burned the beautiful theatre, and ruined the manager for their revenge and wicked malice? If he should confess that he had choused the management out of half a dollar he impeached his own honesty. Could he then consistently ask to be believed innocent of other crimes?
Besides, what good would his confession do now? The rascals were no doubt far enough away by this time. The theatre was burned, the money and diamonds were gone, the manager was ruined; and Ned thought that unless he held his tongue with unparalleled discretion he might be punished for the crimes of the absconded scamps.
As he sat there, his elbows on his knees, his hat drawn down, his face pale and grave, his hands holding his throbbing head, the fact that he was troubled in his mind and tortured by his conscience was very evident to a tall, quiet, thin man, with an unobtrusive manner and a pensive aspect, who chanced to saunter by more than once.
Ned did not notice him, however. Only now and then by an effort he tore his attention from the subject that so absorbed him, and upbraided himself for wasting his opportunity for the beneficial influences of a change of air, of scene, of thought that might of itself serve to solve the problems which racked him. He lifted his head and addressed himself to an earnest attempt to divert his mind. It was rare, since his life was spent in vibration between the business portions of the city and the tenement district, that he saw the equipages of people of wealth and fashion, which now flashed by in quick succession. He noticed that they were filled with the silken shimmer of dainty attire and bright pink-and-white faces, which seemed to bloom in the delicate shadow of the quivering lace or fringe of parasols; these parasols, being white or violet or of roseate hue, were themselves of flower-like suggestion, resembling some species of convolvuli. An automobile astonished his gaze rather more than it surprised the sophisticated horses, but it was to these animals he awarded the palm as a means of locomotion. In them he felt a sort of proprietary interest. He noted the value of their fine form; he appraised their glossy coats; he narrowed his eyes to discriminate details of their harness, often so slight as to seem barely to restrain their activities, and hiding no point of beauty or grace. His infancy had been spent in a horse-raising country, but his interest was really apart from memory, and only stimulated by having heard his father's enthusiastic talk of notable favorites which he had seen or shod, for the Scotch emigrant had first settled as a wheelwright and blacksmith in New Arcady, Kentucky, and there he had remained until the last few years of his life.
The sleek, whirling spokes, as they caught the light and glittered, soon dazzled Ned's tired eyes; the gay voices that floated down to him seemed all out of tune with the melancholy conditions of his struggling, troubled existence. Only once did he look up with keen and spontaneous attention; a tandem, a thing much in vogue in this place, of fine blood bays went by like the wind,—so fast indeed that he hardly recognized the manager and his elderly skeleton-like friend. Ned rose from his seat to stare after them in doubt and eagerness, all unmindful that a man on a bench in the shade of a tree opposite had noted his excitement, and the identity of the parties who had elicited it, and was steadily gazing at him.
Ned did not seat himself again, but began to wander along the shores of the lake. There was all about it a hedge or border of the Southern plant calledYucca gloriosa, and its bayonet-like leaves and tall shafts with their white pendent liliaceous blossoms were reflected in the smooth water, all as motionless as if the whole were some softly vivid aquarelle. Presently a skiff, freighted with children, came gliding along with ripples about its prow and a wake of foam in which the reflections were lost for a time, the snowy blossoms only gradually sketched anew on the surface as by some trembling, tentative, unpracticed brush. The detective, now strolling along the broad drive, could ill keep his eye upon the boy as he dawdled among the tall, flowering spikes; even less when Ned abruptly came to a stand-still to gaze fixedly upon the countenance of a swan, waddling in its ungainly style up the green bank toward a small, daintily befrilled, rosy child, who with her nurse's arm protectively about her waist, was making bold to offer the bird a bit of cracker in disregard of the mandatory sign, "Don't feed the Swans."
The detective found it yet more difficult to dispose of himself appropriately when, as he still incidentally followed the boy, Ned paused in further reaches of the park to gaze through a high fence, which was constructed in a pretty, rustic fashion, and which served to keep in a few deer. One of these had a fawn, and the little creature was beside its mother. The boy had not known before that these animals are dappled with white in early youth, and this indisputable presentment of the fact brought him bolt upright against the fence, where he stared in the interstices while both hands grasped the structure.
The officer could not follow his example, without attracting attention, for what is eminently sane in one stage of human development would be evidence of an unbalanced mind in a more advanced age and a different station of life. He was not, however, willing to pass on, lest he lose sight of the boy; and something, he could not say what, convinced him that there was an objective point in Ned's wanderings, albeit he himself, perhaps, was as yet unconscious whither, in his undiscriminated mental processes, his steps were tending. The officer met the emergency by pausing in the middle of the road and taking out a cigar. The wind was stirring anew, and thus he was enabled to make the business of deliberately lighting it a longer operation than was really necessary. More than one match flickered and was extinguished by the freakish gusts, although he appeared to shield carefully the timorous flame with his hand. This enabled him to stand still until Ned was once more forging ahead, when the genteel-looking man in citizen's dress again began to stroll along, swinging his cane and leisurely puffing his cigar. He needed its solace, for a sharp nettling irritation was beginning to be very prominent in his consciousness. "I'd rather shadow a grasshopper than a boy," he said to himself, for there seemed to be some chance to restrain the mere activities of the one, and he could not be sure what the vagaries of the other implied. He prided himself on his experience. He had outwitted noted crooks in his time. He felt fully competent to divine any usual motive of flight or aggression or craft or wickedness, but the interest of standing still as Ned was now doing and kicking at a frog as it hopped from one side of the road to the other was something he could not appreciate. It seemed so casual, so inconsistent with any other motive than mere idle diversion, that he would have been minded to leave Ned in this choice batrachian company were he not lured on and on by the hope of finding the boy making an effort to communicate with the older and more important conspirators in the crime. The unique difficulties of the situation, too, appealed to his vanity in invention. What to do while Ned was engaged with the frog he did not, for one moment, know. The next, with a sentiment of discovery, he drew out his watch, having observed a dial on the tower of a small building down a glade so steep that the clock was not many feet higher than his head as he stood on the hillside; he affected to compare the timepieces and then to reset his watch, and to wind it carefully anew. He had not completed this ruse, which he was exploiting in the most natural manner possible, when Ned suddenly started forward at a brisk pace and evidently with a definite goal in view.
The boy had all at once recognized the impulse in his mind to which he had been unconsciously tending. He desired counsel. His nature was frank, not secretive. He had only feared to divulge his knowledge of the crime lest a worse thing befall him, and he distrusted the people he knew, all more or less strangers to him and naturally devoid of any special interest in him or his welfare. When in the longing to open his heart he had thought of his mother, the impulse was checked by the doubt of her capacity to cope with the situation. She was even more ignorant of the ways of this world than he himself, he argued, for he knew town life, while she, suspiciously restricting her intercourse even with her nearest neighbors, was hardly more sophisticated now than if she had never left her rural home in New Arcady, Kentucky, where she was born. Moreover she would scold,—alack, for poor femininity! She would ask him why he had done this, and why he had not done that,—all irrevocable, all a part of the immutable past,—and withal she would be as helpless as he himself to take up now the tangled present and unravel its tortuous coils. If only his father had lived! And so Ned suddenly bethought himself of certain of his father's old friends,—friends in the sense of patrons in that far-away country home he had left,—men whose horses he had shod, whose good opinion had been his meat and bread, whose relinquished favor he had always regretted, whose names and exploits were forever on his lips to the day of his death. These were men of note in their section, of substance, of sophistication, of breeding. How often had Ned heard his father describe their genial traits, their lordly traditions, and liberal ways! Doubtless these portraits of the rural magnates were idealized under the softening touch of regretful memory and the roseate haze of distance, but Ned did not appreciate this. He only realized that they were of such station, character, and worldly knowledge as to render them above suspicion and eminently capable of advising him accurately as to his duty and danger in the matter. He thought they would believe his story; they would befriend him and protect him. And what so easy as to seek their advice and assistance! There in that deep cut lay the railroad, the parallel steel bars even now jangling faintly with the vibratory resonance of a far-off train. Should he leave at midnight after his work was over, he would be in that bucolic paradise at noon. Only a few hours' stay, and the night would bring him back, and till all was over and explained, his mother might never know of his absence, being pacified with the subterfuge of a press of work at the printing office.
It was a compact, resolute little shadow, stepping decisively and briskly along, that blurred and blotted out the dapplings of the chestnut and maple leaves, all fair and fresh and whole, which were imprinted by the sunshine in their graceful entirety on the smooth, broad, sandy stretch that led to the little station. The determination, though so suddenly taken, was definite in Ned's mind, and as he entered the building and walked over to the ticket-seller's window he had not a doubt as to his best course now. The man that the little aperture framed was blond, clean-shaven, young, with a steel blue eye and a cardigan jacket which he had donned to save the sleeves of the natty coat hanging on a hook beside his desk, and indeed the frayed sleeves of the jacket told of the wear and tear incident to driving a pen. He fixed upon Ned those matter of course, disconcerting eyes peculiar to the human automaton, whose business it is to do the same mechanical thing a thousand times a day and to repeat the same mechanical words.
Ned demanded the price of a ticket, his little grimy paw already on his cheap buckskin wallet, hid away among less valuable stowage in the museum of his pockets.
"To New Arcady, Kentucky? Twelve dollars!" said the man. Ned felt his hair rise,—more than a month's wages! And was he to beg or beat his way back? The prospect in which he had begun to rejoice was dwindling, fading, vanishing like a mirage! And it had been so hopeful! He wondered, when he thought of this, might he not steal a ride thither,—beat his way! Nay,—had he not yet enough of beating his way?
"Want the ticket? Then move on," said the ticket agent as Ned still vaguely clung to the window, as if he thus kept a clutch on his ephemeral hope. He shook his head, unclasped his hand, and slipped away. "What can I do for you, sir?" the agent asked sharply of a gentleman who was now standing silently at the window, seeming scarcely less dazed and wool-gathering than Ned had been. "Oh, time-table?" The automaton ungraciously flung it out, and went back to his writing with an air which seemed to ask if all the fools who wanted to go nowhere, and whom he wished were there, were coming this day to block up his window, and interrupt his work, and impede traffic.
Ned left the tall, thin gentleman in the station building engaged in the study of the time-table. But he did not long remain there. As the dejected little lad, who had not realized how he had been upborne by his secret hope of help and counsel from his father's old friends till it was snatched from him, took his way along the darkening shadowy paths, the tall man was once more swiftly afoot, and although he passed Ned and walked openly in advance he was determined no more to lose trace of the boy. The idea of quitting the city, which the inquiry at the station had revealed, precipitated the necessity of prompt action. Very little more time could now be accorded to the line of investigation which the detective was pursuing,—the hope of discovering the boy in communication with the incendiaries. It would be necessary to arrest him forthwith, lest he escape from the town, and with him vanish the only clue as yet developed of the origin and perpetrators of the crime. Nevertheless the detective determined that he would still seek in this limited interval to secure some inkling, some vestige of a theory, that might lead to the unmasking of the principals in this nefarious affair. Thus he was acutely conscious of the patter of the small feet as they came nimbly along behind him; when at last they began to lag he turned from the road and sat down on a bench by the wayside, and there Ned noticed him for the first time since they had been in the park, and remembered when and where he had before seen him. Ned was relieved to observe as he passed that the man seemed to take no heed of him. He did not even look up. Perhaps in his turn Ned would not have again thought of the stranger, so frequently encountered, had he not turned back as he reached the big iron gate to gaze regretfully over the great green stretch of the park. The man was just rising from the bench under the tree; he stretched his limbs with much deliberation, caught up his cane and came slowly down the broad walk toward the gate. He too was about to leave the place. Ned could not have said why, but he determined that he would not ride back to town in the same car. He loitered. There were two of the cable double-cars waiting on the track. The foremost was nearly full of passengers,—the other altogether empty.
"I'll take the car that he leaves," Ned said to himself. Impressed with the idea that he was watched, he had half expected that the man would hesitate and wait for him.
To his surprise the stranger strode past without so much as a glance toward him and stepped upon the platform of the foremost car.
"I'm the biggest fool in town!" thought Ned in scorn for his terrors, turning nevertheless toward the other car.
"Go on!" said the grip-man of the empty cable car. "This car is going to turn in."
Ned went on, dismayed by the possibility that the man had noticed and understood this effort to avoid him, but when he too stepped upon the rear platform of the foremost car and the cumbrous vehicle started off, he saw that the man had bought the evening paper and was already deeply absorbed in its contents.
"He ain't even thinking about me," Ned reflected, much reassured. "He ain't even looked ter see if I took the kyar or no."
The boy who had sold the paper still stood in the doorway. He was a squabby little fellow of eight or ten, with carrot-tinted hair, a broad, dirty, freckled face, a wide mouth with several front teeth missing, a beguiling blue eye, and a persuasive lisp, although his voice was keyed to a blatant whine. He scanned the faces of the men in the car with a precocious attention and business tact at once ludicrous and pathetic as he recited the headlines of the news columns. There was something very appealing in his innocent and earnest eyes and long list of enormities.
"All about the bloody murder at the wharf!" he sang out suddenly.
There was no response. The car whizzed on. Nobody talked. There was not even smoking here, although from the "grip" visible ahead, the wind brought back the fragrance of cigars.
"Executhion at the Jail-yard! Two murdererth on the thame gallowth! Dying thpeech an' confethion!—Their neckth were broke!" he added suddenly, the last clause of his own motion and by way of explanation.
His air demanded, who could resist such fascinating reading as that! Still there was no response. That belled cat, the conductor, was taking the fares, and ever and anon the sharp tones of his bell-punch jangled on the air.
The disappointed little boy fetched a heavy sigh. He could remain on the car fare-free as long as he was selling or seeking to sell his papers, but if merely in transit he must pay like other people. It was a long way back to the business portion of the town for those fat, short legs, which had already been abundantly exercised to-day, and the little boy racked his brains for more scareheads. Then with eternally springing hope he blurted out:
"All about the grave robbery! Goulth still at large."
He cocked his beguiling eye up at a gray-bearded gentleman distinguished by a mild, refined aspect and a clerical coat.
The old clergyman looked disgusted.
The boy had sold but one paper on this trip, and the car was already approaching the outskirts of the town. There was a tremulo in his voice which in any other person of his years, less hardy and self-reliant than a newsboy, would have preceded a burst of tears. With him it only preceded a shrill squawk:
"Gorham's theaytre burned,—latest detailth, total dethructhion!"
Ned winced. He thought of the fiery, impulsive owner. How would he endure the loss, the humbled pride, the day of small things! With the weight of the recollection of his own wrong-doing Ned felt as if he were responsible for the moral ordeal as well as the material disaster—although he had no concern with either—which the manager seemed destined to encounter.
"Heavy Inthurance. New York Companies," the boy sang out unexpectedly.
Ned started as suddenly as if he had been shot.
"'Ere, boy," he said, fishing out of his pocket the change of the silver quarter which the "funny man" had bestowed upon him. "Gimme that paper."
The little fat boy in the door stared, his mouth open in astonishment and exhibiting the vacant spaces where his teeth ought to be. He had never known a small working boy such as Edward to buy a daily paper. He thought Ned was guying him until he took another look at the outstretched hand with the proffered nickel. Then he gravely handed over the folded journal. The elderly gentleman of clerical aspect looked down at Ned with a smile; he saw in the occurrence only an amusing affectation of mannish tastes and habits. It had a far graver meaning to another person in the car, who was openly staring at Ned, with a new light kindling in his eyes and an expression of triumph in the curl of his lip.
Ned was cowering back, making a feint of opening the paper, and yet all a-quiver with the realization that he had betrayed himself. How could a poor boy, such as he was, be supposed to take an interest in Gorham's insurance? He feared his eagerness upon the mention of the subject might intimate to the man—if this were really a detective who had watched and followed him—that he possessed some knowledge of the fire, connected with the question of insurance. It might even imply the truth,—arson! Only he would be numbered with the incendiaries. He had given the detective the clue,—Insurance!
Ned presently made an effort to seem to read the paper,—he could not pin his mind to a single syllable. It was scant comfort to him now—since he had given himself away—to know that the First Player and he must have overheardonly a partof Gorham's conversation with his friend, and that in refusing to renew his policy in the Rising Phœnix Insurance Company because of a quarrel with the agent he had at once placed the risk elsewhere. Thus the burned theatre was amply insured in other companies, and Gorham's loss would be slight, comparatively speaking, by reason of the disaster.
The lamp had been lighted in the car, although it was not yet quite dark. Ned could see still as they whizzed along on some considerable elevation the wide spread of the city stretching in dusky undulations against the sky, which had now grown gray, portending rain. Beyond some dip, full of roofs, massive blocks of business houses rose, frowning and gloomy, while between surged smoke and dust in fantastic, haggard clouds that suggested witches and demons and undreamed-of powers of the air. The mazes of the telegraph and telephone wires now and then became visible, meshed and webbed about the town as if it were caught and held fast in the toils of some big scientific spider. Oh, it was a dreary evening,—long did Ned remember it! Even the most commonplace things had strange and sinister effects. The air was pulsing with rhythmic vibrations; the earth throbbed tumultuously; from a square railed inclosure in the middle of the street a column of black smoke gushed suddenly forth as if spewed from the pits of hell, and a locomotive was shrieking like a demon as it rushed out from the long tunnel beneath the avenue where the cable car rolled heavily on and on, its gong clamoring at every intersecting street, and now and again in a tumult of jarring warning lest some enterprising vehicle usurp the track.
Once more Ned looked at the detective. The detective was looking at Ned. For that moment they understood each other.
But the sharp boy of a town is no match for the sharp man of a town. The quiet personage in plain black clothes folded up his newspaper, put it in his breast pocket, then turning slightly in his seat, looked out of the window at the rows of decorous, even handsome residences which they were now passing. The gilded numbers were distinct upon the illuminated transoms, for within the gas was already lighted. He seemed to scan each with interest, as if he sought some particular number. Presently he rose, passed to the platform, quietly swung himself off, and walked slowly and meditatively to the sidewalk.
Ned sat amazed as the progress of the car soon left him behind. He began to think that he had been mistaken from the first,—that he had neither been watched nor followed. The man had looked attentively at him to be sure,—but what of that? The white-haired gentleman of clerical aspect had also looked at him with interest. Ned felt quite certain now that influenced by his own secret anxiety he had magnified the danger, and fancied suspicion in every casual careless stranger. He was sure that he had encountered no detective.
Ned could not see through the buildings on either hand. He could not know that the few passers along a side street were staring in mild surprise at a grave, genteel-looking man, dressed in black, who was running at full speed as if for his life. When this man reached a broad avenue parallel to the one which he had quitted he did not slacken his pace, but plunged down another side street, then through an alley, and out once more upon a thoroughfare. There he hailed a passing car and sprang upon it. He had calculated time and distance very narrowly, for as the car made a broad curve, turning down a street at right angles with the avenue it had just traversed, it came upon the track close behind a car with a blue light, the one which he had left not five minutes earlier, which was still rolling down the street in a straight line.
As he looked through the window at the vehicle in advance his sharp eyes were quick to detect the slim little figure of the printer's devil still sitting close to the door, and he felt that whether it were instinct which had warned the boy or inadvertence on his own part in bringing his surveillance too close, it had been cleverly counteracted.
CHAPTER VI
The detective pondered seriously upon all these things as he sat there. He wondered that as yet the boy should have done nothing to indicate his partners in a crime so far beyond his own scope. More than all, he wondered how the little printer's devil should know or care anything about the insurance of the theatre, and what the question of the insurance had to do with his surreptitious entrance and the theft of the diamonds and other portable valuables.
The fire had been at first supposed to be the result of accident or of carelessness on the part of the theatre's employees, until Peter Bateman's story had suggested to the police the possibility that theft had necessitated that sequence of pillage, which is incendiarism. Thus the detective had believed that the theatre had been robbed by some gang of thieves, of whom Ned was but the humble tool, and then fired to conceal the traces of the more profitable crime. Now this conclusion was shaken,—and again and again he asked himself in perplexity and doubt what the question of the insurance could have had to do with the crime.
The more he thought of it the more he was convinced that this was to be a singular and difficult case. Properly worked up it would reflect much credit on the officer who should finally bring it to a successful issue. Once in the course of his varied speculations on the subject he came very close indeed to the truth; he canvassed the possibility that the theatre was burned from motives of malice or revenge, for Gorham was a man who made and kept bitter enemies. But the fact that any fool must know that so large and valuable a property was always amply insured would, he thought, prevent antagonism or reprisal from taking that form, since the loss would fall most heavily upon the various companies who had assumed the risk,—vague, unimagined corporations, beyond the scope of malice or antagonism, foreign to the thought of an incendiary.
Still meditating aimlessly about the question of insurance, he began to wonder if Gorham were not actually a gainer rather than a loser by the fire. The theatre's furnishings were getting shabby and out of style; much of the scenery was old; the site had become, by reason of one of those swift expansions of the commercial section of the town, so common in our growing southwestern cities, more valuable by far than the building itself; the season had not been very prosperous,—too much legitimate drama to cope successfully with spectacular opposition. The smaller theatres drew the crowds, and light opera was the vogue. More than all, there was of record a rather heavy mortgage on the structure itself, which showed that the owner had needed money in considerable emergencies. Taken all in all, Gorham was doubtless in better financial case now, a richer man to-day than yesterday.
All at once the detective began to put two and two methodically together. Gorham, by reason of the heavy insurance, had profited by the burning of the theatre. The boy, who was known to have secretly entered the house, presumably for the purpose of theft, had unwittingly manifested a tumult of excited interest upon the sheer mention of the insurance of the building,—a matter usually absolutely alien to one of his age, his class, and his ignorance; when in a state of obviously alert suspicion he became aware that this incongruity had been observed, he grew so restive under surveillance, evidently recognizing its menace, that the officer, not wishing to make an arrest prematurely, was obliged to withdraw, and only shadow him from afar.
Insurance!Had the boy indeed done nothing to indicate the perpetrator of the crime!
The car was now passing the ruins of the theatre. The smoke, still curling slowly into the air, had a certain luminous quality, reflected from the dying embers. Red lanterns here and there marked the lines of the débris, where the brick walls had fallen across the sidewalks and street, blocking the way, and served as a warning to the benighted passer-by. One of these lanterns cast a dull flush upon the gilded mask of Folly high on the frescoed wall, still grotesquely leering down upon the melancholy scene. As the lurid glare gradually faded in the distance, the detective, his conclusion reached at last, silently nodded his head, decisively, aggressively.
For this astute person had come to believe that Gorham had himself fired his own theatre!
He believed the boy, entering for the purpose of theft and concealed among the scenery, had accidentally gained a knowledge of the manager's crime,—else why should a lad of his years, a mere child, feel an interest in so remote a subject as the details of the insurance of the building? He doubtless went or was sent there with the object of stealing, nefarious enough! but burning the building could work an advantage to no one but the owner, who would get the big insurance money! Thus the detective deduced that Gorham himself had committed the crime which in double-dealing, joining with the "star," the manager of the theatrical company, and the insurance companies, he now pretended to cause to be investigated by the police.
The detective's anxiety to discover the printer's devil in seeking to communicate with some criminal, some noted "crook," on the subject of the theatre, changed to an alert expectation. He believed the boy would seek to communicate with Gorham,—he would make use of his knowledge of the crime in an effort to extort money.
When Ned at last left the car the detective had become so cautious as to follow only at a very considerable distance, so extra-hazardous had his surveillance become, so alertly suspicious seemed the boy. Down and down Ned took his way, through streets that grew more dirty and dingily lighted as he went. The tall, gloomy tenement houses on either hand, for miles, it seemed, apparently leaned toward each other across the way, to limit the sky and exclude the air from the sad purlieus below. Some women were quarreling in shrill, shrewish accents on a corner; one reeled as she walked, and hard by there was a saloon that exuded a dim glow of untrimmed kerosene lamps, a pervasive odor of beer and whiskey, and a series of dirty, frowzy customers of both sexes at all hours of the day and night. It had a more remote trade, too; now and then a child, tangle-haired, begrimed, unnaturally sharp of eye and tongue, yet still suggestive of that universal promise of youth,—dim, dim, not a possibility, hardly a dream, only intimating a higher purpose in its creation,—scuttled out with a pitcher of beer, bearing it carefully away to some drink-sodden wretch in a forlorn attic. The clouds had thickened; they seemed to Ned to-night, though never before, to resemble the clouds of sin and sorrow and suffering that hang over the homes of the wicked and weak, and to prefigure the bursting of the vials of wrath. And search the sky as he would, he could discern no star.
When he had toiled up four flights of a dark, rickety staircase, and opened a door in the rear of the mansard roof, the sudden contrast of the scene within smote upon his quivering nerves, his quickened perceptions, as if he had never before beheld it. The floor was scoured white, and throughout the atmosphere was the pungent aroma of coarse yellow soap. The clean patchwork quilts on the two beds were as gay with many colors as Joseph's coat. The monkey-stove sought to atone for its many misdeeds emblazoned on the smoke-blackened walls, and glowed to a scarlet hue, and upon it simmered the savory dish of onion stew that he loved. His sickly, puny little sister, seated on a home-woven rug in the centre of the floor, found plenteous entertainment in banging a tin cup with an iron spoon, while her mother was busied in the task of wrapping hundreds of bonbons in gayly fringed papers, for this work for the candy factory could be done at home, and the care of the child prevented her from going out to secure better paid work elsewhere.
"That child is the bane of yer life," her neighbors sometimes said, with a species of antagonism toward the hindrance, born, it seemed, only to be a clog and a dead-weight. "Ye had better sen' it to the 'sylum, or somewher's, an' git some use of yerself."
Ned's mother returned no comment, no reply, to these suggestions; sometimes it seemed as if she had some impediment in her speech, so silent she had become, so taciturn with her neighbors. The fact that she was country-bred was shown abundantly in her stolid uncommunicativeness, her vague terror of all the ways of the great city outside of these four walls, her old-fashioned code of manners and morals, and the painfully wrought and maintained cleanliness of her surroundings. No slight task it was, to be sure, to "pack" the water which plentifully drenched floors, tables, pots, kettles, windows, up four flights of steep stairs from the hydrant in the yard! Small wonder that poverty and dirt are so often concomitant. It had been an evil day for her and her simple, untutored husband when some vague, distorted ambition had moved him to despise the small havings of a country-side blacksmith and seek to become a "horse-shoer" among the often mythical advantages of a large town. He had little of the canny thrift characteristic of his Scotch nationality. He was an open-handed, jovial, florid, red-haired, fiery-tempered man,—over sanguine and credulous. The many deceptions practiced upon greenhorns, the greater expense of living, the fierce competition of an already crowded trade, baffled and bewildered the sturdy fellow. He worked as long as he had work, but when he was idle he began to drink more and more, and perhaps at last it was no great misfortune to his family when one of the pestilences which decimate the tenement region laid this once fair stalk of wheat low with the "cheat." He left his wife, Ned, and the puny, sickly little girl as remote, as alien from their old, country home, as if that haven of humble, hearty comfort were in a foreign planet. They lived as best they might on the boy's wages and the few jobs of coarse washing that she could get to do at home. It was the pride of both mother and son that they had maintained this precarious existence on these slender means now for more than a year, and in this fact they saw a glad augury for the future.
Her face always wore, however, an apprehensive, appealing expression, although Ned remembered when it had been otherwise. As she turned it toward him now all her perseverance, her self-sacrifice, her deprivations, her honest, persistent uprightness, her mingled fears and faith in some fair future for him touched his heart with a potent force. He cast but one glance at her and burst instantly into tears.
"What ails ye, sonny?" she asked soothingly, and with an intonation that promised partisanship, earnest and loving; for sometimes he came home with great griefs of editorial tyranny, or fault-finding and injustice in the composing-rooms, or the guying of some facetiously disposed junior reporter, or in a revolt of indignation against the pressure of new and severe regulations—when his partisan mother would straightway vilify his enemies (for the nonce), till he would be sorry for them and rouse himself to protest and remonstrate in their defense.
But now Ned shook his head and would say nothing.
His silence evidently alarmed her. She perceived that his trouble was far more serious than the usual misadventures in the day's work. Once or twice she urged him to speak, but in vain. She looked at him apprehensively for a moment longer, and not without anger. Then as if appreciating the futility of remonstrance, she turned away to the table, took up a flaunting red and gilded paper, and with mechanical swiftness and dexterity twisted the fringed ends.
"Boys are hard to know how to deal with," she remarked. "They can't l'arn no sense, and they ain't got no instinct. A boy ought ter know by nature that he hev got two friends what can't wish him nothing but well. One is his God in Heaven, and the t'other is his mother on earth,—and them is the ones he trusts the least an' trusts the last."
"The harm is done now," sobbed Ned.
"Undo it, then," said his mother sternly.
Ned walked to the window, and heavily leaning against the sill, looked out at the gloomy night. When he had first lost the fear that he had been "spotted" by the detective he had felt almost glad of the discovery that the insurance companies only would sustain the loss by the fire, for these, being corporations vague to his mind, impersonal, of presumably illimitable wealth, did not appeal very strongly to his limited experience for sympathy. He was glad that the manager whom he had defrauded would not suffer from the villainy he had witnessed. This feeling had served in some sort to blunt his conscience and numb his sense of his own wrong-doing. Now, however, among the familiar surroundings of home,—sacred as an altar, a temple, even though only an attic in the tenement district,—he regained his normal poise; he realized how his mother would regard it. He winced from the sheer recollection of the old-fashioned phrase with which she was wont to characterize such shifty dealings. "Stealin', an' nothin' shorter!" It was indeed theft. She would think that he had stolen the price of admission to the theatre as absolutely as if he had picked Manager Gorham's pocket. What did it matter to him whose was the loss in the burning of the beautiful theatre! The fact remained. He was a thief.
The aspect of dishonesty had never been so odious to him as now. Hitherto he had carried his mother's teaching in one hand and his trusty conscience in the other, and with a fair accord between them he had gone triumphantly through the multiform temptations which assail a small boy struggling for a living amidst the turmoils of a great town. Now it was all over. He could never again feel aught but contempt for himself. In his poignant pang of despair he had a strong impulse to confess to his mother. He glanced over his shoulder at her, but she had gone back wearily but unfalteringly to her work, and he relapsed once more to staring dismally out over the roofs about him, mostly on a lower level than the windows of this "sky parlor."
Scores of chimney-pots loomed up close at hand. Despite their smoky, gloomy, unsocial aspect, this insensate crew served in some sort as company for the boy. They were always there,—they saw him depart in the morning, they waited for him to come home at night. They had stories to tell him. He loved a vague, fanciful sense of community interests with the unknown firesides below them. He pictured to himself the families clustered about these invisible hearths. Every fantastic wreath of soot-bespangled smoke curling out from these grimy tubes indited for him an idyl on the fair page of the sky. What tragic, or poetic, or romantic episodes were kindled with the homely fires cooking the supper—and ended in smoke!
When winds were abroad and went rioting about the chimney-pots, whistling and singing, the smoke affected too a jovial mien, and came rushing and rollicking up to join its boisterous playfellows, who now would sweep vast clouds of it aside in tenuous dispersal in the air, and now would roll up great curling lengths of it like so many yards of dusky ribbon, tucking it back into the chimney-pots whence it had sought to issue forth. What roaring farces in the house-top regions these wild days! What sense of hilarity, of joyous motion, of jocund voice! "Ha! ha! ha!" said the winds. "What a high old time!"
Whenever the moon was up, weird, dark shadows would haunt the chimney-pots, and go skulking slyly over the roofs, and Ned's imagination would conjure into the air beings far more strange than his simple mythical friends whom he had placed in order about their unknown hearths below. If it were in the glad summer-time these gruesome shapes would so far abandon their port of terror as to dance with the misty images of the smoke to the music of a brass band, which played in a city square, distant indeed, but not altogether out of earshot. In the winter the snow-covered roofs reflected the silvery lunar sheen and shimmered. The chimney-pots were often begirt with zones of icicles. Grotesque gargoyles of frozen slush and sleet blocked the water-spouts and hung far over the eaves. A star with a chill crystalline palpitation would look down. Far, far away the deep, mellow tones of the cathedral bells would ring out the Angelus. And winter or summer he loved it all, for his heart was light, his conscience clear, and this was Home!
But now the atmosphere was murky; the clouds were low; the swift gleams of lightning were beginning to quiver among the chimney-pots, that seemed in the uncertain fluctuations to move, to wince, to start aside, to draw back as in fright. Suddenly resonant torrents were beating upon the roof; the tin gutters clamored; the mutterings of thunder swelled to sonorous emphasis.
Ned felt all at once refreshed, elated,—a sense often induced by a rain-fall long delayed. Perhaps the interval of rest had calmed his nerves; and had restored his jaded faculties. A new idea suddenly sprang into his mind.
He did not hesitate; he turned briskly, got down from a shelf an ink-bottle,—nearly empty from evaporation rather than exhausted by service,—tore a blank page from an old copy-book which he had used in his short attendance at the public school, and proceeded at once to indite some straggling characters. He had addressed an envelope before he looked up at his mother, who was silently watching him.
"I want some money out o' my wages," he said stoutly, assuming an air as of a moneyed man who demands what is his own by rights. Then, "Tain't fur no harm," he added reassuringly.
He had feared her questions, which he was resolved he would not answer. Without a word, however, she pointed at the drawer of the table. If he would not voluntarily give her his confidence she would not attempt to coerce it. She did not even ask nor look to see what sum he took.
The envelope was sealed, and presently Ned was flying along through street after street with the rain pelting in his face and the wind bantering him for the loan of his hat. He did not care! His heart was so much lighter! He saw from afar the great red and blue bottles in the illuminated windows of a drug-store, and here he paused and went within and with much circumspection bought a postage-stamp; then he plunged out in the rain again, making straight for a certain box under a gleaming lamp in the distance that sent its quivering shafts of light far through the gloom.
He brought up under the lamp-post, agitated, anxious, but still unswerving. He looked about him expectantly, watchfully,—it might have seemed even fearfully to one noting his attitude from a distance. But he had no longer any fear. The moment was fraught with peculiar importance to him. He had posted many letters for employers, but never one for himself, and never before nor after one like this. A man beyond the furthest limits of the lamp's aureola of misty light had paused too, breathing hard. He was not used to running so far nor running so fast. He thought the boy's look and attitude very suspicious, as Ned, realizing the supreme significance of the moment and the value of this letter to him, slowly and solemnly dropped it into the box, and then swiftly scudded off down the street.
When the letter-carrier next came to this box the detective was lurking in its vicinity. He whispered a request and mentioned a name, but the postman shook his head with all the dignity of one invested with a little brief authority, and it seemed that "the regulations" were the only words his tongue would deign to frame. "Why, what harm can it do to let me see the outside of the letters?" insisted the detective plausibly. The postman's head wagged to and fro more slowly under the well applied force of argument.
"The handwriting on the outside of the envelope alone will tell me all that I want to know; it is a very important crime which I am investigating."
The postman's head ceased to vibrate. Yet he was slow and thoughtful as he laid his hand on the box. As the detective waited eagerly for it to be opened he looked rather like a fox,—so keen, and so crafty, and so alertly expectant. The letters, as they were slowly shuffled before his eyes, he perceived belonged unmistakably to commercial correspondence,—neat, compact, evidently the work of practiced scribes,—except only one; this was blurred and smirched, with a crumpled envelope and a wildly diagonal address, which moreover was grievously misspelled. He stared with breathless interest and curiosity at the scrawling characters:—
Manger A. J. GormManger Gorm's Theter.
In less than half an hour the detective was in close conference with his chief. "That is all," he said, concluding his account of these incidents. "I think I have caught the boy communicating with the criminal. The criminal is the owner himself,—and that letter in my opinion is the boy's attempt to extort money from Gorham by threatening to blab all he knows."
CHAPTER VII
There was a strange procession in the streets early in the morning. Its line of march lay through the principal business quarters of the city, and everywhere its advent was greeted with wild hurrahs. In fact it did much of its own cheering. The enthusiasm for itself which pervaded its ranks was of a gratifying fervor. It was kindly esteemed, too, by others. Very seldom do the solid business men of a city look upon a procession of strikers—for these were strikers—with the benign indulgence accorded this noisy crew. And very seldom do respectable citizens of any town appear in such dingy boots as those which covered the feet of some genteel people.