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Local Color

by Irvin S. Cobb · English · Gutenberg #41297 · 626,688 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Local Color

Author: Irvin S. Cobb


        
Release date: November 5, 2012 [eBook #41297]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOCAL COLOR ***

LOCAL COLOR




THE WORKS OF
IRVIN S. COBB


LOCAL COLOR




The Review of Reviews Corporation
_Publishers_ New York

Published by Arrangement With George H. Doran Company




Copyright, 1916,
By George H. Doran Company




PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
COPYRIGHT, 1914, 1915 AND 1916,
BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY




TO MY SISTERS




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                       PAGE
      I Local Color                               11

     II Field of Honor                            47

    III The Smart Aleck                           91

     IV Blacker than Sin                         129

      V The Eyes of the World                    159

     VI The Great Auk                            204

    VII First Corinthians: Chap. XIII, v. 4      246

   VIII Enter the Villain                        303

     IX Persona au Gratin                        368

      X Smooth Crossing                          408




LOCAL COLOR




CHAPTER I

LOCAL COLOR


Felix Looms, the well-known author, disappeared--or, rather, he went
away--on or about June fifteenth, four years ago. He told his friends,
his landlady and his publisher--he had no immediate family--he felt run
down and debilitated and he meant to go away for a good long stay. He
might try the Orient; then again perhaps he would go to the South Seas.
When he came back, which might be in a year or two years or even three,
he expected to bring with him the material for a longer and better book
than any he had written. Meantime he wanted to cut loose, as he put it,
from everything. He intended, he said, to write no letters while he was
gone and he expected to receive none.

He gave a power of attorney to a lawyer with whom he had occasional
dealings, left in bank a modest balance to meet any small forgotten
bills that might turn up after his departure, surrendered his bachelor
apartments in the Rubens Studio Building, paid off his housekeeper,
said good-bye to a few persons, wrote explanatory notes to a few more;
and then quietly--as he did everything in this life--he vanished.

Nobody particularly missed him, for he was not a famous author or even
a popular one; he was merely well known as a writer of tales dealing in
the main with crime and criminals and criminology. People that liked his
writings said he was a realist, who gave promise of bigger things.
People that did not like his writings said he was a half-baked
socialist. One somewhat overcritical reviewer, who had a bad liver and
a bitter pen, once compared him to an ambitious but immature hen pullet,
laying many eggs but all soft-shelled and all of them deficient in yolk.

Personally Felix Looms was a short, slender, dark man, approaching
forty, who wore thick glasses and coats that invariably were too long in
the sleeves. In company he was self-effacing; in a crowd he was entirely
lost, if you know what I mean. He did not know many people and was
intimate with none of those he did know. Quite naturally his departure
for parts unknown left his own little literary puddle unrippled.

Looms went away and he did not come back. His publisher never heard from
him again; nor did his lawyer nor the manager of the warehouse where he
had stored his heavier belongings. When three years had passed, and
still no word came from him, his acquaintances thought--such of them as
gave him a thought--that he must have died somewhere out in one of the
back corners of the East. He did die too; but it was not in the East. He
died within a block and a half of the club of his lawyer and not more
than a quarter of a mile from the town house of his publisher. However,
that detail, which is inconsequential, will come up later.

At about seven-forty-five on the evening of June seventeenth, four years
ago, Patrolman Matthew Clabby was on duty--fixed post duty--at the
corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Second Avenue. According to the
report made by him at the time to his immediate superior and
subsequently repeated by him under oath before the grand jury and still
later at the trial, his attention was attracted--to use the common
formula--by a disturbance occurring on a crosstown trolley car, eastward
bound, which had halted just west of the corner.

Patrolman Clabby boarded the car to find a small, shabby man
endeavouring to break away from a larger and better-dressed man, who
held him fast by the collar. In reply to the officer's questions the
large man stated that he had detected the small one in the act of
picking his pocket. He had waited, he said, until the other lifted his
watch and chain and then had seized him and held him fast and called for
help. At least three citizens, passengers on the car, confirmed the main
points of the accuser's story. For added proof there were the watch and
chain. They were in the thief's side coat pocket. With his own large
firm hands Patrolman Clabby fished them out from there and confiscated
them for purposes of evidence. As for the prisoner, he said nothing at
all.

The policeman totted down in his little book the names and addresses of
the eyewitnesses. This done, he took the small man and led him off afoot
to the East Thirty-fifth Street Station, the owner of the watch going
along to make a formal charge. Before the desk in the station house this
latter person said he was named Hartigan--Charles Edward Hartigan, a
private detective by occupation; and he repeated his account of the
robbery, with amplifications. The pickpocket gave his name as James
Williams and his age as thirty-eight, but declined to tell where he
lived, what occupation he followed, or what excuse he had for angling
after other people's personal property on a crosstown car.

At this juncture Clabby grabbed one of his prisoner's hands and ran a
finger over its inner surface, seeking for callosities of the palm; then
he nodded meaningly to the desk lieutenant.

"I guess he's a dip all right, Loot," said Clabby; "the inside of his
hand is as soft as a baby's."

"Take him back!" said the lieutenant briefly.

Before obeying, Clabby faced the man about and searched him, the search
revealing a small amount of money but no objects that might serve for
the prisoner's better identification. So, handling James Williams as
casually and impersonally as though he were merely a rather unwieldy
parcel, Clabby propelled him rearward along a passageway and turned him
over to a turnkey, who turned him into a cell and left him there--though
not very long. Within an hour he was taken in a patrol wagon to the
night court, sitting at Jefferson Market, where an irritable magistrate
held him, on the strength of a short affidavit by Clabby, to await the
action of the grand jury.

Thereafter for a period James Williams, so far as the processes of
justice were concerned, ceased to be a regular human being and became a
small and inconspicuous grain in the whirring hopper of the law. He was
as one pepper-corn in a crowded bin--one atom among a multitude of
similar atoms. Yet the law from time to time took due cognisance of this
mote's existence.

For example, on the morning of the eighteenth a closed van conveyed him
to the Tombs. For further example, an assistant district attorney, in
about a month, introduced Clabby and Hartigan before the July grand
jury. It took the grand jury something less than five minutes to vote an
indictment charging James Williams with grand larceny; and ten days
later it took a judge of General Sessions something less than
three-quarters of an hour to try the said Williams.

The proceedings in this regard were entirely perfunctory. The defendant
at the bar had no attorney. Accordingly the judge assigned to the task
of representing him a fledgling graduate of the law school. Hartigan
testified; Clabby testified; two eyewitnesses, a bricklayer and a
bookkeeper, testified--all for the state. The prisoner could produce no
witnesses in his own behalf and he declined to take the stand himself,
which considerably simplified matters.

Red and stuttering with stage fright, the downy young law-school
graduate made a brief plea for his client on the ground that no proof
had been offered to show his client had a previous criminal record.
Perfunctorily the young assistant district attorney summed up. In a
perfunctory way the judge charged the jury; and the jury filed out,
and--presumably in a perfunctory fashion also--took a ballot and were
back in less than no time at all with a verdict of guilty.

James Williams, being ordered to stand up, stood up; being ordered to
furnish his pedigree for the record, he refused to do so; being
regarded, therefore, as a person who undoubtedly had a great deal to
conceal, he was denied the measure of mercy that frequently is bestowed
on first offenders. His Honour gave him an indeterminate sentence of not
less than three years at hard labour in state prison, and one of the
evening newspapers gave him three lines in the appropriate ratio of one
line for each year. In three days more James Williams was at Sing Sing,
wearing among other things a plain grey suit, a close hair-cut and a
number, learning how to make shoes.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now then, the task for me is to go back and begin this story where
properly it should begin. Felix Looms, the well-known writer who went
away on or about June fifteenth, and James Williams, who went to jail
June seventeenth for picking a pocket, were one and the same person; or
perhaps it would be nearer the truth to say that James Williams was
Felix Looms.

Lest my meaning be misunderstood let me add that this is no tale of
a reversion to type. It has nothing whatever to do with any suddenly
awakened hereditary impulse. In the blend of Felix Looms' breed no
criminal strain persisted. His father was a Congregational preacher from
Massachusetts and his mother a district school-teacher from Northern New
York. His grandsires, on both sides, were good, clean-strain American
stock. So far as we know, never a bad skeleton had rattled its bones in
his family's closet. He himself was a product of strict training in a
Christian home, a Yale education and much book reading. The transition
from Felix Looms, bookworm, author and sociologist, to James Williams,
common rogue and convict, was accomplished deliberately, and, as it
were, with malice aforethought.

Here was how the thing came about. Secretly, through a period of years,
Felix Looms had nursed an ambition to write a great novel of prison
life. It is true he had written a number of short stories and at least
one novelette dealing with prison life, and, what was more to the point,
had sold them after writing them; but they lacked sincerity. There was
neither sureness nor assurance about them. He felt this lack; his
publishers felt it; and in a way his readers no doubt felt it too,
without knowing exactly why they felt it.

It is one of the inexplicable mysteries of the trade of writing that no
man, however well he handles the tools of that trade, can write
convincingly of things about which he personally does not know. A man
might aspire, let us say, to write a story with scenes laid in Northern
Africa. In preparation for this task he might read a hundred volumes
about Northern Africa, its soil, its climate, its natives, its
characteristics. He might fairly saturate himself in literature
pertaining to Northern Africa; then sit him down and write his story.
Concede him to be a good craftsman; concede that the story was well
done; that his descriptions were strong, his phrasing graphic, his
technic correct--nevertheless, it would lack that quality they call
plausibility. Somehow the reader would sense that this man had never
seen Northern Africa with his own eyes or breathed its air with his own
nostrils.

To this rule there are two exceptions: A writer may write of things that
happened in a past generation, after the last man of that generation is
dead--therefore historical novelists are common; or, provided his
imagination be sufficiently plastic, he may write of things that are
supposed to happen in the future--he may even describe the inhabitants
of the planet Mars and their scheme of existence. None will gainsay him,
seeing that no contemporary of his has been to Mars or knows more of the
conditions that will prevail a year or a century hence than he knows.
But where he deals with the actualities of his own day and time he must
know those actualities at first hand, else his best efforts fall to the
ground and are of no avail. He simply cannot get away with it. Hearsay
evidence always was poor evidence.

Felix Looms knew this. In his own case he knew it better than his
readers knew it--or even his publisher. Critical analysis of his work
had revealed its flaws to him until in his own soul he was ashamed and
humiliated, feeling himself to be a counterfeiter uttering a most
spurious coinage. So one day he said to himself:

"The worst thing in our modern civilisation is a prison. It is wrong and
we know it is wrong; and yet we have devised nothing to take its place.
A prison is crime's chemical laboratory; it is a great retort where
virulent poisons are distilled. Civilisation maintains it in the hope
of checking certain gross evils; yet in it and by it evils as great are
born and fostered. And the truth about it has never been told in the
form of fiction, which is the most convincing form of telling the truth.
Always the trouble has been that the people who have been in prison
could not write about it and the people who could write about it have
not been in prison.

"I know I could write about it, and so I am going to prison. I shall go
to prison for one year, perhaps two or possibly three years; and when I
come out I shall write a novel about prison life that will make my name
live after me, for I shall know my facts at first hand--I shall have the
local colour of a prison in my grip as no other man has ever had it who
had my powers as a writer. I am going to gamble with this thing--the
prison. I will give it a slice out of my life for the sake of the great
work I shall do afterward."

Mind you, I am not saying he put his big idea--for surely it was an idea
and a big one--in exactly those words; but that was his thought. And
when he came to work out the plan he was astonished to find how easy it
was to devise and to accomplish. Thanks to his mode of life, his
practical isolation in the midst of five million other beings, he needed
to confide in but one person; and in Hartigan he found that person.
Hartigan, a veteran of the detective business, who knew and kept almost
as many intimate secrets as a father confessor, showed surprise just
twice--first when Looms confided to him his purpose and again when he
learned how generously Looms was willing to pay for his co-operation.

Besides, as Looms at their first meeting pointed out and as Hartigan saw
for himself, there was no obligation upon him to do anything that was
actually wrong. Aboard that crosstown car Looms did really take a watch
from Hartigan's pocket. Whatever the motive behind the act, the act
spoke for itself. All that Hartigan told under oath on the witness stand
was straight enough. It was what he did not tell that mortised the
fabric of their plot together and made the thing dovetail, whole truth
with half truth.

At the very worst they had merely conspired--he as accessory and Looms
as principal--to cheat the state of New York out of sundry years of free
board and freedomless lodgings at an establishment wherein probably no
other man since it was built had ever schemed of his own free will to
abide.

So Hartigan, the private detective, having first got his fee, eventually
got his watch back and now disappears from this narrative. So Felix
Looms, the seeker after local colour, gave up his bachelor apartments in
the Rubens Studio Building and went away, leaving no forwarding address
behind him. So James Williams, the petty felon, with no known address
except the size number in his hat, went up the river to serve an
indeterminate sentence of not less than three years.

       *       *       *       *       *

From the hour he entered the Tombs on that morning of the eighteenth of
June, Felix Looms began to store up material against the day when he
should transmute it into the written word. Speaking exactly, he began
storing it up even sooner than that. The thrill and excitement of the
arrest, the arraignment before the cross magistrate in the night court,
the night in the station-house cell--all these things provided him with
startlingly new and tremendously vivid sensations. Indeed, at the moment
his probing fingers closed on Hartigan's watch the mind pictures began
to form and multiply inside his head.

Naturally, the Tombs had been most prolific of impressions; the local
colour fairly swarmed and spawned there. He had visited the Tombs once
before in his life, but he knew now that he had not seen it then. Behind
a mask of bars and bolts it had hidden its real organism from him who
had come in the capacity of a sightseer; but now, as an inmate, guarded
and watched and tended in his cell like a wild beast in a show, he got
under the skin of it. With the air he breathed--and it was most
remarkably bad air--he took in and absorbed the flavour of the place.

He sensed it all--the sordid small intrigues; the playing of favourites
by the turnkeys; the smuggling; the noises; the smells; the gossip that
ran from tier to tier; the efforts of each man confined there to beat
the law, against which each of them presumably had offended. It was as
though he could see a small stream of mingled hope and fear pouring from
beneath the patterned grill of each cell door to unite in a great flood
that roared unendingly off and away to the courts beyond.

Mentally Felix Looms sought to put himself in the attitude of the men
and women about him--these bona fide thieves and murderers and swindlers
and bigamists who through every waking hour plotted and planned for
freedom. That was the hardest part of his job. He could sense how they
felt without personally being able to feel what they felt. As yet he
took no notes, knowing that when he reached Sing Sing he would be
stripped skin-bare and searched; but his brain was like a classified
card index, in which he stored and filed a thousand and one thoughts.
Hourly he gave thanks for a systematic and tenacious memory. And so day
by day his copy and his local colour accumulated and the first chapters
of his novel took on shape and substance in his mind.

Lying on the hard bed in his cell he felt the creative impulse stirring
him, quickening his imagination until all his senses fairly throbbed to
its big, deep harmonies. The present discomforts of his position, the
greater discomforts that surely awaited him, filmed away to nothingness
in the vision of the great thing he meant to accomplish. He told himself
he was merely about to barter a bit out of his life for that for which
a writer lives--the fame that endures; and he counted it a good bargain
and an easy one.

In the period between his arrest and his conviction Felix Looms had one
fear, and one only--that at his trial he might be recognised. He allowed
his beard to grow, and on the day the summons came for him to go to
court he laid aside his glasses. As it happened, no person was at the
trial who knew him; though had such a person been there it is highly
probable that he would not have recognised Felix Looms, the smugly
dressed, spectacled, close-shaved man of letters, in this shabby,
squinting, whiskered malefactor who had picked a citizen's pocket before
the eyes of other citizens.

With him to Sing Sing for confinement went four others--a Chinese Tong
fighter bound for the death house and the death chair; an Italian
wife-murderer under a life sentence; a young German convicted of
forgery; and a negro loft robber--five felons all told, with deputies to
herd them. Except the negro, Looms was the only native-born man of the
five. The Chinaman, an inoffensive-looking little saffron-hided man, was
manacled between two deputies. Seeing that the state would presently be
at some pains to kill him, the state meantime was taking the very best
of care of him. The remaining four were hitched in pairs, right wrist of
one to left wrist of the other. A deputy marched with each coupled pair
and a deputy marched behind. Looms' fetter-mate was the Italian, who
knew no English--or, at least, spoke none during the journey.

A prison van carried them from the Tombs to the Grand Central Station.
It was barred and boarded like a circus cage--the van was--and like a
circus cage it had small grated vents at each end, high up. A local
train carried them from the station to Sing Sing. From start to finish,
including the van ride, the journey took a little less than three hours.
Three hours to get there, and three years to get back! Felix Looms made
a mental note of this circumstance as he sat in his seat next the car
window, with the wife-murderer beside him. He liked the line. It would
make a good chapter heading.

The town of Ossining, where Sing Sing is, is a hilly town, the railroad
station being at the foot of a hill, with the town mounting up uneven
terraces on one side and the prison squatting flat on the river bank on
the other. Arriving at Ossining, special and distinguishing honours were
paid to the little yellow Chinaman. In a ramshackle village hack, with
his two guards, he rode up a winding street, across a bridge spanning
the railroad tracks, and then along a ridge commanding a view of the
Hudson to the prison.

The four lesser criminals followed the same route, but afoot. They
scuffled along through the dust their feet kicked up, and before their
walk was done grew very sweaty and hot. The townspeople they met barely
turned their heads to watch the little procession as it passed; for to
them this was an every-day occurrence--as common a sight as a bread
wagon or a postman.

It was not a long walk for the four. Quite soon they came to their
destination. An iron door opened for them and in they went, two by two.
Felix Looms saw how the German forger, who was ahead of him, flinched up
against the negro as the door crashed behind them; but to Looms the
sound the door made was a welcome sound. Secretly a high exaltation
possessed him.

       *       *       *       *       *

For a fact, this man who meant to learn about prison life at first hand
went to the right place when he went to Sing Sing; for Sing Sing, the
main part of it, was built in 1825-28, nearly a hundred years ago, when
the punishment of imprisonment meant the punishment of soul and body and
mind. In 1825 the man who for his misdeeds forfeited his liberty and his
civil rights forfeited also the right to be considered in any wise a
human being. As an animal he was regarded and as an animal he was
treated, and as an animal he became. The institution made a beast not
only of him but of the man who was set to keep him. Also, in such
by-products as disease and degeneracy the plant was especially prolific.

The cell house, the dominating structure within the prison close, must
look to-day very much as it looked along toward the end of the third
decade of last century. Straight-walled, angular, homely beyond
conception, it rises high above the stone stockade that surrounds it.
Once its interior was lighted and aired only by narrow windows. You
could hardly call them windows--they were like slits; they were like
seams. About twenty years ago large inlets were cut into the walls.
These inlets admit much air and some light.

As the cell house is the core of Sing Sing, so the cell structure is its
core. In the exact centre of the building, steel within stone, six
levels of cells rise, one level on another, climbing up almost to the
roof, from which many hooded, round ventilators stare down like watchful
eyes that never sleep. In each tier are two hundred cells, built back to
back, each row of cells being faced by narrow iron balconies and reached
by narrow wooden stairways. The person who climbs one of those flights
of stairs and walks along one of those balconies passes a succession of
flat-banded, narrow iron doors. Each door has set into it an iron grill
so closely barred that the spaces between the patterns are no larger
than the squares of a checkerboard.

Not a single cell has a window in it. Even at high noon the interior is
wrapped in a sourish, ill-savoured gloom as though the good daylight had
addled and turned sour as soon as it got inside this place. The
lowermost cells are always damp. Moisture forms on the walls, sweating
through the pores of the stone like an exhalation, so that, with his
finger for a pen, a man may write his name in the trickling ooze.

A cell measures in width three feet four inches; in length, six feet six
inches; in height, seven feet and no inches. It has a cubic capacity of
about one hundred and fifty feet, which is considerably less than half
the cubic space provided by our Government for each individual in army
barracks in time of war. It contains for furniture a bunk, which folds
back against the wall when not in use, or two bunks, swung one above the
other; sometimes a chair; sometimes a stool; sometimes a shelf, and
always a bucket.

For further details of the sanitary arrangements see occasional
grand-jury reports and semioccasional reports by special investigating
committees. These bodies investigate and then report; and their reports
are received by the proper authorities and printed in the newspapers.
Coincidentally the newspapers comment bitterly on the conditions
existing at Sing Sing and call on public opinion to rouse itself. Public
opinion remaining unroused, the sanitary arrangements remain unchanged.

The man who occupies the cell is wakened at six-thirty A. M. At
seven-thirty he is marched to the mess hall, where he eats his
breakfast. By eight o'clock he is supposed to be at work somewhere,
either in the workshop or on a special detail. At noon he goes to the
mess hall again. He is given half an hour in which to eat his dinner.
For that dinner half an hour is ample. At twelve-thirty he returns to
his task, whatever it is. He works until quarter past three.

He gets a little exercise then, and at four he is marched to his cell.
On his way he passes a table piled with dry bread cut in large slices.
He takes as much bread as he wants. Hanging to his cell door is a tin
cup, which a guard has just filled with a hottish coloured fluid
denominated tea. Being put into his cell and locked in, he eats his
bread and drinks his tea; that is his supper. He stays in his cell until
between six-thirty and seven-thirty the following morning.

He knows Sundays only to hate them. On Sunday he is let out of his cell
for breakfast, then goes to religious services, if he so desires, and at
eleven o'clock is returned to his cell for the remainder of the day,
with his rations for the day. When a legal holiday falls on Monday he
stays in his cell from four o'clock on Saturday until six-thirty Tuesday
morning, except for the time spent at certain meals and at divine
services.

This is his daily routine. From the monotony of it there is one relief.
Should he persistently misbehave he is sent to a dark cell, from which
he emerges half blind and half mad, or quite blind and all mad,
depending on the length of time of his confinement therein.

This, in brief, is Sing Sing; or at least it is Sing Sing as Sing Sing
was when Felix Looms went there. Wardens have been changed since then
and with wardens the system is sometimes altered. Physically, though,
Sing Sing must always remain the same. No warden can change that.

       *       *       *       *       *

Had he let it be known that he was a man of clerkly ways and book
learning, Felix Looms might have been set to work in the prison office,
keeping accounts or filing correspondence; but that was not his plan.
So, maintaining his rôle of unskilled labourer, he was sent to the shoe
shop to learn to make shoes; and in time, after a fashion, he did learn
to make shoes.

He attracted no special attention in the shameful community of which he
had become a small and inconsequential member. His had been a colourless
and unobtrusive personality outside the prison; inside he was still
colourless and unobtrusive. He obeyed the rules; he ate of the coarse
fare, which satisfied his stomach but killed his palate; he developed
indigestion and a small cough; he fought the graybacks that swarmed in
his cell and sought to nibble on his body. By day he watched, he
learned, he studied, he analysed, he planned and platted out his book;
and at night he slept, or tried to sleep.

At first he slept poorly. Bit by bit he accustomed himself to the bad
air; to the pent closeness of his cell; to the feeling in the darkness
that the walls were closing in on him to squeeze him to death--a feeling
that beset him for the first few weeks; to the noises, the coughing, the
groaning, the choking, which came from all about him; to the padding
tread of the guards passing at intervals along the balcony fronting his
cell. But for a long time he could not get used to the snoring of his
cellmate.

Sing Sing being overcrowded, as chronically it is, it had been expedient
to put Looms in a cell with another prisoner. To the constituted
authorities this prisoner was known by a number, but the inner society
of Tier III knew him as The Plumber. The Plumber was a hairy,
thick-necked mammal, mostly animal but with a few human qualities too.
The animal in him came out most strongly when he slept. As the larger
man and by virtue of priority of occupancy he had the lower bunk, while
Looms, perforce, took the upper.

The Plumber slept always on his back. When his eyes closed his mouth
opened; then, hour after hour, unceasingly, he snored a gurgling,
rumbling drone. It almost drove Looms crazy--that snoring. In the night
he would roll over on his elbow and peer down, craning his neck to
glare in silent rage at the spraddled bulk beneath him. He would be
seized with a longing to climb down softly and to fix his ten fingers in
that fat and heaving throat and hold fast until the sound of its exhaust
was shut off forever.

After a while, though, he got used to The Plumber's snoring, just as he
had got used to the food and the work and the heavy air and the cell and
all. He got used to being caged with a companion in a space that was
much too small, really, for either of them. A man can get used to
anything--if he has to. He even came to have a sort of sense of
comradeship for his cellmate.

The Plumber was not a real plumber. By profession he was a footpad, a
common highwayman of the city streets, a disciple in practice of Dick
Turpin and Jack Sheppard; but possessed of none of those small graces of
person, those prettified refinements of air and manner with which
romance has invested these masters of the calling.

His title was derived from his method of operation. Dressed in the
overalls of an honest workingman and carrying in his pocket a pair of
pliers, a wrench and a foot-long scrap of gas pipe, he ranged the darker
streets of his own East Side at night on the lookout for business.
Spying out a prospective victim, he would first wrap the gas pipe in a
handy newspaper; then, stalking his quarry from behind, he would knock
him cold with one blow of the gas pipe on the skull, strip the victim's
pockets of what cash they contained, and depart with all possible
despatch, casting aside the newspaper as he went. If there was any blood
it would be on the newspaper; there would be none on the gas pipe.

Should suspicion fall on its owner--why, he was merely a straight-faring
artisan, bound homeward, with certain of the tools and impedimenta of
his trade on his person. It had been The Plumber's own idea, this device
of the gas pipe and the evening paper, and he was proud of it and
derisive of the imitators who had adopted it after he, growing
incautious, had been caught, as it were, red-handed and sent up the
river.

With pride and a wealth of detail he confided these professional secrets
to his spectacled little bunkie after he came to know him. A fragment at
a time he told Looms of his life, his likes and dislikes, and his
associates in crimedom. He taught Looms the tricks of the prison,
too--how to pass messages; how to curry the favour of the keepers; how,
when so desiring, to smuggle contrabands in and out; how to talk with
one's neighbours while at work or at mess, where silence is demanded,
which same is accomplished with the eyes facing straight ahead and the
words slipping sidewise from the corners of the mouth, the lips meantime
moving but little. Considering the differences in them, they came to be
pretty good friends.

Evenings and Sundays and holidays The Plumber would take the floor,
literally as well as figuratively. He would stand at the door of their
cell, shifting from foot to foot like a caged cat-animal in quarters too
small for it, and sniffing like an animal through the small squares of
the iron lattice; or else he would pace back and forth the length of the
cell, constantly scraping his body between the wall and the edge of the
upper berth. In these movements he found relief from his restlessness.

And while The Plumber walked and talked Looms would lie prone on his bed
listening or making notes. For making these notes he used an indelible
pencil, and for greater security against discovery he set them down in
shorthand. The shorthand was partly of his own devising and partly based
on an accepted stenographic system. As fast as he filled one sheet of
paper with the minutely done, closely spaced lines he pasted it to
another sheet; so that in time he had a long, continuous strip, all
written over thickly with tiny, purplish-blue characters. Being folded
flat and thin and inclosed in an envelope made of thin leather pilfered
from the shoe shop, this cipher manuscript was carried by Looms inside
his shirt during the day, and it went under his pillow when he slept.
Once a week he was sent to the baths. At such times he hid the precious
packet beneath his mattress.

The Plumber, of course, had abundant opportunity to examine these notes;
but naturally enough he could make nothing of them. Privily he
catalogued Looms--or Williams, which he thought was his cell-mate's
name--as a sort of harmless lunatic; in short, a nut. Looms meantime
made copy out of The Plumber. He meant to use The Plumber as a character
in his book--as one of the principal characters. A criminal of the type
of The Plumber ought to furnish much material; and without his
suspecting it he did furnish much.

At the end of nine months they parted. The Plumber, having completed his
term, went forth to sin some more. Thereafter Looms had a cell to
himself. Before very long, his record being clean, he was the recipient
of a mark of favour from the warden's office. He became a trusty. As a
trusty he was doubly alert to win special privileges for himself. He
knew all the tricks and devices of the place by now. Outwardly he was
every inch a convict--a commonplace convict if not a typical one.
Inwardly he now frequently caught himself slipping into a convict's mode
of thinking--found himself viewing his prison existence, not as an
observer of the system but as an integral part and parcel of the prison
machine.

Drugged by the stupefying monotony of it he felt sometimes as though he
had always been a convict. The days passed, leaving no conscious
impressions on the retina of his brain. It was as though he rode on an
endless band, which circled once in twenty-four hours, never changing
its gait or its orbit. It took an effort to rid himself of this feeling.

The graybacks which crawled over his body at night, coming out of the
cracks of the wall and the folds of his blanket to bite his flesh, no
longer made him sick, for they were part of the system too.

Not once did he regret what he had done to get himself into Sing Sing.

       *       *       *       *       *

The first year went by thus, and the second, and Looms entered on the
third. He still kept his flat packet of manuscript close and safe,
wearing it in its leather envelope next to his skin; but now he added no
more notes in his cryptic shorthand code. He told himself he added no
more because he already had at his fingers' ends, waiting to be
transcribed into copy, the whole drama of prison life--the poisons it
distills; the horrors it breeds; its qualities and its inequalities; its
wrongs that might be reformed and its wrongs that can never be reformed.
This was what he told himself. The fact remained that for the last seven
months of his imprisonment he set down no notes.

At the end of the third year he was discharged.

       *       *       *       *       *

The man who had entered Sing Sing three years before was not the man who
came out. The man who went in had been slender and quick of movement,
careful of his personal appearance, almost old-maidish in his neatness.
He carried himself erectly; he walked with rather a brisk tread. This
man had shapely hands.

The man who came out resembled the other in that he was small of frame
and wore thick-lensed glasses. In nearly every other essential regard he
differed from him. Even his height seemed less, for now he moved with a
stoop in his shoulders and with his head sunken. His hands dangled at
his sides as though they had grown too heavy for the arms on which they
were hung. They were the hands of one who has done coarse manual
labour--the nails were blunted and broken, the palms bossed with warty
calluses. This man walked with a time-killing shamble, scraping his feet
along. Beneath the natural sallowness of his skin his face had the
bleached, unhealthy look of any living thing that has been kept too long
in artificial twilight, away from fresh air and sunshine. By its colour
it suggested a pale plant growing in a cellar, a weed sprig that had
sprouted beneath a log. It suggested a white grub burrowing in rotted
wood.

The greatest change of all, however, was in the expression of the face;
for now the eyes moved with a furtive, darting movement--a quick
scrutiny that lingered on its target for a second only and then flashed
away. And when the lips framed words the mouth, from force of training,
was pursed at the corner, so that the issuing speech could be heard with
greater distinctness by one who stood alongside the speaker than by one
who faced him.

The clothes Looms had worn when he entered the prison had disappeared;
so for his reentrance into the world the authorities gave him a suit of
prison-made slops, poorly cut and bunchily sewed. They gave him this
suit of clothes, a shirt and a hat and a pair of shoes; also a small sum
of money, a ticket back to the point from which he had been brought, and
the small articles that had been taken from his person at the time he
entered Sing Sing.

These and his sheaf of shorthand notes pasted together, folded flat and
inclosed in his small leather pack, were all that Felix Looms brought
away with him from the prison.

Once more he went afoot along the dusty road, followed the ridge along
the river, crossed the bridge above the railroad tracks and descended to
the station below to wait for a train bound for the city. Persons who
were gathered on the platform looked at him--some understandingly; some
curiously. He found it easier to evade their eyes than to return their
stares.

Presently a train came and he boarded it, finding a seat in the smoker.
The exaltation that had possessed him when he went to Sing Sing was all
gone. A certain indefinable numbness affected his body, his limbs, his
mind, making his thoughts heavy and his movements sluggish. For months
past he had felt this numbness; but he had felt sure that liberty and
the coming of the time for the fulfillment of his great work would
dissipate it. He was free now, and still the lassitude persisted.

He viewed the prospect of beginning his novel with no particular
enthusiasm. He said to himself that disuse of the pen had made him
rusty; that the old enthusiasm, which is born of creation, of
achievement, of craftsmanship exercised, would return to him as soon as
he had put the first word of his book on paper; and that after that the
story would pour forth with hardly a conscious effort on his part. It
had been so in the past; to a much greater degree it should be so now.
Yet, for the moment, he viewed the prospect of starting his novel almost
with physical distaste.

In this mental fog he rode until the train rolled into the Grand Central
Station and stopped. Seeing his fellow passengers getting off he roused
himself and followed them as they trailed in straggling lines through
the train shed and out into the great new terminal. It was late
afternoon of a summer's day.

His plans immediately following his advent into the city had all been
figured out long in advance. He meant to seek obscure lodgings until he
could secure a few needed additions to his wardrobe. Then he would
communicate with his publisher and make to him a private confession
regarding his whereabouts during the past three years, and outline to
him the book he had in mind to write. Under the circumstances it would
be easy to secure a cash advance from any publisher.

Thus fortified with ready money Looms would go away to some quiet place
in the country and write the book. Mulling these details over in his
head he shambled along automatically until suddenly he found himself
standing in Forty-second Street. He slipped backward involuntarily, for
the crowds that swirled by him daunted him. It seemed to him that they
were ten times as thick, ten times as noisy, ten times as hurried as
they had been when last he paused in that locality.

For a minute, irresolute, he hesitated in the shelter of the station
doorway. Then, guided by habit, a thing which often sleeps but rarely
dies, he headed westward. He walked as close to the building line as he
could squeeze himself, so as to be out of the main channels of sidewalk
travel. When he came to Fifth Avenue he mechanically turned north,
shrinking aside from contact with the swarms of well-dressed,
quick-paced men and women who passed him, bound in the opposite
direction. From the asphalt beyond the curbing arose a clamour of wheels
and hoofs and feet which dinned unpleasantly in his ears, creating a
subconscious sense of irritation.

He moved along, dragging his feet, for two blocks; then halted on a
corner. A big building rose before him, a building with many open
windows. There were awnings and flower boxes at the windows; and,
looking in at the window nearest him, he caught sight of well-dressed
men and women sitting at tables. With almost a physical jolt he realised
that this was a restaurant in which he himself had dined many a time on
such an evening as this; somehow, though, those times seemed centuries
back of him in a confused previous existence.

A uniformed carriage starter, who stood at one of the entrances, began
staring at him and he went on up the avenue with his hands rammed deep
into his pockets, his head bent between his shoulders, and his heels
dragging on the sidewalk. He had a feeling that everybody was staring at
him. It nagged and pestered him--this did.

He continued his way for four or five blocks, or possibly six, for he
took no close note of his progress. Really he had no purpose in this
northward progress; a restlessness he could not analyse kept him moving.
He came to another building, also with awninged windows. He knew it for
a club. Once or twice, he recalled, he had been in that club as a guest
of a member, but for the moment he could not think of its name. Sitting
at a window facing him were two men and in a spurt of reviving memory he
placed one of them as a man he had known slightly--a man named
Walcroft, a corporation lawyer with offices downtown.

This man Walcroft stared straight into Looms' face, but in his eyes
there was no glint of recognition; only on his face was a half-amused,
half-contemptuous expression as though he wondered why a person of so
dubious an appearance should be loitering along Fifth Avenue at such an
hour.

Looms, squinting back at Walcroft through his glasses, felt a poke in
the small of the back. He swung round; a policeman approaching from the
rear had touched him with a gloved thumb. The look the policeman gave
him as they faced each other was at once appraising, disapproving and
suspicious.

"Move on!" he said briskly. "Keep movin'!"

"I'm doing nothing," said Looms slowly; but as he spoke he backed away
a pace or two and his eyes flickered and shifted uneasily, avoiding the
policeman's direct and accusing stare.

"That's the trouble," said the policeman. "You're doin' nothing now, but
you're likely to do something if you stay here. Beat it! You're in the
wrong street!" With an air of finality the policeman turned away.

Irresolutely the ex-convict retreated a few yards more, stepping out
into the roadway. Was he indeed in the wrong street? Was that why he
felt so uncomfortable? Yes, that must be it--he was in the wrong street!
Fifth Avenue was not for him any more, even though once he had lived on
Fifth Avenue.

As he shambled across to the opposite sidewalk he shoved his hand up
under his hat, which was too large for him, and scratched his head in
a new perplexity. And then to him, in a flash, came a solution of the
situation, and with it came inspiration and purpose. It was precisely
in that brief moment that Felix Looms, the well-known writer, died, he
having been killed instantaneously by the very thing after which he had
lusted.

The man who had been Felix Looms--Felix Looms, who was now dead--headed
eastward through a cross street. He hurried along, moving now with
decision and with more speed than he had shown in his loitering course
from the station. In turn he crossed Madison Avenue and Park Avenue and
Lexington Avenue, so that soon the district of big restaurants and clubs
and churches and hotels and apartment houses lay behind him and he had
arrived in a less pretentious and more crowded quarter. He reached Third
Avenue, with its small shops and its tenements, and the L structure
running down the middle of it; he crossed it and kept on.

Midway of the next block he came to a place where a building was in
course of construction. The ground floor was open to the street, for the
façade, which was to be a shop front, had not gone up yet. The slouching
pedestrian stopped and looked in searchingly. He saw scattered about
over a temporary flooring, which was laid roughly on the basement
rafters, a clutter of materials and supplies. He saw a line of gas pipes
and water pipes, which protruded their ends from beneath a pile of
sheathing, looking rather like the muzzles of a battery of gun barrels
of varied bores.

At sight of this piping the eyes of the passer-by narrowed earnestly.
Over his shoulders, this way and that, he glanced. There was no watchman
in sight. The workmen--all good union men, doubtless--had knocked off
for the day; but it was not yet dark and probably the night watchman had
not come on duty.

He looked again, and then he stepped inside the building.

In a minute or so he was out. He had one arm pressed closely against his
side as though to maintain the position of something he carried hidden
beneath his coat. Head down, he walked eastward. Between Third Avenue
and Second he found the place for which he sought--a small paved
passageway separating two tenements, its street end being stopped with
a wooden door-gate which swung unlocked. He entered the alley, slipping
into the space just behind the protecting shield of the gate.

When he emerged from here the brick paving of the passage where he had
tarried was covered with tough paper, torn to ragged fragments. There
was a great mess of these paper scraps on the bricks. A small leather
envelope, worn slick by much handling, gaped emptily where it had been
dropped in an angle of the wall behind the door. The man responsible for
this litter continued on his way. His left arm was still held tight
against his side, holding upright a fourteen-inch length of gas pipe the
man had pilfered from the unfinished building a block away.

About the gas pipe was wrapped a roll of sheets of thin paper, pasted
together end to end and closely covered with minute characters done in
indelible, purplish-blue shorthand ciphers. The sheets, forming as they
did a continuous strip, spiralled about the gas pipe snugly, protecting
and hiding the entire length of the heavy metal tube.

       *       *       *       *       *

This was about six o'clock. About nine o'clock Marcus Fishman, a
Roumanian tailor, going to his home in Avenue A from a sweatshop in
Second Avenue, was stalked by a footpad at a dark spot in East
Fifty-first Street, not far from the river, and was knocked senseless by
a blow on the head and robbed of eleven dollars and sixty cents.

A boy saw the robbery committed and he followed after the disappearing
robber, setting up a shrill outcry that speedily brought other pursuers.
One of these stopped long enough to pick up a paper-covered gas pipe the
fugitive had cast aside.

The chase was soon over. As the fleeing footpad turned the corner of
Fiftieth Street and First Avenue he plunged headlong into the outspread
arms of Policeman Otto Stein, who subdued him after a brief struggle.
The tailor's money was still clutched in his hand.

In the Headquarters Rogues' Gallery the prisoner's likeness was found;
also his measurements were in the Bertillon Bureau, thus identifying him
beyond doubt as James Williams, who had been convicted three years
before as a pickpocket. Further inquiry developed the fact that Williams
had been released that very day from Sing Sing.

On his trial for highway robbery, James Williams, as a confirmed and
presumably an incorrigible offender, was given no mercy. He got a
minimum of five years in state prison at hard labour.




CHAPTER II

FIELD OF HONOR


This war, which started with the assassination of an archduke and his
archduchess--a thing we are apt to forget about in the face of a tragedy
a billion-fold greater--this war, which started thus and so, already has
touched or is touching or yet will touch, at some angle and in some
fashion, every one of us in every corner of the world. Some it has
touched indirectly, by the oblique. Upon others, who are as numberless
now as the sands on the shore, it has come with such brutal emphasis
that it must seem to them--such of them as survive--that the whole
incredible business was devised and set afoot for the one and the sole
purpose of levelling them, their lives and their own small personal
affairs in the bloodied red mire of this thing.

For example, let us take the case of Paul Gaston Michel Misereux, his
orphaned sister Marie and his orphaned half-sister Helene. In the summer
of 1914 they lived in a three-room flat in a five-story tenement house
in East Thirteenth Street in New York, not far from the East River.

New York seemed a long, long way then from the town of Sarajevo wherein
the egg of war was hatching. Indeed, to the three I have just named New
York seemed a long way from most of the things which to their uncomplex
natures stood for what was comfortable and domestic and satisfying. They
were desperately homesick very often for the Paris where they had been
born and reared, and from where they had emigrated two years before
after the death of their father.

But that summer the homesickness was wearing off a little. The city,
which at the moment of seeing its notched and fangy skyline as they came
up the bay had appeared to them not as a gateway into a promised land
but as a great sabre-toothed shark of a city lying in wait to grind them
up between its jaws, and which for the first few months of their life
here had been so cold, so inhospitable, so strange in all its ways, so
terribly intent upon its own matters and so terribly disregardful of
theirs, was beginning to be something more than a mere abiding place to
them. To them it was beginning to be home. The lonesomeness was losing
some of its smart. In another year or two more France would be the old
country and America would be their country.

Paul fancied himself half an American already. He had taken out his
first papers, which, as he figured it, made him part way a citizen.
Before very long he would be all a citizen. Likewise, by the practice of
a thousand petty economies common among the first generation of
foreigners who settle here and most remarkably uncommon among their
descendants, they were starting in a small frugal way to prosper. If New
York had given them a stone when they came into it asking for bread, it
was giving them now the bread, and the butter to go on the bread.

Paul Misereux was a pastry cook. He worked as assistant to a chief
pastry cook in a basement kitchen under a big, medium-priced restaurant
near Union Square. He was small and dumpy and unhandsome, with the
dead-white face of a man cook. His skin, seen by daylight, had a queer
glaze on it, like the surface of a well-fluxed, well-baked crockery.
Once it had been a blistery red; that though was in the days of his
apprenticeship to this trade. The constant heat of it had acted upon him
as alcohol does upon the complexion of a man who gets drunk quickly--it
made him deathly white at the last, but before that it made him red.

He was the chief breadwinner. Marie had a place as trimmer and
saleswoman in a small millinery shop on lower Sixth Avenue. Helene, the
half sister and youngest of the three, was the housekeeper. She was
inclined to be frail and she had a persistent cough. She was not in the
least pretty. For the matter of that, none of them had any provable
claim upon beauty.

So far as looks went Marie was the pick of the lot. At least she had
fine eyes and a trim round figure that showed to its best advantage in
the close-fitting, smooth-fronted uniform of her employment--a black
frock with white collar and cuffs.

That June, there was a balance showing on the happy side of their
partnership ledger. Paul had his mind set upon some day owning a
business of his own--a bakeshop, perhaps even a small café. For her part
Marie meant to be a fashionable milliner in her own right. When Paul was
the proprietor of the biggest restaurant on Broadway she would be
Madame, the mistress and the owner of the smartest hat-shop along Fifth
Avenue. Helene was content to go on keeping house for the other two. The
limit of her present ambitions was to be rid of her cough. To marrying
and to the rearing of families none of them gave thought yet; there
would be time for such things in due season, after affluence had come.
Meanwhile, they would dwell together and save and save and save.
Deposited to their joint account in the savings bank, the nest-egg of
their hopes grew at the rate of a few dollars each week, drawing
interest besides; and there was meat in the pot when they felt the need
of meat to stay them.

Over yonder in Sarajevo a stumpy Serbian man, with twisted ideas
regarding his patriotic duties, loaded up an automatic pistol and waited
for a certain carriage of state to pass a given point. The carriage did
pass, and presently the man and the woman who rode in it were both of
them dead--the first to fall in the war which as to date claimed so rich
a toll of the manhood of this planet, and which, being the unslakable
glutton that it is, continues to claim more and more with every day that
passes. The echoes of those pistol shots ran round the world and round
again.

A monarch on a throne in Germany exchanged telegrams with his beloved
cousin in Russia, and with another revered and venerated cousin in
England, and with a dear but distant kinsman of his in Belgium, and with
a respected friend, not related to him by ties of blood or marriage, who
chanced for the moment to be the president of a republic in France. A
family quarrel started up. The quarrel having progressed to a point
where the correspondents lost their affection for one another, they
severally called upon the people who suffered them to be what they were
to go out and settle the grudge according to a fashion which originated
when Cain clouted Abel in the first trade-war of which there is record.
Because every other war from that day to this has been a trade-war, too,
the plan of settlement has remained the same that was employed by Cain
when he made carrion of his brother. The tools of this fashionable
industry have been altered and greatly improved, and for that
civilisation is to be thanked; but the results do not in the least
differ from the original forms.

The people obeyed their rulers' calls. Looking back on it now it seems
to us, who are onlookers, that there was no good and sufficient reason
why they should have done this, but we know that obedience in such
contingencies is a habit which has come down to them--and to us--from
our remotest common ancestors, and it runs in our blood with the
corpuscles of our blood. It is like a contagious miasma, which, being
breathed into the body, afflicts all its victims with the same symptoms.
So they put on the liveries designed for them by their lords against the
coming of just such an occasion--shoddy-wools, or khakis, or
red-and-blue fustians, as the case might be--and they went out, these
men and these boys who were not yet men, to adjudicate the
misunderstanding which had arisen as between the occupants of sundry
palaces in sundry capital cities.

The tide of war--such being the pretty phrase coined by those who would
further popularise the institution--lapped one shore after another. It
went from hemisphere to continent, from continent to archipelago, from
archipelago to scattered islands in seas suddenly grown barren of
commerce. It flooded jungles in South Africa; it inundated the back
corners of Australia; it picked up and carried away on its backwash men
of every colour and of every creed and of every breed. It crossed the
Atlantic Ocean to New York, and having crossed, it reached into a
basement near Union Square for Paul Misereux. And the way of that was
this:

France called out her reserves. Paul Misereux, although half an
American, as has been stated, was likewise a French reservist. So at
length the call came to him. Although he was French he was not
excitable. He accepted the summons very calmly and as a matter of
course. He had been expecting that it would come, sooner or later. That
same day he visited the office of the French consul where certain
formalities were speedily concluded. Then he went home and to his sister
and his half-sister he very quietly broke the news of what had happened
and what he had done; and very quietly they took it. For they were not
outwardly emotional either.

For six days life in the three-room flat went on very much as it had
gone on before, except that the sisters went daily now to early mass,
and on the first morning following the brother did not shave himself
when he got up. French soldiers mainly wear beards, and he meant his
beard should be well sprouted when he reported for service. At the end
of those six days, on the seventh day, a new assistant pastry cook began
serving in the restaurant cellar and a steamer drew out of her New York
dock with flags flying, being bound--God and the submarines willing--for
foreign parts. On the deck set apart for the second-class passengers,
close up against the rail that was next the shore, Paul Misereux stood,
a most dumpy and unheroic figure of a man, with patches of woolly beard
showing on his pale chops, waving his hand, and with many others singing
the Marseillaise Hymn.

When the steamer was gone from sight down the river toward open water
the sisters left the pierhead where they had been standing and went
away, Marie to her job in the millinery place on Sixth Avenue and Helene
to hers in the small flat.

Except that Paul was gone, life for the remaining two continued for a
while after this to be materially unaltered. Beyond a single long letter
written on the voyage across and posted upon his arrival at Bordeaux,
they had no word of him. For this, though, he was not to blame. A thing
so systematic it had no aspect of being of human devisement and subject
to human control had caught him. This system took him in hand in the
same hour that his feet touched dry land. It gave him a number, it
clothed him in a uniform, put a gun in his hands, strapped upon his back
and about his waist and on his flanks all the other tools needful for
the prosecution of the highly specialised modern trade of manslaughter,
and set him aboard a train and started him north. Thereafter the north
swallowed him up and concerning him no news whatsoever came back. He was
an atom in a world event, and the atoms do not count even though they
contribute to the progress of the event itself.

While these sisters of his waited, hoping each day the postman would
bring them a letter with a French stamp and a French postmark on it, but
sorely dreading what the portent of that letter might be, a stroke of
bad fortune befell them. The man who owned the place where Marie worked
professed to deal in French wares exclusively; but he had a German name
and he spoke with a German accent. Perhaps he felt deeply the things
some people said to him and about him and about his Fatherland. Perhaps
he found it hard to be neutral in his words and all his acts when so
many about him were so passionately unneutral in their words and their
acts. Perhaps in those papers which avowedly were pro-German, and in
those which avowedly were anti-German, he read editorials that changed
his views on certain subjects. You see, the tide of war had searched him
out too.

Or perhaps after all he merely realised the need, in a time when
business conditions were so unsettled, of economising. At any rate one
Saturday, without prior warning, he dismissed from his employ three of
his women workers--an outspoken Irish girl, a silent Russian Jewess,
whose brothers wore the uniform of a government which oppressed them,
and a French girl, this last being Marie Misereux.

Monday morning early Marie was abroad, trying to find for herself a new
job. She was deft enough with her fingers, but there were handicaps
which denied her opportunity of proving to any interested person just
how deft those fingers of hers were. For one thing, millinery shops, big
and little, were retrenching in their expenses or trying to. For
another, she was ignorant of the town and of the ways of the millinery
trade--her first job had been her only one. Finally, she had only a
faulty knowledge of English, and that in some lines is yet a bar against
the applicant for work even in the polyglot, more-than-half-foreign city
of New York.

The week which began with that Monday morning went by; other Mondays and
other weeks went by, and Marie, walking the soles off her shoes upon the
pavements uptown and downtown, earned nothing at all. The account in the
savings bank, which always before Paul went away had grown steadily and
which for the first month or so after he went had grown in a lesser
degree, was dwindling and dwindling. Now when Helene coughed she pressed
her hand against her side. There was no news of their brother. Except
for a few distant cousins three thousand miles away, they had no
kinspeople. And in this country they had no friends.

Along the crest of a low hill, like a seam, ran a succession of
shattered tree trunks, hemming earthline to skyline with ragged and
irregular stitches. Once upon a time, not so very long before, a fine
little grove of half-grown poplars had crowned that small eminence. But
the cannon and the spouting volleys from the rapid-fire guns had mowed
down every tree, leaving only the mutilated and homely boles.

Upon one slope of the hill--the slope that was nearer the city--a
triangular-shaped patch of woodland projected its point like a
promontory well up toward the hilltop. The shells had wrought most
grievously here, too, but, being protected somewhat by the dip in the
land, the forest, as they call such a stretch of park timber in Europe,
had not suffered in the same proportionate extent that the comb of
saplings higher up suffered. The twistified masses of shot-down boughs
made good cover for the French sharpshooters.

Just under the far shoulder of the rise, zig-zagging this way and that
after the fashion of a worm that has stiff joints, was a German
trench--the foremost German trench of all the myriad trenches and
cross-trenches that formed the sector of the investments at this
particular point. Behind the Germans as they squatted in this trench was
the village of Brimont. It had been a village once. Now it was a
flattened huddle of broken masonry and shattered woodwork, from which
arose constantly a sour stench of rotting things. Back of the site of
the village, where a little valley made out between more hills, was a
sunken road winding off to the north. Upon either side of the road were
fields gouged by misaimed shells until the mangled earth looked as
though a thousand swine had rooted there for mast.

That was what the Germans saw when they looked over their shoulders.
What they saw when they looked straight ahead was, first, the patch of
woodland sheltering their foes and beyond that, three miles away, the
old French city of Rheims, with the damaged towers of the great
cathedral rising above lesser buildings, and on beyond, melting away
into blue reaches of space, the fields of Champagne. That is to say,
they could see so much when the weather was clear, which generally it
wasn't. Nine days in ten, this time of the year, it rained--the cold,
constant, searching rain of mid-October. It was raining on this
particular day, and up on this saucer-rim of land, which ringed the
plain in, the wind blew steadily with a raw bite to it.

Firing back and forth between defenders and besiegers went on
intermittently. At this spot there was no hard fighting; there had been
none for weeks. Farther way, right and left, along the battle line which
stretched from Switzerland to the sea, the big guns roared like bulls.
But here the men lay in their shelters and nibbled at their foes like
mice.

On second thought I beg to withdraw the latter simile. These men were
not so much like mice as they were like moles. For they grubbed in the
earth, as moles do, eating and sleeping, living and dying down in their
mud burrows. Only, moles keep their fur tidied and fine, while these men
were coated and clogged with the tough clayey substance in which they
wallowed. It was as much as they could do to keep their rifles in
cleansed working order.

Over in the German trench a slim Saxon youth was squatted, ankle-deep in
cold yellow water. At intervals he climbed into a small scarp in the
wall of the trench, a kind of niche just large enough to hold his body,
and kneeling there, with his head tucked down and his shoulders drawn
in, he swapped shots with a Frenchman in the woods slightly beneath and
directly in front of him. Neither of them ever saw the other. Each in
his firing was guided by the smack of his enemy's gun and the tiny puff
of white smoke which marked its discharge; each knowing in a general way
only the approximate location of the man he coveted to kill, for after
an exchange of shots both would shift, the German to another scarp, the
Frenchman to another tangle of felled boughs. There was nothing
particularly personal, nothing especially hateful or passionate in the
present ambition of either. It was merely the job in hand.

As between these two--the Frenchman and the German--there was, excusing
the differences of language and religion, no great amount of
distinction to be drawn. Temperamentally they were of much the same
cast. Each in his separate small sphere of endeavour had been a
reasonably law-abiding, reasonably industrious, fairly useful
individual, until somebody else, sitting in a high place, had willed it
for him that he should put by whatsoever task he might be concerned with
and engage in this business of gunning for his fellow-man.

Their uniforms, to be sure, differed in cut and colour, or had so
differed until the mud of Champagne had made them of a pattern together.
The German soldier's helmet had a sharp spike set in it; the Frenchman's
cap had a flattened top. Also the German carried his name and number in
a small leather pouch which hung on a thong about his neck and lay
snugly against the chilled skin of his breast under his shirt, whereas
the Frenchman wore his name and his number on a small brass token that
was made fast to a slender wire bracelet riveted about his left wrist.

Concerning these methods of marking men there had been argument from
time to time, the German authorities contending that their system is the
better of the two. For proof of the claim they point out that in the
case of a Frenchman an arm may be torn away, bodily carrying the
bracelet and the tag with it, whereas as regards a German, he may be
shot in two and yet retain his identification label since it is not so
very often that the head is entirely dissevered from the trunk. Here
again, as in many other details, they contend German efficiency
maintains its superiority over all. On both sides the matter is
discussed dispassionately, just as the toxic properties of various makes
of poisonous gases are discussed, or the rending powers of shrapnel upon
human flesh.

About four o'clock in the afternoon the German climbed up into his
favourite scarp once more. Hoping to draw his opponent's fire, he jerked
his head up into sight for half a second, then jerked it down again. The
trick worked; the Frenchman fired, but fired high. The German shoved his
gun barrel out between two clods, shut both eyes--for he was by no means
a clever marksman--and pumped a shot back in reply. The bullet from his
rifle, which was a long, sharp-nosed, steel-jacketed bullet, devised in
accordance with the most scientific experiments, found its billet. It
struck the Frenchman as he lay belly downward on the earth with his
gunstock against his cheek. It removed two fingers of the Frenchman's
right hand, three fingers of his left hand, tore away his lower jaw,
beard and all, and passed out at the back of his neck, taking splintered
fragments of his spinal processes with it. He turned over on his back,
flapping with his arms and legs, threshing about in the wet leaves and
in the mud, making grotesque bubbling sounds down in his throat.

Pretty soon after that twilight came on and the rifle firing slackened.
The Saxon youth, never knowing he had killed his enemy, called it a day
and knocked off. He hunkered down in the slime to eat a tallowy stew of
bull meat and barley from a metal pannikin. It was nourishing enough,
this mess was, but it had the aspect of swill. Having eaten, he
immediately thereafter crawled, in his wet clothes and soaked boots,
into a sort of dugout hollowed in the wall of his trench, and slept
there with four of his comrades on a bed of mouldy, damp rye straw.
While they slept the vermin travelled from one to another of them,
making discriminative choice of which body to bite.

Down in the little forest below, the Frenchman presently quit flapping
and quietly bled to death. During the night a burial party of his own
people came and found him and shovelled him underground where he lay.
But first the sergeant in command of the squad removed the bangle from
his wrist. In due course of time, therefore, word was carried back and
back by succeeding stages to headquarters, and from there on to Paris,
and from Paris on to New York, so that within a month's time or a little
less it became the painful duty of a consular clerk in New York to
transmit by mail to the deceased's next of kin, a sister, the
intelligence, as conveyed in the official notification, that her
brother, Paul Gaston Michel Misereux, was heroically dead on the Field
of Honour.

For the repose of their brother's spirit they had a mass said at the
little French Catholic Church where they worshipped, and in his memory
candles burned upon the altar. Out of a length of cheap sleazy stuff
they made a mourning frock for Helene. Wearing it, her face seemed
whiter than ever and the two red spots in her cheeks seemed redder.
Marie had the black frock, with the white collars and cuffs, which had
been her uniform as a saleswoman in the place on lower Sixth Avenue; she
wore that as she hunted for work. Regardless of their sorrow, the hunt
must go on. It went on, and was a vain quest. From much weeping her eyes
were swollen and puffy and her face was drawn out of all comeliness.
Even though through merciful forbearance each forbore to tell her so,
none of those to whom she applied for work cared to hire so homely
appearing a serving woman. In another week, or at most two, they would
be scraping the bottom of their savings account.

Before this they had lived on scanty rations, wasting never a crumb. Now
they trimmed the food allowance still finer. It may have been the lack
of sufficient nourishment that caused Helene to drop down in a faint on
the floor of the tiny kitchen one evening in the middle of the second
week following the receipt of the news from the consul's office. As
Marie bent to raise her head in her arms, a little stream of blood began
to run from one corner of Helene's mouth. For some time after she
recovered consciousness and had opened her eyes the little trickle of
blood continued, and Marie, sitting beside her, wiped it away as fast as
it oozed out between her lips. The younger girl appeared to suffer no
pain, but was very weak. Marie got her undressed and into her bed in the
small middle room. Then she ran downstairs to the basement to find out
from the caretaker where the nearest doctor was to be found.

It seemed there was one only two doors away. He came presently, a testy
man of sixty who was lame. One of his legs was inches shorter than its
mate. He lived in a tenement himself and his practice was among tenement
dwellers, and he was underpaid and overworked and had trouble enough
sometimes to make both ends meet. He grew shorter of breath and of
disposition at every step as he wallowed up the stairs, Marie going
ahead to show him the way to the rear flat at the top of the house.
Wheezing until the sound of his breathing filled the room, he sat down
alongside Helene, and while he held one of her pipe-stem wrists in his
hand he asked Marie certain questions. Then he told Marie to go into the
front room and wait for him there.

In ten minutes or less he limped in to her where she sat with her hands
clenched between her knees and her eyes big and rounded with
apprehension. He thought he closed the intervening door behind him, but
the latch failed to catch in the slot and it swung ajar for a space of
two or three inches. Neither of them took note of this.

"She's quiet now," he said: "the hemorrhage is checked. I took a sample
of her blood. I'll make a blood test to-morrow morning. How long has
this been going on--this cough?"

A good long time, Marie told him--several months. She went on, in her
broken English, to explain: "We thought it was but a bad cold, that soon
she would be well----"

He broke in on her impatiently:

"That's what you said before. That's no excuse." He looked about him.
"How many are there of you living here--just you two?"

"We are quite alone," she told him. "We had also a brother, but--but he
now is dead."

It did not occur to her to tell him how the brother had died, or when.

"What's your business?" he demanded. Then as she seemed not to get his
intent, he added:

"Can't you understand plain English? What do you do for a living?"

"Your pardon, doctor; I am a milliner."

"And this other girl--your sister--she's been staying at home and doing
the housekeeping, you said?"

She nodded. For a moment there was silence, she still seated, he before
her balancing himself on the longer leg of the two and on his heavy
cane. "I'll make a blood test in the morning," he said at length,
repeating what he had said a moment before.

"Doctor," said Marie, "tell me, please, the truth. My sister--is she
then so ill?"

"Ill?" he burst out at her irritably. "Ill? I should say she is ill.
She's got tuberculosis, if you know what that means--consumption."

She sucked her breath in sharply. Her next question came slowly: "What
is there then to do?"

"Well, she couldn't last long here--that's dead certain. You've got to
get her away from here. You've got to get her up into the North Woods,
in the mountains--Saranac or some place like that--in a sanitarium or an
invalids' camp where she can have the right kind of treatment. Then
she'll have a chance."

By a chance he meant that with proper care the sick girl might live for
three months or for four, or at the outside for six. The case was as
good as hopeless now; he knew that. Still his duty was to see that his
patients' lives were prolonged--if possible.

"These mountains, I do not know them. We are strangers in this country."

"I'll find out about a place where you can get her in," he volunteered.
"I'll bring you the information in the morning--names and addresses and
everything. Somebody'll have to go up there with her--you, I guess--and
get her settled. She's in no shape to be travelling alone. Then you can
leave her there and arrange to send up so much a week to pay for her
keep and the treatment and all. Oh, yes--and until we get her away from
here you'll have to lay off from your work and stay with her, or else
hire somebody to stay with her. She mustn't be left alone for long at
a time--she's too sick for that. Something might happen. Understand?"

"And all this--it will cost much money perhaps?"

The cripple misread the note in her voice as she asked him this. This
flat now, it was infinitely cleaner than the abodes of nine-tenths of
those among whom he was called to minister. To his man's eyes the
furnishings, considering the neighbourhood, appeared almost luxurious.
That bed yonder against the wall was very much whiter and looked very
much softer than the one upon which he slept. And the woman herself was
well clad. He had no patience with these scrimping, stingy
foreigners--thank God he was himself native-born--these cheap, penurious
aliens who would haggle over pennies when a life was the stake. And
there was no patience in his uplifted, rumbling voice as he answered
her:

"Say, you don't want your sister to be a pauper patient, do you? If you
do, just say so and I'll notify the department and they'll put her in a
charity institution. She'd last just about a week there. Is that your
idea?--if it is, say so!"

"No, no, no," she said, "not charity--not for my sister."

"I thought as much," he said, a little mollified. "All right then, I'll
write a letter to the sanitarium people; they ought to make you a
special rate. Oh, it'll cost you twenty-five dollars a week maybe--say,
at the outside, thirty dollars a week. And that'll be cheap enough,
figuring in the food she'll have to have and the care and the nursing
and all. Then, of course, there'll be your railroad tickets on top of
that. You'd better have some ready money on hand so we can get her
shipped out of here before it's too--Well, before many days anyhow."

She nodded.

"I shall have the money," she promised.

"All right," he said; "then you'd better hand me two dollars now. That's
the price of my call. I don't figure on charging you for making the
blood test. And the information about the sanitarium and the letter I'm
going to write--I'll throw all that in too."

She paid him his fee from a small handbag. At the hall door he paused on
his stumping way out.

"I think she'll be all right for to-night--I gave her something," he
said with a jerk of his thumb toward the middle room. "If you just let
her stay quiet that'll be the best thing for her. But you'd better run
in my place the first thing in the morning and tell me how she passed
the night. Good night."

"Good night, doctor--and we thank you!"

He went clumping down the steps, cursing the darkness of the stairwell
and the steep pitch of the stairs. Before the sound of his fumbling feet
had quite died away Marie, left alone, had made up her mind as to a
certain course. In so short a time as that had the definite resolution
come to her. And as she still sat there, in an attitude of listening,
Helene, in the middle room, dragged herself up from her knees where she
had been crouched at the slitted door between. She had heard all or
nearly all the gruff lame doctor said. Indeed, she had sensed the truth
for herself before she heard him speak it. What he told her sister was
no news to the eavesdropper; merely it was confirmation of a thing she
already knew. Once up on her bare feet, she got across the floor and
into her bed, and put her head on the pillow and closed her eyes,
counterfeiting sleep. In her mind, too, a plan had formed.

It was only a minute or two after this that Marie came silently to the
door and peered in, looking and listening. She heard the regular sound
of the sick girl's breathing. By the light of the gas that was turned
down low she saw, or thought she saw, that Helene was asleep. She closed
the door very softly. She freshened her frock with a crisp collarband
and with crisp wristbands. She clasped about her neck a small gold chain
and she put on her head her small, neat black hat. And then this girl,
who meant to defile her body, knelt alongside her bed and prayed the
Blessed Virgin to keep her soul clean.

With her handbag on her arm she passed out into the hall. Across the
hall a Jewish family lived--by name, the Levinski family--consisting of
a father who was a push-cart peddler, a gross and slattern mother who
was continually occupied with the duties of being a mother, and any
number of small Levinskis. In answer to her knock at their door, Mrs.
Levinski came, a shapeless, vast shape in her night dress, bringing with
her across the threshold strong smells of stale garlic, soiled flannel
and cold fried carp. Marie had a nodding acquaintance with this
neighbour of hers and no more.

"My sister, she is sick," she told Mrs. Levinski. "And I must go out.
Please, will you listen? If she should awake and call out for me, you
will please to tell her I am gone but soon will be back again. If you
please?"

Mrs. Levinski said she would, and to show she meant it opened wide her
door before she returned to her household duties.

For November the weather was warm, but it was damp and would be damper.
A fine drizzle was falling as Marie Misereux came to the lower hallway
entrance and looked out into the night; and East Thirteenth Street,
which is never entirely empty, was almost empty. She hesitated a moment,
with her left hand clenched tight against her breast, and then stepped
out, heading westward. At the first avenue crossing she came upon a
man, a fairly well-dressed man, who stood below the stoop of a private
house that had been converted into some sort of club, as if undecided in
his own mind whether to go in or to stay out. She walked straight up to
him.

"Will you go with me, m'sieur?" she said.

He peered at her from under his hatbrim. Almost over them was a street
lamp. By its light he saw that her face was dead white; that neither her
lips nor her cheeks were daubed with cosmetics, and that her lips were
not twisted into the pitiable, painted smile of the streetwalker.
Against the smooth fulness of her dress her knotted left hand made a
hard, white clump. Her breasts, he saw, heaved up and down as though she
had been running and her breath came out between her teeth with a
whistling sound. Altogether she seemed most oddly dressed and most oddly
mannered for the part she played.

"You want me to go with you?" he asked, half incredulously, half
suspiciously, still staring hard.

"If--if you will be so good."

"Do you need the money that bad?"

"Assuredly, m'sieur," she said with a simple, desperate directness. "Why
else would I ask you?"

"Say," he said almost roughly, "you better go on home. I don't believe
you belong on the streets. Here!"

He drew something that was small and crumply from a waistcoat pocket,
and drawing a step nearer to her he shoved it between two of the fingers
of her right hand.

"Now, then," he said, "you take that and hustle on back home."

He laughed, then, shamefacedly and in a forced sort of way, as though
embarrassed by his own generosity, and then he turned and went quickly
up the steps and into the club house.

She looked at what he had given her. It was a folded dollar bill. As
though it had been nasty to the touch, she dropped it and rubbed her
hand upon her frock, as if to cleanse it of a stain. Then, in the same
instant nearly, she stooped down and picked up the bill from the dirty
pavement and kissed it and opened her black handbag. Except for a few
cents in change, the bag was empty. Except for those few cents and a sum
of less than ten dollars yet remaining in the savings bank, the two
dollars she had given the lame doctor was all the money she had in the
world. She tucked the bill up in still smaller compass and put it in the
bag. She had made the start for the fund she meant to have. It was not
charity. In the sweat of her agonized soul she had earned it.

She crossed over the first bisecting avenue to the westward, and the
second; she passed a few pedestrians, among them being a policeman
trying door latches, a drunken man whose body swayed and whose legs
wove queer patterns as he walked, and half a dozen pale, bearded men who
spoke Yiddish and gestured volubly with their hands as they went by in
a group. At Third Avenue she turned north, finding the pavements more
thickly populated, and just after she came to where Fourteenth Street
crosses she saw a heavily built, well-dressed man in a light overcoat,
coming toward her at a deliberative, dawdling gait. She put herself
directly in his path. He checked his pace to avoid a collision and
looked at her speculatively, with one hand fingering his moustache.

"Will you go with me?" she said, repeating the invitation she had used
before.

"Where to?" he said, showing interest.

"Where you please," she said in her halting speech.

"You're on," he said. He fell in alongside her, facing her about and
slipping a hand well inside the crook of her right arm.

"You--you will go with me?" she asked. Suddenly her body was in a
tremble.

"No, sister," he stated grimly, "I ain't goin' with you but you're sure
goin' with me." And as he said it he tightened his grip upon her
forearm.

He had need to say no more. She knew what had happened. She had not
spent two years and better in a New York tenement without learning that
there were men of the police--detectives they called them in
English--who wore no uniforms but went about their work apparelled as
ordinary citizens. She was arrested, that was plain enough, and she
understood full well for what she had been arrested. She made no outcry,
offered no defence, broke forth into no plea for release. Indeed her
thought for the moment was all for her half-sister and not for herself.
So she said nothing as he steered her swiftly along.

At a street light where a patrol telephone box of iron was bolted to the
iron post the plain-clothes man slowed up. Then he changed his mind.

"Guess I won't call the wagon," he said. "I happen to know it's out. It
ain't far. You and me'll walk and take the air." He turned with her
westward through the cross street. Then, struck by her silence, he asked
a question:

"A Frenchy, ain't you?"

"Yes," she told him. "I am French. Where--where are you taking me,
m'sieur? Is it to the prison--the station house?"

"Quit your kiddin'," he said mockingly. "I s'pose you don't know where
we're headin'? Night court for yours--Jefferson Market. Right over here
across town."

"They will not keep me there long? They will permit me to go if I pay
a fine, eh? A small fine, eh? That is all they will do to me, is it not
so?"

He grunted derisively. "Playin' ignorant, huh? I s'pose you're goin' to
tell me now you ain't never been up in the night court before?"

"No, no, m'sieur, never--I swear it to you. Never have I been--been like
this before."

"That's what they all say. Well, if you can prove it--if you ain't got
any record of previous complaints standin' agin' you, and your finger
prints don't give you away--you'll get off pretty light, maybe, but not
with a fine. I guess the magistrate'll give you a bit over on the
Island--maybe thirty days, maybe sixty. Depends on how he's feelin'
to-night."

"The Island?"

"Sure, Blackwell's Island. A month over there won't do you no harm."

"I cannot--you must not take me," she broke out passionately now. "For
thirty days? Oh, no, no, m'sieur!"

"Oh, yes, yes, yes!" He was mimicking her tone. "I guess you can stand
doin' your thirty days if the rest of these cruisers can. If you should
turn out to be an old offender it'd likely be six months----"

He did not finish the sentence. With a quick, hard jerk she broke away
from him and turned and ran back the way she had come. She dropped her
handbag and her foot spurned it into the gutter. She ran straight, her
head down, like a hunted thing sorely pressed. Her snug skirt hampered
her though. With long strides the detective overtook her. She fought him
off silently, desperately, with both hands, with all her strength. He
had to be rough with her--but no rougher than the emergency warranted.
He pressed her flat up against a building and, holding her fast there
with the pressure of his left arm across her throat, he got his nippers
out of his pocket. Another second or two more of confused movement and
he had her helpless. The little steel curb was twined tight about her
right wrist below the rumpled white cuff. By a twist of the handles
which he held gripped in his palm he could break the skin. Two twists
would dislocate the wrist bone. A strong man doesn't fight long after
the links of the nippers start biting into his flesh.

"Now, then," he grunted triumphantly, jerking her out alongside him, "I
guess you'll trot along without balkin'. I was goin' to treat you nice
but you wouldn't behave, would you? Come on now and be good."

He glanced backward over his shoulder. Three or four men and boys,
witnesses to the flight and to the recapture, were tagging along behind
them.

"Beat it, you," he ordered. Then as they hesitated: "Beat it now, or
I'll be runnin' somebody else in." They fell back, following at a safer
distance.

He had led his prisoner along for almost a block before he was moved to
address her again:

"And you thought you could make your getaway from me? Not a chance! Say,
what do you want to act that way for, makin' it harder for both of us?
Say, on the level now, ain't you never been pinched before?"

She thought he meant the pressure of the steel links on her wrist.

"It is not that," she said, bending the curbed hand upward. "That I do
not think of. It is of my sister, my sister Helene, that I think." Her
voice for the first time broke and shivered.

"What about your sister?" There was something of curiosity but more of
incredulity in his question.

"She is ill, m'sieur, very ill, and she is alone. There is no one but me
now. My brother--he is dead. It is for her that I have done--this--this
thing to-night. If I do not return to her--if you do not let me go
back--she will die, m'sieur. I tell you she will die."

If she was acting it was good acting. Half convinced against his will of
her sincerity, and half doubtfully, he came to a standstill.

"Where do you live--is it far from here?"

"It is in this street, m'sieur. It is not far." He could feel her arm
quivering in the grip of his nippers.

"Maybe I'm makin' a sucker of myself," he said dubiously, defining the
diagnosis as much to himself as to her. "But if it ain't far I might
walk you back there and give this here sister of yours the once-over.
And then if you ain't lyin' we'll see----"

"Must I go so?" She lifted her hand up, indicating her meaning.

"You bet your life you're goin' that way or not at all. I'm takin' no
more chances with you."

"But it would kill her--she would die to see me so. She must not know
I have done this thing, m'sieur. She must not see this----" The little
chain rattled.

"Come on," he ordered in a tone of finality. "I thought that sick sister
gag was old stuff, but I was goin' to give you a show to make good----"

"But I swear----"

"Save your breath! Save your breath! Tell your spiel to the judge. Maybe
he'll listen. I'm through."

They were almost at the doors of the squat and ugly building which the
Tenderloin calls Jeff Market when he noticed that her left hand was
clutched against her breast. He remembered then she had held that hand
so when she first spoke to him; except during her flight and the little
struggle after he ran her down, she must have been holding it so all
this time.

"What's that you've got in your hand?" he demanded suspiciously, and
with a practiced flip of the nipper handles swung her round so that she
faced him.

"It is my own, m'sieur. It is----"

"Nix, nix with that. I gotta see. Open up them fingers."

She opened her hand slowly, reluctantly. The two of them were in the
shadow of the elevated structure then, close up alongside a pillar, and
he had to peer close to see what the object might be. Having seen he did
not offer to touch it, but he considered his prisoner closely, taking
her in from her head to her feet, before he led her on across the
roadway and the pavement and in at one of the doors of that odoursome
clearing house of vice and misery, mercy and justice, where the night
court sits seven nights a week.

First, though, he untwisted the disciplinary little steel chain from
about her wrist. The doorway by which they entered gave upon the Tenth
Street face of the building and admitted them into a maze of smelly dim
corridors and cross-halls in the old jail wing directly beneath the
hideous and aborted tower, which in a neighbourhood of stark
architectural offences makes of Jefferson Market courthouse a shrieking
crime against good looks and good taste.

The inspector's man escorted the French girl the length of a short
passage. At a desk which stood just inside the courtroom door he
detained her while a uniformed attendant entered her name and her age,
which she gave as twenty-one, and her house number, in a big book which
before now has been Doomsday Book for many a poor smutted butterfly of
the sidewalks. The detective, standing by, took special note of the name
and the address and, for his own purposes, wrote them both down on a
scrap of card. This formality being finished, the pair crossed the
half-filled courtroom, he guiding by a hand on her elbow, she obeying
with a numbed and passive docility, to where there is a barred-in space
like an oversized training den for wild animals. This cage or coop,
whichever you might choose to call it, has a whited cement wall for its
back, and rows of close-set rounded iron bars for its front and sides,
and wooden benches for its plenishings. The bars run straight up, like
slender black shadows caught and frozen into solidity, to the soiled
ceiling above; they are braced across with iron horizontals, which makes
the pen strong enough to hold a rhino. Its twin stands alongside it,
filling the remaining space at the far side of the big room. In the old
days one pen was meant for male delinquents and one for female. But now
the night court for men holds its sessions in a different part of town
and only women delinquents are brought to this place. It may or may not
be a reflection upon our happy civilisation--I leave that point for the
sociologists to settle--but it is a fact that ninety per cent of them
are brought here charged with the same thing.

The first coop held perhaps a dozen women and girls. One of them was
quietly weeping. The others, looking, as they sat on one of the benches
in their more or less draggled finery, like a row of dishevelled cage
birds of gay plumage, maintained attitudes which ranged from the highly
indifferent to the excessively defiant. The detective unlatched the
door, which was of iron wattles too, and put his prisoner inside.

"You'll have to stay here awhile," he bade her. His tone was altered
from that which he had employed toward her at any time before. "Just set
down there and be comfortable."

But she did not sit. She drew herself close up into a space where wall
and wall, meeting at right angles, made a corner. Her cellmates eyed
her. Being inclined to believe from her garb that she probably was a
shopgirl caught pilfering, none of them offered to hail her; all of them
continued, though, to watch her curiously. As he closed and bolted the
door and moved away the plain-clothes man, glancing back, caught a fair
look at her face behind the iron uprights. Her big, staring eyes
reminded him of something, some creature, he had seen somewhere. Later
he remembered. He had seen that same look out of the staring eyes of
animals, lying with legs bound on the floor of a slaughterhouse.

Following this, the ordinary procedure for him would have been to call
up the East Twenty-second Street station house by telephone and report
that, having made an arrest, he had seen fit to bring his prisoner
direct to court; then visit the complaint clerk's office in a little
cubby-hole of a room, and there swear to a short affidavit setting forth
the accusation in due form; finally, file the affidavit with the
magistrate's clerk and stand by to await the calling of that particular
case. Strangely enough, he did none of these things.

Instead, he made his way direct to the magistrate's desk inside the
railing which cut the room across from side to side. The pent, close
smell of the place was fit to sicken men unused to it. It commingled
those odours which seem always to go with a police court--of unwashed
human bodies, of iodoform, of stale fumes of alcohol, of cheap rank
perfumery. Petty crime exhales an atmosphere which is peculiarly its
own. This man was used to this smell. Smelling it was to him a part of
the day's work--the night's work rather.

The magistrate upon the bench was a young magistrate, newly appointed by
the mayor to this post. Because he belonged to an old family and because
his sister had married a rich man the papers loved to refer to him as
the society judge. As the detective came up he was finishing a hearing
which had lasted less than three minutes.

"Any previous record as shown by the finger prints and the card
indexes?" he was asking of the officer complainant.

"Three, Your Honour," answered the man glibly. "Suspended sentence
oncet, thirty days oncet, thirty days oncet again. Probation officer's
report shows that this here young woman----"

"Never mind that," said the magistrate; "six months."

The officer and the woman who had been sentenced to six months fell
back, and the detective shoved forward, putting his arms on the top of
the edge of the desk to bring his head closer to the magistrate.

"Your Honour," he began, speaking in a sort of confidential undertone,
"could I have a word with you?"

"Go ahead, Schwartzmann," said the magistrate, bending forward to hear.

"Well, Judge, a minute ago I brought a girl in here; picked her up at
Fourteenth Street and Thoid Avenue for solicitin'. So far as that goes
it's a dead-open-and-shut case. She come up to me on the street and
braced me. She wasn't dressed like most of these Thoid-Avenue cruisers
dress and she's sort of acted as if she'd never been pinched
before--tried to give me an argument on the way over. Well, that didn't
get her anywheres with me. You can't never tell when one of them dames
will turn out in a new make-up, but somethin' that happened when we was
right here outside the door--somethin' I seen about her--sort of----" He
broke off the sentence in the middle and started again. "Well, anyhow,
Your Honour, I may be makin' a sucker of myself, but I didn't swear out
no affidavit and I ain't called up the station house even. I stuck her
over there in the bull-pen and then I come straight to you."

The magistrate's eyes narrowed. Thus early in his experience as a police
judge he had learned--and with abundant cause--to distrust the motives
of plain-clothes men grown suddenly philanthropic. Besides, in the first
place, this night court was created to circumvent the unholy partnership
of the bail-bond shark and the police pilot fish.

"Now look here, Schwartzmann," he said sharply, "you know the law--you
know the routine that has to be followed."

"Yes, sir, I do," agreed Schwartzmann; "and if I've made a break I'm
willin' to stand the gaff. Maybe I'm makin' a sucker of myself, too,
just like I said. But, Judge, there ain't no great harm done yet. She's
there in that pen and you know she's there and I know she's there."

"Well, what's the favour you want to ask of me?" demanded His Honour.

"It's like this: I want to slip over to the address she gave me and see
if she's been handin' me the right steer about certain things. It ain't
so far." He glanced down at the scribbled card he held in his hand. "I
can get over there and get back in half an hour at the outside. And then
if she's been tryin' to con me I'll go through with it--I'll press the
charge all right." His jaw locked grimly on the thought that his
professional sagacity was on test.

"Well, what is her story?" asked the magistrate.

"Judge, to tell you the truth it ain't her story so much as it's
somethin' I seen. And if I'm makin' a sucker of myself I'd rather not
say too much about that yet."

"Oh, go ahead," assented the magistrate, whose name was Voris. "There's
no danger of the case being called while you're gone, because, as I
understand you, there isn't any case to call. Go ahead, but remember
this while you're gone--I don't like all this mystery. I'm going to want
to know all the facts before I'm done."

"Thank you, sir," said Schwartzmann, getting himself outside the railed
inclosure. "I'll be back in less'n no time, Your Honour."

He wasn't, though. Nearly an hour passed before an attendant brought
Magistrate Voris word that Officer Schwartzmann craved the privilege of
seeing His Honour alone for a minute or two in His Honour's private
chamber. The magistrate left the bench, suspending the business of the
night temporarily, and went; on the way he was mentally fortifying
himself to be severe enough if he caught a plain-clothes man trying to
trifle with him.

"Well, Schwartzmann?" he said shortly as he entered the room.

"Judge," said the detective, "the woman wasn't lyin'. She told me her
sister was sick alone in their flat without nobody to look after her and
that her brother was dead. I don't know about the brother--at least I
ain't sure about him--but the sister was sick. Only she ain't sick no
more--she's dead."

"Dead? What did she die of?"

"She didn't die of nothin'--she killed herself with gas. She turned the
gas on in the room where she was sick in bed. The body was still warm
when I got there. I gave her first aid, but she was gone all right. She
wasn't nothin' more than a shell anyhow--had some wastin' disease from
the looks of her; and I judge it didn't take but a few whiffs to finish
her off. I called in the officer on post, name of Riordan, and I
notified the coroner's office myself over the telephone, and they're
goin' to send a man up there inside of an hour or so to take charge of
the case.

"And so, after that, feelin' a sort of personal interest in the whole
thing, as you might say, I broke the rules some more. When I found this
here girl dead she had two pieces of paper in her hand; she'd died
holdin' to 'em. One of 'em was a letter that she'd wrote herself, I
guess, and the other must 'a' been a letter from somebody else--kind of
an official-lookin' letter. Both of 'em was in French. I don't know
exactly why I done it, unless it was I wanted to prove somethin' to
myself, but I brought off them two letters with me and here they are,
sir. I'm hopin' to get your court interpreter to translate 'em for me,
and then I aim to rush 'em back over there before the coroner's
physician gets in, and put 'em back on that bed where I found 'em."

"I read French--a little," said the young magistrate. "Suppose you let
me have a look at them first."

Schwartzmann surrendered them and the magistrate read them through.
First he read the pitiably short, pitiably direct farewell lines the
suicide had written to her half-sister before she turned on the gas, and
then he read the briefly regretful letter of set terms of condolence,
which a clerk in a consular office had in duty bound transcribed. Having
read them through, this magistrate, who had read in the newspapers of
Liège and Louvain, of Mons and Charlevois, of Ypres and Rheims, of the
Masurien Lakes and Poland and Eastern Prussia and Western Flanders and
Northern France; who had read also the casualty reports emanating at
frequent intervals from half a dozen war offices, reading the one as
matters of news and the other, until now, as lists of steadily mounting
figures--he raised his head and in his heart he silently cursed war and
all its fruits. And next day he went and joined a league for national
preparedness.

"Schwartzmann," he said as he laid the papers on his desk, "I guess
probably your prisoner was telling the whole truth. She did have a
brother and he is dead. He was a French soldier and he died about a
month or six weeks ago--on the Field of Honour, the letter says. And
this note that the girl left, I'll tell you what it says. It says that
she heard what the doctor said about her--there must have been a doctor
in to see her some time this evening--and that she knows she can never
get well, and that they are about out of money, and that she is afraid
Marie--Marie is the sister who's in yonder now, I suppose--will do
something desperate to get money, so rather than be a burden on her
sister she is going to commit a mortal sin. So she asks God to forgive
her and let her be with her brother Paul--he's the dead brother, no
doubt--when she has paid for her sin. And that is all she says except
good-bye."

He paused a moment, clearing his throat, and when he went on he spoke
aloud, but it was to himself that he spoke rather than to the detective:
"Field of Honour? Not one but two out of that family dead on the Field
of Honour, by my way of thinking. Yes, and though it's a new name for
it, I guess you might call Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue a Field of
Honour, too, and not be so very far wrong for this once. What a hellish
thing it all is!"

"How's that, sir?" asked Schwartzmann. "I didn't quite get you." He had
taken the two papers back in his own hands and was shuffling them
absently.

"Nothing," said the magistrate. And then almost harshly: "Well, what do
you want me to do about the woman in the pen yonder?"

"Well, sir," said the other slowly, "I was thinkin' that probably you
wouldn't care to tell her what's just come off in the flat--at least not
in court. And I know I don't want to have to tell her. I thought maybe
if you could stretch the rules so's I could get her out of here without
havin' to make a regular charge against her and without me havin' to
arraign her in the regular way----"

"Damn the rules!" snapped Voris petulantly. "I'll fix them. You needn't
worry about that part of it. Go on!"

"Well, sir, I was thinkin' maybe that after I found somebody to take
these letters back where they belong, I could take her on home with
me--I live right down here in Greenwich Village--and keep her there for
the night, or anyhow till the coroner's physician is through with what
he's got to do, and I'd ask my wife to break the news to her and tell
her about it. A woman can do them things sometimes better'n a man can.
So that's my idea, sir."

"You're willing to take a woman into your home that you picked up for
streetwalking?"

"I'll take the chance. You see, Your Honour, I seen somethin'
else--somethin' I ain't mentioned--somethin' I don't care to mention if
you don't mind."

"Suit yourself," said the other. "I suppose you'll be looking up the
newspaper men before you go. This will make what they call a great
heart-interest story."

"I don't figure on tellin' the reporters neither," mumbled Schwartzmann,
as though ashamed of his own forbearance.

The magistrate found the detective's right hand and started to shake
it. Then he dropped it. You might have thought from the haste with which
he dropped it that he also was ashamed.

"I'll see you don't get into any trouble with the inspector," he said.
Then he added: "You know of course that this brother was a French
soldier?"

"Sure I know it--you told me so."

"You're German, aren't you?" asked Voris. "German descent, I mean?"

"I don't figure as that's got anythin' to do with the case," said the
plain-clothes man, bristling.

"I don't either, Schwartzmann," said the magistrate. "Now you go ahead
and get that woman out of this hole."

Schwartzmann went. She was where he had left her; she was huddled up,
shrinking in, against the bars, and as he unlatched the iron door and
swung it in and beckoned to her to come out from behind it, he saw, as
she came, that her eyes looked at him with a dumb, questioning misery
and that her left hand was still gripped in a hard knot against her
breast. He knew what that hand held. It held a little, cheap, carved
white crucifix.

       *       *       *       *       *

I see by the papers that those popularly reputed to be anointed of God,
who are principally in charge of this war, are graciously pleased to
ordain that the same shall go on for quite some time yet.




CHAPTER III

THE SMART ALECK


Cap'n Buck Fluter, holding his watch in the approved conductor's grip,
glanced back and forth the short length of the four-five accommodation
and raised his free hand in warning:

"All aboard!"

From almost above his head it came:

"If you can't get a board get a scantlin'!"

Clustered at the White or shady end of the station, the sovereign
Caucasians of Swango rocked up against one another in the unbridled
excess of their merriment. Farther away, at the Coloured or sunny end of
the platform, the assembled representatives of the African population
guffawed loudly, though respectfully. To almost any one having the gift
of spontaneous repartee it might have occurred to suggest the
advisability of getting a plank provided you could not get a board. It
took Gash Tuttle to think up scantling.

The humourist folded his elbows on the ledge of the window and leaned
his head and shoulders out of the car, considering his people
whimsically, yet benignantly. He wore attire suitable for travelling--a
dented-in grey felt hat, adhering perilously to the rearmost slope of
his scalp; a mail-order suit of light tan, with slashed seams and rows
of buttons extending up the sleeves almost to the elbows; a
hard-surfaced tie of pale blue satin; a lavender shirt, agreeably
relieved by pink longitudinal stripings.

Except his eyes, which rather protruded, and his front teeth, which
undoubtedly projected, all his features were in a state of active
retreat--only, his nose retreated one way and his chin the other. The
assurance of a popular idol who knows no rival was in his pose and in
his poise. Alexander the Great had that look--if we may credit the
likenesses of him still extant--and Napoleon Bonaparte had it, and David
Garrick, to quote a few conspicuous examples.

Alone, of all those within hearing, Cap'n Buck Fluter did not laugh.
Indeed, he did not even grin.

"All right, black boy," he said. "Let's go from here!"

The porter snatched up the wooden box that rested on the earth, flung it
on the car platform and projected his person nimbly after it. Cap'n Buck
swung himself up the step with one hand on the rail. The engine spat out
a mouthful of hot steam and the wheels began to turn.

"Good-by, my honeys, 'cause I'm gone!" called out Mr. Tuttle, and he
waved a fawn-coloured arm in adieu to his courtiers, black and white.
"I'm a-goin' many and a-many a mile from you. Don't take in no bad money
while your popper's away."

The station agent, in black calico sleeve-protectors and celluloid
eyeshade, stretched the upper half of his body out the cubby-hole that
served him for an office.

"Oh, you Gash!" he called. "Give my love to all the ladies."

The two groups on the platform waited, all expectant for the retort.
Instantly it sped back to them, above the clacking voice of the train:

"That's all you ever would give 'em, ain't it?"

Mr. Gip Dismukes, who kept the livery stable, slapped Mr. Gene Brothers,
who drove the bus, a resounding slap on the back.

"Ain't he jest ez quick ez a flash?" he demanded of the company
generally.

The station agent withdrew himself inside his sanctum, his sides heaving
to his mirthful emotions. He had drawn a fire acknowledged to be deadly
at any range, but he was satisfied. The laugh was worth the wound.

Through the favoured section traversed by the common carrier to whose
care genius incarnate had just committed his precious person there are
two kinds of towns--bus towns and non-bus towns. A bus town lies at an
appreciable distance from the railroad, usually with a hill
intervening, and a bus, which is painted yellow, plies between town and
station. But a non-bus town is a town that has for its civic equator the
tracks themselves. The station forms one angle of the public square;
and, within plain sight and easy walking reach, the post office and at
least two general stores stand; and handily near by is a one-story bank
built of a stucco composition purporting to represent granite, thus
signifying solidity and impregnability; and a two-story hotel, white,
with green blinds, and porches running all the way across the front;
also hitch rails; a livery stable; and a Masonic Hall.

Swango belonged to the former category. It was over the hill, a hot and
dusty eighth of a mile away. So, having watched the departing four-five
accommodation until it diminished to a smudgy dot where the V of the
rails melted together and finally vanished, the assembled Swangoans
settled back in postures of ease to wait for the up train due at
three-eight, but reported two hours and thirty minutes late. There would
still be ample time after it came and went to get home for supper.

The contemptuous travelling man who once said that only three things
ever happened in Swango--morning, afternoon and night--perpetrated a
libel, for he wilfully omitted mention of three other daily events: the
cannon-ball, tearing through without stopping in the early forenoon; the
three-eight up; and the four-five down.

So they sat and waited; but a spirit of depression, almost of sadness,
affected one and all. It was as though a beaming light had gone out of
their lives. Ginger Marable, porter and runner of the Mansard House,
voiced the common sentiment of both races as he lolled on a baggage
truck in the sunshine, with his cap of authority, crowned by a lettered
tin diadem, shoved far back upon his woolly skull.

"Dat Mistah Gashney Tuttle he sho is a quick ketcher," stated Ginger
with a soft chuckle. "W'ite an' black--we suttinly will miss Mistah
Tuttle twell he gits back home ag'in."

Borne away from his loyal subjects to the pulsing accompaniment of the
iron horse's snorted breath, the subject of this commentary extended
himself on his red plush seat and considered his fellow travellers with
a view to honing his agile fancy on the whetstones of their duller
mentalities. On the whole, they promised but poor sport. Immediately in
front of him sat a bride and groom, readily recognisable at a glance for
what they were--the bride in cream-coloured cashmere, with many ribbons;
the groom in stiff black diagonals, with braided seams, and a white lawn
tie. A red-faced man who looked as though he might be a deputy sheriff
from somewhere slept uneasily one seat in the rear. He had his shoes
off, revealing gray yarn socks. His mouth was ajar, and down in his
throat he snored screechily, like a planing mill. The youngest member
of a family group occupying two seats just across the aisle whimpered
a desire. Its mother rummaged in a shoebox containing, among other
delicacies, hard-boiled eggs, salt and pepper mixed and enveloped in
a paper squill, blueberry pie, leaking profusely, and watermelon-rind
preserves, and found what she sought--the lower half of a fried chicken
leg. Satisfied by this gift the infant ceased from fretful repining,
sucking contentedly at the meat end; and between sucks hammered
contentedly with the drumstick on the seat back and window ledge,
leaving lardy smears there in the dust.

Cap'n Buck--captain by virtue of having a regular passenger run--came
through the car, collecting tickets. At no time particularly long on
temper, he was decidedly short of it to-day. He was fifteen minutes
behind his schedule--no unusual thing--but the locomotive was
misbehaving. Likewise a difference of opinion had arisen over the proper
identity of a holder of mileage in the smoker. He halted alongside Gash
Tuttle, swaying on his legs to the roll and pitch of the car floor.

"Tickets?" he demanded crisply.

"Wee gates, Cap," answered the new passenger jovially. "How does your
copperosity seem to sagashuate this evenin'?"

"Where goin'?" said Fluter, ignoring the pleasantry. "I'm in a hurry.
What station?"

"Well," countered the irrepressible one, "what stations have you got?"

Cap'n Buck Fluter's cold eye turned meaningly toward the bell cord,
which dipped like a tired clothesline overhead, and he snapped two
fingers peevishly.

"Son," he said almost softly, "don't monkey with me. This here ain't my
day for foolin'!"

Favoured son of the high gods though he was, Gash Tuttle knew instantly
now that this was indeed no day for fooling. Cap'n Buck was not a large
man, but he had a way of growing to meet and match emergencies. He
handled the Sunday excursions, which was the acid test of a trainman's
grit. Coltish youths, alcoholically keened up or just naturally high
spirited, who got on his train looking for trouble nearly always got off
looking for a doctor. As regards persons wishful of stealing a ride,
they never tried to travel with Cap'n Buck Fluter oftener than once.
Frequently, for a period of time measurable by days or weeks, they were
in no fit state to be travelling with any one except a trained nurse.

Gash Tuttle quit his fooling. Without further ado--whatever an ado
is--he surrendered his ticket, receiving in exchange a white slip with
punchmarks in it, to wear in his hatband. Next came the train butcher
bearing chewing gum, purple plums in paper cornucopias, examples of the
light literature of the day, oranges which were overgreen, and bananas
which were overripe, as is the way with a train butcher's oranges and
bananas the continent over. In contrast with the conductor's dourness
the train butcher's mood was congenially inclined to persiflage.

After an exchange of spirited repartee, at which the train butcher by an
admiring shake of the head tacitly confessed himself worsted, our hero
purchased a paper-backed work entitled, "The Jolly Old Drummer's Private
Joke Book." This volume, according to the whispered confidences of the
seller, contained tales of so sprightly a character that even in sealed
covers it might be sent by mail only at the sender's peril; moreover,
the wink which punctuated this disclosure was in itself a promise of the
spicy entertainment to be derived from perusal thereof. The price at
present was but fifty cents; later it would go up to a dollar a copy;
this, then, was a special and extraordinary rate.

The train continued on its course--not hurriedly, but with reasonable
steadfastness and singleness of purpose. After much the same fashion the
sun went down. The bride repeatedly whisked cindery deposits off her
cashmered lap; the large-faced man, being awakened by one of his own
snores, put on his shoes and indulged in fine-cut tobacco, internally
applied; but the youngest passenger now slept all curled up in a moist
little bundle, showing an expanse of plump neck much mottled by
heat-rash, and clutching in one greased and gritted fist the denuded
shank-bone of a chicken with a frieze of gnawed tendons adhering to its
larger joint.

At intervals the train stopped at small way stations, bus or non-bus in
character as the case might be, to let somebody off or somebody on.
Cap'n Buck now made his trips carrying his lantern--the ornate
nickel-plated one that had been awarded to him in the voting contest for
the most popular trainman at the annual fair and bazaar of True Blue
Lodge of the Junior Order of American Mechanics. It had his proper
initials--J. J. F.--chased on its glass chimney in old English script,
very curlicue and ornamental. He carried it in the crook of his left
elbow with the handle round his biceps; and when he reached the end of
his run he would extinguish its flame, not by blowing it out but by a
quick, short, expert jerk of his arm. This is a trick all conductors
seek to acquire; some of them succeed.

Twilight, the stage manager of night, had stolen insidiously on the
scene, shortening up the backgrounds and blurring the perspectives; and
the principal character of this tale, straining his eyes over the fine
print, had reached the next to the last page of "The Jolly Old Drummer's
Private Joke Book" and was beginning to wonder why the postal
authorities should be so finicky in such matters and in a dim way to
wish he had his fifty cents back, when with a glad shriek of relief the
locomotive, having bumped over a succession of yard switches, drew up
under a long open shed alongside a dumpy brick structure. To avoid any
possible misunderstanding this building was labelled Union Depot in
large letters and at both ends.

Being the terminus of the division, it was the train's destination and
the destination of Mr. Tuttle. He possessed himself of an imitation
leather handbag and descended on solid earth with the assured manner of
a seasoned and experienced traveller. Doubtless because of the flurry
created by the train's arrival and the bustling about of other arrivals
his advent created no visible stir among the crowd at the terminal. At
least he noticed none. Still, these people had no way of knowing who he
was.

In order to get the Union Depot closer to the railroad it had been
necessary to place it some distance away from the heart of things; even
so, metropolitan evidences abounded. A Belt Line trolley car stood
stationary, awaiting passengers; a vociferous row of negro hackmen were
kept in their proper places by a uniformed policeman; and on the horizon
to the westward a yellow radiance glowed above an intervening comb of
spires and chimneys, showing where the inhabitants of the third largest
second-class city in the state made merry at carnival and street fair,
to celebrate the dedication and opening of their new Great White Way--a
Great White Way seven blocks long and spangled at sixty-foot intervals
with arc lights disposed in pairs on ornamental iron standards. Hence
radiance.

Turning westward, therefore, Mr. Tuttle found himself looking along a
circumscribed vista of one-story buildings with two-story fronts--that
is to say, each wooden front wall extended up ten or fifteen feet above
the peak of the sloping roof behind it, so that, viewed full-on, the
building would have the appearance of being a floor taller than it
really was. To add to the pleasing illusion certain of these
superstructures had windows painted elaborately on their slab surfaces;
but to one seeking a profile view the false work betrayed a razor-like
thinness, as patently flat and artificial as stage scenery.

Travellers from the Eastern seaboard have been known to gibe at this
transparent artifice. Even New York flat dwellers, coming direct from
apartment houses which are all marble foyers and gold-leaf elevator
grilles below and all dark cubby-holes and toy kitchens above, have been
known to gibe; which fact is here set forth merely to prove that a sense
of humour depends largely on the point of view.

To our Mr. Tuttle such deceits were but a part of the ordered
architectural plan of things, and they moved him not. What did interest
him was to note that the nearmost of these bogusly exalted buildings
displayed, above swinging twin doors, a cluster of lights and a sign
testifying that this was the First Chance Saloon. Without looking he
sensed that the reverse of that Janus-faced sign would advertise this
same establishment as being the Last Chance. He did not know about
Janus, but he did know about saloons that are handily adjacent to union
depots. Moreover, an inner consciousness advised him that after a dry
sixty-mile trip he thirsted amain. He took up his luggage and crossed
the road, and entered through the knee-high swinging doors.

There was a bar and a bar mirror behind it. The bar was decorated at
intervals with rectangles of fly paper, on the sticky surfaces of which
great numbers of flies were gummed fast in a perished or perishing
state; but before they became martyrs to the fad of sanitation these
victims had left their footprints thickly on the mirror and on the
fringes of coloured tissue paper that dangled from the ceiling. In a
front corner, against a window, was a lunch counter, flanked on one side
by stools and serving as a barricade for an oil stove and shelves of
cove oysters in cans, and hams and cheeses for slicing, and vinegar
cruets and pepper casters and salt cellars crusted with the saline
deposits of the years. A solitary patron was lounging against the bar in
earnest conversation with the barkeeper; but the presiding official of
the food-purveying department must have been absent on business or
pleasure, for of him there was no sign.

Gash Tuttle ordered a beer. The barkeeper filled a tall flagon with brew
drawn from the wood, wiped the clinging froth from its brim with a
spatulate tool of whittled cedar, and placed the drink before the
newcomer, who paid for it out of a silver dollar. Even as Mr. Tuttle
scooped in his change and buried the lower part of his face in the
circumference of the schooner he became aware that the other customer
had drawn nearer and was idly rattling a worn leather cup, within which
dice rapped against the sides like little bony ghosts uneasy to escape
from their cabinet at a séance.

The manipulator of the dice held a palm cupped over the mouth of the cup
to prevent their escape. He addressed the barkeeper:

"Flem," he said, "you're such a wisenheimer, I'll make you a
proposition: I'll shake three of these here dice out, and no matter whut
they roll I'll betcha I kin tell without lookin' whut the tops and
bottoms will come to--whut the spots'll add up to."

The other desisted from rinsing glassware in a pail beneath the bar.

"Which is that?" he inquired sceptically. "You kin tell beforehand whut
the top and bottom spots'll add up?"

"Ary time and every time!"

"And let me roll 'em myself?"

"And let you roll 'em yourself--let anybody roll 'em. I don't need to
touch 'em, even."

"How much'll you risk that you kin do that, Fox?" Roused greed was in
the speaker's tone.

"Oh, make it fur the drinks," said Fox--"jest fur the drinks. I ain't
aimin' to take your money away frum you. I got all the money I need."
For the first time he seemed to become aware of a third party and he
turned and let a friendly hand fall on the stranger's shoulder. "Tell
you whut, Flem, we'll make it drinks fur this gent too. Come on,
brother," he added; "you're in on this. It's my party if I lose, which
I won't, and ole Flem's party if he loses, which he shore will."

It was the warmth of his manner as much as the generosity of his
invitation that charmed Mr. Tuttle. The very smile of this man Fox
invited friendship; for it was a broad smile, rich in proteids and
butterfats. Likewise his personality was as attractively cordial as
his attire was striking and opulent.

"'Slide or slip, let 'er rip!'" said Mr. Tuttle, quoting the poetic
words of a philosopher of an earlier day.

"That's the talk!" said Fox genially. He pushed the dice box across the
bar. "Go to it, bo! Roll them bones! The figure is twenty-one!"

From the five cubes in the cup the barkeeper eliminated two. He agitated
the receptacle violently and then flirted out the three survivors on the
wood. They jostled and crocked against one another, rolled over and
stopped. Their uppermost faces showed an ace, a six and a five.

"Twelve!" said Flem.

"Twelve it is," echoed Fox.

"A dozen raw," confirmed Gash Tuttle, now thoroughly in the spirit of
it.

"All right, then," said Fox, flashing a beam of admiration toward the
humourist. "Now turn 'em over, Flem--turn 'em over careful."

Flem obeyed, displaying an ace, a deuce and a six.

"And nine more makes twenty-one in all!" chortled Fox triumphantly.

As though dazed, the barkeeper shook his head.

"Well, Foxey, ole pardner, you shore got me that time," he confessed
begrudgingly. "Whut'll it be, gents? Here, I reckin the cigars is on me
too, after that." From a glass-topped case at the end of the bar
alongside Gash Tuttle he produced a full box and extended it hospitably.
"The smokes is on the house--dip in, gents. Dip in. Try an Old Hickory;
them's pure Tampas--ten cents straight."

He drew the beers--large ones for the two, a small one for himself--and
raised his own glass to them.

"Here's to you and t'ward you!" he said.

"Ef I hadn't a-met you I wouldn't a-knowed you," shot back Gash Tuttle
with the lightning spontaneity of one whose wit moves in boltlike
brilliancy; and at that they both laughed loudly and, as though dazzled
by his flashes, bestowed on him the look that is ever the sweetest
tribute to the jester's talents.

The toast to a better acquaintance being quaffed and lights exchanged,
the still nonplussed Flem addressed the winners:

"Well, boys, I thought I knowed all there was to know about dice--poker
dice and crap dice too; but live and learn, as the feller says. Say,
Fox, put me on to that trick--it'll come in handy. I'll ketch Joe on it
when he gits back," and he nodded toward the lunch counter.

"You don't need to know no more'n you know about it already," expounded
Fox. "It's bound to come out that way."

"How is it bound to come out that way?"

"Why, Flem, it's jest plain arithmetic; mathematics--that's all. Always
the tops and bottoms of ary three dice come to twenty-one. Here, gimme
that cup and I'll prove it."

In rapid succession, three times, he shook the cubes out. It was indeed
as the wizard had said. No matter what the sequence, the complete tally
was ever the same--twenty-one.

"Now who'd 'a' thought it!" exclaimed Flem delightedly. "Say, a feller
could win a pile of dough workin' that trick! I'd 'a' fell fur some real
money myself."

"That's why I made it fur the drinks," said the magnanimous Fox. "I
wouldn't put it over on a friend--not for no amount; because it's a
sure-thing proposition. It jest naturally can't lose! I wouldn't 'a'
tried to skin this pardner here with it even if I'd 'a' thought I
could." And once more his hand fell in flattering camaraderie on a
fawn-coloured shoulder. "I know a regular guy that's likewise a wise guy
as soon as I see him. But with rank strangers it'd be plumb different.
The way I look at it, a stranger's money is anybody's money----"

He broke off abruptly as the doorhinges creaked. A tall, thin individual
wearing a cap, a squint and a cigarette, all on the same side of his
head, had entered. He stopped at the lunch counter as though desirous of
purchasing food.

"Sh-h! Listen!" Fox's subdued tones reached only the barkeeper and Mr.
Tuttle. "That feller looks like a mark to me. D'ye know him, Flem?"

"Never seen him before," whispered back Flem after a covert scrutiny of
the latest arrival.

"Fine!" commented Fox, speaking with rapidity, but still with low-toned
caution. "Jest to test it, let's see if that sucker'll fall. Here"--he
shoved the dice cup into Gash Turtle's grasp--"you be playin' with the
bones, sorter careless. You kin have the first bet, because I've already
took a likin' to you. Then, if he's willin' to go a second time, I'll
take him on fur a few simoleons." The arch plotter fell into an attitude
of elaborate indifference. "Go ahead, Flem; you toll him in."

Given a guarantee of winning, and who among us is not a born gamester?
Gash Tuttle's cheeks flushed with sporting blood as he grabbed for the
cup. All his corpuscles turned to red and white chips--red ones mostly.
As for the barkeeper, he beyond doubt had the making of a born
conspirator in him. He took the cue instantly.

"Sorry, friend," he called out, "but the grub works is closed down
temporary. Anything I kin do fur you?"

"Well," said the stranger, edging over, "I did want a fried-aig
sandwich, but I might change my mind. Got any cold lager on tap?"

"Join us," invited Fox; "we're jest fixin' to have one. Make it beer all
round," he ordered the barkeeper without waiting for the newcomer's
answer.

Beer all round it was. Gash Tuttle, too eager for gore to more than sip
his, toyed with the dice, rolling them out and scooping them up again.

"Want to shake for the next round, anybody?" innocently inquired the
squint-eyed person, observing this byplay.

"The next round's on the house," announced Flem, obeying a wink of
almost audible emphasis from Fox.

"This here gent thinks he's some hand with the bones," explained Fox,
addressing the stranger and flirting a thumb toward Gash Tuttle. "He was
sayin' jest as you come in the door yonder that he could let anybody
else roll three dice, and then he could tell, without lookin' even, whut
the tops and bottoms would add up to?"

"Huh?" grunted the squinty-eyed man. "Has he got any money in his
clothes that says he kin do that? Where I come frum, money talks." He
eyed Gash Tuttle truculently, as though daring him to be game.

"My money talks too!" said Mr. Tuttle with nervous alacrity. He felt in
an inner vest pocket, producing a modest packet of bills. All eyes were
focused on it.

"That's the stuff!" said Fox with mounting enthusiasm. "How much are you
two gents goin' to bet one another? Make it fur real money--that is, if
you're both game!"

"If he don't touch the dice at all I'll bet him fur his whole roll,"
said the impetuous newcomer.

"That's fair enough, I reckin," said Fox. "Tell you whut--to make it
absolutely fair I'll turn the dice over myself and Flem'll hold the
stakes. Then there can't be no kick comin' from nobody whatsoever, kin
there?" He faced their prospective prey. "How strong are you?" he
demanded, almost sneeringly. "How much are you willin' to put up against
my pardner here?"

"Any amount! Any amount!" snapped back the other, squinting past Fox at
Gash Tuttle's roll until one eye was a button and the other a
buttonhole. "Twenty-five--thirty--thirty-five--as much as forty dollars.
That's how game I am."

Avarice gnawed at the taproots of Gash Tuttle's being, but caution
raised a warning hand. Fifteen was half of what he had and thirty was
all. Besides, why risk all on the first wager, even though there was no
real risk? A person so impulsively sportive as this victim would make
a second bet doubtlessly. He ignored the stealthy little kick his
principal accomplice dealt him on the shin. "I'll make it fur fifteen,"
he said, licking his lips.

"If that's as fur as you kin go, all right," said the slit-eyed man,
promptly posting his money in the outstretched hand of the barkeeper,
who in the same motion took over a like amount from the slightly
trembling fingers of the challenger.

Squint-eye picked up the dice cup and rattled its occupants.

"Come on now!" he bantered Gash Tuttle. "Whut'll they add up, tops and
bottoms?"

"Twenty-one!" said Mr. Tuttle.

"Out they come, then!"

And out they did come, dancing together, tumbling and somersaulting, and
finally halting--a deuce, a trey and a four.

"Three and two is five and four is nine," Gash Tuttle read off the pips.
"Now turn 'em over!" he bade Fox. "That's your job--turn 'em over!" He
was all tremulous and quivery inside.

In silence Fox drew the nearest die toward him and slowly capsized it.
"Four," he announced.

He flipped the deuce end for end, revealing its bottom: "Five!"

He reached for the remaining die--the four-spot. Dragging it toward him,
his large fingers encompassed it for one fleeting instance, hiding it
from view entirely; then he raised his hand: "Six!"

"Makin' twenty-one in all," stuttered Gash Tuttle. He reached for the
stakes.

"Nix on that quick stuff!" yelled his opponent, and dashed his hand
aside. "The tops come to nine and the bottoms to fifteen--that's
twenty-four, the way I figger. You lose!" He pouched the money
gleefully.

Stunned, Gash Tuttle contemplated the upturned facets of the three dice.
It was true--it was all too true! Consternation, or a fine imitation of
that emotion, filled the countenances of Flem and of Fox.

"That's the first time I ever seen that happen," Fox whispered in the
loser's ear. "Bet him again--bet high--and git it all back. That's the
ticket!"

Mr. Tuttle shook his head miserably, but stubbornly. For this once, in
the presence of crushing disaster, the divine powers of retort failed
him. He didn't speak--he couldn't!

"Piker money! Piker money!" chanted the winner. "Still, ever' little bit
helps--eh, boys?"

And then and there, before Gash Tuttle's bulging and horrified eyes, he
split up the winnings in the proportion of five for Flem and five for
Fox and five for himself. Of a sudden the loser was shouldered out of
the group. He looked not into friendly faces, but at contemptuous backs
and heaving shoulders. The need for play acting being over, the play
actors took their ease and divided their pay. The mask was off.
Treachery stood naked and unashamed.

Reaching blindly for his valise, Gash Tuttle stumbled for the door, a
load lying on his daunted spirit as heavy as a stone. Flem hailed him.

"Say, hold on!" He spoke kindly. "Ain't that your quarter yonder?"

He pointed to a coin visible against the flat glass cover of the cigar
case.

"Sure it is--it's yourn. I seen you leave it there when I give you the
change out of that dollar and purposed to tell you 'bout it at the time,
but it slipped my mind. Go on and pick it up--it's yourn. You're welcome
to it if you take it now!"

Automatically Gash Tuttle reached for the quarter--small salvage from a
great and overwhelming loss. His nails scraped the glass, touching only
glass. The quarter was cunningly glued to its underside. Surely this
place was full of pitfalls. A guffawed chorus of derision rudely smote
his burning ears.

"On your way, sucker! On your way!" gibed the perfidious Fox, swinging
about with his elbows braced against the bar and a five-dollar bill held
with a touch of cruel jauntiness between two fingers.

"Whut you got in the gripsack--hay samples or punkins?" jeered the
exultant Slit-Eye.

"Yes; whut is the valise fur?" came Flem's parting taunt.

Under their goadings his spirit rallied.

"Cat's fur, to make kittens' britches!" he said. Then, as a final shot:
"You fellers needn't think you're so derned smart--I know jest exactly
how you done it!"

He left them to chew on that. The parting honours were his, he felt, but
the spoils of war--alas!--remained in the camp of the enemy. Scarcely
twenty minutes at the outside had elapsed since his advent into city
life, and already one-half of the hoarded capital he had meant should
sustain him for a whole gala week was irretrievably gone, leaving behind
an emptiness, a void as it were, which ached like the socket of a newly
drawn tooth.

Vague, formless thoughts of reprisal, of vengeance exacted an
hundredfold when opportunity should fitly offer, flitted through his
numbed brain. Meantime though adventure beckoned; half a mile away or
less a Great White Way and a street fair awaited his coming. That
saffron flare against the sky yonder was an invitation and a promise.
Sighing, he shifted his valise from one hand to the other.

The Belt Line car, returning stationward, bore him with small loss of
time straightway to the very centre of excitement; to where bunting
waved on store fronts and flag standards swayed from trolley poles,
converting the County Square into a Court of Honour, and a myriad
lights glowed golden russet through the haze of dust kicked up by the
hurrying feet of merrymaking thousands. Barkers barked and brass bands
brayed; strange cries of man and beast arose, and crowds eddied to and
fro like windblown leaves in a gusty November. And all was gaiety and
abandon. From the confusion certain sounds detached themselves, becoming
intelligible to the human understanding. As for example:

"Remembah, good people, the cool of the evenin' is the time to view the
edgycated ostritch and mark his many peculiarities!"

And this:

"The big red hots! The g-e-r-reat big, juicy, sizzlin' red hots! The
eriginal hot-dog sand-wige--fi' cents, halluf a dime, the twentieth part
of a dollah! Here y'are! Here y'are! The genuwine Mexican hairless
Frankfurter fer fi' cents!"

And this:

"Cornfetti! Cornfetti! All the colours of the rainbow! All the pleasures
of the Maudie Graw! A large full sack for a nickel! Buy cornfetti and
enjoy yourselves."

And so on and so forth.

The forlorn youth, a half-fledged school-teacher from a back district,
who had purchased the county rights of a patent razor sharpener from a
polished gentleman who had had to look at the map before he even knew
the name of the county, stood on a dry-goods box at the corner of
Jefferson and Yazoo, dimly regretful of the good money paid out for
license and unsalable stock, striving desperately to remember and
enunciate the patter taught him by the gifted promoter. For the
twentieth time he lifted his voice, essaying his word-formula in husky
and stuttering accents for the benefit of swirling multitudes, who never
stopped to listen:

"Friends, I have here the Infallible Patent Razor Sharpener. 'Twill
sharpen razors, knives, scissors, scythe blades or any edged tool. If
you don't believe it will----" He paused, forgetting the tag line; then
cleared his throat and improvised a finish: "If you don't believe it
will--why, it will!" It was a lame conclusion and fruitful of no sales.

How different the case with a talented professional stationed half a
block down the street, who nonchalantly coiled and whirled and threw
a lasso at nothing; then gathered in the rope and coiled and threw it
again, always at nothing at all, until an audience collected, being
drawn by a desire to know the meaning of a performance seemingly so
purposeless. Then, dropping the rope, he burst into a stirring panegyric
touching on the miraculous qualifications of the Ajax Matchless Cleaning
and Washing Powder, which made bathing a sheer pleasure and household
drudgery a joy.

Never for one moment abating the flow of his eloquence, this person
produced a tiny vial, held it aloft, uncorked it, shook twenty drops of
its colourless fluid contents on the corrugated surface of a seemingly
new and virgin sponge; then gently kneaded and massaged the sponge
until--lo and behold!--lather formed and grew and mounted and foamed, so
that the yellow lump became a mass of creamy white suds the size of a
peck measure, and from it dripped huge bubbles that foamed about his
feet and expired prismatically, as the dolphin was once believed to
expire, leaving smears upon the boards whereon the operator stood.

Thereat dimes flowed in on him in clinking streams, and bottles of the
Matchless flowed from him until, apparently grown weary of commerce, he
abandoned his perch, avowedly for refreshment, but really--this being a
trade secret--to rub shavings of soft yellow soap into the receptive
pores of a fresh sponge and so make it ready against the next
demonstration.

Through such scenes Gash Tuttle wandered, a soul apart. He was of the
carnival, but not in it--not as yet. With a pained mental jolt he
observed that about him men of his own age wore garments of a novel and
fascinating cut. By contrast his own wardrobe seemed suddenly grown
commonplace and prosaic; also, these city dwellers spoke a tongue that,
though lacking, as he inwardly conceded, in the ready pungency of his
own speech, nevertheless had a saucy and attractive savour of novelty in
its phrasing. Indeed, he felt lonely. So must a troubadour of old have
felt when set adrift in an alien and hostile land. So must the shining
steel feel when separated from the flint on which it strikes forth its
sparks of fire. I take it a steel never really craves for its flint
until it parts from it.

As he wormed through a group of roistering youth of both sexes he
tripped over his own valise; a wadded handful of confetti struck him
full in the cheek and from behind him came a gurgle of laughter. It was
borne in on him that he was the object of mirth and not its creator. His
neck burned. Certainly the most distressing situation which may beset a
humourist follows hard on the suspicion that folks are laughing--not
with him, but at him!

He hurried on as rapidly as one might hurry in such crowded ways. He was
aware now of a sensation of emptiness which could not be attributed
altogether to the depression occasioned by his experience at the First
and Last Chance Saloon; and he took steps to stay it. He purchased and
partook of hamburger sandwiches rich in chopped onions.

Later it would be time to find suitable lodgings. The more alluring of
the pay-as-you-enter attractions were yet to be tested. By way of a
beginning he handed over a ten-cent piece to a swarthy person behind a
blue pedestal, and mounting eight wooden steps to a platform he passed
behind a flapping canvas curtain. There, in company with perhaps a dozen
other patrons, he leaned over a wooden rail and gazed downward into a
shallow tarpaulin-lined den where a rather drowsy-appearing, half-nude
individual, evidently of Ethiopian antecedents, first toyed with some
equally drowsy specimens of the reptile kingdom and then partook
sparingly and with no particular avidity of the tail of a very small
garter snake.

Chance, purely, had led Gash Tuttle to select the establishment of Osay
rather than that of the Educated Ostrich, or the Amphibious Man, or
Fatima the Pearl of the Harem, for his first plunge into carnival
pleasures; but chance is the hinge on which many moving events swing. It
was so in this instance.

Osay had finished a light but apparently satisfying meal and the
audience was tailing away when Gash Tuttle, who happened to be the
rearmost of the departing patrons, felt a detaining touch on his arm. He
turned to confront a man in his shirtsleeves--a large man with a
pock-marked face, a drooping moustache and a tiger-claw watch charm on
his vest. It was the same man who, but a minute before, had delivered a
short yet flattering discourse touching the early life and manners and
habits of the consumer of serpents--in short, the manager of the show
and presumably its owner.

"Say!" began this gentleman.

"Say yourself," flashed Gash, feeling himself on safe ground once more;
"your mouth's open."

The man grinned in appreciation of the thrust--a wincing grin, as though
owning himself beaten in the very first sally.

"All right, old scout," he said jovially, "I will. Come back here where
nobody can't hear me while I say it." He drew the younger man to the
inner side of the platform and sank his voice to a confidential rumble.
"Soon as I seen you comin' in I says to myself, 'That's the party I'm
lookin' for.' You don't live here in this town, do you?"

Gash Tuttle shook his head and started to speak, but the big man was
going on. Plainly he was not one to waste time in idle preliminaries:

"That's the way I doped it. You're in the profesh, ain't you? You've
been workin' this street-fair game somewhere, ain't you?"

"No," Gash Tuttle confessed, yet somehow at the same time feeling
flattered.

"Well, that just goes to show how a guy can be fooled," said the Osay
man. "I'd 'a' swore you was on to all the ropes in this biz. Anyway,
I know just by the cut of your jib you're the party I'm lookin' for.
That's why I braced you. My name's Fornaro; this here is my outfit. I
want somebody to throw in with me--and I've made up my mind you're the
party I'm lookin' for."

Once bitten, twice shy; and Gash Tuttle's fifteen-dollar bite was still
raw and bleeding. He started to pull away.

"I wouldn't choose to invest in anything more until I'd looked it over,"
he began. The large man grasped him by his two lapels and broke in on
him, drowning out the protest before it was well started.

"Who said anything about anybody investin' anything?" he demanded. "Did
I? No. Then listen to me a minute--just one minute. I'm in a hurry my
own self and I gotta hand you this proposition out fast."

Sincerity was in his tone; was in his manner too. Even as he spoke his
gaze roved past Gash Tuttle toward the tarpaulin draperies which
contributed to their privacy, and he sweat freely; a suetlike dew
spangled his brow. There was a noise outside. He listened intently, then
fixed a mesmerising stare on Gash Tuttle and spoke with great rapidity
and greater earnestness:

"You see, I got some other interests here. Besides this pit show, I'm
a partner in a store pitch and a mitt-joint; and, what with everything,
I'm overworked. That's the God's truth--I'm overworked! What I need is
a manager here. And soon as I seen how you handled yourself I says to
myself, 'That's the party I want to hire for manager.' What did you say
your name was?"

"Tuttle--Gashney P. Tut----"

"That's enough--the Tuttle part will do for me. Now, Tuttle, set down
that there keister of yours--that gripsack--and listen. I gotta go down
the street for a half hour--maybe an hour--and I want you to take
charge. You're manager while I'm gone--the joint is yours till I git
back. And to-night, later on, we'll fix up a deal together. If you
think you like the job we'll make a reg'lar arrangement; we'll make it
permanent instid of temporary. See?"

"But--but----"

"But nothin'! I want to find out if my first judgment about you is
correct. See? I want to make a test. See? That's it--a test. You ain't
goin' to have much to do, first off. The nigger is all right s'long as
he gits his dope." He motioned toward the canvas-lined retreat where
Osay now dozed heavily among the coils of his somnolent pets. "And
Crummy--that's my outside man--kin handle the front and make the spiel,
and take in what money comes in. I'll mention to him as I'm leavin' that
you're in charge. Probably I'll be back before time for the next
blow-off. All you gotta do is just be manager--that's all; and if
anybody comes round askin' for the manager, you're him. See?"

His impetuosity was hypnotising--it was converting; nay, compelling. It
was enough to sweep any audience off its feet, let alone an audience of
one. Besides, where lives the male adult between the ages of nine and
ninety who in his own mind is not convinced that he has within him the
making of a great and successful amusement purveyor? Still, Gash Tuttle
hesitated. The prospect was alluring, but it was sudden--so sudden.

As though divining his mental processes, the man Fornaro added a
clinching and a convincing argument.

"To prove I'm on the dead level with you, I'm goin' to pay you for your
time--pay you now, in advance--to bind the bargain until we git the
details all fixed up." He hauled out a fair-sized wad of currency and
from the mass detached a frayed green bill. "I'm goin' to slip you a
she-note on the spot."

"A which?"

"A she-note--two bones. See?"

He forced the money into the other's palm. As Gash Tuttle automatically
pocketed the retainer he became aware that this brisk new associate of
his, without waiting for any further token of agreement on his part,
already was preparing to surrender the enterprise into his keeping.
Fornaro backed away from him and dropped nimbly down off the back of the
platform where there was a slit in the canvas wall; then turned and,
standing on tiptoe to bring his mouth above the level of the planking,
spoke the parting admonition in hasty tones:

"Remember now, you're the boss, the main guy, the whole cheese! If
anybody asts you tell 'em you're the manager and stick to it."

The canvas flapped behind him and he was gone. And Gash Tuttle, filled
with conflicting emotions in which reawakened pride predominated, stood
alone in his new-found kingdom.

Not for long was he alone, however. To be exact, not for more than half
a minute at the very most. He heard what he might have heard before had
his ears been as keenly attuned as the vanished Fornaro's were. He
heard, just outside, voices lifted conflictingly in demand, in
expostulation, in profane protest and equally profane denunciation of
something or other. A voice which seemed to be that of the swarthy man
denominated as Crummy gave utterance to a howl, then instantly dimmed
out, as though its owner was moving or being moved from the immediate
vicinity with unseemly celerity and despatch. Feet drummed on the wooden
steps beyond the draperies. Something heavy overturned or was overthrown
with a crash.

And as Mr. Tuttle, startled by these unseemly demonstrations, started
toward the front entrance of his domain the curtain was yanked violently
aside and a living tidal wave flowed in on him, dashing high and wide.
On its crest, propelled by irresistible cosmic forces, rode, as it were,
a slouch-hatted man with a nickel-plated badge on his bosom, and at this
person's side was a lanky countryman of a most threatening demeanour;
and behind them and beyond them came a surging sea of faces--some
hostile, some curious, and all excited.

"Who's in charge here?" shouted the be-badged man.

"Me--I am," began Gash Tuttle. "I'm the manager. What's wanted?"

"You are! I 'rest you in the name of the law for runnin' a skin game!"
the constable whooped gleefully--"on a warrant swore out less 'en a hour
ago."

And with these astounding words he fixed his fingers, grapple-hook
fashion, in the collar of the new manager's coat; so that as Gash
Tuttle, obeying a primal impulse, tried to back away from him, the back
breadth of the coat bunched forward over his head, giving him the
appearance of a fawn-coloured turtle trying to retreat within its own
shell. His arms, hampered by sleeves pulled far down over the hands,
winnowed the air like saurian flippers, wagging in vain resistance.

Holding him fast, ignoring his muffled and inarticulate protests, the
constable addressed the menacing countryman:

"Is this here the one got your money?"

"No, 'tain't. 'Twas a big ugly feller, with mushtashes; but I reckin
this here one must've helped. Lemme search him."

"Hands off the prisoner!" ordered the constable, endeavouring to
interpose his bulk between maddened accuser and wriggling captive.

He spoke too late and moved too slowly. The countryman's gouging hands
dived into Mr. Tuttle's various pockets and were speedily out again in
the open; and one of them held money in it--paper and silver.

"Here 'tis!" barked the countryman, exultant now. "This here two-dollar
bill is mine--I know it by this here red-ink mark." He shuffled out the
three remaining bills and stared at them a moment in stupefaction, and
his yelp of joy turned to a bellow of agonised berserk rage. "I had two
hundred and twenty-eight dollars in cash, and here ain't but seventeen
dollars and sixty cents! You derned sharper! Where's the rest of my
mortgage money that yore gang beat me out of?"

He swung a fearsome flail of an arm and full in Gash Tuttle's chest he
landed a blow so well aimed, so vigorous, that by its force the
recipient was driven backward out of his coat, leaving the emptied
garment in the constable's clutches; was driven still further back until
he tottered on the rear edge of the platform and tumbled off into space,
his body tearing away a width of canvas wall and taking it along with
him as he disappeared.

Perhaps it was because he fell so hard that he bounced up so
instantaneously. He fought himself free of the smothering folds of dusty
tarpaulin and turned to flee headlong into the darkness. He took three
flying steps and tripped over the guy rope of the next tent. As he fell
with stunning violence into the protecting shadows he heard pursuit roll
over the platform past Osay, thud on the earth, clatter on by him and
die away in the distance to the accompaniment of cheers, whoops and the
bloodthirsty threats of the despoiled countryman.

       *       *       *       *       *

If one has never stolen a ride on a freight train the task presents
difficulties and dangers. Still, it may be done, provided one is
sufficiently hard pressed to dare its risks and risk its discomforts.
There is one especially disagreeable feature incident to the
experience--sooner or later discovery is practically inevitable.

Discovery in this instance came just before the dawn, as the freight
lumbered through the swampy bottoms of Obion Creek. A sleepy and
therefore irritable brakeman found, huddled up on the floor of an empty
furniture car, a dark heap, which, on being stirred with a heavy
boot-toe, moved and moaned and gave forth various other faint signs of
life. So, as the locomotive slowed down for the approach to the trestle,
he hoisted the unresisting object and with callous unconcern shoved it
out of the open car door on to the sloping bank of the built-up right of
way--all this occurring at a point just beyond where a white marker post
gleamed spectrally in the strengthening light of the young summer day,
bearing on its planed face the symbol, S-3--meaning by that, three miles
to Swango Junction.

At sunup, forty minutes later, a forlorn and shrunken figure,
shirt-sleeved, hatless and carrying no baggage whatsoever, quit the
crossties and, turning to the left from the railroad track some rods
above the station, entered, with weary gait, a byway leading over the
hill to the town beyond. There was a drooping in the shoulders and a
dragging of the mud-incrusted legs, and the head, like Old Black Joe's,
was bending low.

The lone pedestrian entered the confines of Swango proper, seeking, even
at that early hour, such backways as seemed most likely to be empty of
human life. But as he lifted his leaden feet past the Philpotts place,
which was the most outlying of local domiciles, luck would have it that
Mr. Abram Philpotts should be up and stirring; in fact, Mr. Philpotts,
being engaged in the milk and butter business, was out in his barn
hitching a horse to a wagon. Chancing to pass a window of the barn he
glanced out and saw a lolled head bobbing by above the top of his back
fence.

"Hey there!" he called out. "Hey, Gash, what air you doin' up so early
in the mornin'?"

With a wan suggestion of the old familiar sprightliness the answer came
back, comically evasive:

"That's fur me to know and fur you to find out!"

Overcome, Mr. Philpotts fell up against his stable wall, feebly slapping
himself on the legs with both hands.

"Same old Gashney!" he gurgled. "They can't nobody ever git ahead of
you, kin they boy?"

The words and the intent of the tribute reached beyond the palings.
Their effect was magical; for the ruler was in his realm again, back
among his loyal, worshipful subjects. The bare head straightened; the
wearied legs unkinked; the crushed and bruised spirit revived. And
Gashney Tuttle, king of jesters, re-crowned, proceeded jauntily on his
homeward way, with the wholesome plaudits of Mr. Philpotts ringing in
his gratified ears and the young sun shining, golden, in his face.




CHAPTER IV

BLACKER THAN SIN


It was the year after the yellow fever that Major Foxmaster moved out
from Virginia; that would make it the year 1876. And the next year the
woman came. For Major Foxmaster her coming was inopportune. It is
possible that she so timed it with that very thing in mind. To order her
own plans with a view to the upsetting and the disordering of his plans
may have been within the scope of her general scheme. Through intent,
perhaps, she waited until he had established himself here in his new
environment, five hundred miles from tidewater, before she followed him.

Be this as it may, that was what happened. The Major came out in the
spring of the year. He was pushing fifty then, a fine upstanding figure
of a man--what women, for lack of a better name, call distinguished
looking. He had been a lieutenant in the Mexican War and a major in the
Civil War--on the Confederate side, of course, seeing that he came from
the seaboard side and not from the mountainous flank of Virginia.

You get some notion of what manner of man he was when I tell you that in
all the years he lived in this city, which was a fair-sized city, only
one man ever called him by his first name. Behind his back he was to
others The Major, sometimes The Old Major, and rarely Major; but to his
face people always hailed him, properly, as Major Foxmaster. And,
despite the rôle he was to play in the community, he never acquired a
nickname; and that was not so strange, either. You give nicknames to
geysers, but not to glaciers.

This man's manner was icily formal toward those he deemed his inferiors,
icily polite toward those whom he acknowledged his equals. He had no
code for his intercourse with superiors because he never met anybody
whom he regarded as his social superior. He looked upon the world with a
bleak, chill eye, and to it he showed a bleak, chill face. It was a mask
really--a mask of flesh held in such fine and rigid control that it gave
no hint, ever, of what went on in the cool brain behind it. A
professional poker player would have traded five years out of his life
to be the owner of such a face.

Well, the Major came. He had money, he had family, he had a military
record; likewise he had the poise and the pose which, lacking all the
other things, still would have given him consideration and a place in
town life. His status in the financial world became fixed when he
deposited in the largest bank a drawing account of such size as
instantly to win the cuddling admiration of the president of the bank.
He had established himself in rooms at the Gaunt House--then, and for
many years thereafter, the principal hotel. Before fall he was proposed
for membership in the exclusive Kenilworth Club, that was the
unattainable Mecca toward which many men turned wistful eyes. Judge
Sherwan, who was afterward to be his only close friend, sponsored his
candidacy and he was elected promptly. Very soon his life fell into the
grooves that always thenceforward it was to follow.

The Major did not go into any business. Opportunities to go into this or
that were in due season presented to him. He listened with his air of
congealed courtesy, but declined them all, explaining that his present
investments were entirely satisfactory and yielded him a satisfactory
income. Like many men of his breed and generation, he liked a good horse
so well that it was more than a liking--with him it was a love.
Afternoons he frequently drove one: a ramping bay mare with a fractious
temper and a set of gifted heels. He was fond of cards, and in the
evenings generally played cards with certain of his fellow club members
in a private room at the Kenilworth Club.

These men, though, never became his friends, but were merely the men
with whom he played cards. If of a morning after breakfast he went for a
walk, as sometimes happened, he went alone, except on those infrequent
occasions when Judge Sherwan accompanied him. At the beginning he was
asked to affairs at the homes of influential people; but, since he never
accepted these invitations--any of them--people presently quit asking
him. Among a hundred thousand human beings he became, or rather he
remained, so far as interchange of thought, or of affection, or of
confidence, or of intimacy was concerned, a social Crusoe upon a desert
island set in an empty sea, with no Man Friday to bear him company in
his loneliness--unless it might be said that old Sherwan qualified,
after a fashion, for the Man-Friday job.

You see, the Major knew all along that--sooner or later--the woman would
be coming. For these few months he had played the truant from his
destiny, or his Nemesis, or his fate, or by whatever fancy name you
might choose to call it; but there was no chance of his having escaped
it altogether. Through strength of will power he could in silence
continue to endure it as he had in silence endured it through the years
that stretched-backward between young-manhood and middle age. Through
pride he would involve no other person, however remotely, in the sorry
web of his own weaving. Mentally he manoeuvred to stand apart from his
kind; to render himself as inaccessible, as aloof, as unknowable by
them as the core of an iceberg.

Nevertheless, it was inevitable that the channels of his outer life, no
matter how narrowly they ran or how coldly they coursed, would be
disturbed and set awry by her coming. A cultivated and well-sustained
indifference to popular opinion is all well enough, but gossip is a
corrosive that eats through the calluses until it finds quick flesh
underneath. The Major might arm himself against showing what he felt,
but he could not armour himself against feeling what he felt. He knew
it--and she knew it. Perhaps that was why she, this one time, delayed
her coming until he had ample opportunity for becoming, in a measure,
fixed in the community and identified with it.

She came. One morning in the young spring of the year following the year
when this narrative begins, Major Foxmaster stepped out from between the
tall pillars of the Gaunt House doorway to find her waiting for him upon
the sidewalk. She stood close to the curbing, a tall and straight
figure, swathed all in dead and dreary black, with black skirts hiding
her feet and trailing on the bricks behind her; with black gloves upon
her clasped hands; with a long, thick veil of black crêpe hiding her
face and the shape of her head, and descending, front and back, almost
to her waist--a striking figure and one to catch the eye.

After the first glance he gave no heed to her at all, nor she to
him--except that when he had descended the short flight of stone steps
and set off down the street at his usual brisk, soldierly gait, she
followed, ten paces in his rear. By reason of her skirts, which swept
the ground round her, and by reason, too, that her shoes had soles of
felt or of rubber, she seemed almost to float along the pavement behind
him, without apparent effort--certainly without sound.

Two blocks down the street he entered a business house. She waited
outside, as silent as a mute and as funereal as a pall. In a few minutes
he reappeared; she fell in behind him. He crossed over to the other
side; she crossed, too, maintaining the distance between them. Crossing,
his heels hit hard upon the rutted cobbles of the roadway; but she
glided over them noiselessly and smoothly, almost like one who walked on
water. He went into the Kenilworth Club and for an hour or two sat in
the reading room behind a newspaper. Had he raised his eyes he might
have seen, through the window, the woman waiting on the curb. He ate his
luncheon there in the club at a table in a corner of the dining room,
alone, as was his way. It was two o'clock and after before he left to go
to the livery stable where he kept his mare. She followed, to wait
outside the livery stable until he had driven away in his gig, bound for
the trotting track where the city's horse fanciers exercised their
harness stock.

For a space, then, she disappeared. Having returned the rig to its
quarters and having dined at the Gaunt House, the Major came forth once
more at eight-thirty o'clock to return to the Kenilworth for a bout at
the cards. He was spruced and for the second time that day he had
shaved. Plainly his measured and customary habit of life was to go on
just as it had gone on before the woman came--or, rather, it might be
said that it was only now reassuming the routine which, with breaks in
between, it had pursued through so many years. Major Foxmaster came down
the steps, drawing on his gloves. From the deeper darkness beyond a
patch of yellowish glow where a gas lamppost stood the woman emerged,
appearing now as an uncertain, wavering shape in her black swathings.
Again she followed him, at a distance of a few paces, to the Kenilworth
Club; again she waited in the shadows cast by its old-fashioned portico
while he played his game and, at its end, cashed in his winnings--for
the Major won that night, as very often he did; again she followed him
homeward at midnight through the silent and empty street. Without a word
or a sign or a backward glance he ascended the steps and passed within
the doors of the Gaunt House. Without a word or a sign she lingered
until he had disappeared; then she turned off the pavement into the road
and vanished, swimming away upright, as it were, without visible motion
of her limbs or her body, into a stilled and waveless sea of darkness.

I have here set down the story of this day with such detail because,
with occasional small variations, it was to be the story of an uncounted
number of other days coming after it.

Inside of twenty-four hours the whole city knew the tale, and buzzed and
hummed with it. Inside of forty-eight hours the woman, by common
consent, had been given the names she was ever thereafter to wear. She
was, to some, The Woman in Black; to others, Foxmaster's Shadow. Inside
of a week or two the town was to know, by word of mouth passed on from
this person to that, and by that person to another, all that it was ever
to know of her.

She came from the same place whence he came--a small Virginia town
somewhere near the coast. As the current reports ran, the Foxmaster
plantation and the plantation of her family adjoined; as
children--remember, I am still quoting the account that was generally
accepted--they had played together; as young man and young woman they
had been sweethearts. He wronged her and then denied her marriage. Her
father was dead; she had no brothers and no near male relatives to
exact, at the smaller end of a pistol, satisfaction from the seducer. So
she dedicated her days and nights to the task of haunting him with the
constant reminder of his crime and her wrongs. She clad herself in
black, with a veil before her face to hide it, as one in mourning for a
dead life; and she set herself to following him wherever he might go.
She never spoke to him; she never, so far as the world at large knew,
wrote to him nor meddled in any fashion whatsoever with him or his
affairs--but she followed him.

The war, coming on, broke for four years the continuity of her
implacable plan of vengeance. When the war was over, and he came back
home, she took it up again. He left the town where he had been reared
and moved to Richmond, and then after a time from Richmond to Baltimore;
in due season she followed after. Finally he had moved to this more
westerly city, lying on the border between the North and the South. And
now here she was too.

Through an agent in Virginia she had leased, ready furnished, the old
Gresham place, diagonally across the way from the front entrance of the
Gaunt House; that fact speedily came out, proving that, like him, she
also had means of her own. Through this same agent the taxes were
thereafter paid. Presumably she moved in under cover of night, for she
was a figure that, once seen, was not to be forgotten; and most
certainly no one could remember having seen her before that fine spring
morning when Major Foxmaster came out of the Gaunt House to find her
waiting for him.

She had brought her servants with her--a middle-aged mulatto man and his
wife, a tall, young, coal-black negro woman; both of them as
close-mouthed as only some negroes can be, when they are the exceptions
to prove the rule of a garrulous race. The mulatto man was a combination
of butler and gardener. It was he who did the marketing, dealing with
the tradespeople and paying all the bills. The negro woman was the cook,
presumably. Passers-by rarely saw her. These two, with their mistress,
composed the household.

For such a mistress and such a household the old Gresham place made a
most fit abiding place. It was one of those houses that seemed builded
for the breeding of mysteries and the harbouring of tragedies--the kind
of house that cannot stand vacant long without vaguely acquiring the
reputation of being haunted. It was a big, foursquare house of greyish
stone, placed in the exact centre of a narrow, treeless lot, which
extended through for the full depth of the city block. In front of it
was a high picketed fence and a deep, bare grassplot; behind it was a
garden of sorts, with a few stunted and illy-nourished berry bushes; and
on each side of it was a brick wall, so high that the sunshine never
fell on the earth at the side of the house toward the north; and even in
the hottest summer weather the foundation stones there were slick and
sweaty with the damp, and big snails crawled on the brick wall that ran
in the shadow of the wall, leaving trails of a luminous slime across the
slick greenish mould which covered the bricks.

The woman took this house, with its gear and garnishings, just as the
last of the Greshams had left it when he died. During the months and
years it remained tenantless all the upper windows had been tightly
shuttered; she left them so. In the two lower front windows, which
flanked the deeply recessed front door and which lacked blinds, were
stiff, heavy shades of a dull silver colour, drawn down until only a
glassed space of inches showed between their unfringed ends and the
stone copings. These, too, were left as they had been. They accorded
well with the blank, cold house itself; they matched in with its drear
old face; they made you think of coins on a dead man's eyes.

This house, as I have said, stood almost opposite the Gaunt House. What
went on within it no outsider ever knew, for no outsider ever crossed
its threshold--to this good day no outsider ever has known; but every
day its door opened to let out its draped and veiled mistress, setting
forth on her business, which was to follow Major Foxmaster; and every
night, when that day's business was done, it opened again to let her
back in. In time the town grew used to the sight; it never grew tired of
talking about it.

As for Major Foxmaster, he would dodge about the country no more; for,
in the long run or the short, dodging availed him nothing. The years
behind him proved that. He would bide where he was until death, which
was the supreme handicapper, named the winner of this, the last heat of
their strange match. He would outlive her and be free; else she would
outlive him, to see her long-famished hatred sated. And he wondered
whether, if he died first, she, in her black mourning, would dog his
dead body to the grave as she had dogged his living steps! It was a
morbid fancy and, perhaps because it was morbid, it found a lodgment in
the Major's mind, recurring to him again and again. The existence that
he--and she--had willed him to lead was not conducive to an entirely
healthy mental aspect.

Whatever his thoughts were, he betrayed none of them to the rest of
creation. Exactly as before she appeared, so he continued to deport
himself. His behaviour showed no change. He took his walks, drove his
bay filly, played his cards at the Kenilworth. He carried his head as
high as ever; he snapped his military heels down as firmly as ever on
the stones of the street and the bricks of the sidewalk. With a pair of
eyes that were as inscrutable and yet as clear as two bits of hard blue
ice, and with a face like a square of chipped flint, he went his daily
and his hourly way, outwardly oblivious to the stares of acquaintance
and stranger alike, seeming not to know that ten paces in his rear, or
twelve, came drifting this erect veiled shape which was clad all in dead
black--as black as sin, as black as his sin had been, as black as her
misery had been--the incarnate embodiment of her shame and his.

In fair weather as in foul, in blistering midsummer and blizzardy
midwinter, daytime and nighttime, she followed him. If she lost the
trail she waited in all patience until he reappeared. She seemed
tireless and hungerless. Wet or cold or heat seemed not to affect her.
In her grim pursuit of him her spirit rose triumphant above the calls of
the flesh. At midnight, after a long vigil outside the Kenilworth, she
moved behind him with the same swift, noiseless, floating motion that
marked her in the morning. And so it went with these two.

If he did not notice her presence, neither did he seek ever to elude
her. If he never spoke to her, neither did he speak of her to others. As
for the woman, she never spoke to any one at all. Outside the walls of
the house where she lived her voice was never heard and her face was
never seen. Only one person ever dared speak to the Major of her.

Old Sherwan himself did not dare. Of all human beings he stood nearest
to the Major. If the Major might be said to have an intimate Judge
Sherwan was the one. Moreover, he, Sherwan, was by way of being a
he-gossip, which of all the created breeds of gossips is the most
persistent and the most consistent, the most prying and, therefore, the
most dangerous. He yearned for the smell of impropriety as a drug-fiend
yearns for his drug. His was a brackish old soul and from its soured
depths he dearly loved to spew up the bilge waters of scandal. The
pumps leading to that fouled hold were always in good order. Give him
the inch of fact and he would guarantee to provide the ell of surmise
and innuendo. Grown too old to sin actually he craved to sin
vicariously--to balance always on the edge of indiscretion, since he no
longer plunged into it bodily.

Wherefore, after the woman came and the first shock of her coming wore
off, he made a point of being seen in Major Foxmaster's company as much
as possible. The share of notoriety the association brought him was dear
to his withered, slack-valved old heart. In his manner and his look, in
the very way he cocked his hat and waggled his stiffened legs, you
discerned that he wished to divide with his friend the responsibility
for the presence of his friend's trailing shadow.

But, for all this and all that, he did not dare ever to speak of her to
Major Foxmaster. Joel Bosler dared to, though, he being one of the
meagre-minded breed proverbially reputed to go rushing in where angels
fear to tread. This Joel Bosler was a policeman; his beat included the
Gaunt House corner and both sides of the street upon which the Gaunt
House fronted. He was a kindly enough creature; a long slab-pole of a
man, with the face of an old buck sheep. For some reason--which he least
of all could fathom--Joel Bosler had contracted a vague sort of
attachment for the Major. They met occasionally on the sidewalk outside
the hotel; and, since the Major always responded with iced and
ceremonial politeness to the policeman's salute, it may have been that
this, to Bosler's limited mind, was proof of a friendly understanding
existing between them.

One day, about a month after the woman moved into the old Gresham place,
Bosler, having first scratched his head assiduously for a space of
minutes to stimulate the thought, was moved to invade the Gaunt House
lobby and send his name upstairs to the Major's rooms. A negro bell boy
brought word back that the Major would be very glad to see Policeman
Bosler, and Policeman Bosler accordingly went up. The Major was in the
sitting room of his suite of rooms on the second floor. Bosler, bowing,
came in and shut the door behind him with an elaborate carefulness.

"Good morning, sir?" said Major Foxmaster formally, with the note of
polite interrogation in his tone; and then, as Bosler stood fingering
his blue cap and shuffling his feet: "Well, sir; well?"

"Major Foxmaster, suh," began Bosler, "I--er--I kinder wanted to say
somethin' to you privatelike."

He halted lamely. Before the daunting focus of those frigid blue eyes
his speech, carefully rehearsed beforehand, was slipping away from him.

"Except for ourselves, there is no one within hearing," stated the
Major. "Kindly proceed--if you will be so good."

"Well, suh," faltered Bosler, fumbling his words out--"well, suh, Major
Foxmaster, it's this-a-way: I've been--been a-thinkin' it over; and if
this here lady--this woman that wears black all the time--the one that's
moved into the old Gresham place acrost the street--if she pesters you
any by follerin' you round every wheres, the way she does--I thought I'd
be very glad--if you said the word--to warn her to quit it, else
I'd--I'd have to take steps agin her by law or somethin'. And so--and
so----" He stopped altogether. He had been chilled at the moment of his
entrance; now he was frozen mentally to below the zero point.

The Major spoke, and his syllables battered on Joel Bosler's unprotected
head like hailstones.

"Have you ever observed that the person to whom you refer has spoken to
me?" he demanded.

"No, suh; but----"

"Or ever molested me in any way?"

"Oh, no, suh; but, you see----"

"Have you ever observed that I spoke to her?"

"No, suh; but----"

"Have you any reason for believing, of your own knowledge, that she
knows me?"

"Well, suh, I----"

"Or that I am acquainted with her?"

"Well, I----"

"Then, sir, since she is minding her own business and I am minding my
own business, I suggest that you take pattern by such examples and
cultivate the habit of minding your own business. Kindly do not address
me hereafter upon this subject--or any other. I find your conversation
singularly unattractive. Good day, sir!"

Policeman Joel Bosler had no recollection afterward of having withdrawn
himself. He presently found himself downstairs in the lobby, and, a
little later on, outside the hotel, upon his regular beat. How he got
there or how long it took him to get there he could not, with any degree
of certainty, say.

Presently, though, he saw the Major issue forth from the Gaunt House
door. And as the Major's foot descended upon the first step of the
flight leading down to the street level, the gate of the old Gresham
place across the way clicked, and here came the cloaked, veiled woman,
floating noiselessly across the road to follow him.

Joel Bosler, still in a state of intellectual numbness, watched them as
they passed down the street--the Major striding on ahead, the gliding
woman ten paces behind him. He had witnessed the same sight perhaps
thirty times before. In days to come he was to witness it hundreds of
times more; but always he watched it and never grew weary of watching
it. Nor did the eyes of the rest of the town weary of watching it.

And so the thing went on.

       *       *       *       *       *

The years went by. Five of them went by. Ten of them went by. A new
generation was growing up, coming into manhood and womanhood. An old
generation was thinning out and dying off. The Gaunt House was no longer
the best hotel in the city. It was the second best and, before very
long, was to be the third best. Tall business houses--six, seven, eight,
nine stories tall--shouldered up close to it; and they dwarfed it,
making it seem squatty and insignificant, whereas before it had loomed
massive and monument-high, dominating the corner and the rest of the
block. Once the cobbled road before its doors had clinked to the
heel-taps of smart carriage horses. Now it thundered clamorously beneath
the broad iron-shod tires of dray and vans.

The old Gresham place, diagonally across the way, looked much as it had
always looked; indeed, there was not much about it, exteriorly speaking,
to undergo change. Maybe the green mould in the damp, slick walk at its
northern side was a little bit greener and a little bit thicker; and
maybe, in summer, the promenading snails were a trifle more numerous
there. The iron gate, set in the middle breadth of the iron fence,
lolled inward upon one rusted hinge, after the fashion of a broken wing.
The close-drawn shades in the two lower front windows had faded from a
tarnished silver colour to a dulled leaden colour; and one of them--the
one on the right-hand side--had pulled away and awry from its fastenings
above and was looped down, hanging at a skewed angle behind the dirtied
and crusted panes, as though one of the coins had slipped halfway off
the dead man's eyelids. People persistently called it the old Gresham
place, naming it so when they pointed it out to strangers and told them
the tale of its veiled chatelaine and her earthly mission.

For, you know, Major Foxmaster's shadow still followed after Major
Foxmaster. Long before, these two had been accepted as verities; it
might now be said of them that they had become institutional--inevitable
fixtures, with orbits permanent and assured in the swing of community
life. In the presence of this pair some took a degree of pride, bragging
when away from home that they came from the town where so strange a
sight might forever be seen, and when at home bringing visitors and
chance acquaintances to this corner of the town in order to show it to
these others.

Along with this morbid pride in a living tragedy ran a sort of
undercurrent of sympathy for its actors. From the beginning there had
been pity for the woman who, the better everlastingly to parade her
shame, hid her face eternally from the light of day; and in possibly a
more limited circle there had been abundant pity for the man as well.
Settling down to watch the issue out, the town, from the outset, had
respected the unbendable, unbreakable fortitude of the man, and
respected, also, the indomitable persistency of the woman.

For a variety of very self-evident reasons no one had ever or would ever
meddle in the personal affairs of Major Foxmaster. For reasons that were
equally good, though perhaps not so easy to define in words, none
meddled with her either. Street gamins feared to jeer her as she passed,
without knowing exactly why they feared.

In these ten years the breaks in the strange relationship had been few
and short. Once a year, on an average, the Major made short trips back
to Virginia, presumably upon business pertaining to his estate and his
investments. Such times the woman was not seen abroad. Once, in '79, for
a week, and once again, just following the great blizzard of '81, she
was missed for a few days; and people wondered whether she was ailing or
housebound, or what. For those days the Major walked without his shadow.
Then the swathed figure reappeared, tracking him about as before.

Time undeniably was working its changed with Major Foxmaster, as with
his surroundings. He must be about sixty now; but, seeing him for the
first time, you might have been pardoned for setting him down as a man
of seventy or thereabouts--he looked it. His shoulders, which formerly
he carried squared back so splendidly, were beginning to fold in upon
the casing of his ribs. His hair used to be black, shot with white
hairs; it was now white, shot with a few black hairs. His back had had
a hollow in it; there was a curve in it yet, but the curve was outward
instead of inward. When a man's figure develops convex lines where there
used to be concavities, that man is getting on; and the Major plainly
was getting on pretty fast. His eyes, which remained dignifiedly and
defiantly scornful of all the world, and of all the world might think
and might say, nevertheless were filmed over the least bit, so that they
lost something of their icy blue keenness. His face, though, with the
jaws sinking in upon the shrunken gums and the brows growing shaggier,
was as much of a mask as it had ever been.

What was true of Major Foxmaster was seemingly not true of her who
followed him. Within the flapping shapelessness of her disguise her
figure showed as straight and supple as in the beginning, and her
noiseless step was as nimble and quick as ever it had been. And that was
a mighty strange thing too. It was as though her shroud of wrappings,
which kept the sunshine and the wind off her, kept off age too.

This very same thought came at length into Major Foxmaster's head. It
took lodgment there and sprouted, sending out roots into all the odd
corners of his mind. It is not for me to tell why or how he got this
notion, or exactly when. It is for me merely to narrate as briefly as
may be the progress of the obsession and its consequences.

       *       *       *       *       *

Another five years passed, and then three, making eight more on top of
the first ten. Major Foxmaster was crowding seventy; he looked eighty.
Men and women who had been children when he moved out from Virginia were
themselves almost face to face with impending middle age and had
children of their own growing up, who, in their turn, would hear the
story of Major Foxmaster's shadow and bear it forward into yet another
generation. The stone copings above the Gaunt House door were sooty
black with the accretions of decades; for this was a soft-coal town, and
factories, with tall chimneys that constantly vomited out greasy black
smoke, had crept up, taking the old hotel by flank and by rear. The
broken shade in the right-hand lower front window of the old Gresham
place, across the way, was gone altogether, having parted its rotted
fabric from its decayed fastenings; so the bleak, bare face of the house
winked with one dead eye and stared with the other.

The crotchety bay mare was long gone to the bone yard. Her hide was
chair bottoms and her gristles were glue; and out on the trotting track
wealthy young bloods of the town exercised her get and her skittish
grand-get. The Major did not drive a harness nag any more--he had a
palsy of the hands and a stoop of the spine; but in most regards he
adhered to the old habits. He took his daily constitutionals--sometimes
alone--except, of course, for the tagging black shape behind
him--oftener with the octogenarian Sherwan; and of evenings he played
his poker games at the Kenilworth Club, which, after the way of
ultraconservative clubs, stood fast on its original site, even though
the neighbourhood about it was so distressfully altered. His heels had
quit ringing against the sidewalk; instead, his legs lifted tremulously
and his feet felt for a purchase on the earth when he set them down.

His face was no longer chipped grey flint; it was a chalk-white, with
deep lines in it. The gold-headed cane of ebony wood, which he carried
always, had ceased to be an ornament to his gait and had become a
necessary prop to his step. His jaws sagged in until there were deep
recesses at the corners of his mouth; and there, in those little hollow
places, the spittle would accumulate in tiny patches. Possibly, by
reason of the bleary casts that had overspread them, his eyes--still the
faithfully inscrutable peepholes of his brain--gave no betrayal of the
racking thoughts behind them. They were racking thoughts too. The
delusion was a mania now--a besetting mania, feeding on silence and
isolation, colouring and tincturing all the processes of his intellect.

By years--so he reasoned it out with himself in every waking hour--by
years, she who bided within that shuttered house over the way was his
age, or near it. By rights, her draped form should be as shrunken and
warped as his own. By rights, the face behind that thick black veil
should be as old as his, and bleached, moreover, to a corpsey paleness.
Yet the furtive glances he stole over his shoulder told him that the
figure behind him moved as alertly erect as ever it had; that its
movements had the same sure and silent swiftness.

So that, after a while, Major Foxmaster began to think things that no
entirely sane man has any business thinking. He began to say to himself
that now he had solved the secret which, all these years, had been kept
from his ken. A curse had been put upon him--that was it; that must be
it! Behind that veil was no face old and sunken and wasted as his was,
but, instead, a young, plump face, with luminous grey eyes set in it,
and a sweet, full mouth, and about it wavings of lustrous, rich brown
hair--the face of the girl he once loved as she looked in the days
before he quit loving her.

He held up his own hands before his watery eyes. They were trembly,
wrinkled hands, gnarled in their knuckles, corded on their backs. They
were the colour of scorched leather--the texture of it too. But hers
must be the plump little white hands he remembered, with rosy-pink palms
and bright, pointed nails. Before a long mirror in his dressing room he
studied himself--studied his bowed back and his hunching shoulders and
his shaky shanks--and all. Her figure, inside its flapping black
draperies, was straight as an arrow; her head poised itself firmly
upright on her shoulders. That much at least he knew; so if that much
were true, why was not the rest of it true too?

It was not fair! According to his lights he had fought out the fight
with only such weapons as Nature and his own will gave him; but the
Supreme Handicapper had stacked the cards against him. He was bound to
lose the long, long race. He could not last much longer. He could feel
age tugging at every flabby muscle; infirmity was forever fingering his
tissues, seeking the most vulnerable spot at which to strike in at him.

He would lie down and die. And not until then--not until the last rattle
of breath had scaped out of his collapsing windpipe; not until she,
still triumphantly active and alert and youthful, still cloaked and
gloved and hooded, had followed his sapped, empty shell to the
graveyard--would she surrender and shrivel into her rightful semblance,
growing old and feeble in an hour or in a day. It was not fair--this
conjury business! From the beginning he never had a chance to win. All
the days of his manhood he had walked with a living nightmare. Why, in
dying, should he be doomed to point the moral of a living ghost tale?

First he told himself it could not be true; that it was a hideous
imagination born of his broodings. This was the fag-end of the
nineteenth century in which he lived, when supernatural events did not
happen. Then he told himself it must be true--the testimony before his
eyes proved the fact of what he could not see. Then something happened
which, as far as Major Foxmaster was concerned, settled the issue.

On a winter night, after rough weather, the Major came feebly out of the
Kenilworth Club, groping his way and muttering to himself. This habit of
muttering to himself was one that had come on him just lately.

There were patches of ice upon the sidewalk, and the wind, like a lazy
housewife, had dusted the snow back into corners and under projections.
Between the porticoes of the doorway his foot slipped on one of these
little ice patches. He threw out his gloved left hand to catch at some
support and his fingers closed on her black-clad arm, where she had
drawn herself into the shelter and shadow of the door-arch to await his
appearance.

For the first time in nearly fifty years he touched her.

He jerked his hand back and fled away at a staggering, crippling run;
and, as he ran to hide himself within his rooms, in panting gulps he
blasphemed the name of his Maker; for to his feel her flesh, through the
thick cloth sleeve on her arm, had seemed to him to be as firm and plump
as it had felt when he was twenty-two and she was twenty. The evidence
was complete.

       *       *       *       *       *

All through the next day he kept himself behind closed doors, wrestling
with his torments; but in the evening old Sherwan came for him and he
dressed himself. They started out together, a doddering, tottering
twain; suggesting, when they halted for a moment to rest at the foot of
the office stairs, a pair of grey locust husks from which age,
spider-fashion, had sucked out all the rich juices of health and
strength; suggesting, when they went on again, a pair of crawling sick
beetles which, though sick, still could crawl a little.

Side by side they crossed the tarnished, shabby old lobby, with its
clumpings of dingy grey pillars and its red-plush sofa seats, and, in
the centre, its rotunda mounting to the roof, up floor by floor, in
spiral rings that in perspective graduated smaller and smaller, like an
inverted funnel; and side by side they issued forth from beneath the
morguelike copings of the outer door and descended the Gaunt House
steps--Major Foxmaster feeling ahead of him with his cane, and Judge
Sherwan patting his left breast with his open hand--just as Policeman
Joel Bosler, now dead and gone, had seen them do upon many another such
evening as this. Promptly and inevitably befell another thing, then,
which likewise the late deceased Bosler had witnessed times without
number.

From the darker space beyond the corner lamp-post, out into the gassy
yellow circle of radiance, appeared the straight, gliding black form,
advancing on silent, padded feet and without visible effort,
relentlessly to follow after them wheresoever they might choose to go.

So, then, at sight of the familiar apparition the icy shell of half a
century thawed and broke to bits and was washed away in a freshet of
agony; and to his one friend, for one moment, Major Foxmaster bared his
wrung and tortured soul. He threw down his cane and threw up his arms.

"Sherwan," he shrieked out, "I can't stand it any longer--I can't stand
it! It's killing me! I must look at the face--I must know!"

With a sudden frenzied energy he darted at the cloaked shape. It
hesitated, shrinking back from his onward rush as though daunted; but he
fixed his clutching fingers in the crêpe veil and tore it in twisted
rags from the front of its wearer, and the light shone full on the face
revealed beneath the close black hood of the bonnet. ... He gave one
blubbery, slobbered, hideous yell and fell flat at the base of the
lamp-post.

Old Sherwan saw the face too. Swollen and strengthened with senile rage,
he seized the figure by both its arms and shook it.

"You hussy! You wench! You Jezebel! You she-devil!" he howled at the top
of his cracked voice, and rocked his prisoner to and fro. "What's this?
What does this mean, you hell spawn?"

A dart of pain nipped at his diseased heart then, and closed his throat.
For a moment, without words, they struggled together. With a heave of
her supple arms she broke his hold. She shoved him off from her and
reared back on her heels, breathing hard--a full-blooded negress, with
chalky popeyes and thick, p

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