Front matter (continued 6)

Koerner looked up, clutching at hope again.

"You t'ink dot? You t'ink I vin, huh?"

"Sure," said Marriott heartily, determined to drag joy back into the world.

"Py Gott, dot's goodt! I guess I beat dot gompany. I vork for it dose t'irty-sefen year; den dey turn me off. Vell, I beat him, yet. Chust let dot lawyer Ford talk; let him talk his damned headt off. I beat him--some day."

"I'll go now, Mr. Koerner. I'll speak to the grocer, and I'll send you something so you can have a little supper. No, don't get up."

Koerner stretched forth his hand.

"You bin a goodt friendt, Mis'er Marriott."

Marriott went to the grocery on the corner. The grocer, a little man, very fat, ran about filling his orders, sickening Marriott with his petty sycophancy.

"Some bacon? Yes, sir. Sugar, butter, bread? Yes, sir. Coffee? Here you are, sir. Potatoes--about a peck, sir?"

Marriott, with no notion of what he should buy, bought everything, and added some tobacco for Koerner and some candy for the children. And when he had arranged with the grocer for an extension of credit to Koerner on his own promise to pay--a promise the canny grocer had Marriott indorse on the card he gave him--Marriott went away with some of the satisfaction of his good deed; but the grace of spring had gone out of the day and would not now return.

XX

The reason why Archie had not answered his father's letter was a simple one. On that spring afternoon while Koerner and Marriott were sitting on the stoop, Archie, stripped to the waist, was hanging by his wrists from the ceiling of a dungeon, called a bull cell, in the cellar under the chapel, his bare feet just touching the floor. He had been hanging there for three days. At night he was let down and given a piece of bread and a cup of water, and allowed to lie on the floor, still handcuffed. At morning guards came, raised Archie, lifted him up, and chained his wrists to the bull rings. Later, Deputy Warden Ball sauntered by with his cane hooked over his arm, peered in through the bars, smiled, and said, in his peculiar soft voice:

"Well, Archie, my boy, had enough?"

McBride, the contractor, who had picked Archie out of the group of new convicts in the idle house the day after he arrived at the prison, had set him to work in a shop known as "Bolt B." His work was to make iron bolts, and all day long, from seven in the morning until five in the afternoon, he stood with one foot on the treadle, sticking little bits of iron into the maw of the machine and snatching them out again. At dinner-time the convicts marched out of the shop, stood in close-locked ranks until the whistle blew, and then marched across the yard to the dining-room for their sky-blue, their bread, their molasses and their boot-leg. Archie had watched the seasons change in this yard, he had seen its grass-plot fade and the leaves of its stunted trees turn yellow, he had seen it piled with snow and ice; now it was turning green with spring, just like the world outside. Sometimes, as they passed, he caught a glimpse of the death-squad--the men who were being kept until they could be killed in the electric chair--taking their daily exercise, curiously enough, for the benefit of their health. This squad varied in numbers. Sometimes there were a dozen, then there would come a night of horror when the floor of the cell-house was deadened with saw-dust. The next day one would be missing; only eleven would be exercising for their health. Then would come other nights of horror, and the squad would decrease until there were but six. But soon it would begin to increase again, and the number would run up to the normal. Sometimes, in summer, the Sunday-school excursionists had an opportunity to see the death-squad. Archie had seen the children, held by a sick, morbid interest, shrink when the men marched by, as if they were something other than mere people.

Each evening Archie and the other convicts marched again to the dining-room, and ate bread and molasses; then they sat in their cells for an hour while the cell-house echoed with the twanging of guitars and banjos, mouth-organs, jews'-harps, accordeons, and the raucous voices of the peddlers--a hideous bedlam. Those who had hall-permits talked with one another, or with friendly guards. Sometimes, if the guard were "right," he gave Archie a candle and permitted him to read after the lights were out.

All week-days were alike. On Sunday they went to chapel and listened to the chaplain talk about Christ, who, it was said, came to preach deliverance to the captives. The chaplain told the convicts they could save their souls in the world to which they would go when they died, if they believed on Christ. Archie did not understand what it was that he was expected to believe, any more than he had when the sky-pilot at the works had said very much the same thing. It could not be that they expected him to believe that Christ came to preach deliverance to captives such as he. So he paid no attention to the sky-pilot. He found it more interesting to watch the death-squad, who, as likely to go to that world before any of the others, were given seats in the front pews. Near the death-squad were several convicts in chains. They were considered to be extremely bad and greatly in need of religion. The authorities, it seemed, were determined to give them this religion, even if they had to hold them in chains while they did so. In the corners of the chapel, behind protecting iron bars, were guards armed with rifles, who vigilantly watched the convicts while the chaplain preached to them the religion of the gentle Nazarene. The chaplain said it was the religion of the gentle Nazarene, but in reality it was the religion of Moses, or sometimes that of Paul, and even of later men that he preached to the convicts rather than the religion of Jesus. The convicts did not know this, however. Neither did the chaplain.

Yes, the days were exactly alike, especially as to the work, for Archie was required to turn out hundreds of bolts a day; a minimum number was fixed, and this was called a "task." If he did not do this task, he was punished. It was difficult to perform this task; only by toiling incessantly every minute could he succeed. And even then it was hard, for in addition to keeping his eye on his machine, he had to keep his eye on the pile of bolts beside him, for the other convicts would rat; that is, steal from his pile in order to lessen their own tasks. For those bolts that were spoiled, Archie was given no credit; every hour an inspector came around, looked the bolts over and threw out those that were defective. For this toil, which was unpaid and in which he took no pride and found no joy because it was ugly and without any result to him, Archie felt nothing but loathing. This feeling was common among all the men in the shop; they resorted to all sorts of devices to escape it; some of them allowed the machines to snip off the ends of their fingers so they could work no more; others found a friend in Sweeny, the confidence man who was serving a five-year sentence and was detailed as a steward in the hospital. When they were in the hospital, Sweeny would burn the end of a finger with acid, rub dirt on it, and when it festered, amputate the finger.

Belden, who worked a machine next to Archie, did that; but only as a last resort.

"It's no use for me to learn this trade," he said to Archie one day when the guard was at the other end of the shop.

"Why not?"

"'Cause I'll be on the street in two months; my mouthpiece's going to take my case to the Supreme Court, and he's sure to have it reversed. All I got to do's to raise a hundred and fifty case; I've written my mother, and she's already saved up seventy-eight. There's nothing to it. Me learn to make these damned bolts for McBride? I guess not!"

Belden talked a great deal about his case in the Supreme Court. Many of the convicts did that. They did everything to raise money for their lawyers. After Belden's attorney had taken the case up, and failed, Belden made application for pardon; and this required more money. His mother was saving up again. But this failed also; then Belden feigned sickness, was sent to the hospital; and they all admired him for his success.

Archie was sick once, and after three sick calls--he was, in reality, utterly miserable and suffered greatly--the physician, who, like every one else in the penitentiary, was controlled by the contractors, gave in and sent him to the hospital. Though the hospital was a filthy place, Archie for two days enjoyed the rest he found there. Then Sweeny told him that the bed he occupied had not been changed since a consumptive had died in it the day before Archie arrived.

"You stick to that pad," said Sweeny, "and the croakers'll be peddling your stiff in a month."

Sweeny was accounted very wise, as indeed he was; for he held his position by reason of his discovery that the doctor was supplying his brother, who kept a drugstore outside, with medicines, silk bandages, plasters and surgical instruments.

Archie recovered then and went back to Bolt B.

After his return things went better for a while, because, to his surprise, the Kid, of whom he had heard in the jail at home, was there working at the machine next to his. The Kid had been transferred to that shop because he had utterly demoralized Bolt A, where he had been working. The little pickpocket, indeed, had been tried on all kinds of work--in the broom factory, in the cigar factory, in the foundry, everywhere, but he could not long be tolerated anywhere. His presence was too diverting. He was taken from the broom shop because he amused himself at the expense of a country boy sent up for grand larceny, whom, as the country boy thought, he was teaching to be a prowler. In the cigar shop he made another unsophisticated boy think that he could teach him the secret of making "cluck," or counterfeit money; and he went so far as to give him a can of soft gray earth, which the convict thought was crude silver, and some broken glass to give the metal the proper ring. The convict hid this rubbish in his cell and jealously guarded it; he was to be released in a month. For a while the warden employed the Kid about the office, but one day he said to one of the trusties, an old life man who had been in the prison twenty years, until his mind had weakened under the confinement:

"What do you want to stay around here for? Ain't there other countries besides this?"

The old man sniggered in his silly way, then he went to the warden, and hanging his head with a demented leer said:

"Warden, the Kid said there's other countries besides this."

He stood, swaying like a doltish school-boy from side to side, grinning, with his tongue lolling over his lips.

The warden summoned the Kid.

"What do you mean," he said, "putting notions in old Farlow's head?"

The Kid was surprised.

"Oh, come off," said the warden impatiently. "You know--telling him there were other countries besides this?"

"Oh!" said the Kid with sudden illumination. "Oh, now I know what you mean!" And he laughed. "He asked me where I was from and I told him Canada. Then he wanted to know if Canada was in this country, and I told him there were other countries besides this."

"You're too smart, Willie," said the warden. "You'd better go back to the shops."

They tried all the punishments, the paddle, the battery, the water-cure, the bull rings, but nothing availed to break the Kid's spirit. Then he was put on a bolt machine.

There was a convict named Dalton working near Archie and the Kid. Dalton had but one thought left in his mind, and this was that when he got out he would go to where he had concealed a kit of burglar tools. He had been the victim of some earlier practical jokers in the penitentiary, and had had a locksmith fashion for him tools such as no burglar ever needed or used in a business in which a jimmy, a piece of broom-stick and creepers are all the paraphernalia necessary. Dalton still had fourteen years to serve.

"Well, Jack, how's everything this morning?" the Kid would ask as soon as the guard went down to the other end of the shop.

"Oh, all right," Dalton would reply. Then he would grow serious, grit his teeth, clench his fist for emphasis and say: "Just wait till I get home! By God, if any one springs that kit of mine, I'll croak him!"

"Where's the plant?" the Kid would ask. "In the jungle?"

"Oh, you'll never find out!" Dalton would reply warily.

"Some of the hoosiers or the bulls are likely to spring it," the Kid would suggest.

The possibility tortured Dalton.

"By God," he could only say, "if they do--I'll croak 'em!"

"I wouldn't do that," said the Kid. "Get Dutch here to take you out with a tribe of peter men; he can teach you to pour the soup. Can't you get a little soup and some strings and begin with him now, Archie?"

"Sure," said Archie, grinning, proud to be thus recognized.

"That's the grift; we'll nick the screw; and when you go home you'll be ready to--"

"No," said Dalton determinedly, "I've got them tools planted--but--"

"Why don't you take him out with a swell mob of guns?" suggested Archie.

"Think he could stall for the dip?" asked the Kid. "What do you think, Jack?"

"I'll stick to prowlin'," said Dalton, shaking his head and muttering to himself.

"He's stir simple," remarked the Kid, not without pity.

But the Kid was tired of his new occupation.

"I don't believe I'm a very good bolt-maker," he said to Archie.

"You might cut off a finger, or get Sweeny--"

"Nix," said the Kid. "Not for Willie. I'll need my finger. I'd do a nice job of reefing a kick with a finger gone, wouldn't I?" He looked at his fingers, rapidly stiffening under the rough, hard work.

"Didn't I tell you to stop that spieling?" demanded a guard who had slipped up behind him.

The Kid gave the guard a look that expressed the contempt he felt for him better than any words.

"I'll report you for insolence," said the guard angrily.

"For what?" said the Kid.

"Insolence."

"How could you?" asked the Kid calmly. "You couldn't spell the word."

The guard made a mark on his card.

"You'll be stood out for that," said the guard. The Kid's face darkened, but he controlled himself. For he had another plan.

A few days later he said to Archie:

"Are you on to that inspector?"

"What for?" asked Archie.

"He's boostin' bolts."

Archie thought of this for a long time. It took several days for him to realize a new idea. The inspector, in pretending to throw out defective bolts, threw out quite as many perfect ones. These were boxed, shipped and sold by the contractor, who pocketed the entire proceeds without reporting them to the authorities. The Kid had discovered this system after a week of experience in having his labor stolen from him, and the inspector, more and more greedy, had grown bolder, until now he was stealing large quantities of bolts; and the tasks of Archie and the Kid were becoming more and more impossible of performance. The Kid was silent for days; his brows contracted as he jumped nimbly up and down before his clanking machine. Then one day when McBride was in the shop the Kid obtained permission to speak to him.

"Mr. McBride," he said, "I want a thousand dollars."

McBride took his cigar from his lips, flecked some dust from his new top-coat, and a laugh spread over his rough red face.

"What's the kid this time, Willie?"

"This is on the square," said the Kid. "I want a thousand case, that's all."

McBride saw that he was serious for once.

"I'll blow it off, if you don't," said the Kid.

"Blow what off?"

"The graft."

"What graft?"

"The defectives--oh, you know!"

McBride turned ashen, then his face blazed suddenly with rage.

"I'll report you for this insolence!"

"All right," said the Kid, "I'll report you for stealing. It ain't moral, the sky-pilot says."

Archie saw the Kid no more after that evening; he was "stood out" at roll-call; and in the way the news of the little insular world inclosed in the prison walls spreads among its inmates, he heard that the Kid had been given the paddle and had been hung up in the cellar. When his punishment was ended, he was transferred to the shoe shop and set to work making paper soles for shoes. But he did not work long. He soon conceived a plan which for two years was to baffle all the prison authorities, especially the physicians. He developed a disease of the nerves; he said it was the result of running a bolt machine and of his subsequent punishment. The theory he imparted to the doctors, in his innocent manner, was that the blows of the paddle with the hanging had bruised and stretched his spine.

The symptoms of the Kid's strange affliction were these: he could not stand still for an instant; his nerves seemed entirely demoralized, his muscles beyond control. He would stand before the doctors and twitch and spasmodically shuffle his feet for hours, while the doctors, those on the prison staff and those from outside, held consultations. Opinions differed widely. Some said that the Kid was malingering, others that his spine was really affected. Day after day the doctors examined him; they tested the accommodation of the pupils of the eyes, they had him walk blindfolded, they tested his extremities with heat and cold, with needles, and with electricity. Then they seated him, had him cross his legs and struck him below the knee-cap, testing his reflex action. Strangely enough, his reflexes were defective.

"Bum gimp, eh, Doc?" he would say mournfully.

For a while, after the Kid had gone, Archie found it easier to accomplish his daily task, for the reason that the inspector did not throw out so many defective bolts. But McGlynn, the guard on Archie's contract, disliked him and was ever ready to report him, and Archie, while he did not at all realize it and could not analyze it, developed the feeling within him that the system which the people, and the legislature, and the committee on penal and reformatory institutions, and the state board of charities had devised and were so proud of, was not a system at all, for the simple reason that it depended solely on men and had nothing else to depend on. And just as the judge, the jury-men, the prosecutor and the policemen were swayed by a thousand whims and prejudices and moved by countless influences of which they were unconscious, so the guards who held power over him were similarly swayed. For each demerit he lost standing, and demerits depended not on his conduct, but on the feelings of the guards. McGlynn disliked Archie because he was German. He gave him demerits for all sorts of things, and it was not long before Archie realized that he had already lost all his good time and would have to serve out the whole year. And then the inspector grew reckless and bold. McBride was greedy for profits, and in a few weeks the bolts under Archie's machine were again disappearing as rapidly as ever, and his task was wholly beyond him. And then a dull, sullen stubbornness seized him, and one morning, in a fit of black rage, seeing the inspector throw out a dozen perfect bolts, he stopped work. The inspector looked up, then signaled the guard. McGlynn came.

"Get to work, you!" he said in a rage.

Archie looked at him sullenly.

"You hear?" yelled McGlynn, raising his voice above the din of the machines.

Archie did not move.

McGlynn took a step toward him, but when he saw the look in Archie's eyes, he paused.

"Stand out, you toaster," he said.

The next morning at seven o'clock Archie stood, with forty other convicts who had broken rules or were accused of breaking rules, in the prison court. This court was held every morning in the basement of the chapel to try infractions of the prison discipline. This basement of the chapel was known about the penitentiary as "the cellar," and as the word was spoken it took on indeed a dark and sinister, one might almost say a subterranean significance. For in the cellar were the solitary, the bull rings, the ducking tub, the paddle,--all the instruments of torture. And in the cellar, too, was the court. Externally, it might have reminded Archie somewhat of the police court at home, as it reminded other convicts of other police courts. It was a small room made of wooden partitions, and in it, behind a rail, was a platform for the deputy warden. It may have reminded the convicts, too, of other courts in its pitiable line of accused, in its still more pitiable line of accusers. For there were guards grinning in petty triumph, awaiting the revenge they could vicariously and safely enjoy for the infractions which never could seem to their primitive, brutal minds other than personal slights and affronts.

This strange and amazing court, based on no law and owning no law, this court from which there was no appeal, whose judgments could not be reviewed, this court which could not err, was presided over by Deputy Warden Ball. He lay now loosely in his chair behind the railing, his long legs stretched before him, the soles of his big shoes protruding, his long arms hanging by his sides, rolling a cigar round and round between his long teeth blackened by nicotine. He lay there as if he had fallen apart, as if the various pieces of him, his feet and legs, his arms and hands, would have to be assembled before he could move again. But this impression of incoherence was wholly denied by his face. The lines about his mouth were those of a permanent smile that never knew humor; the eyes at the top of his long nose were small and glistened coldly, piercing through the broken, dry skin of his cheeks and eyelids like the points of daggers through leather scabbards. Such was the deputy warden, the real executive of the prison, the judge who could pronounce any sentence he might desire, decreeing medieval tortures and slow deaths, dooming bodies to pain, and the remnants of souls to hell, and, when he willed, inventing new tortures. Ball was at once the product and the unconscious victim of the system in which he was the most invaluable and indispensable factor. He had been deputy in the prison for twenty years, and he stood far above the mutations of politics. He might have been said to live in the protection of a civil service law of his own enactment. He ruled, indeed, by laws that were of his own enactment, and he enacted or repealed them as occasion or his mood suggested. He ruled this prison, whether on the bench in the court or scuffing loose-jointedly about the yard, the shops, or the cell-houses, with his cane dangling from the crotch of his elbow, speaking in a low, soft, almost caressing voice, the secret, perhaps, of his power. For his slow and passive demeanor and his slow, soft voice seemed to visiting boards, committees and officials all kindness; and he used it with the convicts, sometimes drawing them close to him, and laying his great hand on their shoulders or their heads, and speaking in a low tone of pained surprise and gentle reproach, just as he was speaking now to a white-haired and aged burglar, wearing the dirty stripes of the fourth grade.

"Why, Dan, what's this I hear? I didn't think it of you, old chap, no I didn't. A little of the solitary, eh? What say? All right--if it must be."

It took Ball half an hour to doom the men this morning, and even at the last, when Archie went forward, when Ball had glanced at the card whereon McGlynn's report was written in his illiterate hand, he said:

"Ah, the Dutchman! Well, Archie, this is very bad. Down to the fourth grade, bread and water to-day,--and to-morrow back to work, my lad. Mind now!"

Archie changed his gray suit for the reddish brown and white stripes, he ate his bread and drank his water, and he went back to the bolt-shop. But he did not work. He would not answer McGlynn when he spoke to him. He set his jaw and was silent.

"What, again!" said Ball the next day. "Well, well, well! If you insist; give him the paddle, Jim."

When court had adjourned, they took Archie into a small room near by. Across one end of this room was a huge bath-tub of wood; this, and all the utensils of torture, which in a kind of fiendish ingenuity of economy were concentrated in it, were water-worn and white. On the floor at the base of the tub were iron stocks. In these, when he had been stripped naked, perhaps for additional shame, Archie's ankles were clamped. Then he was forced to bend forward, over the bath-tub, and was held there by guards while Ball stood by smoking. A burly negro, Jim, a convict with privileges--this privilege among others--beat him on the bare skin with a paddle of ashwood that had been soaked in hot water and dipped in white sand.

But Archie would not work.

The next morning Ball patted him on the head, and said:

"My dear boy! You are certainly foolish. He wants the water, Jim."

Again they stripped him and forced him into the bath-tub. This tub had many and various devices, among them a block of wood, hollowed out on one side to fit a man's chest if he sat in the tub, and as it could be moved back and forth in grooves along the top of the tub and fastened wherever need be, it could be made to fit any man and hold him in its vise against the end of the tub, in which quality of adjusting itself to the size of its victim it differed from the bed of Procrustes. And now they handcuffed Archie, fastened him in the tub, pressed the block against his broad, white, muscular chest, and while Ball and the guards stood by, the negro with the privileges, arrayed now in rubber coat and boots, turned a fierce slender stream of water from a short rubber hose in Archie's face. Archie gasped, his mouth opened, and deftly the negro turned the fierce gushing stream into his mouth, where it hissed and foamed and gurgled, filling his throat and lungs, streaming down over his chin and breast. Archie's lips turned blue; soon his face was blue.

"I guess that'll do, Jim," said Ball.

When Archie regained consciousness they sent him back to the bolt-shop.

But he would not work.

The next morning Ball showed again that tenderness that appealed so strongly to the humane gentlemen on the Prison Board.

"Why, Archie!" he said. "Why, Archie!" Then he paused, rolled his cigar about and said: "String him up, boys, until he's ready to go back to work."

After the guards had fastened his hands above his head in the bull rings, closed and locked the door of the cell and left him, Archie's first thought was of Curly, who had gone through this same ordeal in another prison, and Archie found a compensation in thinking that he would have an experience to match Curly's when next they met and sat around the fire in the sand-house or the fire in the edge of the woods. And then his thoughts ran back to the day when Curly had first told him of the bull rings; and he could see Curly as he told it--his eyes glazing, his face growing gray and ugly, his teeth clenching.

Archie remembered more; somehow, vividly, he saw Curly tying a rope to the running board on top of the freight-car, dangling it over the side and then letting himself down on it until he hung before the car door, the seal of which he quickly broke and unlocked; and the train running thirty miles an hour! No one else could "bust tags" this way; no one else had the nerve of Curly.

At first Archie found relief in changing his position. By raising himself on tiptoe he could ease the strain on his wrists; by hanging his weight from his wrists he could ease the strain on his feet. He did this many times; but he found no rest in either position. The handcuffs grew tight; they cut into his wrists like knives. His hands were beginning to go to sleep; they tingled, the darting needles stung and pricked and danced about. Then his hands seemed to have enlarged to a preposterous size, and they were icy cold. Presently he was filled with terror; he lost all sense of feeling in his arms. Rubbing his head against them, he found them cold; they were no longer his arms, but the arms of some one else. They felt like the arms of a corpse. An awful terror laid hold of him. In his insteps there was a mighty pain; his biceps ached; his neck ached, ached, ached to the bones of it; his back was breaking. The pain spread through his whole body, maddening him. With a great effort he tore and tugged and writhed, lifting one foot, then the other, then stamped. At last he hung there numb, limp, inert. In the cell it was dark and still. No sound could reach him from the outer world.

Some time--it was evening, presumably, for time was not in that cell--they came and let him down. A guard gave him a cup of water. He held forth his hand, groping after it; and he could not tell when his hand touched it. The cup fell, jangled against his handcuffs; the water was spilled, the tin cup rolled and rattled over the cement floor. And Archie wept, wild with disappointment. The guard, who was merciful, brought another cup and held it to Archie's lips, and he drank it eagerly, the water bubbling at his lips as it had once, years ago, when he was a baby and his mother held water to his lips to drink.

Presently Ball came and stood looking at him through the little grated wicket in the door.

"Well, Archie, how goes it?" he said. "Had enough? Ready to go back to work?"

Archie looked at him a moment. His eyeballs, still protruding from the effects of the ducking-tub, gleamed in the light of the guard lantern. He looked at Ball, finally realized, and began to curse. At last he managed to say:

"I'll croak you for this."

Ball laughed.

"Well, good night, my lad," he said.

Archie lay on a plank, the handcuffs still on him, all the night. In the morning they hung him up again.

The next day, and the next, and the next,--for seven days,--Archie hung in the bull rings. In the middle of the eighth day, after his head had been rolling and lolling about on his shoulders between his cold, swollen, naked arms, he suddenly became frantic, put forth a mighty effort, lifted himself, and began to bite his hands and his wrists, gnashing his teeth on the steel handcuffs, yammering like a maniac.

That evening, the evening of the eighth day, when the guard came and flashed his lamp on him, Archie's body was hanging there, still, his chin on his breast. Down his arms the blood was trickling from the wounds he had made with his teeth. The guard set down his lantern, ran down the corridor, returned presently with Ball, and Jeffries, the doctor.

They lowered his body. The doctor bent his head to the white breast and listened.

"Take him to the hospital," he said. "I guess he's had about all he can stand."

"God, he had nerve!" said Ball, looking at the body. "He wouldn't give in."

He shambled away, his head bent. He was perplexed. He had not failed since--when was it?--since number 13993 had--died of heart failure, in the hospital, five years before.

XXI

It was at Bradford Ford's that night of the wedding that Eades made his proposal of marriage to Elizabeth Ward. It was June, court had adjourned, his work was done, the time seemed to him auspicious; he had thought it all out, arranged the details in his mind. The great country house, open to the summer night, was thronged, the occasion, just as the newspapers had predicted in their hackneyed phrase, was a brilliant one, as befitted the marriage of Ford's youngest daughter, Hazel, to Mr. Henry Wilmington Dodge, of Philadelphia. Eades moved about, greeting his friends, smiling automatically, but his eyes were discreetly seeking their one object. At last he had a glimpse of her, through smilax and ribbons; it was during the ceremony; she was in white, and her lips were drawn as she repressed the emotions weddings inspire in women. He waited, in what patience he could, until the service was pronounced; then he must take his place in the line that moved through the crowd like a current through the sea; the bestowal of the felicitations took a long time. Then the supper; Elizabeth was at the bride's table, and still he must wait. He went up-stairs finally, and there he encountered Ford alone in a room where, in some desolate sense of neglect, he had retired to hide the sorrow he felt at this parting with his child, and to combat the annoying feeling the wedding had thrust on him--the feeling that he was growing old. Ford sat by an open window, gazing out into the moonlight that lay on the river by which he had built his colossal house. He was smoking, in the habit which neither age nor sorrow could break.

"Come in, come in," said Ford. "I'm glad to see you. I want some one to talk to. Have a cigar."

But Eades declined, and Ford glanced at him in the suspicion which was part of the bereaved and jealous feeling that was poisoning this evening of happiness for him. He knew that Eades smoked, and he wondered why he now refused. "He declines because I'm getting old; he wishes to shun my society; he feels that if he accepts the cigar, he will have to stay long enough to smoke it. It will be that way now. Yes, I'm getting old. I'm out of it." So ran Ford's thoughts.

Eades had gone to the window and stood looking out across the dark trees to the river, swimming in the moonlight. Below him were the pretty lights of Japanese lanterns, beyond, at the road, the two lamps on the gate-posts. The odors of the June night came to him and, from below, the laughter of the wedding-guests and the strains of an orchestra.

"What a beautiful place you have here, Mr. Ford!" Eades exclaimed.

"Well, it'll do for an old--for a man to spend his declining years."

"Yes, indeed," mused Eades.

Ford winced at this immediate acquiescence.

"And what a night!" Eades went on, "Ideal for a wedding."

Ford looked at him a moment, then decided to change the subject.

"Well, I see you struck pay-dirt in the grand jury," he said.

"Yes," replied Eades, turning away from night and nature when such subjects were introduced.

"You're doing a good work there," said Ford; "a good work for law and order."

He used the stereotyped phrase in the old belief that "law" and "order" are synonyms, though he was not thinking of law or of order just then; he was thinking of the radiant girl in the drawing-room below.

Eades turned to the window again. The night attracted him. He did not care to talk. He, too, was thinking of a girl in the drawing-room below; thinking how she had looked in that moment during the ceremony when he had had the glimpse of her. He must go at once and find her. He succeeded presently in getting away from Ford, and left in a manner that deepened Ford's conviction that he was out of it.

He met her at the foot of the staircase, and they went out of doors.

"Oh," exclaimed Elizabeth, "how delicious it is out here!"

In silence they descended the wide steps from the veranda and went down the walk. The sky was purple, the stars trembled in it, and the moon filled all the heavens with a light that fell to the river, flowing silently below them. They went on to the narrow strip of sward that sloped to the water. On the dim farther shore they could see the light in some farm-house; far down the river was the city, a blur of light.

"What a beautiful place the Fords have here!" said Eades.

"Yes," said Elizabeth, "it's ideal."

"It's my ideal of a home," said Eades, and then after a silence he went on. "I've been thinking a good deal of home lately."

He glanced at the girl; she had become still almost to rigidity.

"I am so glad our people are beginning to appreciate our beautiful river," she said, and her voice had a peculiar note of haste and fear in it. "I'm so glad. People travel to other lands and rave over scenery, when they have this right at home." She waved her hand in a little gesture to include the river and its dark shores. She realized that she was speaking unnaturally, as she always did with him. The realization irritated her. "The Country Club is just above us, isn't it?" she hurriedly continued, consciously struggling to appear unconscious. "Have you--"

He interrupted her. "I've been thinking of you a good deal lately," he said. His voice had mastery in it. "A good deal," he repeated, "for more than a year now. But I've waited until I had something to offer you, some achievement, however small, and now--I begin to feel that I need help and--sympathy in the work that is laid on me. Elizabeth--"

"Don't," she said, "please don't." She had turned from him now and taken a step backward.

"Just a minute, Elizabeth," he insisted. "I have waited to tell you--that I love you, to ask you to be my wife. I have loved you a long, long time. Don't deny me now--don't decide until you can think--I can wait. Will you think it over? Will you consider it--carefully--will you?"

He tried to look into her face, which she had turned away. Her hands were clasped before her, her fingers interlocked tightly. He heard her sigh. Then with an effort she looked up at him.

"No," she began, "I can not; I--"

He stopped her.

"Don't say no," he said. "You have not considered, I am sure. Won't you at least think before deciding definitely?"

She had found more than the usual difficulty there is in saying no to anything, or to any one; now she had strength only to shake her head.

"You must not decide hastily," he insisted.

"We must go in." She turned back toward the house.

"I can wait to know," Eades assured her.

They retraced their steps silently. As they went up the walk she said:

"Of course, I am not insensible of the honor, Mr. Eades."

The phrase instantly seemed inadequate, even silly, to her. Why was it she never could be at ease with him?

"Don't decide, I beg," he said, "until you have considered the matter carefully. Promise me."

"You must leave me now," she said.

He bowed and stood looking after her as she went up the steps and ran across the veranda in her eagerness to lose herself in the throng within the house. And Eades remained outside, walking under the trees.

Half an hour later Elizabeth stood with Marriott in the drawing-room. Her face was pale; the joy, the spirit that had been in it earlier in the evening had gone from it.

"Ah," said Marriott suddenly, "there goes John Eades. I hadn't seen him before."

Elizabeth glanced hurriedly at Eades and then curiously at Marriott. His face wore the peculiar smile she had seen so often. Now it seemed remote, to belong to other days, days that she had lost.

"He's making a great name for himself just now," said Marriott. "He's bound to win. He'll go to Congress, or be elected governor or something, sure."

She longed for his opinion and yet just then she felt it impossible to ask it.

"He's a--"

"What?" She could not forbear to ask, but she put the question with a little note of challenge that made Marriott turn his head.

"One of those young civilians."

"One of what young civilians?"

"That Emerson writes about."

"He's not so very young, is he?" Elizabeth tried to smile.

"The young civilians are often very old; I have known them to be octogenarians."

He looked at her and was suddenly struck by her pallor and the drawn expression about her eyes. She had met his gaze, and he realized instantly that he had made some mistake. They were standing there in the drawing-room, the canvas-covered floor was littered with rose-leaves. It was the moment when the guests had begun to feel the first traces of weariness, when the laughter had begun to lose its spirit and the talk its spontaneity, when the older people were beginning to say good night, leaving the younger behind to shower the bride and groom with rice and confetti. Perplexed, excited, self-conscious after Eades's declaration, feeling a little fear and some secret pride, suddenly Elizabeth saw the old, good-humored, friendly expression fade from Marriott's eyes, and there came a new look, one she had never seen before, an expression of sudden, illuminative intelligence, followed by a shade of pain and regret, perhaps a little reproach.

"Where does Emerson say--that?" she asked.

"You look it up and see," he said presently.

She looked at him steadily, though it was with a great effort, tried to smile, and the smile made her utterly sick at heart.

"I--must look up father," she said, "it's time--"

She left him abruptly, and he stood there, the smile gone from his face, his hands plunged deep in his pockets. A moment he bit his lips, then he turned and dashed up the stairs.

"I'm a fool," he said to himself.

Elizabeth had thought of love, she had imagined its coming to her in some poetic way, but this--somehow, this was not poetic. She recalled distinctly every word Eades had spoken, but even more vividly she recalled Marriott's glance. It meant that he thought she loved Eades! It had all become irrevocable in a moment; she could not, of course, undertake to explain; it was all ridiculous, too ridiculous for anything but tears.

Looking back on her intimacy with Marriott, she realized now that what she would miss most was the good fellowship there had been between them. With him, though without realizing it at the time, she had found expression easy, her thoughts had been clear, she could find words for them which he could understand and appreciate. Whenever she came across anything in a book or in a poem or in a situation there was always the satisfying sense that she could share it with Marriott; he would apprehend instantly. There was no one else who could do this; with her mother, with her father, with Dick, no such thing was possible; with them she spoke a different language, lived in another world. And so it was with her friends; she moved as an alien being in the conventional circle of that existence to which she had been born. One by one, her friends had ceased to be friends, they had begun to shrink away, not consciously, perhaps, but certainly, into the limbo of mere acquaintance. She thought of all this as she rode home that night, and after she had got home; and when it all seemed clear, she shrank from the clarity; she would not, after all, have it too clear; she must not push to any conclusion all these thoughts about Gordon Marriott. She chose to decide that he had been stupid, and his stupidity offended her; it was not pleasant to have him sneer at a man who had just told her he loved her, no matter who the man was, and she felt, with an inconsistency that she clung to out of a sense of self-preservation, that Marriott should have known this; he might have let her enjoy her triumph for a little, and then--but this was dangerous; was he to conclude that she loved him?

What was it, she wondered, that made her weak and impotent in the presence of Eades? She did not like to own a fear of him, yet she felt a fear; would she some day succumb? The fear crept on her and distressed her; she knew very well that he would pursue her, never waver or give up or lose sight of his purpose. In some way he typified for her all that was fixed, impersonal, irrefragable--society on its solid rocks. He had no doubts about anything, his opinions were all made, tested, tried and proved. Any uncertainty, any fluidity, any inconsistency was impossible. And she felt more and more inadequate herself; she felt that she had nothing to oppose to all this.

BOOK III

I

Four miles from town, where a white pike crosses a mud road, is Lulu Corners. There is little at this cross-roads to inspire a name less frivolous, nothing indeed but a weather-beaten store, where the people of the neighborhood wait for the big yellow trolley-cars that sweep across the country hourly, sounding their musical air-whistles over the fields. Half a mile from the Corners two unmarried sisters, Bridget and Margaret Flanagan, for twenty years had lived alone in a hovel that was invaded by pigs and chickens and geese. Together, these aged women, tall, bony and masculine, lived their graceless, squalid lives, untouched by romance or tragedy, working their few acres and selling their pork, and eggs and feathers in the city. The nearest dwelling was a quarter of a mile away, and the neighbors were still farther removed by prejudices, religious and social. Thus the old women were left to themselves. The report was that they were misers, and the miserable manner of their lives supported rather than belied this theory; there was a romantic impression in a country-side that knew so little romance, that a large amount of money was hidden somewhere about the ugly premises.

On an evening in late October, Bridget Flanagan was getting supper. The meal was meager, and when she had made it ready she placed a lamp on the table and waited for Margaret, who had gone out to fasten the shanty in which the barn-yard animals slept. Margaret came in presently, locked the door, and the sisters sat down to their supper. They had just crossed themselves and heaped their plates with potatoes, when they heard a knock at the door.

"Who can that be, sister?" said Bridget, looking up.

"I wonder now!" said Margaret in a surprise that was almost an alarm.

The knocking was repeated.

"Mary help us!" said Bridget, again making the sign of the cross. "No one ever came at this hour before."

The knocking sounded again, louder, more insistent.

"You go on to the door, sister," said Bridget, "and let them in,--whoever they may be, I dunno."

Margaret went to the door, shot back the bolt, and pulled on the knob. And then she turned and cast a look of terror at her sister. Some one was holding the door on the other side. The strange resistance of this late and unknown visitor, who but a moment before had wanted to come in, appalled her. She pressed her knee against the door, and tried to lock it again. But now the door held against her; she strained and pushed, then turned and beckoned her sister with frightened eyes. Bridget came, and the two women, throwing their weight against the door, tried to close it; but the unknown, silent and determined one was holding it on the other side. This strange conflict continued. Presently the two old women glanced up; in the crack, between the door and the jamb, they saw a club. Slowly, slowly, it made way against them, twisting, turning, pushing, forcing its way into the room. They looked in awful fascination. The club grew, presently a foot of it was in the room; then a hand appeared, a man's hand, gripping the club. They watched; presently a wrist with a leather strap around it; then slowly and by degrees, a forearm, bare, enormous, hard as the club, corded with heavy muscles and covered with a thick fell of black hair, came after it. Then there was a final push, an oath, the door flew open, and two masked men burst into the room.

Three hours later, Perkins, a farmer who lived a quarter of a mile away, hearing an unusual sound in his front yard, took a lantern and went out. In the grass heavy with dew, just inside his gate, he saw a woman's body, and going to it, he shed the rays of his lantern into the face of Bridget Flanagan. Her gray hair was matted, and her face was stained with blood; her clothes were torn and covered with the mud through which she had dragged herself along the roadside from her home. Perkins called and his wife came to the door, holding a lamp above her head, shading her eyes with her hand, afraid to go out. When he had borne Bridget indoors, Perkins took his two sons, his lantern and his shot-gun, and went across the fields to the Flanagans'. In the kitchen, bound and gagged, Margaret lay quite dead, her head beaten in by a club. The two old women must have fought desperately for their lives. The robbers, for all their work, as Perkins learned when Bridget almost miraculously recovered, had secured twenty-three silver dollars, which the sisters had kept hidden in a tin can--the fatal fortune which rumor had swelled to such a size.

Perkins roused the neighborhood, and all night long men were riding to and fro between Lulu Corners and the city. A calm Sunday morning followed, and then came the coroner, the reporters and the crowds. While the bell of the little Methodist church a mile away on the Gilboa Pike was ringing, Mark Bentley, the sheriff, dashed up behind a team of lean horses, sweating and splashed with mud from their mad gallop. Behind him came his deputies and the special deputies he had sworn in, and, sitting in his buggy, holding his whip in a gloved hand, waving and flourishing it like a baton, Bentley divided into posses the farmers who had gathered with shot-guns, rifles, pitchforks, axes, clubs, anything, placed a deputy at the head of each posse and sent them forth. Detectives and policemen came, and all that Sunday mobs of angry men were beating up the whole country for miles. Some were mounted, and these flew down the roads, spreading the alarm, leaving women standing horror-stricken in doorways with children whimpering in their skirts; others went in buggies, others plodded on foot. And all day long crowds of women and children pressed about the little house, peering into the kitchen with morbid curiosity. The crowd swelled, then shrank, then swelled again. The newspapers made the most of the tragedy, and under head-lines of bold type, in black ink and in red, they told the story of the crime with all the details the boyish imaginations of their reporters could invent; they printed pictures of the shanty, and diagrams of the kitchen, with crosses to indicate where Margaret had fallen, where Bridget had been left for dead, where the table and the stove had stood, where the door was; and by the time the world had begun a new week, the whole city was in the same state of horror and fear, and breathed the same rage and lust of vengeance that had fallen on Lulu Corners.

II

Four days before the Sunday of the tragedy Archie Koerner finished his year's imprisonment and passed from the prison within the walls to the larger prison that awaited him in the world outside. The same day was released another convict, a man aged at fifty, who had entered the prison twenty years before. The judge who had sentenced him was a young man, just elevated to the bench, and, intoxicated by the power that had come to him so early in life, had read the words, "twenty years," in the statute book, and, assuming as axiomatic that the words were the atonement for the crime the man had committed, without thinking, had pronounced these words aloud, and then written them in a large book. From there a clerk copied them on to a blank form, sealed it with a gilt seal, and, like the young judge, forgot the incident. The day the man was released he could no longer remember what crime he had committed. He was old and shattered, and had looked forward to freedom with terror. Time and again he had asked his guard to report him, so that he might be deprived of his good time and have the day of release postponed. The guard, however, knowing that the man's mind was gone, had refused to do this, and the man was forced out into the world. Having no family, no friends and no home, he clung to Archie as to the last tie that bound him to the only life he knew. Archie, of course, considered him an incubus, but he pitied him, and when they had sold their railroad tickets to a scalper, they beat their way back to the city on a freight-train, Archie showing the old man how it was done.

At eleven o'clock on Friday morning they entered Danny Gibbs's saloon. Archie was glad to find the place unchanged--the same whisky barrels along the wall, the opium pipe above the bar, the old gray cat sleeping in the sun. All was familiar, save the bartender, who, in fresh white jacket, leaned against the bar, a newspaper spread before him, and studied the form sheets that were published daily to instruct men how to gamble on the races.

"Where's Dan?" asked Archie.

The bartender looked at him superciliously, and then concluded to say:

"He's not here."

"Not down yet, heh?" said Archie. "Do you know a certain party called--" Archie glanced about cautiously and leaned over the bar, "--called Curly?"

The bartender looked at him blankly.

"He's a friend of mine--it's all right. If he comes in, just tell him a certain party was asking for him. Tell Dan, too. I've just got home--just done my bit."

But even this distinction, all he had to show for his year in prison, did not impress the bartender as Archie thought it should. He drew from his waistcoat pocket a dollar bill, carefully smoothed it out, and tossed it on to the bar.

"Give us a little drink. Here, Dad," he said to the old convict, "have one." The old man grinned and approached the bar. "Never mind him," said Archie in a confidential undertone, "he's an old-timer."

The old convict had lost the middle finger of his right hand in a machine in the prison years before, and now, in his imbecility, he claimed the one compensation imaginable; he used this mutilation for the entertainment of his fellows. If any one looked at him, he would spread the fingers of his right hand over his face, the stub of the middle finger held against his nose, his first and third fingers drawing down the lower lids of his eyes until their whites showed, and then wiggle his thumb and little finger and look, now gravely, now with a grin, into the eyes of the observer. The old convict, across whose sodden brain must have glimmered a vague notion that something was required of him, was practising his one accomplishment, his silly gaze fixed on the bartender.

When the bartender saw this his face set in a kind of superstitious terror.

"Don't mind him," said Archie; "He's stir simple."

The bartender, as he set out the whisky, was reassured, not so much by the patronage as by Archie's explanation that he had just come from prison. He had been at Danny Gibbs's long enough to know that a man is not to be judged solely by his clothes, and Archie, as a man reduced to the extremity of the garb the state supplied, might still be of importance in their world. While they were drinking, another man entered the saloon, a short, heavy man, and, standing across the room, looked, not at Archie and Dad, but at their reflections in the mirror behind the bar. Archie, recognizing a trick of detectives, turned slightly away. The man went out.

"Elbow, eh?" said Archie.

"Yep," said the bartender. "Cunningham."

"A new one on me. Kouka here yet?"

"Oh, yes."

"Flyin'?"

"Yep."

"Well," said Archie, "give 's another. I got a thirst in the big house anyway--and these rum turns." He smiled an apology for his clothes. They drank again; then Archie said:

"Tell Dan I was here."

"Who shall I say?" inquired the bartender.

"Dutch."

"Oh, yes! All right. He'll be down about one o'clock."

"All right. Come on, Dad," said Archie, and he went out, towing his battered hulk of humanity behind him. At the corner he saw Cunningham with another man, whom he recognized as Quinn. When they met, as was inevitable, Quinn smiled and said:

"Hello, Archie! Back again?"

"Yes," said Archie. He would have kept on, but Quinn laid a hand on his arm.

"Hold on a minute," he said.

"What's the rap?" asked Archie.

"Well, you'd better come down to the front office a minute."

Cunningham had seized the old man, and the two were taken to the Central Police Station. They were charged with being "suspicious persons," and spent the night in prison. The next morning, when they were arraigned before Bostwick, the old man surprised every one by pleading guilty, and Bostwick sentenced him to the workhouse for thirty days. But Archie demanded a jury and asked that word be sent to his attorney.

"Your attorney!" sneered Bostwick, "and who's your attorney?"

"Mr. Marriott," said Archie.

The suggestion of a jury trial maddened Bostwick. He seemed, indeed, to take it almost as a personal insult. He whispered with Quinn, and then said:

"I'll give you till evening to get out of town--you hear?"

Archie, standing at attention in the old military way, said:

"Yes, sir."

"You've got to clear out; we don't want you around, you understand?"

"I understand, sir."

"All right," said Bostwick.

After Archie had bidden good-by to the old convict, who was relieved to get back to prison again, and after he had been photographed for the rogues' gallery--for his confinement and his torture had made him thin and so changed his appearance and his figure that his Bertillon measurements were even more worthless than ever--he was turned out.

Archie, thus officially ordered on, was afraid to go back to Gibbs's, and when he went out of the Central Station that Saturday morning he turned southward into the tenderloin. He thought it possible that he might find Curly at some of the old haunts; at any rate, he might get some word of him.

The morning was brilliant, the autumnal sun lay hot and comforting on his back, and there was a friendliness in the hazy mellow air that was like a welcome to Archie, the first the world had had for him. Though man had cast him out, nature still owned him, and a kind of joy filled his breast. This feeling was intensified by the friendly, familiar faces of the low, decrepit buildings. Two blocks away, he was glad to see the old sign of Cliff Decker's saloon, with the name painted on the window in crude blue letters, and, pictured above it, a preposterous glass of beer foaming like the sea. More familiar than ever, was old man Pepper, the one-eyed, sitting on the doorstep as if it were summer, his lame leg flung aside, as it were, on the walk before him, his square wrinkled face presenting a horrid aspect, with its red and empty socket scarcely less sinister than the remaining eye that swept three quarters of the world in its fierce glance. On another step two doors away, before a house of indulgence frequented only by white men, sat a mulatto girl, in a clean white muslin dress, her kinky hair revealing a wide part from its careful combing. The girl was showing her perfect teeth in her laugh and playing with a white poodle that had a great bow of pink ribbon at its neck. Across the street was Wing Tu's chop-suey joint, deserted thus early in the day, suggesting oriental calm and serenity.

On the other corner was Eva Clason's place, and thither Archie went. He had some vague notion of finding Curly there, for it was Eva who, on that morning, now more than a year ago, in some impotent, puny human effort to stay the fate that had decreed him as the slayer of Benny Moon, had tried to give Curly a refuge.

The place wore its morning quiet. The young bartender, with a stupid, pimpled face, was moping sleepily at the end of the bar; at Archie's step, he looked up. The step was heard also in the "parlor" behind the bar, revealing through chenille portières its cheap and gaudy rugs and its coarse-grained oaken furniture, upholstered in plush of brilliant reds and blues. One of the two girls who now appeared had yellow hair and wore a skirt of solid pink gingham that came to her knees; her thin legs wore open-work stockings, her feet bulged in high-heeled, much-worn shoes. She wore a blouse of the same pink stuff, cut low, with a sailor collar, baring her scrawny neck and the deep hollows behind her collar bones. In her yellow fingers, with a slip of rice paper, she was rolling a cigarette. The other girl, who wore a dress of the same fashion, but of solid blue gingham, splotched here and there with starch, was dark and buxom, and her low collar displayed the coarse skin of full breasts and round, firm neck. The thin blonde came languidly, pasting her cigarette with her tongue and lighting it; but the buxom brunette came forward with a perfunctory smile of welcome.

"Where's Miss Clason?" Archie asked.

"She's gone out to Steve's," said the brunette. The thin girl sank into a chair beside the portières and smoked her cigarette. The brunette, divining that there was no significance in Archie's visit, and feeling a temporary self-respect, dismissed her professional smile and became simple, natural and human.

"Did you want to see her?" she asked.

"Yes, I'm looking for a certain party."

"Who?"

"Well, you know him, maybe--they call him Curly; Jackson's his name."

The girl looked at Archie, exchanged glances with the bartender; and then asked:

"You a friend o' hisn?"

"Yes, I just got home, and I must find him."

"Oh," said the girl, wholly satisfied. She turned to the bartender. "Was Mr. Jackson in to-day, Lew? He's around, in and out, you know. Comes in to use the telephone now and then."

Archie was relieved.

"Tell him Dutch was in, will you?" he said.

"Sure," replied the girl.

"Maybe he's in at Hunt's," said the thin girl, speaking for the first time.

"I was going there," said Archie.

"I can run in and ask for you," said the brunette, in the kindly willingness of the helpless to help others. "Or, hold on,--maybe Teddy would know."

"Never mind," said Archie, "I'll go in to Hunt's myself."

"I'll tell Mr. Jackson when he comes in," said the brunette, going to the door with Archie. "Who did you say?"--she looked up into Archie's face with her feminine curiosity all alive.

"Dutch."

"Dutch who?"

"Oh, just Dutch," said Archie, smiling at her insistence. "He'll know."

"Oh, hell!" said the girl, "what's your name?"

Archie looked down into her brown eyes and smiled mockingly; then he relented.

"Well, it's Archie Koerner. Ever hear of me before?"

The girl's black brows, which already met across her nose, thickened in the effort to recall him.

"You're no more wiser than you was; are you, little one?" said Archie, and walked away.

He had reserved Hunt's as a last resort, for there, in a saloon which was a meeting place for yeggs, Hunt himself being an old yegg man who had stolen enough to retire on, Archie was sure of a welcome and of a refuge where he could hide from the police for a day, at least, or until he could form some plan for the future.

Hunt was not in, but Archie found King's wife, Bertha Shanteaux, in the back room. She was a woman of thirty-five, very fleshy, and it seemed that she must crush the low lounge on which she sat, her legs far apart, the calico wrapper she wore for comfort stretching between her knees. She was smoking a cigar, and she breathed heavily with asthma, and, when she welcomed Archie, she spoke in a voice so hoarse and of so deep a bass that she might well have been taken for a man in woman's attire.

"Why, Dutch!" she said, taking her cigar from her lips in surprise. "When did you get home?"

"Yesterday morning," said Archie. "I landed in with an old con, went up to Dan's--then I got pinched, and this morning Bostwick gave me the run."

"Who made the pinch?"

"Quinn and some new gendy."

"Suspicion?"

"Yes."

"Huh," said Bertha, beginning to pull at her cigar again.

"Where's John?"

"Oh, he went up town a while ago."

"Is Curly here?"

"Yes, he's around. Just got in the other day. What you goin' to do?"

"Oh, I'm waiting to see Curly. I've got to get to work and see if I can't make a dollar or two. I want to frame in with some good tribe."

"Well, Curly hasn't been out for a while. He'll be glad to see you."

"Is Gus with him?"

"Oh, no. Gus got settled over in Illinois somewhere--didn't you hear? The boys say he's in wrong. But wait! Curly'll show up after a while."

"Well, I'm hipped, and I don't want to get you in trouble, Mrs. Shanteaux, but if Kouka gets a flash at me, it's all off."

"Oh, you plant here, my boy," she said in a motherly way, "till Curly comes."

The tenderloin awoke earlier than usual that day, for it was Saturday, and the farmers were in town. In the morning they would be busy in Market Place, but by afternoon, their work done, their money in their pockets, they would be free, and beginning at the cheap music halls, they, especially the younger ones, would drift gradually down the line, and by night they would be drinking and carousing in the dives.

Children, pale and hollow-eyed, coming with pitchers and tin buckets to get beer for their awaking elders, seemed to be the first heralds of the day; then a thin woman, clutching her dirty calico wrapper to her shrunken breast, and trying to hide a bruised, blue and swollen eye behind a shawl, came shuffling into the saloon in unbuttoned shoes, and hoarsely asked for some gin. A little later another woman came in to borrow enough oil to fill the lamp she carried without its chimney, and immediately after, a man, ragged, dirty, stepping in old worn shoes as soft as moccasins, flung himself down in a chair and fell into a stupor, his bloodless lips but a shade darker than his yellow face, his jaws set in the rigidity of the opium smoker. Archie looked at him suspiciously and shot a questioning glance at Bertha.

"The long draw?" he said in a low tone, as she passed him to go to the woman who had the lamp.

"Umph huh," said Bertha.

"I thought maybe he might be--"

"No," she said readily. "He's right--he's been hanging around for a month.--Some oil?" she was saying to the woman. "Certainly, my dear." She took the lamp.

"Where's your husband now?" she asked.

"Oh, he's gone," the woman said simply. "When the coppers put the Silver Moon Café"--she pronounced it "kafe"--"out of business and he lost his job slinging beer, he dug out."

Archie, beginning to fear the publicity of midday, had gone into the back room again. Presently Bertha joined him.

"Thought it was up to me to plant back here," he said, explaining his withdrawal. "There might be an elbow."

"Oh, no," said Bertha, in her hoarse voice, picking up the cigar she had laid on a clock-shelf and resuming her smoking, "we're running under protection now. That dope fiend in there showed up two months ago with his woman. They had a room in at Eva's for a while, but they stunk up the place so with their hops that she cleaned 'em out--she had to have the room papered again, but she says you can still smell it. They left about five hundred paper-back novels behind 'em. My God! they were readers! Nothing but read and suck the bamboo all the time; they were fiends both ways. One's 'bout as bad as the other, I guess."

She smoked her cigar and ruminated on this excessive love of romanticistic literature.

"When Eva gave 'em the run," she went on later, "the coppers flopped the moll--she got thirty-sixty, and Bostwick copped the pipe to give to a friend, who wanted a ornament for his den. Since then her husband comes in here now and then--and--why, hello there! Here's some one to see you, Curly!"

Archie sprang to his feet to greet Curly, who, checking the nervous impulse that always bore him so energetically onward, suddenly halted in the doorway. The low-crowned felt hat he wore shaded his eyes; he wore it, as always, a little to one side; his curls, in the mortification they had caused him since the mates of his school-days had teased him about them, were cropped closely; his cheeks were pink from the razor, and Archie, looking at him, felt an obscure envy of that air of Curly's which always attracted. Curly looked a moment, and then, with a smile, strode across the room and took Archie's hand. Archie was embarrassed, and his face, white with the prison pallor, flushed--he thought of his clothes, quite as degrading as the hideous stripes he had exchanged for them, and of his hair, a yellow stubble, from the shaving that had been part of his punishment. But the grip in which Curly held his hand while he wrung his greeting into it, made him glad, and Bertha, going out of the room, left them alone. The strangeness there is in all meetings after absence wore away. Curly sat there, his hat tilted back from his brow, leaned forward, and said:

"Well, how are you, anyway? When did you land in?"

"Yesterday morning."

"Been out home yet?"

Archie's eyes fell.

"No," he said, his eyes fixed on the cigarette he had just rolled with Curly's tobacco and paper. "I was pinched the minute I got here; Quinn and some flatty--and I fed the crummers all last night in the boob. This morning Bostwick give me orders."

"Well, you can't stay here," said Curly.

"No, I was waiting to see you. I've got to get to work. Got anything now?"

"Well, Ted and me have a couple of marks--a jug and a p. o."

"Where?"

"Oh, out in the jungle--several of the tribes have filled it out."

"Well, I'm ready."

"Not now," Curly said, shaking his head; "the old stool-pigeon's out--she's a mile high these nights."

A reminiscent smile passed lightly over Curly's face, and he flecked the ash from his cigarette.

"Phillie Dave's out,"--and then he remembered that Archie had never known the thief who had been proselyted by the police and been one of a numerous company of such men to turn detective, and so had bequeathed his name as a synonym for the moon. "But you never knew him, did you?"

"Who?"

"Dave--Phillie Dave we call him; he really belonged to the cat--he's become a copper. He was before your time."

They chatted a little while, and as the noise in the bar-room increased, Curly said:

"You can't hang out here. Those hoosiers are likely to start something any minute--we'll have to lam."

"Where to?"

"We'll go over to old Sam Gray's."

They did not show themselves in the bar-room again. Some young smart Alecks from the country were there, flushed with beer and showing off. Curly and Archie left by a side door, walked hurriedly to the canal, dodged along its edges to the river, then along the wharves to the long bridge up stream, and over to the west side, and at four o'clock, after a wide detour through quiet streets, they gained Sam Gray's at last.

Sam Gray kept a quiet saloon, with a few rooms upstairs for lodgers. Gray was a member of a family noted in the under world; his brothers kept similar places in other cities. His wife was a Rawson, a famous family of thieves, at the head of which was old Scott Rawson, who owned a farm and was then in hiding somewhere with an enormous reward hanging over his head. Gray's wife was a sister of Rawson; and the sister, too, of Nan Rawson, whom Snuffer Wilson had in mind when, on the scaffold, he said, "Tell Nan good-by for me." And in these saloons, kept by the Rawsons and the Grays, and at the Rawson farm, thieves in good standing were always welcome; many a hunted man had found refuge there; the Rawsons would have care of him, and nurse him back to health of the wounds inflicted by official bullets.

When Curly and Archie entered, a man of sixty years with thick white hair above a wide white brow, in shirt-sleeves, his waistcoat unbuttoned, and his trousers girded tightly into the fat at his waist, came out, treading softly in slippers.

"A friend of mine, Mr. Gray," said Curly. "He's right. He's just done his bit; got home last night, and the bulls pinched him. He's got orders and I'm going to take him out with me. But we can't go yet--Phillie Dave's out."

The old man smiled vaguely at the mention of the old thief.

"All right," he said, taking Archie's hand.

Archie felt a glow of pride when Curly mentioned his having done his bit; he was already conscious, now that he had a record, of improved standing.

"Who's back there?" asked Curly, jerking his head toward a partition from behind which voices came.

"A couple of the girls," said old Sam. "You know 'em, I guess."

The two women who sat at a table in the rear room looked up hastily when the men appeared.

"Hello, Curly," they said, in surprise and relief.

They had passed thirty, were well dressed in street gowns, wore gloves, and carried small shopping-bags. They had put their veils up over their hats. Archie, thinking of his appearance, was more self-conscious than ever, and his embarrassment did not diminish when one of the women, after Curly had told them something of their plans, looked at the black mark rubbed into Archie's neck by the prison clothes and said:

"You can't do nothin' in them stir clothes." Before he could reply, she got up impulsively.

"Just wait here," she said. She was gone an hour. When she returned, her cheeks were flushed, and with a smile she walked into the room with a peculiar mincing gait that might have passed as some mode of fashion, went to a corner, shook herself, and then, stepping aside, picked from the floor a suit of clothes she had stolen in a store across the bridge and carried in her skirts all the way back. Curly laughed, and the other woman laughed, and they praised her, and then she said to Archie:

"Here, kid, these'll do. I don't know as they'll fit, but you can have 'em altered. They'll beat them stir rags, anyhow."

Archie tried to thank her, but she laughed his platitudes aside and said:

"Come on, Sadie, we must get to work."

When they were away Archie looked at Curly in surprise. There were things, evidently, he had not yet learned.

"The best lifter in the business," Curly said, but he added a qualification that expressed a tardy loyalty, "except Jane."

Archie found he could wear the clothes, and he felt better when he had them on.

"If I only had a rod now," he remarked. "I'll have to go out and boost one, I guess."

"You can't show for a day," said Curly.

"I wish I had that gat of mine. I wouldn't mind doing time if I had that to show for it!"

"I told you that gat would get you in trouble," said Curly, and then he added peremptorily: "You'll stay here till to-morrow night; then you'll go home and see your mother. Then you'll go to work."

They remained at Gray's all that Saturday night and all the following day, spending the Sunday in reading such meager account of the murder of the Flanagan sisters as the morning papers were able to get into extra editions.

III

Sergeant Cragin, a short, red-haired Irishman with a snub nose that with difficulty kept his steel-bowed spectacles before his small, rheumy eyes, had just finished calling the roll of the night detail at the Central Police Station when the superintendent of police, Michael Cleary, unexpectedly appeared in the great drill hall. Cleary stood in the doorway with Inspector McFee; his cap was drawn to his eyebrows, revealing but a patch of his close-cut white hair; his cheeks were red and freshly shaven, his small chin-whiskers newly trimmed. The velvet collar and cuffs of his blue coat, as usual, were carefully brushed, the diamonds on his big gold badge flashed in the dim, shifting light. The men did not often see their chief; he appeared at the station but seldom, spending most of his time, presumably, in his office at the City Hall.

"Men," he said, "I want a word with you--about this Flanagan job. We've got to get the murderers. They're somewhere in town right now. I want you to keep a lookout; run in every suspicious character you see to-night--no matter who he is--run him in. See what I mean? We're going to have a cleaning up. I want you to pull every place that's open after hours. I want you to pinch every crook and gun in town. See what I mean? I won't stand for any nonsense! You fellows have been loafing around now long enough; by God, if something isn't done before morning, some of you'll lose your stars. You've heard me. You've got your orders; now execute them. See what I mean?"

This proceeding was what Cleary called maintaining discipline on the force, and, in delivering his harangue, he had worked himself into a rage; his face was red, his cheeks puffed out. The line of policemen shifted and shuffled; the red faces became still redder, deepening at last to an angry blue.

Cleary, with their anger and resentment following him, left the drill room, descended the stairs, and burst into the detective bureau. The room, like all the rooms in the old building, was large, the ceiling high, and in the shutters of the tall arched windows the dust of years had settled; on the yellow walls were wire racks, in which were thrust photographs of criminals, each card showing a full face, a profile, and a number; there was little else, save some posters offering rewards for fugitives.

The detectives who had been on duty all the day were preparing to leave; those who were to be on duty that night were there; it was the hour when the day force and the night force gathered for a moment, but this evening the usual good nature, the rude joking and badinage were missing; the men were morose and taciturn; in one corner Kouka and Quinn were quarreling. When Cleary halted in the door, as if with some difficulty he had brought himself to a stop, the detectives glanced up.

"Well," Cleary exploded, "that Flanagan job is twenty-four hours old, and you fly cops haven't turned anything up yet. I want you to turn up something. See what I mean? I want you to get busy, damn you, and get busy right away. See what I mean?"

"But, Chief," one of the men began.

Cleary looked at him with an expression of unutterable scorn.

"G-e-t r-i-g-h-t!" he said, drawling out the words in the lowest register of his harsh bass voice. "Get right! See what I mean? Come to cases, you fellows; I want a show-down. You make some arrests before morning or some of you'll quit flyin' and go back to wearin' the clothes. See what I mean?"

He stood glowering a moment, then repeated all he had said, cursed them all again, and left the room, swearing to himself.

Down-stairs, in the front office, the reporters were waiting. Cleary stopped when he saw them, took off his cap, and wiped his forehead with a large silk handkerchief.

"Do you care to give out anything, Chief, about the Flanagan job?" asked one of the reporters timidly.

"No," said Cleary bluntly.

"Have you any clue?"

Cleary thought a moment.

"We'll have the men to-morrow."

The reporters stepped eagerly forward.

"Any details, Chief?"

"I'd be likely to give 'em to you fellows to print, wouldn't I?" said Cleary sarcastically.

"But--"

"You heard what I said, didn't you? We'll have the men to-morrow. Roll that up in your cigarette and smoke it. See what I mean?"

"Do you care to comment on what the Post said this evening?" asked a representative of that paper.

"What the hell do I care what your dirty, blackmailing sheet says? What the hell do I care?"

Cleary left then, and a moment later they heard his heavy voice through the open window, swearing at the horse as he drove away in his light official wagon.

In truth, the police were wholly at sea. All day the newspapers had been issuing extras giving new details, or repeating old details of the crime. The hatred that had been loosened in the cottage of the Flanagan sisters had, as it were, poured in black streams into the whole people, and the newspapers had gathered up this stream, confined it, and then, with demands for vengeance, poured it out again on the head of the superintendent of police, and he, in turn, maddened and tortured by criticism, had poured out this hatred on the men who were beneath him; and now, at nightfall, they were going out into the dark city, maddened and tormented themselves, ready to pour it on to any one they might encounter. And it was this same hatred that had sickened the breasts of Kouka and Quinn so that, after a friendship of years, they had quarreled, and were quarreling even now up-stairs in the detectives' office.

When he heard of the crime, Kouka realized that if he could discover the murderers of Margaret Flanagan he might come into a notoriety that would be the making of him. And he had wondered how he might achieve this. He had visited Lulu Corners, and all day his mind had been at work, incessantly revolving the subject; he had recalled all the criminals he knew, trying to imagine which of them might have done the deed, trying to decide on which of them he might fasten the crime. For his mind worked like the minds of most policemen--the problem was not necessarily to discover who had committed the crime, but who might have committed it, and this night, with the criticism of the newspapers, and with the abuse of the superintendent, he felt himself more and more driven to the necessity of doing something in order to show that the police were active. And when he heard from Quinn that he had arrested Archie Koerner on Friday, and that Bostwick had ordered him out of the city, he instantly suspected that it was Archie who had murdered Margaret Flanagan. Quinn had laughed at the notion, but this only served to convince Kouka and make him stubborn. The problem then was to find Archie. When Inspector McFee made his details for that night, all with special reference to the Flanagan murder, Kouka asked for a special detail, intimating that he had some clue which he wished to follow alone, and McFee, who was at his wits' end, was willing enough to let Kouka follow his own leading.

The night detail tramped heavily down the dark halls and out into Market Place; the detectives left the building and separated, stealing off in different directions. An hour later, patrol wagons began to roll up to the station; the tenderloin was in a turmoil; saloons, brothels and dives were raided, the night was not half gone before the prison was crowded with miserable men and women, charged with all sorts of crimes, and, when no other charge could be imagined, with suspicion.

Meanwhile, Archie and Curly were trudging through dark side-streets and friendly alleys on their way to Archie's home; for Archie had determined to see his father and his mother once more before he left the city. Archie was armed with a revolver he had procured from Gray.

IV

Kouka visited the tenderloin and learned that Archie had not left town. He learned, too, that he had a companion, and though he could follow the trail no farther, he had decided to watch Archie's home in the chance that the boy might visit it some time during the night. And now, for two hours, in the patience that was part of his stupidity, he had lurked in the black doorway of the grocery. Bolt Street was dark and still. Overhead, low clouds were flying; and the old stool-pigeon, coming later and later each night, as if bad habits were growing on it, had not yet appeared. Now and then, hearing footsteps, Kouka would shrink into the darkest corner of the doorway; the steps would sound louder and louder on the wooden sidewalk, some one would pass, and the steps would gradually fade from his hearing. All this had a curious effect on Kouka's mind. In some doubt at first, the waiting, the watching with one object in view, more and more convinced him that he was right, and in time the idea that Archie was the murderer he sought became definitely fixed. The little house across the street gradually, through the slowly moving hours, took on an aspect that confirmed Kouka's theory; it seemed to be waiting for Archie's coming as expectantly as the detective. During the first hour of his vigil, a shaft of yellow light had streamed out of the kitchen window into the side yard, and Kouka watched this light intently. Finally, at nine o'clock, it was suddenly drawn in, as it were, and the house became dark. After this, the house seemed to enshroud itself with some mysterious tragic apprehension; and Kouka waited, stolidly, patiently, possessed by his theory.

And then, it must have been after ten o'clock, Kouka, who had heard no footsteps and no sound whatever, suddenly, across the street, saw two figures. They stopped, opened the low gate, stepped on to the stoop and knocked. Their summons was answered almost immediately; the door opened, and, in the light that suddenly filled the door-frame, Kouka recognized Archie Koerner; a woman, his mother, doubtless, stood just inside; he heard her give a little cry, then Archie put out his arms and bent toward her; then he went in, his companion following, and the door was closed. In another moment the shaft of light shot out into the side yard again.

Kouka was exultant, happy; he experienced an intense satisfaction; already he realized something of the distinction that would be his the next morning, when the little world he knew would hail him as the man who, all alone, had brought the murderers of that poor old Flanagan woman to the vengeance of the people's law.

And yet, he must be cautious; he knew what yeggs were; he knew how readily they would shoot and how well, and he did not care to risk his own body, and the chance of missing his prey besides, by engaging two bad men alone. Bad men they were, to Kouka, and nothing else; they had come suddenly to impersonate to him all the evil in the world, just as, though unknown, they or some two men impersonated all evil to all the people of the city and the county, whereas Kouka felt himself to be a good man whose mission it was to crush this badness out of the world. He must preserve himself, as must all good men, and he ran down the street, opened a patrolmen's box, called up the precinct station, and gave the alarm. Then he hurried back; the shaft of light was still streaming out into the side yard, its rays, like some luminous vapor, flowing palpably from the small window and slanting downward to be absorbed in the dark earth.

He heard the roll of wheels, the urge of straining horses; the patrol wagon stopped at the corner; he heard the harness rattle and one of the horses blow softly through its delicate fluttering nostrils; a moment later, the squad of policemen came out of the gloom; three of the men were in civilian attire, the other six were in uniform.

Kouka received his little command with his big, heavy hand upraised for silence. It was a fine moment for him; he felt the glow of authority; he felt like an inspector; perhaps this night's work would make an inspector of him; he had never had such an opportunity before. He must evolve a plan, and he paused, scowled, as he felt a commander should who, confronted by a crisis, was thinking. Presently he laid his plan before them; it was profound, strategical. The officers in uniform were to surround the house, but in a certain way; he explained this way. Three of them were to go to the right and cover the ground from the corner of the house to the shaft of light that streamed from the window, the others were to extend themselves around the other way, coming as far as the lighted window; then no one would be exposed.

"You'll go with me," said Kouka to the plain-clothes men. He said it darkly, with a sinister eye, implying that their work was to be heavy and dangerous.

"Don't shoot until I give the command."

They went across the street, bending low, almost crouching, stealing as softly as they could in their great heavy boots, gripping their revolvers nervously, filled with fear. Inside the gate, they surrounded the house.

Kouka led the way, motioning the others behind him with his hand. He stepped on to the low stoop, but stood at one side lest Archie shoot through the door. He stood as a reconnoitering burglar stands at one side of a window, out of range; cautiously he put forth his hand, knocked, and hastily jerked his hand away ... He knocked twice, three times ... After a while the door opened slowly, and Kouka saw Mrs. Koerner standing within, holding a lamp. Kouka instantly pushed his knee inside the door, and shouldered his way into the room. The three officers followed, displaying their revolvers.

"It's all off," said Kouka. "The house is surrounded. Where is he?"

Mrs. Koerner did not speak; she could not. Her face was white, the lamp shook in her hand; its yellow flame licked the rattling chimney, the reek of the oil filled the room. Finally she got to the table and with relief set the lamp down among the trinkets Archie had brought from the Philippines.

"Aw come, old woman!" said Kouka, seizing her by the arm fiercely. "Come, don't give us any of the bull con. Where is he?"

Kouka held to her arm; he shook her and swore. Mrs. Koerner swallowed, managed to say something, but in German. And then instantly the four officers, as if seized by some savage, irresistible impulse, began to rummage and ransack the house. They tore about the little parlor, entered the little bedroom that had been Gusta's; they looked everywhere, in the most unlikely places, turning up mats, chairs, pulling off the bed-clothes. Then they burst into the room behind. Suddenly they halted and huddled in a group.

There, in the center of the room, stood old man Koerner, clad in his red flannel underclothes, in which he must have slept. He had an air of having just got out of bed; his white hair was tumbled, and he leaned on one crutch, as if one crutch were all that was necessary in dishabille. Below the stump of his amputated leg the red flannel leg of his drawers was tied into a knot. He presented a grotesque appearance, like some aged fiend. Under the white bush of his eyebrows, under his touseled white hair, his eyes gleamed fiercely.

"Vat de hell ails you fellers?"

"We want Archie," said Kouka, "and, by God, we're going to have him, dead or alive." He used the words of the advertised reward. "Where is he?"

Kouka and the other officers glanced apprehensively about the room, as if Archie and Curly might start out of some corner, or out of the floor, but in the end their glances came always back to Koerner, standing there in his red flannels, on one crutch and one leg, the red knot of the leg of his drawers dangling between.

"You vant Archie, huh?" asked Koerner. "Dot's it, aind't it--Archie--my poy Archie?"

"Yes, Archie, and we want him quick."

"Vat you want mit him, huh?"