The Valley of Fear
“Well, I thought his name was known clear across the country. It’s been
in the papers often enough.”
“What for?”
“Well,” the miner lowered his voice—“over the affairs.”
“What affairs?”
“Good Lord, mister! you are queer, if I must say it without offense.
There’s only one set of affairs that you’ll hear of in these parts, and
that’s the affairs of the Scowrers.”
“Why, I seem to have read of the Scowrers in Chicago. A gang of
murderers, are they not?”
“Hush, on your life!” cried the miner, standing still in alarm, and
gazing in amazement at his companion. “Man, you won’t live long in
these parts if you speak in the open street like that. Many a man has
had the life beaten out of him for less.”
“Well, I know nothing about them. It’s only what I have read.”
“And I’m not saying that you have not read the truth.” The man looked
nervously round him as he spoke, peering into the shadows as if he
feared to see some lurking danger. “If killing is murder, then God
knows there is murder and to spare. But don’t you dare to breathe the
name of Jack McGinty in connection with it, stranger; for every whisper
goes back to him, and he is not one that is likely to let it pass. Now,
that’s the house you’re after, that one standing back from the street.
You’ll find old Jacob Shafter that runs it as honest a man as lives in
this township.”
“I thank you,” said McMurdo, and shaking hands with his new
acquaintance he plodded, gripsack in hand, up the path which led to the
dwelling house, at the door of which he gave a resounding knock.
It was opened at once by someone very different from what he had
expected. It was a woman, young and singularly beautiful. She was of
the German type, blonde and fair-haired, with the piquant contrast of a
pair of beautiful dark eyes with which she surveyed the stranger with
surprise and a pleasing embarrassment which brought a wave of colour
over her pale face. Framed in the bright light of the open doorway, it
seemed to McMurdo that he had never seen a more beautiful picture; the
more attractive for its contrast with the sordid and gloomy
surroundings. A lovely violet growing upon one of those black
slag-heaps of the mines would not have seemed more surprising. So
entranced was he that he stood staring without a word, and it was she
who broke the silence.
“I thought it was father,” said she with a pleasing little touch of a
German accent. “Did you come to see him? He is down town. I expect him
back every minute.”
McMurdo continued to gaze at her in open admiration until her eyes
dropped in confusion before this masterful visitor.
“No, miss,” he said at last, “I’m in no hurry to see him. But your
house was recommended to me for board. I thought it might suit me—and
now I know it will.”
“You are quick to make up your mind,” said she with a smile.
“Anyone but a blind man could do as much,” the other answered.
She laughed at the compliment. “Come right in, sir,” she said. “I’m
Miss Ettie Shafter, Mr. Shafter’s daughter. My mother’s dead, and I run
the house. You can sit down by the stove in the front room until father
comes along—Ah, here he is! So you can fix things with him right away.”
A heavy, elderly man came plodding up the path. In a few words McMurdo
explained his business. A man of the name of Murphy had given him the
address in Chicago. He in turn had had it from someone else. Old
Shafter was quite ready. The stranger made no bones about terms, agreed
at once to every condition, and was apparently fairly flush of money.
For seven dollars a week paid in advance he was to have board and
lodging.
So it was that McMurdo, the self-confessed fugitive from justice, took
up his abode under the roof of the Shafters, the first step which was
to lead to so long and dark a train of events, ending in a far distant
land.
Chapter II
The Bodymaster
McMurdo was a man who made his mark quickly. Wherever he was the folk
around soon knew it. Within a week he had become infinitely the most
important person at Shafter’s. There were ten or a dozen boarders
there; but they were honest foremen or commonplace clerks from the
stores, of a very different calibre from the young Irishman. Of an
evening when they gathered together his joke was always the readiest,
his conversation the brightest, and his song the best. He was a born
boon companion, with a magnetism which drew good humour from all around
him.
And yet he showed again and again, as he had shown in the railway
carriage, a capacity for sudden, fierce anger, which compelled the
respect and even the fear of those who met him. For the law, too, and
all who were connected with it, he exhibited a bitter contempt which
delighted some and alarmed others of his fellow boarders.
From the first he made it evident, by his open admiration, that the
daughter of the house had won his heart from the instant that he had
set eyes upon her beauty and her grace. He was no backward suitor. On
the second day he told her that he loved her, and from then onward he
repeated the same story with an absolute disregard of what she might
say to discourage him.
“Someone else?” he would cry. “Well, the worse luck for someone else!
Let him look out for himself! Am I to lose my life’s chance and all my
heart’s desire for someone else? You can keep on saying no, Ettie: the
day will come when you will say yes, and I’m young enough to wait.”
He was a dangerous suitor, with his glib Irish tongue, and his pretty,
coaxing ways. There was about him also that glamour of experience and
of mystery which attracts a woman’s interest, and finally her love. He
could talk of the sweet valleys of County Monaghan from which he came,
of the lovely, distant island, the low hills and green meadows of which
seemed the more beautiful when imagination viewed them from this place
of grime and snow.
Then he was versed in the life of the cities of the North, of Detroit,
and the lumber camps of Michigan, and finally of Chicago, where he had
worked in a planing mill. And afterwards came the hint of romance, the
feeling that strange things had happened to him in that great city, so
strange and so intimate that they might not be spoken of. He spoke
wistfully of a sudden leaving, a breaking of old ties, a flight into a
strange world, ending in this dreary valley, and Ettie listened, her
dark eyes gleaming with pity and with sympathy—those two qualities
which may turn so rapidly and so naturally to love.
McMurdo had obtained a temporary job as bookkeeper for he was a
well-educated man. This kept him out most of the day, and he had not
found occasion yet to report himself to the head of the lodge of the
Eminent Order of Freemen. He was reminded of his omission, however, by
a visit one evening from Mike Scanlan, the fellow member whom he had
met in the train. Scanlan, the small, sharp-faced, nervous, black-eyed
man, seemed glad to see him once more. After a glass or two of whisky
he broached the object of his visit.
“Say, McMurdo,” said he, “I remembered your address, so I made bold to
call. I’m surprised that you’ve not reported to the Bodymaster. Why
haven’t you seen Boss McGinty yet?”
“Well, I had to find a job. I have been busy.”
“You must find time for him if you have none for anything else. Good
Lord, man! you’re a fool not to have been down to the Union House and
registered your name the first morning after you came here! If you run
against him—well, you mustn’t, that’s all!”
McMurdo showed mild surprise. “I’ve been a member of the lodge for over
two years, Scanlan, but I never heard that duties were so pressing as
all that.”
“Maybe not in Chicago.”
“Well, it’s the same society here.”
“Is it?”
Scanlan looked at him long and fixedly. There was something sinister in
his eyes.
“Isn’t it?”
“You’ll tell me that in a month’s time. I hear you had a talk with the
patrolmen after I left the train.”
“How did you know that?”
“Oh, it got about—things do get about for good and for bad in this
district.”
“Well, yes. I told the hounds what I thought of them.”
“By the Lord, you’ll be a man after McGinty’s heart!”
“What, does he hate the police too?”
Scanlan burst out laughing. “You go and see him, my lad,” said he as he
took his leave. “It’s not the police but you that he’ll hate if you
don’t! Now, take a friend’s advice and go at once!”
It chanced that on the same evening McMurdo had another more pressing
interview which urged him in the same direction. It may have been that
his attentions to Ettie had been more evident than before, or that they
had gradually obtruded themselves into the slow mind of his good German
host; but, whatever the cause, the boarding-house keeper beckoned the
young man into his private room and started on the subject without any
circumlocution.
“It seems to me, mister,” said he, “that you are gettin’ set on my
Ettie. Ain’t that so, or am I wrong?”
“Yes, that is so,” the young man answered.
“Vell, I vant to tell you right now that it ain’t no manner of use.
There’s someone slipped in afore you.”
“She told me so.”
“Vell, you can lay that she told you truth. But did she tell you who it
vas?”
“No, I asked her; but she wouldn’t tell.”
“I dare say not, the leetle baggage! Perhaps she did not vish to
frighten you avay.”
“Frighten!” McMurdo was on fire in a moment.
“Ah, yes, my friend! You need not be ashamed to be frightened of him.
It is Teddy Baldwin.”
“And who the devil is he?”
“He is a boss of Scowrers.”
“Scowrers! I’ve heard of them before. It’s Scowrers here and Scowrers
there, and always in a whisper! What are you all afraid of? Who are the
Scowrers?”
The boarding-house keeper instinctively sank his voice, as everyone did
who talked about that terrible society. “The Scowrers,” said he, “are
the Eminent Order of Freemen!”
The young man stared. “Why, I am a member of that order myself.”
“You! I vould never have had you in my house if I had known it—not if
you vere to pay me a hundred dollar a veek.”
“What’s wrong with the order? It’s for charity and good fellowship. The
rules say so.”
“Maybe in some places. Not here!”
“What is it here?”
“It’s a murder society, that’s vat it is.”
McMurdo laughed incredulously. “How can you prove that?” he asked.
“Prove it! Are there not fifty murders to prove it? Vat about Milman
and Van Shorst, and the Nicholson family, and old Mr. Hyam, and little
Billy James, and the others? Prove it! Is there a man or a voman in
this valley vat does not know it?”
“See here!” said McMurdo earnestly. “I want you to take back what
you’ve said, or else make it good. One or the other you must do before
I quit this room. Put yourself in my place. Here am I, a stranger in
the town. I belong to a society that I know only as an innocent one.
You’ll find it through the length and breadth of the States, but always
as an innocent one. Now, when I am counting upon joining it here, you
tell me that it is the same as a murder society called the Scowrers. I
guess you owe me either an apology or else an explanation, Mr.
Shafter.”
“I can but tell you vat the whole vorld knows, mister. The bosses of
the one are the bosses of the other. If you offend the one, it is the
other vat vill strike you. We have proved it too often.”
“That’s just gossip—I want proof!” said McMurdo.
“If you live here long you vill get your proof. But I forget that you
are yourself one of them. You vill soon be as bad as the rest. But you
vill find other lodgings, mister. I cannot have you here. Is it not bad
enough that one of these people come courting my Ettie, and that I dare
not turn him down, but that I should have another for my boarder? Yes,
indeed, you shall not sleep here after to-night!”