The Valley of Fear
Then suddenly raising his voice and bending his huge black brows into a
terrible frown, “See here, Brother Morris, I have my eye on you, and
have had for some time! You’ve no heart yourself, and you try to take
the heart out of others. It will be an ill day for you, Brother Morris,
when your own name comes on our agenda paper, and I’m thinking that
it’s just there that I ought to place it.”
Morris had turned deadly pale, and his knees seemed to give way under
him as he fell back into his chair. He raised his glass in his
trembling hand and drank before he could answer. “I apologize, Eminent
Bodymaster, to you and to every brother in this lodge if I have said
more than I should. I am a faithful member—you all know that—and it is
my fear lest evil come to the lodge which makes me speak in anxious
words. But I have greater trust in your judgment than in my own,
Eminent Bodymaster, and I promise you that I will not offend again.”
The Bodymaster’s scowl relaxed as he listened to the humble words.
“Very good, Brother Morris. It’s myself that would be sorry if it were
needful to give you a lesson. But so long as I am in this chair we
shall be a united lodge in word and in deed. And now, boys,” he
continued, looking round at the company, “I’ll say this much, that if
Stanger got his full deserts there would be more trouble than we need
ask for. These editors hang together, and every journal in the state
would be crying out for police and troops. But I guess you can give him
a pretty severe warning. Will you fix it, Brother Baldwin?”
“Sure!” said the young man eagerly.
“How many will you take?”
“Half a dozen, and two to guard the door. You’ll come, Gower, and you,
Mansel, and you, Scanlan, and the two Willabys.”
“I promised the new brother he should go,” said the chairman.
Ted Baldwin looked at McMurdo with eyes which showed that he had not
forgotten nor forgiven. “Well, he can come if he wants,” he said in a
surly voice. “That’s enough. The sooner we get to work the better.”
The company broke up with shouts and yells and snatches of drunken
song. The bar was still crowded with revellers, and many of the
brethren remained there. The little band who had been told off for duty
passed out into the street, proceeding in twos and threes along the
sidewalk so as not to provoke attention. It was a bitterly cold night,
with a half-moon shining brilliantly in a frosty, star-spangled sky.
The men stopped and gathered in a yard which faced a high building. The
words, “Vermissa Herald” were printed in gold lettering between the
brightly lit windows. From within came the clanking of the printing
press.
“Here, you,” said Baldwin to McMurdo, “you can stand below at the door
and see that the road is kept open for us. Arthur Willaby can stay with
you. You others come with me. Have no fears, boys; for we have a dozen
witnesses that we are in the Union Bar at this very moment.”
It was nearly midnight, and the street was deserted save for one or two
revellers upon their way home. The party crossed the road, and, pushing
open the door of the newspaper office, Baldwin and his men rushed in
and up the stair which faced them. McMurdo and another remained below.
From the room above came a shout, a cry for help, and then the sound of
trampling feet and of falling chairs. An instant later a gray-haired
man rushed out on the landing.
He was seized before he could get farther, and his spectacles came
tinkling down to McMurdo’s feet. There was a thud and a groan. He was
on his face, and half a dozen sticks were clattering together as they
fell upon him. He writhed, and his long, thin limbs quivered under the
blows. The others ceased at last; but Baldwin, his cruel face set in an
infernal smile, was hacking at the man’s head, which he vainly
endeavoured to defend with his arms. His white hair was dabbled with
patches of blood. Baldwin was still stooping over his victim, putting
in a short, vicious blow whenever he could see a part exposed, when
McMurdo dashed up the stair and pushed him back.
“You’ll kill the man,” said he. “Drop it!”
Baldwin looked at him in amazement. “Curse you!” he cried. “Who are you
to interfere—you that are new to the lodge? Stand back!” He raised his
stick; but McMurdo had whipped his pistol out of his pocket.
“Stand back yourself!” he cried. “I’ll blow your face in if you lay a
hand on me. As to the lodge, wasn’t it the order of the Bodymaster that
the man was not to be killed—and what are you doing but killing him?”
“It’s truth he says,” remarked one of the men.
“By Gar! you’d best hurry yourselves!” cried the man below. “The
windows are all lighting up, and you’ll have the whole town here inside
of five minutes.”
There was indeed the sound of shouting in the street, and a little
group of compositors and pressmen was forming in the hall below and
nerving itself to action. Leaving the limp and motionless body of the
editor at the head of the stair, the criminals rushed down and made
their way swiftly along the street. Having reached the Union House,
some of them mixed with the crowd in McGinty’s saloon, whispering
across the bar to the Boss that the job had been well carried through.
Others, and among them McMurdo, broke away into side streets, and so by
devious paths to their own homes.
Chapter IV
The Valley of Fear
When McMurdo awoke next morning he had good reason to remember his
initiation into the lodge. His head ached with the effect of the drink,
and his arm, where he had been branded, was hot and swollen. Having his
own peculiar source of income, he was irregular in his attendance at
his work; so he had a late breakfast, and remained at home for the
morning writing a long letter to a friend. Afterwards he read the Daily
Herald. In a special column put in at the last moment he read, “Outrage
at the Herald Office—Editor Seriously Injured.” It was a short account
of the facts with which he was himself more familiar than the writer
could have been. It ended with the statement:
The matter is now in the hands of the police; but it can hardly be
hoped that their exertions will be attended by any better results than
in the past. Some of the men were recognized, and there is hope that a
conviction may be obtained. The source of the outrage was, it need
hardly be said, that infamous society which has held this community in
bondage for so long a period, and against which the Herald has taken so
uncompromising a stand. Mr. Stanger’s many friends will rejoice to hear
that, though he has been cruelly and brutally beaten, and though he has
sustained severe injuries about the head, there is no immediate danger
to his life.
Below it stated that a guard of police, armed with Winchester rifles,
had been requisitioned for the defense of the office.
McMurdo had laid down the paper, and was lighting his pipe with a hand
which was shaky from the excesses of the previous evening, when there
was a knock outside, and his landlady brought to him a note which had
just been handed in by a lad. It was unsigned, and ran thus:
I should wish to speak to you, but would rather not do so in your
house. You will find me beside the flagstaff upon Miller Hill. If you
will come there now, I have something which it is important for you to
hear and for me to say.
McMurdo read the note twice with the utmost surprise; for he could not
imagine what it meant or who was the author of it. Had it been in a
feminine hand, he might have imagined that it was the beginning of one
of those adventures which had been familiar enough in his past life.
But it was the writing of a man, and of a well educated one, too.
Finally, after some hesitation, he determined to see the matter
through.
Miller Hill is an ill-kept public park in the very centre of the town.
In summer it is a favourite resort of the people, but in winter it is
desolate enough. From the top of it one has a view not only of the
whole straggling, grimy town, but of the winding valley beneath, with
its scattered mines and factories blackening the snow on each side of
it, and of the wooded and white-capped ranges flanking it.
McMurdo strolled up the winding path hedged in with evergreens until he
reached the deserted restaurant which forms the centre of summer
gaiety. Beside it was a bare flagstaff, and underneath it a man, his
hat drawn down and the collar of his overcoat turned up. When he turned
his face McMurdo saw that it was Brother Morris, he who had incurred
the anger of the Bodymaster the night before. The lodge sign was given
and exchanged as they met.
“I wanted to have a word with you, Mr. McMurdo,” said the older man,
speaking with a hesitation which showed that he was on delicate ground.
“It was kind of you to come.”
“Why did you not put your name to the note?”
“One has to be cautious, mister. One never knows in times like these
how a thing may come back to one. One never knows either who to trust
or who not to trust.”
“Surely one may trust brothers of the lodge.”
“No, no, not always,” cried Morris with vehemence. “Whatever we say,
even what we think, seems to go back to that man McGinty.”
“Look here!” said McMurdo sternly. “It was only last night, as you know
well, that I swore good faith to our Bodymaster. Would you be asking me
to break my oath?”
“If that is the view you take,” said Morris sadly, “I can only say that
I am sorry I gave you the trouble to come and meet me. Things have come
to a bad pass when two free citizens cannot speak their thoughts to
each other.”
McMurdo, who had been watching his companion very narrowly, relaxed
somewhat in his bearing. “Sure I spoke for myself only,” said he. “I am
a newcomer, as you know, and I am strange to it all. It is not for me
to open my mouth, Mr. Morris, and if you think well to say anything to
me I am here to hear it.”
“And to take it back to Boss McGinty!” said Morris bitterly.
“Indeed, then, you do me injustice there,” cried McMurdo. “For myself I
am loyal to the lodge, and so I tell you straight; but I would be a
poor creature if I were to repeat to any other what you might say to me
in confidence. It will go no further than me; though I warn you that
you may get neither help nor sympathy.”
“I have given up looking for either the one or the other,” said Morris.
“I may be putting my very life in your hands by what I say; but, bad as
you are—and it seemed to me last night that you were shaping to be as
bad as the worst—still you are new to it, and your conscience cannot
yet be as hardened as theirs. That was why I thought to speak with
you.”
“Well, what have you to say?”
“If you give me away, may a curse be on you!”
“Sure, I said I would not.”
“I would ask you, then, when you joined the Freeman’s society in
Chicago and swore vows of charity and fidelity, did ever it cross your
mind that you might find it would lead you to crime?”
“If you call it crime,” McMurdo answered.
“Call it crime!” cried Morris, his voice vibrating with passion. “You
have seen little of it if you can call it anything else. Was it crime
last night when a man old enough to be your father was beaten till the
blood dripped from his white hairs? Was that crime—or what else would
you call it?”
“There are some would say it was war,” said McMurdo, “a war of two
classes with all in, so that each struck as best it could.”
“Well, did you think of such a thing when you joined the Freeman’s
society at Chicago?”
“No, I’m bound to say I did not.”
“Nor did I when I joined it at Philadelphia. It was just a benefit club
and a meeting place for one’s fellows. Then I heard of this place—curse
the hour that the name first fell upon my ears!—and I came to better
myself! My God! to better myself! My wife and three children came with