Three sevens A detective story
“Sure. Before I did. He might have jumped you, at that, if you hadn’t
called George in. He’ll forget all about Bud Gaspell, now that he’s
picked up your trail.”
“Bud Gaspell?”
“It was him this dick was tailing--ever since Bud held up the
express the night of his get-away. Bud passed this way two days ago.”
“Where is he now?”
“I know where he was headin’ for,” said Solly.
“Where are you heading for, Solly?”
Solly coughed. He said that all he wanted was to die in the open air,
and that could be none too soon to satisfy him.
“You’re foolish,” said Craig. “You ought to go to a hospital. You
could live a long time yet.”
“It’s a hospital that done this to me,” said Solly, coughing.
“Maybe I can work a pardon for you.”
“How?”
“By your helping me to turn Bud Gaspell back to San Pedro.”
Solly averred that San Pedro was a shade worse than the place where
he hoped Warden Green and all his underlings would go when they died.
“But there’s a new deal there,” said Craig. “If I’d known what was
coming off, I wouldn’t have started this thing you helped me to
start. Take you, for example, and George, here. Both of you would
be better off back there with the new warden than out here getting
chased through the woods.”
“How can we work it?” Solly asked. “What’s the lay?”
Fame, scoffed at by certain philosophers ever since some Nimrod of
the Stone Age killed the last dinosaur, nonetheless has remained
alluring to the hearts of men, and with a reason. She comes with
gifts in her hands, as Craig was quick to discover. The gifts are
money, power, and privilege. He enjoyed all these gifts within the
next three days.
He was traveling alone, then. Solly and the faithful George he had
established in a hidden camp in the woods. To them there he sent an
emissary with food and other things for their comfort. He could have
sent them a thousand dollars--a thousand dollars apiece--if he had
wanted to.
Thanks to Fame. For Solly had told him about a certain neighboring
town, and a certain notorious citizen who lived there. Craig called
on the notorious citizen--a man who had once served a term in prison
on his own account, deservedly--and had changed nothing much but
his name on getting out. This man conducted a sort of employment
agency, for want of a better term, for those still under the shadow
of the law. He could furnish men to either side, or both, in a
labor-and-capital dispute, or a political campaign, or could keep
a stolen painting hidden for a dozen years--he was an amateur of
painting; all this besides financing a first-class gambling house and
other enterprises.
“Three Sevens!”
This man was almost for treating Craig as an equal. They could be of
vast and mutual benefit to each other later on. So Craig borrowed as
much money as he guessed he would need. But best of all, he got the
private address of Bud Gaspell, found that Bud was at that address
now, and that the place was less than five miles away.
Early the next morning, a trifle before dawn, to be exact, some
dwellers in this town that Craig had visited in the night, may have
sworn a little when they were awakened by the passing of a junk cart,
its passage advertised by a string of jingling sleigh bells. They
didn’t know that this junk cart was the property of a “fence”--a kind
old gentleman who lent the wagon at times to clients of his. They
would never have suspected that the kind old gentleman had now lent
the wagon to that most famous of all modern criminals, Three Sevens,
the new “Napoleon of the Underworld.”
But while the sun was still red in the trees, Craig, to the music of
the jingling bells--music of the bygone clean and frosty days and
nights of his boyhood--discovered the house he had been looking for.
Bud Gaspell was there, as Craig could tell from the blue smoke that
streaked up from the chimney. He drew a long breath.
He had come to the first debt set down in the red ledger. What would
the payment be?
CHAPTER IX
OLD RAGS!
There were a scattered score of buildings in the neighborhood, most
of them like the one to which he had been directed, dilapidated
cottages once put up by a communistic colony of intellectual
insurgents against the general scheme of things. Long since, the
intellectuals had disappeared. Their property--which they disclaimed,
anyway--had gradually become the home of insurgents of another
strain, anarchists, mostly, enemies of society all.
A queer place for a junk dealer to come to, as Craig guessed. He
looked neither to the right nor the left as the old horse drew his
cart up the rutty road into the settlement, but he knew that he was
watched. He also knew as well as if some one had told him so that
not without guile would he ever be able to bring Bud Gaspell away
from here. Bud also had fame to some extent, also money, and also,
therefore, friends who would be willing to take a chance on his
account.
“Old rags!”
Craig let out his call as he halted the old horse in front of the
little frame cottage he had come to find.
He waited an interval. He got down from his cart. The horse nodded,
flicked a fly, prepared to drowse. There was no danger of a runaway.
Craig went around to the back door of the cottage. He knocked three
times.
There was no answer from within. He dared not wait too long. He knew
that there was a tunnel from the cellar for a quick escape in case of
surprise.
“Any old rags?”
He would hate to have Bud get away from him now, with George
Washington and Solly Wells waiting for him in their own hiding place
twenty miles away.
Then the door opened. Without waiting, Craig slipped through.
Neither did Craig wait, once he was inside. There was just time for
the tenant of the cottage to get out a gasp, for Craig had drawn as
he entered. He found himself facing a blurred figure in the sudden
twilight as he kicked the door shut back of him. The blurred figure
resolved itself into that of a man who might have been an overgrown
baboon--not very tall, hunched shoulders, but thin through the waist,
agile and strong--Bud Gaspell, all right.
“What in the----” Bud began.
“Put ’em up. We’ll talk later.”
Craig stuck out his left hand cautiously, as Bud raised his own
hands. Bud had a dirk in a sheath at his belt. Craig took this.
Bud would also have a gun somewhere. Bud had been edging backward,
inch by inch. And Craig had never ceased to strain his ears. There
had been no way of telling, thus far, whether Bud had been keeping
bachelor hall or not.
A draft, a badly balanced pan, a jumping rat--it must have been one
of these things--caused a clicking sound off to one side. At the
same time, Bud Gaspell let go his pent-up muscles as he might have
released a spring. In a moment he and Craig were locked.
Bud had caught Craig’s gun hand under his left arm. At the same time,
Bud had circled his right arm about Craig’s neck, got a grip on
Craig’s chin. They went down in a heap, with a softly solid chug,
like the fall of a single tightly loaded sack of wheat or flour.
Then, silence for a while, as if both were listening for something,
then a whimpering of breath and complaining speech.
It wasn’t a pretty fight. There was scarcely anything to see. No
favorite describer of prize fights, no medaled war correspondent,
could have made much of it.
But to one who would have known all the facts of the fight, this very
static quality of the struggle would have added to the interest of
it. It was like one of those struggles so common elsewhere in nature
where two antagonistic growths meet and fight to the death--the
strangling liana and the jungle tree, the starfish and the oyster,
the king snake and the diamondback. This fight also was silent,
deadly, and possibly as important to the final evolution of the
world, a part of the same endless struggle for the survival of the
fittest.
Which was the fittest here? No telling. Nature and man have different
standards, apparently. Nature favors the weeds, man the wheat; nature
the wolf, man the hound.
With that twisting, neck-breaking grip that Gaspell had on Craig’s
neck and jaw, a calm observer--had there been one--would have said
that the odds favored Gaspell. Craig was helpless. He couldn’t even
kick, for the train robber had locked his legs into Craig’s with the
same sort of a bone-cracking effort.
But in Craig’s mind there was no doubt. He couldn’t lose. He was in
the right. Consciously, or unconsciously, there poured into his heart
a knowledge and a purpose that Gaspell couldn’t have known. There
was Joan Gracie back there in the outside world. The world was new.
The world was to be his, Craig’s, and all that it contained. With a
perfect sureness of what the result would be, Craig had shoved his
left fist up between himself and Gaspell.
It was like trying to force his fist between two logs in a jam. But
his fist won a little way, a little way more.
Silence, all this time, except for that occasional whimper--from
which one of them probably neither of them knew--for the working
knowledge of each of them was concentrated in this small compass of
their two bodies.
Then Craig’s fist had reached Gaspell’s chin. It kept pushing. It
went another inch, yet another inch.
Craig was still confident even when he discovered that he could no
longer breathe, when he felt that his blood had become a boiling
torrent in his head. He felt a certain confidence even when he
guessed that it might be like this that he was going to die. For,
after all, what did it matter whether he died or not so long as he
was doing what was right? And then, as swiftly as possible the shock
of death itself might have come to him, he was aware that Gaspell’s
hold on his neck was relaxing and that his own fist was still pushing
up--and back--under Gaspell’s jaw. And straightway it occurred to
Craig that the result of the battle could never have been in doubt at
all--not in the least.
With no great relaxing of the tension, he worked his arm slowly from
under Gaspell’s arm. But there was no occasion either to strike or
shoot. Craig saw that he had fought better than he knew. Perhaps
there was an inspiration in fighting--as there was, or as there was
reported to be, in the writing of great songs. Anyway, he saw it
now--he had been pressing, not Gaspell’s chin so much as Gaspell’s
throat, the vital cartilage of his Adam’s apple.
Thus, in the brief time that the fight had lasted, Gaspell’s thick
and hairy hawser that moored him to the shores of life had been
reduced to a single, fragile thread.
Those furtive neighbors of Gaspell’s had heard no sound. Presently
they had seen the junk dealer come from the cottage alone. He led
his old horse and cart with no great haste around to the back of the
cottage. Again he entered. When he emerged the next time, it was with
something wrapped in burlap--a staggering load--one that might have
been the body of a man, or a dozen mail pouches done into a package,
or nothing at all but a mattress.
It was evident that nothing had happened--nothing of consequence. The
smoke still rose peacefully from the chimney. And Gaspell was not the
man to receive visitors unless he cared to.
They suspected nothing amiss on the following day, when the chimney
showed no smoke, nor later, when it gradually became known by the
underground telegraph that served them for much of their social
interchange that Gaspell had departed.
Neighbors were continually drifting away like that. It wasn’t
considered unneighborly that he hadn’t said good-by.
But, in the meantime, Craig had joined Solly Wells and the black
deputy in the woods where he had left them. And then, there began one
of the strangest treks in the history of any men. For Craig held on