Three sevens A detective story
about his being the “Napoleon of the Underworld.” There was an
underworld even along these river boats--in levee saloons and dance
halls, in show boats and shanty boats, on raft and barge and freight
deck, wherever the vagrants of the big river assembled. And in all
these places Craig found that he could be certain of both friendship
and honors by the simple announcement of his name, his prison name,
Three Sevens.
No one disputed him. Maybe there was that look about him that
advertised the fact that here was the man who had done all that had
been reported of Thomas Masters, late of San Pedro. Some one, filled
with river gin, tried to dispute it one night--it was in the bar of a
floating blind tiger--but they threw the heretic overboard, and Craig
himself was the only one who would rescue him.
This heretic was a small man, cross-eyed, given to grinning. He was
not one that Craig, or any man, would have looked to for gratitude.
Perhaps he meant no gratitude. Perhaps the service he rendered Craig
in return was altogether selfish.
But he told Craig about a new lumber camp over in the cypress of the
bayou country where labor was so precious and scarce, and the lumber
company so powerful, that the only thing a sheriff would arrest a man
for, over there, was the crime of leaving the job.
“How about the Federal marshals,” asked Craig, “and the detectives
and sheriffs from other States?”
“Settin’ around the company’s fence like buzzards,” said the
cross-eyed man. “They know the reservation’s full of their meat--men
from the chain gangs of a dozen States. The company treats ’em fine,
these officers. Likes to have ’em there. Keeps the boys on the job.
But, no sir! Let one of them Yankee marshals try to take a man away,
company’d leave him out in the woods as quick as it’d leave an
ordinary man who tried it.”
The cross-eyed man was headed for this place. As yet he didn’t say
why. But he had a skiff--he called it a pirogue--and knew the way. He
begged Craig to go along for company.
Craig accepted. Perhaps it was the fascination of Pahkaville that
was luring Craig’s friend. The little man talked about Pahkaville.
It appeared that Pahkaville was also part of the lumber company’s
domain--founded complete on a mud island far out in the deep swamp
of the cypress country, as a further inducement, no doubt, for labor
to come and remain. For it would take more than mere sheriffs and
marshals to keep men at the killing work of the cypress slashings
even at high pay, without other inducements.
It was late one night, when they had drifted and paddled all one day
through a forest that couldn’t have been wilder in De Soto’s day,
that they got their first glimmer of the lights of Pahkaville, far
off through the blue gloom of the water. A little later, there came
the faint strains of music--fiddle, drum, and guitar.
“Saturday night,” said the cross-eyed man. “I reckon they’re having a
ball.”
“And I reckon that’ll suit you?” said Craig.
“I reckon I won’t stop.”
“Stop now,” said Craig pointedly.
The little man sat motionless. They were on a rather broad stretch
of water. There glinted through Craig’s mind the odd thought that
perhaps this little man with the cross eyes was a detective after all.
“Who are you, anyway?” asked Craig softly.
“My real name is Sanders.”
“What’s your business?”
There was no use conducting a conversation like this without a show
of proper authority. Craig’s hand was at his side.
“I’m a paper hanger,” said Mr. Sanders. “I had a brother who was a
sheep-herder.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
There was a long pause. An owl hooted. Underneath this big sound,
like fireflies under the moon, there came the tinkle and drub of the
Pahkaville orchestra. It was to this accompaniment, and the even more
fitting accompaniment of the silence, that the little man spoke.
“Stranger, I’ll tell you. I ain’t prying into your business. If
you’re a detective, yourself, you can’t say I didn’t tell you what
the company’s apt to do to detectives that try to interfere with
their men. If you ain’t a detective--if you’re a man that’s had an
accident----”
“How do you mean?”
“--and are a man who has shed human blood--you can’t say I didn’t
tell you what a good place Pahkaville and the slashin’s are to hide
out in. No offense, stranger!”
“Go on.”
“Four years ago a man killed my brother, and I started out to kill
_him_. I didn’t have the nerve. Then this man got put in jail, and
I laid off. But last week I heard he had broke jail and come to
Pahkaville. When I saw you and heard you was lookin’ for this same
man, I ’lowed I’d turn the job of gettin’ him over to you. I brought
you to Pahkaville hoping you’d kill Sancho Red. I know it’s my own
sacred duty, but”--his teeth began to chatter--“I’ll tell you honest,
I’m skeert!”
“Well, well, well,” said Craig.
“Are you a detective?”
“Sort of.”
“And you _are_ after Sancho Red?”
“Yes.”
“Then kill him,” said Mr. Sanders, “before he kills you. Neither he
nor the company’ll ever let you arrest him otherwise nohow.”
“Mr. Sanders,” said Craig, “if I take this job, or the equivalent of
this job, off your hands, are you willing to help me some?”
The cross-eyed man raised his right hand in the blue gloom.
Those who knew Sancho Red best said that his mother was an Apache and
his father a Mexican. His looks supported this theory of descent,
granted his father was one of the big Mexicans--of which there are
not a few. Sancho was big. Nor was this bigness a mere matter of
height, although he was all of six feet. He was big of bone and
breadth. He had stupendous shoulders. His face was big, although when
you looked at it, or remembered it, you were chiefly impressed by his
small, glittering eyes and the extremely wide, cruelly curved mouth.
Also like the cottonmouth snake, it was in the nature of Sancho
neither to run nor to toil. His way was to bask, take things easy,
with no activity outside his restless, small eyes and the restless
small brain back of these eyes, until such time as a victim should
come his way. Then a blow--and gluttony--and more luxurious repose.
There was something peculiarly fitting in the fact that since coming
to the secretive kingdom of the Pahkaville Lumber Company he had
established a small gambling joint--with another and nimbler man to
operate it, himself to rule it and take the profits.
Pahkaville was what they call wide open. There were all sorts of
attractions there of a kind strong men hanker for. It was like what
must have been one of those old towns of the Caribbean, when the
Buccaneers were running things--all colors here and there, white
and yellow, tawny and black--a sprinkling of Chinese, Malays, and
Filipinos, from the Gulf Coast; Creoles, Spanish, French, and
Portuguese; blond squareheads from the big woods of the North, black
refugees from chain gangs and turpentine camps, white adventurers
waiting for some new Skagway to call them, and men like Sancho, drawn
to a place like this as are snakes to a water hole when the summer
droughts begin.
Craig looked Sancho over, without himself being seen. Craig had no
difficulty in lining up a job for himself. There was engineering
enough for a regiment of engineers out among the big trees of that
swamp--tracks to lay, cables to rig, these changing and extending
from day to day as the slashings bit deeper into the wet jungle. Each
night Craig came back to the spendthrift hilarity of Pahkaville,
joined the crowds in the “plaza,” the town’s one public square and
street. A primitive place as ever was--filled with primitive people,
man and woman--and Sancho Red in his element.
Sancho’s gambling joint was an open front shed, with a faro layout at
the rear. Back of this, in another shed, entirely closed, Sancho had
his personal den.
“Fire would drive him out,” said Craig to himself.
But fire also might drive all Pahkaville out as well. All the
buildings in it were built of raw lumber--most of it so filled with
turpentine that it would have burned in a rainstorm, almost. To avoid
fire, the company had long since abolished kerosene and lamps. There
was electric light for all who wanted it, and arc lamps hung from the
serpentine branches of the live oaks over the plaza at night.
There was not only an abundance of artificial light in this city of
darkness. There was no lack of police, either--here where outlaw
games and drink ran their course and outlaw men found shelter.
Nights particularly, Pahkaville was patrolled by the company’s own
police--men with a talent for killing, who prowled about, watchful
but restless like hungry cats.
One of these men had good-naturedly relieved Craig of his gun. It was
the night of Craig’s arrival. Mr. Sanders had no gun. They had left
their pirogue in a creek that ran around back of the island on which
Pahkaville was built.
“So no one’s apt to do any shooting around here,” said Craig.
The policeman smiled grimly. “If there’s any shootin’ to be done,”
said the policeman, “the company likes to do it itself. You see, we
don’t like to lose our hands.”
“Suppose a couple of the hands get unfriendly.”
“That does happen. Not often. We generally manage to keep order. We
don’t like to lose our men.”
“What’s to keep them from hurting each other with razors and things?”
“Nothing! Nothing! They do get at each other, now and then, with an
ax, or a cant hook, or a stick of wood. Only, we discourage it. We
try to keep every one good-natured. Fellow who starts anything like
that generally disappears before long.”
The policeman drifted away, lean and watchful, like a cat.
“We’ll have to be careful,” said Mr. Sanders.
“Mighty careful.”
“Even if we done somethin’ to Sancho, and they found it out----”
“They mustn’t find out,” said Craig. “The thing for you to do is to
forget what you’re here for. They’ll be glad to have you work in the
store. Both of us will sleep in the bunk house with the rest of the
men for a while, and we’ll eat in the mess house.”
“I ain’t aimin’ to find out,” said the little man apologetically,
“but what did you say was the name I’m to use in addressin’ you, sir?”
“My own name, Daniel Craig; and not ‘sir.’ We’re partners.”
The two of them fell into the life of this queer city of the woods
without attracting attention. Newcomers were not rare. Nor was it in
keeping with local etiquette to ask questions. The town drowsed by
day, flamed into life at night with the return of the swampers.
Each night Sancho sat impassive in the back of his den, while his
little black eyes flicked at all who came and went. Days, he slept
and ate. He had an inordinate capacity for food and sleep. He was
growing bigger.
It was in the daytime, while Sancho slept, that Craig and Mr. Sanders
finally took up their quarters in a new small cabin that had been
built for them beyond that of Sancho, right on the edge of the
island. Close under the cabin they had moored the pirogue that had
brought them here. Day by day they accumulated stores in their cabin
of a kind and quantity to last them a long sojourn in the woods, once
they should care to leave.
Sancho Red, himself, had not looked on this advent of a neighbor
without disfavor, but he was mollified when he saw Mr. Sanders and
learned that he was clerk in the company store.
He was more mollified yet, when Mr. Sanders let him know that there
were nights when there was as much as ten thousand dollars in the
company safe, and that he possessed the combination.
For things had been occurring to bother Sancho--things that he could
not understand, things which gave him a nostalgia for the arid hills
of his home range and the completer safety that the solitude of those
hills promised him. It was all very well here in the crowd for a