Three sevens A detective story
“Felons are people, Gary,” she answered. “I dread them, and hate
what they represent as much as you do. Still, you can’t generalize.”
She may have colored slightly. Her eyes failed to meet his.
“You know,” said Lee, “that there is nothing under heaven that I
wouldn’t do on your account, Joan. No risk that you could ask me to
take would be too great.”
“I’m grateful to you, Gary,” said Joan.
“I’m not referring, therefore, to anything that might have happened
to me if I’d been caught helping that convict to escape. It’s the
fact that you’d be willing to run such a risk, submit others to the
risk--your father, your Aunt Katherine. No convict is worth it--not
all the felons in the State.”
“I thought you said you were interested in reform.”
“I am.”
“This was humanitarian.”
“That’s the danger of this sort of stuff,” said Lee. “You let your
sympathies run away with you.”
“He was ready to sacrifice himself on our account--give up his own
chances of escape.”
“Noble, I’ll admit.”
“And undo the wrong he had committed. He didn’t intend to let the bad
ones out, and he’s promised to bring them back.”
Lee was torn between scorn and pity, anger and desire.
“I did what you wanted me to,” he said. “I even went so far as not to
look at him when it was getting light. I couldn’t tell him now from
Adam. I wouldn’t know him if I met him in the street. I did all this
on your account when my every instinct was to arrest him myself, or,
at least, so fix his face in my mind that I could identify him and do
my part as a citizen and an officer of the court--help put him back
where he belongs.”
“I’m sorry--sorry!” said Joan.
“Then, marry me,” said Lee.
Her eyes finally met his.
“You said you wouldn’t ask me again unless----”
“You gave me some sign,” said Lee, with concentrated feeling. “Wasn’t
this thing sign enough? Your honor and mine are at stake. They’ll
arrest this cur. He’ll blab--tell what he knows--try to blackmail us
both.”
She met him squarely.
“I don’t believe it.”
“Joan, I’m a lawyer. I know these vermin.”
“Don’t! Don’t!” she said. “It isn’t fair. It isn’t just.”
“Marry me,” he whispered, with a touch of desperation.
She looked at him in silence. Almost in silence he left her.
There was a danger in this situation which neither Gary Lee nor
Joan Gracie had mentioned, but which both had recognized in their
several ways. They had not mentioned it, although, in many respects,
that same degree of almost brutal frankness existed between them as
often exists between brother and sister. Like brother and sister,
they were of the same caste, had known each other intimately since
childhood--had squabbled, played, studied together, gone to the same
parties.
That was in Clear Rapids, the principal city of the State, where
Joan’s mother herself had passed her girlhood. Then, when Mrs.
Gracie died, Major Gracie had returned to the home of his own youth,
Fairhaven, near which place Aunt Katherine Middleton had her home.
The danger was this:
Gary Lee must have things his own way. He had always been like that.
Generous, courtly, as long as his own will wasn’t interfered with, he
could be as ruthless as a tiger when things went wrong.
A little strain of madness, perhaps, such as all of us are reported
to possess--and, if the truth were known, the only thing that makes
life worth living, perhaps. It’s like the yeast, bad in itself, a
fungus, a ferment, that yet makes bread palatable; or the strain of
madness that makes the poet, or the general, or the savant who passes
a lifetime looking at bugs and worms.
When Lee read in the Clear Rapids _Sentinel_, incidental to the other
news that was still coming out of San Pedro, that Miss Joan Gracie
had returned to her home in Fairhaven, he felt a familiar surge of
heat in the region of his heart. It was a feeling he had known ever
since he could remember--when he was a mere infant, and the nurse
wouldn’t give him a toy, when he was a cub, and they wouldn’t let him
eat another piece of cake, when he was an adolescent and some girl or
other, Joan as often as not, showed preference for a rival.
There entered Lee’s mind a dark thought that this was a case
of rivalry now, that there actually was a rivalry between
himself--himself, Gary Lee!--and this felon.
But he conquered the thought, to some extent. Also, to some extent
he conquered that feeling of heat in the region of his heart. He was
aware of his weakness. As he grew older he had learned, as men must,
each year a little more self-control.
Yet there was no denying it. There was Joan in Fairhaven. Five miles,
not more, from Fairhaven was the cottage to which he himself had
carried that man in the dark of the night. His hand trembled a little
as he picked up the telephone from his office desk. He ordered his
car. His stenographer looked at him with a touch of concern.
“You’re to attend a directors’ meeting at two thirty.”
“I can’t be there. Tell ’em so.”
“You were to see Mr. Strouthers at----”
“Telephone him not to come.”
“Will you sign your letters?”
“Hold them,” said Lee. “I’m called to Fairhaven. Put everything off
until to-morrow.”
He descended to the street. The garage was near by. There was never
any delay when he ordered his car. The car rolled up to meet him at
the curb. He changed his hat for a cap, drew on a pair of driving
gloves, dismissed the chauffeur. It always helped him a lot, in a
mood like this, to drive as few chauffeurs would or could have driven.
He was standing there with his hand on the door of the car, when a
newspaper man whom Lee knew well happened along.
“Hello, Gary,” said the journalist. “Big news.”
“Hello, Jack,” and Gary, indifferent, entered the car.
“They’ve got him,” said the newspaper man.
“Who?”
“Three Sevens, the fellow----”
“They’ve what?”
“Just got the tip at the office. They caught the fellow who put over
the big play at San Pedro.”
“Are you sure?”
“We’re never sure till we know, but we got the tip from one of our
own men. Phoned over from Fairhaven----”
Lee had thrown in the clutch, was on his way.
* * * * *
Major Gracie, at San Pedro, had got word also almost as soon as any
one that there were matters of interest to him under way over there
in the direction of his home. First that a farmer had recognized one
of the escaped convicts by the name of Gosse. Three hundred dollars’
reward, in this case, and the informant wanted to register his claim
for all that was coming to him. Then another informant telephoned.
Next came a claim by telegram. After that, the _Sentinel_ sent word
that it was not Gosse who had been seen, but Masters, the ringleader
of the big escape.
The major had sent word to his daughter to their home in Fairhaven.
It wasn’t a measure of discipline, exactly, but he felt sure that she
had been getting a trifle too much of this prison atmosphere lately.
She was too earnest, too devoted to her work as his secretary and
mentor.
There crinkled into his thought a crooked little flash of light--like
remote lightning, faint and devoid of thunder as yet, but possibly
prophetic of storm.
Did Joan have anything to do with this? He also ordered his car, was
off for Fairhaven.
Joan Gracie herself also had heard the news. It had been a day of
news.
First of all, her aunt had telephoned her, as she did daily. Aunt
Katherine was the volunteer probation officer of this convict she had
harbored at Joan’s request. She understood Joan almost better than
any one did. Joan had acted on impulse. Joan had been sure that her
impulse was right. But, since then, the girl had begun to worry.
“La, he’s all right. I’ll ship him off, as soon’s you say--_if_ he’ll
wait that long.”
Every day since Joan’s Return to Fairhaven Aunt Katherine had
telephoned things like that, except when Aunt Katherine was coming
to town, as she did two or three times a week, in the suburban bus.
It was the old lady who was furnishing the strength required by the
situation now, and there was also a grim humor in the situation that
had made its appeal to Aunt Katherine’s bitter but wholesome nature.
So far as she knew she had never harmed a human being in the course
of her long life, yet now she had become a lawbreaker by harboring an
escaped convict. The whole country was interested in the discovery
of a famous bad man. She alone was seeing him daily and finding him
gentle and good. There was a thousand dollars’ reward out for his
arrest. She had him.
But she wouldn’t let Joan come to her house, not while Craig was
there. Ah, no! People talk. She herself was safe from scandal.
Anyway, she was too old to mind any more. But not so, where a young
girl was concerned, Joan above all.
Then, at last, this day, after those earlier rumors of a bandit
chase through the woods north of town, there came a call from Aunt
Katherine for Joan to come out. No explanation--everything all right.
Joan met a friend at the gate, daughter of some county official or
other, and hence in touch with the courthouse.
“Have you heard!” she cried. “They say they’ve caught that famous
bandit--Masters----”
“Where?”
“Out near your Aunt Katherine’s.”
CHAPTER XVII
GATHERING STORM
Meantime that hunt through the woods for that king of big-game
animals, man himself!
The rumors that had thus far spread out as far as Clear Rapids and
San Pedro, and farther yet, as a matter of fact, for this developing
event in the neighborhood of Fairhaven was the news of the day for
the country at large, were like lions of magnetic attraction, an
attraction that ran straight to the innermost fibers of half the men
who heard the reports, calling them to drop other things, awakening
inside of them old atavisms of the chase and war. A man hunt was on.
It was free for every one. Grab a pitchfork or a gun.
That nucleus of a mob, with the ex-warden of San Pedro at its head,
was growing steadily.
A man in a Norman runabout saw a farmer with a gun on the highway and
asked him what was going on. The farmer told him. The Norman became
the chariot of a herald.
The driver of the rural bus carried the news into Fairhaven, and
there the word spread like a grass fire.
“Got him cornered!”
“Who?”
“Masters, of San Pedro.”
“Where?”
“Right outside of town--Dingledine Woods!”
There had already been a report that one of the escaped convicts
of San Pedro had been seen--Harry, the Goose--but this earlier
report merely went to strengthen the later one. Harry, the Goose,
was forgotten. No one had ever heard of him, anyway. Masters was the
man--the Napoleon of the Underworld!
“They got him cornered!”
“Ain’t got him yet. Bet he puts up a battle!”
There was a drift out of town by all who could go--the call of
excitement, the promptings of greed; but, most of all, the old lust
of the chase, the man hunt.
As a thousand little events go into the fabrication of the big event,
so the thousand little rumors swell the big rumor. It was that way
now. Two men shot! Got him in a barn--goin’ to set fire to it!
Murdered an old woman!
Loafers, day workers, high-school boys, farmers, politicians,
ex-deputy sheriffs; all the hands of a suburban paper mill, the
working force of a stone quarry; all the spectators and some of the
players from an amateur baseball game.
Here and there some one fired a gun--with what intent only himself
might know--just nervousness, most likely, but successful always
in starting a new swirl of movement, a new drift, a fresh batch of
rumors. The chase was at its height when it was added to by the
strangers and notables from other villages and towns.