Three sevens A detective story
recognized quickly enough--Harry, the Goose, and the organist
Zabrewski. Great guns! What was this that Masters was putting over
now? Even in these thunderous seconds he could see that, in some way,
Masters, the escaped convict, was really at the head of the mob, the
leader of it. It wasn’t he at all that the mob meant when it chanted
death. And the ex-warden began to vociferate the news.
It was almost sundown. The mob was facing west. Such light as there
was came slanting and red from straight ahead.
“Halt!” shouted Craig, his mind suddenly clear.
The command was repeated by the squirrel hunter and his friends who
were the chief guardians of Harry, the Goose, and Zabrewski.
“Hold up!” “Stop yer shovin!” “Plenty of time, boys!”
Those at the head of the disordered procession were holding back.
Even the noisy ones were aware that a crisis impended, stopped
yelling, began to call for silence.
Craig spoke rapidly to those about him.
“If you want to save your reward, you’ve got to save these men.”
He spoke with authority. There was no time for argument. He spoke
to Harry and Zabrewski. They had been half dead, but his words
galvanized them like hot needles:
“Beat it straight ahead!”
They stumbled forward in a shambling run--the two of them.
Zabrewski fell. He was on his feet again.
Twenty policemen, with nightsticks, sprang forward as the mob gave a
surge.
Some one, on the mob side, fired a wild shot, and this brought in the
trail of it a swishing roar and a chaotic babble of voices in another
key as the firemen answered the impromptu signal and turned the water
on.
Craig was no longer one of the mob surge. He was a man again, with
mastery of his mind, and his mind master of the circumstances that
whirled and changed around him. His mind was clear. It perceived
many things--that Zabrewski and Harry, the Goose, had been taken in
charge by Major Gracie’s forces, and that they were safe. Back of
him in the street through which he had just passed, the mob was like
a clay bank when attacked under hydraulic pressure. Joan Gracie had
disappeared from the window where he had seen her.
He fought. A flat and beefy face as full of rage as a Chinese mask
appeared in front of him. He jabbed his fist into it. He saw two
straining figures locked together in front of him. He pushed them
over.
He had instinctively turned to the right, in the direction of
that vision of his. There was a row of brick business buildings
there--stores on the ground floor, and offices above. Before he was
at the curb, he saw that all doors were closed, that there was likely
to be no escape in this direction. But neither was there escape back
of him, nor up the street, nor down the street.
He plunged against a wooden door--one of two that closed an entrance
way to an office building. Locked! And a roar just back of him.
“It’s him himself!” the voice of ex-Warden Green.
Then the door opened. Craig sprang inside and slammed it shut.
He shoved the bolt back into place, he even listened for some
fraction of a second before he turned. There at the side of him in
the dim light of the hall he saw her as if he had known that she
would be there, as if this were an appointed rendezvous.
She stood with her back against the wall, as if she were glad of the
wall’s support. Seen in this comparative darkness of the hallway, she
was little more than a glimmer of white and a pair of eyes. So, at
any rate, she appeared to Craig--unreal, unearthly, and yet a fact as
unshakable as the floor beneath his feet.
“Look out! He’s armed!” This from outside, muffled by the closed
doors.
Craig heard the words, but he only heard them with the surface of
his brain, so to speak. And the surface of his brain was telling him
that there wasn’t a moment to lose, that already some elements of the
mob and of the force that had been opposed to the mob were uniting
against him, would soon be storming this fragile fortress of his.
But he paused.
“You!” he whispered.
There was a look in the girl’s eyes of fright, relief, of something
else. It was like a look of pure emotion that could be divided into
all the elements of feeling, that embraced them all.
“Hurry,” she whispered.
She was no longer the masterly creature she had appeared that day in
San Pedro. She was more like a child. But if she was like a child,
so was Craig. He himself felt that way--a rush of carelessness,
happiness, such as he had not experienced since his remotest past.
It was a mood that came and was gone in a second. And what had
happened during this second? It was a question that was to haunt
pretty much the remainder of his life.
His memory of it was to remain expansive and complex, yet oddly
dreamlike, a jumble of impressions.
Then, Joan was running up the stairs to that office where she had
left her aunt, and Craig himself was ghosting back through the hall,
knowing that there was a way out, back there, and an alley that would
bring him to an unfrequented street, but with this other shred of
information in his brain overriding all other information, and as
necessary to his life:
He had kissed her!
He hurried, but he was as indifferent to the mob he had put behind
him, and all its various elements--police, Green, lynchers--as if he
had been a spirit and they with no power over him whatsoever. They
didn’t belong to his order. They were of a different and inferior
race.
It must have been Joan who had told him about the alley and the
street beyond, but he couldn’t remember her having told him. He
merely knew what to expect. That was all. He hurried through the
alley. He came to the street. He slanted across this--fast enough,
but not too fast to arouse suspicion--and came to an unfenced area of
unimproved land that had been used, betimes, as a ball field.
Every one seemed to be absent, as if this part of the town were
under a spell. Every one had hurried away, apparently, to watch the
excitement, the noises of which still reached him, indistinct and
confused. And beyond the ball field he saw a freight train trundling
into speed.
While this was taking place, Joan Gracie must, herself, have
experienced some such thing as had befallen the spirit of Daniel
Craig.
She fled up the stairs. At the head of the stairs, she stood for a
moment with her hand on her heart. She ran forward to the door of
the office she had quitted when instinct told her that Craig was
coming this way. At the door of the office she stopped again. She was
frightened--not frightened so much as touched with awe; and in her
awe there was a riot of something strangely like joy.
She entered the office, and there was no sign that any one had
noticed that she had been missing. They were all banked about the
windows. No one turned to look at her, not even her Aunt Katherine.
She was grateful. She guiltily told herself that not even did it
matter much that her own father was out there in the crowded and
disordered street.
As for Craig, he was still on the freight train when the night came
on, and he was rolling through a country that was strange to him.
A brakeman passed along the running board at the top of the cars, and
when he was safely gone, Craig came up from the bumpers and sat there
and looked up. He was like a prophet on a mountaintop, this mountain
rumbling along by some special magic. But he looked at the stars as
any prophet may have looked at them--with that feeling of prophecy
that comes to all men when out in the night alone.
One of the slowly accumulated heritages of the human race, no doubt,
this power to draw consolation and wisdom from nocturnal solitude.
To this men have always fled when they needed it most; or have been
driven to it even when they themselves didn’t recognize the healing
value of it. Back through the ages the stars have looked down on them
all--the dying warriors, the man lost in the desert, the drunkard
reeling home, the slave in the canebrake, the fugitive prince.
Toward dawn, the train was going through a region of flat pine woods,
and the weather had changed. It was coming on to rain. Faintly in the
distance Craig saw a white building that he took to be a schoolhouse.
This dawning day was Saturday, he reflected, and so the building
would give him shelter and seclusion. He was almost dead with fatigue.
He let himself off the train. He was rather more satisfied than not
when he discovered that his building was a church. He tried the door.
It was unlocked. The place was in keeping with his mood.
The escape, the kiss, the resolves and the hopes that these had
inspired, were the mental elements of another sort of dawn.
CHAPTER XX
THE MAGNET
A stout man, rather flabby and down at the heel, had been standing
for some time in the Cincinnati post office deeply interested,
apparently, in his copy of the _Times Star_. Also he appeared to be
rather nearsighted, to judge by the way he held his paper. Only some
one close to him would have seen that he wasn’t reading the paper at
all, and that his eyes, anything but nearsighted, watched furtively
all who came and went at the window marked General Delivery.
The day was hot. The post office was airless. Now and then a bead of
sweat rolled down the flabby man’s face. Now and then a fly sought,
and found a landing place on his stubbly cheek. He let the sweat
roll. He let the fly hum and forage.
An old colored mammy of the “befo’-de-wah” type waddled past the
window, then an anæmic, half-grown girl, and an Italian laborer.
These gone, the flabby man with the newspaper cast a final glance
about the room. No one visible. He drew a long breath. He stepped up
to the window with alacrity.
He spoke a name. The clerk sifted through a handful of letters,
tossed one of these aside.
“Where were you expecting it from?”
“Chicago.”
The clerk shoved the letter through the window, turned his back. The
flabby man also turned, slowly. He was still the only one in the
neighborhood of the wicket. He had chosen the right time.
He was safe in the room of a small office of the neighborhood before
he opened his mail. The envelope, addressed “James R. Henderson,”
contained a brief note with no address at all. It read:
Fishing good and plenty of bait at the old grounds.
The flabby man read this with great satisfaction. With an even
greater satisfaction, however, he read an inclosure from the same
envelope. This was a newspaper clipping with a San Francisco date
line. It stated that the body of a man found in the harbor there had
been identified as that of Taylor Leamy, recently escaped from San
Pedro Prison, and once known as the king of the slick engineers, one
of the most notorious mining swindlers the country had ever known.
The flabby man had lost some of his flabbiness when he had completed
his reading. He closed his eyes. He raised his face with a beatific
smile.
“Well, well, well,” he droned. “I feel pretty chipper for a drowned
man at that!”
His mood changed. He glanced about him at the sultry and meager
little office. One would have said that the office was personal. He
spat at it. His erstwhile flabby face took on a look of ferocious
triumph.
“Good night for you!” he gritted. “I’ll show ’em whether I’m dead or
not. Money! Suckers! A million dollars’ worth of stock! And Taylor
Leamy hisself again!”
* * * * *
About the same time that this monologue was in course of delivery,
there was a dialogue in progress in the back room of a saloon in
East St. Louis. It was a sordid place, where this dialogue was
staged--dank and dark, acrid with the effluvia of stale beer and
the smell of cold tobacco smoke--but it suited admirably the parties