Three sevens A detective story
to the conversation. There were sleeping rooms upstairs that could
be reached by a flight of stairs from the room itself. The windows
of most of these rooms were convenient to the houses next door.
Underneath, there was a cellar, also available through an interior
stairway, but with a semisecret exit through an adjoining cellar and
thence into a vacant lot.
“It’s a neat little dump,” said one of the speakers ironically, with
a glance for the squalor about him.
He was rather a dandified youth, dark and well barbered; but
dandified only according to certain standards. The new cap he wore
was pressed down too close to his ears. His necktie, also new, was
green and purple.
The man across the table from him was not so neat, although the
clothing he wore still had the creases of the store it had come
from. It was the man’s face, though, that would have kept almost any
one from remarking what he wore--a face that was white, exceedingly
bitter. It was the face of a monkey that had been bleached and
otherwise mistreated.
“It’s better’n stir,” protested monkey-face, getting the other’s
irony. “And how in hell am I goin’ to change it wit’ the bulls and
the stools of the whole world layin’ fer me?”
The other brought from his pocket a paper which he carefully unfolded
and flattened on the table. The paper was a poster. It was headed
“$300 REWARD.” Then there were a pair of portraits, full face and
profile. Under this was the information that the portraits were those
of Edward Rogers, alias Trick O’Ray, safe blower, escaped from San
Pedro, et cetera, et cetera.
The other compared the portraits with the face of the man opposite
him. He refolded the paper complacently.
“He thought of that, too, Trick,” said he.
“Who?”
“Three Sevens!”
“Was it him that sent you?”
“Who else? He says to me: ‘There’s only two birds in the country that
I’ll trust with this job. One of ’em’s Eddie Yarmouth, and he’s still
in stir out in old San Pedro,’ he says. ‘The other’s Trick O’Ray.’
Get me?”
“It’s all right fer you to talk, Mike,” said Trick, with a gust of
temperament. “But you seen for yourself.” He was referring to the
poster.
“’At’s what I’m telling you, Tricky. Three Sevens, he says, ‘Bring
Trick a fake birthmark, bring him some woman clothes--some of
Violet’s’, he says. ‘She won’t need her old ones any more.’”
“For the love of----”
Trick had suddenly clenched, not his fist, but his whole body. A
spasm of black passion came into his face.
“What?” he whispered.
“I thought you knew,” said Mike.
“What?”
“Everybody’s wise.”
“Wise _me_!”
“About Violet’s takin’ up with Benny Jarvis.”
“Him!”
“Sure, he comes to Chicago, sees her. Mebbe he don’t know she’s
yours.”
“Cut it!” said Trick hoarsely. “He was my pal in San Pedro.”
“What’s the answer?”
“I’m comin’ to Chi to kill him.”
“But first,” said Mike, “you’ll turn this job. What use’ll Violet be
to you, anyhow, if you’re broke?”
* * * * *
By a coincidence which was not strange if all the facts were
known--Chicago had become the magnetic pole for yet another late
dweller in San Pedro, within the same week. The thing befell when the
steamer _Chihuahua_, from Vera Cruz, had barely made her berth in the
North River, New York.
A small messenger boy beat the first ship-news reporter up the
gangplank and began to bark a name. He didn’t pronounce it very well:
“Seenyore Edwardo Cortinnys Y. Ottero!”
A tall and slender man with classic features and a black beard who
had already joined the line of passengers waiting to leave the boat
called the boy.
“I am,” he said, with a slow and precise English, “Señor Cortinez.”
“Seenyore Edwardo----” the boy began again, studying the address.
“Si, Señor Eduardo Cortinez y Otero!”
“Sign here,” said the boy.
The tall man with the black beard made a mark on the book that might
have been a signature or not, staggered the boy with the gift of a
Mexican peso which later turned out to be bad, gave a glance about
him, opened his message, and read it at a glance.
It took him but a glance to read it, for the message consisted of but
two words, and one of these words was presumably the signature:
Official Max.
The message must have been clear, though, as well as brief. As
soon as the gentleman of the black beard had read it he crumpled
it into a tight ball. He dropped it into the muddy, churning water
between ship and piling. He did this casually, one would have said
absent-mindedly; but, at the same time, his eyes were flicking hither
and yon, and the muscles of his cheek were twitching, even as a cat’s
tail twitches at a moment of high tension.
Fear also can serve as a magnetic force, as much as love, or greed,
or jealousy.
The recent Count Wolf could have attested to that. Max was to have
met him here in New York. And there must have been a reason, good and
sufficient, why Max should have wired him from Chicago. As a matter
of fact, the reason was amply stated in that one word: “Official.”
In the vocabulary of both Max and the count, otherwise Señor Eduardo
Cortinez y Otero, that one word meant police, Federal agents, judges,
prison.
Count Wolf had had enough of “official” for a while. He was going
to Chicago as swiftly as he could. He prayed heaven--or hell--that
nothing should delay him.
As a matter of fact, all these men--Leamy, Trick O’Ray, Ben Jarvis,
and now Count Wolf, were fleeing as lovers elect to keep some mystic
rendezvous. Always it happens like that in the affairs of men.
CHAPTER XXI
PARLEY
That first Sunday out of Fairfield, Craig had earned his dinner by
pumping the organ in that church where he had slept--making it a
night and a day to recall his stern upbringing, and awaken the faith
of his ancestors.
After that, he had struck north, for no other reason than that he
knew that from Chicago came Ben Jarvis, and that Ben’s name was next
in that red ledger of his. He would have to take Ben. But his plans
were vague.
They were, until he came upon the deserted section of a Chicago
newspaper--part of a Sunday edition--and found therein two pages
devoted to himself. Three Sevens! Napoleon of the Underworld! He was
becoming legendary now. There was not only a lurid, but fascinating,
story of the great San Pedro revolution, and a corresponding account
of what had happened in Fairhaven, but all sorts of crimes and orgies
had been attributed to him as well.
He was reported to have broken the heart of an heiress in New York.
He was supposed to be the real brains back of a certain big bank
robbery in New Orleans. He owed his immunity not only to his own
unfailing wit and courage. An army of lesser crooks were ever at his
beck and call.
Craig didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. There was one thing,
though, that he had salvaged from the wreck of his career in college,
and that was a rudimentary knowledge of how to think--how to round
up a problem and get it started as a first step in its solution. He
did this now. Here was the problem: To use this fame of his to the
squaring of the red ledger.
His mind was like a spider, working day and night, spinning on a web
the design of which he had no preknowledge, and yet with the spider’s
persistence--with something also, had he only known it, of the
spider’s close adhesion to some universal law.
Thinking, perpetually thinking!
It was like the thinking he had done immediately after his disgrace
in college, again when he had permitted himself to be condemned
for another’s crime, again when he was in the dark cell. From one
dark cell he had merely escaped into a bigger one. The bigger dark
cell was composed of these present circumstances in which he found
himself. But, out of this cell also he would think his way and work
his way to the final freedom.
There were thoughts like this in his mind one afternoon while he was
piling cordwood in a wood yard far out in the outskirts of Chicago.
It was a large yard, covering a couple of acres, surrounded by a
board fence, with an office and a wide gate at one corner of it. The
place had seemed so open and safe, the work of a kind calling for
so little mental effort, and the world in general so friendly and
peaceful, that he had let himself go in his thinking altogether.
He was so occupied with the spinning of his mind that he never
noticed that a small and muddy auto had arrived at the gate of the
wood yard, that a man had got down from it, and that this man was
ex-Warden Green of San Pedro. The ex-warden had gone into the office.
“Why, let’s see,” said the proprietor of the place. “Yes, there was
a fellow I hired this morning that answers your description.”
The two of them had gone to the door.
“There he is. What did you say he’s wanted for?”
Green didn’t say. There was a dance of death inside of him, but his
exterior was stolid enough--big, bearded. He looked across the yard
shimmering in the June sunshine. There was the man who had shackled
him, made him the laughingstock of the country. He drew back.
Finally he went out to the muddy little auto and got a sawed-off
shotgun.
“You ain’t going to shoot him, are you?” demanded the proprietor of
the yard.
“Not unless I have to.”
“But you can’t shoot a man like that.”
“I’ve got a license and a warrant,” said Green. “He’ll come, all
right. Don’t you worry about that. But I haven’t followed him, foot
by foot, all the way from Fairhaven to let him get away from me now.”
Craig, still busy with his thought, turned a corner of the woodpile
on which he was working. As he did so, he was almost knocked from his
feet by a thrust of steel against his breast.
“Don’t move!”
He saw the double muzzle of the shotgun. Those black holes were
ready to spout fire. He saw Green looming just back of the gun.
It was Green who had spoken. Green wasn’t so stolid any more. The
hands that held the gun had a tremor in them, but it was the tremor
of restraint. The hammers of the gun were back. There was a finger
on the triggers. Just a little pressure, and Green would have that
vindication he was panting for.
Curious; but, even so, Craig was aware that his brain was spinning
again--placidly, as if aware that even this was part of the accepted
plan.
“If you shoot me,” said Craig softly, as if speaking with the
internal voice of his mind, “you’ll shoot an innocent man.”
“Stick ’em up,” said Green.
Craig did so, slowly, not very high. He heard voices and a sound of
running. In a couple of minutes there was going to be an audience. He
was willing. Green was the man to shoot him here back of the woodpile
so long as they were alone. He was not the man, perhaps, to do it if
there were others there to see.
“Green, you’re a fool,” said Craig.
The fire blazed in the other’s eyes. He mouthed an epithet through
his beard, as if to justify in his own mind the act he secretly
meditated.
“The truth will come out.”
“You’re damn right!”
“About--some one--dear to you.”
“I’ll make you keep your trap shut, you----”
“And you’ll wish you’d shot yourself instead. Do you know----”
“Turn round, and keep your hands up!”
“--why I went to prison?”
“Yes.”
“Ask your soul if you’re certain.”
There was no telling what response may have come back to Green from
his soul. It was something that caused his hand to shake. He was
remembering, moreover, in this connection, certain queer remarks,
certain unforgettable hints, that convict No. 3777 had dropped that
day of the great delivery. Curiosity, secret dread--these things
existed in the soul of Green as much as, and maybe a trifle more,
than they exist in the souls of most men who go up and down the earth.