Three sevens A detective story
“Stallin’, are you?” demanded Green coarsely, and he forced his
laugh. “Turn round, you pup.”
“You’ll never laugh again,” said Craig, himself remembering what he
had said on a former occasion. “Murder--such black murder! When the
truth comes out.”
Was this fellow referring, somehow or other, to Amy? The man with the
shotgun wondered. Strength was dribbling from him as from a leaky
pail. But he summoned his strength into solider shape--something
frozen and cold, like ice.
But Craig himself was as an intelligence disembodied, all mind.
There had been a score of men at work in the yard, mostly about some
coal piles on the other side. A couple of these cautiously appeared
from around a woodpile back of Green. A teamster climbed on the pile
itself at the side of Craig.
“Keep ’em up, and turn round,” said Green.
“Murder,” Craig repeated, and didn’t move. The audience was growing.
He had spoken just now for the others.
“What’s this?” demanded the teamster on the woodpile.
“I’m an officer of the law,” said Green.
“Prove it,” said Craig.
He could see without looking that the teamster on the woodpile was
gripping a stick of cordwood. The teamster might have been as pure
as the driven snow, but, again, he himself might have served a
prison sentence. He was a type of man Craig recognized--impulsive,
whole-hearted, especially when it came to serving the underdog, brave
as a lion. Maybe the ex-warden of San Pedro also recognized the type.
“Men----” he began.
Right then the tension broke. There had been a slight unflexing of
the hand controlling the triggers. Craig struck--down! There was the
suspended flash of fire, a roar. But the charge had passed Craig’s
knee, kicked up chips and dust on the earth as he sprang back.
Even so, Green might have got him with the other barrel, but the
teamster banged down his stick of wood just as the gun roared again.
Then Green was snatching at his revolver.
Craig went. He took the fence. He followed the fence around to a
corner where he saw a couple of men running toward the wood yard from
a corner saloon. Up the unbuilt street he saw a policeman turn and
stare.
There was a path leading down through deep weeds to a belt of marsh
partly filled in with ashes and other débris. Craig went through the
weeds and looked back. He saw that others were scaling the fence and
looking about them. Before he could get out of sight, some one saw
him, let out a whoop.
He ran out across the filled-in land and plunged over the edge of it.
For a while he was following the slope of it. He couldn’t turn back.
He dared not try the bog. It looked too treacherous. But, at the same
time, from the sounds that reached him, he knew that the chase had
begun, and that some of his pursuers were headed to cut him off.
He took a chance and stepped out into the bog where it looked as if
it might be solid enough to hold him. The first step sent him down
into the mud almost to the knees, but he floundered on.
Now it was a little better, now it was worse. But with every step
he was losing seconds. He heard shouts not far back of him, then
something that sounded like a command.
There was a shot--a revolver shot, this time. But whether it was
Green or the policeman who was using him for a target he didn’t stop
to investigate. He struggled on.
That first shot had been sent high, most likely. He hadn’t heard the
bullet. He was hearing bullets now. Some of them plumped in the mud.
Some whined past his head. He gained a bit of ground that was solider
than that through which he had just passed. There was an old log of a
fallen tree. He crawled back of this for a breathing spell.
He saw that he wouldn’t have much farther to go before reaching the
edge of a muddy stream--whether river or drainage ditch, canal or
open sewer, he didn’t care. The stream was an ally.
Beyond the stream there was a level acreage of railroad tracks, these
covered with cars--freight cars and passenger cars. Once across the
stream and among those cars he would be like a mouse in a wheat field.
With only a glance and scarcely a thought for those back of and
to either side of him--they were all distant--he plunged on ahead
through the remainder of the morass. Again the bullets “plopped” or
whined. But there was only one thing that worried him, now, even for
a moment. It was the fear that the mud on the edge of the stream
would be so soft and the water so shallow that he wouldn’t have a
chance to swim.
Even this fear was no sooner flickering in his mind than it had
flickered out. On the bank of the stream nearest him was a derelict
barge. He gained this, slid out into deep water.
* * * * *
The papers carried a bit of this story also that evening. The stories
and the headlines differed with the different papers, but what was
in one was typical of them all--“Wild West Scene in Chicago Suburb!”
“Rube Sheriff Uses Shotgun!” “Masters, Famous Bandit, Swims to
Freedom!”
Craig read this and much else in the corner of a crowded saloon
well within the frontiers of the big town of the lakes. He had come
to Chicago on a criminal chase of his own. But now he knew that the
police of Chicago were looking for him. He himself had heard here and
there while on the road that here in Chicago were the favorite haunts
of other such men as Trick O’Ray, Ben Jarvis, and even the famous
swindler, Taylor Leamy.
But what were any of these compared to himself--his mythical
self--Masters, Three Sevens, the man who had cut himself from an iron
box and accomplished the greatest jail delivery in all history!
He kept his eye on the crowd about him--tramps and other hangers-on
of the railroads, mostly. Was he doomed to pass his life among such
as these? Then he perceived a small difference in one part of the
crowd--something that was hard to define. It was as if the interest
in the room, say, had been fluid, but in this one particular place
had coagulated or solidified.
He heard a sibilant whisper:
“Me mither’s ghost! If it ain’t Three Sevens himself!”
CHAPTER XXII
THE UNDERWORLD
It was Jim Bartow, the man who had occupied cell No. 1 of the
punishment block, back there in San Pedro. Not a bad sort. He had
tried crime as an experiment. The experiment had failed.
Craig answered a signal, and without haste, with all that elaborate
but stealthy watchfulness which Craig himself had learned was as
much a part of the lives of the hunted in big towns as it was in the
jungle, he and Bartow were outside.
“This way,” said Bartow.
He led the way down a narrow passage at the side of the building they
had left. They came into a dark yard. Here Bartow listened long. He
beckoned Craig to follow.
There was much of the jungle beast about this guide, Craig reflected.
His shoulders sloped. His strength and agility were disguised by an
apparent looseness and weakness of build. It was the head that made a
difference. Bartow’s head also contained a sort of thinking machine,
said Craig to himself, and it was working now.
“I came there to warn another pal of mine,” said Bartow, after a
while. “I got the tip straight that the bulls were out to-night for
an old-fashioned clean-up, all over the town, on account of that mess
you was in to-day over at the wood yard. You’re great.”
From the back yard of the saloon they had come into the rear areaway
of a block of tenement buildings. They went through the basement of
these into a shabby and shadowy street. They crossed this to a vacant
lot. At the next street they stopped. Not more than a couple of
hundred yards away a patrol wagon had halted near the curb. Policemen
were piling out of it.
“The tip was straight,” breathed Bartow.
Craig didn’t speak.
Bartow, by a roundabout course, had brought Craig to a tumble-down
shanty in the corner of a vacant lot. There he lit a lantern and
started to make coffee over a smelly oil stove.
“Me, I’m no good,” Bartow explained indulgently. “I got started
too late. The live ones, like in every other line, are specialists
these days. Am I right or am I wrong? The yeggs are yeggs. The
Dutch-house-men are Dutch-house-men. But you--holy smoke! I been
reading what the papers been printing about you--you’re an all-round
genius.”
“I hope you lay off the crooked stuff, Bartow,” said Craig, out of
his reflection.
“Sure.”
“What are you doing now?”
“Night watchman.” And Bartow vaguely indicated the cabin and the
vacant lot beyond. “It’s a political job.”
“Political?”
“Sure.” He gave Craig a survey of the situation. Almost every one
would be taken care of, until after election. The election was going
to be close. The reformers were getting together. “All any one has to
do to get a job,” said Bartow, “is to see Artie the lawyer.”
“Who’s he?”
“The man who hands out all the jobs and looks out for the ’bos and
the crooks.”
“That’s me,” said Craig.
Bartow laughed. “I guess you won’t be broke for long,” he said.
“Still, you’d better see Artie if you’re thinking of staying in
Chicago for a while. He’ll see that the dicks leave you in peace, at
least until after election.”
It was early morning when Craig found the Jake Exchange Bar, which
Bartow had informed him was the throne room of the lawyer he had come
to seek. The bar was a heavy and glittering oasis in the midst of
a crowded but dull and squalid neighborhood. And, early as it was,
Artie was there, like a good magistrate, ready to straighten out the
human tangles of the night.
Craig looked at him with interest--a small man with a keen but
degenerate face, a sagging lower lip and flapping ears, a big, soft,
pendulous nose; only his eyes were hard, glittering hard, and small
and cynical, and yet with something very human back of them--his vast
fund of purely human wisdom, perhaps.
Artie was leaning against the bar in a disconsolate attitude as
Craig drew near him. Artie hadn’t raised his head, but Craig knew
that he had been observed. Craig even felt a certain liking for this
chancellor of the underworld. At least, here was an intelligence.
There _was_ an underworld, Craig told himself, a little later on.
Artie had given him a card with a name scribbled on it, and this was
to serve him as a passport should the guardians of the law try to lay
hands on him.
He passed through crowded streets. He saw the cars crowded with
those who were going to work. Other crowds were about him--intent,
clean, human, faithful, brave. And these were the people on whom
that underworld battened--these girls and boys, men and women,
who worked--worked--worked! They didn’t know it, but he would be
fighting for them, from now on, forever. So he told himself. And it
was from this thought that his courage came.
Then Craig took an elevator to a small anteroom on one of the upper
floors of a skyscraper. From beyond the door there came a click of
typewriters, a vague smell of paper and ink. An office boy, with an
eye for Craig’s old clothes, asked him whom he wanted to see.
“The man who wrote this,” said Craig, and he showed the pages of the
Sunday story he had read.
“What do you want to see him for?”
“To give him a better story.”
“You got to see the Sunday editor,” said the boy, “and he ain’t here.”
Craig was about to turn away, when a tall young man with sandy hair
and hazel eyes stepped from the elevator. The young man looked at
Craig with a friendly but frank curiosity.
“Who is it for?” he asked.
“The Sunday editor,” Craig answered for himself.
“What do you want to see him about?”
“I had a story.”
“What sort of a story?”
“About”--Craig smiled--this man not much older than himself was easy
to talk to--“well, all about this matter of San Pedro, and the mob at