Part 4

Burgess knew Vevay Street, for he owned a business block at its intersection with Senate Avenue. Beyond the avenue it deteriorated rapidly and was filled with tenements and cheap boarding houses. Several blocks west ran an old canal, lined with factories, elevators, lumber yards and the like, and on the nearer bank was a network of railroad switches.

He thought it best not to approach the Murdock house in his motor; so he left it at the drug-store corner, and, bidding the chauffeur wait for him, walked down Vevay Street looking for 787. It was a forbidding thoroughfare and the banker resolved to complain to the Civic League; it was an outrage that such Stygian blackness should exist in a civilized city, and he meant to do something about it. When he found the number it proved to be half of a ramshackle two-story double house. The other half was vacant and plastered with For Rent signs. He struck a match and read a dingy card that announced rooms and boarding. The window shades were pulled halfway down, showing lights in the front room. Burgess knocked and in a moment the door was opened guardedly by a stocky, bearded man.

“Mr. Murdock?”

“Well, what do you want?” growled the man, widening the opening a trifle to allow the hall light behind him to fall on the visitor’s face.

“Don’t be alarmed. A friend of Robert Drake’s in Chicago asked me to see him. My errand is friendly.”

A woman’s voice called from the rear of the hall:

“It’s all right, dad; let the gentleman in.”

Murdock slipped the bolt in the door and then scrutinized Burgess carefully with a pair of small, keen eyes. As he bent over the lock the banker noted his burly frame and the powerful arms below his rolled-up shirtsleeves.

“Just wait there,” he said, pointing to the front room. He closed the hall door and Burgess heard his step on the stairs.

An odor of stale cooking offended the banker’s sensitive nostrils. The furniture was the kind he saw daily in the windows of furniture stores that sell on the installment plan; on one side was an upright piano, with its top littered with music. Now that he was in the house, he wondered whether this Murdock was after all a crook, and whether the girl with the red feather, with her candid eyes, could possibly be his daughter. His wrath against Hill rose again as he recalled his cynical tone--and on the thought the girl appeared from a door at the farther end of the room.

She bade him “Good evening!” and they shook hands. She had just come from her day’s work at the lumber company’s office, she explained. He found no reason for reversing his earlier judgment that she was a very pretty girl. Now that her head was free of the hat with the red feather, he saw that her hair, caught up in a becoming pompadour, was brown, with a golden glint in it. Her gray eyes seemed larger in the light of the single gas-burner than they had appeared by daylight at the bank. There was something poetic and dreamy about them. Her age he placed at about half his own, but there was the wisdom of the centuries in those gray eyes of hers. He felt young before her.

“There was a detective in the bank when I was in there this morning. He knew me,” she said at once.

“Yes; he spoke of you,” said Burgess.

“And he knows--what does he know?”

The girl’s manner was direct; he felt that she was entitled to a frank response.

“He told me your father had been--we will say suspected in times past; that he had only lately come here; but, unless he deceived me, I think he has no interest in him just now. The detective is a friend of mine. He visits the bank frequently. It was just by chance that he spoke of you.”

“You didn’t tell him that Mr. Gordon had asked you to come here?”

“No; Drake wasn’t mentioned.”

Nellie nodded; she seemed to be thinking deeply. Her prettiness was enhanced, he reflected, by the few freckles that clustered about her nose. And he was ready to defend the nose which the detective, reciting from his card catalogue, had called snub!

“Did your friend tell you Bob wants to be married before he leaves? I suppose you don’t know that?”

She blushed, confirming his suspicion that it was she whom Drake was risking arrest to marry.

“Yes; and if I guess rightly that you’re the girl I’d like to say that he’s an extremely fortunate young man! You don’t mind my saying that!”

He wondered whether all girls who have dimples blush to attract attention to them. The point interested Webster G. Burgess. The thought that Nellie Murdock meant to marry a freshly discharged convict, no matter how promising he might be, was distasteful to him; and yet her loyalty and devotion increased his admiration. There was romance here, and much money had not hardened the heart of Webster G. Burgess.

“It all seems too good to be true,” she said happily, “that Bob and I can be married after all and go away into a new world where nobody knows us and he can start all over again.” And then, coloring prettily: “We’re all ready to go except getting married--and maybe you can help us find a minister.”

“Easily! But I’m detaining you. Better have Drake come in; I want to speak to him, and then we can make all the arrangements in a minute.”

“I’m afraid he’s been watched; it’s brutal for them to do that when he’s done his time and means to live straight! I wonder----” She paused and the indignation that had flashed out in her speech passed quickly. “It’s asking a great deal, Mr. Burgess, but would you let us leave the house with you? The quicker we go the better--and a man of your position wouldn’t be stopped. But if you’d rather not----”

“I was just going to propose that! Please believe that in every way I am at your service.”

His spirits were high. It would give edge to the encounter to lend his own respectability to the flight. The idea of chaperoning Nellie Murdock and her convict lover through an imaginable police picket pleased him.

She went out and closed the door. Voices sounded in the hall; several people were talking earnestly. When the door opened a man dodged quickly into the room, the girl following.

“This is Robert Drake, Mr. Burgess. Bob, this is the gentleman Mr. Gordon told you about.”

Burgess experienced a distinct shock of repulsion as the man shuffled across the room to shake hands. A stubble of dark beard covered his face, his black hair was crumpled, and a long bang of it lying across his forehead seemed to point to his small, shifty blue eyes. His manner was anxious; he appeared decidedly ill at ease. Webster G. Burgess was fastidious and this fellow’s gray suit was soiled and crumpled, and he kept fingering his collar and turning it up round a very dirty neck.

“Thank you, sir--thank you!” he repeated nervously.

A door slammed upstairs and the prospective bridegroom started perceptibly and glanced round. But Burgess’s philosophy rallied to his support. This was the fate of things, one of life’s grim ironies--that a girl like Nellie Murdock, born and reared in the underworld, should be linking herself to an outlaw. After all, it was not his affair. Pretty girls in his own world persisted in preposterous marriages. And Bob grinned cheerfully. Very likely with a shave and a bath and a new suit of clothes he would be quite presentable. The banker had begun to speak of the route to be taken to New Orleans when a variety of things happened so quickly that Burgess’s wits were put to high tension to keep pace with them.

The door by the piano opened softly. A voice recognizable as that of Murdock spoke sharply in a low tone:

“Nellie, hit up the piano! Stranger, walk to the window--slow--and yank the shade! Bob, cut upstairs!”

These orders, given in the tone of one used to command, were quickly obeyed. It was in the banker’s mind the moment he drew down the shade that by some singular transition he, Webster G. Burgess, had committed himself to the fortunes of this dubious household. If he walked out of the front door it would likely be into the arms of a policeman; and the fact of a man of his prominence being intercepted in flight from a house about to be raided would not look well in the newspapers. Nellie, at the piano, was playing Schubert’s Serenade--and playing it, he thought, very well. The situation was not without its humor; and here, at last, was his chance to see an adventure through. He heard Bob take the stairs in three catlike jumps. Nellie, at the piano, said over her shoulder, with Schubert’s melody in her eyes:

“This isn’t funny; but they wouldn’t dare touch you! You’d better camp right here.”

“Not if I know myself!” said Burgess with decision as he buttoned his ulster.

She seemed to accept his decision as a matter of course and, still playing, indicated the door, still ajar, through which the disconcerting orders had been spoken. Burgess stepped into a room where a table was partly set for supper.

“This ain’t no place for you, stranger!” said Murdock harshly. “How you goin’ to get away?”

“I’ll follow Bob. If he makes it I can.”

“Humph! This party’s too big now. You ought to have kept out o’ this.”

There was a knock at the front door and Murdock pointed an accusing finger at Burgess.

“Either set down and play it out or skip!” He jerked his head toward the stairs. The music ceased at the knock. “Nellie, what’s the answer?”

Murdock apparently deferred to Nellie in the crisis; and as the knock was repeated she said:

“I’ll get Bob and this gentleman out. Don’t try to hold the door--let ’em in.”

Before he knew what was happening, Burgess was at the top of the stairway, with the girl close at his heels. She opened a door into a dark room.

“Bob!” she called.

“All right!” whispered Drake huskily.

Near the floor Burgess marked Bob’s position by a match the man struck noiselessly, shielding it in the curve of his hand at arm’s length. It was visible for a second only. Nellie darted lightly here and there in the dark. A drawer closed softly; Burgess heard the swish of her jacket as she snatched it up and drew it on. The girl undoubtedly knew what she was about. Then a slim, cold hand clutched his in a reassuring clasp. Another person had entered the room and the doorkey clicked.

“Goodby, mother!” Burgess heard the girl whisper.

The atmosphere changed as the steps of the three refugees echoed hollowly in an empty room. A door closed behind them and there was a low rumble as a piece of furniture was rolled against it. Burgess was amazed to find how alert all his senses were. He heard below the faint booming of voices as Murdock entertained the police. In the pitch-dark he found himself visualizing the room into which they had passed and the back stairway down which they crept to the kitchen of the vacant half of the house. As they paused there to listen something passed between Drake and Nellie.

“Give it to me--quick! I gotta shake that guy!” Drake whispered hoarsely.

The girl answered:

“Take it, but keep still and I’ll get you out o’ this.”

Burgess thought he had struck at her; but she made no sign. She took the lead and opened the kitchen door into a shed; then the air freshened and he felt rain on his face. They stood still for an instant. Some one, apparently at the Murdock kitchen door, beat three times on a tin pan.

“There are three of them!” whispered Nellie. “One’s likely to be at the back gate. Take the side fence!” She was quickly over; and then began a rapid leaping of the partition fences of the narrow lots of the neighborhood. At one point Burgess’s ulster ripped on a nail; at another place he dropped upon a chicken coop, where a lone hen squawked her terror and indignation. It had been some time since Webster G. Burgess had jumped fences, and he was blowing hard when finally they reached a narrow alley. He hoped the hurdling was at an end, but a higher barricade confronted them than the low fences they had already negotiated. Nellie and Bob whispered together a moment; then Bob took the fence quickly and silently. Burgess jumped for the top, but failed to catch hold. A second try was luckier, but his feet thumped the fence furiously as he tried to mount.

“Cheese it on the drum!” said Nellie, and she gave his legs a push that flung him over and he tumbled into the void. “Bob mustn’t bolt; he always goes crazy and wants to shoot the cops,” he heard her saying, so close that he felt her breath on his cheek. “I had to give him that hundred----”

A man ran through the alley they had just left. From the direction of Vevay Street came disturbing sounds as the Murdocks’ neighbors left their supper tables for livelier entertainment outside.

“If it’s cops they’ll make a mess of it--I was afraid it was Hill,” said the girl.

It already seemed a good deal of a mess to Burgess. He had got his bearings and knew they were in the huge yard of the Brooks Lumber Company. Great piles of lumber deepened the gloom. The scent of new pine was in the moist air. Nellie was already leading the way down one of the long alleys between the lumber. A hinge creaked stridently behind them. The three stopped, huddled close together. The opaque darkness seemed now to be diminishing slightly as the moon and a few frightened stars shone out of the clouds. Then the blackness was complete again.

“They’ve struck the yard!” said Nellie. “That was the Wood Street gate.”

“If they stop to open gates they’re not much good,” said the banker largely, in the tone of one who does not pause for gates.

The buttons had been snapped from his ulster at the second fence and this garment now hung loosely round him, a serious impediment to flight. He made a mental note to avoid ulsters in future. A nail had scraped his shin, and when he stopped to rub it he discovered an ugly rent in his trousers. Nellie kept moving. She seemed to know the ways of the yard and threaded the black lumber alleys with ease. They were close together, running rapidly, when she paused suddenly. Just ahead of them in a cross-alley a lantern flashed. It was the lumber company’s private watchman. He stopped uncertainly, swung his lantern into the lane where the trio waited, and hurried on.

They were halfway across the yard as near as Burgess could judge, hugging the lumber piles closely and stopping frequently to listen, when they were arrested by a sound behind. The moon had again swung free of clouds and its light flooded the yard. The distance of half a block behind a policeman stood in the alley they had just traversed. He loomed like a heroic statue in his uniform overcoat and helmet. His shout rang through the yard.

“Beat it!” cried Nellie.

III

Nellie was off as she gave the word. They struck a well-beaten cross-alley--a main thoroughfare of the yard--and sprinted off at a lively gait. It was in Burgess’s mind that it was of prime importance that Drake should escape--it was to aid the former convict that he had involved himself in this predicament; and even if the wedding had to be abandoned and the girl left behind it was better than for them all to be caught. He was keeping as close as possible to Bob, but the young man ran with incredible swiftness; and he now dodged into one of the narrower paths and vanished.

The yard seemed more intricate than ever with its network of paths, along which the lumber stacks rose fantastically. Looking over his shoulder, Burgess saw that the single policeman had been reenforced by another man. It was a real pursuit now--there was no belittling that fact. A revolver barked and a fusillade followed. Then the moon was obscured and the yard was black again. Burgess felt himself jammed in between two tall lumber piles.

“Climb! Get on top quick and lie down!”

Nellie was already mounting; he felt for the strips that are thrust between planks to keep them from rotting, grasped them and gained the top. It was a solid pile and it lifted him twenty feet above the ground. He threw himself flat just as the pursuers rushed by; and when they were gone he sat up and nursed his knees. He marked Nellie’s position by her low laugh. He was glad she laughed. He was glad she was there!

Fifty yards away a light flashed--a policeman had climbed upon a tall pile of lumber and was whipping about him with a dark lantern.

“It will take them all night to cover this yard that way,” she whispered, edging close. “They’re crossing the yard the way women do when they’re trying to drive chickens into a coop. They won’t find Bob unless they commit burglary.”

“How’s that?” asked Burgess, finding a broken cigar in his waistcoat pocket and chewing the end.

“Oh, I gave him the key to the office and told him to sit on the safe. It’s a cinch they won’t look for him there; and we’ve got all night to get him out.”

Burgess was flattered by the plural. Her good humor was not without its effect on him. The daughter of the retired yeggman was a new kind of girl, and one he was glad to add to his collection of feminine types. He wished she would laugh oftener.

The president of the White River National Bank, perched on a pile of lumber on a wet January evening with a girl he knew only as his accomplice in an escapade that it would be very difficult to explain to a cynical world, reflected that at about this hour his wife, hardly a mile distant, in one of the handsomest houses in town, was dressing for dinner to be ready to greet a guest, who was the most valiant member of the sedate House of Bishops. And Webster G. Burgess assured himself that he was not a bit frightened; he had been pursued by detectives and police and shot at--and yet he was less annoyed than when the White River National lost an account, or an ignorant new member preempted his favorite seat in the University Club dining room. He had lost both the sense of fear and the sense of shame; and he marveled at his transformation and delighted in it.

“How long will it be before that begins to bore them, Nellie?” he remarked casually, as though he were speaking to a girl he had known always, in a cozy corner at a tea.

The answer was unexpected and it did not come from Nellie. He heard the scraping of feet, and immediately a man loomed against the sky not thirty feet away and began sweeping the neighboring stacks with an electric lamp; its rays struck Burgess smartly across the face. He hung and jumped; and as he let go the light flashed again and an automatic barked.

“Lord! It’s Hill!” he gasped.

As he struck the ground he experienced a curious tingle on the left side of his head above the ear--it was as though a hot needle had been drawn across it. The detective yelled and fired another shot to attract the attention of the other pursuers. Nellie was already down and ready for flight. She grasped Burgess’s arm and hurried him over and between unseen obstacles. There seemed to be no method of locomotion to which he was not urged--climbing, crawling, running, edging in between seeming Gibraltars of lumber. From a low pile she leaped to a higher, and on up until they were thirty feet above the ground; then it seemed to amuse her to jump from pile to pile until they reached earth again. Running over uneven lumber piles in the dark, handicapped by an absurd ulster, does not make for ease, grace or security--and wet lumber has a disagreeable habit of being slippery.

They trotted across an open space and crept under a shingle shed.

“Good place to rest,” panted Nellie--and he dropped down beside her on a bundle of shingles. The rain fell monotonously upon the low roof of their shelter.

“That’s a pretty picture,” said the girl dreamily.

Burgess, breathing like a husky bellows, marveled at her. What had interested her was the flashing of electric lamps from the tops of the lumber piles, where the pursuers had formed a semicircle and were closing in on the spot where the quarry had disappeared. They were leaping from stack to stack, shooting their lamps ahead.

“The lights dancing round that way are certainly picturesque,” observed Burgess. “Whistler would have done a charming nocturne of this. I doubt whether those fellows know what a charm they impart to the mystical, moist night. The moving pictures ought to have this. What’s our next move?” he asked, mopping his wet face with his handkerchief.

“I’ve got to get Bob out of the office and then take a long jump. And right here’s a good time for you to skedaddle. You can drop into the alley back of this shed and walk home.”

“Thanks--but nothing like that! I’ve got to see you married and safely off. I’d never dare look Gordon in the face if I didn’t.”

“I thought you were like that,” she said gently, and his heart bounded at her praise. She stole away into the shadows, and he stared off at the dancing lights where the police continued their search.

Far away the banker saw the aura of the city, and he experienced again a sensation of protest and rebellion. He wondered whether this was the feeling of the hunted man--the man who is tracked and driven and shot at! He, Webster G. Burgess, had been the target of a bullet; and, contrary to every rule of the life in which he had been reared, he was elated to have been the mark for a detective’s gun. He knew that he should feel humiliated--that he owed it to himself, to his wife waiting for him at home, to his friends, to society itself, to walk out and free himself of the odium that would attach to a man of his standing who had run with the hare when his place by all the canons was with the hounds. And then, too, this low-browed criminal was not the man for a girl like Nellie to marry--he could not free himself of that feeling.

As he pondered this she stole back to his hiding-place. The ease, lightness and deftness with which she moved amazed him; he had not known she was near until he heard Drake’s heavier step beside her.

“Bob’s here, all right. We must march again,” she said.

She explained her plan and the three started off briskly, reached a fence--the world seemed to be a tangle of fences!--and dropped over into a coalyard. Burgess was well muddled again, but Nellie never hesitated. It had grown colder; heavier clouds had drifted across the heavens and snow began to fall. They reached the farther bound of the coalyard safely; and as they were about to climb out a dog yelped and rushed at them.

“I forgot about that dog! Over, quick! The watchman for this yard is probably back there playing with the police, or else he’s hiding himself,” said Nellie.

This proved to be the most formidable fence of the series for Burgess, and his companions got him over with difficulty just as a dog snapped at his legs. They landed in a tangle of ice-covered weeds and lay still a moment. Bob was in bad humor, and kept muttering and cursing.

“Chuck it, Bob!” said Nellie sharply.

They were soon jumping across the railroad switches and could see the canal stretching toward the city, marked by a succession of well-lighted bridges.

“They’ll pinch us here! Nellie, you little fool, if you hadn’t steered me to that office I’d ’a’ been out o’ this!”

He swore under his breath and Burgess cordially hated him for swearing at the girl. But, beyond doubt, the pursuers had caught the scent and were crossing the coalyard. They heard plainly the sounds of men running and shouting. Bob seized Nellie and there was a sharp tussle.

“For God’s sake, trust me, Bob! Take this; don’t let him have it!” And she thrust a revolver into Burgess’s hand. “Better be caught than that! Mind the bank here and keep close together. Good dog--he’s eating the cops!” And she laughed her delicious mirthful laugh. A pistol banged and the dog barked no more.