Part 2

“No,” said Jerry. “What they say is true. I don’t remember seeing them; but I feel it.”

“Feel what?” I said.

“That they did meet me; for there’s another me about, Steve; you know I’ve felt that. I know now he must be one of two things--either another personality living in me which turns Jerry Fanneal off, sometimes, and turns on--Keeban, Steve, like the dual personality cases in the psychology books; or he must be a real, physical duplicate of me--Keeban; that’s possible, too, of course. But the way I feel him usually is another way; and the one way he can’t possibly be; he seems to be me going on and growing up and living my life, as it would have been, if I’d never come to you, Steve. So, that way, sometimes he seems more me than myself; for I seem to be somebody else and he, when I think of him that way, seems to be me.”

We couldn’t get any further than that; Jerry and I went to New York the next day and poked about the district where Davis claimed to have met Jerry, but we couldn’t find trace of anybody like him. Jerry paid the hundred to Davis, I remember; he considered himself in some way responsible and soon the incident passed off as the fight had; Jerry lived it down and nothing like it occurred again for years, until this night when Jerry, at the Drake, talked to himself at the Sparlings and he went back to the Sparlings to learn that he had just that moment gone out with Dorothy Crewe.

If what Jerry had just told me was exactly true, there was--of course--no explanation of it but one; there existed, physically, another Jerry. I could not say to myself that Jerry had not told me the truth as he knew it; but I could not help wondering how much of it he knew. Was he actually at the Drake at the same time “he” also was at the Sparlings’; could he have talked to “himself”; and done the other things he related? Or was there, living outside of him most of the time, Keeban--the man he would have become had he never come to us--who occasionally, at long intervals, could take command of Jerry’s body? That idea had never seized me until to-night as I sat beside him in the cab which was hurrying us to the police station where Dorothy Crewe lay; for now I no longer doubted, either, that she was Dot.

Ahead on the dark and still street showed lighted windows and a police ambulance stood end to the curb; we saw it was empty and so we went at once into the station.

In a little, dingy room a girl lay on the stretcher by which she had been carried; an ambulance doctor and two police detectives bent over her. The police turned to us when we entered.

Jerry stepped ahead of me but over his shoulder I saw Dorothy Crewe. She lay almost as if she were asleep in her pale blue dress in which she had danced that night; her hair was beautiful as ever--corn-color hair, little disarranged; her face and neck and arms were white and run with red where cuts and scratches showed. There were signs of street soil on her dress but none on her body; some one had washed them away.

“She’s not dead!” Jerry cried; then, in a whisper, “How is she?”

Said the ambulance surgeon, “We don’t know.”

“But she’s not dead!”

“No; not yet, anyway.”

Jerry’s face hovered over hers as he searched hers; then, very softly, he kissed her. “You’ll not die!” he whispered to her; then, to the surgeon, “Don’t let her die, doctor,” he said.

“What’s happened here?” I asked the officers.

It seemed that she’d been found in the street by a patrolman walking his beat; he thought she was dead so he sent her to the station. Now, having found life in her, the doctor was for taking her to a hospital; but he honestly thought it no use at all.

“What do you know?” the police came back at us.

“She’s Dorothy Crewe,” Jerry told them, and added her father’s name and number of his home. “To-night I took her to a dance at the Sparlings’. She had a necklace--here.”

Gently he touched her throat where were marks made by him who had snatched at her necklace and torn it away.

“Diamonds and sapphires,” Jerry went on and seemed to forget what he said.

A police captain named Mullaney kept at me. “When did she leave Mr. Sparling’s?”

“About half-past twelve,” I said. “She was going from there to a dance at the Drake hotel given by Mr. Casoway. She never arrived there.”

“Go on,” said the captain.

Jerry went on. “She left the Sparlings’ wearing, besides what she has on, a blue silk cloak and a necklace of diamonds and sapphires on a platinum chain, which her father brought her from Paris.”

“Perhaps you’ve read about it,” I put in. “They were supposed to be worth a quarter million.”

“I suppose,” said Jerry, “they were gone when you found her.”

“She had on her a quarter million in stones!” the captain repeated. “Well, that makes it some plainer, sir. They was off her when we found her. Now go right on, Mr. Fanneal. She left Mr. Sparling’s big house on the Drive to go to the Drake hotel at half-past twelve, you say? She didn’t go off, at that hour, alone?”

Jerry swung quickly and looked at me. “I’ll tell ’em, Steve!”

“Go ahead,” I said. God knows, I didn’t want to. I had no idea how to tell it; my thoughts, on the subject of Keeban, were absolutely a blob, just then.

“She did not leave alone, Captain,” Jerry told. “There is some confusion over who she went with. That was why, when she did not come to the Drake or return home, we became alarmed and I telephoned to you. Some people thought she went away with me; but she did not.”

“Go on,” said Mullaney again.

“You’ll find a good many that say she went with me, Captain; Gibson, the doorman, and probably Mrs. Sparling and some of the guests. But it wasn’t me, Captain.”

Mullaney squinted his eyes as he looked at Jerry and then he looked at me.

“Where was you, Mr. Steve Fanneal?” he challenged.

“I’d gone home, then.”

“Then where was you?” he swung back to Jerry.

“I’d gone to the Drake.”

“Leavin’ your partner at Mr. Sparling’s? I thought you said you took her there.”

“I did.”

“Then why didn’t you take her away?”

“I’ll tell him, Jerry,” I said; for I felt the sudden strength of his suspicion. At first, he had spoken alike to Jerry and to me; but now he treated me and my word in one way and Jerry and his word in another. I was the known, actual son of Austin Fanneal; Jerry, as everybody knew, was the waif of any blood from anywhere.

“You can’t, Steve,” Jerry warned.

But there, like the fool I was, I started to tell.

Two big men in uniform came in and each took an arm of Jerry.

The doctor was doing things during most of this time; now and then I noticed a hypodermic needle.

Dorothy Crewe breathed and her eyelids fluttered; she opened her eyes.

Only the grimy ceiling was in her sight; she stared at this and then saw a blue coat, and some realization and remembrance began to reach her; and she jerked and shivered violently.

Jerry started to her, pulling the two big men with him. The motion made her turn her eyes and she saw Jerry; and she screamed!

It sent me shaking; it dropped Jerry down, hiding his face. She was convulsing in a spasm of hysteria. “He! He! He! He!----” She seemed to try to cry “He did it” but she could only scream “he, he,” until it went into a crazy laugh.

The doctor tried to calm her; the big men dragged Jerry away. He was making no resistance, God knows; he was limp. Could a man go against a thing more awful than he’d just met? Here was the girl he loved; she’d trusted herself to him and she believed that, for the diamonds about her neck, he’d attacked her!

She told something more in that scream of a laugh; she told a little, at least, of how she had struggled before she’d been strangled and knocked senseless and thrown into the street. And she had thought Jerry did it!

I stepped along beside him. “Keeban,” he whispered desperately to me. “You see there’s Keeban.”

It meant nothing at all to the police. To me? What did I know?

“Go back to her, Steve,” Jerry begged. “But, old fellow!” he held me.

“What?”

“You’ll believe there’s Keeban? Think, Steve! If you don’t, you’ll believe I did that!”

“No! I know you couldn’t.”

“And you’ll keep on knowing? You’ll always know?”

“Jerry!” I cried.

“Your word, Steve?”

“Of course.”

“Go back, now, to her.”

I left him to be dragged, limp, down the corridor between the big, uniformed men.

In the grimy room, Dorothy Crewe had lost consciousness again; she was quiet; there was nothing I could do for her.

A pair of shots sounded; a couple more, almost together; and yells.

I knew the trouble before they shouted it to us; Jerry had got away. Instantly, without a jerk of warning, he had sprung from their hands as they dragged him, all limp the second before; he was out of a door and gone; and their loud bullets bagged them nothing.

They were all about the streets and alleys searching for him when I came out to the ambulance beside the stretcher on which was Dorothy Crewe.

“I’ll not go with you to the hospital,” I told the surgeon. “I’ll go to her people; don’t ’phone them.” And so, while the police looked for Jerry, I went to Dorothy’s people and tried to tell them--Keeban.

Keeban? Of course they did not believe. Stunned themselves, they thought me mildly maddened by what had happened. Keeban! What did I truthfully know of him? I got back home at last and stopped at Jerry’s room, which had always been next to mine; I opened the door and in the dark looked in. “Keeban!” I said to myself. “By God, there’s a Keeban; there has to be!”

And, careful not to wake my own people, I went into my room.

III

I HAVE ENCOUNTER BY THE RIVER.

As long as I stayed by myself, I had some luck at believing; but there was morning and the newspapers and telephone calls. I had to tell my father then, and mother; and they talked with the police. They talked with Mrs. Sparling and Gibson and fifty others who were at the dance. And also they talked with Dorothy.

She was conscious now but in complete collapse, and her prostration, added to what she said, gave the final proof against Jerry. She’d loved him, too, it seemed; and he’d attacked and robbed her.

There’s no sense in stringing here the sensations the papers spread; they were perfectly plain and obvious. “Foster Son of Millionaire Attacks and Robs Society Girl”; and “Foundling of Fanneals Turns Brute”; and “Waif Reared to Riches Reverts to Original Savagery” and all that tosh. They dogged my people and me, the servants and even our office force. They ran articles by “professors,” cheap alienists, psychoanalysts and the rest of the ruck running after sensation.

Jerry had “reverted”; that was the seed of their stuff. He carried in his blood a “complex” which suddenly caused him to cast off all the restraints and habits of thought and conduct which our family had drilled into him and to plan and effect the robbery of the jewels about Dorothy Crewe’s neck. The dance and drink that night had inflamed him, they said; then something flared up inside him and he forgot all that we had grafted into him, forgot even his own obvious advantage in remaining the son of Austin Fanneal, for the “primordial, overpowering instinct for violence.”

I found nothing to put against all this. I talked to the people whom Jerry had told me he’d seen at the Drake at the time when Gibson and the rest said he was at the Sparlings’. Townsend and Sally Westman and Downs admitted they’d seen Jerry at the Drake but they all believed they’d become confused in guessing at the time. It was earlier that he was over there, they thought; then he must have gone back to the Sparlings’ and taken Dorothy away. I got no help from them.

How could I tell them of Keeban? My own mother was sorry for me when I told her. She took the strong line she always does; she considered herself to blame for having taken in Jerry, twenty-eight years ago, and with no knowledge of his blood, rearing a child with unknown capacities for crime and putting him into a position to harm others.

Dorothy’s people that day proclaimed a reward of ten thousand dollars for the taking of Jerry Fanneal, dead or alive; and my father, on that same day, put up ten more. He sent pictures of Jerry to all the papers and himself supplied the minute descriptions telegraphed to St. Louis, Cleveland, Denver, Philadelphia, New York, everywhere.

They set the whole world after Jerry while I--I, in those days, went down to business and tried to do it, there in my office with my name on the door, next to the door which had borne Jerry’s name.

But now his name was gone. They dissolved it with acid, so that no one could see that the gold leaf on the glass had ever formed his initial; and they burned every sheet of paper with his name on it. So there by day, beside his empty office, I tried to do business and, when the day was over, I walked by the river.

The Chicago River, as many may know, cuts the city like a great, wide Y with long, narrow, irregular arms, one reaching northwest and the other southwest from the top of the short, straight shank which is the east-and-west channel from Lake Michigan. Not to the lake, remember, for the Chicago River flows in the opposite direction from the natural current, since men have turned it around to carry water from the lake up the shank of the Y and then up the southwest branch to the drainage canal and to the Illinois and the Mississippi rivers. It is a useful, but not the most fervent Chicagoan can call it a pleasing stream, even in its valuable reaches on the main channel east and west, and where the south branch turns past the most precious property of the city.

Here and there are modern warehouses with a hundred yards or so of decent, new dock between the bridges which cross the channel every block or so, but most of the buildings forming the river bank show straight up-and-down walls of narrow, tall, none-too-clean windows and cheap brick, badly painted. At the bottom of the wall, there may be only a pile strip to support the structure, but more frequently the buttress before the slow flow of the water is a couple of yards wide, offering a loading platform for ships which may tie up alongside or for the flat steam scows of the Merchants Lighterage Company which ply up and down the river.

Our building backs on the river, not far from its bend to the south and frequently, at the end of the day’s work, Jerry and I would go out by the river way and along on the strip of platform beside the water. Instantly it took us from the world of streets and dust and carts and trucks and taxicabs, from the traffic pound and clatter; there a five-thousand-ton steamer, deep-laden, slips up beside one so silently that you hardly hear the plash of the bow wave washing before it and the lap of the eddies on the timber under your feet; you hear the sudden, clear voices of seamen; bells sounding from engine-room depths; now the whole air rumbles with a tremendous, unlandlike blast as the vessel blows for the opening of the bridge, under which scurries a black tug, lake bound, dipping her banded funnel for clearance. Watermen scull an open boat across the oily current on river business of their own. Before you and above reach the bridges bearing the streets; but they seem now concerned with affairs of another world.

No one else ever took that walk with Jerry and me; we had idled along the river hours on end together, following the black band of the narrow timber causeway above the water to which, here and there, elusive, unidentified doors would open. Somewhere along there, if anywhere, Jerry was likely to look for me, I thought, if he wanted me alone and unwitnessed. So, after Jerry was gone, I kept up by myself the habit we had formed together; and on the seventh night I came this way--it was Monday evening and the ninth day after Jerry disappeared--one of those doors to the water suddenly opened beside me.

The hour, which was half-past five, was more afternoon than evening, but the darkness was almost of night; for the month had turned to November, and between the brick walls of the canyon where the black river flowed there was less light from the sky than from the few windows where yellow bulbs glowed. It was so cool as to feel frosty as I walked against the fresh breeze blowing in from the lake.

“Steve!” said a girl’s voice, hailing me.

I turned, and, in the light which came through the doorway, I found a trim young person gazing at me. As the illumination which came from a single, unshaded electric bulb set on a blank wall opposite the door was behind her, I could see at first only that she wore a dark, tailored suit and a small, dark hat over hair which was unbobbed, abundant and light in color--almost as light as Dorothy Crewe’s had been.

“Steve, do you want to talk with Jerry?” she asked me calmly. “Come in, then.”

She stepped back, and I stepped after her. As soon as I was in, she closed the door; and there was Jerry standing in the corner back of the door.

“Hello, Steve,” he greeted me without emotion.

“Hello, Jerry,” I said, and tried to show as little, but I was feeling more than ever before in my life. For here we were, Jerry and I, who’d spent all our lives together; here we were alone with that girl, who’d evidently come with him. I looked at her again and made sure I didn’t know her.

“This is Christina, Steve,” Jerry told me in that same, dull voice, purposely deadened to keep out emotion. “Christina,” he said to her, “this is Steve.”

“Who’s Christina, Jerry?” I said; stupid thing to ask. He knew it was stupid and he smiled, as Jerry always did; he was used to my being stupid. He simply nodded toward her to say, “You see; there she is.”

I stared from her and looked about the room, which was a square, bare place with whitewashed walls, corresponding to an ordinary cellar room.

Considered from the street side of the building, a hundred feet or so away, it was a cellar, though its riverside door was eight or ten feet above the water. A single window, with a drawn blind, was beside that door; in the opposite wall, beside the light, was another door, leading either to a basement cavern which could have no outside light, or to a stair; I could not know, for the door was closed and bolted.

The floor was cracked cement, strewn with straw and wisps of excelsior; old, open boxes and barrels stood about and a broken desk and chairs. Evidently the place had once been used as a shipping room but had been deserted. I tried to locate it in connection with some particular building, but failed, for I had not kept track how far I’d walked.

Suddenly Jerry told me, as though he’d seen my thought, “We’re back of Linthrop’s old warehouse, Steve.”

Then I knew that the building above us was empty; and I knew, as I gazed at Jerry, that he’d chosen this place to stop me because of his uncertainty of me.

And here I stood before Jerry shaking with my uncertainty of him! He saw it. An impulse swept over me to seize him and drag him through that door to an arrest; for the instant, I stood before Jerry, not as his brother who believed in him--I who had given my word to believe in him--but as a representative of society which hunted him for his treacherous, savage attack upon Dorothy Crewe. For the instant, I saw him as others thought,--my brother with a beast inside him which had struck, through him, at Dorothy Crewe.

Then the sight of his face heaped upon me too many other memories of Jerry and me through twenty-eight years. He was not quite as he had been; how could he be? He was hunted for crime; for nine days he had known that all his world--all the world which we had made his--believed he had committed that attack on Dorothy Crewe. And she had believed!

So it showed in his eyes; it lined his lip stiffer and more defiantly; it cast something harder into his whole countenance. Of course his clothes made him different, too, for he had on a heavy, badly cut suit of cheap wool such as roustabouts and deckhands wear; he had a Mackinaw coat and cap on the chair behind him.

“I’ve got to get out, Steve,” he said to me. “That’s why I stopped you.”

“You’ve been here all the time?”

He nodded. “In Chicago,” he said.

The girl had been keeping away from us, but she stepped up beside him; and I saw again the corn color of her hair, which was like Dorothy Crewe’s. She had blue eyes, too; otherwise, she was not like Dorothy. She was pert and bold, this girl--a sort to get what she went after. What was she to Jerry? I wondered. Where had he found her? What was her business here to-night with him?

“He’s got to have coin, Steve, don’t you see?” she said to me.

“Why?”

“Why?” She laughed at me. “Ain’t nobody after him? Oh, perhaps you ain’t heard? You don’t read the papers; maybe you don’t read. Can’t Steve read, Jerry?”

Jerry made no reply but to shake his head a little at her; then he watched me.

“D’you suppose,” Christina continued to me, “it’s worth nothing to nobody--whoever sees him or gives him a hand or a cot or a meal--to do a squeal? Is everybody in this city so elegantly fixed that nobody could possibly find any use for twenty thousand smackers?”

“Keep still, Christina,” Jerry said.

“How much do you need?” I asked him.

“How much can you drag with you?” the girl kept at me. “When you got to buy yourself past bulls and beefers, who can drag down twenty thou by simply settin’ the squeal, how far do you suppose a dime’ll go toward squarin’ ’em?”

“Cut it, Christina,” Jerry said this time. “Steve doesn’t know how to be mean.”

“Don’t this time,” she shot at me. “Have it with you along here at ten to-morrow night. If the old man can stick up ten thou to get him, can’t you find something like it to help him away?” And she switched out the light.

I replied but stood in the dark and heard the door to the warehouse unbolted; I heard their steps within, echoing away. Outside, on the platform beside the river, somebody approached but did not stop. The warehouse went quiet and there was nobody by the river, so I stepped out.

Here I was, where I had gone in, and I tried to think how I’d changed from ten minutes before. I’d talked to Jerry; or hadn’t I?

It was strange that never once, when he was before me and I was speaking to him, I doubted he was Jerry; yet I’d sworn to him, on that night they arrested him, that I’d believe Keeban existed also; I’d believe Keeban robbed Dorothy Crewe and threw her into the street. Consequently, I ought to believe that the man with Christina might be Keeban. But I didn’t; I didn’t believe in Keeban at all just now; and yet a few minutes ago, I did.

I went home and said nothing to my people; I said nothing about this to any one at all. I stayed by myself that evening and, about eleven o’clock, I walked down by the edge of the lake beyond that strip of park which turns in front of the homes on the Drive and near which we live.

“Steve!” a voice whispered to me; and I jumped about.

Jerry had come up beside me at the edge of the lake. This time he was alone.

He was not in deckhand’s garb and Mackinaw coat; he wore a plain, dark jacket and felt hat. I could not plainly see his face; the light from the lamps on the Drive gave me only glints on his cheekbone and nose and chin and in his eyes turned to mine, but enough to make me know Jerry.

Then I remembered I’d known the man in the warehouse basement for Jerry when he was speaking to me.

“Hello,” I said.

“Steve, he called on you to-day!”

“Who?”

“Keeban!”

I stopped and thought a minute; and I was shaking. “Oh,” I asked him, “where was that?”

“You know,” he came back. “I don’t; but didn’t he see you?”

“Yes,” I said; and went right on. “What was over our old beds when we slept together in the north room?”

“You didn’t ask him that?” this fellow said.

“No; but I’m asking you.”

“Oh, a picture of the _Constitution_ fighting the _Guerrière_, Steve, you old fool!”

“Anything peculiar about it?”