Chapter 28

His third and last assault on the Advance office, in fact, had amounted to an unequivocal ejection. Three short questions from the shirt-sleeved autocrat of that benzine-odored bedlam had led to Trotter's undoing. He wasn't expected to know much about newspaper work, but before he came bothering people he ought at least to know a shadow of something about the city he was living in! And the one-time class orator of the University of Michigan was calmly and pointedly advised to go and cut his eyeteeth on the coral of adversity. He was disgustedly told to go out and make good, instead of coming round and bothering busy people.

And Trotter went meekly out. But he had not made good.

He drifted hungrily about the great new city, the city that seemed written in a cipher to which he could find no key. He even guardedly shadowed the resentful-eyed Advance reporters on their morning assignments, to get some chance inkling of the magic by which the trick was turned. He wandered about the river front and the ship wharves and the East Side street markets. He nosed inquisitively and audaciously about anarchists' cellars and lodging-houses; he found saloons where for a nickel very palatable lamb stew could be purchased; he located those swing-door corners where the most munificent free lunches were on display; he dipped into halls where Socialistic fire-eaters nightly stilettoed modern civilization; he invaded ginmills where strange and barbaric sailors foregathered and talked. From all this he was not learning Journalism. He was, however, learning New York.

But now he had struck luck--sudden and unlooked for--in the humble creation of "rhyme-ads" for a Sixth Avenue furniture store. So, having his Bohemian young head somewhat turned by his first check of twenty dollars, he had promptly celebrated his return to affluence by as promptly spending a goodly portion of that wealth. He had bidden a cadaverous animal painter named Mershon and two equally hungry-eyed Michiganders yclept Albright to his room with the rakish back wall, where the feast had been a regal if somewhat subdued one.

And now Trotter looked about the room, thoughtfully, and decided it was time to act. All record of this past orgy would have to be wiped out. The window, he knew, was impossible, for already there had been divers complaints as to the mysterious showers of eggshell which day by day fell into the area below.

So Trotter laid several newspapers together. On these outspread newspapers he placed four empty beer bottles, a sardine can, odds and ends of biscuit and zwieback, a well-scraped wooden butter tray, and--what had troubled and haunted him most, from the moment of its purchase in a Sixth Avenue delicatessen store--the lugubrious and clean-picked carcass of a roast turkey.

It had been a fine turkey, and done to a turn. But all along Trotter had been wondering just how he was going to get rid of those telltale bones. At the merriest moments of the feast the question of the corner in which they could be secreted or the aperture out of which they could be thrust had hung over him like a veritable sword of Damocles.

But now he knew there was only one way to solve the problem. And that was to wrap the remains carefully together, tie them up, and make his escape down through the quiet house into the midnight street. There the ever-damnatory parcel could be casually dropped into a near-by ash barrel or tossed into a refuse can, and he could aimlessly round the block, like a sedentary gentleman enjoying his belated airing.

II

Trotter crept down through the quiet house with all the trepidation of a sneak-thief. His one dread was the apparition of Mrs. Teetzel; she would naturally surmise he was making away with the bedroom stoneware, or the door knobs, or even the lead piping.

He felt freer when he had once gained the street. But no peace of mind could be his, he knew, until he had utterly discarded those carefully wrapped turkey bones. It would be easy enough to toss them into an areaway, if the worst came to the worst.

He looked up and down the street for a garbage can. But there was none in sight. So he walked toward the avenue corner, with his parcel under his arm. There he turned south, and at the next corner swung about west again. But the right chance to get rid of his turkey bones had not come. He glanced uneasily about. He suddenly remembered that the police had the habit of holding up belated parcel carriers and inspecting what they carried. So he quickened his steps. But all the while he was covertly on the lookout for his dumping spot.

A moment later he saw a patrolman on the street corner ahead of him. He dreaded the thought of passing those scrutinizing eyes. He eventually decided it would be too risky. So he doubled on his own tracks, rabbit-like, crossing the street and turning north at the next corner. He had had enough of the whole thing. It was getting to be more than a joke. He would shilly-shally no longer, even though he had to toss the cursed thing up on a house step.

He let the parcel slip lower down on his arm, with one finger crooked through the string that tied it together. He was about to fling it into the gloom of a brownstone step shadow when the door above opened and a housemaid in cap and apron thrust a plaintively meowing cat from the portico into the street. Trotter quickened his steps, tingling, abashed, shaken with an inordinate and ridiculous sense of guilt. He felt that he wanted to keep out of the light, that he ought to skulk in the shadows until he was free of the weight on his arm. He hurried on until he became desperate, determined to end the farce at any hazard. So, as he passed a building where a house front was being converted into a low-windowed shop face, he dropped the paper package into an abandoned mortar box.

He was startled, a moment later, by a voice calling sharply after him: "Hi, yuh! You've dropped y'ur bundle!"

Trotter turned guiltily about. It was a night watchman. He stepped slowly out to the mortar box as he spoke, and picked up the parcel.

There was nothing for Trotter to do but go back and take it. He mumbled something--he scarcely remembered whether it was a word of explanation or of thanks. But he felt the eye of the night watchman boring through him like a gimlet, and he was glad to edge off and be on his way again.

By this time Trotter could feel the sweat of embarrassment on his tingling body. He began to dramatize ridiculous contingencies. He pictured himself as haled into night court, as cross-examined by domineering and incredulous magistrates, who would send him to the Island as a suspicious person. He began to be haunted by the impression that he was being followed. The parcel became a weight to him, a disheartening and dragging weight. He was now sure he was being followed. He squinted back over his shoulders, only to catch sight of a nocturnal "bill-sniper" placarding vulnerable areas with his lithographed laudations of a vaudeville dancing woman. A child murderer burdened with the body of his victim could not have been more ill at ease, more timorous, more terrified.

A sudden idea came to him as he passed a Chinese laundry in which lights still burned and irons still thumped on an ironing board. It was an audacious one, but it pointed toward deliverance.

His plan was to enter the laundry and pass over his parcel, as though it were his week's washing. He would be gone before they had discovered its contents. He merely needed to be offhand and nonchalant. More than once he had seen dilapidated actors carrying a limited wardrobe to the laundry at equally small hours of the night. And the sloe-eyed iron-thumpers would never again get sight of him!

But it took a moment or two to key himself up to the right pitch. He stepped in beside one of the granite column bases of the First National Trust, to give an extra tug to his still lagging courage. He leaned for a moment against the huge steel grillwork that covered the wide bank window behind him, looking eastward along the side street to where he could see the oblong of light from the laundry front.

A wave of exasperation swept through him at the thought of his own white-livered irresolution. He was about to step forward to face the end of his dilemma when an unlooked-for movement occurred between him and the illuminated laundry front.

It was the movement of a shadowy figure which seemed, at first sight, to erupt from the earth itself. It was several moments, in fact, before Trotter realized that the figure had come up from the basement of the building which stood immediately at the rear of the bank, the building which also contained the laundry. But this was not the thing that held Trotter's attention. The discovery which was causing his eyes to follow every step of the stranger was the fact that this second man ALSO CARRIED A LARGE PAPER PARCEL UNDER HIS ARM.

He turned eastward without looking back. Yet there was something circumspect in his footfall, something suspicious in the very casualness of his movements. Trotter leaned out and looked after him, nonplused by the coincidence, wondering if this second man's mission was the same as his own. He was almost glad to see somebody in the same boat.

Then curiosity overcame him. He turned and followed the other man. He walked eastward, keeping as well in to the house shadows as he could. He saw the man cross the wider traffic-way that ran north and south, look quickly up and down the deserted street and then, as he gained the shadow of the next house wall, veer close in to an iron paling. Then there was a movement which Trotter could not quite make out.

It was not until he crossed the street that he saw what the movement meant. It was not until he caught sight of a galvanized ash barrel standing beside the basement step and the stranger ahead of him walking empty-handed away, that Trotter realized the completeness of the coincidence.

The other man, without so much as stopping for a second, had quietly dropped his paper-wrapped parcel on the top of the galvanized barrel.

At no time did Trotter feel that there was anything momentous in the movement. But it aroused his curiosity. It challenged investigation. It set off his inquisitive young soul into spreading pyrotechnics of imagination. And he realized, as he walked up to the barrel, that his earlier sense of timidity had disappeared. He quite calmly lifted the parcel from the barrel top. Then he quite calmly dropped the other parcel in its place.

He was a little astonished, as he started on again, at the pregnant weight of this new parcel. But he did not stop to investigate. He did not care to gulp and lose the mystery at one swallow. He scurried off with it, chucklingly, like a barnyard hen with a corncob, to peck at it in solitude. He swung south and then west again, to his own street. He went up his own steps, through his own door, and up to his own top-floor room with the rakish back wall. There he cautiously lighted the gas, drew the blinds, and locked himself in. Next, he dragged a chair over to the bedside, sat down on it, and carefully untied the parcel string. Then, with somewhat accelerated pulse, he unwrapped the paper-screened enigma.

A little puff of ironic disappointment escaped his pursed-up lips. For at one glance he could see that it held no mystery. The only mystery about it all was that he had been theatrical enough to imagine it could prove anything that was not sordid and worthless.

For lying on the paper before him was nothing more than a litter of mortar and wall plaster, interspersed with stone chips. It was nothing more than the sweepings a brick-layer had left behind him, a pile of worthless rubbish, a bundle of refuse, another white elephant on his hands.

Trotter stirred the heap of dust and lime, impassively, disdainfully. There was nothing more than an occasional brick corner, an occasional piece of wall plaster. The only other thing was one larger fragment of stone. Trotter looked at it indolently. It was merely a piece of granite--an ounce or two of stone with one highly polished end, a bit of refuse which a hurrying mason might have used to "rubble" a wall crevice. And he had been fool enough to cart it up four flights of stairs!

He turned the piece of stone over in his hands. It was of porphyritic granite, with distinct crystals of feldspar embedded in a fine grained matrix. Trotter's brow wrinkled in vague thought as he peered down at it. He was trying to think what it reminded him of, what possible link it made in a chain of lost association.

Then he remembered. It was toward the pillars of the First National Trust Building that his mind was trying to grope. They were of the same stuff, highly polished porphyritic granite, the pride and wonder of the avenue along which they made a burnished and flashing peristyle.

Trotter rubbed his chin, meditatively, and once more examined the stone. Then he took a sudden deeper breath, and, leaning hurriedly forward, raked through the parcel with his fingers. He found nothing of note.

But as he sat there, stupidly staring at the fragment of granite, his crouching body, with his feet tucked in under the chair rungs, was startlingly like that familiar figure known as an interrogation mark.

III

It was nine o'clock the next morning when Trotter, carrying a parcel of laundry, walked casually past the First National Trust Building and turned the corner. He also made note, as he stepped into the open-fronted Chinese laundry, of this incongruous side-street neighbor, its squalid meanness cheek by jowl with the lordly magnificence of the many-columned bank structure.

On a narrow-fronted ground floor was the crowded little laundry with its red-lettered sign, its uncurtained windows, its shelves of red-tagged parcels, and its ever-present odor of borax. Below this was a basement, a cellar as narrow and dark as a cistern. A flight of perilously inclined steps led to the door of this basement. This door, in turn, was glass-fronted, but protected by a heavy woven-wire grating. On it was a sign which read:

"J. HEENEY. PLUMBING, WIRING AND ELECTRIC SUPPLIES."

It was this basement which so inordinately interested Trotter. He essayed several mild inquiries, in handing his frugal parcel of washing over the Chinaman's counter, as to the occupant of the cellar below. About "J. Heeney," however, he discovered nothing beyond the fact that he had occupied the cellar for several months. Trotter did not want to arouse unnecessary suspicion by overinterrogating "J. Heeney's" neighbors.

So he went mildly back to his top-floor room, and sat down and tried to study things out. As he sat there wrapped in thought, his idly wandering gaze rested on the electric bell above the door. He looked at it for several seconds. Then he stood on a chair and twisted away the bell's wiring. Using his pocket knife as a screwdriver, he released the bell from the door lintel. Then he cleaned and polished it. This done, he removed the clapper, wrapped the bell up in a piece of newspaper, and made his unhesitating way back to the cellar beneath the Chinese laundry. He was very much awake as he went slowly down the narrow steps. He wanted nothing to escape his notice.

He found the wire-screened door at the bottom locked. But he could get a clear enough view of the interior, even through the dirty glass. The entire space within was not more than ten feet wide and eight feet deep. It held a litter of plumber's tools, a few lengths of gas piping, a row of batteries, a blowpipe, a small hand-forge, a couple of porcelain washbowls, a deal table and chair and what seemed to be an electric transformer in a sadly battered case.

Across the back of the shop ran a wooden partition, plainly shutting off the main part of the cellar. In this partition, Trotter's careful scrutiny discovered, stood a narrow door. He ached to know what lay behind that door and that partition. But he had to be content with the shallower shop front. So he was not hurried in his inspection of it. It was not until he had fixed the details of the entire place in his mind that he ventured to knock.

There was no answer to his knock. Yet it was plain that some one was inside, for he could see the key in the lock, through the dirty glass. Who that person was he intended to find out.

He was rattling the wire fretwork, impatiently, loudly, when the partition door swung open.

Through this door stepped a short and extremely broad-shouldered man. There was no trace of annoyance on his face. In fact, much to Trotter's vague disappointment, he was smiling, smiling easily and broadly. He wore a workman's jumper, stained with oil and iron rust, and in his hand he carried a large pair of pipe tongs. But these did not interest Trotter. What caught his eye was the fact that the man's boots were white with lime dust.

"Hold on, sister; hold on!" said the man, with a laugh, for Trotter was still rattling the door. The owner stepped across his shop and turned the key in the lock.

"Hard to hear when I'm in doin' my lathe work," he explained, as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. All the while, as he swung back the door, his eyes were closely studying the eyes of the other man. Trotter noticed the row of matches stuck in the soiled hatband, and the cotton bag of "Durham" that swung from his sweat-stained belt.

"What can I do for you, sister?" was his companionable greeting. Trotter unwrapped his electric bell.

"Can you give me a clapper for this?" he asked.

The other man took the bell in his hand. Trotter could see powdered lime under his nails.

"I guess I can fix you out," said the shop owner. "Wait a minute."

He turned to the door in the partition, and disappeared from sight, closing the door after him.

Trotter's first decision had been to take the key from the outer door lock. But some sixth sense made him hesitate, prompted him to turn and look at the inner door.

His stare was rewarded by the discovery of a hole in this door, about five feet from the floor. It was a lookout; he felt sure he was being watched. So he thrust his hands into his pockets, gazed carelessly about the shop, and waited.

The man reappeared, shaking his head.

"Nothing doing," he said. He was not able to fit a clapper to the bell.

"But I thought you kept electric supplies here," objected Trotter.

The other man smiled. His good nature was impregnable.

"Oh, I can get it, if you've got to have it. Come back about ten to-morrow."

"All right," was Trotter's indifferent answer, as he turned languidly away. He went up the steps with equal languor, humming as he went.

IV

Trotter kept guarded watch on "J. Heeney's" plumbing establishment. He watched it like a hungry cat watching a rat hole. And it was three hours later that he had the satisfaction of seeing the plumber ascend to the street and walk hurriedly westward. Trotter could see that he carried a kit of tools under his arm. But to follow him in open daylight was too great a risk. Instead of that, he went down the narrow steps, and through the dusty glass examined the doorlock.

Fifteen minutes later he went down another flight of basement steps, this time to the cellar of a Sixth Avenue locksmith.

"I've got a closet door locked shut on me," he explained. "And I want a key to get it open."

The locksmith looked him up and dow.n He seemed respectable enough, this mild-eyed youth with the locked closet.

But the locksmith knew the tricks of his trade.

"Then I'll take a bunch of `blanks' over with me and open her up for you."

"I'd rather get her open by myself."

"It will cost you a dollar," was the locksmith's ultimatum.

"It's worth a dollar," agreed Trotter. "But how'll we do it?"

"I'll dip a skeleton blank in hot wax and lampblack. Then you put the key in the lock and turn it as far as you can. That'll show the ward marks, where they bite the wax. Then bring me the key and I'll cut it. Maybe it'll take two cuttings. That'll be two dollars!"

Trotter paid a quarter deposit and took the key, made a circuitous way to the plumber's cellar, descended the steps, knocked, got no answer, and quietly inserted the key in the lock, turning it as far as it would go.

Instead of going back to the locksmith, he bought a ten-cent file, and with his own hand cut away the blank according to the ward marks. Once more he made his way to the door of the empty shop and fitted his key. It turned part way round in the lock, but did not throw back the bar. He recoated the key flange with the black wax by holding it to a lighted match and letting it cool again.

He at once saw where his cutting had been imperfect. A few strokes of his file remedied this. He once more fitted the key to the lock, and found that he was free to pass in and out of the door.

Yet he deferred forcing an entrance, at the moment, hungrily as he studied the inner partition door through the iron-grated glass. He knew what such a movement meant. He could not count on Heeney's continued absence. Above all, at this, the beginning of things, he wanted to avoid any untimely mis-step. So he made his way to the street, shuttling cautiously back and forth across the avenue, aimless of demeanor, diffident of step, yet ever and always on the lookout. From half a block away he saw Heeney return to his cellar. From an even remoter stand, two hours later, he perceived the plumber emerge, like a rabbit out of its warren. He also perceived that the rapidly disappearing man carried a large paper parcel under his arm.

As before, this parcel was carried for three blocks and then adroitly deposited on the top of an ash barrel.

Trotter, once Heeney had skulked about the next corner, quietly crossed the street and sauntered past the parcel-crowned barrel, with his open pocketknife in his hand. One sweep of the knife blade slit the paper wrapper, and without so much as stopping on his way Trotter was able to catch up a handful of the litter it held. This litter, as before, was made up of ground mortar and plaster and stone chips. But this time, amid the lime and dust, he could detect the glitter of minute particles of steel.

He tested the larger fragments of these with his knife point. They were very hard, harder even than his tempered blade steel, diamond-like in their durity. He concluded, as he sat on the edge of his bed that night, rubbing them between his fingers, that they could be nothing but particles of keenly-tempered chromium steel. And chromium steel, he knew, was not used in gas pipes. It was foolish to think of it as a subject for lathe work. It was equally absurd to accept it as an everyday element in any plumber's everyday work. Trotter was not ignorant of the fact that steel of this character was used almost exclusively in the construction of high grade safes and bank vaults.

He stood up, suddenly, and crossed the room to his little bookshelf. From this shelf he took down a much-thumbed "World Almanac," a paper-bound volume which for months past had been serving as his only guide to New York. He turned to the pages headed "Banks in Manhattan and Bronx." It took but a minute's search to secure the names of the president and cashier of the First National Trust Company. But when he further read that its capital was three million five hundred thousand, and that its total resources amounted to forty-seven million three hundred thousand dollars, his breath came in shorter gasps of excitement. He began to realize the colossal wealth which lay guarded behind the great porphyritic granite pillars. He also began to realize some new and as yet undefined responsibility. The mere thought of the magnitude of the movement in which he was being made a deliberate and yet disinterested factor brought him once more to his feet, pacing his little den of a room with thoughtful and preoccupied steps.

V