BOOK II

I

All day long Archie Koerner and Curly Jackson had ridden in the empty box-car. They had made themselves as comfortable as they could, and had beguiled the time with talk and stories and cigarettes. Now and then they had fallen asleep, but not for long, for their joints ached with the jolting of the train, and, more than all else, there was a constant concern in their minds that made them restless, furtive and uneasy. The day was warm, and toward noon the sun beat down, hotter and hotter; the car was stifling, its atmosphere charged with the reminiscent odors of all the cargoes it had ever hauled. Long before daylight that morning they had crawled into the car as it stood on a siding in a village a hundred miles away. Just before dawn the train came, and they heard the conductor and brakeman moving about outside; now and then they caught the twinkle of their lanterns. Then the car was shunted and jolted back and forth for half an hour; finally the train was made up, and pulled out of the sleeping village they were so glad to get away from. With the coming of the dawn, they peeped out to see the sun come up over the fields. They watched the old miracle in silence until they saw a farmer coming across the field with a team. The farmer stopped, watched the train go by, then turned and began to plow corn.

"Pipe the Hoosier," Curly had said, the sight of a human being relieving the silence imposed by nature in her loneliness. "We call 'em suckers. He'll be plowing all day, but next winter he'll be sitting by a fire--and we'll--we'll be macing old women for lumps at the back doors."

Archie was not much affected by Curly's sarcastic philosophy; he had not yet attained to Curly's point of view.

Two days before, at evening, they had left the city and spent the first half of the night on foot, trudging along a country road; then a freight-train had taken them to a little town far to the south, where, in the small hours of the morning, they had broken into a post-office, blown open the safe with nitroglycerin, and taken out the stamps and currency. Curly considered the venture successful, though marred by one mishap: in the explosion the currency had been shattered and burned. But he had carefully gathered up the remnants, wrapped them in a paper, and stowed them away in his pocket with the stamps. The next day they hid in a wood. Curly made a fire, cooked bacon, and brewed tea in a tomato can, and these, with bread, had made a meal for them. Then he had carefully sorted the stamps, and had hidden in the ground all the five- and ten-cent stamps, preserving only those of the one- and two-cent denominations. After that he had lain down on the grass and slept.

While Curly slept, Archie sat and examined with an expert's loving interest and the fascination of a boy a new revolver he had stolen from a hardware store in the city three days before. Curly at first had opposed the theft of the revolver, but had finally consented because he recognized Archie's need; Archie had had no revolver since he was sent to the workhouse. The one he had when he was arrested had been confiscated--as it is called--by the police, and given by Bostwick to a friend, a lawyer who had long wanted a revolver to shoot burglars in case any should break into his home. Curly had consented to Archie's stealing the revolver, but he had commanded him to take nothing else, and had waited outside while Archie went into the hardware store. Archie had chosen a fine one, a double-acting, self-cocking revolver of thirty-eight caliber, like those carried by the police. He had been childishly happy in the possession of this weapon; he had taken it out and looked at it a hundred times, and had been tempted when they were alone in the woods to take a few practice shots, but when Curly ordered him not to think of such nonsense, he drew the cartridges, aimed at trees, twigs, birds, and snapped the trigger. Every little while in the box-car that day he had taken it out, looked at it, caressed it, turned it over in his palm, delicately tested its weight, and called Curly to admire it with him. He thought much more of the revolver than he did of the stamps and blasted currency they had stolen, and Curly had spoken sharply to him at last and said:

"If you don't put up that rod, I'll ditch it for you."

Archie obeyed Curly, but when he had restored the revolver to his pocket, he continued to talk of it, and then of other weapons he had owned, and he told Curly how he had won the sharp-shooter's medal in the army.

But finally, in his weariness, Archie lost interest even in his new revolver, and when Curly would not let him go to the door of the car and look out, lest the trainmen should see them and force them into an encounter, Archie had fallen asleep in a corner.

It was a relief to Curly when Archie went to sleep, for in addition to his joy in his revolver, Archie had been excited over their adventure. Curly was in many ways peculiar; he was inclined to be secretive; he frequently worked alone, and his operations were as much a mystery to his companions and to Gibbs as they were to the police. He had had his eye on the little post-office at Trenton for months; it had called to him, as it were, to come and rob it. It had advantages, the building was old; an entrance could be effected easily. He had stationed Archie outside to watch while he knocked off the peter, and Archie had acquitted himself to Curly's satisfaction. The affair came off smoothly. Though it was in the short summer night, no one had been abroad; they got away without molestation. Now, as they drew near the city, Curly felt easy.

Late in the afternoon Curly saw signs of the city's outposts--the side-tracks were multiplying in long lines of freight-cars. Then Curly wakened Archie, and when the train slowed up, they dropped from the car.

It was good to feel once more their feet on the ground, to walk and stretch their tired, numb muscles, good to breathe the open air and, more than all, good to see the city looming under its pall of smoke. They joined the throngs of working-men; and they might have passed for working-men themselves, for Curly wore overalls, as he always did on his expeditions, and they were both so black from the smoke and cinders of their journey, that one might easily have mistaken their grime for that of honest toil.

They came to the river, pressed up the long approach to its noble bridge, and submerged themselves in the stream of life that flowed across it, the stream that was made up of all sorts of people--working-men, clerks, artisans, shop-girls, children, men and women, the old and the young, each individual with his burden or his care or his secret guilt, his happiness, his hope, his comedy or his tragedy, losing himself in the mass, merging his identity in the crowd, doing his part to make the great epic of life that flowed across the bridge as the great river flowed under it--the stream in which no one could tell the good from the bad, or even wish thus to separate them, in which no one could tell Archie or Curly from the teacher of a class in a Sunday-school. Here on the bridge man's little distinctions were lost and people were people merely, bound together by the common possession of good and bad intentions, of good and bad deeds, of frailties, errors, sorrows, sufferings and mistakes, of fears and doubts, of despairs, of hopes and triumphs and heroisms and victories and boundless dreams.

Beside them rumbled a long procession of trucks and wagons and carriages, street-cars moved in yellow procession, ringing their cautionary gongs; the draw in the middle of the bridge vibrated under the tread of all those marching feet; its three red lights were already burning overhead. Far below, the river, growing dark, rolled out to the lake; close to its edge on the farther shore could be descried, after long searching of the eye, the puffs of white smoke from crawling trains; vessels could be picked out, tugs and smaller craft, great propellers that bore coal and ore and lumber up and down the lakes; here and there a white passenger-steamer, but all diminutive in the long perspective. Above them the freight-depots squatted; above these elevators lifted themselves, and then, as if on top of them, the great buildings of the city heaved themselves as by some titanic convulsive effort in a lofty pile, surmounted by the high office buildings in the center, with here and there towers and spires striking upward from the jagged sky-line. All this pile was in a neutral shade of gray,--lines, details, distinctions, all were lost; these huge monuments of man's vanity, or greed, or ambition, these expressions of his notions of utility or of beauty, were heaped against a smoky sky, from which the light was beginning to fade. Somewhere, hidden far down in this mammoth pile, among all the myriads of people that swarmed and lost themselves below it, were Gusta and Dick Ward, old man Koerner and Marriott, Modderwell and Danner, Bostwick and Parrish, and Danny Gibbs, and Mason, and Eades, but they were lost in the mass of human beings--the preachers and thieves, the doctors and judges, and aldermen, and merchants, and working-men, and social leaders, and prostitutes--who went to make up the swarm of people that crawled under and through this pile of iron and stone, thinking somehow that the distinctions and the grades they had fashioned in their little minds made them something more or something less than what they really were.

II

And yet, after having crossed the bridge in the silence that was the mysterious effect of the descent of evening over the city, after having been gathered back again for a few moments into human relations with their fellow mortals, Archie and Curly became thieves again. This change in them occurred when they saw two policemen standing at the corner of High Street, where the crowd from the bridge, having climbed the slope of River Street, began to flow in diverging lines this way and that. The change was the more marked in Archie, for at sight of the policemen he stopped suddenly.

"Look!" he whispered.

"Come on!" commanded Curly, and Archie fell into step. "You never want to halt that way; it don't make any difference with harness bulls, but if a fly dick was around, it might put him hip."

It was a relief to Archie when at last they turned into Danny Gibbs's; the strange shrinking sensation he had felt in the small of his back, the impulse to turn around, the starting of his heart at each footfall behind him, now disappeared. It was quiet at Gibbs's; the place was in perfect order; in the window by the door, under the bill which pictured two pugilists, the big cat he had seen now and then slinking about the place was curled in sleep; and two little kittens were playing near her. At one of the tables, his head bowed in his hands, was the wreck of a man Archie had so often seen in that same attitude and in that same place--the table indeed seemed to be used for no other purpose. Gibbs himself was there, in shirt-sleeves, leaning over the evening paper he had spread before him on his bar. He was freshly shaven, and was reading his paper and smoking his cigar in the peace that had settled on his establishment; his shirt was fresh and clean; the starch was scarcely broken in its stiff sleeves, and Archie was fascinated by the tiny red figures of horseshoes and stirrups and jockey caps that dotted it; he had a desire to possess, some day, just such a shirt himself. At the approaching step of the two men, Gibbs looked up suddenly, and the light flashed blue from the diamond in the bosom of his shirt. Curly jerked his head toward the back room. Gibbs looked at Curly an instant and then at Archie, a question in his glance.

"Sure," said Curly; "he's in." Then Gibbs carefully and deliberately folded his paper, stuck it in one of the brackets of his bar, and went with the two men into the back room. There he stood beside the table, his hands thrust into his pockets, his cigar rolling in the corner of his mouth, his head tilted back a little. Archie was tingling with interest and expectation.

"Well," said Gibbs, in an introductory way.

Curly was unbuttoning his waistcoat; in a moment he had drawn from its inner pocket a package, unwrapped it, and disclosed the sheets of fresh new stamps, red and green, and stiff with the shining mucilage. He counted them over laboriously and separated them, making two piles, one of the red two-cent stamps, another of the green one-cent stamps, while Gibbs stood, squinting downward at the table. When Curly was done, Gibbs counted the sheets of postage stamps himself.

"Just fifty of each, heh?" he asked when he had done.

"That's right," said Curly.

"That's right, is it?" Gibbs repeated; a shrewdness in his squint.

"Yes," Curly said.

"Sixty per cent.," said Gibbs.

"All right," said Curly.

"I can't give more for the stickers just now," Gibbs went on, as if the men were entitled to some word of explanation; "business is damned bad, and I'm not making much at that."

"That's all right," said Curly somewhat impatiently, as one who disliked haggling.

"That goes with you, does it, Dutch?" Gibbs said to Archie.

"Sure," said Archie, glancing hastily at Curly, "whatever he says goes with me all right." And then he smiled, his white teeth showing, his face ruddier, his blue eyes sparkling with the excitement he felt--smiled at this new name Gibbs had suddenly given him.

Curly had thrust his hand into another pocket meanwhile, and he drew out another package, done up in a newspaper. He laid this on the table, opened it slowly, and carefully turning back the folds of paper, disclosed the bundle of charred bank-notes. Gibbs began shaking his head dubiously as soon as he saw the contents.

"I can't do much with that," he said. "But you leave it and I'll see."

"Well, now, that's all right," said Curly, speaking in his high argumentative tone; "I ain't wolfing. You can give us our bit later."

"All right," said Gibbs, and carefully doing up the parcels, he took them and disappeared. In a few moments he came back, counted out the money on the table--ninety dollars--and then went out with the air of a man whose business is finished.

Curly divided the money, gave Archie his half, and they went out. The bar-room was just as they had left it; the wreck of a man still bowed his head on his forearms, the cat was still curled about her kittens. Gibbs had taken down his paper, and resumed his reading.

"I'm going to get a bath and a shave," Curly said. He passed his hand over his chin, rasping its palm on the stubble of his beard. Archie was surprised and a little disappointed at the hint of dismissal he felt in Curly's tone. He wished to continue the companionship, with its excitement, its interest, its pleasure, above all that quality in it which sustained him and kept up his spirits. He found himself just then in a curious state of mind; the distinction he had felt but a few moments before in the back room with Gibbs, the importance in the success of the expedition, more than all, the feeling that he had been admitted to relationships which so short a time before had been so mysterious and inaccessible to him,--all this was leaving him, dying out within, as the stimulus of spirits dies out in a man, and Archie's Teutonic mind was facing the darkness of a fit of despondency; he felt blue and unhappy; he longed to stay with Curly.

"Look at, Dutch," Curly was saying; "you've got a little of the cush now--it ain't much, but it's something. You want to go and give some of it to your mother; don't go and splash it up in beer."

It pleased Archie to have Curly call him Dutch. There was something affectionate in it, as there is in most nicknames--something reassuring. But the mention of his mother overcame this sense; it unmanned him, and he looked away.

"And look at," Curly was going on, "you'll bit up on that burned darb; you be around in a day or two."

Curly withdrew into himself in the curious, baffling way he had; the way that made him mysterious and somewhat superior, and, at times, brought on him the distrust of his companions, always morbidly suspicious at their best. Archie disliked to step out of Gibbs's place into the street; it seemed like an exposure. He glanced out. The summer twilight had deepened into darkness. The street was deserted and bare, though the cobblestones somehow exuded the heat and turmoil of the day that had just passed from them. Archie thought for an instant of what Curly had said about his mother; he could see her as she would be sitting in the kitchen, with the lamp on the table; Gusta would be bustling about getting the supper, the children moving after her, clutching at her skirts, retarding her, getting in her way, seeming to endanger their own lives by scalding and burning and falling and other domestic accidents, which, though always impending, never befell. The kitchen would be full of the pleasant odor of frying potatoes, and the coffee, bubbling over now and then and sizzling on the hot stove--Archie had a sense of all these things, and his heart yearned and softened. And then suddenly he thought of his father, and he knew that the conception of the home he had just had was the way it used to be before his father lost his leg and all the ills following that accident had come upon the family; the house was no longer cheerful; the smell of boiling coffee was not in it as often as it used to be; his mother was depressed and his father quarrelsome, even Gusta had changed; he would be sure to encounter that lover of hers, that plumber whom he hated. He squeezed the roll of bills in his pocket; suddenly, too, he remembered his new revolver and pressed it against his thigh, and he had pleasure in that. He went out into the street. After all, the darkness was kind; there were glaring and flashing electric lights along the street, of course; the cheap restaurant across the way was blazing, people were drifting in and out, but they were not exactly the same kind of people in appearance that had thronged the streets by day. There was a new atmosphere--a more congenial atmosphere, for night had come, and had brought a change and a new race of people to the earth--a race that lived and worked by night, with whom Archie felt a kinship. He did not hate them as he was unconsciously growing to hate the people of the daylight. He saw a lame hot-tamale man in white, hobbling up the street, painfully carrying his steaming can; he saw cabmen on their cabs down toward Cherokee Street; he saw two girls, vague, indistinct, suggestive, flitting hurriedly by in the shadows; the electric lights were blazing with a hard fierce glare, but there were shadows, deep and black and soft. He started toward Cherokee Street; he squeezed the money in his pocket; he was somehow elated with the independence it gave him. At the corner he paused again; he had no plan, he was drifting along physically just as he was morally, following the line of least resistance, which line, just then, was marked by the lights along Market Place. He started across that way, when all at once a hand took him by the lapel of his coat and Kouka's black visage was before him. Archie looked at the detective, whose eyes were piercing him from beneath the surly brows that met in thick, coarse, bristling hairs across the wide bridge of his nose.

"Well," said Kouka, "so I've got you again!"

Archie's heart came to his throat. A great rage suddenly seized him, a hatred of Kouka, and of his black eyes; he had a savage wish to grind the heel of his boot heavily, viciously, remorselessly into that face, right there where the eyebrows met across the nose--grinding his heel deep, feeling the bones crunch beneath it. For some reason Kouka suddenly released his hold.

"You'd better duck out o' here, young fellow," Kouka was saying. "You hear?"

Archie heard, but it was a moment before he could fully realize that Kouka knew nothing after all.

"You hear?" Kouka repeated, bringing his face close to Archie's.

"Yes, I hear," said Archie sullenly, as it seemed, but thankfully.

"Don't let me see you around any more, you--"

Archie, saved by some instinct, did not reply, and he did not wait for Kouka's oath, but hurried away, and Kouka, as he could easily feel, stood watching him. He went on half a block and paused in a shadow. He saw Kouka still standing there, then presently saw him turn and go away.

Archie paused in the shadow; he thought of Kouka, remembering all the detective had done to him; he remembered those forty days in the workhouse; he thought of Bostwick, of the city attorney, of the whole town that seemed to stand behind him; the bitterness of those days in the workhouse came back, and the force of all the accumulated hatred and vengeance that had been spent upon him was doubled and quadrupled in his heart, and he stood there with black, mad, insane thoughts clouding his reason. Then he gripped his roll of money, he pressed his new revolver, and he felt a kind of wild, primitive, savage satisfaction,--the same primitive satisfaction that Kouka, and Bostwick, the city attorney, the whole police force, and the whole city had seemed to take in sending him to the workhouse. And then he went on toward the tenderloin.

III

Gibbs, never sure that the police would keep their word with him, rose earlier than usual the next morning, ate his breakfast, called a cab--he had an eccentric fondness for riding about in hansom-cabs--and was driven rapidly to the corner of High and Franklin Streets, the busiest, most distracting corner in the city. There the enormous department store of James E. Bills and Company occupied an entire building five stories high. The store was already filled with shoppers, mostly women, who crowded about the counters, on which all kinds of trinkets were huddled, labeled with cards declaring that the price had just been reduced. The girls behind the counters, all of whom were dressed in a certain extravagant imitation of the women who came every day to look these articles over, were already tired; their eyes lay in dark circles that were the more pronounced because their cheeks were covered with powder, and now and then they lifted their hands, their highly polished finger-nails gleaming, to the enormous pompadours in which they had arranged their hair. Many of the women in the store, clerks and shoppers, wore peevish, discontented expressions, and spoke in high ugly voices; the noise of their haggling filled the whole room and added to the din made by the little metal money-boxes that whizzed by on overhead wires, and increased the sense of confusion produced by the cheap and useless things which, with their untruthful placards, were piled about everywhere. The air in the store was foul and unwholesome; here and there pale little girls who carried bundles in baskets ran about on their little thin legs, piping out shrill numbers.

Gibbs was wearied the moment he entered, and irritably waved aside the sleek, foppish floor-walker. The only person to whom he spoke as he passed along was a private detective leaning against one of the counters; Gibbs had already had dealings with him and had got back for him articles that had been stolen by certain women thieves who were adept in the art of shoplifting. Gibbs went straight back to the elevator and was lifted out of all this din and confusion into the comparative quiet of the second floor, where the offices of the establishment occupied a cramped space behind thin wooden partitions. Gibbs entered the offices and glanced about at the clerks, who worked in silence; on each of them had been impressed a subdued, obedient demeanor; they glanced at Gibbs surreptitiously. It was plain that all spirit had been drilled out of them; they were afraid of something, and, driven by their necessities, they toiled like machines. Gibbs felt a contempt for them as great as the contempt he felt for the floor-walkers below, a contempt almost as great as that he had for Bills himself. A timid man of about forty-five, with a black beard sprouting out of the pallor of his skin, came up, and lifted his brows with amazement when Gibbs, ignoring him, made plainly for the door that was lettered: "Mr. Bills."

"Mr. Bills is engaged just now," the man said in a hushed tone.

"Well, tell him Mr. Gibbs is here."

"But he's engaged just now, sir; he's dictating." The man leaned forward and whispered the word "dictating" impressively.

But Gibbs kept on toward the door; then the man blocked his way.

"Tell him if you want to," said Gibbs, "if not, I will."

It seemed that Gibbs might walk directly through the man, who retreated from him, and, having no other egress, went through Mr. Bills's door. A moment more and he held it open for Gibbs.

Bills was sitting at an enormous desk which was set in perfect order; on either side of him were baskets containing the letters he was methodically answering. Bills's head showed over the top of the desk; it was a round head covered with short black hair, smoothly combed and shining. His black side-whiskers were likewise short and smooth. His neck was bound by a white collar and a little pious, black cravat, and he wore black clothes. His smoothly-shaven lips were pursed in a self-satisfied way; he was brisk and unctuous, very clean and proper, and looked as if he devoutly anointed himself with oil after his bath. In a word, he bore himself as became a prominent business man, who, besides his own large enterprise, managed a popular Sunday-school, and gave Sunday afternoon "talks" on "Success," for the instruction of certain young men of the city, too mild and acquiescent to succeed as anything but conformers.

"Ah, Mr. Gibbs," he said. "You will excuse me a moment."

Bills turned and resumed the dictation of his stereotyped phrases of business. He dictated several letters, then dismissed his stenographer and, turning about, said with a smile:

"Now, Mr. Gibbs."

Gibbs drew his chair close to Bills's desk, and, taking a package from his pocket, laid out the stamps.

"One hundred sheets of twos, fifty of ones," he said.

Bills had taken off his gold glasses and slowly lowered them to the end of their fine gold chain; he rubbed the little red marks the glasses left on the bridge of his nose, and in his manner there was an uncertainty that seemed unexpected by Gibbs.

"I was about to suggest, Mr. Gibbs," said Bills, placing his fingers tip to tip, "that you see our Mr. Wilson; he manages the mail-order department, now."

"Not for mine," said Gibbs decisively. "I've always done business with you. I don't know this fellow Wilson."

Bills, choosing to take it as a tribute, smiled and went on:

"I think we're fully stocked just now, but--how would a sixty per cent. proposition strike you?"

"No," said Gibbs, as decisively as before.

"No?" repeated Bills.

"No," Gibbs went on, "seventy-five."

Bills thought a moment, absently lifting the rustling sheets.

"How many did you say there were?"

"They come to one-fifty," said Gibbs; "count 'em."

Bills did count them, and when he had done, he said:

"That would make it one-twelve-fifty?"

"That's it."

"Very well. Shall I pass the amount to your credit?"

"No; I'll take the cash."

"I thought perhaps Mrs. Gibbs would be wanting some things in the summer line," said Bills.

Gibbs shook his head.

"We pay cash," said he.

Bills smiled, got up, walked briskly with a little spring to each step and left the room. He returned presently, closed the door, sat down, counted the bills out on the leaf of his desk, laid a silver half-dollar on top and said:

"There you are."

Gibbs counted the money carefully, rolled it up deliberately and stuffed it into his trousers pocket.

Gibbs had one more errand that morning, and he drove in his hansom-cab to the private bank Amos Hunter conducted as a department of his trust company. Gibbs deposited his money, and then went into Hunter's private office. Hunter was an old man, thin and spare, with white hair, and a gray face. He sat with his chair turned away from his desk, which he seldom used except when it became necessary for him to sign his name, and then he did this according to the direction of a clerk, who would lay a paper before him, dip a pen in ink, hand it to Hunter, and point to the space for the signature. Hunter was as economical of his energy in signing his name as in everything else; he wrote it "A. Hunter." He sat there every day without moving, as it seemed, apparently determined to eke out his life to the utmost. His coachman drove him down town at ten each morning, at four in the afternoon he came and drove him home again. It was only through the windows of the carriage and through the windows of his private office that Hunter looked out on a world with which for forty years he had never come in personal contact. His inert manner gave the impression of great age and senility; but the eyes under the thick white brows were alert, keen, virile. He was referred to generally as "old Amos."

Gibbs went in, a parcel in his hand.

"Just a little matter of some mutilated currency," he said.

Old Amos's thin lips seemed to smile.

"You may leave it and we'll be glad to forward it to Washington for you, Mr. Gibbs," he said, without moving.

Gibbs laid the bundle on old Amos's desk, and, taking up a bit of paper, wrote on it and handed it to Hunter.

"Have you a memorandum there?" asked Hunter. He glanced at the paper and wrote on the slip:

"A. H."

Then he resumed the attitude that had scarcely been altered, laid his white hands in his lap and sat there with his thin habitual smile.

Gibbs thanked him and went away. His morning's work among the business men of the city was done.

IV

It promised to be a quiet evening at Danny Gibbs's. There had been a vicious electrical storm that afternoon, but by seven o'clock the lightning played prettily in the east, the thunder rolled away, the air cooled, and the rain fell peacefully. The storm had been predicted to Joe Mason in the rheumatism that had bitten his bones for two days, but now the ache had ceased, and the relief was a delicious sensation he was content simply to realize. He sat in the back room, smoking and thinking, a letter in his hand. Gibbs's wife had gone to bed--she had been drinking that day. Old Johnson, the sot who, by acting as porter, paid Gibbs for his shelter and the whisky he drank--he ate very little, going days at a time without food--had set the bar-room in order and disappeared. Gibbs was somewhere about, but all was still, and Mason liked it so. From time to time Mason glanced at the letter. The letter was a fortnight old; it had been written from a workhouse in a distant city by his old friend Dillon, known to the yeggs as Slim. Mason had not seen Dillon for a year--not, in fact, since they had been released from Dannemora. This was the letter:

OLD PAL--I thought I would fly you a kite, and take chances of its safe arrival at your loft. I was lagged wrong, but I am covered and strong and the bulls can't throw me. I am only here for a whop, and I'll hit the road before the dog is up. I have filled out a country jug that can be sprung all right. We can make a safe lamas. There is a John O'Brien at 1:30 A. M., and a rattler at 3:50. The shack next door is a cold slough, and the nearest kip to the joint is one look and a peep. There is a speeder in the shanty, and we can get to the main stem and catch the rattler and be in the main fort by daylight. The trick is easy worth fifty centuries. Now let me know, and make your mark and time. I am getting this out through a broad who will give it to our fall-back, you know who.

Yours in durance vile, SLIM.

Mason had not answered the letter, and only the day before Dillon had appeared, bringing with him a youth called Squeak. And now this night, as Mason sat there, he did not like to think of Dillon. Dillon had traveled hundreds of miles by freight-trains to be with Mason, to give him part in his enterprise; he had been to the little town and examined the bank; he had even entered it by night alone. He had laid his plans, and, like all his kind, could not conceive of their miscarrying. He had estimated the amount they would procure; he considered five thousand dollars a conservative estimate. It was the big touch, of which they were always dreaming as a means of reformation. But Mason had refused. Then Dillon asked Curly, and Curly refused. Mason gave Dillon no reason for his refusal, but Curly contended that summer was not the time for such a big job; the nights were short and people slept lightly, with open windows, even if the old stool-pigeon was not up. Dillon had taunted him and hinted contemptuously at a broad. They had almost come to blows. Finally Dillon had left, taking with him Mandell and Squeak and Archie--all eager to go.

Mason sat there and thought of Dillon and his companions. He could imagine them on the John O'Brien, jolting on through the rain, maybe dropping off when the train stopped, to hide under some water-tank, or behind some freight-shed--he had done it all so many, many times himself. Still he tried not to think of Dillon, for he could not do so without a shade of self-reproach; it seemed like pigging to refuse Dillon as he had; they had worked so long together. Dillon's long, gaunt figure presented itself to his memory as crouching before some old rope mold, a bit of candle in his left hand, getting ready to pour the soup, and then memory would usually revert to that night when Dillon had suddenly doused the candle--but not before Mason had caught the gleam in his eyes and the setting of his jaw--and, pulling his rod, had barked suddenly into the darkness. Then the flight outside, the rose-colored flashes from their revolvers in the night, the race down the silent street--white snow in the fields across the railroad tracks, and the bitter cold in the woods.

He shook his head as if to fling the memories from him. But Dillon's figure came back, now in the front rank of his company, marching across the hideous prison yard, his long legs breaking at the middle as he leaned back in the lock-step. Mason tried to escape these thoughts, but they persisted. He got a newspaper, but understood little of what he read, except one brief despatch, which told of a tramp found cut in two beside the tracks, five hundred dollars sewed in his coat. The despatch wondered how a hobo could have so much money, and this amused Mason; he would tell Gibbs, and they would have a laugh--their old laugh at the world above them. Then they themselves would wonder--wonder which one of the boys it was; it might be weeks before the news would reach them in an authoritative form. He enjoyed for a moment his laugh at the stupid world, the world which could not understand them in the least, the world which shuddered in its ignorance of them. Then he thought of Dillon again. Dillon had never refused him; he had not refused him that evening in northern Indiana, when the sheriff and the posse of farmers, armed with pitchforks and shot-guns and old army muskets, had brought them to bay in the wheat stubble; his ammunition had given out, but old Dillon, with only three cartridges left, had stood cursing and covering his retreat. Mason was beginning to feel small about it, and yet--Dillon did not understand; when he came back he would explain it all to him. This notion gave him some comfort, and he lighted his cigar, turned to his newspaper again, and listened for the rain falling outside. Suddenly there was a noise, and Mason started. Was that old Dillon crouching there beside him, his face gleaming in the flicker of the dripping candle? He put his hand to his head in a kind of daze.

"Je's!" he exclaimed. "I'm getting nutty."

He was troubled, for his head had now and then gone off that way in prison--they called it stir simple. Mason sat down again, but no longer tried to read. He heard the noise in the bar-room, the noise of high excitement, and he wondered. His curiosity was great, but he had learned to control his curiosity. He could hear talking, laughing, cursing, the shuffle of feet, the clink of glasses--some sports out for a time, no doubt. In a moment the door opened and Gibbs appeared.

"Where's Kate?" he demanded.

"She went to bed half an hour ago," said Mason. "Why--what's the excitement?"

"Eddie Dean's here--come on out." Gibbs disappeared; the door closed.

Mason understood; no wonder the place thrilled with excitement. He had heard of Eddie Dean. Down into his world had come stories of this man, of his amazing skill and cleverness, of the enormous sums he made every year--made and spent. Dean had the fascination for Mason that is born of mystery; he had had Dean's methods and the methods of other big-mitt men described to him; he had heard long discussions in sand-house hang-outs and beside camp-fires in the woods, but the descriptions never described; he could never grasp the details. He could understand the common, ordinary thefts; he could see how a pickpocket by long practice learned his art, but the kind of work that Dean did had something occult in it. How a man could go out, wearing good clothes, and, without soiling his fingers, merely by talking and playing cards, make such sums of money--Mason simply could not realize it. Surely it was worth while to have a look at him. He started out, then he remembered; he passed his hand over the stubble of hair that had been growing after the shaving at the workhouse, and he picked up his low-crowned, narrow-brimmed felt hat--the kind worn by the brakemen he now and then wished to be taken for--pulled it down to his eyebrows, and went out.

Eddie Dean, who stood at the bar in the blue clothes that perfectly exemplified the fashion of that summer, was described in the police identification records as a man somewhat above medium size, and now, at forty, he was beginning to take on fat. His face was heavy, and despite the fact that his nose was twisted slightly to one side, and his upper lip depressed where it met his nose, the women whom Dean knew considered him handsome. His face was smooth-shaven and blue, like an actor's, from his heavy beard. His mouth was large, and his lips thin; he could close them and look serious and profound; and when he smiled and disclosed the gold fillings in his teeth, he seemed youthful and gay. His face showed vanity, a love of pleasure, vulgarity, selfishness, sensuality accentuated by dissipation, and the black eyes that were so sharp and bright and penetrating were cruel. Mason, however, could not analyze; he only knew that he did not like this fellow, and merely grunted when Gibbs introduced him, and Dean patronizingly said, without looking at him:

"Just in time, my good fellow."

Then he motioned imperiously to the bartender, who took down another wine-glass, wiped it dexterously, and set it out with an elegant flourish and filled it. Mason watched the golden bubbles spring from the hollow stem to the seething surface. He did not care much for champagne, but he lifted his glass and looked at Dean, who was saying:

"Here's to the suckers--may they never grow less."

The others in the party laughed. Besides Gibbs, who was standing outside his own bar like a visitor, there were Nate Rosen, a gambler, dressed more conspicuously than Dean; a small man in gray, with strange pale eyes fastened always on Dean; and a third man in tweeds, larger than either, with broad shoulders, heavy jaw and an habitual scowl. Beyond him, apart, with the truckling leer of the parasite, stood a man in seedy livery, evidently the driver of the carriage that was waiting outside in the rain.

Dean's history was the monotonous one of most men of his kind. Having a boy's natural dislike for school, he had run away from home and joined a circus. At first he led the sick horses, then he was hired by one of the candy butchers and finally allowed to peddle on the seats; there he learned the art of short change, and when he had mastered this he sold tickets from a little satchel outside the tents; by the time he was twenty-five he knew most of the schemes by which the foolish, seeking to get something for nothing, are despoiled of their money. He was an adept at cards; he knew monte and he could work the shells; later he traveled about, cheating men by all kinds of devices, aided by an intuitive knowledge of human nature. He could go through a passenger train from coach to coach and pick out his victims by their backs. As he went through he would suddenly lose his balance, as if by the lurching of the train, and steady himself by the arm of the seat in which his intended victim sat. His confederate, following behind, would note and remember. Later, he would return and invite him to make a fourth hand at whist or pedro or some other game. Dean would do the rest. He went to all large gatherings--political conventions, especially national conventions, conclaves, celebrations, world's fairs, the opening of any new strip of land in the West, the gold-fields of Alaska, and so on. He had roamed all over the United States; he had been to Europe, and Cuba, and Jamaica, and Old Mexico; he had visited Hawaii; he boasted that he had traveled the whole world over--"from St. Petersburg to Cape Breton" was the way he put it, and it impressed his hearers all the more because most of them had none but the most confused notion of where either place was. He boasted, too, that United States senators, cabinet officers, congressmen, governors, financiers and other prominent men had been among his victims, and many of these boasts were justified--by the facts, at least.

The atmosphere of the bar-room had been changed by the arrival of Dean. It lost its usual serenity and quivered with excitement. The deference shown to Dean was marked in the attitude of the men in his suite; it was marked, too, by the bartender's attitude, and even in that of Gibbs, though Gibbs was more quiet and self-contained, bearing himself, indeed, quite as Dean's equal. He did not look at Dean often, but stood at his bar with his head lowered, gazing thoughtfully at the glass of mineral water he was drinking, turning it round and round in his fingers, with a faint smile on his lips. But no one could tell whether the amusement came from his own thoughts or the little adventures Dean was relating.

"No, I'm going out in the morning," Dean was saying, the diamond on his white, delicate hand flashing as he lifted his glass.

"Which way?" asked Gibbs.

"I'm working eastward," said Dean. "Here!" he turned to the bartender, "let's have another--and get another barrel of water for Dan."

He smiled with what tolerance he could find for a man who did not drink.

"How much of that stuff do you lap up in a week, Dan?"

"Oh, I don't know," Gibbs said. He was not quick at repartee.

"Well, slush up, but don't make yourself sick," Dean went on.

The bartender, moving briskly about, pressed the cork from a bottle, poured a few drops into Dean's glass, and then proceeded to fill the other glasses.

"Well, how's the graft?" Gibbs asked presently.

"Oh, fairly good," said Dean. "A couple of bucks yesterday." He switched his leg with the slender stick he carried.

Gibbs's eyes lighted with humorous interest and pleasure.

"They were coming out of St. Louis," Dean went on, and then, as if he had perhaps given an exaggerated impression of the transaction, he went on in a quick, explicatory way: "Oh, it didn't amount to much--just for the fun of the thing, you know. But say, who do you think I saw in St. Louis?"

"Don't know," said Gibbs, shaking his head.

"Why, old Tom Young."

"No!" exclaimed Gibbs, looking up in genuine interest and surprise.

"Sure," said Dean.

"What's he doing?"

"He made the big touch, quit the business, got a farm in Illinois, and settled down with Lou. The girl's grown up, just out of a seminary, and the boy's in college. He said he'd like me to see the place, but he wouldn't take me out 'cause the girl was home then. Remember the old joint in the alley?"

Gibbs's eyes kindled with lively memories.

"Remember that afternoon Bob's man came down for the brace-box? I can see Tom now--he gets the box and says, 'Tell Bob not to frisk him.' God! They sent that mark through the alley that afternoon to a fare-you-well. And they had hell's own time keepin' the box in advance of 'em--it was the only one in the alley. Remember?"

Gibbs remembered, but that did not keep Dean from relating the whole story.

"What became of Steve Harris?" Dean asked.

"He's out with the rag, I guess," Gibbs replied.

"I heard Winnie sold her place."

"Oh, yes," said Gibbs; "bought a little home in the swell part--quiet street and all that--and they're living there happy as you please."

"Well, that's good," said Dean. "Steve and me was with the John Robinson show in the old days. He was holdin' a board for the monte tickets, and old Pappy King was cappin' for the game. I remember one night in Danville, Kentucky"--and Dean told another story. The stories were all alike, having for their theme the despoilment of some simpleton who had tried to beat Dean or his confederates at one of their own numerous games.

"I was holding the shingle for Jim Steele when he was playing the broads, you understand. He was the greatest spieler ever. I can see him now, taking up the tickets, looking around and saying: 'Is there a speculator in the party?'"

Dean's face was alight with the excitement of dramatizing the long-past scene. He laid his stick on the bar and bent over, with his white fingers held as if they poised cards. He was a good mimic. One could easily imagine the scene on the trampled grass, with the white canvas tents of the circus for a background.

"Dick Nolan and Joe Hipp were capping, and Dick would come up--he had the best gilly make-up in the world, you understand, a paper collar, a long linen duster and big green mush--he'd look over the cards--see?"--Dean leaned over awkwardly like a country-man, pointing with a crooked forefinger--"and then he'd say, 'I think it's that one.'"

His voice had changed; he spoke in the cracked tone of the farmer, and his little audience laughed.

"Well, the guy hollers, you understand, but at the come-back they're all swipes--working in the horse tents; you'd never know 'em. And then," Dean went on, with the exquisite pleasure of remembering, "old Ben Mellott was there working the send--you remember Ben, Dan?"

Gibbs nodded.

"Jake Rend was running the side-show, and old Jew Cohen had a dollar store--a drop-case, you know."

Gibbs nodded again. Dean grew meditative, and a silence fell on the group.

"We had a great crowd of knucks, too; the guns to-day are nothing to them. Those were the days, Dan. Course, there wasn't much in it at that."

Dean meditated over the lost days a moment, and then he grew cheerful again.

"I met Luke Evans last fall, Dan," he began again. "In England. The major and I were running between London and Liverpool, working the steamer trains, and him and me--"

And he was off into another story. Having taken up his English experience, Dean now told a number of vulgar stories, using the English accent, which he could imitate perfectly. While in the midst of one of them, he suddenly started at a footfall, and looked hastily over his shoulder. A man came in, glanced about, and came confidently forward.

"Good morning, Danny," he said, in a tone of the greatest familiarity.

Gibbs answered the greeting soberly, and then, at a sign from the man, stepped aside rather reluctantly and whispered with him. Dean eyed them narrowly, took in the fellow's attire from his straw hat to his damp shoes, and, when he could catch Gibbs's eye, he crooked his left arm, touched it significantly, and lifted his eyebrows in sign of question. Gibbs shook his head in a negative that had a touch of contempt for the implication, and then drew the man toward the bar. Without the man's seeing him or hearing him, Dean touched his arm again and said to Gibbs softly:

"Elbow?"

"No," said Gibbs, "reporter."

Then he turned and, speaking to the new-comer, he presented him to Dean, saying:

"Mr. Jordon, make you acquainted with Mr. Wales, of the _Courier_."

"Glad to meet you, Mr. Jordon," said the newspaper man.

"Ah, chawmed, I'm suah," said Dean, keeping to the English accent he had just been using. "I say, won't you join us?"

The bartender, at a glance from Dean, produced another bottle of champagne; the newspaper man's eyes glistened with pleasure, Dean was taking out his cigarette case. Wales glanced at the cigarettes, and Dean hastened to proffer them. In conversation with the reporter Dean impersonated an English follower of the turf who had brought some horses to America. As he did this, actor that he was, he became more and more interested in his impromptu monologue, assumed the character perfectly and lived into it, and the others there who knew of the deceit he was practising on the reporter--he was nearly always practising some sort of deceit, but seldom so innocently as now--were utterly delighted; they listened to his guying until nearly midnight, when Dean, having sustained the character of the Englishman for more than two hours, grew weary and said he must go. As he was leaving he said to the reporter:

"You've been across, of course? No? Well, really now, that's quite too bad, don't you know! But I say, whenever you come, you must look me up, if you don't mind, at Tarlingham Towers. I've a bit of a place down in the Surrey country; I've a beast there that's just about up to your weight. Have you ever ridden to the hounds?"

The reporter was delighted; he felt that a distinction had been conferred upon him. Wishing to show his appreciation, he asked Dean, or Jordan, as he was to him, if he might print an interview. Dean graciously consented, and the reporter left for his office, glad of a story with which to justify to his city editor, at least partly, his wasted evening.

When Dean had gone, taking his three companions with him, Gibbs and Mason sat for a long while in the back room.

"So that's Eddie Dean!" said Mason.

"Yes," said Gibbs, "that's him."

"And what's his graft?"

"Oh," said Gibbs, "the send, the bull con, the big mitt, the cross lift--anything in that line."

"And those two other guys with him?" asked Mason.

"That little one is Willie the Rat, the other is Gaffney."

"Sure-thing men, too?"

"Yes, they're in Ed's mob."

Mason was still for a while, then he observed:

"Je's! He did make a monkey of that cove!"

Gibbs laughed. "Oh, he's a great cod! Why, do you know what he did once? Well, he went to Lord Paisley's ball in Quebec, impersonating Sir Charles Jordon--that's why I introduced him as Mr. Jordon to-night." Gibbs's eyes twinkled. "He went in to look for a rummy, but the flatties got on and tipped him off."

"He's smart."

"Yes, the smartest in the business. He's made several ten-century touches."

Gibbs thought seriously a moment and then said:

"No, he isn't smart; he's a damn fool, like all of them."

"Fall?"

"Yes, settled twice; done a two-spot at Joliet and a finiff at Ionia."

Mason knit his brows and thought a long time, while Gibbs smoked. Finally Mason shook his head.

"No," he said, "no, Dan, I don't get it. I can understand knocking off a peter--the stuff's right there. All you do is to go take it. I can understand a hold-up, or a heel, or a prowl; I can see how a gun reefs a britch kick and gets a poke--though I couldn't put my hand in a barrel myself and get it out again--without breaking the barrel. I haven't any use for that kind, which you know--but these sure-thing games, the big mitt and the bull con--no, Dan, I can't get hip."

Gibbs laughed.

"Well, I can't explain it, Joe. You heard him string that chump to-night."

Mason dropped that phase of the question and promptly said:

"Dan, I suppose there's games higher up, ain't they?"

Gibbs laughed a superior laugh.

"Higher up? Joe, there's games that beat his just as much as his beats yours. I could name you men--" Then he paused.

Mason had grown very solemn. He was not listening at all to Gibbs, and, after a moment or two, he looked up and said earnestly:

"Dan, what you said a while back is dead right. I'm a damn fool. Look at me now--I've done twenty years, and in all my time I've had less than two thousand bucks."

Gibbs was about to speak, but Mason was too serious to let himself be interrupted.

"I was thinking it all over to-night, and I decided--know what I decided?"

Gibbs shook his head.

"I decided," Mason went on, "to square it without waiting for the big touch." Gibbs was not impressed; the good thieves were always considering reformation. "I know I can't get anything to do--I'm too old, and besides--well, you know." Mason let the situation speak for itself. "I'm about all in, but I was thinking, Dan, this here place you've got in the country, can't you--" Mason hesitated a little--"can't you let me work around there? Just my board and a few clothes?" Mason leaned forward eagerly.

"You know, Joe," said Gibbs, seeing that Mason was serious, "that as long as I've got a place you can have a home with me. I'm going to take Kate out there and live. I've got the place almost paid for."

Mason leaned back, tried to speak, paused, swallowed, and moistened his lips.

"I worried about Slim to-night," he managed to say presently. It was hard for him to give utterance to thoughts that he considered sentimental. "My treating him so, you see--that I decided; I want to try it. That's why I wouldn't go with him; he didn't understand, but maybe I can explain. As I was thinking to-night, my head went off again--that stir simple, you know."

He raised his hand to his head and Gibbs was concerned.

"You'd better take a little drink, Joe," he said.

After Gibbs had brought the whisky, they sat there and discussed the future until the early summer dawn was red.

V

Dillon, Archie, Mandell and Squeak had left the city that morning. Dillon was gloomy and morose because Mason had refused to join him. He had been disappointed, too, in Curly, but not so much surprised, for Curly was so strange and mysterious that nothing he might do could surprise his friends. Cedarville was far away, in Illinois, and long before daylight the four men had started on their journey in a freight-train. Dillon's plan was to rob the bank that night. He had chosen Saturday night because a Sunday would probably intervene before discovery, and thus give them time to escape. But the journey was beset by difficulties; the train spent long hours in switching, in cutting out and putting in cars, and at such times the four men had been compelled to get off and hide, lest the trainmen detect them. Besides, the train made long inexplicable stops, standing on a siding, with nothing to mar the stillness but the tired exhaust of the engine and the drone of the wide country-side. At noon the empty box-car in which the men had been riding was cut out and left stranded at a village; after that, unable to find another empty car, they rode on a car that was laden with lumber, but this, too, was cut out and left behind. Then they rode in most uncomfortable and dangerous positions on the timber-heads over the couplings. Half-way to Cedarville they met the storm. It had been gathering all the morning, and now it broke suddenly; the rain came down in torrents, and they were drenched to the skin. Mandell, who was intensely afraid of lightning, suffered agonies, and threatened to abandon the mob at the first opportunity. Late in the afternoon, just as the train was pulling into the village of Romeo, the rear brakeman discovered them, called the conductor and the front brakeman, and ordered the men to leave the train.

"Stick and slug!" cried Mandell, made irritable by the storm. But Dillon repressed him.

"Unload!" he commanded. "Don't goat 'em."

Archie, on the other side of the car, had not been seen clearly by the trainmen, but the others had, and though Dillon made them all get off, he could not keep Squeak from stopping long enough to curse the train-men with horrible oaths. Then the train went on and left them.

At evening they went into the woods and built a fire. There were discouragements as to the fire; the wood was wet, but finally they achieved a blaze, and Dillon went into the village after food. When he returned the fire was going well, the men had dried their clothes, and their habitual spirits had returned. In the water of a creek Dillon washed the can he had found, and made tea; they cooked bacon on pointed sticks, broke the bread and cheese, and ate their supper. Then, in the comfort that came of dry clothes and warmth and the first meal they had eaten that day, they sat about, rolled cigarettes, and waited for the night. Then darkness fell, Dillon made them put out the fire, and they tramped across the fields to the railroad.

"We'll wait here for the John O'Brien," said Dillon, when they came to the water-tank. "We must get the jug to-night--that'll give us all day to-morrow for the get-away."

They waited then, and waited, while the summer night deepened to silence; once, the headlight of an engine sent its long light streaming down the track; they made ready; the train came swaying toward them.

"Hell!" exclaimed Mandell, in the disappointment that was common to all of them. "It's a rattler!" And the lighted windows of a passenger-train swept by.

They waited and waited, and no freight-train came. At midnight, when they were all stiff and cold, Dillon ordered them into the village. They were glad enough to go. In the one business street of the town they found a building in which a light gleamed. They glanced through a window; it was the post-office. Then Dillon changed his plan in that ease with which he could change any plan, and forgot the little bank at Cedarville. He placed Squeak at the rear of the building, Mandell in the front.

"Come on, Dutch," he said.

He took Archie with him because he was not so sure of him as he was of the two other men, though Archie felt that he had been honored above them. He followed Dillon into the deep shadows that lay between the post-office and the building next door. He kept close behind Dillon, and watched with excitement while Dillon's tall form bent before one of the windows. Dillon was groping; presently he stood upright, his back bowed, he strained and grunted and swore, then the screws gave, and Dillon wrenched the little iron bars from the windows.

"Come on," he said.

He was crawling through the window; Archie followed.

Inside, Dillon stood upright, holding Archie behind him, and peered about in the dim light from the oil lamp that burned before a tin reflector on the wall. The safe was in the light. Dillon looked back, made a mental note of the window's location, and put out the lamp. Then he lighted a candle and knelt before the safe.

Archie stood with his revolver in his hand; Dillon laid his on the floor beside him. Then from the pocket of his coat he drew out some soap; a moment more and Archie could see him plastering up the crevices about the door of the safe, leaving but one opening, in the middle of the top of the door. Then out of the soap he fashioned about this opening a crude little cup. Archie watched intently. Dillon worked rapidly, expertly, and yet, as Archie noted, not so rapidly nor so expertly as Curly had worked. Curly was considered one of the most skilful men in the business, but Dillon was older and could tell famous tales of the old days when they had blown gophers--the days when they used to drill the safes and pour in powder. Dillon's age was telling; his fingers were clumsy and knotted with rheumatism, and now and then they trembled.

"Now the soup," Dillon was saying, quite to himself, and he poured the nitroglycerin from a bottle into the little cup he had made of soap.

"And the string," said Archie, anxious to display his knowledge.

"Cheese it!" Dillon commanded.

He was fixing a fulminating cap to the end of a fuse, and he inserted this into the cup. Then he plastered it all over with soap, picked up his revolver, lighted the slow fuse from the candle, and, rising quickly, he stepped back, drawing Archie with him. They stood in a corner of the room watching the creeping spark; a moment more and there was the thud of an explosion, and Dillon was springing toward the safe; he seized the handle, opened the heavy door, and was down with his candle peering into its dark interior. He went through it rapidly, drew out the stamps and the currency and the coin. Another moment and they were outside. Mandell and Squeak were where Dillon had left them.

"All right," Dillon said. "Lam!"

VI

A week later, returning by a roundabout way, Dillon and his companions came back to town. That night Dillon, Archie, Squeak, Mandell and Mason were arrested. When Archie was taken up to the detectives' office and found himself facing Kouka, his heart sank.

"Couldn't take a little friendly advice, could you?" said Kouka, thrusting forward his black face.

Archie was dumb.

"Where'd you get that gat?" Kouka demanded.

Still Archie was dumb.

"You might as well tell," Kouka said. "Your pals have split on you."

Archie had heard of that ruse; he did not think any of them would confess, and he was certain they had not done so when Kouka referred to his revolver, for no one but Jackson knew where he had got the weapon. After an hour Kouka gave it up, temporarily at least, and sent Archie back to the prison.

The next morning all five men were taken to the office of the detectives. Besides Kouka, Quinn and Inspector McFee, there were two others, one of whom the prisoners instantly recognized as Detective Carney. Dillon and Mason had long known Carney, and respected him; he was the only detective in the city whom they did respect, for this silent, undemonstrative man, with the weather-beaten face, white hair and shrewd blue eyes, had a profound knowledge of all classes of thieves and their ways. Indeed, this knowledge, which made Carney the most efficient detective in the city, militated against him with his superiors; he knew too much for their comfort. As for Kouka and the other detectives, they were jealous of him, though he never interfered in their work nor offered suggestion or criticism; but they all felt instinctively that he contemned them. When Dillon saw Carney his heart sank; Mason's, on the contrary, rose. Carney gave no sign of recognition; it was plain that he was a mere spectator. But when Dillon saw the other man he whispered to Mason out of the corner of his mouth:

"It's all off."

This man was a tall, well-built fellow, with iron-gray hair, a ruddy face and a small black mustache above full red lips; he was dressed in gray, and he bore himself as something above the other officers present because he was an United States inspector. His name was Fallen. He glanced at the five men, and smiled and nodded complacently.

"I thought it looked like one of your jobs," he said, addressing Dillon and Mason jointly. Dillon could not refrain from nudging Mason, and in the same instant he caught Carney's eye. Carney winked quietly, and Dillon smiled, and to hide the smile, self-consciously ducked his head and spat out his tobacco.

"Well," said Fallen, "I'm much obliged to you men." He included McFee officially, and Kouka and Quinn personally in this acknowledgment. "I'll have the marshal come for them after dinner. I want Mason there and Dillon"--he pointed fiercely and menacingly--"and Mandell and that kid." He was indicating Squeak. "What's your name?" he demanded.

Squeak hesitated, then said: "Davis."

Fallen laughed in his superior, federal way, and said:

"That'll do as well as any."

Then he looked at Archie.

"I don't want him," he said. "He doesn't belong to this gang; he wasn't there. There were only four of them. You can cut him out."

Kouka and Quinn looked at each other in surprise; they were about to protest. In Archie's heart, as he watched this little drama, a wild hope flamed. Carney, too, looked up, showing the first interest he had evinced. Something in his look deterred Fallen, held his eye. He knew Carney and his reputation; his glance plainly implied a question.

"You're wrong on that fellow Mason," said Carney.

Fallen looked at him, then at Mason; then he smiled his superior smile.

"Oh, I guess not," he said lightly. He turned away with his complacent, insulting smile.

"All right," said Carney. "You've got him wrong, that's all. He's been here in town for three weeks. Of course, it's nothing to me--'tain't my business." He plunged his hands in his trousers pockets and walked over to the window.

The men in the chained line shuffled uneasily.

"Do I get out now?" Archie asked.

Kouka laughed.

"Yes--when I'm through with you."

That afternoon Dillon, Mason, Mandell and Squeak were taken to the county jail on warrants charging them with the robbery of the post-office at Romeo.

Gibbs appeared at the jail early that evening, his blue eyes filled with a distress that made them almost as innocent as they must have been when he was a little child.

"I just heard of the pinch," he said apologetically.

"Didn't they send you word last night?" asked Dillon.

Gibbs shook his head impatiently, as if it were useless to waste time in discussing such improbabilities.

"Never mind," he said. "I'll send a mouthpiece."

"Yes, do, Dan," said Mason. "We want a hearing."

"Well, now, leave all that to me, Joe," said Gibbs. "I'll send you some tobacco and have John fetch in some chuck."

Gibbs attended to their little wants, but he had difficulty as to the lawyer. He had, from time to time, employed various lawyers in the city, being guided in his selections, not by the reputed abilities of the lawyers, but by his notions of their pull with the authorities. Formerly he had employed Frisby on the recommendation of Cleary, the chief of police, with whom Frisby divided such fees, but Frisby's charges were extortionate, and lately, Gibbs understood, his influence was waning. In thinking over the other lawyers, he recalled Shelley Thomas, but Thomas, he found, was on a drunk. At last he decided on Marriott.

"There's nothing to it," he said to Marriott, "especially so far as Mason's concerned; he's a friend of mine. He's in wrong, but these United States inspectors will job him if they get a chance."

Marriott wished that Gibbs had retained some other lawyer. The plight of the men seemed desperate enough. He thought them guilty, and, besides, he wished to go away on his vacation. But his interest deepened; he found that he was dealing with a greater power than he encountered in the ordinary state case; the power, indeed, of the United States. The officials in the government building were unobliging; Fallen was positively insulting; from none of them could he receive any satisfaction. The hearing was not set, and then one evening Fallen mysteriously disappeared. Marriott was enraged, Gibbs was desperate, and Marriott found himself sharing Gibbs's concern.

Dillon and Mandell and Squeak spoke only of proving an alibi; they said that Gibbs would arrange this for them. This disheartened Marriott, confirmed his belief in their guilt, and he shrank from placing on the stand the witnesses Gibbs would supply. And then, one afternoon at the jail, a strange experience befell him. Mason was looking at him, his face pressed against the bars; he fixed his eyes on him, and, speaking slowly, with his peculiar habit of moistening his lips and swallowing between his words, he said:

"You think I'm guilty of this, Mr. Marriott."

Marriott tried to smile, and tried to protest, but his looks must have belied him.

"I know you do," Mason went on, "but I'm not, Mr. Marriott. I've done time--lots of it, but they've got me wrong now. These inspectors will lie, of course, but I can prove an alibi. What night was the job done?"

"The twelfth," said Marriott.

"That was Saturday, wasn't it?"

"Yes."

"Well, that night I was in Gibbs's. There was a mob of sure-thing men in there that night--Ed Dean and the Rat and some others--Gibbs will tell you. I can't subpoena them--they couldn't help; nobody would believe them, and they dassen't show, anyway."

"Are they--" Marriott felt a delicacy in saying the word.

"Thieves?" said Mason. "Yes--you see how it is."

"Of course," said Marriott.

"But," Mason went on, "there was a fellow in there--I don't know his name--a reporter; he put a piece in his paper the next day about Dean. Dean was kidding him--Gibbs can tell you. I wish you'd see him--he'll remember me, and he can fix the time by that piece he wrote."

Mason paused.

"I've done nearly twenty years, Mr. Marriott," he said presently. "That was all right; they done that on the square; this is the first time they ever had me in wrong. Dillon was with me every time--we worked together--that'll go against me. And them inspectors don't care--they'd just as soon job a fellow as not. All I ask now is a fair show. But those United States courts are a fierce game to put a man up against."

While Mason was talking a great wave of sympathy swept over Marriott; a conviction came to him that Mason was telling the truth.

"But," he said as the thought came to him, "can't Dillon and the others help you?"

"Well," Mason hesitated. "They've got themselves to look after. I'd rather fall myself than to throw them down. You see Gibbs about that reporter."

Marriott was convinced that Mason was not deceiving him; he felt a reproach at his own original lack of faith in the man. As he waited for the turnkey to unlock the door and let him out, a sickness came over him. The jail was new; there were many boasts about its modern construction, its sanitary conditions, and all that, but when he went out, he was glad of the cool air of the evening--it was wholly different from the atmosphere inside, however scientifically pure that may have been. He stopped a moment and looked back at the jail. It lifted its stone walls high above him; it was all clean, orderly, and architecturally not bad to look on. The handsome residence of the sheriff was brilliantly lighted; there were lace curtains at the windows, and within, doubtless, all the comforts, and yet--the building depressed Marriott. It struck him, though he could not then tell why, as a hideous anachronism. He thought of the men mewed within its stone walls; he could see Dillon's long eager face, ugly with its stubble of beard; he could see the reproach in Mason's eyes; he could see the shadowy forms of the other prisoners, walking rapidly up and down the corridors in their cramped exercises--how many were guilty? how many innocent? He could not tell; none could tell; they perhaps could not tell themselves. A great pity for them all filled his breast; he longed to set them all free. He wished this burden were lifted from him; he wished Gibbs had never come to him; he wished he could forget Mason--but he could not, and a great determination seized him to liberate this man, to prevent this great injustice which was gathering ominously in the world, drawing within its coils not only Mason, but all those who, like Fallen and the other officials, were concerned in the business, even though they remained free in the outer world. And Marriott had one more thought: if he could not prevent the injustice, would it taint him, too, as it must taint all who came in contact with it? He shuddered with a vague, superstitious fear.

Marriott found Wales, who recalled the evening at Gibbs's, consulted the files of his newspaper, made sure of the date, and then went with Marriott to the jail and looked through the bars into Mason's expectant eyes. He prolonged his inspection, plainly for the effect. Presently he said:

"Yes, he was there."

"You'll swear to it?" asked Marriott.

"Sure," said Wales, "with pleasure."

There was relief in Mason's eyes and in his manner, as there was relief in Marriott's mind.

"That makes it all right, Joe," he said, and Mason smiled gratefully. Marriott left the jail happy. His faith was restored. The universe resumed its order and its reason. After all, he said to himself, justice will triumph. He felt now that he could await the preliminary hearing with calmness. Wales's identification of Mason made it certain that he could establish an alibi for him; he must depend on Gibbs for the others, but somehow he did not care so much for them; they had not appealed to him as Mason had, whether because of his conviction that they were guilty or not, he could not say. The hearing was set for Thursday at two o'clock, but Marriott looked forward to it with the assurance that as to Mason, at least, there was no doubt of the outcome.

VII

Although Fallen had told the police they could set Archie free, the police did not set him free.

"It's that fellow Kouka," Archie explained to Marriott. "He's got it in for me; he wants to see me get the gaff."

That afternoon Archie was legally charged with being a "suspicious person." The penalty for being thus suspected by the police was a fine of fifty dollars and imprisonment in the workhouse for sixty days. Marriott was angry; the business was growing complicated. He began to fear that he would never get away on his vacation; he was filled with hatred for Fallen, for Kouka, because just now they personified a system against which he felt himself powerless; finally, he was angry with Archie, with Dillon, even with Mason, for their stupidity in getting into such desperate scrapes.

"They're fools--that's what they are," he said to himself; "they're crazy men." But at this thought he softened. When he recalled Mason in his cell at the jail, and Archie in the old prison at the Central Station, his anger gave way to pity. He resolved to give up his vacation, if necessary, and fight for their release. He determined to demand a jury to try Archie on this charge of suspicion; he knew how Bostwick and all the attaches of the police court disliked to have a jury demanded, because it made them trouble. As he walked up the street he began to arrange the speech he would make in Archie's defense; presently, he noticed that persons turned and looked at him; he knew he had been talking to himself, and he felt silly; these people would think him crazy. This dampened his ardor, crushed his imagination and ruined his speech. He began to think of Mason again; he would have to let Archie's case go until after Mason had had a hearing; he must do one thing at a time.

Archie had been able to endure the confinement as long as Mason and Dillon and Mandell and Squeak were there; the five men had formed a class by themselves; they had a certain superiority in the eyes of the other prisoners, who were confined for drunkenness, for disturbance, for fighting, for petty thefts and other insignificant offenses. But when his companions were taken away, when his own hope of liberty failed, he grew morose. The city prison was an incredibly filthy place. The walls dripped always with dampness. High up, a single gas-jet burned economically in its mantle, giving the place the only light it ever knew. A bench ran along the wall below it, and on this bench the prisoners sat all day and talked, or stretched themselves and slept; now and then, for exercise, they tried chinning themselves from the little iron gallery that ran around the cells of the upper tier. Twice a day they were fed on bologna and coffee and bread. At night they were locked in cells, the lights were put out, and the place became a hideous bedlam. Men snored from gross dissipations, vermin crawled, rats raced about, and the drunken men, whose bodies from time to time were thrown into the place, went mad with terror when they awoke from their stupors, and cursed and blasphemed. The crawling vermin and the scuttling rats, the noises that suggested monsters, made their delirium real. The atmosphere of the prison was foul, compounded of the fumes of alcohol exhaled by all those gaping mouths, of the feculence of all those filthy bodies, of the foul odors of the slop-pails, of the germs of all the diseases that had been brought to the place in forty years. Archie could not sleep; no one could sleep except those who were overcome by liquor, and they had awful nightmares.

His few moments of relief came when the turnkey, a man who had been embruted by long years of locking other men in the prison, opened the door, called him with a curse and turned him over to Kouka. Then the respite ended. He was subjected to new terrors, to fresh horrors, surpassing those physical terrors of the night by infinity. For Kouka and Quinn took him into a little room off the detectives' office, closed and locked the door, and then for two hours questioned him about the robbery of the post-office at Romeo, about countless other robberies in the city and out of it; they accused him of a hundred crimes, pressed him to tell where he had stolen the revolver. They bent their wills against his, they shook their fingers under his nose, their fists in his face; they told him they knew where he had got the revolver; they told him that his companions had confessed. He was borne down and beaten; he felt himself grow weak and faint; at times a nausea overcame him--he was wringing with perspiration.

The first day of this ordeal he sat in utter silence, sustained by dogged Teutonic stubbornness. That afternoon they renewed the torture; still he did not reply.

The morning of the second day, though weakened in body and mind, he still maintained his stubbornness; that afternoon they had brought McFee with a fresh will to bear on him. By evening he told them he had stolen the revolver in Chicago. He did this in the hope of peace. It did gain him a respite, but not for long. The next morning they told him he had lied and he admitted it; then he gave them a dozen explanations of his possession of the revolver, all different and all false. Then, toward evening, Kouka suddenly fell upon him, knocked him from his chair with a blow, and then, as he lay on the floor, beat him with his enormous hairy fists. Quinn, the only other person in the room, stood by and looked on. Finally, Quinn grew alarmed and said:

"Cheese it, Ike! Cheese it!"

Kouka stopped and got up.

Archie was weeping, his whole body trembling, his nerves gone. That night he lay moaning in his hammock, and the man in the cell under him and the man in the cell next him, cursed him. In the morning they took him again up to the detective's office; this was the morning of the third day. Archie was in a daze, his mind was no longer clear, and he wondered vaguely, but with scarcely any interest, why it was that Kouka looked so smiling and pleasant.

"Set down, Arch, old boy," Kouka said, "and let me tell you all about it."

And then Kouka told him just where he had stolen the revolver, and when, and how--told him, indeed, more about the hardware store and the owners of it than Archie had ever known. And yet Archie did not seem surprised at this. He felt numbly that it was no longer worth while to deny it--he wondered why he ever had denied it in the first place. It did not matter; nothing mattered; there was no difference between things--they were all the same. But presently his mind became suddenly clear; he was conscious that there was one unanswered question in the world.

"Say, Kouka," he said, "how did you tumble?"

Kouka laughed. He was in fine humor that morning.

"Oh, it's no use, my boy," he said; "it's no use; you can't fool your Uncle Isaac. You'd better 'ave taken his advice long ago--and been a good boy."

"That's all right," said Archie, a strange calm having come to him because of the change in the world, "but who put you wise?"

Kouka looked at Quinn and smiled, and then he said to Archie:

"Oh, what you don't know won't hurt you."

Then he had Archie taken back to the prison, but before they locked him up Kouka gave him a box of cigarettes he had taken from a prostitute whom he had arrested the night before, and he left Archie leaning against the door of the prison smoking one of the cigarettes.

"What have they been doing to you?" asked a prisoner.

"The third degree," said Archie laconically.

The knowledge which Kouka preferred to shroud in mystery had been obtained in a simple way. Glancing over the records in the detective's office, he had by chance come across an old report of the robbery of a hardware store. Kouka had taken the revolver found on Archie to the merchant, and the merchant had identified it. That evening Marriott read in the newspapers conspicuous accounts of the brilliant work of Detective Kouka in solving the mystery that had surrounded a desperate burglary. The articles gave Kouka the greatest praise.

VIII

The United States court-room had been closed ever since court adjourned in May, but when it was thrown open for the hearing of the case against Dillon and Mason and the rest, it was immediately imbued with the atmosphere of federal authority. This atmosphere, cold, austere and formal, smote Marriott like a blast the moment he pushed through the green baize doors.

The great court-room was furnished in black walnut; the dark walls immediately absorbed the light that came through the tall windows. On the wall behind the bench was an oil portrait of a former judge; Marriott could see it now in the slanting light--the grave and solemn face, smooth-shaven, with the fine white hair above it, expressing somehow the older ideals of the republic. On the wall, laureled Roman fasces were painted in gilt. The whole room was somber and gloomy, suggesting the power of a mighty government poised menacingly above its people; there were hints of authority and old precedents in that atmosphere.

The reason the room held this atmosphere was that the judge who ordinarily sat on the bench had been appointed to his position for life, and there were no real checks on his power. For twenty years before he had been appointed this man had been the attorney for great corporations, had amassed a fortune in their promotion and defense, and, as a result, his sympathies and prejudices were with the rich and powerful. He knew nothing of the common currents and impulses of humanity, having never been brought in contact with the people; the almost unlimited power he wielded, and was to wield until he died, made him, quite naturally, autocratic, and he had impressed his character on the room and on all who held official positions there. The clerks, commissioners and assistant prosecutors whom he appointed imitated him and acquired his habits of thought, for they received his opinions just as they received his orders.

Marriott sat at the table and waited, and while he waited looked about. He looked at Wilkison, the commissioner; the judge had appointed him to his place; the amount of fees he received depended entirely on the number of cases the district attorney and his assistants brought before him; consequently, there being two commissioners, he wished to have the good will of the district attorney, and always reached decisions that would please him.

Dalrymple, the assistant district attorney, was a good-looking young man with a smooth-shaven, regular face that might have been pleasant, but, because of his new importance, it now wore a stern and forbidding aspect. He was dressed in new spring clothes; the trousers were rolled up at the bottoms, showing the low tan shoes which just then had come again into vogue. He wore a pink flannel shirt of exquisite texture; on this flannel shirt was a white linen collar. This combination produced an effect which was thought to give him the final touch of aristocracy and refinement. When he was not talking to Wilkison or to Fallen, he was striding about the court-room with his hands in his trousers pockets. Once he stopped, drew a silver case from his pocket and lighted a cigarette made with his monogram on the paper.

Marriott turned from Dalrymple with disgust; he looked beyond the railing, and there, on the walnut benches, sat Gibbs, with a retinue that made Marriott smile. They must have come in when Marriott was preoccupied, for he was surprised to see them. Gibbs sat on the end of one bench, as uncomfortable and ill at ease as he would have been in a pew at church. He was shaved to a pinkness, his hair was combed smooth, and he was very solemn. Marriott could easily see that the atmosphere of the court-room oppressed and cowed him; he had lost his native bearing, and had suddenly grown meek, humble and afraid. Marriott knew none of the others; there were half a dozen men, none of them dressed as well as Gibbs, with strange visages, marked by crime and suffering, all the more touching because they were so evidently unconscious of these effects. The heads ranged along the bench were of strange shapes, startlingly individual in one sense, very much alike in another. They were all solemn, afraid to speak, bearing themselves self-consciously, like children suddenly set out before the public. On one bench sat a young girl, and something unmistakable in her eyes, in her mouth, in the clothes she wore--she had piled on herself all the finery she had--told what she was. Her toilet, on which she had spent such enormous pains, produced the very effect the womanhood left in her had striven to avoid.

Marriott smiled, until he detected the deep concern which Gibbs was trying to hide; then his heart was touched, as the toilet of the girl had touched it. Marriott knew that these people were the witnesses by whom Gibbs expected to establish an alibi for Dillon and Squeak and Mandell; the sight of them did not reassure him; he had again that disheartening conviction of the utter lack of weight their appearance would carry with any court; he did not credit them himself, and he began to feel a shame for offering such witnesses. He was half decided, indeed, not to put them forward. But his greater concern came with the thought of Mason, whom he believed to be innocent; where, he suddenly wondered, was the reporter Wales?

But just at this moment the green baize doors of the court-room swung inward and suddenly all the people in the court-room--Dalrymple, Fallen, Wilkison, Marriott, Gibbs, the clerks and the reporters, the bailiff and the group Gibbs had brought up with him from the under world--forgot the distinctions and prejudices and hatreds that separated them, yielded to the claims of their common humanity and became as one in the eager curiosity which concentrated all their interest on the entering prisoners.

They came in a row, chained together by handcuffs, in charge of deputy marshals. They were marched within the bar, still wearing the hats they could not remove. The United States marshal himself and another deputy came forward and joined the deputies in charge of the prisoners. The officers took off their hats for them, and when they took chairs at the table, stood close beside them, as if to give the impression that the prisoners were most dangerous and desperate characters, and that they themselves were officials with the highest regard for their duty.

Wilkison, with great deliberation, was seating himself at the clerk's desk. Ordinarily he held hearings in an anteroom, but as this hearing would be reported in the newspapers he felt justified in using the court-room; besides, he could then test some of the sensations of a judge.

"Aren't you going to unhandcuff these men?" said Marriott to the marshal.

The marshal merely smiled in a superior official way, and the smile completed the rage that had seized on Marriott when the deputies stationed themselves behind the prisoners. Marriott felt in himself all the evil and all the hatred that were in the hearts of these officers; he felt all the hatred that was gathering about these prisoners; it seemed that every one there wished to revenge himself personally on them. Fallen, sitting beside Dalrymple, had an air of directing the whole proceeding, as if his duties did not end with the apprehension of his prisoners, but required him to see that the assistant district attorney, the commissioner and the rest did their whole duty. He sat there with the two rosy spots on his plump cheeks glowing a deeper red, his blue eyes gloating. Marriott restrained himself by an effort; he needed all his faculties now.

"The case of the United States _versus_ Dillon and others." Wilkison was officially fingering the papers on his desk. "Are the defendants ready for hearing?"

"We're ready, yes," said Marriott, plainly excluding from his words and manner any of the respect for the court ordinarily simulated by lawyers. Mason, sitting beside him, and Dillon and the rest followed with eager glances every movement, listened to every word. They forgot the handcuffs, and fastened their eyes on Fallen standing up to be sworn. When the oath had been administered, Dalrymple put the stereotyped preliminary questions and then asked him who the defendants were. Fallen pointed to them one after another and pronounced their names as he did so. When he had done this Dalrymple turned, looked at Marriott with his chin in the air, and said pertly:

"Take the witness."

Marriott was surprised and puzzled; the suspicions that he had all along held were increased.

"How many witnesses will you have?" he asked.

"This is all," said Dalrymple with an impertinent movement of the lip, "except this." He held up a legal document. "This certified copy of an indictment--"

At the word "indictment" the truth flashed on Marriott. He understood now; this explained the delay, the stealth, the subterfuge of which he had been dimly conscious for days; this explained the conduct of the officials; this explained Fallen's absence--he had gone to Illinois, secured the indictment of the four men, and returned. And this was not a preliminary hearing at all; it was a mere formality for the purpose of removing the prisoners to the jurisdiction in which the crime had been committed. He saw now that he would not be allowed to offer any testimony; nothing could be done. The men would be tried in Illinois, where they could have no witnesses, for the law, as he remembered, provided that process for witnesses to testify on behalf of defendant could not be issued beyond a radius of one hundred miles of the court where they were tried; they were poor, they could not pay to transport witnesses, and now the alibis for Dillon and Squeak and Mandell could not be established, and Mason could not have the benefit of Wales's testimony, unless depositions were used, and he knew what a farce depositions are. He had been tricked. It was all legal, of course, but he had been tricked, that was all, and he was filled with mortification and shame and rage.

"Mr. Marriott," Wilkison was saying in his most impartial tone, "do you wish to examine this witness?"

Marriott was recalled. He looked at Fallen, waiting there in the witness-chair, pulling at his little mustache, the pink spots in his cheeks glowing, and his eyes striving for an expression of official unconcern. Marriott questioned Fallen, but without heart. He tried to break the force of his identification, but Fallen was positive. They were Joseph Mason, James Dillon, Louis Skinner, alias Squeak, and Stephen Mandell. When Marriott had finished, Dalrymple rose and said:

"Your Honor, we offer as evidence a certified copy of an indictment returned by the grand jury at this present term, and the government rests."

He looked in triumph at Marriott.

The prisoners were leaning eagerly over the table under which they hid their shackled hands, not understanding in the least the forces that were playing with them. Dillon's long, unshaven face was suspended above the green felt, his eyes, bright with excitement and deepest interest, shifting quickly from Dalrymple to Marriott and then back again to Dalrymple. Mason's eyes went from one to the other of the lawyers, but his gaze was easier, not so swift, hardly so interested. A slight smile lurked beneath the mask he wore, and the commissioner decided with pleasure that this smile proved Mason's guilt, a conclusion which he found it helpful to communicate to Dalrymple after the hearing. Mandell and Squeak wore heavy expressions; the realization of their fate had not yet struggled to consciousness. In fact, they did not know what had happened, and they were trying to learn from a study of the expressions of Dalrymple and Marriott.

Dalrymple continued to look at Marriott in the pride he felt at having beaten him. Because he had really been unfair and had practised a sharp trick on Marriott, he disliked him. This dislike showed now in Dalrymple's glance, as it had been expressed in the sharp, important voice in which he had put his questions during the hearing. He had spoken with an affected accent, and had objected to every question that Marriott asked on cross-examination. He had learned to speak in this affected accent at college, where he had spent four years, after which he had spent three other years at a law school; consequently, he knew little of that life from which he had been withdrawn for those seven years, knew nothing of its significance, or meaning, or purpose, and, of course, nothing of human nature. The stern and forbidding aspect in which he tried to mask a countenance that might have been good-looking and pleasing, had it worn a natural and simple expression, was amusing to those who, like Dillon and Mason, were older and wiser men. Dalrymple had no views or opinions or principles of his own; those he had, like his clothes and his accent, had been given him by his parents or the teachers his parents had hired; he had accepted all the ideas and prejudices of his own class as if they were axioms. He felt it a fine thing to be there in the United States court in an official capacity that made every one look at him, and, as he supposed, envy him; that gave an authority to anything he said. He thought it an especially fine thing to represent the government. He used this word frequently, saying "the government feels," or "the government wishes," or "the government understands," speaking, indeed, as if he were the government himself. The power behind him was tremendous; an army stood ready at the last to back up his sayings, his opinions, and his mistakes. Against such a power, of course, Dillon and Mason, who were poor, shabby men, had no chance. Dalrymple, to be sure, had no notion of what he was doing to these men; no notion of how he was affecting their lives, their futures, perhaps their souls. He was totally devoid of imagination and incapable of putting himself in the place of them or of any other men, except possibly those who were dressed as he was dressed and spoke with similar affectation. He did not consider Dillon and Mason men, or human beings at all, but another kind of organism or animate life, expressed to him by the word "criminal." He did not consider what happened to them as important; the only things that were important to him were, first, to be dressed in a correct fashion, and modestly, that is, to be dressed like a gentleman; secondly, to see to it that his sympathies and influence were always on the side of the rich, the well-dressed, the respectable and the strong, and to maintain a wide distinction between himself and the poor, disreputable and ill-clad, and, thirdly, to bear always, especially when in court or about the government building, an important and wise demeanor. He felt, indeed, that in becoming an assistant United States district attorney, he had become something more than a mere man; that because a paper had been given him with an eagle printed on it and a gilt seal, a paper on which his name and the words by which he was designated had been written, he had become something more than a mere human being. The effect of all this was revealed in the look with which he now regarded Marriott.

Marriott, however, did not look at Dalrymple; he wished Dalrymple to feel the contempt he had for him, and after a moment he rose and addressed the commissioner.

The commissioner straightened himself in his chair; his face was very long and very solemn. He did not listen to what Marriott was saying; having conferred with Dalrymple before the hearing and read a decision which Dalrymple had pointed out to him in a calf-bound report, he was now arranging in his mind the decision he intended to give presently.

Marriott, of course, realized the hopelessness of his case, but he did not think it becoming to give in so easily, or, at least, without making a speech. He began to argue, but Wilkison interrupted him and said:

"This whole question is fully discussed in the Yarborough case, where the court held that in a removal proceeding no testimony can be presented in behalf of the defense."

Then Wilkison announced his decision, saying that Marriott's witnesses could be heard at the proper time and place, that is, on the trial, where he said the rights of the defendants would be fully conserved. Feeling that his use of this word "conserved" was happy and appropriate and had a legal sound, he repeated it several times, and concluded by saying:

"The defendants will be remanded to the custody of the marshal for removal."

The marshal and his deputies tapped the prisoners on the shoulders. Just then there was a slight commotion; Gibbs had pushed by the bailiff and was coming forward. He came straight up to the men. The marshal put out a hand to press him back, but Marriott said:

"Oh, let him talk to them a minute. Good God--!"

The marshal glared at Marriott, and then gave way.

"But he wants to be quick about it," he threatened.

Gibbs leaned over Mason's shoulder.

"Well, Joe," he said.

"I'm kangarooed, Dan," said Mason.

"It looks that way," said Gibbs.

"Dan, I want you to do something for me--I want you to send me some tobacco. You know you can get those clippings in pound packages; they only cost a quarter."

Gibbs looked hurt.

"Joe," he said, "I've known you for forty years, and that's the only mean thing you ever said to me."

"Well, don't get sore, Dan," Mason said. "I knew you would--only--"

The marshal cut them short and marched the prisoners out of the court-room. Outside in the street the prison-van was waiting, the van that had been ordered before the hearing, to take the prisoners to the station.

IX

It was several days before Marriott saw Gibbs again, and then he appeared at Marriott's office with a companion and leaned for an instant unsteadily against the door he had carefully closed. Marriott saw that he was changed, and that it was the change drink makes in a man. Gibbs sank helplessly into a chair, and stared at Marriott blankly. He was not the clean, well-dressed man Marriott had beheld in him before. He was unshaven, and the stubble of his beard betrayed his age by its whiteness; the pupils of his eyes were dilated, his lips stained with tobacco. His shoes were muddy, one leg of his trousers was turned up; and his lack of a collar seemed the final proof of that moral disintegration he could not now conceal. When he had been there a moment the atmosphere was saturated with the odor of alcohol.

"My friend, Mr. McDougall," said Gibbs, toppling unsteadily in his chair, as he waved one fat hand at his companion, a heavy blond fellow, six feet tall, well dressed and dignified.

"I've gone to the bad," said Gibbs. Marriott looked at him in silence. The fact needed no comment.

"The way those coppers jobbed Mason was too much for me," Gibbs went on. "Worst I ever seen. I couldn't stand for it, it put me to the bad."

"Well, you won't do him any good, at that--" McDougall began.

"Aw, to hell with you!" said Gibbs, waving McDougall aside with a sweep of his arm. The movement unsettled him in his chair, and he steadied himself by digging his heels into the rug. Then he drew a broken cigar from his coat pocket, struck a match, and held it close to his nose; it took him a long time to light his cigar; he puffed hurriedly, but could not keep the cigar in the flame; before he finished he had burned his fingers, and Marriott felt a pain as Gibbs shook the match to the floor.

"He hasn't touched a drop for five years," said McDougall indulgently. "But when they kangarooed Mason--"

McDougall looked at Gibbs, not in regret or pity, nor with disapproval, but as one might look at a woman stricken with some recent grief. To him, getting drunk seemed to be as natural a way of expressing emotion as weeping or wringing the hands. Marriott gazed on the squalid little tragedy of a long friendship, gazed a moment, then turned away, and looked out of his window. Above the hideous roofs he could see the topmasts of schooners, and presently a great white propeller going down the river. It was going north, to Mackinac, to the Soo, to Duluth, and the sight of it filled Marriott with a longing for the cold blue waters and the sparkling air of the north.

Gibbs evidently had come to talk about Mason's case, but when he began to speak his voice was lost somewhere in his throat; his head sank, he appeared to sink into sleep. McDougall glanced at him and laughed. Then he turned seriously to Marriott.

"It was an outrage," he said. "Mason has been right here in town--I saw him that day. He ought to be alibied."

"Couldn't you testify?" asked Marriott.

McDougall looked at Marriott with suspicion, and hesitated. But suddenly Gibbs, whom they had supposed to be asleep, said impatiently, without opening his eyes:

"Oh, hell!--go on and tell him. He's a right guy, I tell you. He's wise to the gun." And Gibbs slumbered again.

"Well," said McDougall with a queer expression, "my business is unfortunately of such a nature that it can't stand much investigation, and I don't make the best witness in the world."

Gibbs suddenly sat up, opened his eyes, and drew an enormous roll of money from his pocket.

"How much do I owe you?" he asked, unrolling the bills. "It comes out of me," he said. Marriott was disappointed in this haggling appeal, not for his own sake, but for Gibbs's; it detracted from the romantic figure he had idealized for the man, just as Gibbs's intoxication had done. Marriott hesitated in the usual difficulty of appraising professional services, but when, presently, he rather uncertainly fixed his fee, Gibbs counted out the amount and gave it to him. Marriott took the money, with a wonder as to where it had come from, what its history was; he imagined in a flash a long train of such transactions as McDougall must be too familiar with, of such deeds as had been involved in the hearing before the commissioner, of other transactions, intricate, remote, involved, confused in morals--and he thrust the bills into his pocket.

"It comes out of me," Gibbs explained again. "They hadn't any fall money."

"Have you heard from them?" asked Marriott, who did not know what fall money was, and wished to change the subject.

"No," said Gibbs, shaking his head. "I'm going out to the trial. I'll take along that newspaper guy and some witnesses for the others. I'll get 'em a mouthpiece. Maybe we can spring 'em."

But, as Marriott learned several days later, Gibbs could not spring them. He went to the trial with an entourage of miserable witnesses, but he did not take Wales, for Wales's newspaper would not give him leave of absence, and there was no process to compel his attendance. But Kouka and Quinn went, and they gave Gibbs such a reputation that his testimony was impeached. He could not, of course, take Dean. Dean's business, like McDougall's, was unfortunately of such a nature that it did not stand investigation, and he did not make the best witness in the world. Mason and Dillon and Mandell and Squeak were sentenced to the penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth for five years. At about the same time Archie Koerner pleaded guilty to stealing the revolver and was sentenced to prison for a year.

Marriott left at last for his vacation, but he could not forget Mason taking his unjust fate so calmly and philosophically. He had great pity for him, just as he had for Archie, though one was innocent and the other guilty. He had pity for Dillon, too, and, yes, for Mandell and Squeak. He thought of it all, trying to find some solution, but there was no solution. It was but one more knot in the tangle of injustice man has made of his attempts to do justice; a tangle that Marriott could not unravel, nor any one, then or ever.

X

Like most of the great houses along Claybourne Avenue, the dwelling of the Wards wore an air of loneliness and desolation all that summer. With Mrs. Ward and Elizabeth in Europe, the reason for maintaining the establishment ceased to be; and the servants were given holidays. Barker was about for a while each day looking after things, and Gusta came to set the house in order. But these transient presences could not give the place its wonted life; the curtains were down, the furniture stood about in linen covers, the pictures were draped in white cloth. At evening a light showed in the library, where Ward sat alone, smoking, trying to read, and, as midnight drew on, starting now and then at the strange, unaccountable sounds that are a part of the phenomena of the stillness of an empty house. He would look up from his book, listen, wait, sigh, listen again, finally give up, go to bed, worry a while, fall asleep, be glad when morning came and he could lose himself for another day in work. Dick never came in till long after midnight, and Ward seldom saw him, save on those few mornings when the boy was up early enough to take breakfast with him at the club. Such mornings made the whole day happy for Ward.

But the few hours she spent each day in the empty house were happy hours for Gusta Koerner. She was not, of course, a girl in whom feeling could become thought, or sensation find the relief of expression; she belonged to the class that because it is dumb seems not to suffer, but she had a sense of change in the atmosphere. She missed Elizabeth, she missed the others, she missed the familiar figures that once had made the place all it had been to her. But she loved it, nevertheless, and if it seemed to hold no new experiences for her, there were old experiences to be lived over again.

At first the loneliness and the emptiness frightened her, but she grew accustomed; she no longer started at the mysterious creakings and tappings in the untenanted rooms, and each morning, after her work was done, she lingered, and wandered idly about, looked at herself in the mirrors, gazed out of the windows into Claybourne Avenue, sometimes peeped into the books she could so little understand.

Occasionally she would have chats with Barker, but she did not often see him; he was always busy in the stables. Ward and Dick were gone before she got there. But the peace and quiet of the deserted mansion were grateful, and Gusta found there a sense of rest and escape that for a long time she had not known. She found this sense of escape all the more grateful after Archie's trouble. He had not been at home in a long time, and they had heard nothing of him; then, one evening she learned of his latest trouble in those avid chroniclers of trouble, the newspapers. Her father, who would not permit the mention of his son's name, nevertheless plainly had him on his mind, for he grew more than ever gloomy, morose and irritable. And then, to make matters worse, one Saturday evening Charlie Peltzer threw it up to Gusta, and they parted in anger. On Sunday afternoon she went to see Archie at the jail, and stayed so late that it was twilight before she got to the Wards'. She had never had the blues so badly before; her quarrel with Peltzer, her father's scolding, her mother's sighs and furtive tears, her own visit to the prison, all combined to depress her, and now, in the late and lonesome Sunday afternoon she did her work hurriedly, and was just about to let herself out of the door when it opened suddenly, and Dick Ward, bolting in, ran directly against her.

"Hello! Beg pardon--is that you, 'Gusta?" he said.

"Oh!" she exclaimed, leaning against the wall, "you scared me!"

Dick laughed.

"Well, that's too bad; I had no idea," he said.

She had raised her clasped hands to her chin, and still kept the shrinking attitude of her fright. Dick looked at her, prettier than ever in her sudden alarm, and on an impulse he seized her hands.

"Don't be scared," he said. "I wouldn't frighten you for the world."

She was overwhelmed with weakness and confusion. She shrank against the wall and turned her head aside; her heart was beating rapidly.

"I--I'm late to-day," she said. "I ought to have been here this morning."

"I'm glad you weren't," said Dick, looking at her with glowing eyes.

"I must hurry"---she tried to slip away. "I--must be going home, it's getting late; you--you must let me go."

She scarcely knew what she was saying; she spoke with averted face, her cheeks hot and flaming. He gazed at her steadily a moment; then he said:

"Never mind. I'll take you home in my machine. May I?"

She looked at him in wonderment. What did he mean? Was he in earnest?

"May I?" he pressed her hands for emphasis, and gazed into her eyes irresistibly.

"Yes," she said, "if you'll--let me--go now."

Suddenly he kissed her on the lips; there was a rustle, a struggle, he kissed her again, then released her, left her trembling there in the hall, and bounded up the stairs.

"Wait a minute!" he called. "I came home to get something. You'll wait?"

Gusta was dazed, her mind was in a whirl, she felt utterly powerless; but instinctively she slipped through the door and out on to the veranda. The air reassured and restored her. She felt that she should run away, and yet, there was Dick's automobile in the driveway; she had never been in an automobile, and-- She thought of Charlie Peltzer--well, it would serve him right. And then, before she could decide, Dick was beside her.

"Jump in," he said, glancing up and down the avenue, now dusky in the twilight. They went swiftly away in the automobile, but they did not go straight to Bolt Street--they took a long, roundabout course that ended, after all, too suddenly. The night was warm and Gusta was lifted above all her cares; she had a sensation as of flying through the soft air. Dick stopped the machine half a block from the house, and Gusta got out, excited from her swift, reckless ride. But, troubled as she was, she felt that she ought to thank Dick. He only laughed and said:

"We'll go again for a longer ride. What do you say to to-morrow night?"

She hesitated, tried to decide against him, and before she could decide, consented.

"Don't forget," he said, "to-morrow evening." He leaned over and whispered to her. He was shoving a lever forward and the automobile was starting.

"Don't forget," he said, and then he was gone and Gusta stood looking at the vanishing lights of the machine. Just then Charlie Peltzer stepped out of the shadows.

"So!" he said, looking angrily into her face. "So that's it, is it? Oh--I saw you!"

"Go away!" she said.

He snatched at her, caught her by the wrist.

"Go away, is it?" he exclaimed fiercely. "I've caught you this time!"

"Let me alone!"

"Yes, I will! Oh, yes, I'll let you alone! And him, too; I'll fix him!"

"Let me go, I tell you!" she cried, trying to escape. "Let me go!" She succeeded presently in wrenching her wrist out of his grasp. "You hurt me!" She clasped the wrist he had almost crushed. "I hate you! I don't want anything more to do with you!"

She left him standing there in the gloom. She hurried on; it was but a few steps to the door.

"Gusta!" he called. "Gusta! Wait!"

But she hurried on.

"Gusta! Wait a minute!"

She hesitated. There was something appealing in his voice.

"Oh, Gusta!" he repeated. "Won't you wait?"

She felt that he was coming after her. Then something, she knew not what, got into her, she felt ugly and hateful, and hardened her heart. She cast a glance back over her shoulder and had a glimpse of Peltzer's face, a pale, troubled blur in the darkness. She ran into the house, utterly miserable and sick at heart.

Gusta could not thereafter escape this misery; it was with her all the time, and her only respite was found in the joy that came to her at evening, when regularly, at the same hour, under the same tree, at the same dark spot in Congress Street, she met Dick Ward. And so it began between them.

XI

The way from the station to the penitentiary was long, but Sheriff Bentley, being a man of small economies, had decided to walk, and after the long journey in the smoking-car, Archie had been glad to stretch his legs. The sun lay hot on the capital city; it was nearly noon, and workmen, tired from their morning's toil, were thinking now of dinner-buckets and pipes in the shade. They glanced at Archie and the sheriff as they passed, but with small interest. They saw such sights every day and had long ago grown used to them, as the world had; besides, they had no way of telling which was the criminal and which the custodian.

Archie walked rapidly along, his head down, and a little careless smile on his face, chatting with the sheriff. On the way to the capital, Bentley had given him cigars, let him read the newspapers, and told him a number of vulgar stories. He was laughing then at one; the sheriff had leaned over to tell him the point of it, though he had difficulty in doing so, because he could not repress his own mirth. They were passing under a viaduct on which a railroad ran over the street. A switch-engine was going slowly along, and the fireman leaned out of the cab window. He wore, oddly enough, a battered old silk hat; he wore it in some humorous conceit that caricatured the grandeur and dignity the hat in its day had given some other man, whose face was not begrimed as was the comical face of this fireman, whose hands were not calloused as was the hand that slowly, almost automatically, pulled the bell-cord. That old plug hat gave the fireman unlimited amusement and consolation, as he thrust it from his cab window while he rode up and down the railroad yards. Archie looked up and caught the fireman's eye; the fireman winked drolly, confidentially, and waved his free arm with a graceful, abandoned gesture that conveyed a salutation of brotherliness and comradeship; Archie smiled and waved his free arm in recognition.

And then they stepped out of the shade of the viaduct into the sun again, and Archie's smile went suddenly from his face. They were at the penitentiary. The long wall stretched away, lifting its gray old stones twelve feet above their heads. Along its coping of broad overhanging flags was an iron railing; coming to the middle of a man, and at every corner, and here and there along the wall, were the sentry-boxes, black and weather-beaten, and sinister because no sentry was anywhere in sight. Archie looked, and he did not hear the denouement of the sheriff's story, which, after all, was just as well.

Midway of the block the wall jutted in abruptly and joined itself to a long building of gray stone, with three tiers of barred windows, but an ivy vine had climbed over the stones and hidden the bars as much as it could. A second building lifted its Gothic towers above the center of the grim facade, and beyond was another building like the first, wherein the motive of iron bars was repeated; then the climbing ivy and the gray wall again, stretching away until it narrowed in the perspective. Before the central building were green lawns and flower-beds, delightful to the eyes of the warden's family, whose quarters looked on the free world outside; delightful, too, to the eyes of the legislative committees and distinguished visitors who came to preach and give advice to the men within the walls, who never saw the flowers.

Archie and the sheriff turned into the portico. In the shade, several men were lounging about. They wore the gray prison garb, but their clothes had somehow the effect of uniforms; they were clean, neatly brushed, and well fitted. They glanced up as Archie and the sheriff entered, and one of them sprang to his feet. On his cap Archie saw the words, "Warden's Runner." He was young, with a bright though pale face, and he stepped forward expectantly, thinking of a tip. He was about to speak, but suddenly his face fell, and he did not say what had been on his lips. He uttered, instead, a short, mistaken,

"Oh!"

The sheriff laughed, and then with the knowledge and familiarity men love so much to display, he went on:

"Thought we wanted to see the prison, eh? Well, I've seen it, and the boy here'll see more'n he wants."

The warden's runner smiled perfunctorily and was about to turn away, when Bentley spoke again:

"How long you in for?" he asked.

"Life," said the youth, and then went back to his bench. He did not look up again, though Archie glanced back at him over his shoulder.

"Trusties," Bentley explained. "They've got a snap."

In the office, where many clerks were busy, they waited; presently a sallow young man came out from behind a railing. The sheriff unlocked his handcuffs and blew on the red bracelet the steel had left about his wrist.

"Hot day," said the sheriff, wiping his brow. The sallow clerk, on whom the official air sat heavily, ignored this and said:

"Let's have your papers."

He looked over the commitments with a critical legal scowl that seemed to pass finally on all that the courts had done, and signaled to a receiving guard.

"Good-by, Archie." Bentley held out his hand.

"Good-by," said Archie.

"Come on," said the receiving guard, tossing his long club to his shoulder in a military way. The great steel door in the guard-room swung open; the guard sitting lazily in a worn chair at the double inner gates threw back the lever, and the receiving guard and Archie entered the yard.

It was a large quadrangle, surrounded by the ugly prison houses, with the chapel and the administration building in the center. Archie glanced about, and presently he discerned in the openings between the buildings companies of men, standing at ease. A whistle blew heavily, the companies came to attention, and then began to march across the yard. They marched in sets of twos, with a military scrape and shuffle, halted now and then to dress their intervals, marked time, then went on, massed together in the lock-step. As they passed, the men looked at Archie, some of them with strange smiles. But Archie knew none of them; not Delaney, with the white hair; not the Pole, who had been convicted of arson; not the Kid, nor old Deacon Sammy, who still wore his gold-rimmed glasses, nor Harry Graves. Their identity was submerged, like that of all the convicts in that prison, like that of all the forgotten prisoners in the world. The men marched by, company after company, until enough to make a regiment, two regiments, had passed them. A guard led Archie across the yard to the administration building. As they entered, a long, lean man, whose lank legs stretched from his easy chair half-way across the room, it seemed, to cock their heels on a desk, turned and looked at them. He was smoking a cigar very slowly, and he lifted his eyelids heavily. His eyes were pale blue--for some reason Archie shuddered.

"Here's a fresh fish, Deputy," said the guard.

The deputy warden of the prison, Ball, flecked the ashes from his cigar.

"Back again, eh?" he said.

Archie stared, and then he said:

"I've never stirred before."

"The hell you haven't," said the deputy. "The bull con don't go in this dump! I know you all!" The receiving guard looked Archie over, trying to recall him.

The deputy warden let his heavy feet fall to the floor, leaned forward, took a cane from his desk, got up, hooked the cane into the awkward angle of his left elbow, and shambled into the rear office, his long legs unhinging with a strange suggestion of the lock-step he was so proud of being able to retain in the prison by an evasion of the law. A convict clerk heaved an enormous record on to his high desk, then in a mechanical way he dipped a pen into the ink, and stood waiting.

"What's your name?" asked the deputy.

Archie told him.

"Age?"

"Twenty-three."

"Father and mother living?"

"Yes."

"Who shall we notify if you die while you're with us?"

Archie started; and the deputy laughed.

"Notify them."

"Ever convicted before? No? Why, Koerner, you really must not lie to me like that!"

When the statistical questions were finished the deputy said:

"Now, Koerner, you got a stretch in the sentence; you'll gain a month's good time if you behave yourself; don't talk; be respectful to your superiors; mind the rules; you can write one letter a month, have visitors once a month, receive all letters of proper character addressed to you. Your number is 48963. Take him and frisk him, Jimmy."

The deputy warden hooked his cane over his arm and shambled out. Archie watched him, strangely fascinated. Then the guard touched him on the shoulder, tossed a bundle of old clothing over his arm, and said:

"This way."

They made him bathe, then the barber shaved him, and he donned his prison clothes, which were of gray like those worn by the trusties he had seen at the gate of the prison. But the clothes did not fit him; the trousers were too tight at the waist and far too long, and they took a strange and unaccountable shape on him, the shape, indeed, of the wasted figure of an old convict who had died of consumption in the hospital two days before.

The guard took Archie to the dining-room, deserted now, and he sat down at one of the long tables and ate his watery soup and drank the coffee made of toasted bread--his first taste of the "boot-leg" he had heard his late companions talk about.

And then the idle house, stark and gloomy, with silent convicts ranged around the wall. On an elevated chair at one end, where he might have the scant light that fell through the one high window, an old convict, who once had been a preacher, read aloud. He read as if he enjoyed the sound of his own voice, but few of the prisoners listened. They sat there stolidly, with heavy, hardened faces. Some dozed, others whispered, others, whom the prison had almost bereft of reason, simply stared. The idle house was still, save for the voice of the reader and the constant coughing of a convict in a corner. Archie, incapable, like most of them, of concentrated attention, sat and looked about. He was dazed, the prison stupor was already falling heavily on his mind, and he was passing into that state of mental numbness that made the blank in his life when he was in the workhouse with Mason. He thought of Mason for a while, and wondered what his fate and that of Dillon had been; he thought of Gusta, and of his mother and father, of Gibbs and Curly, wondering about them all; wondered about that strange life, already dim and incredible, he had so lately left in what to convicts is represented by the word "outside." He wished that he had been taken with Mason and Dillon. Then he thought of Kouka--thought of everything but the theft of the revolver, which bore so small a relation to his real life.

The entrance of a contractor brought diversion. The contractor, McBride, a man with a red face and closely-cropped white hair, smoking a cigar the aroma of which was eagerly sniffed in by the convicts, came with the receiving guard. At the guard's command, Archie stood up, and the contractor, narrowing his eyes, inspected him through the smoke of his cigar. After a while he nodded and said:

"He'll do--looks to me like he could make bolts. Ever work at a machine?" he suddenly asked.

Archie shook his head.

"Put him on Bolt B," said the contractor; "he can learn."

The day ended, somehow; the evening came, with supper in the low-ceiled, dim dining-hall, then the cells.

"You'll lock in G6," said the guard.

Archie marched to the cell-house, where, inside the brick shell, the cells rose, four tiers of them. The door locked on Archie, and he looked about the bare cell where he was to spend a year. For an hour, certain small privileges were allowed; favored convicts, in league with officials, peddled pies and small fruits at enormous commissions; somewhere a prisoner scraped a doleful fiddle. Near by, a guard haggled with a convict who worked in the cigar shop and stole cigars for the guard to sell on the outside. The guard, it seemed, had recently raised his commission from fifty to sixty per cent., and the convict complained. But when the guard threatened to report him for his theft, the convict gave in.

At seven o'clock the music ceased, and hall permits expired. Then there was another hour of the lights, when some of the convicts read. Then, at eight, it grew suddenly dark and still. Presently Archie heard the snores of tired men. He could not sleep himself; his pallet of straw was alive with vermin; the stillness in the great cell-house was awful and oppressive; once in a while he heard some one, somewhere, from a near-by cell, sigh heavily. Now, he thought, he was doing his bit at last; "buried," the guns called it. Finally, when the hope had all gone from his heart, he fell asleep.

The summer night fell, and the prison's gray wall merged itself in the blackness; but it still shut off the great world outside from the little world inside. The guards came out and paced the walls with their rifles, halting now and then with their backs to the black forms of the cell-houses, and looked out over the city, where the electric lights blazed.

XII

Elizabeth had gone abroad feeling that she might escape the dissatisfaction that possessed her. This dissatisfaction was so very indefinite that she could not dignify it as a positive trouble, but she took it with her over Europe wherever she went, and she finally decided that it would give her no peace until she took it home again. She could not discuss it with her mother, for Mrs. Ward was impatient of discussion. She could do no more than feel Elizabeth's dissatisfaction, and she complained of it both abroad and at home. She told her husband and her son that Elizabeth had practically ruined their trip, that Elizabeth hadn't enjoyed it herself, nor allowed her to enjoy it. Elizabeth, however, if unable to realize the sensations she had anticipated in their travels, gave her mother unexpected compensation by recalling and vivifying for her after they had returned in the fall, all their foreign experiences, so that they enjoyed them in retrospect. Ward, indeed, said that Elizabeth had seen everything there was to see in Europe. He only laughed when Elizabeth declared that, now she was at home again, she intended to do something; just what, she could not determine.

"Perhaps I'll become a stenographer or a trained nurse."

"The idea!" exclaimed Mrs. Ward. "To talk like that! You should pay more attention to your social duties."

"Why?" demanded Elizabeth, looking at her mother with clear, sober eyes.

Mrs. Ward, in her habitual avoidance of reasons, could not think of one instantly.

"You owe it to your station," she declared presently, and then, as if this were, after all, a reason, she added, "that's why."

Dick showed all the manly indignation of an elder brother.

"You don't know what you're talking about, Bess," he said in the husky voice he had acquired. He had not changed; he bore himself importantly, wore a scowl, dressed extravagantly, and always in the extreme of the prevailing fashion; he seemed to have an intuition in such matters; he wore a new collar or a new kind of cravat two weeks in advance of the other young men in town, and they did not seem to follow him so much as he seemed to anticipate them. He lunched at the club, and Elizabeth divined that he spent large sums of money, and yet he was constant in his work; he was always at the Trust Company's office early; he did not miss a single day. No, Dick had not changed; nothing had changed, and this thought only increased Elizabeth's discontent, or vague uneasiness, or vague dissatisfaction, or whatever it was.

"I don't know what it is," she confided to Marriott the first time she saw him. "I ought to be of some use in the world, but I'm not--Oh, don't say I am," she insisted when she caught his expression; "don't make the conventional protest. It's just as I told you before I went away, I'm useless." She glanced over the drawing-room in an inclusive condemnation of the luxury represented by the heavy furniture, the costly bric-a-brac, and all that. Her face wore an expression of weariness. She knew that she had not expressed herself. What she was thinking, or, rather, what she was feeling was, perhaps, the disappointment that comes to a spirited, imaginative, capable girl, who by education and training has developed ambitions and aspirations toward a real, full, useful life, yet who can do nothing in the world because the very conditions of that existence which give her those advantages forbid it. Prepared for life, she is not permitted to live; an artificial routine called a "sphere" is all that is allowed her; she may not realize her own personality, and, in time, is reduced to utter nothingness.

"By what right--" she resumed, but Marriott interrupted her.

"Don't take that road; it will only make you unhappy."

"Before I went abroad," she went on, ignoring the warning, "I told you that I would do something when I came back--something to justify myself. That's selfish, isn't it?" She ended in a laugh. "Well, anyway," she resumed, "I can look up the Koerners. You see the Koerners?"

"I haven't tried that case yet," Marriott said with a guilty expression.

"How dreadful of you!"

"Reproach me all you can," he said. "I must pay some penance. But, you know--I--well, I didn't try it at the spring term because Ford wanted to go to Europe, and then--well--I'm going to try it right away--soon."

The next morning, as Marriott walked down town, he determined to take up the Koerner case immediately. It was one of those mild and sunny days of grace that Nature allows in the mellow autumn, dealing them out one by one with a smile that withholds promise for another, so that each comes to winter-dreading mortals as a rare surprise. The long walk in the sun filled Marriott with a fine delight of life; he was pleased with himself because at last he was to do a duty he had long neglected. He sent for Koerner, and the old man came on a pair of new yellow crutches, bringing his wife and his enormous pipe.

"Well, Mr. Koerner," said Marriott, "I'm glad you're about again. How are you getting along?"

"Vell, ve get along; I bin some goodt yet, you bet. I can vash--I sit up to dose tubs dere undt help der oldt voman."

Marriott's brows knotted in a perplexity that took on the aspect of a mild horror. It required some effort for him to realize this old man sitting with a wash-tub between his knees; the thought degraded the leonine figure. He wished that Koerner had not told him, and he hastened to change the subject.

"Your case will come on for trial now," he said; "we must talk it over and get our evidence in shape."

"Dot bin a long time alreadty, dot trial."

"Yes, it has," said Marriott, "but we'll get to it now in two weeks."

"Yah, dot's vat you say."

He puffed at his pipe a moment, sending out the thin wreaths of smoke in sharp little puffs. The strong face lifted its noble mask, the white hair--whiter than Marriott remembered it the last time--glistening like frost.

"You vait anoder year and I grow out anoder leg, maybe," Koerner smoked on in silence. But presently the thin lips that pinched the amber pipe-stem began to twitch, the blue eyes twinkled under their shaggy-white brows; his own joke about his leg put him in good humor, and he forgot his displeasure. Marriott felt a supreme pity for the old man. He marveled at his patience, the patience everywhere exhibited by the voiceless poor. There was something stately in the old man, something dignified in the way in which he accepted calamity and joked it to its face.

Marriott found relief in turning to the case. As he was looking for the pleadings, he said carelessly:

"How's Gusta?"

And instantly, by a change in the atmosphere, he felt that he had made a mistake. Koerner made no reply. Marriott heard him exchange two or three urgent sentences with his wife, in his harsh, guttural German. When Marriott turned about, Koerner was smoking in stolid silence, his face was stone. Mrs. Koerner cast a timid glance at her husband, and, turning in embarrassment from Marriott, fluttered her shawl about her arms and gazed out the windows. What did it mean? Marriott wondered.

"Well, let's get down to business," he said. He would ask no more questions, at any rate. But as he was going over the allegations of the petition with Koerner, finding the usual trouble in initiating the client into the mysteries of evidence, which are as often mysteries to the lawyers and the courts themselves, he was thinking more of Gusta than of the case. Poor Gusta, he thought, does the family doom lie on her, too?

XIII

Elizabeth kept to her purpose of doing something to justify her continuing in existence, as she put it to her mother, and there was a period of two or three weeks following a lecture by a humanitarian from Chicago, when she tortured the family by considering a residence in a social settlement. But Mrs. Ward was relieved when this purpose realized itself in a way so respectable as joining the Organized Charities. The Organized Charities was more than respectable, it was eminently respectable, and when Mrs. Russell consented to become its president, it took on a social rank of the highest authority. The work of this organization was but dimly understood; it was incorporated, and so might quite legally be said to lack a soul, which gave it the advantage of having the personal equation excluded from its dealings with the poor. Business men, by subscribing a small sum might turn all beggars over to the Organized Charities, and by giving to the hungry, who asked for bread, the stone of a blue ticket, secure immediate relief from the disturbing sense of personal responsibility. The poor who were thus referred might go to the bureau, file their applications, be enrolled and indexed by the secretary, and have their characters and careers investigated by an agent. All this was referred to as organized relief work, and it had been so far successful as to afford relief to those who were from time to time annoyed by the spectacles of poverty and disease that haunted their homes and places of business.

When the Organized Charities resumed in the fall the monthly meetings that had been discontinued during the heated term, Elizabeth was on hand. Mrs. Russell was in the president's chair, and promptly at three o'clock, consulting the tiny jeweled watch that hung in the laces at her bosom, she called the meeting to order. After the recording secretary had read the minutes of the last meeting, held in the spring, and these had been approved, the corresponding secretary read a report, and a list of the new members. Then a young clergyman, with a pale, ascetic face, and a high, clerical waistcoat against which a large cross of gold was suspended by a cord, read his report as treasurer, giving the names of the new members already reported by the corresponding secretary, but adding the amount subscribed by each, the amount of money in the treasury, the amount expended in paying the salaries of the clerks, the rent of the telephone, printing, postage, and so on. Then the agents of the organization reported the number of cases they had investigated, arranging them alphabetically, and in the form of statistics. Then the clerk reported the number of meal tickets that had been distributed and the smaller number that had been gastronomically redeemed. After that there were reports from standing committees, then from special committees, and when all these had been read, received and approved, they were ordered to be placed on file. These preliminaries occupied an hour, and Elizabeth felt the effect to be somewhat deadening. During the reading of the reports, the members, of whom there were about forty, mostly women, had sat in respectful silence, decorously coughing now and then. When all the reports had been read a woman rose, and addressing Mrs. Russell as "Madame President," said that she wished again to move that the meetings of the society be opened with prayer. At this the faces of the other members clouded with an expression of weariness. The woman who made the motion spoke to it at length, and with the only zeal that Elizabeth had thus far observed in the proceedings. Elizabeth was not long in discerning that this same woman had made this proposal at former meetings; she knew this by the bored and sometimes angry expressions of the other members. The young curate seemed to feel a kind of vicarious shame for the woman. When the woman had finished, the matter was put to a vote, and all voted no, save the woman who had made the proposal, and she voted "aye" loudly, going down to defeat in the defiance of the unconvinced.

Then another woman rose and said that she had a matter to bring before the meeting; this matter related to a blind woman who had called on her and complained that the Organized Charities had refused to give her assistance. Now that the winter was coming on, the blind woman was filled with fear of want. Elizabeth had a dim vision of the blind woman, even from the crude and inadequate description; she felt a pity and a desire to help her, and, at the same time, with that condemnation which needs no more than accusation, a kind of indignation with the Organized Charities. For the first time she was interested in the proceedings, and leaned forward to hear what was to be done with the blind woman. But while the description had been inadequate to Elizabeth, so that her own imagination had filled out the portrait, it was, nevertheless, sufficient for the other members; a smile went round, glances were exchanged, and the secretary, with a calm, assured and superior expression, began to turn over the cards in her elaborate system of indexed names. There was instantly a general desire to speak, several persons were on their feet at once, saying "Madame President!" and Mrs. Russell recognized one of them with a smile that propitiated and promised the others in their turn. From the experiences that were then related, it was apparent that this blind woman was known to nearly all of the charity workers in the city; all of them spoke of her in terms of disparagement, which soon became terms of impatience. One of the ladies raised a laugh by declaring the blind woman to be a "chronic case," and then one of the men present, a gray-haired man, with a white mustache stained yellow by tobacco, rose and said that he had investigated the "case" and that it was not worthy. This man was the representative of a society which cared for animals, such as stray dogs, and mistreated horses, and employed this agent to investigate such cases, but it seemed that occasionally he concerned himself with human beings. He spoke now in a professional and authoritative manner, and when he declared that the case was not worthy, the blind woman, or the blind case, as it was considered, was disposed of. Some one said that she should be sent to the poorhouse.

When the blind woman had been consigned, so far as the bureau was concerned, to the poorhouse, Mrs. Russell said in her soft voice:

"Is there any unfinished business?"

Elizabeth, who was tired and bored, felt a sudden hope that this was the end, and she started up hopefully; but she found in Mrs. Russell's beautiful face a quick smile of sympathy and patience. And Elizabeth was ashamed; she was sorry she had let Mrs. Russell see that she was weary of all this, and she felt a new dissatisfaction with herself. She told herself that she was utterly fickle and hopeless; she had entered upon this charity work with such enthusiasm, and here she was already tiring of it at the first meeting! Elizabeth looked at Mrs. Russell, and for a moment envied her her dignity and her tact and her patience, all of which must have come from her innate gentleness and kindness. The face of this woman, who presided so gracefully over this long, wearying session, was marked with lines of character, her brow was serene and calm under the perfectly white hair massed above it. The eyes were large, and they were sad, just as the mouth was sad, but there dwelt in the eyes always that same kindness and gentleness, that patience and consideration that gave Mrs. Russell her real distinction, her real indisputable claim to superiority. Elizabeth forgot her impatience and her weariness in a sudden speculation as to the cause of the sadness that lay somewhere in Mrs. Russell's life. She had known ease and luxury always; she had been spared all contact with that world which Elizabeth was just beginning to discover beyond the confines of her own narrow and selfish world. Mrs. Russell surely never had known the physical hunger which now and then was at least officially recognized in this room where the bureau met; could there be a hunger of the soul which gave this look to the human face? Elizabeth Ward had not yet realized this hunger, she had not yet come into the full consciousness of life, and so it was that just at a moment, when she seemed very near to its recognition, she lost herself in the luxury of romanticizing some sorrow in Mrs. Russell's life, some sorrow kept hidden from the world. Elizabeth thought she saw this sorrow in the faint smile that touched Mrs. Russell's lips just then, as she gave a parliamentary recognition to another woman--a heavy, obtrusive woman who was rising to say:

"Madame President."

Elizabeth had hoped that there would be no unfinished business for the society to transact, but she had not learned that there was one piece of business which was always unfinished, and that was the question of raising funds. And this subject had no interest for Elizabeth; the question of money was one she could not grasp. It affected her as statistics did; it had absolutely no meaning for her; and now, when she was forced to pay attention to the heavy, obtrusive woman, because her voice was so strong and her tone so commanding, she was conscious only of the fact that she did not like this woman; somehow the woman over-powered Elizabeth by mere physical proportions. But gradually it dawned on Elizabeth that the discussion was turning on a charity ball, and she grew interested at once, for she felt herself on the brink of solving the old mystery of where charity balls originate. She had attended many of them, but it had never occurred to her that some one must have organized and promoted them; she had found them in her world as an institution, like calls, like receptions, like the church. But now a debate was on; the little woman, who had urged the society to open its sessions with prayer, was opposing the ball, and Elizabeth forgot Mrs. Russell's secret romance in her interest in the warmth with which the project of a charity ball was being discussed.

XIV

The debate over the charity ball raged until twilight, and it served for unfinished business at two special sessions. The spare little woman who had proposed that the meetings be opened with prayer led the opposition to the charity ball, and, summoning all her militant religion to her aid, succeeded in arraying most of the evangelical churches against it. In two weeks the controversy was in the newspapers, and when it had waged for a month, and both parties were exhausted, they compromised on a charity bazaar.

The dispute had been distressing to Mrs. Russell, whose nature was too sensitive to take the relish most of the others seemed to find in the controversy, and it was through her tact that peace was finally established. Even after the bazaar was decided on, the peace was threatened by dissension as to where the bazaar should be held. The more sophisticated and worldly-minded favored the Majestic Theater, and this brought the spare little woman to her feet again, trembling with moral indignation. To her the idea of a bazaar in a theater was even more sacrilegious than a ball. But Mrs. Russell saved the day by a final sacrifice--she offered her residence for the bazaar.

"It was beautiful in you!" Elizabeth exclaimed as they drove homeward together in the graying afternoon of the November day. "To think of throwing your house open for a week--and having the whole town tramp over the rugs!"

"Oh, I'll lay the floors in canvas," said Mrs. Russell, with a little laugh she could not keep from ending in a sigh.

"You'll find it no light matter," said Elizabeth; "this turning your house inside out. Of course, the fact that it is your house will draw all the curious and vulgar in town."

This was not exactly reassuring and Elizabeth felt as much the moment she had said it.

"You must help me, dear!" Mrs. Russell said, squeezing Elizabeth's hand in a kind of desperation. Elizabeth had never known her to be in any wise demonstrative, and her own sympathetic nature responded immediately.

"Indeed I shall!" she said.

The bazaar was to be held the week before Christmas, and the ladies forgot their differences to unite in one of those tremendous and exhausting labors they seem ever ready to undertake, though the end is always so disproportionate to the sacrifice and toil that somehow bring it to pass. Elizabeth was almost constantly with Mrs. Russell; they were working early and late. Mrs. Russell appointed her on the committee on arrangements, and the committee held almost daily meetings at the Charities. And here Elizabeth at last found an opportunity of seeing some of the poor for whom she was working.

The fall had prolonged itself into November; the weather was so perfect that Dick could daily speed his automobile, and the men who, like Marriott, still clung to golf, could play on Saturdays and Sundays at the Country Club. But December came, and with it a heavy rain that in three days became a sleet; then the snow and a cold wave. The wretched winter weather, which seems to have a spite almost personal for the lake regions, produced its results in the lives of men--there were suicides and crimes for the police, and for the Organized Charities, the poor, now forced to emerge from the retreats where in milder weather they could hide their wretchedness. They came forth, and when Elizabeth and Mrs. Russell entered the Charities one morning, there they were, ranged along the wall. They sat bundled in their rags, waiting in dumb patience for the last humiliation of an official investigation, making no sound save as their ailments compelled them to sneeze or to cough now and then; and as Elizabeth and Mrs. Russell passed into the room, they were followed by eyes that held no reproach or envy, but merely a mild curiosity. The poor sat there, perhaps glad of the warmth and the rest; willing to spend the day, if necessary; with hopes no higher than some mere temporary relief that would help them to eke out their lives a few hours longer and until another day, which should be like this day, repeating all its wants and hardships. The atmosphere of the room was stifling, with an odor that sickened Elizabeth, the fetor of all the dirt and disease that poverty had accumulated and heaped upon them.

At the desk Mrs. Rider, the clerk, and the two agents of the society were interrogating a woman. The woman was tall and slender, and her pale face had some trace of prettiness left; her clothing was better than that of the others, though it had remained over from some easier circumstance of the summer.

The woman was hungry, and she was sick. She had reported her condition to the agent of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty, but as this man could think of nothing better than to arrest somebody and have somebody punished, he had had the woman's husband sent to the workhouse for six months, thus removing the only hope she had.

To Elizabeth it seemed that the three inquisitors were trying, not so much to discover some means of helping this woman, as to discover some excuse for not helping her; they took turns in putting to her, with a professional frankness, the most personal questions,--questions that made Elizabeth blush and burn with shame, even as they made the woman blush. But just then a middle-aged woman appeared, and Elizabeth instantly identified her when Mrs. Rider pleasantly addressed her by a name that appeared frequently in the newspapers in connection with deeds that took on the aspect of nobility and sacrifice.

"I'm so glad you dropped in, Mrs. Norton," said Mrs. Rider. "We have a most perplexing case."

The clerk lifted her eyebrows expressively, and somehow indicated to Mrs. Norton the woman she had just had under investigation. Mrs. Norton glanced at the hunted face and smiled.

"You mean the Ordway woman? Exactly. I know her case thoroughly. Mr. Gleason 'phoned me from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty and I looked her up. You should have seen her room--the filthiest place I ever saw--and those children!" She raised her hands, covered with gloves, and her official-looking reticule slid up her forearm as if to express an impossibility. "The woman was tired of farm life--determined to come to town--fascinated by city life--she complained of her husband, and yet--what do you think?--she wanted me to get him out of the work-house!"

Mrs. Norton stopped as if she had made an unanswerable argument and proved that the woman should not be helped; and Mrs. Rider and the two agents seemed to be relieved. Presently Mrs. Rider called the woman, and told her that her case was not one that came within the purview of the society's objects, and when the hope was dying out of the woman's face Mrs. Norton began to lecture her on the care of children, and to assure her the city was filled with pitfalls for such as she. The woman, beaten into humility, listened a while, and then she turned and dragged herself toward the door. The eyes of the waiting paupers followed her with the same impersonal curiosity they had shown in the entrance of Mrs. Russell and Elizabeth and Mrs. Norton.

The limp retreating figure of the woman filled Elizabeth with distress. When, at the door, she saw the woman press to her eyes the sodden handkerchief she had been rolling in her palm during the interview, she ran after her; in the hall outside, away from others, she called; the woman turned and gazed at her suspiciously.

"Here!" said Elizabeth fearfully.

She opened her purse and emptied from it into the woman's hand all the silver it held.

"Where do you live?" she asked, and as the woman gave her the number of the house where she rented a room, Elizabeth realized how inappropriate the word "live" was. Elizabeth returned to the office with a glow in her breast, though she dreaded Mrs. Norton, whom she feared she had affronted by her deed. But Mrs. Norton received her with a smile.

"It seemed hard to you, no doubt," Mrs. Norton said, and Mrs. Rider and the two agents looked up with smiles of their own, as if they were about to shine in Mrs. Norton's justification, "but you'll learn after a while. We must discriminate, you know; we must not pauperize them. When you've been in the work as long as I have,"--she paused with a superior lift of her eyebrows at the use of this word "work,"--"you'll understand better."

Elizabeth felt a sudden indignation which she concealed, because she had her own doubts, after all. The ladies were gathering for the committee meeting and just then Mrs. Russell beckoned her into an inner room.

"The air is better in here," she said.

XV

Every day Elizabeth went to the Organized Charities. The committee on arrangements divided itself into subcommittees, and these, with other committees that were raised, must have meetings, make reports, receive instructions, and consider ways and means. The labor entailed was enormous. The women were exhausted before the first week had ended; the rustling of their skirts as they ran to and fro, their incessant chatter---they all spoke at once--their squealing at each other as their nerves snapped under the strain, filled the rooms with clamor. But all this endless confusion and complication were considered necessary in order to effect an organization. If any one doubted or complained, it was only necessary to speak the word "organization," and criticism was immediately silenced.

It had been discovered very early in the work of this organization that Mrs. Russell's great house would be too small for the bazaar, and it had been a relief to her when a certain Mrs. Spayd offered to place at the disposal of the committee the new mansion her husband had just built on Claybourne Avenue and named with the foreign-sounding name of "Bellemere." Mrs. Spayd privately conveyed the information that the young people might have the ball-room at the top of the house, where the most exclusive, if they desired, could dance, and she commissioned a firm of decorators to transform Bellemere into a bazaar. Mrs. Spayd was to bear the entire expense, and her charity was lauded everywhere, especially in the society columns of the newspapers. The booths were to represent different nations, and it was suddenly found to be desirable to dress as peasants. The women who were to serve in these booths flew to costumers to have typical clothing made. And this occasioned still greater conflict and confusion, for each woman wished to represent that country whose inhabitants were supposed to wear the most picturesque costumes.

Meanwhile the cold weather held and the poor besieged the Charities. No matter how early Elizabeth might arrive, no matter how late she might leave, they were always there, a stolid, patient row along the wall, or crowding up to the railing, or huddling in the hall outside. For a while Elizabeth, regarding them in the mass, thought that the same persons came each day, but she discovered that this was not the case. As she looked she noted a curious circumstance: the faces gradually took on individuality, slight at first, but soon decided, until each stood out among the others and developed the sharpest, most salient characteristics. She saw in each face the story of a single life, and always a life of neglect and failure, as if the misery of the world had been distributed in a kind of ironical variation. These people all were victims of a common doom, presenting itself each time in a different aspect; they were all alike--and yet they were all different, like leaves of a tree.

One afternoon Elizabeth suddenly noted a face that stood out in such relief that it became the only face there for her. It was the face of a young man, and it wore a strange pallor, and as Elizabeth hurried by she was somehow conscious that the young man's eyes were following her with a peculiar searching glance. When she sat down to await the women of the committee with which she was to meet, the young man still gazed at her steadily; she grew uncomfortable, almost resentful. She felt this continued stare to be a rudeness, and then suddenly she wondered why any rudeness of these people should be capable of affecting her; surely they were not of her class, to be judged by her standards. But she turned away, and determined not to look that way again, for fear that the young man might accost her.

And yet, though she persistently looked away, the face had so impressed her that she still could see it. In her first glimpse it had been photographed on her mind; its pallor was remarkable, the skin had a damp, dead whiteness, as if it had bleached in a cave, curls of thin brown hair clung to the brows; on the boy's neck was a streak of black where the collar of his coat had rubbed its color. In his thin hands he held a plush cap. And out of his pale face his wan eyes looked and followed her; she could not escape them, and for relief she finally fled to the inner room.

"We have made arrangements," said one of the women, "to hold our committee meetings hereafter at Mrs. Spayd's. She has kindly put her library at our disposal. This place is unbearable!"

She flung up a window and let the fresh air pour in.

"Yes," sighed another woman, "the air is sickening. It gives me a headache. If the poor could only be taught that cleanliness is akin to godliness!"

Elizabeth's head ached, too; it would be a relief to be delivered out of this atmosphere. But still the face of the young man pursued her. She could not follow the deliberations of the committee; she could think of nothing but that face. Where, she continually asked herself, had she seen it before? She sat by a window, and looked down into the street, preoccupied by the effort to identify it. She gave herself up to the pain of the process, as one does when trying to remember a name. Now and then she caught phrases of the sentences the women began, but seemed never able to finish:--"Oh, I hardly think that--" "As a class, of course--" "Oriental hangings would be best--" "Cheese-cloth looks cheap--" "Of course, flags--" "We could solicit the merchants--" "My husband was saying last night--"

But where had she seen that face before? Why should it pursue and worry her? What had she ever done? Finally, after two hours of the mighty effort and patience that are necessary to bring a number of minds to grasp a subject and agree even on the most insignificant detail, two hours in which thoughts hovered and flitted here and there, and could not find expression, when minds held back, and continually balked at the specific, the certain, the definite, and sought refuge from decision in the general and the abstract, the committee exhausted itself, and decided to adjourn. Then, although it had reached no conclusions whatever, the matron who presided smiled and said:

"Well, I feel that we're making progress."

"I don't feel as if we'd done much," some one else said. "And I can not come on Friday."

"Do you know, I really haven't got a single one of my Christmas presents yet."

"I have to give sixty-seven! Just think! What a burden it all is!"

Elizabeth dreaded the sight of that boy's face again, but it was growing late, the early winter twilight was expanding its gloom in the room. She made haste, and walked swiftly through the outer office. The young man was no longer there. But though this was a relief, his face still followed her. Who could he be?

The air out of doors was grateful. It soothed her hot cheeks, and, though her head throbbed more violently for an instant from the exertion of coming down the steps, she drew in great drafts of the winter air with a comforting sense that it was cleansing her lungs of all that foul atmosphere of poverty she had been breathing for two days. She walked hurriedly to the corner, to wait for a car; beside her, St. Luke's, as with an effort, lifted its Gothic arches of gray stone into the dark sky; across the street the City Hall loomed, its windows bright with lights. The afternoon crowds were streaming by on the sidewalk, wagons and heavy trucks jolted and rumbled along the street; she saw the drivers of coal-wagons, the whites of their eyes flashing under the electric lights against faces black as negroes with the grime. Politicians were coming from the City Hall; here and there, in and out of the crowd, newsboys darted, shouting "All 'bout the murder!" The shops were ablaze, their windows tricked out for the holidays; throngs of people hurried by, intent, preoccupied, selfish. As Elizabeth stood there, the constant stream of faces oppressed her with an intolerable gloom; the blazing electric lights, signs of theaters and restaurants, were mere mockeries of pleasure and comfort. And always the roar of the city. It was the hour when the roar became low and dull, a deep, ugly note of weariness and discontent was in it, the grumble of a city that was exhausted from its long day of confusion and wearing, complicated effort. On the City Hall corner, a man with the red-banded cap of the Salvation Army stood beside an iron kettle suspended beneath a tripod, swaying from side to side, stamping his huge feet in the cold, jangling a little hand-bell, and constantly crying in a bass voice:

"Remember the poor! Remember the poor!"

She recalled, suddenly, that the outcasts at the Charities invariably sneered whenever the Salvation Army was suggested, and she was impatient with this man in the cap with the red band, his enormous sandy mustache frozen into repulsive little icicles. Why must he add his din to this tired roar of the worn-out city?

Her car came presently, jerking along, stopping and starting again in the crowded street. The crowd sweeping by brushed her now and then, but suddenly she felt a more personal contact--some one had touched her. She shrank; she shuddered with fear, then she ran out to her car. Inside she began again that study of faces. She tried not to do so, but she seemed unable to shake off the habit--that face seemed always to be looking out at her from all other faces, white and sensitive, with the black mark on the neck where the coat collar had rubbed its color. And the eyes more and more reproached her, as if she had been responsible for the sadness that lay in them. The car whirred on, the conductor opened the door with monotonous regularity, and called out the interminable streets. The air in the car, overheated by the little coal-stove, took on the foul smell of the air at the Charities. Elizabeth's head ached more and more, a sickness came over her. At last she reached the street which led across to Claybourne Avenue, and got off. She crossed the little triangular park. The air had suddenly taken on a new life, it was colder and clearer. The dampness it had held in suspense for days was leaving it. Looking between the black trunks of the trees in the park she saw the western sky, yellow and red where the sun had gone down; and she thought of her home, with its comfort and warmth and light, and the logs in the great fireplace in the library. She hastened on, soothed and reassured. In the sense of certain comfort she now confidently anticipated, she could get the poor out of her mind, and feel as she used to feel before they came to annoy her. The clouds were clearing, the sky took on the deep blue it shows at evening; one star began to sparkle frostily, and, just as peace was returning, that young man's face came back, and she remembered instantly, in a flash, that it was the face of Harry Graves.

XVI

Elizabeth was right; it was Harry Graves. Four weeks before he had been released from the penitentiary. On the day that he was permitted to go forth into the world again as a free man, the warden gave him a railroad ticket back to the city, a suit of prison-made clothes, a pair of prison-made brogans, and a shirt. These clothes were a disappointment and a chagrin to Graves. When he went into the prison, the fall before, he had an excellent suit of clothes and a new overcoat, and during the whole year he had looked forward to the pleasure he would experience in donning these again. He had felt a security in returning to the world well-habited and presentable. But one of the guards had noticed Graves's clothes when he entered the penitentiary and had stolen them, so that when he was released, Graves was forced to go back wearing a suit of the shoddy clothes one of the contractors manufactured in the prison, and sold to the state at a profit sufficient to repay him and to provide certain officials of the penitentiary with a good income as well. These clothes were of dull black. A detective could recognize them anywhere. Before Graves had reached the city, the collar had rubbed black against his neck.

Things, of course, had changed while he was in prison. His mother had died and he had no home to go to. Besides this, he had contracted tuberculosis in the penitentiary, as did many of the convicts unless they were men of exceptionally strong constitutions. Nevertheless Graves was glad to be free on any terms, and glad to be back in the city in which he had been born and reared. And yet, no sooner was he back than the fear of the city lay on him. He dreaded to meet men; he felt their eyes following him curiously. He knew that he presented an uncouth figure in those miserable clothes and the clumsy prison brogans. Besides, he had so long walked in the lock-step that his gait was now constrained, awkward and unnatural; having been forbidden to speak for more than a year, and having spoken at all but surreptitiously, he found it impossible to approach men with his old frankness; having been compelled to keep his gaze on the ground, he could not look men in the eyes, and so he seemed to be a surly, taciturn creature with a hang-dog air.

During the three weeks Graves had been confined in jail, prior to his plea and sentence, he had thought over his misdeeds, recognized his mistakes and formed the most strenuous resolutions of betterment. He was determined, then, to live a better life; but as he could not live while in prison, but merely "do time," he was compelled, of course, to wait a year before he could begin life anew. During the eleven months he spent in the penitentiary he had tried to keep these resolutions fresh, strong and ever clear before him. This was a difficult thing to do, for his mind was weakened by the confinement, and his moral sense was constantly clouded by the examples that were placed before him. On Sundays, in the chapel, he heard the chaplain preach, but during the week the guards stole the comforts his mother sent to him before she died, the contractors and the prison officials were grafting and stealing from the state provisions, household furniture, liquors, wines, and every other sort of thing; one of the prison officials supplied his brother's drug store with medicines and surgical appliances from the prison hospital. Besides all this, the punishments he was compelled at times to witness--the water-cure, the paddle, the electric battery, the stringing up by the wrists, not to mention the loathsome practices of the convicts themselves--benumbed and appalled him, until he shuddered with terror lest his mind give way. But all these things, he felt, would be at an end if he could keep his reason and his health, and live to the end of his term. Then he could leave them all behind and go out into the world and begin life anew.

Graves came back to town during those last glorious days of the autumn, and the fact that he had no place to go was not so much a hardship. He did not care to show himself to his old friends until he had had opportunity to procure new clothes, and he felt that he was started on the way to this rehabilitation when almost immediately he found a place trucking merchandise for a wholesale house in Front Street. He felt encouraged; his luck, he told himself, was good, and for three days he was happy in his work. Then, one morning, he noticed a policeman; the policeman stood on the sidewalk, watching Graves roll barrels down the skids from a truck. The policeman stood there a good while, and then he spoke to the driver, admired the magnificent horses that were hitched to the truck, patted their glossy necks, picked up some sugar that had been spilled from a burst barrel and let the horses lick the sugar from the palm of his hand. The horses tossed their heads playfully as they did this, and, meanwhile, the policeman glanced every few minutes at Graves. Presently, he went into the wholesale house, and through the window Graves saw him talking to the manager. That evening the manager paid Graves for his three days' work and discharged him.

On this money, four dollars and a half, Graves lived for a week, meanwhile hunting another job. He could do nothing except manual labor, for he was not properly clothed for any clerical employment. He walked along the entire river front, seeking work on the wharves as a stevedore, but no one could work there who was not a member of the Longshoremen's Union, and no one could be a member of the Longshoremen's Union who did not work there; so this plan failed. He visited employment bureaus, but these demanded fees and deposits. Graves read the want advertisements in the newspapers, but none of these availed him; each prospective employer demanded references which Graves could not give.

The snow-storm brought him a prosperity as fleeting as the snow itself; he went into the residence district--where as yet he had not had the heart to go because of memories that haunted it--and cleaned the sidewalks of the well-to-do. After a day or so, the sidewalks of the well-to-do were all cleaned,--that is, the sidewalks of those who respected the laws sufficiently to have their sidewalks cleaned. Then the rain came, and Graves tramped the slushy streets. His prison-made shoes were as pervious to water as paper, of which substance, indeed, they were made; he contracted a cold, and his cough grew rapidly worse. He had no place to sleep. He spent a night in each of the two lodging-houses in the city, then he "flopped" on the floor of a police station. In this place he became infested with vermin, though this was no new experience to him after eleven months in the cells of the penitentiary. Meanwhile, he had little to eat. Once or twice, he visited hotel kitchens and the chefs gave him scraps from the table; then he did what for days he had been dreading--he tried to beg. After allowing twenty people to go by, he found the courage to hold out his hand to the twenty-first; the man passed without noticing him; a dozen others did likewise. Then a policeman saw him and arrested him on a charge of vagrancy. At the police station the officers, recognizing his prison clothes, held him for three days as a suspicious character. Then he was arraigned before Bostwick, who scowled and told him he would give him twenty-four hours in which to leave the city.

It was now cold. The wind cut through Graves's clothing like a saw; he skulked and hid for two days; then, intolerably hungry, he went to the Organized Charities. He sat there for two hours that afternoon, glad of the delay because the room was warm. He thought much during those two hours, though his thoughts were no longer clear. He was able, however, to recall a belief he had held before coming out of the penitentiary,--a belief that he had paid the penalty for his crime, that, having served the sentence society had imposed on him, his punishment was at an end. This view had seemed to be confirmed by the certificate that had been issued to him, under the Great Seal of State and signed by the governor, restoring him to citizenship. But now he realized that this belief had been erroneous, that he had not at all paid the penalty, that he had not served his sentence, that his punishment was not at an end, and that he had not been restored to citizenship. The Great Seal of State had attested an hypocrisy and a lie, and the governor had signed his name to this lie with a conceited flourish at the end of his pen. Graves formulated this conclusion with an effort, but he grasped it finally, and his mind clung to it and revolved about it, finding something it could hold to.

And then, suddenly, Elizabeth Ward entered the room. He knew her instantly, and his heart leaped with a wild desperate hope. He watched her; she was beautiful in the seal-skin jacket that fitted her slender figure so well; her hat with its touch of green became her dark hair. He noted the flush of her cheek, the sparkle of her eyes behind the veil. He remembered her as he had seen her that last day she came into her father's office; he remembered how heavy his own heart had been under its load of guilty fears. He recalled the affection her father had shown, how his tired face had smiled when he saw her. Graves remembered that the smile had filled him with a pity for Ward; he seemed once more to see Ward fondly take her little gloved hand and hold it while he looked up at her, and how he had laughed and evidently joked her as he swung about to his desk and wrote out a check. And then, as she went out, she had smiled at the clerks and spoken to them; she had smiled on him and spoken to him; would she smile now, this day? The hope leaped wild in his heart. If she did! She was the apple of her father's eye--he would do anything for her; if she would but see and recognize him now, give him the least hint of encouragement or permission, he would tell her, she would speak to her father and he would help him. His whole being seemed to melt within him--he half started from his chair--his eyes were wide with the excitement of this hope. He never once took them from her; he must not permit an instant to escape him, lest she look his way. He watched her as she sat by the window; she made a picture he never could forget. Once she turned. Ah! it was coming now!--but no--yes, she was moving! She had gone into the other room. He hoped now that his case would be one of the last. He must see her. After a while the agent beckoned him, looked at him suspiciously, and said:

"How long have you been out?"

"A month," said Graves.

"Well, I haven't got no use for convicts," said the agent.

Graves waited in the hall. He waited until it was dark, but not so dark that the agent could not recognize him.

"You needn't hang around," he said; "there's nothing to steal here."

Graves waited, then, outside. He feared he would miss Elizabeth in the dark, or confuse her among the other women. The thought made him almost frantic. The women came out, and finally--yes, it was Elizabeth! He could nowhere mistake that figure. He pressed up, he spoke, he put forth a hand to touch her--she turned with a start of fright. He saw a policeman looking at him narrowly. And then he gave up, slunk off, and was lost in the crowd.

XVII

Seated in the library at the Wards', Eades gave himself up to the influences of the moment. The open fire gave off the faint delicious odor of burning wood, the lamp filled the room with a soft light that gleamed on the gilt lettering of the books about the walls, the pictures above the low shelves--a portrait of Browning among them--lent to the room the dignity of the great souls they portrayed. Eades, who had just tried his second murder case, was glad to find this refuge from the thoughts that had harassed him for a week. Elizabeth noticed the weariness in his eyes, and she had a notion that his hair glistened a little more grayly at his temples.

"You've been going through an ordeal this week, haven't you?" She had expressed the thought that lay on their minds. He felt a thrill. She sympathized, and this was comfort; this was what he wanted!

"It must have been exciting," Elizabeth continued. "Murder trials usually are, I believe. I never saw one; I never was in a court-room in my life. Women do go, I suppose?"

"Yes--women of a certain kind." His tone deprecated the practice. "We've had big audiences all the week; it would have disgusted you to see them struggling and scrambling for admission. Now I suppose they'll be sending flowers to the wretch, and all that."

Eades chose to forget how entirely the crowd had sympathized with him, and how the atmosphere of the trial had been wholly against the wretch.

"Well, I'll promise not to send him any flowers," Elizabeth said quickly. "He'll have to hang?"

"No, not hang; we don't hang people in this state any more; we electrocute them. But I forgot; Gordon Marriott told me I mustn't say 'electrocute'; he says there is no such word."

"Gordon is particular," Elizabeth observed with a laugh.

Eades thought she laughed sympathetically; and he wanted all her sympathy for himself just then.

"He calls it killing." Eades grasped the word boldly, like a nettle.

"Gordon doesn't believe in capital punishment."

"So I understand."

"I don't either."

Her tone startled him. He glanced up. She was looking at him steadily.

"Did you read of this man's crime?" he asked.

"No, I don't read about crimes."

"Then I'll spare you. Only, he shot a man down in cold blood; there were eye-witnesses; there is no doubt of his guilt. He made no defense."

"Then it couldn't have been hard to convict him."

"No," Eades admitted, though he did not like this detraction from his triumph. "But the responsibility is great."

"I should imagine so."

He did not know exactly what she meant; he wondered if this were sarcasm.

"It is indeed," he insisted.

"Yes," she went on, "I know it must be. I couldn't bear it myself. I'm glad women are not called to such responsibilities. I believe it is said--isn't it?--that their sentimental natures unfit them." She was smiling.

"You're guying now," he said, leaning back in his chair.

"Oh, indeed, no! Of course, I know nothing about such things--save that you men are superior to your emotional natures, and rise above them and control them."

"Well, not always. We become emotional, but our emotions are usually excited on the side of justice."

"What is that?"

"Justice? Why--well--"

"You mean 'an eye for an eye,' I suppose, and 'a life for a life.'" Elizabeth looked at him steadily, and he feared she was making him ridiculous.

"I'm not sure that I believe in capital punishment myself," he said, seeing that she would not, after all, sympathize with him, "but luckily I have no choice; I have only my duty to do, and that is to enforce the laws as I find them." He settled back as if he had found a sure foundation and placed his fingers tip to tip, his polished nails gleaming in the firelight as if they were wet. "I can only do my duty; the jury, the judge, the executioner, may do theirs or not. My personal feelings can not enter into the matter in the least. That's the beauty of our system. Of course, it's hard and unpleasant, but we can't allow our sentiments to stand in the way." Plainly he enjoyed the nobility of this attitude. "As a man, I might not believe in capital punishment--but as an official--"

"You divide yourself into two personalities?"

"Well, in that sense--"

"How disagreeable!" Elizabeth gave a little shrug. "It's a kind of vivisection, isn't it?"

"But something has to be done. What would you have me do?" He sat up and met her, and she shrank from the conflict.

"Oh, don't ask me! I don't know anything about it, I'm sure! I know but one criminal, and I don't wish to dream about him to-night."

"It is strange to be discussing such topics," said Eades. "You must pardon me for being so disagreeable and depressing."

"Oh, I'll forgive you," she laughed. "I'd really like to know about such things. As I say, I have known but one criminal."

"The one you dream of?"

"Yes. Do you ever dream of your criminals?"

"Oh, never! It's bad enough to be brought into contact with them by day; I put them out of my mind when night comes. Except this Burns--he insists on pursuing me more or less. But now that he has his just deserts, perhaps he'll let me alone. But tell me about this criminal of yours, this lucky one you dream of. I'd become a criminal myself--"

"You know him already," Elizabeth said hastily, her cheeks coloring.

"I?"

"Yes. Do you remember Harry Graves?"

Eades bent his head and placed his knuckles to his chin.

"Graves, Graves?" he said. "It seems to me--"

"The boy who stole from my father; you had him sent to the penitentiary for a year--and papa--"

"Oh, I remember; that boy! To be sure. His term must be over now."

"Yes, it's over. I've seen him."

"You!" he said in surprise. "Where?"

"At the Charity Bureau, before Christmas."

"Ah, begging, of course." Eades shook his head. "I was in hopes our leniency would do him good; but it seems that it's never appreciated. I sometimes reproach myself with being too easy with them; but they do disappoint us--almost invariably. Begging! Well, they don't want to work, that's all. What became of him?"

"I don't know," said Elizabeth. "I saw him there, but didn't recognize him. After I had come away, I recalled him. I've reproached myself again and again. I wonder what has become of him!"

"It's sad, in a way," said Eades, "but I shouldn't worry. I used to worry, at first, but I soon learned to know them. They're no good, they won't work, they have no respect for law, they have no desire but to gratify their idle, vicious natures. The best thing is just to shut them up where they can't harm any one. This may seem heartless, but I don't think I'm heartless." He smiled tolerantly for himself. "I have no personal feeling in the matter, but I've learned from experience. As for this Graves--I had my doubts at the time. I thought then I was making a mistake in recommending leniency. But, really, your father was so cut up, and I'd rather err on the side of mercy." He paused a moment, and then said: "He'll turn up in court again some day. You'll see. I shouldn't lose any more sleep over him."

Elizabeth smiled faintly, but did not reply. She sat with her elbow on the arm of her chair, her delicate chin resting on her hand, and Eades was content to let the subject drop, if it would. He wished the silence would prolong itself. His heart beat rapidly; he felt a new energy, a new joy pulsing within him. He sat and looked at her calmly, her gaze bent on the fire, her profile revealed to him, her lashes sweeping her cheek, the lace in her sleeve falling away from her slender arm. Should he tell her then? He longed to--but this was not, after all, the moment. The moment would come, and he must be patient. He must wait and prove himself to her; she must understand him; she should see him in time as the modern ideal of manhood, doing his duty courageously and without fear or favor. Some day he would tell her.

"Your charity bazaar was a success, I hope?" he said presently, coming back to the lighter side of their last topic.

"I don't know," Elizabeth said. "I never inquired."

"You never inquired?"

"No."

"How strange! Why not?"

"I lost interest."

"Oh!" he laughed. "Well, we all do that."

"The whole thing palled on me--struck me as ridiculous."

Eades was perplexed. He could not in the least understand this latest attitude. Surely, she was a girl of many surprises.

"I shouldn't think you would find charity ridiculous. A hard-hearted and cruel being like me might--but you--oh, Miss Ward! To think that helping the poor was ridiculous!"

"But it isn't to help the poor at all."

He was still more perplexed.

"It's to help the rich. Can't you see that?"

She turned and faced him with clear, sober gray eyes.

"Can't you see that?" she asked again. "If you can't, I wish I knew how to make you.

"'The organized charity, scrimped and iced, In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ'--

"Do you know Boyle O'Reilly's poetry?"

Eades showed the embarrassment of one who has not the habit of reading, and she saw that the words had no meaning for him.

"Don't take it all so seriously," he said, leaning over as if he might plead with her. "'The poor,' you know, 'we have always with us.'" He settled back then as one who has said the thing proper to the occasion.

XVIII

Although Marriott had promised Koerner early in the fall that his action against the railroad would be tried at once, he was unable to bring the event to pass. In the first place, Bradford Ford, the attorney for the railroad, had to go east in his private car, then in the winter he had to go to Florida to rest and play golf, and because of these and other postponements it was March before the case was finally assigned for trial.

"So that's your client back there, is it?" said Ford, the morning of the trial, turning from the window and the lingering winter outdoors to look at Koerner.

Koerner was sitting by the trial table, his old wife by his side. He was pale and thin from his long winter indoors; his yellow, wrinkled skin stretched over his jaw-bones, hung flabby at his throat. As Ford and Marriott looked at him, a troubled expression appeared in Koerner's face; he did not like to see Marriott so companionable with Ford; he had ugly suspicions; he felt that Marriott should treat his opponent coldly and with the enmity such a contest deserved. But just at that minute Judge Sharlow came in and court was opened.

The trial lasted three days. The benches behind the bar were empty, the bailiff slept with his gray chin on his breast, the clerk copied pleadings in the record, pausing now and then to look out at the flurries of snow. Sharlow sat on the bench, trying to write an opinion he had been working on for weeks. The jury sat in the jury-box, their eyes heavy with drowsiness, breathing grossly. Long ago life had paused in these men; they had certain fixed opinions, one of which was that any man who sued a corporation was entitled to damages; and after they had seen Koerner, with the stump of his leg sticking out from his chair, they were ready to render a verdict.

Marriott knew this, and Ford knew it, and consequently they gave attention, not to the jury, but to the stenographer bending over the tablet on which he transcribed the testimony with his fountain pen. Marriott and Ford were concerned about the record; they saw not so much this trial, as a hearing months or possibly years hence in the Appellate Court, and still another hearing months or years hence in the Supreme Court. They knew that just as the jurymen were in sympathy with Koerner, and by any possible means would give a verdict in his favor, so the judges in the higher courts would be in sympathy with the railroad company, and by any possible means give judgment in its favor; and, therefore, while Marriott's efforts were directed toward trying the case in such a way that the record should be free from error, Ford's efforts were directed toward trying the case in such a way that the record should be full of error. Ford was continually objecting to the questions Marriott asked his witnesses, and compelling Sharlow to drop his work and pass on these objections. One of Marriott's witnesses, a stalwart young mechanic, unmarried and with no responsibilities, testified positively that the frog in which Koerner had caught his foot had no block in it; he had examined it carefully at the time. Another, a man of middle age with a large family, an employe of the railroad company, had the most unreliable memory--he could remember nothing at all about the frog; he could not say whether it had been blocked or not; he had not examined it; he had not considered it any of his business. While giving his testimony, he cast fearful and appealing glances at Ford, who smiled complacently, and for a while made no objections. Another witness was Gergen, the surgeon, a young man with eye-glasses, a tiny gold chain, and a scant black beard trimmed closely to his pale skin and pointed after the French fashion. He retained his overcoat and kept on his glasses while he testified, as if he must get through with this business and return to his practice as quickly as possible. With the greatest care he couched all his testimony in scientific phrases.

"I was summoned to the hospital," he said, "at seven-sixteen on that evening and found the patient prostrated by hemorrhage and shock. I supplemented the superficial examination of the internes and found that there were contusions on the left hip, and severe bruises on the entire left side. The most severe injury, however, developed in the right foot. The tibiotarsal articulation was destroyed, the calcaneum and astragalus were crushed and inoperable, the metatarsus and phalanges, and the internal and external malleolus were also crushed, and the fibula and tibia were splintered to the knee."

"Well, what then?"

"I gave orders to have the patient prepared, and proceeded to operate. My assistant, Doctor Remack, administered the anesthetic, and I amputated at the lower third."

Doctor Gergen then explained that what he had said meant that he had found Koerner's foot, ankle and knee crushed, and that he had cut off his leg above the knee. After this he told what fee he had charged; he did this in plain terms, calling dollars dollars, and cents cents.

But Koerner himself was a sufficient witness in his own behalf. Sitting on the stand, his crutches in the hollow of his arm, the stump of his leg thrust straight out before him and twitching now and then, he told of his long service with the railroad, pictured the blinding snow-storm, described how he had slipped and caught his foot in the unblocked frog--then the switch-engine noiselessly stealing down upon him. The jurymen roused from their lethargy as he turned his white and bony face toward them; the atmosphere was suddenly charged with the sympathy these aged men felt for him. Sharlow paused in his writing, the clerk ceased from his monotonous work, and Mrs. Koerner, whose expression had not changed, wiped her eyes with the handkerchief which, fresh from the iron, she had held all day without unfolding.

When Ford began his cross-examination, Koerner twisted about with difficulty in his chair, threw back his head, and his face became hard and obdurate. He ran his stiff and calloused hand through his white hair, which seemed to bristle with leonine defiance. Ford conducted his cross-examination in soft, pleasant tones, spoke to Koerner kindly and with consideration, scrupulously addressed him as "Mr. Koerner," and had him repeat all he had said about his injury.

"As I understand it, then, Mr. Koerner," said Ford, "you were walking homeward at the end of the day through the railroad yards."

"Yes, sir, dot's right."

"You'd always gone home that way?"

"Sure; I go dot vay for twenty year, right t'rough dose yards dere."

"Yes. Was that a public highway, Mr. Koerner?"

"Vell, everybody go dot vay home all right; dot's so."

"But it wasn't a street?"

"No."

"Nor a sidewalk?"

"You know dot alreadty yourself," said Koerner, leaning forward, contracting his bushy white eyebrows and glaring at Ford. "Vot you vant to boder me mit such a damn-fool question for?"

The jurymen laughed and Ford smiled.

"I know, of course, Mr. Koerner; you will pardon me--but what I wish to know is whether or not you know. You had passed through those yards frequently?"

"Yah, undt I knows a damn-sight more about dose yards dan you, you bet."

Again the jurymen laughed in vicarious pleasure at another's profanity.

"I yield to you there, Mr. Koerner," said Ford in his suave manner. "But let us go on. You say your foot slipped?"

"Yah, dot's right."

"Slipped on the frozen snow?"

"Yah. I bedt you shlip on such a place as dot."

"No doubt," said Ford, who suddenly ceased to smile. He now leaned forward; the faces of the two protagonists seemed to be close together.

"And, as a result, your foot slid into the frog, and was wedged there so that you could not get it out?"

"Yah."

"And the engine came along just then and ran over it?"

"Yah."

Ford suddenly sat upright, turned away, seemed to have lost interest, and said:

"That's all, Mr. Koerner."

And the old man was left sitting there, suspended as it were, his neck out-thrust, his white brows gathered in a scowl, his small eyes blinking.

Sharlow looked at Marriott, then said, as if to hurry Koerner off the stand:

"That's all, Mr. Koerner. Call your next."

When all the testimony for the plaintiff had been presented Ford moved to arrest the case from the jury; that is, he wished Sharlow to give judgment in favor of the railroad company without proceeding further. In making this motion, Ford stood beside his table, one hand resting on a pile of law-books he had had borne into the court-room that afternoon by a young attorney just admitted to the bar, who acted partly as clerk and partly as porter for Ford, carrying his law-books for him, finding his place in them, and, in general, relieving Ford from all that manual effort which is thought incompatible with professional dignity. As he spoke, Ford held in his hand the gold eye-glasses which seemed to betray him into an age which he did not look and did not like to admit. Marriott had expected this motion and listened attentively to what Ford said. The Koerners, who did not at all understand, waited patiently. Meanwhile, Sharlow excused the jury, sank deeper in his chair and laid his forefinger learnedly along his cheek.

Ford's motion was based on the contention that the failure to block the frog--he spoke of this failure, perfectly patent to every one, as an alleged failure, and was careful to say that the defendant did not admit that the frog had not been blocked--that the alleged failure was not the proximate cause of Koerner's injury, but that the real cause was the ice about the frog on which Koerner, according to his own admission, had slipped. The unblocked frog, he said--admitting merely for the sake of argument that the frog was unblocked--was the remote cause, the ice was the proximate cause; the question then was, which of these had caused Koerner's injury? It was necessary that the injury be the effect of a cause which in law-books was referred to as a proximate cause; if it was not referred to as a proximate cause, but as a remote cause, then Koerner could not recover his damages. After elaborating this view and many times repeating the word "proximate," which seemed to take on a more formidable and insuperable sound each time he uttered it, Ford proceeded to elucidate his thought further, and in doing this, he used a term even more impressive than the word proximate; he used the phrase, "act of God." The ice, he said, was an "act of God," and as the railroad company was responsible, under the law, for its own acts only, it followed that, as "an act of God" was not an act of the railroad company, but an act of another, that is, of God, the railroad company could not be held accountable for the ice.

Having, as he said, indicated the outline of his argument, Ford said that he would pass to a second proposition; namely, that the motion must be granted for another reason. In stating this reason, Ford used the phrases, "trespass" and "contributory negligence," and these phrases had a sound even more ominous than the phrases "proximate" and "act of God." Ford declared that the railroad yards were the property of the railroad company, and therefore not a thoroughfare, and that Koerner, in walking through them, was a trespasser. The fact that Koerner was in the employ of the railroad, he said, did not give him the right to enter in and upon the yards--he had the lawyer's reckless extravagance in the use of prepositions, and whenever it was possible used the word "said" in place of "the"--for the reason that his employment did not necessarily lead him to said yard and, more than all, when Koerner completed his labors for the day, his right to remain in and about said premises instantly ceased. Therefore, he contended, Koerner was a trespasser, and a trespasser must suffer all the consequences of his trespass. Then Ford began to use the phrase "contributory negligence." He said that Koerner had been negligent in continuing in and upon said premises, and besides, had not used due care in avoiding the ice and snow on and about said frog; that he had the same means of knowing that the ice was there that the railroad company had, and hence had assumed whatever risk there was in passing on and over said ice, and that then and thereby he had been guilty of contributory negligence; that is, had contributed, by his own negligence, to his own injury. In fact, it seemed from Ford's argument that Koerner had really invited his injury and purposely had the switch-engine cut off his leg.

"These, in brief, if the Court please," said Ford, who had spoken for an hour, "are the propositions I wish to place before your Honor." Ford paused, drew from his pocket a handkerchief, pressed it to his lips, passed it lightly over his forehead, and laid it on the table. Then he selected a law-book from the pile and opened it at the page his clerk had marked with a slip of paper. Sharlow, knowing what he had to expect, stirred uneasily and glanced at the clock.

During Ford's argument Sharlow had been thinking the matter over. He knew, of course, that the same combination of circumstances is never repeated, that there could be no other case in the world just like this, but that there were hundreds which resembled it, and that Ford and Marriott would ransack the law libraries to find these cases, explain them to him, differentiate them, and show how they resembled or did not resemble the case at bar. And, further, he knew that before he could decide the question Ford had raised he would have to stop and think what the common law of England had been on the subject, then whether that law had been changed by statute, then whether the statute had been changed, and, if it was still on the statute books, whether it could be said to be contrary to the Constitution of the United States or of the State. Then he would have to see what the courts had said about the subject, and, if more than one court had spoken, whether their opinions were in accord or at variance with each other. Besides this he would have to find out what the courts of other states had said on similar subjects and whether they had reversed themselves; that is, said at one time something contrary to what they had said at another. If he could not reconcile these decisions he would have to render a decision himself, which he did not like to do, for there was always the danger that some case among the thousands reported had been overlooked by him, or by Ford or Marriott, and that the courts which would review his decision, in the years that would be devoted to the search, might discover that other case and declare that he had not decided the question properly. And even if the courts had decided this question, it might be discovered that the question was not, after all, the exact question involved in this case, or was not the exact question the courts had meant to decide. It would not do for Sharlow to decide this case according to the simple rule of right and wrong, which he could have found by looking into his own heart; that would not be lawful; he must decide it according to what had been said by other judges, most of whom were dead. Though if Sharlow did decide, his decision would become law for other judges to be guided by, until some judge in the future gave a different opinion.

Considering all this, Sharlow determined to postpone his decision as long as possible, and told Ford that he would not then listen to his authorities, but would hear what Marriott had to say.

And then Marriott spoke at length, opposing all that Ford had said, saying that the unblocked frog must be the proximate cause, for if it had been blocked, Koerner could not have caught his foot in it and could have got out of the way of the switch-engine. Furthermore, he declared that the yards had been used by the employes as a thoroughfare so long that a custom had been established; that the unblocked frog, according to the statute, was _prima facie_ negligence on the part of the defendant. And he said that if Ford was to submit authorities, he would like an opportunity to submit other authorities equally authoritative. At this Sharlow bowed, said he would adjourn court until two o'clock in order to consider the question, recalled the jury and cautioned them not to talk about the case. This caution was entirely worthless, because they talked of nothing else, either among themselves or with others; being idle men, they had nothing else to talk about.

Koerner had listened with amazement to Ford and Marriott, wondering how long they could talk about such incomprehensible subjects. He had tried to follow Ford's remarks and then had tried to follow Marriott's, but he derived nothing from it all except further suspicions of Marriott, who seemed to talk exactly as Ford talked and to use the same words and phrases. He felt, too, that Marriott should have spoken in louder tones and more vehemently, and shown more antipathy to Ford. And when they went out of the court-house, he asked Marriott what it all meant. But Marriott, who could not himself tell as yet what it meant, assured Koerner that an important legal question had arisen and that they must wait until it had been fully argued, considered and decided by the court. Koerner swung away on his crutches, saying to himself that it was all very strange; the switch-engine had cut off his leg, against his will, no one could gainsay that, and the only important question Koerner could see was how much the law would make the railroad company pay him for cutting off his leg. It seemed silly to him that so much time should be wasted over such matters. But then, as Marriott had said, it was impossible for Koerner to understand legal questions.

By the time he opened court in the afternoon, Sharlow had decided on a course of action, one that would give him time to think over the question further. He announced that he would overrule the motion, but that counsel for defense might raise the question again at the close of the evidence, and, should a verdict result unfavorably to him, on the motion for a new trial.

Ford took exceptions, and began his defense, introducing several employes of the railroad to give testimony about the ice at the frog. When his evidence was in, Ford moved again to take the case from the jury, but Sharlow, having thought the matter over and found it necessary for his peace of mind to reach some conclusion, overruled the motion.

Then came the arguments, extending themselves into the following day; then Sharlow must speak; he must charge the jury. The purpose of the charge was to lay the law of the case before the jury, and for an hour he went on, talking of "proximate cause," of "contributory negligence," of "measure of damages," and at last, the jury having been confused sufficiently to meet all the requirements of the law, he told them they might retire.

It was now noon, and the court was deserted by all but Koerner and his wife, who sat there, side by side, and waited. It was too far for them to go home, and they had no money with which to lunch down town. The bright sun streamed through the windows with the first promise of returning warmth. Now and then from the jury room the Koerners could hear voices raised in argument; then the noise would die, and for a long time it would be very still. Occasionally they would hear other sounds, the scraping of a chair on the floor, once a noise as of some one pounding a table; voices were raised again, then it grew still. And Koerner and his wife waited.

At half-past one the bailiff returned.

"Any sign?" he asked Koerner.

"Dey was some fightin'."

"They'll take their time," said the bailiff.

"Vot you t'ink?" Koerner ventured to ask.

"Oh, you'll win," said the bailiff. But Koerner was not so sure about that.

At two o'clock Sharlow returned and court began again. Another jury was called, another case opened, Koerner gave place to another man who was to exchange his present troubles for the more annoying ones the law would give him; to experience Koerner's perplexity, doubt, confusion, and hope changing constantly to fear. Other lawyers began other wrangles over other questions of law.

At three o'clock there was a loud pounding on the door of the jury room. Every one in the court-room turned with sudden expectation. The bailiff drew out his keys, unlocked the door, spoke to the men inside, and then went to telephone to Marriott and Ford. After a while Marriott appeared, but Ford had not arrived. Marriott went out himself and telephoned; Ford had not returned from luncheon. He telephoned to Ford's home, then to his club. Finally, at four o'clock, Ford came.

After the verdict Marriott went to the Koerners and whispered:

"We can go now."

The old man got up, his wife helped him into his overcoat, and he swung out of the court-room on his crutches. He had tried to understand what the clerk had read, but could not. He thought he had lost his case.

"Well, I congratulate you, Mr. Koerner," said Marriott when they were in the corridor.

"How's dot?" asked the old man harshly.

"Why, you won."

"Me?"

"Yes; didn't you know?"

"I vin?"

"Certainly, you won. You get eight thousand dollars."

The old man stopped and looked at Marriott.

"Eight t'ousandt?"

"Yes, eight thousand."

"I get eight t'ousandt, huh?"

"Yes."

A smile transfigured the heavy, bony face.

"Py Gott!" he said. "Dot's goodt, hain't it?"

XIX

Late in April they argued the motion for a new trial, and on the last day of the term Sharlow announced his decision, overruling the motion, and entered judgment in Koerner's favor. Though Marriott knew that Ford would carry the case up on error, he had, nevertheless, won a victory, and he felt so confident and happy that he decided to go to Koerner and tell him the good news. The sky had lost the pale shimmer of the early spring and taken on a deeper tone. The sun was warm, and in the narrow plots between the wooden sidewalks and the curb, the grass was green. The trees wore a gauze of yellowish green, the first glow of living color they soon must show. A robin sprang swiftly across a lawn, stopping to swell his ruddy breast. Marriott made a short cut across a commons, beyond which the spire of a Polish Catholic church rose into the sky. The bare spots of the commons, warmed by the sun, exhaled the strong odor of the earth, recalling memories of other springs. Some shaggy boys, truants, doubtless, too wise to go to school on such a day, were playing a game of base-ball, writhing and contorting their little bodies, raging and screaming and swearing at one another in innocent imitation of the profanity of their fathers and elder brothers.

Koerner, supported by one crutch, was leaning over his front gate. He was recklessly bareheaded; his white, disordered hair maintained its aspect of fierceness, and, as Marriott drew near, he turned on him his great, bony face, without a change of expression.

"Well, Mr. Koerner, this is a fine day, isn't it?" said Marriott as he took the old man's hand. "I guess the spring's here at last."

Koerner took his constant pipe from his lips, raised his eyes and made an observation of the heavens.

"Vell, dot veat'er's all right." As he returned the amber stem to his yellow teeth, Marriott saw that the blackened bowl of the pipe was empty. The old man let Marriott in at his gate, then swinging about, went to the stoop, lowered himself from his crutches and sat down, with a grunt at the effort.

"Aren't you afraid for your rheumatism?" asked Marriott, sitting down beside him.

"Vot's up now again, huh?" demanded Koerner, ignoring this solicitude for his health.

"Nothing but good news this time," Marriott was glad to say.

"Goodt news, huh?"

"Yes, good news. The judge has refused the motion for a new trial."

"Den I vin for sure dis time, ain't it?"

"Yes, this time," said Marriott.

"I get my money now right avay?"

"Well, pretty soon."

The old man turned to Marriott with his blue eyes narrowed beneath the white brush of his eyebrows.

"Vot you mean by dot pretty soon?"

"Well, you see, Mr. Koerner, as I explained to you,"--Marriott set himself to the task of explaining the latest development in the case; he tried to present the proceedings in the Appellate Court in their most encouraging light, but he was conscious that Koerner understood nothing save that there were to be more delays.

"But we must be patient, Mr. Koerner," he said. "It will come out all right."

Koerner made no reply. To Marriott his figure was infinitely pathetic. He looked at the great face, lined and seamed; the eyes that saw nothing--not the little yard before them where the turf was growing green, not the blackened limbs of a little maple tree struggling to put forth its leaves, not the warm mud glistening in the sun, not the dirty street piled with ashes, not the broken fence and sidewalk, the ugly little houses across the street, nor the purple sky above them--they were gazing beyond all this. Marriott looked at the old man's lips; they trembled, then they puckered themselves about the stem of his pipe and puffed automatically. Marriott, hanging his head, lighted a cigarette.

"Mis'er Marriott," Koerner began presently, "I been an oldt man. I been an hones' man; py Gott! I vork hardt efery day. I haf blenty troubles. I t'ink ven I lose dot damned oldt leg, I t'ink, vell, maybe I get some rest now bretty soon. I say to dot oldt leg: 'You bin achin' mit der rheumatiz all dose year, now you haf to kvit, py Gott!' I t'ink I get some rest, I get some dose damages, den maybe I take der oldt voman undt dose childer undt I go out to der oldt gountry; I go back to Chairmany, undt I haf some peace dere. Vell--dot's been a long time, Mis'er Marriott; dot law, he's a damn humpug; he's bin fer der railroadt gompany; he's not been fer der boor man. Der boor man, he's got no show. Dot's been a long time. Maybe, by undt by I die--dot case, he's still go on, huh?"

The old man looked at Marriott quizzically.

"Vell, I gan't go out to der oldt gountry now any more. I haf more drouble--dot poy Archie--vell, he bin in drouble too, and now my girl, dot Gusta--"

The old man's lips trembled.

"Vell, she's gone, too."

A tear was rolling down Koerner's cheek. Marriott could not answer him just then; he did not dare to look; he could scarcely bear to think of this old man, with his dream of going home to the Fatherland--and all his disappointments. Suddenly, the spring had receded again; the air was chill, the sun lost its warmth, the sky took on the pale, cold glitter of the days he thought were gone. He could hear Koerner's lips puffing at his pipe. Suddenly, a suspicion came to him.

"Mr. Koerner," he asked, "why aren't you smoking?"

The old man seemed ashamed.

"Tell me," Marriott demanded.

"Vell--dot's all right. I hain't--chust got der tobacco."

The truth flashed on Marriott; this was deprivation--when a man could not get tobacco! He thought an instant; then he drew out his case of cigarettes, took them, broke their papers and seizing Koerner's hand said:

"Here, here's a pipeful, anyway; this'll do till I can send you some."

And he poured the tobacco into Koerner's bare palm. The old man took the tobacco, pressed it into the bowl of his pipe, Marriott struck a match, Koerner lighted his pipe, and sat a few moments in the comfort of smoking again.

"Dot's bretty goodt," he said presently. He smoked on. After a while he turned to Marriott with his old shrewd, humorous glance, his blue eyes twinkled, his white brows twitched.

"Vell, Mis'er Marriott, you nefer t'ought you see der oldt man shmokin' cigarettes, huh?"

Marriott laughed, glad of the relief, and glad of the new sense of comradeship the tobacco brought.

"Now tell me, Mr. Koerner," he said, "are you in want--do you need anything?"

Koerner did not reply at once.

"Come on now," Marriott urged, "tell me--have you anything to eat in the house?"

"Vell," Koerner admitted, "not much."

"Have you anything at all to eat?"

Koerner hung his head then, in the strange, unaccountable shame people feel in poverty.

"Vell, I--undt der oldt voman--ve hafn't had anyt'ing to eat to-day."

"And the children?"

"Ve gif dem der last dis morning alreadty."

Marriott closed his eyes in the pain of it. He reproached himself that he who argued so glibly that people in general lack the cultured imagination that would enable them to realize the plight of the submerged poor, should have had this condition so long under his very eyes and not have seen it. He was humbled, and then he was angry with himself--an anger he was instantly able to change into an anger with Koerner.

"Well, Mr. Koerner," he said. "I don't know that I ought to sympathize with you, after all. You might have told me; you might have known I should be glad to help you; you might have saved me--"

He was about to add "the pain," but he recognized the selfishness of this view, and paused.

"I'll help you, of course," he went on. "My God, man, you mustn't go hungry! Won't the grocer trust you?"

The old man was humbled now, and this humility, this final acquiescence and submission, this rare spirit beaten down and broken at last, this was hardest of all to bear, unless it were his own self-consciousness in this presence of humiliated age--these white hairs and he himself so young! He felt like turning from the indignity of this poverty, as if he had been intruding on another's unmerited shame.

"I'll go and attend to it," said Marriott, rising at once.

"No, you vait," said Koerner, "chust a minute. You know my boy, Mis'er Marriott, Archie? Vell, I write him aboudt der case, but I don't get a answer. He used to write eff'ry two veeks, undt now--he don't write no more. Vot you t'ink, huh?" The old man looked up at him in the hunger of soul that is even more dreadful than the hunger of body.

"I'll attend to that, too, Mr. Koerner; I'll write down and find out, and I'll let you know."

"Undt Gusta," the old man began as if, having opened his heart at last, he would unburden it of all its woes--but he paused and shook his head slowly. "Dot's no use, I guess. De veat'er's getting bedder now, undt maybe I get out some; maybe I look her up undt find her."

"You don't know where she is?"

The white head shook again.

"She's go avay--she's got in trouble, too."

In trouble! It was all the same to him--poverty, hunger, misfortune, guilt, frailty, false steps, crime, sin--to these wise poor, thought Marriott, it was all just "trouble."

"But it will be all right," he said, "and I'll advance you what money you need. I'll write to the warden about Archie, we'll find Gusta, and we'll win the case." He thought again--the old man might as well have his dream, too. "You'll go back to Germany yet, you'll see."

Koerner looked up, clutching at hope again.

"You t'ink dot? You t'ink I vin, huh?"

"Sure," said Marriott heartily, determined to drag joy back into the world.

"Py Gott, dot's goodt! I guess I beat dot gompany. I vork for it dose t'irty-sefen year; den dey turn me off. Vell, I beat him, yet. Chust let dot lawyer Ford talk; let him talk his damned headt off. I beat him--some day."

"I'll go now, Mr. Koerner. I'll speak to the grocer, and I'll send you something so you can have a little supper. No, don't get up."

Koerner stretched forth his hand.

"You bin a goodt friendt, Mis'er Marriott."

Marriott went to the grocery on the corner. The grocer, a little man, very fat, ran about filling his orders, sickening Marriott with his petty sycophancy.

"Some bacon? Yes, sir. Sugar, butter, bread? Yes, sir. Coffee? Here you are, sir. Potatoes--about a peck, sir?"

Marriott, with no notion of what he should buy, bought everything, and added some tobacco for Koerner and some candy for the children. And when he had arranged with the grocer for an extension of credit to Koerner on his own promise to pay--a promise the canny grocer had Marriott indorse on the card he gave him--Marriott went away with some of the satisfaction of his good deed; but the grace of spring had gone out of the day and would not now return.

XX

The reason why Archie had not answered his father's letter was a simple one. On that spring afternoon while Koerner and Marriott were sitting on the stoop, Archie, stripped to the waist, was hanging by his wrists from the ceiling of a dungeon, called a bull cell, in the cellar under the chapel, his bare feet just touching the floor. He had been hanging there for three days. At night he was let down and given a piece of bread and a cup of water, and allowed to lie on the floor, still handcuffed. At morning guards came, raised Archie, lifted him up, and chained his wrists to the bull rings. Later, Deputy Warden Ball sauntered by with his cane hooked over his arm, peered in through the bars, smiled, and said, in his peculiar soft voice:

"Well, Archie, my boy, had enough?"

McBride, the contractor, who had picked Archie out of the group of new convicts in the idle house the day after he arrived at the prison, had set him to work in a shop known as "Bolt B." His work was to make iron bolts, and all day long, from seven in the morning until five in the afternoon, he stood with one foot on the treadle, sticking little bits of iron into the maw of the machine and snatching them out again. At dinner-time the convicts marched out of the shop, stood in close-locked ranks until the whistle blew, and then marched across the yard to the dining-room for their sky-blue, their bread, their molasses and their boot-leg. Archie had watched the seasons change in this yard, he had seen its grass-plot fade and the leaves of its stunted trees turn yellow, he had seen it piled with snow and ice; now it was turning green with spring, just like the world outside. Sometimes, as they passed, he caught a glimpse of the death-squad--the men who were being kept until they could be killed in the electric chair--taking their daily exercise, curiously enough, for the benefit of their health. This squad varied in numbers. Sometimes there were a dozen, then there would come a night of horror when the floor of the cell-house was deadened with saw-dust. The next day one would be missing; only eleven would be exercising for their health. Then would come other nights of horror, and the squad would decrease until there were but six. But soon it would begin to increase again, and the number would run up to the normal. Sometimes, in summer, the Sunday-school excursionists had an opportunity to see the death-squad. Archie had seen the children, held by a sick, morbid interest, shrink when the men marched by, as if they were something other than mere people.

Each evening Archie and the other convicts marched again to the dining-room, and ate bread and molasses; then they sat in their cells for an hour while the cell-house echoed with the twanging of guitars and banjos, mouth-organs, jews'-harps, accordeons, and the raucous voices of the peddlers--a hideous bedlam. Those who had hall-permits talked with one another, or with friendly guards. Sometimes, if the guard were "right," he gave Archie a candle and permitted him to read after the lights were out.

All week-days were alike. On Sunday they went to chapel and listened to the chaplain talk about Christ, who, it was said, came to preach deliverance to the captives. The chaplain told the convicts they could save their souls in the world to which they would go when they died, if they believed on Christ. Archie did not understand what it was that he was expected to believe, any more than he had when the sky-pilot at the works had said very much the same thing. It could not be that they expected him to believe that Christ came to preach deliverance to captives such as he. So he paid no attention to the sky-pilot. He found it more interesting to watch the death-squad, who, as likely to go to that world before any of the others, were given seats in the front pews. Near the death-squad were several convicts in chains. They were considered to be extremely bad and greatly in need of religion. The authorities, it seemed, were determined to give them this religion, even if they had to hold them in chains while they did so. In the corners of the chapel, behind protecting iron bars, were guards armed with rifles, who vigilantly watched the convicts while the chaplain preached to them the religion of the gentle Nazarene. The chaplain said it was the religion of the gentle Nazarene, but in reality it was the religion of Moses, or sometimes that of Paul, and even of later men that he preached to the convicts rather than the religion of Jesus. The convicts did not know this, however. Neither did the chaplain.

Yes, the days were exactly alike, especially as to the work, for Archie was required to turn out hundreds of bolts a day; a minimum number was fixed, and this was called a "task." If he did not do this task, he was punished. It was difficult to perform this task; only by toiling incessantly every minute could he succeed. And even then it was hard, for in addition to keeping his eye on his machine, he had to keep his eye on the pile of bolts beside him, for the other convicts would rat; that is, steal from his pile in order to lessen their own tasks. For those bolts that were spoiled, Archie was given no credit; every hour an inspector came around, looked the bolts over and threw out those that were defective. For this toil, which was unpaid and in which he took no pride and found no joy because it was ugly and without any result to him, Archie felt nothing but loathing. This feeling was common among all the men in the shop; they resorted to all sorts of devices to escape it; some of them allowed the machines to snip off the ends of their fingers so they could work no more; others found a friend in Sweeny, the confidence man who was serving a five-year sentence and was detailed as a steward in the hospital. When they were in the hospital, Sweeny would burn the end of a finger with acid, rub dirt on it, and when it festered, amputate the finger.

Belden, who worked a machine next to Archie, did that; but only as a last resort.

"It's no use for me to learn this trade," he said to Archie one day when the guard was at the other end of the shop.

"Why not?"

"'Cause I'll be on the street in two months; my mouthpiece's going to take my case to the Supreme Court, and he's sure to have it reversed. All I got to do's to raise a hundred and fifty case; I've written my mother, and she's already saved up seventy-eight. There's nothing to it. Me learn to make these damned bolts for McBride? I guess not!"

Belden talked a great deal about his case in the Supreme Court. Many of the convicts did that. They did everything to raise money for their lawyers. After Belden's attorney had taken the case up, and failed, Belden made application for pardon; and this required more money. His mother was saving up again. But this failed also; then Belden feigned sickness, was sent to the hospital; and they all admired him for his success.

Archie was sick once, and after three sick calls--he was, in reality, utterly miserable and suffered greatly--the physician, who, like every one else in the penitentiary, was controlled by the contractors, gave in and sent him to the hospital. Though the hospital was a filthy place, Archie for two days enjoyed the rest he found there. Then Sweeny told him that the bed he occupied had not been changed since a consumptive had died in it the day before Archie arrived.

"You stick to that pad," said Sweeny, "and the croakers'll be peddling your stiff in a month."

Sweeny was accounted very wise, as indeed he was; for he held his position by reason of his discovery that the doctor was supplying his brother, who kept a drugstore outside, with medicines, silk bandages, plasters and surgical instruments.

Archie recovered then and went back to Bolt B.

After his return things went better for a while, because, to his surprise, the Kid, of whom he had heard in the jail at home, was there working at the machine next to his. The Kid had been transferred to that shop because he had utterly demoralized Bolt A, where he had been working. The little pickpocket, indeed, had been tried on all kinds of work--in the broom factory, in the cigar factory, in the foundry, everywhere, but he could not long be tolerated anywhere. His presence was too diverting. He was taken from the broom shop because he amused himself at the expense of a country boy sent up for grand larceny, whom, as the country boy thought, he was teaching to be a prowler. In the cigar shop he made another unsophisticated boy think that he could teach him the secret of making "cluck," or counterfeit money; and he went so far as to give him a can of soft gray earth, which the convict thought was crude silver, and some broken glass to give the metal the proper ring. The convict hid this rubbish in his cell and jealously guarded it; he was to be released in a month. For a while the warden employed the Kid about the office, but one day he said to one of the trusties, an old life man who had been in the prison twenty years, until his mind had weakened under the confinement:

"What do you want to stay around here for? Ain't there other countries besides this?"

The old man sniggered in his silly way, then he went to the warden, and hanging his head with a demented leer said:

"Warden, the Kid said there's other countries besides this."

He stood, swaying like a doltish school-boy from side to side, grinning, with his tongue lolling over his lips.

The warden summoned the Kid.

"What do you mean," he said, "putting notions in old Farlow's head?"

The Kid was surprised.

"Oh, come off," said the warden impatiently. "You know--telling him there were other countries besides this?"

"Oh!" said the Kid with sudden illumination. "Oh, now I know what you mean!" And he laughed. "He asked me where I was from and I told him Canada. Then he wanted to know if Canada was in this country, and I told him there were other countries besides this."

"You're too smart, Willie," said the warden. "You'd better go back to the shops."

They tried all the punishments, the paddle, the battery, the water-cure, the bull rings, but nothing availed to break the Kid's spirit. Then he was put on a bolt machine.

There was a convict named Dalton working near Archie and the Kid. Dalton had but one thought left in his mind, and this was that when he got out he would go to where he had concealed a kit of burglar tools. He had been the victim of some earlier practical jokers in the penitentiary, and had had a locksmith fashion for him tools such as no burglar ever needed or used in a business in which a jimmy, a piece of broom-stick and creepers are all the paraphernalia necessary. Dalton still had fourteen years to serve.

"Well, Jack, how's everything this morning?" the Kid would ask as soon as the guard went down to the other end of the shop.

"Oh, all right," Dalton would reply. Then he would grow serious, grit his teeth, clench his fist for emphasis and say: "Just wait till I get home! By God, if any one springs that kit of mine, I'll croak him!"

"Where's the plant?" the Kid would ask. "In the jungle?"

"Oh, you'll never find out!" Dalton would reply warily.

"Some of the hoosiers or the bulls are likely to spring it," the Kid would suggest.

The possibility tortured Dalton.

"By God," he could only say, "if they do--I'll croak 'em!"

"I wouldn't do that," said the Kid. "Get Dutch here to take you out with a tribe of peter men; he can teach you to pour the soup. Can't you get a little soup and some strings and begin with him now, Archie?"

"Sure," said Archie, grinning, proud to be thus recognized.

"That's the grift; we'll nick the screw; and when you go home you'll be ready to--"

"No," said Dalton determinedly, "I've got them tools planted--but--"

"Why don't you take him out with a swell mob of guns?" suggested Archie.

"Think he could stall for the dip?" asked the Kid. "What do you think, Jack?"

"I'll stick to prowlin'," said Dalton, shaking his head and muttering to himself.

"He's stir simple," remarked the Kid, not without pity.

But the Kid was tired of his new occupation.

"I don't believe I'm a very good bolt-maker," he said to Archie.

"You might cut off a finger, or get Sweeny--"

"Nix," said the Kid. "Not for Willie. I'll need my finger. I'd do a nice job of reefing a kick with a finger gone, wouldn't I?" He looked at his fingers, rapidly stiffening under the rough, hard work.

"Didn't I tell you to stop that spieling?" demanded a guard who had slipped up behind him.

The Kid gave the guard a look that expressed the contempt he felt for him better than any words.

"I'll report you for insolence," said the guard angrily.

"For what?" said the Kid.

"Insolence."

"How could you?" asked the Kid calmly. "You couldn't spell the word."

The guard made a mark on his card.

"You'll be stood out for that," said the guard. The Kid's face darkened, but he controlled himself. For he had another plan.

A few days later he said to Archie:

"Are you on to that inspector?"

"What for?" asked Archie.

"He's boostin' bolts."

Archie thought of this for a long time. It took several days for him to realize a new idea. The inspector, in pretending to throw out defective bolts, threw out quite as many perfect ones. These were boxed, shipped and sold by the contractor, who pocketed the entire proceeds without reporting them to the authorities. The Kid had discovered this system after a week of experience in having his labor stolen from him, and the inspector, more and more greedy, had grown bolder, until now he was stealing large quantities of bolts; and the tasks of Archie and the Kid were becoming more and more impossible of performance. The Kid was silent for days; his brows contracted as he jumped nimbly up and down before his clanking machine. Then one day when McBride was in the shop the Kid obtained permission to speak to him.

"Mr. McBride," he said, "I want a thousand dollars."

McBride took his cigar from his lips, flecked some dust from his new top-coat, and a laugh spread over his rough red face.

"What's the kid this time, Willie?"

"This is on the square," said the Kid. "I want a thousand case, that's all."

McBride saw that he was serious for once.

"I'll blow it off, if you don't," said the Kid.

"Blow what off?"

"The graft."

"What graft?"

"The defectives--oh, you know!"

McBride turned ashen, then his face blazed suddenly with rage.

"I'll report you for this insolence!"

"All right," said the Kid, "I'll report you for stealing. It ain't moral, the sky-pilot says."

Archie saw the Kid no more after that evening; he was "stood out" at roll-call; and in the way the news of the little insular world inclosed in the prison walls spreads among its inmates, he heard that the Kid had been given the paddle and had been hung up in the cellar. When his punishment was ended, he was transferred to the shoe shop and set to work making paper soles for shoes. But he did not work long. He soon conceived a plan which for two years was to baffle all the prison authorities, especially the physicians. He developed a disease of the nerves; he said it was the result of running a bolt machine and of his subsequent punishment. The theory he imparted to the doctors, in his innocent manner, was that the blows of the paddle with the hanging had bruised and stretched his spine.

The symptoms of the Kid's strange affliction were these: he could not stand still for an instant; his nerves seemed entirely demoralized, his muscles beyond control. He would stand before the doctors and twitch and spasmodically shuffle his feet for hours, while the doctors, those on the prison staff and those from outside, held consultations. Opinions differed widely. Some said that the Kid was malingering, others that his spine was really affected. Day after day the doctors examined him; they tested the accommodation of the pupils of the eyes, they had him walk blindfolded, they tested his extremities with heat and cold, with needles, and with electricity. Then they seated him, had him cross his legs and struck him below the knee-cap, testing his reflex action. Strangely enough, his reflexes were defective.

"Bum gimp, eh, Doc?" he would say mournfully.

For a while, after the Kid had gone, Archie found it easier to accomplish his daily task, for the reason that the inspector did not throw out so many defective bolts. But McGlynn, the guard on Archie's contract, disliked him and was ever ready to report him, and Archie, while he did not at all realize it and could not analyze it, developed the feeling within him that the system which the people, and the legislature, and the committee on penal and reformatory institutions, and the state board of charities had devised and were so proud of, was not a system at all, for the simple reason that it depended solely on men and had nothing else to depend on. And just as the judge, the jury-men, the prosecutor and the policemen were swayed by a thousand whims and prejudices and moved by countless influences of which they were unconscious, so the guards who held power over him were similarly swayed. For each demerit he lost standing, and demerits depended not on his conduct, but on the feelings of the guards. McGlynn disliked Archie because he was German. He gave him demerits for all sorts of things, and it was not long before Archie realized that he had already lost all his good time and would have to serve out the whole year. And then the inspector grew reckless and bold. McBride was greedy for profits, and in a few weeks the bolts under Archie's machine were again disappearing as rapidly as ever, and his task was wholly beyond him. And then a dull, sullen stubbornness seized him, and one morning, in a fit of black rage, seeing the inspector throw out a dozen perfect bolts, he stopped work. The inspector looked up, then signaled the guard. McGlynn came.

"Get to work, you!" he said in a rage.

Archie looked at him sullenly.

"You hear?" yelled McGlynn, raising his voice above the din of the machines.

Archie did not move.

McGlynn took a step toward him, but when he saw the look in Archie's eyes, he paused.

"Stand out, you toaster," he said.

The next morning at seven o'clock Archie stood, with forty other convicts who had broken rules or were accused of breaking rules, in the prison court. This court was held every morning in the basement of the chapel to try infractions of the prison discipline. This basement of the chapel was known about the penitentiary as "the cellar," and as the word was spoken it took on indeed a dark and sinister, one might almost say a subterranean significance. For in the cellar were the solitary, the bull rings, the ducking tub, the paddle,--all the instruments of torture. And in the cellar, too, was the court. Externally, it might have reminded Archie somewhat of the police court at home, as it reminded other convicts of other police courts. It was a small room made of wooden partitions, and in it, behind a rail, was a platform for the deputy warden. It may have reminded the convicts, too, of other courts in its pitiable line of accused, in its still more pitiable line of accusers. For there were guards grinning in petty triumph, awaiting the revenge they could vicariously and safely enjoy for the infractions which never could seem to their primitive, brutal minds other than personal slights and affronts.

This strange and amazing court, based on no law and owning no law, this court from which there was no appeal, whose judgments could not be reviewed, this court which could not err, was presided over by Deputy Warden Ball. He lay now loosely in his chair behind the railing, his long legs stretched before him, the soles of his big shoes protruding, his long arms hanging by his sides, rolling a cigar round and round between his long teeth blackened by nicotine. He lay there as if he had fallen apart, as if the various pieces of him, his feet and legs, his arms and hands, would have to be assembled before he could move again. But this impression of incoherence was wholly denied by his face. The lines about his mouth were those of a permanent smile that never knew humor; the eyes at the top of his long nose were small and glistened coldly, piercing through the broken, dry skin of his cheeks and eyelids like the points of daggers through leather scabbards. Such was the deputy warden, the real executive of the prison, the judge who could pronounce any sentence he might desire, decreeing medieval tortures and slow deaths, dooming bodies to pain, and the remnants of souls to hell, and, when he willed, inventing new tortures. Ball was at once the product and the unconscious victim of the system in which he was the most invaluable and indispensable factor. He had been deputy in the prison for twenty years, and he stood far above the mutations of politics. He might have been said to live in the protection of a civil service law of his own enactment. He ruled, indeed, by laws that were of his own enactment, and he enacted or repealed them as occasion or his mood suggested. He ruled this prison, whether on the bench in the court or scuffing loose-jointedly about the yard, the shops, or the cell-houses, with his cane dangling from the crotch of his elbow, speaking in a low, soft, almost caressing voice, the secret, perhaps, of his power. For his slow and passive demeanor and his slow, soft voice seemed to visiting boards, committees and officials all kindness; and he used it with the convicts, sometimes drawing them close to him, and laying his great hand on their shoulders or their heads, and speaking in a low tone of pained surprise and gentle reproach, just as he was speaking now to a white-haired and aged burglar, wearing the dirty stripes of the fourth grade.

"Why, Dan, what's this I hear? I didn't think it of you, old chap, no I didn't. A little of the solitary, eh? What say? All right--if it must be."

It took Ball half an hour to doom the men this morning, and even at the last, when Archie went forward, when Ball had glanced at the card whereon McGlynn's report was written in his illiterate hand, he said:

"Ah, the Dutchman! Well, Archie, this is very bad. Down to the fourth grade, bread and water to-day,--and to-morrow back to work, my lad. Mind now!"

Archie changed his gray suit for the reddish brown and white stripes, he ate his bread and drank his water, and he went back to the bolt-shop. But he did not work. He would not answer McGlynn when he spoke to him. He set his jaw and was silent.

"What, again!" said Ball the next day. "Well, well, well! If you insist; give him the paddle, Jim."

When court had adjourned, they took Archie into a small room near by. Across one end of this room was a huge bath-tub of wood; this, and all the utensils of torture, which in a kind of fiendish ingenuity of economy were concentrated in it, were water-worn and white. On the floor at the base of the tub were iron stocks. In these, when he had been stripped naked, perhaps for additional shame, Archie's ankles were clamped. Then he was forced to bend forward, over the bath-tub, and was held there by guards while Ball stood by smoking. A burly negro, Jim, a convict with privileges--this privilege among others--beat him on the bare skin with a paddle of ashwood that had been soaked in hot water and dipped in white sand.

But Archie would not work.

The next morning Ball patted him on the head, and said:

"My dear boy! You are certainly foolish. He wants the water, Jim."

Again they stripped him and forced him into the bath-tub. This tub had many and various devices, among them a block of wood, hollowed out on one side to fit a man's chest if he sat in the tub, and as it could be moved back and forth in grooves along the top of the tub and fastened wherever need be, it could be made to fit any man and hold him in its vise against the end of the tub, in which quality of adjusting itself to the size of its victim it differed from the bed of Procrustes. And now they handcuffed Archie, fastened him in the tub, pressed the block against his broad, white, muscular chest, and while Ball and the guards stood by, the negro with the privileges, arrayed now in rubber coat and boots, turned a fierce slender stream of water from a short rubber hose in Archie's face. Archie gasped, his mouth opened, and deftly the negro turned the fierce gushing stream into his mouth, where it hissed and foamed and gurgled, filling his throat and lungs, streaming down over his chin and breast. Archie's lips turned blue; soon his face was blue.

"I guess that'll do, Jim," said Ball.

When Archie regained consciousness they sent him back to the bolt-shop.

But he would not work.

The next morning Ball showed again that tenderness that appealed so strongly to the humane gentlemen on the Prison Board.

"Why, Archie!" he said. "Why, Archie!" Then he paused, rolled his cigar about and said: "String him up, boys, until he's ready to go back to work."

After the guards had fastened his hands above his head in the bull rings, closed and locked the door of the cell and left him, Archie's first thought was of Curly, who had gone through this same ordeal in another prison, and Archie found a compensation in thinking that he would have an experience to match Curly's when next they met and sat around the fire in the sand-house or the fire in the edge of the woods. And then his thoughts ran back to the day when Curly had first told him of the bull rings; and he could see Curly as he told it--his eyes glazing, his face growing gray and ugly, his teeth clenching.

Archie remembered more; somehow, vividly, he saw Curly tying a rope to the running board on top of the freight-car, dangling it over the side and then letting himself down on it until he hung before the car door, the seal of which he quickly broke and unlocked; and the train running thirty miles an hour! No one else could "bust tags" this way; no one else had the nerve of Curly.

At first Archie found relief in changing his position. By raising himself on tiptoe he could ease the strain on his wrists; by hanging his weight from his wrists he could ease the strain on his feet. He did this many times; but he found no rest in either position. The handcuffs grew tight; they cut into his wrists like knives. His hands were beginning to go to sleep; they tingled, the darting needles stung and pricked and danced about. Then his hands seemed to have enlarged to a preposterous size, and they were icy cold. Presently he was filled with terror; he lost all sense of feeling in his arms. Rubbing his head against them, he found them cold; they were no longer his arms, but the arms of some one else. They felt like the arms of a corpse. An awful terror laid hold of him. In his insteps there was a mighty pain; his biceps ached; his neck ached, ached, ached to the bones of it; his back was breaking. The pain spread through his whole body, maddening him. With a great effort he tore and tugged and writhed, lifting one foot, then the other, then stamped. At last he hung there numb, limp, inert. In the cell it was dark and still. No sound could reach him from the outer world.

Some time--it was evening, presumably, for time was not in that cell--they came and let him down. A guard gave him a cup of water. He held forth his hand, groping after it; and he could not tell when his hand touched it. The cup fell, jangled against his handcuffs; the water was spilled, the tin cup rolled and rattled over the cement floor. And Archie wept, wild with disappointment. The guard, who was merciful, brought another cup and held it to Archie's lips, and he drank it eagerly, the water bubbling at his lips as it had once, years ago, when he was a baby and his mother held water to his lips to drink.

Presently Ball came and stood looking at him through the little grated wicket in the door.

"Well, Archie, how goes it?" he said. "Had enough? Ready to go back to work?"

Archie looked at him a moment. His eyeballs, still protruding from the effects of the ducking-tub, gleamed in the light of the guard lantern. He looked at Ball, finally realized, and began to curse. At last he managed to say:

"I'll croak you for this."

Ball laughed.

"Well, good night, my lad," he said.

Archie lay on a plank, the handcuffs still on him, all the night. In the morning they hung him up again.

The next day, and the next, and the next,--for seven days,--Archie hung in the bull rings. In the middle of the eighth day, after his head had been rolling and lolling about on his shoulders between his cold, swollen, naked arms, he suddenly became frantic, put forth a mighty effort, lifted himself, and began to bite his hands and his wrists, gnashing his teeth on the steel handcuffs, yammering like a maniac.

That evening, the evening of the eighth day, when the guard came and flashed his lamp on him, Archie's body was hanging there, still, his chin on his breast. Down his arms the blood was trickling from the wounds he had made with his teeth. The guard set down his lantern, ran down the corridor, returned presently with Ball, and Jeffries, the doctor.

They lowered his body. The doctor bent his head to the white breast and listened.

"Take him to the hospital," he said. "I guess he's had about all he can stand."

"God, he had nerve!" said Ball, looking at the body. "He wouldn't give in."

He shambled away, his head bent. He was perplexed. He had not failed since--when was it?--since number 13993 had--died of heart failure, in the hospital, five years before.

XXI

It was at Bradford Ford's that night of the wedding that Eades made his proposal of marriage to Elizabeth Ward. It was June, court had adjourned, his work was done, the time seemed to him auspicious; he had thought it all out, arranged the details in his mind. The great country house, open to the summer night, was thronged, the occasion, just as the newspapers had predicted in their hackneyed phrase, was a brilliant one, as befitted the marriage of Ford's youngest daughter, Hazel, to Mr. Henry Wilmington Dodge, of Philadelphia. Eades moved about, greeting his friends, smiling automatically, but his eyes were discreetly seeking their one object. At last he had a glimpse of her, through smilax and ribbons; it was during the ceremony; she was in white, and her lips were drawn as she repressed the emotions weddings inspire in women. He waited, in what patience he could, until the service was pronounced; then he must take his place in the line that moved through the crowd like a current through the sea; the bestowal of the felicitations took a long time. Then the supper; Elizabeth was at the bride's table, and still he must wait. He went up-stairs finally, and there he encountered Ford alone in a room where, in some desolate sense of neglect, he had retired to hide the sorrow he felt at this parting with his child, and to combat the annoying feeling the wedding had thrust on him--the feeling that he was growing old. Ford sat by an open window, gazing out into the moonlight that lay on the river by which he had built his colossal house. He was smoking, in the habit which neither age nor sorrow could break.

"Come in, come in," said Ford. "I'm glad to see you. I want some one to talk to. Have a cigar."

But Eades declined, and Ford glanced at him in the suspicion which was part of the bereaved and jealous feeling that was poisoning this evening of happiness for him. He knew that Eades smoked, and he wondered why he now refused. "He declines because I'm getting old; he wishes to shun my society; he feels that if he accepts the cigar, he will have to stay long enough to smoke it. It will be that way now. Yes, I'm getting old. I'm out of it." So ran Ford's thoughts.

Eades had gone to the window and stood looking out across the dark trees to the river, swimming in the moonlight. Below him were the pretty lights of Japanese lanterns, beyond, at the road, the two lamps on the gate-posts. The odors of the June night came to him and, from below, the laughter of the wedding-guests and the strains of an orchestra.

"What a beautiful place you have here, Mr. Ford!" Eades exclaimed.

"Well, it'll do for an old--for a man to spend his declining years."

"Yes, indeed," mused Eades.

Ford winced at this immediate acquiescence.

"And what a night!" Eades went on, "Ideal for a wedding."

Ford looked at him a moment, then decided to change the subject.

"Well, I see you struck pay-dirt in the grand jury," he said.

"Yes," replied Eades, turning away from night and nature when such subjects were introduced.

"You're doing a good work there," said Ford; "a good work for law and order."

He used the stereotyped phrase in the old belief that "law" and "order" are synonyms, though he was not thinking of law or of order just then; he was thinking of the radiant girl in the drawing-room below.

Eades turned to the window again. The night attracted him. He did not care to talk. He, too, was thinking of a girl in the drawing-room below; thinking how she had looked in that moment during the ceremony when he had had the glimpse of her. He must go at once and find her. He succeeded presently in getting away from Ford, and left in a manner that deepened Ford's conviction that he was out of it.

He met her at the foot of the staircase, and they went out of doors.

"Oh," exclaimed Elizabeth, "how delicious it is out here!"

In silence they descended the wide steps from the veranda and went down the walk. The sky was purple, the stars trembled in it, and the moon filled all the heavens with a light that fell to the river, flowing silently below them. They went on to the narrow strip of sward that sloped to the water. On the dim farther shore they could see the light in some farm-house; far down the river was the city, a blur of light.

"What a beautiful place the Fords have here!" said Eades.

"Yes," said Elizabeth, "it's ideal."

"It's my ideal of a home," said Eades, and then after a silence he went on. "I've been thinking a good deal of home lately."

He glanced at the girl; she had become still almost to rigidity.

"I am so glad our people are beginning to appreciate our beautiful river," she said, and her voice had a peculiar note of haste and fear in it. "I'm so glad. People travel to other lands and rave over scenery, when they have this right at home." She waved her hand in a little gesture to include the river and its dark shores. She realized that she was speaking unnaturally, as she always did with him. The realization irritated her. "The Country Club is just above us, isn't it?" she hurriedly continued, consciously struggling to appear unconscious. "Have you--"

He interrupted her. "I've been thinking of you a good deal lately," he said. His voice had mastery in it. "A good deal," he repeated, "for more than a year now. But I've waited until I had something to offer you, some achievement, however small, and now--I begin to feel that I need help and--sympathy in the work that is laid on me. Elizabeth--"

"Don't," she said, "please don't." She had turned from him now and taken a step backward.

"Just a minute, Elizabeth," he insisted. "I have waited to tell you--that I love you, to ask you to be my wife. I have loved you a long, long time. Don't deny me now--don't decide until you can think--I can wait. Will you think it over? Will you consider it--carefully--will you?"

He tried to look into her face, which she had turned away. Her hands were clasped before her, her fingers interlocked tightly. He heard her sigh. Then with an effort she looked up at him.

"No," she began, "I can not; I--"

He stopped her.

"Don't say no," he said. "You have not considered, I am sure. Won't you at least think before deciding definitely?"

She had found more than the usual difficulty there is in saying no to anything, or to any one; now she had strength only to shake her head.

"You must not decide hastily," he insisted.

"We must go in." She turned back toward the house.

"I can wait to know," Eades assured her.

They retraced their steps silently. As they went up the walk she said:

"Of course, I am not insensible of the honor, Mr. Eades."

The phrase instantly seemed inadequate, even silly, to her. Why was it she never could be at ease with him?

"Don't decide, I beg," he said, "until you have considered the matter carefully. Promise me."

"You must leave me now," she said.

He bowed and stood looking after her as she went up the steps and ran across the veranda in her eagerness to lose herself in the throng within the house. And Eades remained outside, walking under the trees.

Half an hour later Elizabeth stood with Marriott in the drawing-room. Her face was pale; the joy, the spirit that had been in it earlier in the evening had gone from it.

"Ah," said Marriott suddenly, "there goes John Eades. I hadn't seen him before."

Elizabeth glanced hurriedly at Eades and then curiously at Marriott. His face wore the peculiar smile she had seen so often. Now it seemed remote, to belong to other days, days that she had lost.

"He's making a great name for himself just now," said Marriott. "He's bound to win. He'll go to Congress, or be elected governor or something, sure."

She longed for his opinion and yet just then she felt it impossible to ask it.

"He's a--"

"What?" She could not forbear to ask, but she put the question with a little note of challenge that made Marriott turn his head.

"One of those young civilians."

"One of what young civilians?"

"That Emerson writes about."

"He's not so very young, is he?" Elizabeth tried to smile.

"The young civilians are often very old; I have known them to be octogenarians."

He looked at her and was suddenly struck by her pallor and the drawn expression about her eyes. She had met his gaze, and he realized instantly that he had made some mistake. They were standing there in the drawing-room, the canvas-covered floor was littered with rose-leaves. It was the moment when the guests had begun to feel the first traces of weariness, when the laughter had begun to lose its spirit and the talk its spontaneity, when the older people were beginning to say good night, leaving the younger behind to shower the bride and groom with rice and confetti. Perplexed, excited, self-conscious after Eades's declaration, feeling a little fear and some secret pride, suddenly Elizabeth saw the old, good-humored, friendly expression fade from Marriott's eyes, and there came a new look, one she had never seen before, an expression of sudden, illuminative intelligence, followed by a shade of pain and regret, perhaps a little reproach.

"Where does Emerson say--that?" she asked.

"You look it up and see," he said presently.

She looked at him steadily, though it was with a great effort, tried to smile, and the smile made her utterly sick at heart.

"I--must look up father," she said, "it's time--"

She left him abruptly, and he stood there, the smile gone from his face, his hands plunged deep in his pockets. A moment he bit his lips, then he turned and dashed up the stairs.

"I'm a fool," he said to himself.

Elizabeth had thought of love, she had imagined its coming to her in some poetic way, but this--somehow, this was not poetic. She recalled distinctly every word Eades had spoken, but even more vividly she recalled Marriott's glance. It meant that he thought she loved Eades! It had all become irrevocable in a moment; she could not, of course, undertake to explain; it was all ridiculous, too ridiculous for anything but tears.

Looking back on her intimacy with Marriott, she realized now that what she would miss most was the good fellowship there had been between them. With him, though without realizing it at the time, she had found expression easy, her thoughts had been clear, she could find words for them which he could understand and appreciate. Whenever she came across anything in a book or in a poem or in a situation there was always the satisfying sense that she could share it with Marriott; he would apprehend instantly. There was no one else who could do this; with her mother, with her father, with Dick, no such thing was possible; with them she spoke a different language, lived in another world. And so it was with her friends; she moved as an alien being in the conventional circle of that existence to which she had been born. One by one, her friends had ceased to be friends, they had begun to shrink away, not consciously, perhaps, but certainly, into the limbo of mere acquaintance. She thought of all this as she rode home that night, and after she had got home; and when it all seemed clear, she shrank from the clarity; she would not, after all, have it too clear; she must not push to any conclusion all these thoughts about Gordon Marriott. She chose to decide that he had been stupid, and his stupidity offended her; it was not pleasant to have him sneer at a man who had just told her he loved her, no matter who the man was, and she felt, with an inconsistency that she clung to out of a sense of self-preservation, that Marriott should have known this; he might have let her enjoy her triumph for a little, and then--but this was dangerous; was he to conclude that she loved him?

What was it, she wondered, that made her weak and impotent in the presence of Eades? She did not like to own a fear of him, yet she felt a fear; would she some day succumb? The fear crept on her and distressed her; she knew very well that he would pursue her, never waver or give up or lose sight of his purpose. In some way he typified for her all that was fixed, impersonal, irrefragable--society on its solid rocks. He had no doubts about anything, his opinions were all made, tested, tried and proved. Any uncertainty, any fluidity, any inconsistency was impossible. And she felt more and more inadequate herself; she felt that she had nothing to oppose to all this.