Part 7

“Bob,” said his brother, in huge delight, “I'm proud of you. But--I judge you ain't on to the practical drop. _Stand back there!_” The deacon looked into the muzzle of the steady revolver covering him, and retreated a step, breathing hard. Tom Rand sprang to his feet, and the two faced each other, the deacon looking as dangerous a man as the Westerner.

Suddenly, the wheezy hand-organ beyond the spring began, seemingly trying to play two tunes at once, with Pietro turning the crank as desperately as if the muzzle of the revolver were pointed at him.

“Hi, you monk! Dance!” cried Pietro; and the leathery ape footed it solemnly. The perspiration poured down Pietro's face. Over the faces of the two stern men fronting each other a smile came and broadened slowly, first over the younger's, then over the deacon's.

The deacon's smile died out first. He sat down on a rock, hid his face and groaned.

“I'm an evil-minded man,” he said; “I'm beaten.”

The other cocked his head on one side and listened. “Know what that tune is, Bob? I don't.”

He sat down in the old place again, took up the panes of glass and the copy of the will, hesitated, and put them down.

“I don't reckon you're beaten, Bob. You ain't got to the end of your hand yet. Got any children, Bob? Yes; said you had.”

“Five.”

“Call it a draw, Bob; I'll go you halves, counting in the monument.”

But the deacon only muttered to himself: “I'm an evil-minded man.”

Tom Rand meditatively wrapped the two documents around the revolvers.

“Here, Dago, you drop 'em in the spring!” which Pietro did, perspiring freely. “Shake all that. Come along.”

The two walked slowly toward the yellow road. Pietro raised his voice despairingly. “No cent! Not a nicka!”

“That's so,” said Tom, pausing. “Five, by thunder! Come along, Dago. It's free quarters. Entrez. Take a seat.”

The breeze was blowing up over Elbow Lake, and the butterflies bobbed about in the sunshine, as they drove along the yellow road. Pietro sat at the back of the buck-board, the leathery ape on his knee and a smile on his face, broad, non-professional, and consisting largely of front teeth.

CONLON

CONLON, the strong, lay sick unto death with fever. The Water Commissioners sent champagne to express their sympathy. It was an unforced impulse of feeling.

But Conlon knew nothing of it. His lips were white, his cheeks sunken; his eyes glared and wandered; he muttered, and clutched with his big fingers at nothing visible.

The doctor worked all day to force a perspiration. At six o'clock he said: “I'm done. Send for the priest.”

When Kelly and Simon Harding came, Father Ryan and the doctor were going down the steps.

“'Tis a solemn duty ye have, Kelly,” said the priest, “to watch the last moments of a dying man, now made ready for his end.”

“Ah, not Conlon! He'll not give up, not him,” cried Kelly, “the shtrong man wid the will in him!”

“An' what's the sthrength of man in the hands of his Creathor?” said the priest, turning to Harding, oratorically.

“I don' know,” said Harding, calmly. “Do you?”

“'Tis naught!”

Kelly murmured submissively.

“Kind of monarchical institution, ain't it, what Conlon's run up against?” Harding remarked. “Give him a fair show in a caucus, an' he'd win, sure.”

“He'll die if he don't sweat,” said the doctor, wiping his forehead. “It's hot enough.” Conlon lay muttering and glaring at the ceiling. The big knuckles of his hands stood out like rope-knots. His wife nodded to Kelly and Harding, and went out. She was a good-looking woman, large, massive, muscular. Kelly looked after her, rubbing his short nose and blinking his watery eyes. He was small, with stooping shoulders, affectionate eyes, wavering knees. He had followed Conlon, the strong, and served him many years. Admiration of Conlon was a strenuous business in which to be engaged.

“Ah!” he said, “his wife ten year, an' me his inchimate friend.”

It was ten by the clock. The subsiding noise of the city came up over housetops and vacant lots. The windows of the sickroom looked off the verge of a bluff; one saw the lights of the little city below, the lights of the stars above, and the hot black night between.

Kelly and Harding sat down by a window, facing each other. The lamplight was dim. A screen shaded it from the bed, where Conlon muttered and cried out faintly, intermittently, as though in conversation with some one who was present only to himself. His voice was like the ghost or shadow of a voice, not a whisper, but strained of all resonance. One might fancy him standing on the bank of the deadly river and talking across to some one beyond the fog, and fancy that the voices would so creep through the fog stealthily, not leaping distances like earthly sounds, but struggling slowly through nameless obstruction.

Kelly rubbed his hands before the fire.

“I was his inchimate friend.”

Harding said: “Are you going to talk like a blanked idiot all night, or leave off maybe about twelve?”

“I know ye for a hard man, too, Simmy,” said Kelly, pathetically; “an' 'tis the nathur of men, for an Irishman is betther for blow-in' off his shteam, be it the wrath or the sorrow of him, an' the Yankee is betther for bottlin' it up.”

“Uses it for driving his engine mostly.”

“So. But Conlon--”

“Conlon,” said Harding slowly, “that's so. He had steam to drive with, and steam to blow with, and plenty left over to toot his whistle and scald his fingers and ache in his belly. Expanding that there figure, he carried suction after him like the 1:40 express, he did.”

“'Tis thrue.” Kelly leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I mind me when I first saw him I hadn't seen him before, unless so be when he was puttin' the wather-main through the sand-hills up the river an' bossin' a gang o' men with a fog-horn voice till they didn't own their souls, an' they didn't have any, what's more, the dirty Polocks. But he come into me shop one day, an' did I want the job o' plumbin' the court-house?

“'Have ye the court-house in your pocket?' says I, jokin'.

“'I have,' says he, onexpected, 'an' any plumbin' that's done for the court-house is done in the prisint risidence of the same.'

“An' I looks up, an' 'O me God!' I says to meself, ''tis a man!' wid the black eyebrows of him, an' the shoulders an' the legs of him. An' he took me into the shwale of his wake from that day to this. But I niver thought to see him die.”

“That's so. You been his heeler straight through. I don't know but I like your saying so. But I don't see the how. Why, look here; when I bid for the old water contract he comes and offers to sell it to me, sort of personal asset. I don't know how. By the unbroke faces of the other Water Commissioners he didn't use his pile-driving fist to persuade 'em, and what I paid him was no more'n comfortable for himself. How'd he fetch it? How'd he do those things? Why, look here, Kelly, ain't he bullied you? Ain't you done dirty jobs for him, and small thanks?”

“I have that.”

Kelly's hands trembled. He was bowed down and thoughtful, but not angry. “Suppose I ask you what for?”

“Suppose ye do. Suppose I don' know. Maybe he was born to be king over me. Maybe he wasn't. But I know he was a mastherful man, an' he's dyin' here, an' me blood's sour an' me bones sad wid thinkin' of it. Don' throuble me, Simmy.”

Harding leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling, where the lamp made a nebulous circle of light.

“Why, that's so,” he said at last, in conclusion of some unmentioned train of thought. “Why, I got a pup at home, and his affection ain't measured by the bones he's had, nor the licks he's had, not either of 'em.”

Kelly was deep in a reverie.

“Nor it ain't measured by my virtues. Look here, now; I don' see what his measure is.”

“Hey?” Kelly roused himself.

“Oh, I was just thinking.”

Harding thought he had known other men who had had in some degree a magnetic power that seemed to consist in mere stormy energy of initiative. They were like strong drink to weaker men. It was more physical than mental. Conlon was to Kelly a stimulant, then an appetite. And Conlon was a bad lot. Fellows that had heeled for him were mostly either wrecked or dead now. Why, there was a chap named Patterson that used to be decent till he struck Conlon, when he went pretty low; and Nora Reimer drowned herself on account of Patterson, when he got himself shot in a row at some shanty up the railroad. The last had seemed a good enough riddance. But Nora went off her head and jumped in the new reservoir. Harding remembered it the more from being one of the Water Company. They had had to empty the reservoir, which was expensive. And there were others. A black, blustering sort of beast, Conlon. He had more steam than was natural. Harding wondered vaguely at Kelly, who was spelling out the doctor's directions from a piece of paper.

“A powdher an' five dhrops from the short bottle. 'Tis no tin-course dinner wid the champagne an' entries he's givin' Conlon the night. Hey? A powdher an' five dhrops from the short bottle.”

Harding's mind wandered on among memories of the little city below, an intricate, irregular history, full of incidents, stories that were never finished or dribbled off anywhere, black spots that he knew of in white lives, white spots in dark lives. He did not happen to know any white spots on Conlon.

“Course if a man ain't in politics for his health he ain't in it for the health of the community, either, and that's all right. And if he opens the morning by clumping Mrs. Conlon on the head, why, she clumps him back more or less, and that's all right.” Then, if he went down-town and lied here and there ingeniously in the way of business, and came home at night pretty drunk, but no more than was popular with his constituency, why, Conlon's life was some cluttered, but never dull. Still, Harding's own ways being quieter and less cluttered, he felt that if Conlon were going off naturally now, it was not, on the whole, a bad idea. It would conduce to quietness. It would perhaps be a pity if anything interfered.

The clock in a distant steeple struck twelve, a dull, unechoing sound.

“Simmy,” said Kelly, pointing with his thumb, “what do he be sayin', talkin'--talkin' like one end of a tiliphone?”

They both turned toward the bed and listened.

“Telephone! Likely there's a party at the other end, then. Where's the other end?”

“I don' know,” whispered Kelly. “But I have this in me head, for ye know, when the priest has done his last, 'tis sure he's dhropped his man at the front door of wherever he's goin', wid a letther of inthroduction in his hatband. An' while the man was waitin' for the same to be read an' him certified a thrue corpse, if he had a kettleful of boilin' impatience in himself like Tom Conlon, wouldn't he be passin' the time o' day through the keyhole wid his friends be-yant?”

“'Tain't a telephone, then? It's a keyhole, hey?”

“Tiliphone or keyhole, he'd be talkin' through it, Conlon would, do ye mind?”

Harding looked with some interest. Conlon muttered, and stopped, and muttered again. Harding rose and walked to the bed. Kelly followed tremulously.

“Listen, will ye?” said Kelly, suddenly leaning down.

“I don' know,” said Harding, with an instinct of hesitation. “I don' know as it's a square game. Maybe he's talkin' of things that ain't healthy to mention. Maybe he's plugged somebody some time, or broke a bank--ain't any more'n likely. What of it?”

“Listen, will ye?”

“Don' squat on a man when he's down, Kelly.”

“'Sh!”

“_Hold Tom's hand. Wait for Tom_,” babbled the ghostly voice, a thin, distant sound.

“What'd he say? What'd he say?” Kelly was white and trembling.

Harding stood up and rubbed his chin reflectively. He did not seem to himself to make it out. He brought a chair, sat down, and leaned close to Conlon to study the matter.

“_What's the heart-scald, mother?_” babbled Conlon. “_Where'd ye get it from? Me! Wirra!_”

“'Tis spheakin' to ghosteses he is, Simmy, ye take me worrd.”

“Come off! He's harking back when he was a kid.”

Kelly shook his head solemnly.

“He's spheakin' to ghosteses.”

“_What's that, mother? Arra! I'm sick, mother. What for? I don' see. Where'm I goin'?_'

“You got me,” muttered Harding. “I don' know.”

“_Tom'll be good. It's main dark. Hold Tom's hand_.”

Kelly was on his knees, saying prayers at terrific speed.

“Hear to him!” he stopped to whisper. “Ghosteses! Ora pro nobis--”

“_Tom ain't afraid. Naw, he ain't afraid._”

Harding went back to his window. The air was heavy and motionless, the stars a little dim. He could see the dark line of the river with an occasional glint upon it, and the outline of the hills beyond.

The little city had drawn a robe of innocent obscurity over it. Only a malicious sparkle gleamed here and there. He thought he knew that city inside and out, from end to end. He had lived in it, dealt with it, loved it, cheated it, helped to build it, shared its fortunes. Who knew it better than he? But every now and then it surprised with some hidden detail or some impulse of civic emotion. And Kelly and Conlon, surely he knew them, as men may know men. But he never had thought to see Conlon as to-night. It was odd. But there was some fact in the social constitution, in human nature, at the basis of all the outward oddities of each.

“Maybe when a man's gettin' down to his reckonin' it's needful to show up what he's got at the bottom. Then he begins to peel off layers of himself like an onion, and 'less there ain't anything to him but layers, by and by he comes to something that resembles a sort of aboriginal boy, which is mostly askin' questions and bein' surprised.”

Maybe there was more boyishness in Conlon than in most men. Come to think of it, there was. Conlon's leadership was ever of the maybe-you-think-I-can't-lick-you order; and men followed him, admitting that he could, in admiration and simplicity. You might see the same thing in the public-school yard. Maybe that was the reason. The sins of Conlon were not sophisticated.

The low, irregular murmur from the bed, the heavy heat of the night, made Harding drowsy. Kelly repeating the formula of his prayers, a kind of incantation against ghosts, Conlon with his gaunt face in the shadow and his big hands on the sheet clutching at nothing visible, both faded away, and Harding fell asleep.

He woke with a start. Kelly was dancing about the bed idiotically.

“He's shweatin'!” he gabbled. “He's shweatin'! He'll be well--Conlon.”

It made Harding think of the “pup,” and how he would dance about him, when he went home, in the crude expression of joy. Conlon's face was damp. He muttered no more. They piled the blankets on him till the perspiration stood out in drops. Conlon breathed softly and slept. Kelly babbled gently, “Conlon! Conlon!”

Harding went back to the window and rubbed his eyes sleepily.

“Kind of too bad, after all that trouble to get him peeled.”

The morning was breaking, solemn, noiseless, with lifted banners and wide pageantries, over river and city.

Harding yawned.

“It's one on Father Ryan, anyway. That's a good thing. Blamed old windbag!”

Kelly murmured ecstatically, “Conlon will get well--Conlon!”

ST CATHERINE'S

ST. CATHERINE'S was the life work of an old priest, who is remembered now and presently will be forgotten. There are gargoyles over the entrance aside, with their mouths open to express astonishment. They spout rain water at times, but you need not get under them; and there are towers, and buttresses, a great clock, a gilded cross, and roofs that go dimly heavenward.

St. Catherine's is new. The neighborhood squats around it in different pathetic attitudes. Opposite is the saloon of the wooden-legged man; then the three groceries whose cabbages all look unpleasant; the parochial school with the green lattice; and all those little wooden houses--where lives, for instance, the dressmaker who funnily calls herself “Modiste.” Beyond the street the land drops down to the freight yards.

But Father Connell died about the time they finished the east oriel, and Father Harra reigned over the house of the old man's dreams--a red-faced man, a high feeder, who looked as new as the church and said the virtues of Father Connell were reducing his flesh. That would seem to be no harm; but Father Harra meant it humorously. Father Connell had stumped about too much among the workmen in the cold and wet, else there had been no need of his dying at eighty-eight. His tall black hat became a relic that hung in the tiring room, and he cackled no more in his thin voice the noble Latin of the service. Peace to his soul! The last order he wrote related to the position of the Christ figure and the inscription, “Come unto me, weary and heavy-laden: I will give you rest.” But the figure was not in place till the mid-December following.

And it was the day before Christmas that Father Harra had a fine service, with his boy choir and all; and Chubby Locke sang a solo, “Angels ever bright and fair,” that was all dripping with tears, so to speak. Chubby Locke was an imp too. All around the altar the candles were lighted, and there hung a cluster of gas jets over the head of the Christ figure on the edge of the south transept. So fine it was that Father Harra came out of his room into the aisle (when the people were gone, saying how fine it was, and the sexton was putting out the gas here and there), to walk up and down and think about it, especially how he should keep up with the virtues of Father Connell. Duskier and duskier it grew, as the candles went out cluster by cluster till only those in the south transept were left; and Dennis, coming there, stopped and grunted.

“What!” said Father Harra.

“It's asleep he is,” said the sexton. “It's a b'y, yer riverence.”

“Why, so it is! He went to sleep during the service. H'm--well--they often do that, Dennis.”

“Anyways he don't belong here,” said Dennis.

“Think so? I don't know about that. Wait a bit. I don't know about that Dennis.”

The boy lay curled up on the seat--a newsboy, by the papers that had slipped from his arms. But he did not look businesslike, and he did not suggest the advantages of being poor in America. One does not become a capitalist or president by going to church and to sleep in the best of business hours, from four to six, when the streets are stirring with men on their way to dinners, cigars and evening papers. The steps of St. Catherine's are not a bad place to sell papers after Vespers, and one might as well go in, to be sure, and be warm while the service lasts; only, as I said, if one falls asleep, one does not become a capitalist or president immediately. Father Harra considered, and Dennis waited respectfully.

“It's making plans I am against your natural rest, Dennis. I'm that inconsiderate of your feelings to think of keeping St. Catherine's open this night. And why? Look ye, Dennis. St. Catherine's is getting itself consecrated these days, being new, and of course--But I tell ye, Dennis, it's a straight church doctrine that the blessings of the poor are a good assistance to the holy wather.”

“An' me wid children of me own to be missin' their father this Christmas Eve!” began Dennis indignantly.

“Who wouldn't mind, the little villains, if their father had another dollar of Christmas morning to buy 'em presents.”

“Ah, well,” said the sexton, “yer riverence is that persuadin'.”

“It's plain enough for ye to see yourself, Dennis, though thick-headed somewhat. There you are: 'Come unto me, weary and heavy-laden;' and here he is. Plain enough. And who are the weary and heavy-laden in this city?”

“Yer riverence will be meanin' everybody,” chuckled Dennis.

“Think so? Rich and poor and all? Stuff! I don't believe it. Not to-night. It'll be the outcasts, I'm thinking, Dennis. Come on.”

“An' the b'y, yer riverence?”

“The what? Oh, why, yes, yes. He's all right. I don't see anything the matter with him. He's come.”

It was better weather to go with the wind than against it, for the snow drove in gritty particles, and the sidewalks made themselves disagreeable and apt to slip out from under a person. Little spurts of snow danced up St. Catherine's roofs and went off the ridgepoles in puffs. It ought to snow on Christmas Eve; but it rightly should snow with better manners and not be so cold. The groceries closed early. Freiburger, the saloon man, looked over the curtains of his window.

“I don't know vat for Fater Harra tack up dings dis time by his kirch door, 'Come--come in here.' Himmel! der Irishman!”

Father Harra turned in to his supper, and thought how he would trouble Father Conner's reputation for enterprise and what a fine bit of constructive ability himself was possessed of.

The great central door of St. Catherine's stood open, so that the drift blew in and piled in windrows on the cold floor of the vestibule. The tall front of the church went up into the darkness, pointing to no visible stars; but over the doors two gas jets flickered across the big sign they use for fairs at the parochial school. “Come in here.” The vestibule was dark, barring another gas jet over a side door, with another sign, “Come in here,” and within the great church was dark as well, except for a cluster over the Christ figure. That was all; but Father Harra thought it a neat symbol, looking toward those who go from meagre light to light through the darkness.

Little noises were in the church all night far up in the pitch darkness of rafter and buttress, as if people were whispering and crying softly to one another. Now and again, too, the swing door would open and remain so for a moment, suspicious, hesitating. But what they did, or who they were that opened it, could hardly be told in the dusk and distance. Dennis went to sleep in a chair by the chancel rail, and did not care what they did or who they were, granted they kept away from the chancel.

How the wind blew!--and the snow tapped impatiently at stained windows with a multitude of little fingers. But if the noises among the rafters were not merely echoes of the crying and calling wind without, if any presences moved and whispered there, and looked down on flat floor and straight lines of pews, they must have seen the Christ figure, with welcoming hands, dominant by reason of the light about it; and, just on the edge of the circle of light, shapeless things stretched on cushions of pews, and motionless or stirring uneasily. Something now came dimly up the aisle from the swing door, stopped at a pew, and hesitated.

“Git out!” growled a hoarse voice. “Dis my bunk.”

The intruder gave a nervous giggle. “Begawd!” muttered the hoarse voice. “It's a lady!”

Another voice said something angrily. “Well,” said the first, “it ain't behavin' nice to come into me boodwer.”

The owner of the giggle had slipped away and disappeared in a distant pew. In another pew to the right of the aisle a smaller shadow whispered to another:

“Jimmy, that's a statoo up there.”

“Who?”

“That. I bet 'e's a king.”

“Aw, no 'e ain't. Kings has crowns an' wallups folks.”

“Gorry! What for?”

“I don' know.”

The other sighed plaintively. “I thought 'e might be a king.”

The rest were mainly silent. Some one had a bad cough. Once a sleeper rolled from the seat and fell heavily to the floor. There was an oath or two, a smothered laugh, and the distant owner of the giggle used it nervously. The last was an uncanny sound. The wakened sleeper objected to it. He said he would “like to get hold of her,” and then lay down cautiously on his cushion.