Part 6

Then, hardened though they were by numberless horrible scenes at the operating table, many of the doctors shuddered; for, slowly, indeed so slowly that the motion was barely perceptible, the figure in the chair began to nod its head.

“Answer me,” cried Van Horne, raising his voice, and taking both the man’s hands in his own. One of the doctors, younger than the others, raised the window and thrust his head out into the cold air. The room was becoming oppressive.

Slowly Jean Lescaut’s mouth opened. The lips parted, but no sound came forth.

“Speak,” cried Van Horne sternly.

“I have been executed, I cannot speak. I am dead.” The words came from the man in jerky, spasmodic sentences as if torn from him against his will.

“Tell me, I command you, what has happened since I left you this morning.”

“I am dead,” repeated the murderer in a dull, mechanical tone.

Dr. Van Horne stepped once more to the chair. He held one hand firmly against the man’s forehead. The other he reached down behind the head and pressed at the base of the brain.

Again the man began to speak, this time more rapidly than before, but in a harsh, cackling voice.

“They came and took me from my cell and put me in a chair. They strapped me down, and put sponges on my spine and on my ankles. Then they put ten thousand needles into my body, and I began to grow cold and numb. My heart stopped beating, and I could not breathe. And now I am dead.”

“But you are breathing.”

“And now I am dead,” repeated the other mechanically.

Dr. Van Horne loosened his hands from the man, and turned to the watching group.

“So far I have succeeded,” said he. “So far my theory is correct. The electricity did not produce death in this man because his brain could not receive the sensation. Now I am going to bring him out of the hypnotic state and see if my theory is entirely correct.”

He did not state what that theory was, but stepped back to the man in the chair and began speaking in a low tone. He took both eyelids, and rolling them up, looked straight into the sleeper’s eyes.

“Jean Lescaut,” he cried sharply, “come to yourself! You are no longer asleep.”

For the first time the man moved his body slightly, as if trying to rise. Slowly a bright red spot began to appear on each pallid cheek. His eyes rolled down from under the lids, and the pupils began to dilate.

Then, suddenly, an awful horror came into his face, and without a word of warning, as if impelled by some unseen force, he leaped forward, and fell writhing and twisting on the floor over eight feet away. His arms and legs beat the air and floor for a minute convulsively, then stiffened into strange, grotesque positions.

Dr. Van Horne knelt down beside the body and examined it carefully. Then he stood up and smiled, though he was very pale.

“Gentlemen,” said he, “I was entirely correct in my theory. Had I not expected this ending, I would never have dared to thus violate the law and bring this man back to life. That deadly charge of electricity which was held back from acting by the influence of my hypnotism has at last accomplished its work, as you yourselves just saw. When the numbness produced by hypnotic sleep left the man’s brain, nature began to act, and the shock to the nervous system was all the more powerful because the electricity had changed its form to a static charge. You need not fear; this time he is really dead.”

And thus Jean Lescaut, wife poisoner and perpetrator of a dozen crimes, helped in his expiation of those crimes to advance the cause of science; and justice was not cheated, for the execution of his sentence was merely postponed the matter of a few hours.

THE PAINTED LADY AND THE BOY.

THE PAINTED LADY AND THE BOY.

“Bud Phillips says The Boy is going to the devil,” announced Stebbins, as he strolled into the smoking room at the Sherwood Club, after beating Perkins three games of billiards.

“Well, Bud is certainly in a position to be accurately informed on that subject,” answered the Colonel; and the truth of his reply was so apparent, that everyone smiled.

Bud was night clerk at the Algonquin, the hotel where The Boy had a suite. So he had a chance to see at what hour and how the guests came home. He also knew just how many times a week The Boy’s rooms were a rendezvous for the young subalterns from Fort Blair, who came into town every time they could get leave, to gamble away their month’s scanty pay.

But as Bud Phillips also said, The Boy wasn’t entirely to blame, for he had never had a mother’s care; and, though no one in Preston City except the Colonel and I knew the facts of his early life, everyone had a good word for him, and was inclined to overlook many indiscretions on the part of popular Billy Richards, The Boy.

Colonel Wade and I could remember the day when Stewart Sloan shocked the good people back in Sioux City by bringing home for a wife La Petite Mabelle, skirt dancer from a vaudeville theatre in Des Moines. The predictions of the sewing-club gossips were more than fulfilled, for La Petite Mabelle ran away one fine day before the year was up, leaving Sloan with a two-months-old baby boy, and a little note of farewell. La Petite Mabelle told him in melodramatic sentences, covering two sheets of note paper, that the attractions of the old life, with its cheap finery and grease paint, were too strong for her. She could never remain in Sioux City, where nobody called on her, Stewart himself seemed ashamed of her, and where there was nothing going on. She said further, that he mustn’t think too badly of her, and that he ought to try and forget her.

This Sloan had certainly tried hard enough to do. That fall he secured a divorce, and when the legislature convened in Des Moines next year, he had the name that La Petite Mabelle had disgraced changed to Richards, his mother’s maiden name. So young William Richards, as Sloan rechristened the boy, grew up to manhood, never knowing the tragedy of his father’s early life, and never having felt the softening influence of a mother’s love.

His father died when the lad was twelve, naming as his son’s guardian Colonel Wade, who looked after him as well as an old bachelor of fifty, loaded down with business cares, could be expected to look after a growing and spirited youth.

When Billy attained his majority, and had finished his college days, bluff old Colonel Wade took him aside as gently as a warm-hearted old man could do, told him the story of his first appearance on the stage of life, turned over to him a property more than sufficient for every reasonable need, and sent him out in the world which still called him The Boy, a nickname he had acquired in college. The Boy pondered over his early history for a few days, and then apparently forgot that any such unpleasant thing as history existed, concerning himself wholly with the present, which may be history, though at the time not recognized as such.

Lately The Boy had been drinking and doing some other things more than was good for him; but when the Colonel remonstrated in a fatherly way, he promised to “take a brace,” the same as he would have promised back in his college days, when he was under the discipline of the old professors. Stebbins’s remark, therefore, that The Boy was going to the devil, was rather a surprise to me, for I knew that he usually kept his word.

“Did any of you see the fairy that came in on the express this afternoon?” asked Perkins a little later, and as no one answered, he proceeded to explain:

“I went down to the three o’clock to meet Kitty, who came in from Denver to-day; and the first person who stepped off the train was the d----st looking female you ever saw. She must have been forty-five; but she had locks as golden as a maid of fifteen, and actually, I believe there was half a box of rouge on her cheeks. She had a little woolly dog in her arms, so covered with ribbons that I don’t believe it could walk alone. Kitty said she was flirting with the conductor all the way down from Butte, and some one on the train christened her ‘The Painted Lady.’”

“Where’s she stopping?” asked the Colonel, and I knew what was in his mind.

“She rode up town on the same ’bus with Kitty and me, and got out at the Algonquin,” answered Perkins. “You’d better look out for that protégé of yours, Colonel, he may be doing something rash. The Boy appears to be partial to blondes.”

The next day as I was coming down town I nearly upset a woman hurrying in the opposite direction. I picked up the parasol which I had knocked out of her hand, and as I glanced at her, I knew from Perkins’s description that she was The Painted Lady.

She probably wasn’t more than thirty-seven or thirty-eight, but there were deep lines about her eyes and the corners of the mouth which ought not to be in the face of a woman of sixty. Her hair, under the stimulating influence of peroxide, was a bright yellow, and her cheeks had on them the bloom usually found on buxom Irish lasses, or in small, round boxes in a drug store. At the end of a silver chain, and covered with ribbons, was a diminutive French poodle.

She was stylishly dressed, and her figure, though making me wonder at the time (and strength) taken to produce it, was still quite pleasing to look upon in the final result. Her name, as I found out at the club that evening, was Madame Mabel Fortesque, and one of the evening papers stated that she was a young widow taking a western trip for her health. She had a suite at the Algonquin, and spent most of her time driving about the city, for she had sent to Denver for a showy turnout, and it was not long before it became a common sight to see her riding about with some one of the young officers from Fort Blair beside her.

Dame Rumor, never inclined to be delicate in her handling of young widows who travel about the country without chaperons, of course had a fling at Madame Fortesque; and if only half the stories which were circulated about her were true, she must have found Preston City a lively place.

The day of her arrival The Boy had been called away to Chicago on business, so the Colonel and I were relieved of any immediate worry as to an acquaintance being established between him and The Painted Lady, as nearly everyone in Preston City quickly came to call the widow.

The Boy came back two weeks later, however, and our worst fears were then realized, for he immediately became as attentive to Madame Fortesque as any of the young subalterns from the fort. Most of the men at the club talked it over good-naturedly, and, man-fashion, considered it a good joke; but the wives of these same club men regarded it differently; it was even rumored that old Mrs. Burton, the worst gossip in the city, had written to a girl in Boston to whom The Boy was engaged.

“If she were only some young thing and good-looking,” groaned the Colonel, “it wouldn’t be so bad; but what he can find in that fudged-up old woman is more than I can see. Why, man, she is old enough to be his mother.”

He intended to speak to The Boy about it but never did, for he knew he could not talk to the young man when there was a woman in the case, the same as he could when it was merely a question of his gambling or drinking too much.

Things were going on badly enough, when one evening as I was seated in the reading-room at the Sherwood, looking over a paper, I heard Stebbins talking to a group in the next room.

“Yes, I’ve found out the whole history of The Painted Lady,” he was saying; “she’s all that Old Lady Burton says, and more. She’s been living down at the Rapids for a year or two; and I saw Jack Denvers when I was down there last week, and he gave me the whole story. She was a skirt-dancer among other things when she was young, and some way got her hooks onto a young fellow from Sioux City named Sloan. He came from a fine family, and his people were all broken up over the affair, for she proved a bad lot, I reckon. She ran away from him before they had been married a year, and has been going down the line ever since. Denvers says that if she stops up here the married women would better watch out. She’s the woman that was mixed up in the Stanley divorce case down at the Rapids last year; and they say she got--Hello! what’s the matter with Billy? Same old story?”

Alarmed, for I had not the slightest idea that The Boy was there, I turned and saw him staggering blindly from the room. He ran against a hat-tree, and some of the men laughed, but I saw his face, and I knew that it was not the drink that made him look so ghastly.

I hurried up to the card-room where the Colonel was playing his evening game of whist, and, whispering a word in his ear, I got him into an alcove and told him what had just taken place.

“Good God! this is horrible,” he muttered; “why, it’s his own mother, and he knows it.”

We hastened from the club, but there were no carriages in sight outside.

“The Boy just staggered out bareheaded, and drove off toward his hotel in the only cab here,” said Perkins, who was coming up the steps. “What’s the matter with him? I spoke to him, but he didn’t answer. Stewed again?”

We did not stop to satisfy his curiosity, but walked rapidly up to the Algonquin.

“He went up-stairs about ten minutes ago,” the clerk told us in answer to our question, and grinned knowingly.

The door of his room was not locked, and after knocking several times without getting any reply, we went in, and found just what I had feared we should find, The Boy lying face downwards on the floor, one hand clasping a discharged revolver. I looked at the powder-stained cheek, and though I felt that it was absolutely hopeless, I left the Colonel kneeling by his side, and hurried out in search of a doctor. As I stood by the front door hesitating which way to go, a trap was driven up under the electric lights, and a beardless youth in lieutenant’s uniform helped a loudly-dressed woman to alight. They walked through the foyer, and entered the elevator laughing and talking, while a little yellow dog, covered with ribbons, capered and barked in front of them.

It was The Painted Lady--and another boy.

THE PALACE OF SIN.

THE PALACE OF SIN.

The following advertisement, even had it ever appeared in any of the great dailies, would probably have occasioned little comment or curiosity:--

Those who are weary of the laws and so-called “society restrictions” of the present day can find an immediate and complete relief by applying at once to JENIFER VASS, Lock Box 3265B.

Even in 1885, though the business had not then attained the gigantic proportions of the present day, the advertising genius was still at work; and any one chancing to read such a notice would no doubt have set it down as the bait thrown out by the vendor of some patent medicine, weight lift, or equally undesirable article.

The promoters of the scheme for the “Pursuance of Vice,” as they facetiously called it among themselves, realized this, and did not attempt to reach the public by any such open means. To make known their project they resorted to other methods which, though acting quietly and unnoticed, nevertheless produced sufficient effect, so that on the night of June 16, 1885, when the floating palace of Iniquity, “Lawless,” left one of the North-river piers, she had on board eight hundred souls. That is to say, there were eight hundred passengers; but, judging from the declared object with which the “Lawless” put to sea, it is more probable that the souls of those on board had been left behind.

This voyage of the “Lawless” was the result of much thought on the part of three individuals who, at one time or another, had figured prominently in the police courts of New York and Chicago. Jenifer Vass, in whose brain the plan had first found its inception, was at one time proprietor of the Red Inn, a feeble imitation of the Moulin Rouge of Paris; while Jackson Elbers and Louis Hopeman had both been mixed up in various enterprises, all of which tended to cater to the animal rather than the intellectual passions of their patrons.

Three miles from land, as you may not happen to know, is the limit of distance to which the law of the neighboring country applies. When beyond that point on the high seas no law on earth is valid save the orders of the ship’s captain. Knowing this fact, and from the knowledge of human nature gained in their various former pursuits, the three men mentioned had gotten together a few thousand dollars and purchased the Atlanta, once an ocean liner of the White Star line.

The Atlanta had been taken from the passenger service, being unable to compete with her faster rivals on the Cunard and Hamburg-Bremen lines; and it was planned to remodel and use her for a freight steamer.

Hearing of this, and as speed was no object in the excursions which the Palace of Sin was to make, Jenifer Vass and his two companions made an offer which was immediately accepted by the managers of the White Star line.

Then a work of transformation began. According to the scheme of Jenifer Vass, every vice which tempts men and women, every form of iniquity of the old and the new world, was to be introduced, cultivated, and pampered on board the “Lawless.” Ten staterooms were torn to pieces and made into one. The floors were covered with Turkish rugs; Bagdad curtains and Eastern ornaments were hung about the walls. The final appearance of the room was totally different from the little holes in the wall found in the Chinatown of nearly all the large cities, but its object was the same. Here men and women could smoke opium from morning till night, and with the additional advantage that no one would disturb them. There was no danger of the place being raided and their names appearing in the next morning’s police-court items. On one of the walls was arranged a set of bunks on which the sleepers could be laid away when the drug was really on.

One-half the ship was converted into a gambling hall. Here every game of chance at Monte Carlo,--faro, roulette, poker, pinquette, fantan, and every other game by which a man can win a fortune or lose his all in a single night--was to be put in operation.

There was to be a bar where every known strong drink could be bought, and each man was to be the judge of when he had had enough. No waiter could inform him that the management refused to serve him anything more, and he would have to go elsewhere. Here one could swill brandy, absinthe, bhang, or any other nerve-destroying drink until his brain reeled; and as long as he had the money to pay for more no one would stop him.

Every drug and narcotic, whose sale is guarded by the laws of the United States and other civilized countries, was to be sold as freely as the chocolates of the confectioner. Cocaine, opium, laudanum, and morphine were laid in in bulk for the use of the passengers of the “Lawless,” without limit or restriction. In fact, there was wine for the drinker, women for him who wanted company, song for him who would sing, and each and every other evil thing ever devised by a wicked and lustful world was to be found somewhere between the two decks of this Palace of Sin.

The trips were to last one month, the “Lawless” merely getting into mid ocean and steaming slowly down to the Gulf of Mexico, remaining there until the month was up, when the passengers, saturated with vice and steeped in corruption, were to be returned to the place of starting. The crew was cut down to as small a number as possible, and consisted mostly of the riffraff to be found about the wharves of any large seaport city.

There was nothing about the scheme which could be punished by the laws of any country, nevertheless the arrangements were kept as quiet as possible, and nothing found its way into the papers.

On the night of June 16, 1885, the “Lawless,” as the boat was very appropriately rechristened, steamed away from New York. The passengers had begun to arrive in the evening as soon as it became dark, and at 12.30 every one who had engaged passage was on board. There was no one down to the pier to speed the departing voyager, or to wish him good luck. The sinister expedition set out without as much as the wave of a handkerchief from shore. She was a little longer in getting under way than had been anticipated, but at two o’clock in the morning of the seventeenth, the “Lawless” was well out to sea, and the great hull, which up till then, save for a few lights about deck, had been kept dark, burst suddenly into light. Down in the hold a big Westinghouse generator was whirling away, and, at a word from the captain, fifteen hundred electric lights were suddenly switched into circuit and the “Lawless” was on full blast. The limit was reached, and the ship had come to her own.

There was one flaw, however, in the scheme of the Palace of Sin. That flaw was Pierre Planchette, first assistant engineer. Like most of the lower officers, he had been hired without knowing the object of the voyage, thinking that the “Lawless” was merely bound on a pleasure cruise in southern waters. He had just come from the Bellevue hospital, where he had been dangerously sick with brain fever, and he was still far from recovered, but hearing of the position and the high pay that went with it, he had left the hospital against the orders of the house physician. The man who had been originally hired for assistant having disappointed Jenifer Vass, the patient, with traces of the fever still upon him, was engaged on the very day of departure.

When, therefore, the three-mile limit was passed, and the hell up on deck broke out, Pierre Planchette turned to his chief for explanation of the sounds of revelry floating down below decks. “You don’t mean to say you don’t know the object of this ship?” asked the chief. “Why, the ‘Lawless’ is a floating hell. For the next thirty days every form of vice known to the civilized world will be going on up above there. There’s five hundred men and three hundred women in this gilded shell whose only object in life for one month will be to commit acts which on shore would be punished by fines and imprisonment.”

Without a word the assistant left the chief engineer, and seeking out the captain, demanded to be put on shore.

“You’ve signed with us for one month, and, by G--d, you’ll have to stay,” was all the answer he got from Jenifer Vass, to whom the captain sent him.

Then a strange thing happened. Into the disordered brain of the man, a short time before racked by fever, there came the thought that he had been chosen by God to be the instrument to punish the iniquity which had come to his knowledge.

He returned to the captain, and demanded a raise of fifteen dollars a month in his pay, claiming he did not know the kind of a job he was undertaking when he had signed. O, he was cunning, this fever stricken assistant engineer. He knew how to allay suspicion.

The raise of pay was granted, for Jenifer Vass did not like the look in the man’s eyes. Planchette went about his work, however, for the next few days quietly and apparently satisfied. And when by chance his duties took him up to where the painted women sang and gamed, and the drunken men made ribald jests, he only smiled strangely to himself and went on with his work. But he was busy all this time doing many things for which an assistant engineer is not usually paid to perform.

One evening he came to Vass, the man who was really in command of the “Lawless,” and asked to be shown about the ship. It was a strange request for an under officer to make to the owner of a ship, but Vass, as usual somewhat in his cups, and feeling particularly good-natured, for the money was coming in faster than he had dared to hope, consented.