“For God’s sake,” Hade begged, “let me go.”
“One of Byrnes’s men,” he said, in explanation; “came over expressly to take this chap. He’s a burglar; ‘Arlie’ Lane, alias Carleton. I’ve shown the papers to the captain. It’s all regular. I’m just going to get his traps at the hotel and walk him over to the station. I guess we’ll push right on to New York to-night.”
The officers nodded and smiled their admiration for the representative of what is, perhaps, the best detective force in the world, and let him pass.
Then Hefflefinger turned and spoke to Gallegher, who still stood as watchful as a dog at his side. “I’m going to his room to get the bonds and stuff,” he whispered; “then I’ll march him to the station and take that train. I’ve done my share; don’t forget yours!”
“Oh, you’ll get your money right enough,” said Gallegher. “And, sa-ay,” he added, with the appreciative nod of an expert, “do you know, you did it rather well.”
Mr. Dwyer had been writing while the raid was settling down, as he had been writing while waiting for the fight to begin. Now he walked over to where the other correspondents stood in angry conclave.
The newspaper men had informed the officers who hemmed them in that they represented the principal papers of the country, and were expostulating vigorously with the captain, who had planned the raid, and who declared they were under arrest.
“Don’t be an ass, Scott,” said Mr. Dwyer, who was too excited to be polite or politic. “You know our being here isn’t a matter of choice. We came here on business, as you did, and you’ve no right to hold us.”
“If we don’t get our stuff on the wire at once,” protested a New York man, “we’ll be too late for to-morrow’s paper, and—”
Captain Scott said he did not care a profanely small amount for to-morrow’s paper, and that all he knew was that to the station-house the newspaper men would go. There they would have a hearing, and if the magistrate chose to let them off, that was the magistrate’s business, but that his duty was to take them into custody.
“But then it will be too late, don’t you understand?” shouted Mr. Dwyer. “You’ve got to let us go now, at once.”
“I can’t do it, Mr. Dwyer,” said the captain, “and that’s all there is to it. Why, haven’t I just sent the president of the Junior Republican Club to the patrol-wagon, the man that put this coat on me, and do you think I can let you fellows go after that? You were all put under bonds to keep the peace not three days ago, and here you’re at it–fighting like badgers. It’s worth my place to let one of you off.”
What Mr. Dwyer said next was so uncomplimentary to the gallant Captain Scott that that overwrought individual seized the sporting editor by the shoulder, and shoved him into the hands of two of his men.
This was more than the distinguished Mr. Dwyer could brook, and he excitedly raised his hand in resistance. But before he had time to do anything foolish his wrist was gripped by one strong little hand, and he was conscious that another was picking the pocket of his great-coat.
He slapped his hands to his sides, and, looking down, saw Gallegher standing close behind him and holding him by the wrist. Mr. Dwyer had forgotten the boy’s existence, and would have spoken sharply if something in Gallegher’s innocent eyes had not stopped him.
Gallegher’s hand was still in that pocket in which Mr. Dwyer had shoved his notebook filled with what he had written of Gallegher’s work and Hade’s final capture, and with a running descriptive account of the fight. With his eyes fixed on Mr. Dwyer, Gallegher drew it out, and with a quick movement shoved it inside his waistcoat. Mr. Dwyer gave a nod of comprehension. Then glancing at his two guardsmen, and finding that they were still interested in the wordy battle of the correspondents with their chief, and had seen nothing, he stooped and whispered to Gallegher: “The forms are locked at twenty minutes to three. If you don’t get there by that time it will be of no use, but if you’re on time you’ll beat the town–and the country too.”
Gallegher’s eyes flashed significantly, and, nodding his head to show he understood, started boldly on a run toward the door. But the officers who guarded it brought him to an abrupt halt, and, much to Mr. Dwyer’s astonishment, drew from him what was apparently a torrent of tears.
“Let me go to me father. I want me father,” the boy shrieked hysterically. “They’ve ’rested father. Oh, daddy, daddy. They’re a-goin’ to take you to prison.”
“Who is your father, sonny?” asked one of the guardians of the gate.
“Keppler’s me father,” sobbed Gallegher. “They’re a-goin’ to lock him up, and I’ll never see him no more.”
“Oh, yes, you will,” said the officer, good-naturedly; “he’s there in that first patrol-wagon. You can run over and say good night to him, and then you’d better get to bed. This ain’t no place for kids of your age.”
“Thank you, sir,” sniffed Gallegher, tearfully, as the two officers raised their clubs, and let him pass out into the darkness.
The yard outside was in a tumult, horses were stamping, and plunging, and backing the carriages into one another; lights were flashing from every window of what had been apparently an uninhabited house, and the voices of the prisoners were still raised in angry expostulation.
Three police patrol-wagons were moving about the yard, filled with unwilling passengers, who sat or stood, packed together like sheep and with no protection from the sleet and rain.
Gallegher stole off into a dark corner, and watched the scene until his eyesight became familiar with the position of the land.
Then with his eyes fixed fearfully on the swinging light of a lantern with which an officer was searching among the carriages, he groped his way between horses’ hoofs and behind the wheels of carriages to the cab which he had himself placed at the furthermost gate. It was still there, and the horse, as he had left it, with its head turned toward the city. Gallegher opened the big gate noiselessly, and worked nervously at the hitching strap. The knot was covered with a thin coating of ice, and it was several minutes before he could loosen it. But his teeth finally pulled it apart, and with the reins in his hands he sprang upon the wheel. And as he stood so, a shock of fear ran down his back like an electric current, his breath left him, and he stood immovable, gazing with wide eyes into the darkness.
The officer with the lantern had suddenly loomed up from behind a carriage not fifty feet distant, and was standing perfectly still, with his lantern held over his head, peering so directly toward Gallegher that the boy felt that he must see him. Gallegher stood with one foot on the hub of the wheel and with the other on the box waiting to spring. It seemed a minute before either of them moved, and then the officer took a step forward, and demanded sternly, “Who is that? What are you doing there?”
There was no time for parley then. Gallegher felt that he had been taken in the act, and that his only chance lay in open flight. He leaped up on the box, pulling out the whip as he did so, and with a quick sweep lashed the horse across the head and back. The animal sprang forward with a snort, narrowly clearing the gate-post, and plunged off into the darkness.
“Stop!” cried the officer.
So many of Gallegher’s acquaintances among the ’longshoremen and mill hands had been challenged in so much the same manner that Gallegher knew what would probably follow if the challenge was disregarded. So he slipped from his seat to the footboard below, and ducked his head.
The three reports of a pistol, which rang out briskly from behind him, proved that his early training had given him a valuable fund of useful miscellaneous knowledge.
“Don’t you be scared,” he said, reassuringly, to the horse; “he’s firing in the air.”
The pistol-shots were answered by the impatient clangor of a patrol-wagon’s gong, and glancing over his shoulder Gallegher saw its red and green lanterns tossing from side to side and looking in the darkness like the side-lights of a yacht plunging forward in a storm.
“I hadn’t bargained to race you against no patrol-wagons,” said Gallegher to his animal; “but if they want a race, we’ll give them a tough tussle for it, won’t we?”
Philadelphia, lying four miles to the south, sent up a faint yellow glow to the sky. It seemed very far away, and Gallegher’s braggadocio grew cold within him at the loneliness of his adventure and the thought of the long ride before him.
It was still bitterly cold.
The rain and sleet beat through his clothes, and struck his skin with a sharp, chilling touch that set him trembling.
Even the thought of the over-weighted patrol-wagon probably sticking in the mud some safe distance in the rear, failed to cheer him, and the excitement that had so far made him callous to the cold died out and left him weaker and nervous.
But his horse was chilled with the long standing, and now leaped eagerly forward, only too willing to warm the half-frozen blood in its veins.
“You’re a good beast,” said Gallegher, plaintively. “You’ve got more nerve than me. Don’t you go back on me now. Mr. Dwyer says we’ve got to beat the town.” Gallegher had no idea what time it was as he rode through the night, but he knew he would be able to find out from a big clock over a manufactory at a point nearly three-quarters of the distance from Keppler’s to the goal.
He was still in the open country and driving recklessly, for he knew the best part of his ride must be made outside the city limits.
He raced between desolate-looking cornfields with bare stalks and patches of muddy earth rising above the thin covering of snow; truck farms and brick-yards fell behind him on either side. It was very lonely work, and once or twice the dogs ran yelping to the gates and barked after him.
Part of his way lay parallel with the railroad tracks, and he drove for some time beside long lines of freight and coal cars as they stood resting for the night. The fantastic Queen Anne suburban stations were dark and deserted, but in one or two of the block-towers he could see the operators writing at their desks, and the sight in some way comforted him.
Once he thought of stopping to get out the blanket in which he had wrapped himself on the first trip, but he feared to spare the time, and drove on with his teeth chattering and his shoulders shaking with the cold.
He welcomed the first solitary row of darkened houses with a faint cheer of recognition. The scattered lamp-posts lightened his spirits, and even the badly paved streets rang under the beats of his horse’s feet like music. Great mills and manufactories, with only a night-watchman’s light in the lowest of their many stories, began to take the place of the gloomy farm-houses and gaunt trees that had startled him with their grotesque shapes. He had been driving nearly an hour, he calculated, and in that time the rain had changed to a wet snow, that fell heavily and clung to whatever it touched. He passed block after block of trim work-men’s houses, as still and silent as the sleepers within them, and at last he turned the horse’s head into Broad Street, the city’s great thoroughfare, that stretches from its one end to the other and cuts it evenly in two.
He was driving noiselessly over the snow and slush in the street, with his thoughts bent only on the clock-face he wished so much to see, when a hoarse voice challenged him from the sidewalk. “Hey, you, stop there, hold up!” said the voice.
Gallegher turned his head, and though he saw that the voice came from under a policeman’s helmet, his only answer was to hit his horse sharply over the head with his whip and to urge it into a gallop.
This, on his part, was followed by a sharp, shrill whistle from the policeman. Another whistle answered it from a street-corner one block ahead of him. “Whoa,” said Gallegher, pulling on the reins. “There’s one too many of them,” he added, in apologetic explanation. The horse stopped, and stood, breathing heavily, with great clouds of steam rising from its flanks.
“Why in hell didn’t you stop when I told you to?” demanded the voice, now close at the cab’s side.
“I didn’t hear you,” returned Gallegher, sweetly. “But I heard you whistle, and I heard your partner whistle, and I thought maybe it was me you wanted to speak to, so I just stopped.”
“You heard me well enough. Why aren’t your lights lit?” demanded the voice.
“Should I have ’em lit?” asked Gallegher, bending over and regarding them with sudden interest.
“You know you should, and if you don’t, you’ve no right to be driving that cab. I don’t believe you’re the regular driver, anyway. Where’d you get it?”
“It ain’t my cab, of course,” said Gallegher, with an easy laugh. “It’s Luke McGovern’s. He left it outside Cronin’s while he went in to get a drink, and he took too much, and me father told me to drive it round to the stable for him. I’m Cronin’s son. McGovern ain’t in no condition to drive. You can see yourself how he’s been misusing the horse. He puts it up at Bachman’s livery stable, and I was just going around there now.”
Gallegher’s knowledge of the local celebrities of the district confused the zealous officer of the peace. He surveyed the boy with a steady stare that would have distressed a less skilful liar, but Gallegher only shrugged his shoulders slightly, as if from the cold, and waited with apparent indifference to what the officer would say next.
In reality his heart was beating heavily against his side, and he felt that if he was kept on a strain much longer he would give way and break down. A second snow-covered form emerged suddenly from the shadow of the houses.
“What is it, Reeder?” it asked.
“Oh, nothing much,” replied the first officer. “This kid hadn’t any lamps lit, so I called to him to stop and he didn’t do it, so I whistled to you. It’s all right, though. He’s just taking it round to Bachman’s. Go ahead,” he added, sulkily.
“Get up!” chirped Gallegher. “Good night,” he added, over his shoulder.
Gallegher gave a hysterical little gasp of relief as he trotted away from the two policemen, and poured bitter maledictions on their heads for two meddling fools as he went.
“They might as well kill a man as scare him to death,” he said, with an attempt to get back to his customary flippancy. But the effort was somewhat pitiful, and he felt guiltily conscious that a salt, warm tear was creeping slowly down his face, and that a lump that would not keep down was rising in his throat.
“Tain’t no fair thing for the whole police force to keep worrying at a little boy like me,” he said, in shame-faced apology. “I’m not doing nothing wrong, and I’m half froze to death, and yet they keep a-nagging at me.”
It was so cold that when the boy stamped his feet against the footboard to keep them warm, sharp pains shot up through his body, and when he beat his arms about his shoulders, as he had seen real cabmen do, the blood in his finger-tips tingled so acutely that he cried aloud with the pain.
He had often been up that late before, but he had never felt so sleepy. It was as if some one was pressing a sponge heavy with chloroform near his face, and he could not fight off the drowsiness that lay hold of him.
He saw, dimly hanging above his head, a round disk of light that seemed like a great moon, and which he finally guessed to be the clock-face for which he had been on the lookout. He had passed it before he realized this; but the fact stirred him into wakefulness again, and when his cab’s wheels slipped around the City Hall corner, he remembered to look up at the other big clock-face that keeps awake over the railroad station and measures out the night.
He gave a gasp of consternation when he saw that it was half-past two, and that there was but ten minutes left to him. This, and the many electric lights and the sight of the familiar pile of buildings, startled him into a semi-consciousness of where he was and how great was the necessity for haste.
He rose in his seat and called on the horse, and urged it into a reckless gallop over the slippery asphalt. He considered nothing else but speed, and looking neither to the left nor right dashed off down Broad Street into Chestnut, where his course lay straight away to the office, now only seven blocks distant.
Gallegher never knew how it began, but he was suddenly assaulted by shouts on either side, his horse was thrown back on its haunches, and he found two men in cabmen’s livery hanging at its head, and patting its sides, and calling it by name. And the other cabmen who have their stand at the corner were swarming about the carriage, all of them talking and swearing at once, and gesticulating wildly with their whips.
They said they knew the cab was McGovern’s, and they wanted to know where he was, and why he wasn’t on it; they wanted to know where Gallegher had stolen it, and why he had been such a fool as to drive it into the arms of its owner’s friends; they said that it was about time that a cab-driver could get off his box to take a drink without having his cab run away with, and some of them called loudly for a policeman to take the young thief in charge.
Gallagher felt as if he had been suddenly dragged into consciousness out of a bad dream, and stood for a second like a half-awakened somnambulist.
They had stopped the cab under an electric light, and its glare shone coldly down upon the trampled snow and the faces of the men around him.
Gallegher bent forward, and lashed savagely at the horse with his whip.
“Let me go,” he shouted, as he tugged impotently at the reins. “Let me go, I tell you. I haven’t stole no cab, and you’ve got no right to stop me. I only want to take it to the Press office,” he begged. “They’ll send it back to you all right. They’ll pay you for the trip. I’m not running away with it. The driver’s got the collar–he’s ’rested–and I’m only a-going to the Press office. Do you hear me?” he cried, his voice rising and breaking in a shriek of passion and disappointment. “I tell you to let go those reins. Let me go, or I’ll kill you. Do you hear me? I’ll kill you.” And leaning forward, the boy struck savagely with his long whip at the faces of the men about the horse’s head.
Some one in the crowd reached up and caught him by the ankles, and with a quick jerk pulled him off the box, and threw him on to the street. But he was up on his knees in a moment, and caught at the man’s hand.
“Don’t let them stop me, mister,” he cried, “please let me go. I didn’t steal the cab, sir. S’help me, I didn’t. I’m telling you the truth. Take me to the Press office, and they’ll prove it to you. They’ll pay you anything you ask ’em. It’s only such a little ways now, and I’ve come so far, sir. Please don’t let them stop me,” he sobbed, clasping the man about the knees. “For Heaven’s sake, mister, let me go!”
The managing editor of the Press took up the india-rubber speaking-tube at his side, and answered, “Not yet,” to an inquiry the night editor had already put to him five times within the last twenty minutes.
Then he snapped the metal top of the tube impatiently, and went up-stairs. As he passed the door of the local room, he noticed that the reporters had not gone home, but were sitting about on the tables and chairs, waiting. They looked up inquiringly as he passed, and the city editor asked, “Any news yet?” and the managing editor shook his head.
The compositors were standing idle in the composing-room, and their foreman was talking with the night editor.
“Well,” said that gentleman, tentatively.
“Well,” returned the managing editor, “I don’t think we can wait; do you?”
“It’s a half-hour after time now,” said the night editor, “and we’ll miss the suburban trains if we hold the paper back any longer. We can’t afford to wait for a purely hypothetical story. The chances are all against the fight’s having taken place or this Hade’s having been arrested.”
“But if we’re beaten on it–” suggested the chief. “But I don’t think that is possible. If there were any story to print, Dwyer would have had it here before now.”
The managing editor looked steadily down at the floor.
“Very well,” he said, slowly, “we won’t wait any longer. Go ahead,” he added, turning to the foreman with a sigh of reluctance. The foreman whirled himself about, and began to give his orders; but the two editors still looked at each other doubtfully.
As they stood so, there came a sudden shout and the sound of people running to and fro in the reportorial rooms below. There was the tramp of many footsteps on the stairs, and above the confusion they heard the voice of the city editor telling some one to “run to Madden’s and get some brandy, quick.”
No one in the composing-room said anything; but those compositors who had started to go home began slipping off their overcoats, and every one stood with his eyes fixed on the door.
It was kicked open from the outside, and in the doorway stood a cab-driver and the city editor, supporting between them a pitiful little figure of a boy, wet and miserable, and with the snow melting on his clothes and running in little pools to the floor. “Why, it’s Gallegher,” said the night editor, in a tone of the keenest disappointment.
Gallegher shook himself free from his supporters, and took an unsteady step forward, his fingers fumbling stiffly with the buttons of his waistcoat.
“Mr. Dwyer, sir,” he began faintly, with his eyes fixed fearfully on the managing editor, “he got arrested–and I couldn’t get here no sooner, ’cause they kept a-stopping me, and they took me cab from under me–but–” he pulled the notebook from his breast and held it out with its covers damp and limp from the rain–“but we got Hade, and here’s Mr. Dwyer’s copy.”
And then he asked, with a queer note in his voice, partly of dread and partly of hope, “Am I in time, sir?”
The managing editor took the book, and tossed it to the foreman, who ripped out its leaves and dealt them out to his men as rapidly as a gambler deals out cards.
Then the managing editor stooped and picked Gallegher up in his arms, and, sitting down, began to unlace his wet and muddy shoes.
Gallegher made a faint effort to resist this degradation of the managerial dignity; but his protest was a very feeble one, and his head fell back heavily oh the managing editor’s shoulder.
To Gallegher the incandescent lights began to whirl about in circles, and to burn in different colors; the faces of the reporters kneeling before him and chafing his hands and feet grew dim and unfamiliar, and the roar and rumble of the great presses in the basement sounded far away, like the murmur of the sea.
“Why, it’s Gallegher,” said the night editor.
And then the place and the circumstances of it came back to him again sharply and with sudden vividness.
Gallegher looked up, with a faint smile, into the managing editor’s face. “You won’t turn me off for running away, will you?” he whispered.
The managing editor did not answer immediately. His head was bent, and he was thinking, for some reason or other, of a little boy of his own, at home in bed. Then he said quietly, “Not this time, Gallegher.”
Gallegher’s head sank back comfortably on the older man’s shoulder, and he smiled comprehensively at the faces of the young men crowded around him. “You hadn’t ought to,” he said, with a touch of his old impudence, ’“cause–I beat the town.”
David Greene was an employee of the Burdett Automatic Punch Company. The manufacturing plant of the company was at Bridgeport, but in the New York offices there were working samples of all the punches, from the little nickel-plated hand punch with which conductors squeezed holes in railroad tickets, to the big punch that could bite into an iron plate as easily as into a piece of pie. David’s duty was to explain these different punches, and accordingly when Burdett Senior or one of the sons turned a customer over to David he spoke of him as a salesman. But David called himself a “demonstrator.” For a short time he even succeeded in persuading the other salesmen to speak of themselves as demonstrators, but the shipping clerks and bookkeepers laughed them out of it. They could not laugh David out of it. This was so, partly because he had no sense of humor, and partly because he had a great-great-grandfather. Among the salesmen on lower Broadway, to possess a great-great-grandfather is unusual, even a great-grandfather is a rarity, and either is considered superfluous. But to David the possession of a great-great-grandfather was a precious and open delight. He had possessed him only for a short time. Undoubtedly he always had existed, but it was not until David’s sister Anne married a doctor in Bordentown, New Jersey, and became socially ambitious, that David emerged as a Son of Washington.
It was sister Anne, anxious to “get in” as a “Daughter” and wear a distaff pin in her shirt-waist, who discovered the revolutionary ancestor. She unearthed him, or rather ran him to earth, in the graveyard of the Presbyterian church at Bordentown. He was no less a person than General Hiram Greene, and he had fought with Washington at Trenton and at Princeton. Of this there was no doubt. That, later, on moving to New York, his descendants became peace-loving salesmen did not affect his record. To enter a society founded on heredity, the important thing is first to catch your ancestor, and having made sure of him, David entered the Society of the Sons of Washington with flying colors. He was not unlike the man who had been speaking prose for forty years without knowing it. He was not unlike the other man who woke to find himself famous. He had gone to bed a timid, near-sighted, underpaid salesman without a relative in the world, except a married sister in Bordentown, and he awoke to find he was a direct descendant of “Neck or Nothing” Greene, a revolutionary hero, a friend of Washington, a man whose portrait hung in the State House at Trenton. David’s life had lacked color. The day he carried his certificate of membership to the big jewelry store uptown and purchased two rosettes, one for each of his two coats, was the proudest of his life.
The other men in the Broadway office took a different view. As Wyckoff, one of Burdett’s flying squadron of travelling salesmen, said, “All grandfathers look alike to me, whether they’re great, or great-great-great. Each one is as dead as the other. I’d rather have a live cousin who could loan me a five, or slip me a drink. What did your great-great dad ever do for you?”
“Well, for one thing,” said David stiffly, “he fought in the War of the Revolution. He saved us from the shackles of monarchical England; he made it possible for me and you to enjoy the liberties of a free republic.”
“Don’t try to tell me your grandfather did all that,” protested Wyckoff, “because I know better. There were a lot of others helped. I read about it in a book.”
“I am not grudging glory to others,” returned David; “I am only saying I am proud that I am a descendant of a revolutionist.”
Wyckoff dived into his inner pocket and produced a leather photograph frame that folded like a concertina.
“I don’t want to be a descendant,” he said; “I’d rather be an ancestor. Look at those.” Proudly he exhibited photographs of Mrs. Wyckoff with the baby and of three other little Wyckoffs. David looked with envy at the children.
“When I’m married,” he stammered, and at the words he blushed, “I hope to be an ancestor.”
“If you’re thinking of getting married,” said Wyckoff, “you’d better hope for a raise in salary.”
The other clerks were as unsympathetic as Wyckoff. At first when David showed them his parchment certificate, and his silver gilt insignia with on one side a portrait of Washington, and on the other a Continental soldier, they admitted it was dead swell. They even envied him, not the grandfather, but the fact that owing to that distinguished relative David was constantly receiving beautifully engraved invitations to attend the monthly meetings of the society; to subscribe to a fund to erect monuments on battle-fields to mark neglected graves; to join in joyous excursions to the tomb of Washington or of John Paul Jones; to inspect West Point, Annapolis, and Bunker Hill; to be among those present at the annual “banquet” at Delmonico’s. In order that when he opened these letters he might have an audience, he had given the society his office address.
In these communications he was always addressed as “Dear Compatriot,” and never did the words fail to give him a thrill. They seemed to lift him out of Burdett’s salesrooms and Broadway, and place him next to things uncommercial, untainted, high, and noble. He did not quite know what an aristocrat was, but he believed being a compatriot made him an aristocrat. When customers were rude, when Mr. John or Mr. Robert was overbearing, this idea enabled David to rise above their ill-temper, and he would smile and say to himself: “If they knew the meaning of the blue rosette in my button-hole, how differently they would treat me! How easily with a word could I crush them!”
But few of the customers recognized the significance of the button. They thought it meant that David belonged to the Y. M. C. A. or was a teetotaler. David, with his gentle manners and pale, ascetic face, was liable to give that impression.
When Wyckoff mentioned marriage, the reason David blushed was because, although no one in the office suspected it, he wished to marry the person in whom the office took the greatest pride. This was Miss Emily Anthony, one of Burdett and Sons’ youngest, most efficient, and prettiest stenographers, and although David did not cut as dashing a figure as did some of the firm’s travelling men, Miss Anthony had found something in him so greatly to admire that she had, out of office hours, accepted his devotion, his theatre tickets, and an engagement ring. Indeed, so far had matters progressed, that it had been almost decided when in a few months they would go upon their vacations they also would go upon their honeymoon. And then a cloud had come between them, and from a quarter from which David had expected only sunshine.
The trouble befell when David discovered he had a great-great-grandfather. With that fact itself Miss Anthony was almost as pleased as was David himself, but while he was content to bask in another’s glory, Miss Anthony saw in his inheritance only an incentive to achieve glory for himself.
From a hard-working salesman she had asked but little, but from a descendant of a national hero she expected other things. She was a determined young person, and for David she was an ambitious young person. She found she was dissatisfied. She found she was disappointed. The great-great-grandfather had opened up a new horizon–had, in a way, raised the standard. She was as fond of David as always, but his tales of past wars and battles, his accounts of present banquets at which he sat shoulder to shoulder with men of whom even Burdett and Sons spoke with awe, touched her imagination.
“You shouldn’t be content to just wear a button,” she urged. “If you’re a Son of Washington, you ought to act like one.”
“I know I’m not worthy of you,” David sighed.
“I don’t mean that, and you know I don’t,” Emily replied indignantly. “It has nothing to do with me! I want you to be worthy of yourself, of your grandpa Hiram!”
“But how?” complained David. “What chance has a twenty-five dollar a week clerk—”
It was a year before the Spanish-American War, while the patriots of Cuba were fighting the mother country for their independence.
“If I were a Son of the Revolution,” said Emily, “I’d go to Cuba and help free it.”
“Don’t talk nonsense,” cried David. “If I did that I’d lose my job, and we’d never be able to marry. Besides, what’s Cuba done for me? All I know about Cuba is, I once smoked a Cuban cigar and it made me ill.”
“Did Lafayette talk like that?” demanded Emily. “Did he ask what have the American rebels ever done for me?”
“If I were in Lafayette’s class,” sighed David, “I wouldn’t be selling automatic punches.”
“There’s your trouble,” declared Emily. “You lack self-confidence. You’re too humble, you’ve got fighting blood and you ought to keep saying to yourself, ‘Blood will tell,’ and the first thing you know, it will tell! You might begin by going into politics in your ward. Or, you could join the militia. That takes only one night a week, and then, if we did go to war with Spain, you’d get a commission, and come back a captain!”
Emily’s eyes were beautiful with delight. But the sight gave David no pleasure. In genuine distress, he shook his head.
“Emily,” he said, “you’re going to be awfully disappointed in me.”
Emily’s eyes closed as though they shied at some mental picture. But when she opened them they were bright, and her smile was kind and eager.
“No, I’m not,” she protested; “only I want a husband with a career, and one who’ll tell me to keep quiet when I try to run it for him.”
“I’ve often wished you would,” said David.
“Would what? Run your career for you?”
“No, keep quiet. Only it didn’t seem polite to tell you so.”
“Maybe I’d like you better,” said Emily, “if you weren’t so darned polite.”
A week later, early in the spring of 1897, the unexpected happened, and David was promoted into the flying squadron. He now was a travelling salesman, with a rise in salary and a commission on orders. It was a step forward, but as going on the road meant absence from Emily, David was not elated. Nor did it satisfy Emily. It was not money she wanted. Her ambition for David could not be silenced with a raise in wages. She did not say this, but David knew that in him she still found something lacking, and when they said good-by they both were ill at ease and completely unhappy. Formerly, each day when Emily in passing David in the office said good-morning, she used to add the number of the days that still separated them from the vacation which also was to be their honeymoon. But, for the last month she had stopped counting the days–at least she did not count them aloud.
David did not ask her why this was so. He did not dare. And, sooner than learn the truth that she had decided not to marry him, or that she was even considering not marrying him, he asked no questions, but in ignorance of her present feelings set forth on his travels. Absence from Emily hurt just as much as he had feared it would. He missed her, needed her, longed for her. In numerous letters he told her so. But, owing to the frequency with which he moved, her letters never caught up with him. It was almost a relief. He did not care to think of what they might tell him.
The route assigned David took him through the South and kept him close to the Atlantic seaboard. In obtaining orders he was not unsuccessful, and at the end of the first month received from the firm a telegram of congratulation. This was of importance chiefly because it might please Emily. But he knew that in her eyes the great-great-grandson of Hiram Greene could not rest content with a telegram from Burdett and Sons. A year before she would have considered it a high honor, a cause for celebration. Now, he could see her press her pretty lips together and shake her pretty head. It was not enough. But how could he accomplish more. He began to hate his great-great-grandfather. He began to wish Hiram Greene had lived and died a bachelor.
And then Dame Fortune took David in hand and toyed with him and spanked him, and pelted and petted him, until finally she made him her favorite son. Dame Fortune went about this work in an abrupt and arbitrary manner.
On the night of the 1st of March, 1897, two trains were scheduled to leave the Union Station at Jacksonville at exactly the same minute, and they left exactly on time. As never before in the history of any Southern railroad has this miracle occurred, it shows that when Dame Fortune gets on the job she is omnipotent. She placed David on the train to Miami as the train he wanted drew out for Tampa, and an hour later, when the conductor looked at David’s ticket, he pulled the bell-cord and dumped David over the side into the heart of a pine forest. If he walked back along the track for one mile, the conductor reassured him, he would find a flag station where at midnight he could flag a train going north. In an hour it would deliver him safely in Jacksonville.
There was a moon, but for the greater part of the time it was hidden by fitful, hurrying clouds, and, as David stumbled forward, at one moment he would see the rails like streaks of silver, and the next would be encompassed in a complete and bewildering darkness. He made his way from tie to tie only by feeling with his foot. After an hour he came to a shed. Whether it was or was not the flag station the conductor had in mind, he did not know, and he never did know. He was too tired, too hot, and too disgusted to proceed, and dropping his suit case he sat down under the open roof of the shed prepared to wait either for the train or daylight. So far as he could see, on every side of him stretched a swamp, silent, dismal, interminable. From its black water rose dead trees, naked of bark and hung with streamers of funereal moss. There was not a sound or sign of human habitation. The silence was the silence of the ocean at night. David remembered the berth reserved for him on the train to Tampa and of the loathing with which he had considered placing himself between its sheets. But now how gladly would he welcome it! For, in the sleeping-car, ill-smelling, close and stuffy, he at least would have been surrounded by fellow-sufferers of his own species. Here his companions were owls, water-snakes, and sleeping buzzards.
“I am alone,” he told himself, “on a railroad embankment, entirely surrounded by alligators.”
And then he found he was not alone.
In the darkness, illuminated by a match, not a hundred yards from him there flashed suddenly the face of a man. Then the match went out and the face with it. David noted that it had appeared at some height above the level of the swamp, at an elevation higher even than that of the embankment. It was as though the man had been sitting on the limb of a tree. David crossed the tracks and found that on the side of the embankment opposite the shed there was solid ground and what once had been a wharf. He advanced over this cautiously, and as he did so the clouds disappeared, and in the full light of the moon he saw a bayou broadening into a river, and made fast to the decayed and rotting wharf an ocean-going tug. It was from her deck that the man, in lighting his pipe, had shown his face. At the thought of a warm engine-room and the company of his fellow-creatures, David’s heart leaped with pleasure. He advanced quickly. And then something in the appearance of the tug, something mysterious, secretive, threatening, caused him to halt. No lights showed from her engine-room, cabin, or pilot-house. Her decks were empty. But, as was evidenced by the black smoke that rose from her funnel, she was awake and awake to some purpose. David stood uncertainly, questioning whether to make his presence known or return to the loneliness of the shed. The question was decided for him. He had not considered that standing in the moonlight he was a conspicuous figure. The planks of the wharf creaked and a man came toward him. As one who means to attack, or who fears attack, he approached warily. He wore high boots, riding breeches, and a sombrero. He was a little man, but his movements were alert and active. To David he seemed unnecessarily excited. He thrust himself close against David.
“Who the devil are you?” demanded the man from the tug. “How’d you get here?”
“I walked,” said David.
“Walked?” the man snorted incredulously.
“I took the wrong train,” explained David pleasantly. “They put me off about a mile below here. I walked back to this flag station. I’m going to wait here for the next train north.”
The little man laughed mockingly.
“Oh, no you’re not,” he said. “If you walked here, you can just walk away again!” With a sweep of his arm, he made a vigorous and peremptory gesture.
“You walk!” he commanded.
“I’ll do just as I please about that,” said David.
As though to bring assistance, the little man started hastily toward the tug.
“I’ll find some one who’ll make you walk!” he called. “You wait, that’s all, you wait!”
David decided not to wait. It was possible the wharf was private property and he had been trespassing. In any case, at the flag station the rights of all men were equal, and if he were in for a fight he judged it best to choose his own battleground. He recrossed the tracks and sat down on his suit case in a dark corner of the shed. Himself hidden in the shadows he could see in the moonlight the approach of any other person.
“They’re river pirates,” said David to himself, “or smugglers. They’re certainly up to some mischief, or why should they object to the presence of a perfectly harmless stranger?”
Partly with cold, partly with nervousness, David shivered.
“I wish that train would come,” he sighed. And instantly, as though in answer to his wish, from only a short distance down the track he heard the rumble and creak of approaching cars. In a flash David planned his course of action.
The thought of spending the night in a swamp infested by alligators and smugglers had become intolerable. He must escape, and he must escape by the train now approaching. To that end the train must be stopped. His plan was simple. The train was moving very, very slowly, and though he had no lantern to wave, in order to bring it to a halt he need only stand on the track exposed to the glare of the headlight and wave his arms. David sprang between the rails and gesticulated wildly. But in amazement his arms fell to his sides. For the train, now only a hundred yards distant and creeping toward him at a snail’s pace, carried no headlight, and though in the moonlight David was plainly visible, it blew no whistle, tolled no bell. Even the passenger coaches in the rear of the sightless engine were wrapped in darkness. It was a ghost of a train, a Flying Dutchman of a train, a nightmare of a train. It was as unreal as the black swamp, as the moss on the dead trees, as the ghostly tug-boat tied to the rotting wharf.
“Is the place haunted!” exclaimed David.
He was answered by the grinding of brakes and by the train coming to a sharp halt. And instantly from every side men fell from it to the ground, and the silence of the night was broken by a confusion of calls and eager greeting and questions and sharp words of command.
So fascinated was David in the stealthy arrival of the train and in her mysterious passengers that, until they confronted him, he did not note the equally stealthy approach of three men. Of these one was the little man from the tug. With him was a fat, red-faced Irish-American. He wore no coat and his shirt-sleeves were drawn away from his hands by garters of pink elastic, his derby hat was balanced behind his ears, upon his right hand flashed an enormous diamond. He looked as though but at that moment he had stopped sliding glasses across a Bowery bar. The third man carried the outward marks of a sailor. David believed he was the tallest man he had ever beheld, but equally remarkable with his height was his beard and hair, which were of a fierce brick-dust red. Even in the mild moonlight it flamed like a torch.
“What’s your business?” demanded the man with the flamboyant hair.
“I came here,” began David, “to wait for a train—-”
The tall man bellowed with indignant rage.
“Yes,” he shouted; “this is the sort of place any one would pick out to wait for a train!”
In front of David’s nose he shook a fist as large as a catcher’s glove. “Don’t you lie to me!” he bullied. “Do you know who I am? Do you know who you’re up against? I’m—”
The barkeeper person interrupted.
“Never mind who you are,” he said. “We know that. Find out who he is.”
David turned appealingly to the barkeeper.
“Do you suppose I’d come here on purpose?” he protested. “I’m a travelling man—”
“You won’t travel any to-night,” mocked the red-haired one. “You’ve seen what you came to see, and all you want now is to get to a Western Union wire. Well, you don’t do it. You don’t leave here to-night!”
As though he thought he had been neglected, the little man in riding-boots pushed forward importantly.
“Tie him to a tree!” he suggested.
“Better take him on board,” said the barkeeper, “and send him back by the pilot. When we’re once at sea, he can’t hurt us any.”
“What makes you think I want to hurt you?” demanded David. “Who do you think I am?”