The Incendiary Part 25

"So perhaps by my officiousness I converted an innocent prank into something more serious," she concluded.

"If it was the price of it only, I'd give double that, and land knows I've no stockingful, like some that go to the city for help, for I'd rather rub my knuckles off than beg," said the good woman.

There was a piece of old carpet stuffed in one window-pane, adequate in summer, no doubt, but hardly impregnable to the winter winds--and Emily judged from the table before her that more than once the mother and son had sat down to a Barmecide feast, in which the imagination had to be called on to help appease the palate. So it was by inheritance that the Whistler came by his aversion to s.h.a.garach's charity.

"I think it strange Walter and I have never become acquainted."

"Indeed he knows all your goodness to me."

"Is he still at school?"

"Graduated this year, and his masters recommend him for the best-tempered boy and as innocent--but full of the old Harry, like his father, that would always be dancing, even with seven children between him and his youth."

"What a pity if he should turn out bad now after you've made so many sacrifices for him."

"Oh, for the sacrifices, Walter's willing to take his share. With his paper route he would bring me in sometimes $2 a week, and there was nothing he wouldn't do, distribute handbills, deliver baskets in the meat-market on Sat.u.r.day nights. Look, here's the s...o...b..ack's kit he just bought. Come in, Miss Barlow."

Emily entered the small side room which completed Mrs. Riley's suite.

"There's the blacking-box. Bought it himself with his own savings."

"But he was too changeable. I should think he would have done better to stick to one thing."

"That's what I told him. But you know how a boy is fickle-minded. 'Get me something good, mother,' says he. There's the little cradle I rocked him in that I kept all these years--" Emily herself could hardly check her tears at thought of the mother rocking this empty memento.

"His Aunt Mary gave it to me--not that we couldn't afford it--plenty and to spare I had when my husband was alive, but it wasn't lucky to buy a cradle for your first baby, she said, and so I rocked them all in hers, and now six of them are in heaven with their father, G.o.d ha' mercy, and Walter, all that was left me, is in the lockup this night with the bad people."

Walter's little room was bare but not squalid. A knockabout suit hung on pegs at one side, and a washbowl stood on a cheap commode, like a prophecy of cleanliness in the occupant.

"Don't worry, Mrs. Riley. Since I helped Walter into this sc.r.a.pe, I am bound to help him out of it."

"Heaven bless you, if you can save my Walter--and I know you would try if you knew him. The lovingest boy, full of mischief like his father, but he'd give the blood out of his heart to a soul in trouble. Oh, well I knew he had something on his mind all these weeks. For he wouldn't run up stairs two steps at a time, as he used to, and whistle so that it was sweeter and louder than a cage full of canaries. When I heard him whistle low I knew it was something troubling his mind. 'Yes, mother, it is,' says he, but that was all I could get out of him."

"Suppose I bring a very great lawyer to be his counsel," said Emily, deeply moved by the lonely mother's sorrow, and haunted, too, by a dim remembrance of the central face among the three gamins--a frank boy-face, with red lips and cheeks. "Wouldn't he stand a better chance of getting off?"

"Just as you say, Miss Barlow," answered the sad woman, brightening a little.

"He is very busy, but I feel sure that he will attend to this if I ask him. I'll see him to-night. Don't brood over it too much and never mind about the was.h.i.+ng. I will have Mr. s.h.a.garach call at the station and talk with Walter, and then let you know. Good-night."

"Good-night and bless you," said Mrs. Riley, holding the little candlestick high at the landing. Emily picked her way down two crazy flights of stairs and a doorway barred with sprawling children on to the sidewalk. "While we wink, the lightning may have flashed," was a motto she had copied out of an old book of maxims and embroidered into her life; so, without taking time even for a wink, she hailed a pa.s.sing car that would carry her near s.h.a.garach's house.

Not all that Mrs. Riley had said of her boy, the Whistler, should be set down to a mother's partiality. Mischievous Walter was, if the unquenchable avidity for excitement which reigns at fourteen ent.i.tles a boy to such an aspersion. The five hours' rigid confinement at a school desk especially provoked him to perpetual fidget, and no teacher had yet been found who could make him buckle to his books so long. Yet he was a favorite with one and all, less because of his deft hand at the drawing lesson than because of the real salubrity of his nature, which made him exceptional among the slum children who were his fellow-pupils.

To these very schoolmates Walter figured as a hero, an Admirable Crichton, invincible at all games and master of most things worth knowing for boys. There was no swimmer of his age could equal him in grace or speed, and his dive from the top of the railroad dock was famous in local annals. So was his successful set-to in the brewery yard with Lefty Dinan, the Tenth street c.o.c.k-of-the walk.

Yet for all his proficiency in the art of give, take and avoid, Walter was the least combative of boys, being, as his mother said, "loving" in disposition. The great gray Percherons with s.h.a.ggy fetlocks, that drew the fire-engines, knew this, and admitted him to a brotherly comrades.h.i.+p, bowing with delight when he patted and stroked them. Mechanics found him handy beyond his years, and often employed him at odd jobs. For he had a carpenter's eye for short distances and a surveyor's for long, and there was no tool that did not fit his fingers. If he had run away to join the circus last summer, that was not the unpardonable sin.

s.h.a.garach heard Emily gravely.

"An important witness for our cause," he answered, when she had finished. "We surely cannot suffer him to be thrust into prison." Emily knew that it was unnecessary for her to press the matter further, so she spent a brief evening in conversation with the quaint, affectionate mother, rarely alluding to the Floyd case or the mysterious oaf who had so alarmed her in that oriental room.

The following noon she ran down to the jail to see Robert, half-expecting to hear him playing the violin which she had sent him the day before. Robert's own Stradivarius, with all his other personal effects, had been destroyed at the fire, so Emily, having begged the sheriff's permission, had pinched herself to buy him a new one as richly toned as her slender means could purchase. Her own instrument was the piano, whose keys turned to silver beneath her touch, and it had been in the ensemble cla.s.ses of the conservatory that she and Robert (through Beulah Ware) first met. When Dr. Silsby, the botanist, who had just come home from the west, called yesterday, she had insisted on his taking the violin to Robert, without betraying the giver's name. However, Robert's corridor (murderers' row, the name made her indignant) was silent when she approached it, and she searched his cell vainly for a violin box.

"Dr. Silsby has been to see you, Robert?" she asked, after the greetings due from sweetheart to sweetheart.

"He came in yesterday to cheer me."

"His usual method of cheering, I suppose."

"Oh, yes, said he had never expected me to outlive uncle; I always acted so much older than he did," laughed Robert.

"He is such a droll tease," said Emily, who never could be brought to admit that Robert was overserious for his years.

"But I made myself even with him before he went. He promised to read an article I had written while in prison, and took the ma.n.u.script under his arm, little suspecting what was in store for him. You know how he abhors my social heresies."

"And the article was----"

"My 'Modest Proposal for a Consumers' Trust,' socialistic from kappa to kappa. How Jonas will writhe! The last words he spoke were a thrust at my 'fad.' Yet every letter-carrier and uniformed employe I meet," added Robert, returning to his natural gravity, "contented and useful, convinces me more and more that the world is moving toward co-operation."

"But the reading will be torture to Dr. Silsby."

"It ought to do him good. How hard that lumper works!" Several negroes were staggering down the corridor, shouldering huge sides of beef for the jail cuisine. "And in fifty offices within a radius of a mile men are receiving large salaries for dawdling at elegant desks two or three hours a day."

"There are no sinecures at $10 a week," sighed Emily, drawing upon experience for this generalization. "But did Dr. Silsby have nothing with him when he called?"

"I believe he had--a violin box."

"Just so," said a cheerful voice behind them; "a violin-box, and forgot to leave it. You see I had the jacketing of that birch tree so much on my mind," it was Dr. Silsby himself, "everything else slipped out. You remember my speaking of the birch tree, Rob?"

"At least seven times," answered Robert.

"Cruelty, Miss Barlow, positive cruelty. That fine silver-birch in the jailyard--you saw it, I suppose, coming in--all peeled and naked from the ground as high as my reach. Wanton cruelty. Think of the winter nights. It will die. It will die."

One of Jonas Silsby's eccentricities was his keen sympathy for arboreal life, to which his rugged nature yearned even more than to the delicate products of the flower garden.

"I complained to the sheriff. There ought to be an ordinance severely punis.h.i.+ng the barking of trees."

"Don't they fine the boys who mutilate foliage in the parks?" asked Emily.

"Fine! Horsewhip them! Rattan their knuckles! I'd teach them a lesson or two! The young barbarians! Well, cut it short, thinking of the trees, I forgot your violin. So last night I ordered a jacket made, good canvas cloth, that'll interest you, Rob, if you haven't forgotten all your botany in your wild----"

"How did you like my essay, Jonas?" asked Robert, mischievously.

"Quackery! A poultice to cure incurable diseases. Bah!"

"But you brought the violin to-day?" asked Emily, smiling.

"Yes, with the canvas jacket. You see it's Miss Barlow's present----"

"What!" cried Robert.

"There! Thunder! I've let it out. She was going to blindfold you and let you guess the giver."

"And the violin is in your vest pocket, I suppose?" asked Emily, innocently, on the brink of a peal of laughter.

"The violin! Jupiter!" exclaimed Dr. Silsby, thunderstruck. "It's a box of bulbs. I thought they were rather heavy."

Emily and Robert had a merry time over the botanist's absentmindedness, but he insisted that the original fault lay with the young barbarians who had upset him by unbarking the birch tree.

There was little news to exchange except the arrest of their "important witness," and the lunch hour at best was only sixty minutes long, so Emily was soon forced to make her adieus and leave Robert with his second best friend.

CHAPTER x.x.xII.

EMILY STRIKES A MATCH.

Beulah Ware called that evening to talk over their plans for a trip to the provinces, which Dr. Eustis, the Barlows' family physician, had imperatively ordered for the wasting girl. Could he have looked into her brain while she was preparing to retire in her chamber, and seen the velocity of the thoughts which were coursing through it then, he would surely have lengthened the weeks to months.

"Would the will be upheld?" she asked herself. Dr. Silsby's oral evidence was strong in its favor and s.h.a.garach had spoken hopefully of late. The least that he could expect was a postponement until the trial was concluded. Since the evening she spent at his house, the lawyer had applied himself, if possible, more sternly than ever to the case, and his manner was more than ever that of a man repressing all lightness of spirit to make room for weighty thoughts.

What a mesh they were all entangled in. s.h.a.garach as well as Robert, with the monster reaching again and again at his life! And McCausland--she hated his eternal smile. As if this business of life or death were a comedy for his amus.e.m.e.nt or the display of his superfine powers. She had begun to doubt whether their triumph over the false Bill Dobbs had been as genuine as they first supposed.

"A lie will travel a league while truth is putting on his boots," old John Davidson had said, shaking his head, when she described the adventure to him. And the result had proved him right. Although the truth leaked out, the original impression that Robert had really broken out of prison was never quite corrected, and of course it did him no good with the public.

In spite of herself, Emily could not help feeling that both these powerful minds were overreaching themselves by their very fertility and keenness, like the colossus of old, which tumbled by its own huge height. For the hundredth time she set their theories before her, trying to imagine how a jury would look at them.

Her rambling drowse naturally brought back the whole trip to Hillsborough and her conversation with Bertha. She tried to recall every word that the housemaid had uttered, rendered doubly precious, as it seemed to Emily, by the impossibility of consulting her again until the trial. What she had said of the previous fire especially struck Emily now. She tried to form a vivid picture on the curtain of darkness which surrounded her of that fatal study. The books all upright on their shelves, the canary bird singing, the waste-basket, the slippers under the arm-chair, and the dressing-gown thrown over it, the dog--suddenly Emily's heart stood still. She started up in bed and sat on its edge.

A minute later she was feeling for the match-box. As she stood before the mirror, her image came out slowly, slowly, emerging by the sulphurous blue flame. Lighting the gas, she drew the curtains. The bark of a watchdog broke the silence, or the footsteps of tardy home-comers, and now and then the shrill, faint whistle of a distant steamer, ocean-bound. But her ears were closed to outer impressions. She s.n.a.t.c.hed at a volume of the great encyclopedia which she kept in her room, and, sitting on the bed, laid one knee across its fellow for a book-rest. In this posture she read eagerly, then exchanged the volume for another, and that for another, until she had ranged through the entire set and peeped at every letter from Archimedes to Zero, with long and very attentive stops at many curious headings. It was after 1 o'clock when she turned out the light and nearly 3 when her brain stopped buzzing. Next morning she limped in her left knee where the heavy encyclopedia had rested and her eyes were dull at their work.

The idea was so bold, so novel, that she waited a day before submitting it to s.h.a.garach. Beulah Ware was her first confidant. Beulah took it up enthusiastically, and was for developing it farther before giving it out at all. But Emily judged this secrecy unjust to her lawyer, and, besides, was eager to know his opinion. He listened with interest to her "maybes" and "might bes" and commented in his usual tone of conviction.

"There are a great many 'ifs.' You depend entirely upon Bertha, and she is not at hand. When she does appear it will be so late that you will have little time to work up your idea. This is not said to discourage you; only to point out the obstacles you must surmount. By all means follow out the thought."

This was not the worst that Emily had feared, although she understood that it meant "There are at present only two theories, McCausland's and mine. Those are the horns of the dilemma between which the jury must choose." Seeing that she did not reply, s.h.a.garach turned the subject toward Walter Riley's case, which was more serious than his mother knew.

The robbery of the bicycles was only one of a series of thefts which had been traced to this youthful "gang." In the club-room at Lonergan's, not only the Whistler's bicycle, which he had refused to sell, but a store of cigars, whisky, cheap jewelry and ladies' pocketbooks had been found, and the junkman, Bagley, was under arrest for acting as a "fence" to the thieves.

Walter a.s.serted his innocence of other thefts, and also his ignorance of all the articles excepting the bicycle, which they had urged him to sell. His refusal to do so was corroborated by Turkey and Toot. On this very head he had had a falling out with the crowd and had ceased to visit the club-room, but, although it was frequented by as many as twenty youngsters, some of them half-grown men, no one had dared to heed Bagley's suggestion and dispose of Walter's abandoned property.

"Riley's act at its worst was no more serious than breaking a window or plucking pears from the tree. With your help he may get clear and be put on probation."

"Oh, must I testify?" asked Emily.

"Next Monday the case will be heard. You can be of service to the boy. I shall recommend short terms for Fenton and Watts."

Emily promised to be present. While she was returning to her studio old John Davidson overtook her in his carriage. She was glad to meet his kindly glance again and accept his proffered seat, especially as she espied the manikin, Kennedy, crossing the street in her direction. It was only a few blocks to her destination, but before they arrived she had poured out her new theory to the marshal, as if he were her father.

"Don't you think it's possible, Mr. Davidson?" she appealed to him, craving a morsel of sympathy.

"Possible? Of course it's possible," he answered cheerily; "I've met things a hundred times stranger myself."

But Emily's heart sunk a little, for she saw that he only spoke so out of kindness and that he did not really believe in her idea. And from that day she followed Beulah Ware's advice and hardly mentioned it, except to Beulah.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII.

McCAUSLAND'S AMMUNITION.

It is no wonder at all that Emily Barlow should have come to regard Inspector McCausland as the villain of the drama in which she was taking a part. Although whenever she tried to formulate his theory of the case it seemed to her too frail to hang a kitten by, yet she had moments of doubt in which his great reputation and clean record of victories oppressed and appalled her. And these moments were rendered frequent by a quality which McCausland seemed to possess in common with other satanic characters, his ubiquity, in which he was only surpa.s.sed by Mr. Arthur Kennedy Foxhall. In justice to McCausland, however, it should be stated that he did not make a practice, as the manikin did, of writing bi-weekly billet-doux.

The first time the detective's shadow fell across Emily's path--after her discovery of his ident.i.ty--was on one of her visits to Senda Wesner. Who should be coming out of the bakeshop but chubby Richard in person? His bow was gallant and his smile serene.

"My weekly call," he said, stopping to chat for a moment. "A sociable little magpie, that one," jerking his thumb toward the bakeshop girl. Emily thought this uncomplimentary. From Miss Wesner she gathered enough to lead her to suspect that he was trying to connect the peddler in the green cart, who was certainly no peddler and who had eluded all pursuit thus far, with the slamming of the rear door, which must have been done by some one else than Floyd.

A few days later she had called at the office of the Beacon, the newspaper for which Robert wrote special articles, to obtain some papers from his desk. The desk was indeed there, but all its drawers had been removed and the managing editor explained that they might be found at the office of Inspector McCausland.

Twice she had met the inspector climbing s.h.a.garach's stairs, but pa.s.sing by the lawyer's door and mounting to the top story. The second time she had heard his voice in conference with a throaty falsetto she thought she knew, and the black mask of Pineapple Jupiter, appearing at the head of the stairs, confirmed her suspicions. Without scruple she entered the mission herself one day and expended all her arts to pump the old negro. The moment McCausland's name was introduced, however, his loquacity was checked of a sudden, then took dizzy flights of irrelevance.

"Oh, dese chillun, chillun," cried Jupiter, puttering away at a broken pane, "dey done gone break my winders."

"The stout, ruddy gentleman, I mean," persisted Emily, but Jupiter was so absorbed in his hymn tune that he did not hear her.

Sharper heads than Emily's had failed to force McCausland's hand when he chose to shut it tight. The newspaper reporters, whom no ordinary walls can bar, had bestirred themselves to secure for an inquisitive public the "new evidence" that the government had presented before the grand jury in the Floyd case, but absolutely without avail. Where such experienced allies owned themselves beaten, the gentle maiden might surely do so without dishonor.

As s.h.a.garach foretold, Bertha had been spirited away. Mrs. Christenson, the intelligence offices, the Swedish consul, the Lutheran pastor, were all visited and revisited by Emily, especially since the new inspiration seized her, but none of them knew the address of the housemaid since she left Hillsborough that morning on an outward-bound train. The only rumor of her whereabouts was that vague report, coming from the bakeshop girl, which Dr. Silsby had set out to investigate.

With regard to the Arnolds' coachman, who had driven their carriage on the day of the fire, Emily considered s.h.a.garach to be curiously indifferent. He had promised to subpoena the man for the trial, but that was all. Yet his testimony was crucial, since he must know whether Harry was with his mother in the vehicle.

This was a peculiarity of s.h.a.garach's, in which he differed again from McCausland. Though he prepared his defense with consummate painstaking, when it came his turn to prosecute an unwilling witness, he seemed satisfied to know the truth in his own mind, relying upon his genius to extort a confession during the cross-examination. With a perjurer before him he wielded the lash like a slave-driver, and perhaps he was justified in this case in omitting a rehearsal which would only put the Arnolds on their guard.

But Emily's greatest disappointment came in what seemed to her the one weak point of Robert's defense, the axis around which the entire prosecution revolved. Time and again she had conferred with s.h.a.garach on the subject of her lover's reverie after the deed. To think that he could not remember a face he had seen, an incident, a word spoken, during those four hours--nothing but a vague itinerary of the afternoon, which came out with difficulty each time, and the course of his own meditations, which, to tell the truth, was clear and copious enough, but worthless for the purpose.

At her last visit to the lawyer's home he had entered into this more deeply. Apparently the method of attacking the enigma, which he had hinted at possessing from the very first, was now ripened. For he loaned Emily a ponderous volume on "Diseases of the Memory," and asked her to bring in all the evidence possible showing the mutual affection of nephew and uncle, not failing to wear the water lily from time to time, as he had suggested before. But she was not satisfied with this, and, knowing Robert had visited the park, spent one whole Sunday making a tour of that district, questioning each of the gray-coated policemen.