Not a tramp; rather a good-looking, well-mannered man, who had evidently seen better days.
"He had, moreover, a way of looking you right in the eye without flinching, following yours about like a searchlight without letting go of his hold. His voice, too, was the voice of a man of some refinement—a reed-like voice, like a clarionette, well-modulated, even musical at times, and with an intonation and accent which showed me at once that he was an Englishman.
"'I heard what you said last night about the Lancashire dialect,' he began, 'but I didn't like to stand up to speak to you. I was afraid you might not be satisfied with what I could do for you. But I am in such straits to-day that I couldn't help coming, and so I asked the Superintendent for your address. I don't want any money, but I must have some food; if you will help me you will do a kind act. I am out of money, and I may never get any more from home, so that what you do for me I may not be able to repay. I haven't really had much to eat for nearly a week and my strength is giving out. I could hardly get up your stairs.'
"All this, remember, without giving me a chance to ask him a single question and without stopping to take breath—just as a book agent rattles on—he standing all the time on my door-sill, his hat in his hand, not as a beggar would carry it, but as some well-bred friend who had dropped in for an afternoon call. Good deal in the way a man holds his hat, let me tell you, when you are sizing a stranger up. That's another one of my beliefs.
"I had brought him inside now and he was standing under my skylight, his face and figure making an even better impression on me than when he was in the dark of the doorway.
"'And you speak the Lancashire dialect, of course?' I asked, my eyes now taking in the military curl of his mustache, his broad shoulders and the way his really fine head was set upon them.
"'No,' he answered; 'to tell you the truth, I do not—not to be of any service to you. I know some words, of course, but not many. I ought to be able to speak it perfectly, for my father's place is in the next county; but I have been a good deal away from home. I didn't come for that; I came because you seemed to me last night to be the sort of a man I could talk to; I meet very few of them; I don't like to stop people in the street, and my clothes now are not fit to enter anyone's office, and it would do no good if I did, for I know no one here.'
"'Where have you lived?' I asked.
"'Oh, all over; Australia part of the time, three years in Canada——'
"'You don't look over twenty-five.'
"He dropped his eyes now and looked down at the floor.
"'I wish I was,' he answered slowly; 'I might have done differently. You are wrong, I am thirty-one—will be my next birthday. I was home last summer to see my father, but I only stayed an hour with him. He wouldn't talk to me, so I left and came here.'
"'Why not?'
"'Well, I'd rather not go into that; it's a family matter.'
"'Pretty rough, turning you out, wasn't it?' I was getting interested in him now.
"'No, I can't say that it was. I hadn't been square with him—not the year before.'
"'Well, you were ready to do the decent thing then, I hope?'
"'Yes, but my Governor is a peculiar sort of man that don't forget easily. But he's my father all the same, and so I'd rather keep away than have him hate me. No—please don't ask me anything about it. I don't think he was quite fair, but I'm not going to say so.'
"I had him in a chair now and had laid down my palette and brushes. When a man is thrown out into the world by his father and then refuses to abuse him, or let anybody else do so, there's something inside of him that you can build on.
"I handed him a greenback. 'Go down,' I said, 'on Sixth Avenue and get something to eat and anything else you need for your comfort, and then come back to me.'
"He folded the bill up carefully, put it in his waistcoat pocket, thanked me in a simple, straightforward way, just as any of you would have done had I loaned you an equal amount to tide you over some temporary emergency, and with the bow of a thoroughbred closed my door behind him and went downstairs.
"While he was gone I began unconsciously to let my imagination loose on him. I immediately invested him with all the attributes I had failed to discover in him while he stood hat in hand under my skylight. Some young blood, no doubt, of good family, I said to myself; ran through his allowance, shipped off to Australia, returns and is forgiven. Then more debts, more escapades. Father a choleric old Britisher, who gets purple in the face when he is angry—'Out you go, you dog; never more shall you be son of mine!" You remember George Holland as an irate father of the old school?—same kind of an old sardine. No question, though, but that his son was in hard lines and on the verge of suicide or, what was worse, crime.
"What, then, was my duty under the circumstances? What would my own Governor think of a man who had found me in a similar strait in London, penniless, half-clothed, and hungry, and who had turned me out again into the cold?
"Before I had decided what to do he was back again in my studio looking like a different man. Not only had he been fed, but he was clean-shaven and clean-collared.
"'I took you at your word,' he said. 'I had a bath and bought me a clean collar. Here is the change,' and he handed me back some silver. 'I don't want to promise anything I can't do, and I don't say I'll pay it back, for I may not be able to, but I'll try my best to do so. Good-by, and thank you again.'
"'Hold on,' I said. 'Sit down, and let me talk to you.' Now right here, gentlemen, I want to tell you"—Woods swept his eye around the circle as he spoke, then rose to his feet as if to give greater emphasis to what he was about to say, his round bullet-head, eye-glasses, and immaculate shirt collar glistening in the overhead light—"I want to tell you right here that the buying of that clean collar and the return of the change settled the matter for me. I'm a student of human nature, as most of you know, and I have certain fixed rules to guide me which never fail. My duty was clear; I would play the Good Samaritan for all I was worth. I wouldn't cross over and ask him how the cripple was getting on; I'd walk down both sides of the street, call an ambulance, lift him in to a down-covered cot run on C springs, and trundle him off to flowery beds of ease or whatever else I could scrape up that was comforting. Now listen—and, Mac, I want you to take all this in, for I am telling this yarn for your special benefit.
"That same afternoon I took him up to my rooms—I was living with my aunt then up on Murray Hill—opened up my wardrobe, pulled out a shirt, underwear, socks, shoes, cut-away coat, waistcoat, and trousers; gave him a scarf, and then to add a touch to his whole get-up I picked a scarf-pin from my cushion and stuck it in myself. Next I handed him a cigar, opened up a bottle of Scotch, and after dinner—my aunt was dining out, and we had the table to ourselves—sat up with him till near midnight, he and I talking together like any other two men who had met for the first time and who had, to their delight, found something in common.
"Nor would any of you have known the difference had you happened to drop in upon us. No reference, of course, was made to his condition or to the way in which we had met. He was clean, well-dressed, well-mannered, perfectly at ease, and entirely at home. You could see that by the way in which he shadowed his wine-glass as a sign to the waiter not to refill it; passed the end of his cigar toward me that I might snip it with the cutter attached to my watch-chain, having none of his own, of course—a fact he made no comment upon; did everything, in fact, down to the smallest detail (and I watched and studied him pretty closely) that any one of you would have done under similar circumstances; all of which proved his birth and breeding, and all of which, you will admit, no man not born to it can acquire and not be detected by one who knows.
"My idea was—and this is another one of my theories—that you can restore a man's energies only when you restore his self-respect, and I intended to prove my theory on this Englishman. What I was after was first to bring him back to his old self—he taking his place where he belonged, shutting out the hideous nightmare that was pursuing him—and then get him a situation where he could be self-sustaining. This done, I proposed to write to his father and patch it up somehow between them, and the next time I went abroad we would go together and kill the fatted calf, haul in the Yule log, summon the tenants, build triumphal arches, and all that sort of thing.
"The following morning promptly at ten o'clock he rapped at my studio door. Pitkin saw him and thought he had come to buy out the studio, he was so well dressed—you remember him, Pit?"
Pitkin shook his head and smiled.
"Then commenced the hunt for work, and I tell you it was hard sledding; but I stuck at it, and at the end of the week old Porterfield gave him a position as entry clerk in his foreign department. During all that week he was spending his time between my studio and my aunt's, I looking after his expenditures—not much, only a few dollars a day. Every evening we dined at home, and every evening we roamed the world: mountain climbing, pig sticking, pheasant shooting in Devonshire; who won the Derby, and why; English politics, English art, the tariff—every topic under the sun that I knew anything about and a lot I didn't, he leading or following in the talk, his eyes fixed on mine, his rich, musical voice filling the room, his handsome, well-bred body comfortably seated in my aunt's easiest chair.
"And now comes the most interesting part of this story. The afternoon before he was to present himself at Porterfield's, about five o'clock—an hour before I reached home—he rang my aunt's front-door bell; told the servant that I had been called suddenly out of town for the night and had sent him post haste in a cab for my portmanteau and overcoat. Then he tripped upstairs to my apartment, waited beside the servant until she had stowed away in my best Gladstone my dress-suit, shirt with its links and pearl studs, collars—everything, even to my patent-leather shoes; and then, while she was out of the room in search of my overcoat, emptied into his pockets all my scarf-pins, my silver brandy-flask, and a lot of knick-knacks on my bureau, took the coat on his arm, preceded her leisurely downstairs, she carrying the bag, stepped into the cab, and I haven't seen him since!"
"There, Mac, that yarn is told for your especial benefit. What do you think of it?"
"I think you're all white, Woods, and I'm glad to know you," cried Mac as he grasped the painter's hand and shook it warmly.
"Yes, but what do you think of that cur of an Englishman?"
"I think he'll live to see the day he'll regret the mean trick he played you," answered Mac; "but that doesn't prove your contention that all beggars are frauds."
"Did you try to catch him?" interrupted Boggs.
"No, I was too hurt. I didn't mind the money or the clothes. What I minded was the way in which I had squandered my personality. The only thing I did do was to tell Captain Alec Williams of our precinct about him.
"'Smooth-talking fellow?' Williams asked; 'had a scrap with his father? Light-blue eyes and a little turned-up mustache? Yes, I know him—slickest con' man in the business. We've got his mug in our collection; show it to you some day, if you come;' and he did."
"And the great reader of human nature didn't go to London and build arches and kill the fatted calf, after all," remarked Lonnegan, with a wink at Boggs.
"No," retorted Boggs; "he could have suicided himself at home with less trouble."
"Laugh on, you can't hurt me! I'm immune," said Woods. "I learned my lesson that time, and I've graduated. I'm not practising any theories, old or new; I'm doing missionary work instead, pointing out and running down dead beats wherever I see them. No more men's night meetings for me, no more widows with twins—no nothing. When I've got anything to give I hand it to my aunt. It isn't a pleasant yarn—it's one on me every time. I only told it to Mac so he could save his money."
"I'm saving it, Woods—save it every day; got a lot of small banks all over the place that pay me compound interest. Now I'll tell you a yarn, and I want you fellows to listen and keep still till I get through. If there's any doubts, Boggs, of your releasing your grasp on your talking machine, I'll take your remarks now. All right, enough said. Now hand me that tobacco, Lonnegan, and one of you fellows move back so I can get up closer, where you can all hear. This story, remember, Woods, is for you."
When Mac talks we listen. The story, whatever it may be, always comes straight from his heart.
"One cold, snowy night—so cold, I remember, that I had to turn up my coat collar and stuff my handkerchief inside to keep out the driving sleet—I turned into Tenth Street out of Fifth Avenue on my way here. It was after midnight—nearly one o'clock, in fact—and with the exception of the policeman on our beat—and I had met him on the corner of the Avenue—I had not passed a single soul since I had left the club. When I got abreast of the long iron railing I caught sight of the figure of a man standing under the gaslight. He wore a long ulster, almost to his feet, and a slouch hat. At sound of my footsteps he shrank back out of the light and crouched close to the steps of one of those old houses this side of the long wall. His movements did not interest me; waiting for somebody, I concluded, and doesn't want to be seen. Then the thought crossed my mind that it was a bad night to be out in, and that perhaps he might be suffering or drunk, a conclusion I at once abandoned when I remembered how warmly he was clad and how quickly he had sprung into the shadow of the steps when he heard my approach—all this, of course, as I was walking toward him. That I was in any danger of being robbed never crossed my mind. I never go armed, and never think of such things. It's the fellow who sees first who escapes, and up to this time I had watched his every move.
"When I got abreast of the steps he rose on his feet with a quick spring and stood before me.
"'I'm hungry,' he said in a low, grating voice. 'Give me some money; I don't mean to hurt you, but give me some money, quick!'
"I threw up my hands to defend myself and backed to the lamp-post so that I could see where to hit him best, trying all the time to get a view of his face, which he still kept concealed by the brim of his slouch hat.
"'That's not the way to ask for it,' I answered. I would have struck him then only for the tones of his voice, which seemed to carry a note of suffering which left me irresolute.
"He was edging nearer and nearer, with the movement of a prize-fighter trying to get in a telling blow, his long overcoat concealing the movements of his legs as thoroughly as his slouch hat did the features of his face. Two thoughts now flashed through my mind: Should I shout for the policeman, who could not yet be out of hearing, or should I land a blow under his chin and tumble him into the gutter.
"All this time he was muttering to himself: 'I'm crazy, I know, but I'm starving; nobody listens to me. This man's got to listen to me or I'll kill him and take it away from him.'
"I had gathered myself together and was about to let drive when he grabbed me around the waist; we both slipped on the ice and fell to the pavement, he underneath and I on top. I had my knee on his chest now, and was trying to get my fingers into his shirt collar to choke the breath out of him, when the buttons on his ulster gave way. I let go my hold and sprang up. The man was naked to his shoes, except for a pair of ragged cotton drawers!
"'Don't kill me,' he cried, 'don't kill me.' He was sobbing now, hat off, his face in the snow, all the fight out of him.
"I know a hungry man when I see him; been famished myself, wolfish and desperate once—and this man was hungry.
"'Put on your hat, button up your coat,' I said, 'and come with me.'"
"Bully for you, Mac; that's the kind of talk," cried Boggs. "Waltzed him right down to the police station, didn't you?"
"No, I brought him to this very room, sat him down in that very chair where you sit, Boggs," answered Mac, "and before this very fire. He followed me like a homeless dog that you meet in the street, never speaking, keeping a few steps behind; waited until I had unlocked the street door, held it back for me to pass through; mounted the flight of steps behind me—the light is out, as you know, at that hour, and I had to scratch a match to find my way; remained motionless inside this room until I had turned on the gas, when I found him standing by that screen over there, a dazed expression on his face—like a man who had fallen overboard and been picked up by a passing ship.
"He had been discharged from his last place because some drunken young men had lost their money in a bar-room and had accused him of taking it. For some weeks he had slept in a ten-cent lodging-house. Two days before someone had stolen his clothes, all but his overcoat, which was over him. Since that time he had been walking around half-naked.
"'Pull that coat off,' I said, 'and put on these,' and I handed him some underwear and a suit of sketching clothes that hung in my closet. 'And now drink this,' and I poured out a spoonful of whiskey—all he needed on an empty stomach.
"When he was warm and dry—this did not take many minutes—we started downstairs again and over to Sixth Avenue. Jerry's screens and blinds were shut, but his lights were still burning; some fellows were having a game of poker in the back room.
"'Got anything to eat, Jerry?' I asked.
"'Yes, Mr. MacWhirter; a cold ham and some hot chowder, if they ain't turned off the steam. Pretty good chowder, too, this week. What'll it be—for one or two?'
"'For one, Jerry.'
"I left him alone for a while sitting at one of Jerry's tables, his hungry, eager eyes watching every movement of the old man, as a starved cat watches the bowl of milk you are about to place before it.
"When he had devoured everything Jerry had given him, I moved to the bar, poured out half a glass of whiskey from one of Jerry's bottles, waited until he had swallowed it, and then sent him upstairs to sleep in one of Jerry's beds."
"And that was the last you ever saw of him, of course," broke out Woods, with a laugh.
"No; saw him every day for a month, till he got work. Saw him again to-day at Pusch's. He waited on us. It was Carl."
PART V
In which Boggs Becomes Dramatic and Relates a Tale of Blood.
Mr. Alexander Macwhirter's great picture, "Early Morning on the East River," was still on his easel. The Hanging Committee had taken the outside measurement of the frame; had hung the other pictures up to the line of this measurement; had inserted the title and price in the official catalogue, and were then awaiting Mac's finishing touches.
MacWhirter had struck a snag in the middle distance, and until this was repainted to his satisfaction the picture would not leave his studio, official catalogue or no official catalogue.
On this afternoon Lonnegan was the first to arrive. The great architect on his way downtown must have dropped in upon some social function, or was about to attend one later in the day, for he wore his morning frock-coat, white waistcoat, and a decoration in his button-hole—an unusual attire for Lonnegan unless the affair was of more than customary brilliancy and importance.
"Let up, Mac," cried Lonnegan from behind the Chinese screen, as he looked over its top; "the light's gone and you can't see what you're doing."
"I've got light enough to see where to put my foot," Mac shouted back.
"Easy, easy, old man! Don't smash it; masterpieces are rare! Let me have a look at it. Why, it's all right! What's the matter with it?"
"Shadow tones under the cliffs all out of key. There are a lot of wharves, sheds, and vessels lying there half-smothered in mist. I do not want to do more than suggest them, but they've got to be right."
"Well, but you can't see to paint any longer. Give it up until morning."
"Haven't got time! Hanging Committee has sent here three times to-day."
Marny, Pitkin, Boggs, and Woods walked in and joined the group about Mac's easel, a "sick picture" (pictures get ill and die, or recover and become famous, as well as men) being a matter of the very first importance.
Each new arrival had some advice to offer. Pitkin thought the sky reflections were not silvery enough. Woods wanted a touch of red somewhere on the sides or sterns of the boats, with a "click" of high light on their decks to relieve them from the haze of the background. "Right out of the tube, old man, and don't touch it afterward. It'll make it sing!" Boggs ignored all suggestions by saying, in a dictatorial tone:
"Don't you do anything of the kind, Mac; you don't want any drops of red sealing wax spilt on that middle distance, or any blobs of white; only make it worse. All you need is a touch here and there of yellow-white against that purple haze. But you don't want to guess at it. This East River is a fact, not a dream. And it's right here under our eyes. Everybody knows it and everybody knows how it looks. If you want it true, the best thing for you to do is to go there to-morrow morning at daylight and wait until the sun gets to your angle. You fellows that insist on painting things out of your heads instead of following what is set down before you will run to seed like cabbages. Why you want to scoop up the emptyings of everybody's wash-basins, when it is so easy to get buckets of pure water fresh from nature's well, is what gets me."
"Talks like an art critic," growled Pitkin.
"And with as little sense," added Woods.
"More like a plumber, I should think," remarked Lonnegan drily. "Only don't you go up on that hill at five o'clock in the morning, Mac, or you'll never finish that picture or anything else. Some thug will finish you. That's the worst hole on the river—regular den of thieves live under that hill. I came near being murdered there myself once."
Lonnegan's statement caused a sensation.
"You came near being murdered, you dear Lonny?" Mac asked nervously.
"Yes."
"When?"
"Some three years ago."
Boggs, who was still smarting under the contempt with which his suggestion had been received, now shouted in the voice of a newsboy selling an afternoon edition:
"Full and graphic account of the hair-breadth escape of a great architect. Sit down, gentlemen, and listen to a tale that will clog your veins with dynamite and make goose shivers go up and down your spine. Here, Lonnegan, rest your immaculately upholstered body in this chair and tell us all about it. Put up your brushes, Mac; I'll help you wash 'em. Everybody draw up to the fire." (Here Boggs dropped into his own chair.) "The modern Moses is going to tell us how he was pulled out of the bulrushes and why he has an excuse for still walking around among his fellow-men instead of being tucked away in some comfortable cemetery on a hill under a mausoleum of his own designing.
"Ladies and gentlemen"—Boggs was again on his feet, a ring in his voice like that of a showman—"it is my especial privilege, and one of the greatest honors of my life, to introduce to you this afternoon the distinguished architect, Mr. Archibald Perkins Lonnegan, who——"
"Will you keep still!" cried Pitkin, putting both hands on Boggs's shoulder and forcing him into his chair. "Sit on him, Marny!"
Mac by this time had laid his palette on his painting table and had moved to the fire.
"You never told me anything about that, Lonny."
"Well, don't know that I did; 'twas some time ago."
"You're sure that you aren't really murdered, me long-lost che-ild?" whined Boggs in an anxious tone; these changes of manner, tone, and gesture of the Chronic Interrupter,—imitating in one sentence the newsboy, in another the showman, and now the anxious mother—were as much a part of his personality, and as much enjoyed by the coterie, despite their constant protests, as the bubbling good nature which inspired them.
"Feel that," said Lonnegan, tapping his biceps as he frowned at Boggs, "and you'll find out how much of a corpse I am."
Boggs' plump fingers squeezed the corded muscles of the speaker with the dexterity of a surgeon hunting for broken bones. Then he cast his eyes heavenward.
"Saved by a miracle, gentlemen. Thank God, he is still spared to us! Now go on, you fashion-plate! When, where, and in what part of your valuable and talented person were you almost murdered?"
Everybody was now seated and had his pipe filled, all except Lonnegan, who stood on the rug with his slender, well-built and, to-day, well-dressed body in silhouette against the blazing logs, his shapely legs forming an inverted V.
"This isn't much of a story. I wouldn't tell it at all if it wasn't to save Mac's life. There are two or three places under that East River hill where it is unsafe to walk even in broad daylight, let alone in the gray of the morning. When I tried it I was looking for one of my foremen—or, rather, for one of his derrick-men. I knew the street, but I didn't know the number. After dinner I started up Third Avenue, turned to Avenue A, and found that my only way to reach the place was down a long street leading to the river, flanked on each side by barren lots used as dumping-grounds and dotted here and there with squatters' shanties built of refuse timber, old tin roofs, and junk; gas lamps a block apart, with the sidewalks flagged only in the centre.
"I went myself because I wanted the derrick-man, and I wanted him at seven o'clock on Monday morning, and I knew he'd come if I could see him.
"Half-way down this long street, say two blocks from the avenue, which was brilliantly lighted and thronged with people—it was Saturday night—I saw the lights of a bar-room, the only brick building fronting either side of the walk."
"Were you rigged out in this royal apparel, Lonny?" broke in Boggs.
"No; I was in a dress-suit and wore an overcoat. Without thinking of the danger, I stepped inside and walked up to the barkeeper—a villainous-looking cutthroat, in his shirt sleeves.
"'I am looking for a man by the name of Dennis McGrath,' I said; 'I thought some of you men might know him.'
"The fellow looked me all over, and then he called to two men sitting at the table behind the stove. As he spoke I caught the flash of a wink quivering on his eyelid—the lid farthest from me. Nothing uncovers the workings of a man's brain like a carefully concealed wink. It may mean anything from ridicule to murder.
"One of the men winked at got up from a table and approached the bar, followed by a larger man, with a face like a bull terrier.
"'What yer say his name is—McGrath?'
"All this time his eyes were sizing me up, scrutinizing my hat, my shirt-studs, watch-chain, overcoat, gloves, down to my shoes. The smaller man—'Shorty,' the barkeeper called him—now repeated the larger man's question.
"'Did yer say his name's McGrath? What's he do?'
"'He is a derrick-man.'
"Shorty was now well under the light of the bar. He had a scar over one damaged eye and a flattened nose, the same blow having evidently wrecked both; over the other was pulled a black cloth cap; around his throat was a dirty red handkerchief, no collar showing—a capital make-up for a stage villain, I thought, as I looked him over, especially the handkerchief. Even Mac here would look like a burglar with his hair mussed, collar off, and a red handkerchief tied around his throat.
"The barkeeper piped up again: 'Get a move on, Shorty, and help the gent find the Mick.'
"'Shure! I know him. He's a-livin' under de rocks. Come 'long, Boss. I'll git him.'
"Two more men stepped out of the gloom; one, in a cap and yellow overcoat, went behind the bar and slipped something into his pocket; then the two lounged out of the room and shut the door behind them. I began to take in the situation. The purpose of the wink was clear now. I was in a dive in a deserted street, unarmed and alone, and surrounded by cutthroats. If I tried to find McGrath with any one of these men as a guide I would be robbed and thrown over the cliff; if I attempted to go back I would land in the clutches of the man in the yellow overcoat and his companion. All this time the barkeeper was leaning over the bar, his eyes fixed on my face. My only hope lay in a bold front.
"'All right,' I said to Shorty; 'how far is it?'
"'Oh, not very fur—'bout t'ree blocks.'
"I stepped out into the night.
"Down the long street on the way to the river stood three men—the man in the yellow overcoat, his companion, and one other. They separated when they saw me, the one in the overcoat retracing his steps toward the dive without looking my way, the others sauntering on ahead. I walked on, meditating what to do next. I could throttle Shorty and take to my heels, but then I would have to reckon with the pickets who might be between me and the bar-room.
"Sometimes, when in great danger, a sudden inspiration comes to a man; mine came out of a clear sky.
"'Hold on,' I said to Shorty—we were now half a block from the dive. 'Wait a minute; I have nothing smaller than a ten-dollar bill, and I want to give you something for your trouble. I'll run back and get the barkeeper to change it. Stay where you are; I won't be a minute.'
"I turned on my heel and walked back toward the dive with a quick step, as if I had forgotten something. The man with the yellow overcoat saw me coming and stepped into the street as if to intercept me. Shorty gave two low whistles, and the man stepped back to the sidewalk again. I reached the doorstep of the dive. All the men were now between me and the river, the one in the yellow overcoat but a short distance from the bar-room, Shorty waiting for me where I left him. With the same hurried movement I swung back the door, stepped inside, stripped off my overcoat, folded it close, threw it over my arm, and, before the barkeeper could realize what I was doing, pulled my hat close down to my ears, jerked the lapels of my dress-coat over my shirt-front to hide the white bosom, dashed out of the door and sprang for the middle of the street."
Here Lonnegan stopped and puffed away at his pipe. For a minute every man kept still.
"Go on, Lonny," said Mac, the intensity of his interest apparent in the tones of his voice.
"That's all," said Lonnegan. "The change of coats and slight disguise of hat and lapels threw them off their guard. The outside pickets thought, when I burst through the door, that I was somebody else until I was too far away to be overtaken. That's what saved my life."
"And you call that an adventure, you fake!" cried Boggs. "Ran like a street dog, did you, and hid under your mammy's bed?"
"Well, what's the matter with the yarn," retorted Lonnegan; "it's true, isn't it?"
"Matter with it? Everything! No point to it, no common sense in it; just a fool yarn! You go out hunting trouble with your imagination on edge, like a scared child. You meet a man who offers to conduct you gratuitously to a house up a back street; you agree to pay him for his trouble; you make a lame excuse to dodge him, he relying on your word to return, and then you take to your heels and cheat him out of his pay. No yarn at all; just a disgraceful bunco game!"
The Circle were now in an uproar of laughter, everybody talking at once. Marny finally got the floor.
"Boggs is right," he said, "about Lonnegan's conduct. It is extraordinary how low an honest man will sometimes stoop. Lonnegan's life among the aristocrats of Murray Hill is undermining his high sense of honor. Now I'll tell you a story of an escape that really has some point to it."
"Is this another fake murder yarn?" asked Boggs. "We don't want any more fizzles."
"Pretty close to the real thing—close enough to turn your hair gray. About fifteen years ago——"
"Now hold on, Marny," interrupted Boggs, "one thing more. Is this out of your head, like one of your muddy, woolly landscapes, or is it founded on fact?"
"It's founded on fact."
"Got any proof?"
"Yes, got the pistol that saved my life. It's on a shelf in my studio downstairs. If anybody doubts my story I'll bring it up. About twelve or fifteen years back——"
"He said fifteen a moment since," grumbled Boggs in an undertone to himself, "now he's qualifying it. First knock-down for the doubters. Go on."
"Well, say fifteen then; my memory is not good on dates; my brother and I made a trip to the Peaks of Otter, just over the North Carolina line. I was a boy of twenty and he was a man of thirty-two. He was a dead shot with a rifle or pistol and could knock a cent to pieces edgewise at fifty yards. While I painted, he scalped red squirrels and chipmunks with a long Flobert pistol that carried a ball the size of a buckshot; a toy really, but true as a Winchester.
"We found the Peaks, or rather the peak we climbed, a sugar-loaf of a mountain with almost perpendicular slopes near its top, crowned by a cluster of enormous boulders. From its crest one can see all over that part of the State. Half-way up we stopped at a small tavern, inquired the way to the top, borrowed two small blankets of the landlord, and bought some cold meat and bread and a few teaspoonfuls of tea. These we put in a haversack, and leaving my heavy painting-trap we continued on about three o'clock in the afternoon to climb the peak. The only things we carried, outside of the provisions and blankets, were my pocket sketch-book and the Flobert pistol. It was the worst I have ever done in all my mountain climbing. Sometimes we edged along a precipice and sometimes we pulled ourselves up a cliff almost perpendicular. There was no doubt about the path—that was plainly marked by sign-boards and blazed trees and the wear of many feet, and then again it was perfectly plain that it was the only way up the mountain.
"We reached the top about sundown and found a cabin built of logs, with one window, a sawed pine door with a bolt inside, a rusty stove and pipe, and a low bed covered with dry straw. Scattered about were two or three wooden stools, and on the window-sill stood a tin coffee-pot and two tin cups.
"When it began to grow dark and the chill of the mountains had settled down, we started a fire in the stove, put on the pot, dumped in our tea, and began to spread out our provisions. Then we lighted one of the candles the inn people had given us, and ate our supper.
"About ten o'clock a puff of wind struck the stovepipe and scattered the ashes over the floor. The next instant the growl of distant thunder reached our ears. Then a storm burst upon the mountains, the lightning striking all about us. This went on for two hours—after midnight really; we couldn't sleep, and we didn't try to. We just sat up and took it, expecting every minute that the shanty would be tumbled in on top of us. About one o'clock the rain slackened, the wind went down, and we could hear the growl of the thunder as the lightning played havoc on the peak to the north of us. Then we bolted the door to keep the wind from blowing it in should the storm return, rolled up in our blankets on our bed of straw and leaves, and fell asleep, leaving the matches close to the candle.
"We had hardly dropped off when we were awakened by a pounding at the door. In the dead of night, remember, on top of a mountain that a cat could hardly climb in the daytime, and after that storm!
"We both sprang up, scared out of our wits. Then we heard a man's voice, rough and coarse, and in a commanding tone:
"'Open the door!'
"I was on my feet now. My brother caught up his pistol, slipped in a cartridge, and poured the balance of the ammunition into his side-pocket; then he called:
"'Who are you?'
"'Don't make any difference who we are,' came another voice, sharper and in a higher key. 'You don't own this shanty. Open the door, damn you, or we'll break it in!'
"We might have handled one man; two or more were out of the question. My brother stepped across the bed, backed into the shadow away from the rays of the flickering firelight, cocked the pistol, and nodded to me. I slipped back the bolt.
"Two men entered. One had a brown, bushy beard, a low forehead, and ugly, uncertain mouth. He was stockily built, with stout legs and short, powerful arms and hands. The other was tall and lanky, with a hatchet face and cunning, searching eyes—eyes that looked at you and then looked away. He wore a slouch hat and homespun clothes and high boots, in which were stuffed the bottoms of his trousers. As he followed the shorter man inside the cabin he had to stoop to clear the top of the door-jamb.
"We saw that they were not mountaineers—their dress showed that; nor did they look like the men we had seen in the village. Both were drenched to the skin, the legs of their trousers and boots reeking with mud, the water still dripping from their hats.
"The shorter man looked at me and then ran his eye around the room.
"'Where is the other one?' he asked in the same domineering tone.
"'Here he is,' answered my brother coolly, from behind the bed.
"The two men peered into the shadow, where my brother sat crouched with his back to the logs, the pistol on his knee within reach of his hand. From where I stood I could catch the red glint of the forelight flashing down its barrel. The men must have seen it too.
"'We're goin' to chuck some wood in this 'ere stove. Got any objections?' asked the tall man, pulling his wet slouch hat from his head and beating the water out of it against the pile of firewood. The tone was a little less brutal.
"'No,' answered my brother curtly.
"The tall one reached over the pile, picked up a log and shoved it in the stove. Then the two stretched themselves out at full length and looked steadily at the blaze, the steam from their wet clothes filling the room. No other word was passed, either by the men or by my brother or myself, nor did we change our positions. I sat on one of the stools and my brother sat in the corner where he could draw a bead if either of the men showed fight. Three o'clock came, then four, then five, and then the cold gray light which tells of the coming dawn stole in between the cracks of the cabin and the broken window. At the first streak of light the tall man lifted himself to his feet, the short man followed, and swinging wide the door the two stalked out to the farthest edge of the pile of boulders overlooking the plain, where they squatted on their haunches, their eyes toward the east. We took our positions on a rock behind them, a little higher up. Any move they made would come under the fire of my brother's toy gun. The sun's disk rose slowly—first a peep of the old fellow's eye, then half his cheek, and then his round, jolly face wreathed in smiles. When the bottom edge of his chin had swung clear of the crest of the distant mountain range the tall man leaned over his companion and said in a decisive tone:
"'Well, Bill, she's up,' and without a word to either of us they swung themselves through the opening in the boulders and disappeared."
The coterie had listened in their usual absorbed way whenever Marny had the floor. His experience, like Mac's, covered half the world. Boggs had not taken his eyes from Marny's face during the entire recital.
"And that's all you know about them?" asked Lonnegan in a serious tone.
"Except what the landlord told us," continued Marny in answer, turning to Lonnegan. "The two men, he said, had stopped at the tavern about nine o'clock that night, had asked who was on top, and had hurried on; all they wanted was a stable lantern, which he lent them, and which they didn't return. He had never seen either of them before, and they didn't pass the tavern on their way back."
"What did you think of the affair?" asked Pitkin in a serious tone of voice.
"We had only two conclusions. They had either come to rob us, and were scared off by the toy pistol, or they were carrying out a wager of some kind."
"And it took you all night and the next day to find that out?" exclaimed Boggs in a tone of assumed contempt. "Really, gentlemen, this whole afternoon should go on record as the proceedings of a kindergarten. Just think what rot we've had: Lonnegan promises a poor workingman a job and takes to his heels to cheat him out of his pay; Marny, who, like Mac, poses as a philanthropist, and claims to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, refuses shelter to two half-drowned tourists who come up to see the sunrise, and instead of hustling round to get 'em hot tea and grub, he posts his big brother in a corner with a gun where he can blow the tops of their heads off. Rot—all of it! But what I object to most is the 'let-down' at the tag-end of each of these yarns. You work up to a climax, and nothing happens. Just like one of these half-baked modern plays we've been having—all the climax in the first act, and a dreary drivel from that on till the curtain drops. I expected Marny's yarn would taper off in a hand-to-hand death struggle; both men thrown over the cliff; the finding of their mangled bodies, impaled on the trees, by the sheriff, who had tracked them for years, and who promptly identified both scoundrels, one as 'Dead House Dick' and the other as 'Murder Pete'; a vote of thanks to the two heroes by the State legislature, one of whom, thank God! is still with us"—and he bowed grandiloquently at Marny—"and a ring-down with a beautiful, unknown woman, supposed to be an heiress, creeping in at twilight to weep over their graves, all the stage lights turned down and a low tremolo going on in the orchestra. Tamest, deadest lot of twaddle I've heard around this fire! Now let me tell you a yarn that means something. Blood this time—red blood. None of your dress-suit and warmed-up tea and toy-pistol adventures."
Everybody straightened up in his chair to get a better view of Boggs. The Chronic Interrupter was about to appear in a new rôle. The speaker opened his coat, tossed back the lapels as if to give his plump body more room, and rose slowly to his feet, his black diamond-pointed eyes glistening, his lips quivering with suppressed merriment. It was evident that Boggs was loaded to the muzzle; it was also evident, from the unusual earnestness of his manner, that he was about to fire off something of more than usual importance.
"No preliminaries, mind you. Right to the spot in a jump. This happened in Stamboul the winter I made those sketches of the mosques."
Mac looked up, an expression of surprise in his face. He thought he knew every act of Boggs's life from his cradle up—they being bosom chums. That Boggs had even been in the East was news to him. Boggs caught the look and repeated his opening in a louder voice.
"In Stamboul, remember, across the Galata from Pera. I had finished the flight of marble steps and entrance of the Valedée, and was looking around for another subject, when a Turk with a green scarf around his fez (that showed he'd been to Mecca), who had been keeping off the crowd while I painted, offered to carry my trap to the Mosque of the Six Minarets up in the Plaza of the Hippodrome. A man who has been to Mecca is generally to be trusted, so I handed him my kit and followed his lead. On the way to the plaza he stopped beside a low wall and pointed to an opening in the ground. I looked down and saw a flight of stone steps.
"'This is not for the Effendi to paint,' he said, 'but it is something for him to see. It is the great underground cistern where the water was kept during the sieges.'
"That suited me to a dot—caverns always appeal to me—and down I went, followed by the green fez. Down, down, down, into a big vaulted chamber, the roof supported on marble columns running back into the gloom, only the nearby ones in relief where the light from the opening above fell upon their white shafts, very much as a forest looks at night when a torch is lighted. Stretching away was a dirt floor, uneven in places, and away back in the half-gloom I could make out the surface of a great pool. Now and then something would strike the water, the splash reverberating through the cavern.
"When my eyes became more accustomed to the darkness I could see men moving about, dragging ropes, and beyond these a dull light, like that from a grimy cellar window. This, the Turk said, was the other exit, the one nearest to the Mosque of the Six Minarets; the men, he added, were rope-makers; some of them lived here and only left the cisterns at night, as the daylight blinded them. So I followed on, the Turk ahead, my kit in his hand.
"In the centre of the enormous cavern, half-way between the light of the street opening above the steps and the distant cellar-window light, I came to a circle of big stone columns standing close together, enclosing a space not much bigger than this room of Mac's. They were of marble and rather large for their height, although it was so dark that I could not see the roof distinctly. At this instant one of those indefinable chills, which with me always foretells danger, crept over me. I called to the Turk. There was no answer; only the sound of his feet, but quicker, as if he were running. Then a feeling took possession of me of someone following me—that's another one of my safeguards. I turned my head quickly and caught the edge of a man's body as it dodged behind the column I had just passed. Then a head was thrust from around the column in front, then another on the side—rough looking brutes, bareheaded and frowzy. There was no question now—the Turk was their accomplice and had led me into this trap. These fellows meant business. Not backsheesh, but murder, and your body in the pool!" Here Boggs's manner became more serious. The suppressed smile had vanished.
"I was better built in those days than I am now," he continued in a graver tone; "not so fat, and could run like a sand-snipe, and it didn't take me long to decide what to do. To reach the staircase was my only hope.
"I whirled suddenly, struck the brute behind the rear column full in the face before he could raise his hands, sprang over his body, and ran with all my might toward the light at the foot of the staircase. If you thought you were running, Lonnegan, up that long street, you should have seen me light out. It was a race for life over an uneven pavement, where I might stumble any moment, four men pursuing me, then three, then one. I could tell this from their footfalls. The light grew stronger; I turned my head for a second to size up my opponent. He was younger than the others, was naked to the waist, and wore only a pair of trunks. His bare feet made hardly a sound. I was within fifty yards now of the lower step, running like a deer, my wind almost gone. If I could reach that and bound up into the daylight, he would be afraid to follow. The light footfalls came closer; he was within twenty feet of me; I could hear his heavy breathing and smothered curses. My foot was now within a few feet of the steps; one spring and I would be safe. I put forth all my strength, miscalculated the bottom step, and fell headlong on the steps! The next instant his body struck mine with the impact of a tiger falling upon his prey, flattening me to the steps and grinding my lips into the sand covering the stones—I can taste it now. His fingers tightened about my throat. In my agony I braced myself and rolled over, partly throwing him off. Then my eyes lighted on a long curved knife with a turquoise-studded handle. A man notes these things in a moment like this. I minded even a spot of rust on the blade.
"Again his fingers tightened; my breath was going. That peculiar swelling of the tongue and dryness which sometimes comes with fever filled my mouth. The knife was now tightly gripped in his right hand, his fingers twisting my shirt collar into a tourniquet. I straightened my back, gathered all my strength, and lunged forward. The knife flashed, and then a horrible thing happened!"
