BLOOD AND IRON
Ten o'clock in the Saturday forenoon marked the time of Superintendent Kittredge's flying visit to his chief's headquarters-on-the-field at the head of Shonoho Canyon; and at that hour Evan Blount, blinking dizzily, and with his head bandaged and throbbing as if the premier company of all the African tom-tom symphonists were making free with it, was letting Mrs. Honoria beat up his pillows and prop him with them, so that the drum-beating clamor might be minimized to some bearable degree.
"You are feeling better now?" suggested the volunteer nurse, going to adjust the window-curtains for the better comfort of the blinking and aching eyes.
The victim of the hook-and-ladder squad's mascot answered qualitatively.
"I feel as if I had been having an argument with a battering-ram and had come off second-best. I've been out of my head, haven't I?"
"A little, yes; but that was to be expected. You were pretty badly hurt."
"Have I been talking?"
"Not very much—nothing intelligible." The little lady had drawn her chair to the window and was busying herself with the never-finished embroidery.
"What hit me—was it the truck?"
"No; some of the people in the street said it was a dog; a coach-dog running and jumping at the heads of the fire-horses. In falling you struck your head against the iron grating of a sewer inlet."
"Umph!" said Blount, and the face-wrinkling which was meant to be a sardonic smile turned itself into a painful grin. "Shot to death by a dog! Blenkinsop or some of the others ought to have run that for a head-line." Then, with a twist of the hot eyeballs: "This isn't my room. Where am I?"
"You are in the spare room of our suite. Your father had you brought here so that we could take care of you properly. But you mustn't talk too much; it's the doctor's orders."
Blount lay for a long time watching her as she passed the needle in and out through the bit of snowy linen stretched upon the tiny embroidery-ring. She had fine eyes, he admitted; eyes with the little downward curve in brow and lid at the outer corners—the curve of allurement, he had heard it called. Also, her hands were shapely and pretty. He recalled the saying that a woman may keep her age out of her face, but her hands will betray her. Mrs. Honoria's hands were still young; they looked almost as young as Patricia's, he decided. At the comparison he broke over the rule of silence.
"Does Patricia know?" he asked.
"Certainly. She has been here nearly all morning. She wouldn't let anybody else hold your head while the doctor was sewing it up."
"I know," he returned; "that is a part of her—of her special training: first aid to the injured, and all that. They teach it in the German sociological schools she attended last year."
"Oh, yes; I see"—with a malicious little smile to accentuate the curving downdroop of the pretty eyelids. "You mean that she was just getting a bit of practice. I wondered why she was so willing; most young women are so silly about the sight of a little blood. Don't you think you'd better try to sleep for a while? Doctor Dillon said it would be good for you if you could."
"Heavens and earth!" he chanted impatiently; "I'm not sick!" And then, with a sharp fear stabbing him: "What day is this, please?"
She looked up with a smile. "Are you wondering if you have lost a day? You haven't. The fire was at three o'clock this morning, and this is Saturday."
As if the naming of the day had been a spell to strike him dumb, Blount shut his eyes and groped helplessly for some hand-hold upon the suddenly rehabilitated responsibilities. Saturday—the day when Gryson would return with the proofs which, if they were to serve any good end, must be given the widest possible publicity in the two days remaining before the election. Blount recalled his carefully laid plans: he had intended giving Collins and the two record clerks a half-holiday, so that Gryson might come and go unnoticed. Also, he had meant to make a definite appointment with Blenkinsop and the representative of the United Press, to the end that there might be no delay in the firing of the mine. Lastly, Gryson must be shielded and gotten out of the city in safety; so much the traitor had a right to demand if he should risk his liberty and his life by returning with the evidence.
It was a hideous tangle to owe itself to the joyous gambollings of the firemen's mascot dog. And there was more to it than the hopeless smashing of the Saturday's plans. Into the midst of the mordant reflections, and adding a sting which was all its own, came the thought of this newest obligation laid upon him by his father and his father's wife. They had taken him in and were loading him down with kinsman gifts of care and loving-kindness, while his purpose had been—must still be—to strike back like a merciless enemy. He remembered the old fable of the adder warmed to life in a man's bosom, and it left him sick and nerveless.
None the less, the obsession of the indomitable purpose persisted, gripping him like the compelling hand of a giant in whose grasp he was powerless. For a time he sought to escape, not realizing that the obsession was the call of the blood passed on from the men of his race who, with axe and rifle, had hewn and fought their way in the primeval wilderness, and would not be denied. Neither did he suspect that the dominating passion driving him on was his best gift from the man against whom he was pitting his strength. What he did presently realize was that the giant grip of purpose was not to be broken; and thereupon a vast cunning came to possess him. He must have time and a chance to plan again: if he should feign sleep, perhaps the woman whose presence and personality were shackling the inventive thought would go away and leave him free to think.
She did go after a while, though so noiselessly that when he opened his eyes it was with the fear that he should see her still bending over the little embroidery frame at the window. Finding himself alone, he sat up in bed and gave the broken head an opportunity to blot him out if it could. For a little space the walls of the room became as the interior of a hollow peg-top, spinning furiously with a noise like the rushing of many waters. After the surroundings had resumed their normal figurings he rose to his knees. There was another grapple with the whirling peg-top, and again he mastered the dizzying confusion. Made bold by success, he got his feet on the floor and stood up, clinging to the brass foot-rail of the bed until the unstable encompassments had once more come to rest.
By this time he was able to conquer all save the throbbing headache. Shuffling first to one door and then to the other, he shot the bolts against intrusion. Then he staggered across to the dressing-case and took a look at himself in the glass. The bandaged head, with its haggard, pain-distorted face grimacing back at him, extorted a grunt of sardonic disapproval, but the mirror answered the query which had sent him stumbling across to it. The bandage was comparatively small and tightly drawn; a soft hat could be worn over it—the hat would cover and decently hide it.
Next he found his clothes, those he had been wearing at the time of the accident. Somebody had been thoughtful enough to have them cleaned and pressed; from which he argued that the plunging fall on the wet asphalt had been demoralizing in more ways than one. Continuing the experimental venture, he walked back and forth and up and down until he could do it without clutching at the bed-rails to save himself from falling. Then he reshot the door-bolts and went back to bed to await developments.
The first of these came when Patricia brought his luncheon. He had been wondering if she would be the one to come; wondering and hoping. With the unfilial purpose driving him on, there were added twinges at the thought of his father's wife going on piling the mountain of obligation higher and still higher by waiting upon him, and thus reminding him at every turn of the adder fable. With Patricia it was different.
"Good morning," he grimaced, when Patricia came in with the daintily appointed server. "Getting a bit more of the first-aid practice, are you?"
"I am obeying orders," she flashed back, when she had shaken up the pillows and placed the appetizing meal within his reach. "Mrs. Blount said I'd probably have a less disturbing influence upon you than she would. Shall I feed you?"
"Good heavens, no! I'm not that near dead, I hope! If you don't believe it, you may sit down and watch me eat—if you're not missing your own luncheon."
"Nurses have no regular meal-times," she retorted. And then: "You are feeling a great deal better, aren't you?"
"Much better—since you came. Did they tell you it was a dog?"
She nodded, and he went on.
"It was my unlucky night, I guess. Did the fire burn up my office? I forgot to ask Mrs. Blount about that."
"No; it was a building across the street from the Temple Court."
"'Small favors thankfully received,'" he quoted, resolutely pushing a fresh recurrence of the tomtom beatings into the background; "small favors and larger ones in proportion—this broth, for example. It's simply delicious. I hadn't realized how hungry I was."
"The broth ought to be good; I made it myself, you know."
"You did? Where, for pity's sake?"
"In the hotel kitchen. The chef was furious at first. He twirled his Napoleon-III mustaches and sputtered and swelled up like an angry old turkey. But when I talked nice to him in his own beloved Bordelaise he let me do anything I pleased."
Blount looked up quickly, and the movement brought the head-throbbings back with disconcerting celerity.
"You are cruelly kind to me, Patricia; everybody is kind to me. And I'm not needing kindness just now," he ended.
"Aren't you? I don't agree with you, and I'm sure your father and Mrs. Blount wouldn't." Then she went on to tell him how they had all been up, watching the progress of the fire from their windows, when the word came that he had been hurt in the street. Also, she told how his father had impatiently smashed the telephone because, the wires having been cut and tangled in the fire, he could get no response, and how, thereupon, he had turned the entire night force of the hotel out to go in search of a doctor. "But with all that, he couldn't stand it to look on while the doctor was taking the stitches," she added. "He turned his back and tramped over here to the window; and I could hear him gritting his teeth and—and swearing."
If Evan Blount ate faster than a sick man should, it was because there are limits to the finest fortitude. Patricia ran on cheerfully, minimizing her own part in the first-aid incidents, and magnifying the anxious and affectionate concern of the senator and his wife. He listened because he could not help it; but when he had finished, and she was inquiring if there was anything else she could do for him, he dissembled, saying that he would try to sleep, and asking her to shut out more of the daylight and to deny him to everybody until evening.
She promised; but naturally enough, with the dreadful responsibility drawing nearer with every hour-striking of the tiny leather-cased travelling-clock on the dresser, sleep was out of the question for him. Hot-eyed and restless, he wore out the long afternoon in feverish impatience, slipping now and then into the shadow land of delirium when the pain was severest, but clinging always to the obsessing idea. At whatever cost, the crisis must find him resolute to do his part. Gryson must be met, the evidence of fraud must be secured, and the fraud itself must be defeated.
The bright autumn day was fading to its twilight, and the shadows were gathering around his bed, when Patricia tiptoed in to ask, first, if he were awake, and, next, what he would like to have for his supper. Exhausted by the waiting battle, he answered briefly: he was not hungry; if he could be left alone again, with the assurance that no one would come to disturb him, it was all he would ask. He tried to say it crustily, with the irritable impatience of the convalescent—dissembling again. But the young woman with a self-sacrificial career in view had lost none of her womanly gift of sympathetic intuition.
"You are not so well this evening," she said softly, laying a cool palm on his forehead. "I think I'd better telephone Doctor Dillon."
Now the thing for Patricia's lover to do was obvious. With pity thus trembling on the very crumbling brink of love, the opportunity which months of patient wooing had not evoked lay ready to his hand. It was a fair measure of the mastery an obsession may obtain—the lover's ability to thrust the gentler emotion into the background, to feign restless irritation under the passion-stirring touch, and to say: "No; I don't want Dillon or anybody; I want to be left alone. Please latch the door when you go out, and tell father and his—and Mrs. Blount that I don't want to be disturbed."
She took the curt dismissal in silence, and after she was gone Blount sat up in bed and cursed himself fervently and painstakingly for the little brutality. But the remorseful cursings took nothing from the grim determination which had prompted the brutality. The dusk was thickening, and the street electrics were turning the avenue into a broad highway of radiance. Blount got up, and with a disheartening renewal of the splitting headache, began to dress, but there were many pauses in which he had to sit on the edge of the bed to wait for the throbbing pain to subside.
The next step was to reach his own room, two floors above, and he let himself cautiously into the corridor and locked the door from the outside. Making a long round to avoid the elevators, he dragged himself up two flights of stairs and so came to his goal.
Enveloped in a rain-coat, and with a soft hat drawn well over his eyes, he compassed the escape from the upper floor by means of the remote stair he had used in ascending, and so reached the ground-floor. Fortunately, the lobby was crowded; and turning up the collar of the rain-coat to hide the bandage, Blount worked his way toward the revolving doors. More than once in the dodging progress he rubbed shoulders with men whom he knew, and who knew him; but the shielding hat-brim and the muffling rain-coat saved him.
Reaching the street, he did not attempt to walk to the Temple Court. Instead, he crept around to a garage near the hotel and hired a two-seated road-car. Quite naturally, the garage-keeper wanted to send his own driver, and Blount counted it as an unavoidable misfortune that he was obliged to give his name, and to hear the motor-liveryman say: "Oh, sure! I didn't recognize you, Mr. Blount. I reckon Senator Dave's son can have anything o' mine that he wants."
Blount drove the road-car all the way around the Capitol grounds to come into his office street inconspicuously. Across from the Temple Court the fire ruins were still smouldering, and there was an acrid odor of stale smoke in the air. For a full third of the block the street was littered with débris. Blount stopped his machine at the nearest corner and got out to reconnoitre the office-building entrance. In the vestibule he glanced up at the face of the illuminated wall-clock, making a hasty calculation based upon the leaving time of the east-bound Overland. There were fifty minutes to spare, and when he reached his office, and had turned on the desk-light and dropped heavily into his chair, he called up the railroad station to inquire about the train. The Overland was reported ten minutes late. If Gryson should show up in time, this earliest outgoing train must be made to serve as the means for his flight.
Blount had scarcely formulated the condition when the office-door winged noiselessly, and the man himself, hollow-eyed and haggard, stumbled in. As once before, Blount got up and went to shut the door and lock it. When he came back, Gryson had taken his seat in a chair at the desk-end, where the light from the shaded working-lamp fell upon his sinister face.
"Well, I've been all th' way t' hell and back ag'in," he announced in a grating whisper. "They've put th' reward out, and three times since last night some of me own pals 've tried to snitch on me." Then he drew a carefully wrapped package from its hiding-place under his coat and laid it on the desk. "It's all there," he went on in the same rasping undertone. "Some of 'em give up to get square wit' th' bosses, and some of 'em had to have a gun shoved in their faces. No matter; they've come across—the last damn' wan of 'em; and th' affidavits are there, too—when I c'd get next to a dub of a not'ry that'd make 'em."
Blount did not untie the package, nor did he cross-examine the traitor. His head was throbbing again almost unbearably, and he was beginning to fear that he might not last to carry out the plan of safe-conduct for the informer. Slipping the precious package into an inner pocket of the enveloping coat, he took a compact roll of bank-bills from a drawer in the desk and gave it to Gryson, saying tersely: "That isn't a bribe, you understand; it's merely to help you make your getaway. Can you manage to ride on Transcontinental trains without being recognized offhand?"
Gryson pulled a false beard from his pocket and showed it. "Wit' that, and me old hat, I've been keepin' most o' th' boys from tippin' me off," he said.
"All right; here's the lay-out. You have earned immunity, so far as this latest raid on you is concerned, by turning State's evidence. But you've got to move on, and keep moving. Do you get that?"
The fugitive nodded, and Blount got up to stagger across to the office wardrobe, from which he took the extra rain-coat kept there for emergencies.
"Here, get into this and go down-stairs. At the corner above, you'll find a two-seated motor-car backed against the curb. Do you know enough about machinery to start an auto-engine?"
Gryson nodded again. "I'd ought to, seein' that I've been a gang boss in a shop that made 'em."
"Good enough; crank the motor, climb in, and wait. I'll do the rest."
Five minutes later, Blount had stumbled out of the elevator at the ground-floor and was groping his way along the sidewalk toward the corner—groping because the pain had become blinding again and the street-lights were taking on many-colored and fantastic brilliancies.
When he finally found the car, it was mainly by the sense of hearing; the motor was drumming softly under the hood, and there was a blur in the mechanician's seat which answered for the crouching figure of the ward-worker. By a supreme effort of will Blount swung himself up behind the steering-wheel and let the clutch in. Luckily, the street was clear of vehicles and he made the turn in safety; but fully realizing his handicap, he steered straight away from the business district, and making a wide circuit through the residence quarter, brought the car out in the eastern suburb at the beginning of a road paralleling the Transcontinental tracks.
With the lights of the city dropping away to the rear, and the drumming motor quickened to racing speed, he told the fugitive from justice what was to be done and the manner of its doing. Twenty-two miles out they would reach the coal-mine station of Wardlaw, a few minutes ahead of the Overland. Since all east-bound trains stopped at the coal-mines to coal the engines, the way of escape would be open.
Something more than a wordless, space-devouring half-hour beyond this, Blount applied the brakes and dropped his passenger at the rear of the small iron-roofed building which served as the railroad station for the coal-mines. Far to the rear on the twenty-two-mile tangent the headlight of the coming train showed like a blazing star low on the western horizon.
"Go and blacken your face and hands at one of the slack dumps and pass yourself for a miner quitting his job," was Blount's parting suggestion; but the hollow-eyed fugitive had a last word to say, too, and he said it.
"I've been t' hell and back, as I told you, and 'twas f'r on'y th' wan thing: give me your word, Evan Blount, that you'll chop th' damn' tree down and let it lie where it falls! That's all I'm askin', this trip."
"You needn't lose any sleep worrying about that," was the curt reply; and without waiting for the train arrival, Blount turned the car and sent it racing on the way back to the city.
By all the tests he knew how to apply, he was little better than a dead man when he returned the hired auto to the side-street garage and made his halting way around to the hotel. He had long since given up the idea of trying to see Blenkinsop. He knew that the editor would not be in his office much before ten o'clock, and the two-hour wait was not to be endured.
Clinging desperately to the single purpose of getting back to the deserted room before his absence should be discovered, and weighed down by a crushing sense of the immorality of the step he had just taken in bargaining with a hunted criminal and in conniving at his escape, he pressed on, pushing through the revolving doors and slipping once more into the Saturday evening lobby throng. Edging around to the stair, he took all the cautious steps in reverse; ascending first to his own room to leave the rain-coat and the hat, and afterward feeling his way down the servants' stair and through the lower corridor to the locked door in his father's private suite.
Past this he had a hazy notion that part of him—the observing part—stood aside and looked on while the other part slowly and painfully struggled out of its clothes and into its pajamas. Also he saw the other part, after it had carefully secreted the wrapped package of papers under the mattress, beat the pillows feebly and bury its head in them. After that there was a great blank.