CHAPTER XIV
CONFERENCE BETWEEN MR. HACKLEY, THE DOG MAN, AND MR. RYAN, THE BOSS
At half past six o'clock, or thereabouts, James Hackley dragged slowly up Main Street. He was garbed in his working suit of denim blue, trimmed with monkey wrench and chisel, and he wore, further, an air of exaggerated fatigue. A rounded protuberance upon his cheek indicated that the exhilaration of the quid was not wanting to his inner man, but the solace he drew from it appeared pitifully trifling. Now and then he would pause, rest his person against a lamp-post, or the front of some emporium, and shake his head despondently, like one most fearful of the consequences of certain matters.
Since four o'clock that afternoon, in fact, Mr. Hackley had been out upon a reluctant stint of lawn-mowing, reluctant because he hated all work with a Titanic hatred and sedulously cultivated the conviction that his was a delicate health. In view of the magnificent windfall in connection with the killing of his dog, it had not been his design to accept any more retainers for a long time to come. That occurrence had lifted him, as by the ears, from the proletariat into the capitalistic leisure class; and the map of the world had become but the portrait of his oyster.
But at noon as he lolled upon his rear veranda, chatting kindly with his wife as she hung the linen of quality upon her drying lines, a lady had knocked upon his door, beautiful and insistent, to wheedle his will from him. It was only a tiny bit of a lawn, she had reiterated imploringly, hardly a constitutional to cut, and there was not one tall fellow in all Hunston whom she would permit to touch it but Hackley. Dead to all flattery as he was, his backbone ran to water at the clinging beauty of her smile, and so incredibly betrayed him into yielding. And now, at hard upon half after six o'clock, post-meridian, the dangerous dews of night already beginning to fall, he leaned against a lamp-post, a physical wreck, with a long block and a half still separating him from the comforts of home.
At the next corner but one above rose the red brick Ottoman, its inviting side stretching for many yards down the street towards him. Windows cut it here and there along its length, and over their green silk half-curtains, poured forth a golden light which was hospitality made visible. Yet, so strange are the ways of life, the proprietor of all these luxuries, who stood at the furthest window, beyond Hackley's range, did not look happy in their possession. His eyes gleamed fiercely; his heavy chin protruded savagely, as though deliberately insulting Main Street and the northward universe. Even his small derby, which he seldom doffed save at the hour for taps, contrived to bespeak a certain ferocity.
The Ottoman bar was bare of customers, all Hunston now verging towards its evening meal. Ryan rested his elbow upon its polished surface, and glared into the twilight. He was, as luck had it, in a terrible ill-humor. For he knew himself to-day for a man who had been physically flouted, a boss whose supremacy had been violently assailed, a king who felt his throne careen sickeningly beneath him.
Last night, when four men whom he had never seen before, three of them masked, had borne him off on a long wild drive, and dropped him at ten o'clock in a lonely bit of country eight miles from the Academy Theatre, there had at least been action to give point to his choler. All but out of his mind with passion, he had besought them all, singly or quadruply, to descend from their carriage and meet him in combat, thirsting sorely to kill or be killed. But they had only laughed at him, silently, and galloped away, leaving him screaming out futile curses on the empty night air.
Two hours later, when he had got back to Hunston, after an interminable nightmare of running over rough ground with unaccustomed limbs, and stumbling heavily to earth, and rising up to struggle again, he had learned to what uses his enemies had put that absence. Smith had related the story in the fastness of his office, and in wholly different guise from that which it wore next morning in the columns of his newspaper. And Ryan, listening, had slowly calmed, calmed to the still fury of implacable hate.
But he and Smith had quarreled violently. He was for publishing the story of his taking off in type as black as the dastardly act. Smith had a difficult time in holding him down, however much he pointed out that Ryan had no shadow of proof against his new adversary on the yacht, and that public sympathy in an affair of this sort was always with the successful. In the end Smith had carried his point, because he was, of those two men, both the more wise and the more resolute. But this morning they had conferred again and quarreled even more bitterly.
Yet Ryan, plotting in the window of his splendid gin-palace, his eye always sweeping the evening street as though a-search, was not thinking of the young editor now. Two other policies for the days to come monopolized his attention. One of these was crushing victory at the polls. The other was revenge. Probably in thinking of these, he put them at the moment in reverse order.
"Damn him!" he suddenly exploded: and it was not little Hare that he cursed. "Damn his soul!"
In the next breath, the boss suddenly ducked, and disappeared from the half-curtained window altogether. A moment later, he appeared outside his swinging door, yawning and stretching himself, as one who, wearied with the tedium of life indoors, would see what beguilement might await him abroad.
The boss looked first up the street and permitted his beady eye to range casually over the view. Then his gaze came slowly down and rested in time upon the person of James Hackley, now almost directly opposite. The boss's countenance lit up with a smile of pleased surprise.
"Why, hello, Jim!" he called out. "Where you been hidin' yourself lately? Ain't seen you for a week o' Sundays. Come across and pass the time of day!"
Mr. Hackley, who had been debating whether or not he should pause for inspiration at the Ottoman, and had just virtuously declared for the negative, shambled over.
Ryan eyed him sympathetically. "You look kind o' played out, Jim. What you been doin' with yourself? Come in and take a drop of somethin' to hearten you up some. On the house."
"Well," said Mr. Hackley, unable to resist the novel fascination of liquoring gratis, "just a weeny mite for to cut the dust out o' my windpipe."
Ryan went behind the bar and served them himself, selecting with care a bottle which he described as the primest stuff in the house. From this he poured Hackley a remarkably stiff potation, slightly wetting the bottom of his own glass the while. The bottle he left standing ready on the bar.
"Here's how, friend Jim!"
Whatever Mr. Hackley's foibles, he was a man at his cups. His platform was the straight article uncontaminated by ice or flabby sparkling-water; and chasers and the like of those he left to schoolboys.
"Ain't took a drink for days," he said, holding up his glass to the electric light and squinting through it. "Cut it out religious, I have. Been settin' around the house, an' settin', under physic'an's orders, tryin' fer to get my health back so's I could go to moldin' agin. But Lordamussy, what's the use of torkin'! I ain't no more fitten fer work than a noo-born baby. Well, here's luck, Ryan!"
He set his glass down and involuntarily smacked his lips. The fiery liquid percolated through him down to his very toes. He felt better at once, more ambitious, less conscious of his constitution. And simultaneously, he lost something of that indolent good-nature which was the badge of all his sober hours.
Ryan regarded him with friendly anxiety. "You gotter be more careful with yourself, honest! Here—strengthen your holt a little. One little swallow ain't no help to a man as beat out as you are."
"As yer like, Dennis," said Mr. Hackley, listlessly. "What I reely need is a good long rest, like in a 'orspittle."
Kindly Mr. Ryan filled the small glass almost to the brim; and Hackley, though he had modestly stipulated for "on'y a drap" tossed it all off thirstily at a single practised toss.
"That'll fix you up nice. But ain't I glad," said his host with a sly chuckle, "that nobody sees you taking these drinks on the quiet, which we know you need bad for your health."
Mr. Hackley set down his glass again, this time with something of a bang. "How's that?" he demanded suspiciously.
Ryan laughed deprecatingly. While doing so, he manipulated the tall dark bottle again.
"Shuh!" said he. "It's only the boys' fun, of course. Don't you mind them, Jim."
"What're you drivin' at?" asked Hackley, bristling a bit. "If you got anything worth sayin' to me, spit it out plain, I say."
"Well," laughed Ryan, "if some of the boys was to see you in here putting away a harmless drink or so, o' course they'd say that you was gettin' up your Dutch courage. He, he!"
"Dutch courage!" cried Mr. Hackley, indignantly. "An' wot the hell fer?"
"Sh! Not so loud, Jim. Why, it's only their little joke, o' course. They'd say you was gettin' up your nerve to meet them two friends of yours from New York! Hey? He, he!"
"Wot friends?" asked Hackley again, hotly.
Ryan observed the mounting color on the other's cheek and brow, and his eye, which was like a small, glossy shoe-button, gleamed.
"Why, that 'un that killed that dog o' yours, and put you to sleep before the crowd, and that 'un that sent Mamie Orrick to Gawd knows where. But shucks! Drop it, Jim. I wouldn't have allooded to it, on'y I thought you'd see the fun of the thing."
It takes a philosopher to perceive humor in taunts at his own personal courage, and Mr. Hackley, with three drinks of the Ottoman's choicest beneath his tattered waistcoat, was not that kind of man at all.
He leaned forward against the bar with a belligerence suggesting that he wished to push it over, pinning his pleasant-spoken host to the wall, and pounded the top of it till the glasses tingled.
"Fill her up with the same!" he ordered loudly, looking suddenly, and for the first time, very much like the rough-looking customer who had tackled Peter Maginnis in defense of his dog. "An' I'll have you know, Mister Ryan—I'll have you know, my fine, big, bouncin' buck, that Jim Hackley ain't afeared of anythink that walks."
Ryan filled her up again, though this time more conservatively. He was a keen man and an excellent judge of what was enough.
"Shuh! Don't I know that, Jim! Why, after that big bloke licked the stuffin' out of you the other night, the boys said: 'Well, that's the last o' that little differculty! Jim Hackley'll never foller that up none,' they says. And what'd I say?"
"Well, what'd you say?"
"I says, 'Hell!' I says. 'You boys don't know Jim Hackley!'"
"I'll interdooce myself to 'em!" said Hackley savagely. "And whoever says that Maginnis licked me's a liar. You hear me? Tripped my toe on a rock, I did, and banged all the sense outen my head—"
"I understand, Jim," interrupted Ryan suavely. "Just what I told the boys. O' course, just between you an me, I have been kinder took by surprise that you've waited so long to get your evens. Why, this morning when the piece came out in the Gazette, tellin' the whole town that the feller's side-partner was that yellow cur-dog Stanhope, I says to the boys, first thing: 'Boys, we gotter watch Jim Hackley mighty careful to-day,' says I. 'I'm afeard there'll be gun-play before sunset.' 'Gun-play!' says they. 'F'om Hackley! Hell,' says they. 'You boys,' says I, 'don't know old Jim like I do!' And then o' course,—he, he!—as the whole day slipped by and nothin' doin' at all—why, o' course, I won't deny that they ain't been jollyin' me some."
Hackley leaned far over the bar, and shook his fist in the boss's face. "I ain't a man," he shouted, "to be pushed an' a-nagged at in a deal like this. I takes my time, I makes my plans, I decides on the ways I'll do it. Do yer pipe to that? An' now I've got ever'think fixed and I'm ready. Do yer see!"
The boss, who had retreated a step before that menacing fist, glanced out of the window and instantly started, this time with an amazement that was genuine.
"Why, blast my eyes," he cried, raising a pudgy arm, "if there ain't that dog Stanhope now!"
Hackley, following the pointing finger, peered over the green silk curtain out into the darkening street. A young man, tall and rather thin, in a blue suit and wide gray-felt hat, was walking slowly and with a slight limp up the cross street, evidently heading for the Palace Hotel.
The two men watched him intently, in a moment of perfect silence. Then the boss, who was not without a certain dramatic sense, said slowly:
"Mamie Orrick's old friend!"
A baleful light leaped into Hackley's eyes. He broke away from the bar with a movement that was like a wrench, and started for the door.
"I'll fix him," he muttered dourly. "Fix him good."
But Ryan, who wanted something much better than that, sprang around the bar like lightning, and caught Hackley roughly by the shoulder, at the door.
"What, here in the square!" he hissed sharply. "With the po-lice in sight a'most! Why, you fool, it'll mean the pen for you as sure as your name's Jim Hackley!"
Hackley paused, his resolution unsettled by the other's superior knowledge of the law.
"No, no, Jim—it won't do," went on Ryan with bland decisiveness. "What you want is the two of them together, hey?—on a nice dark stretch o' road, and old Orrick and a few good fellows along to help. You ain't the only one that's got it in for Stanhope, are you? An' you want Maginnis too, I guess? Come on in the orfice and talk about it over a seegar."