Best laid schemes

by Meredith Nicholson

II

A thaw had been in progress during the day and hints of rain were in the air. The moon tottered drunkenly among flying clouds. The bank watchman predicted snow before morning as he bade Burgess good night.

Burgess knew Vevay Street, for he owned a business block at its intersection with Senate Avenue. Beyond the avenue it deteriorated rapidly and was filled with tenements and cheap boarding houses. Several blocks west ran an old canal, lined with factories, elevators, lumber yards and the like, and on the nearer bank was a network of railroad switches.

He thought it best not to approach the Murdock house in his motor; so he left it at the drug-store corner, and, bidding the chauffeur wait for him, walked down Vevay Street looking for 787. It was a forbidding thoroughfare and the banker resolved to complain to the Civic League; it was an outrage that such Stygian blackness should exist in a civilized city, and he meant to do something about it. When he found the number it proved to be half of a ramshackle two-story double house. The other half was vacant and plastered with For Rent signs. He struck a match and read a dingy card that announced rooms and boarding. The window shades were pulled halfway down, showing lights in the front room. Burgess knocked and in a moment the door was opened guardedly by a stocky, bearded man.

“Mr. Murdock?”

“Well, what do you want?” growled the man, widening the opening a trifle to allow the hall light behind him to fall on the visitor’s face.

“Don’t be alarmed. A friend of Robert Drake’s in Chicago asked me to see him. My errand is friendly.”

A woman’s voice called from the rear of the hall:

“It’s all right, dad; let the gentleman in.”

Murdock slipped the bolt in the door and then scrutinized Burgess carefully with a pair of small, keen eyes. As he bent over the lock the banker noted his burly frame and the powerful arms below his rolled-up shirtsleeves.

“Just wait there,” he said, pointing to the front room. He closed the hall door and Burgess heard his step on the stairs.

An odor of stale cooking offended the banker’s sensitive nostrils. The furniture was the kind he saw daily in the windows of furniture stores that sell on the installment plan; on one side was an upright piano, with its top littered with music. Now that he was in the house, he wondered whether this Murdock was after all a crook, and whether the girl with the red feather, with her candid eyes, could possibly be his daughter. His wrath against Hill rose again as he recalled his cynical tone—and on the thought the girl appeared from a door at the farther end of the room.

She bade him “Good evening!” and they shook hands. She had just come from her day’s work at the lumber company’s office, she explained. He found no reason for reversing his earlier judgment that she was a very pretty girl. Now that her head was free of the hat with the red feather, he saw that her hair, caught up in a becoming pompadour, was brown, with a golden glint in it. Her gray eyes seemed larger in the light of the single gas-burner than they had appeared by daylight at the bank. There was something poetic and dreamy about them. Her age he placed at about half his own, but there was the wisdom of the centuries in those gray eyes of hers. He felt young before her.

“There was a detective in the bank when I was in there this morning. He knew me,” she said at once.

“Yes; he spoke of you,” said Burgess.

“And he knows—what does he know?”

The girl’s manner was direct; he felt that she was entitled to a frank response.

“He told me your father had been—we will say suspected in times past; that he had only lately come here; but, unless he deceived me, I think he has no interest in him just now. The detective is a friend of mine. He visits the bank frequently. It was just by chance that he spoke of you.”

“You didn’t tell him that Mr. Gordon had asked you to come here?”

“No; Drake wasn’t mentioned.”

Nellie nodded; she seemed to be thinking deeply. Her prettiness was enhanced, he reflected, by the few freckles that clustered about her nose. And he was ready to defend the nose which the detective, reciting from his card catalogue, had called snub!

“Did your friend tell you Bob wants to be married before he leaves? I suppose you don’t know that?”

She blushed, confirming his suspicion that it was she whom Drake was risking arrest to marry.

“Yes; and if I guess rightly that you’re the girl I’d like to say that he’s an extremely fortunate young man! You don’t mind my saying that!”

He wondered whether all girls who have dimples blush to attract attention to them. The point interested Webster G. Burgess. The thought that Nellie Murdock meant to marry a freshly discharged convict, no matter how promising he might be, was distasteful to him; and yet her loyalty and devotion increased his admiration. There was romance here, and much money had not hardened the heart of Webster G. Burgess.

“It all seems too good to be true,” she said happily, “that Bob and I can be married after all and go away into a new world where nobody knows us and he can start all over again.” And then, coloring prettily: “We’re all ready to go except getting married—and maybe you can help us find a minister.”

“Easily! But I’m detaining you. Better have Drake come in; I want to speak to him, and then we can make all the arrangements in a minute.”

“I’m afraid he’s been watched; it’s brutal for them to do that when he’s done his time and means to live straight! I wonder——” She paused and the indignation that had flashed out in her speech passed quickly. “It’s asking a great deal, Mr. Burgess, but would you let us leave the house with you? The quicker we go the better—and a man of your position wouldn’t be stopped. But if you’d rather not——”

“I was just going to propose that! Please believe that in every way I am at your service.”

His spirits were high. It would give edge to the encounter to lend his own respectability to the flight. The idea of chaperoning Nellie Murdock and her convict lover through an imaginable police picket pleased him.

She went out and closed the door. Voices sounded in the hall; several people were talking earnestly. When the door opened a man dodged quickly into the room, the girl following.

“This is Robert Drake, Mr. Burgess. Bob, this is the gentleman Mr. Gordon told you about.”

Burgess experienced a distinct shock of repulsion as the man shuffled across the room to shake hands. A stubble of dark beard covered his face, his black hair was crumpled, and a long bang of it lying across his forehead seemed to point to his small, shifty blue eyes. His manner was anxious; he appeared decidedly ill at ease. Webster G. Burgess was fastidious and this fellow’s gray suit was soiled and crumpled, and he kept fingering his collar and turning it up round a very dirty neck.

“Thank you, sir—thank you!” he repeated nervously.

A door slammed upstairs and the prospective bridegroom started perceptibly and glanced round. But Burgess’s philosophy rallied to his support. This was the fate of things, one of life’s grim ironies—that a girl like Nellie Murdock, born and reared in the underworld, should be linking herself to an outlaw. After all, it was not his affair. Pretty girls in his own world persisted in preposterous marriages. And Bob grinned cheerfully. Very likely with a shave and a bath and a new suit of clothes he would be quite presentable. The banker had begun to speak of the route to be taken to New Orleans when a variety of things happened so quickly that Burgess’s wits were put to high tension to keep pace with them.

The door by the piano opened softly. A voice recognizable as that of Murdock spoke sharply in a low tone:

“Nellie, hit up the piano! Stranger, walk to the window—slow—and yank the shade! Bob, cut upstairs!”

These orders, given in the tone of one used to command, were quickly obeyed. It was in the banker’s mind the moment he drew down the shade that by some singular transition he, Webster G. Burgess, had committed himself to the fortunes of this dubious household. If he walked out of the front door it would likely be into the arms of a policeman; and the fact of a man of his prominence being intercepted in flight from a house about to be raided would not look well in the newspapers. Nellie, at the piano, was playing Schubert’s Serenade—and playing it, he thought, very well. The situation was not without its humor; and here, at last, was his chance to see an adventure through. He heard Bob take the stairs in three catlike jumps. Nellie, at the piano, said over her shoulder, with Schubert’s melody in her eyes:

“This isn’t funny; but they wouldn’t dare touch you! You’d better camp right here.”

“Not if I know myself!” said Burgess with decision as he buttoned his ulster.

She seemed to accept his decision as a matter of course and, still playing, indicated the door, still ajar, through which the disconcerting orders had been spoken. Burgess stepped into a room where a table was partly set for supper.

“This ain’t no place for you, stranger!” said Murdock harshly. “How you goin’ to get away?”

“I’ll follow Bob. If he makes it I can.”

“Humph! This party’s too big now. You ought to have kept out o’ this.”

There was a knock at the front door and Murdock pointed an accusing finger at Burgess.

“Either set down and play it out or skip!” He jerked his head toward the stairs. The music ceased at the knock. “Nellie, what’s the answer?”

Murdock apparently deferred to Nellie in the crisis; and as the knock was repeated she said:

“I’ll get Bob and this gentleman out. Don’t try to hold the door—let ’em in.”

Before he knew what was happening, Burgess was at the top of the stairway, with the girl close at his heels. She opened a door into a dark room.

“Bob!” she called.

“All right!” whispered Drake huskily.

Near the floor Burgess marked Bob’s position by a match the man struck noiselessly, shielding it in the curve of his hand at arm’s length. It was visible for a second only. Nellie darted lightly here and there in the dark. A drawer closed softly; Burgess heard the swish of her jacket as she snatched it up and drew it on. The girl undoubtedly knew what she was about. Then a slim, cold hand clutched his in a reassuring clasp. Another person had entered the room and the doorkey clicked.

“Goodby, mother!” Burgess heard the girl whisper.

The atmosphere changed as the steps of the three refugees echoed hollowly in an empty room. A door closed behind them and there was a low rumble as a piece of furniture was rolled against it. Burgess was amazed to find how alert all his senses were. He heard below the faint booming of voices as Murdock entertained the police. In the pitch-dark he found himself visualizing the room into which they had passed and the back stairway down which they crept to the kitchen of the vacant half of the house. As they paused there to listen something passed between Drake and Nellie.

“Give it to me—quick! I gotta shake that guy!” Drake whispered hoarsely.

The girl answered:

“Take it, but keep still and I’ll get you out o’ this.”

Burgess thought he had struck at her; but she made no sign. She took the lead and opened the kitchen door into a shed; then the air freshened and he felt rain on his face. They stood still for an instant. Some one, apparently at the Murdock kitchen door, beat three times on a tin pan.

“There are three of them!” whispered Nellie. “One’s likely to be at the back gate. Take the side fence!” She was quickly over; and then began a rapid leaping of the partition fences of the narrow lots of the neighborhood. At one point Burgess’s ulster ripped on a nail; at another place he dropped upon a chicken coop, where a lone hen squawked her terror and indignation. It had been some time since Webster G. Burgess had jumped fences, and he was blowing hard when finally they reached a narrow alley. He hoped the hurdling was at an end, but a higher barricade confronted them than the low fences they had already negotiated. Nellie and Bob whispered together a moment; then Bob took the fence quickly and silently. Burgess jumped for the top, but failed to catch hold. A second try was luckier, but his feet thumped the fence furiously as he tried to mount.

“Cheese it on the drum!” said Nellie, and she gave his legs a push that flung him over and he tumbled into the void. “Bob mustn’t bolt; he always goes crazy and wants to shoot the cops,” he heard her saying, so close that he felt her breath on his cheek. “I had to give him that hundred——”

A man ran through the alley they had just left. From the direction of Vevay Street came disturbing sounds as the Murdocks’ neighbors left their supper tables for livelier entertainment outside.

“If it’s cops they’ll make a mess of it—I was afraid it was Hill,” said the girl.

It already seemed a good deal of a mess to Burgess. He had got his bearings and knew they were in the huge yard of the Brooks Lumber Company. Great piles of lumber deepened the gloom. The scent of new pine was in the moist air. Nellie was already leading the way down one of the long alleys between the lumber. A hinge creaked stridently behind them. The three stopped, huddled close together. The opaque darkness seemed now to be diminishing slightly as the moon and a few frightened stars shone out of the clouds. Then the blackness was complete again.

“They’ve struck the yard!” said Nellie. “That was the Wood Street gate.”

“If they stop to open gates they’re not much good,” said the banker largely, in the tone of one who does not pause for gates.

The buttons had been snapped from his ulster at the second fence and this garment now hung loosely round him, a serious impediment to flight. He made a mental note to avoid ulsters in future. A nail had scraped his shin, and when he stopped to rub it he discovered an ugly rent in his trousers. Nellie kept moving. She seemed to know the ways of the yard and threaded the black lumber alleys with ease. They were close together, running rapidly, when she paused suddenly. Just ahead of them in a cross-alley a lantern flashed. It was the lumber company’s private watchman. He stopped uncertainly, swung his lantern into the lane where the trio waited, and hurried on.

They were halfway across the yard as near as Burgess could judge, hugging the lumber piles closely and stopping frequently to listen, when they were arrested by a sound behind. The moon had again swung free of clouds and its light flooded the yard. The distance of half a block behind a policeman stood in the alley they had just traversed. He loomed like a heroic statue in his uniform overcoat and helmet. His shout rang through the yard.

“Beat it!” cried Nellie.