“Brotherhood of man!” He had a brother, one whom the rest of the brotherhood wanted to hang, a small man, with a queer smile and wriggling fingers, sitting under the dim gas jet.
Even in his familiar rooms he could not think or sleep. He saw before him days upon days, courts and lawyers, preparations for the trial, the long doubt, and what then? Only a black pit full of things intolerable, not to be looked at. Yet it stood there stolidly, in front.
The Assembly? He would rather have Wood than the Assembly to help him here, or Hennion, or Secor. But neither Hennion nor Secor would help him here. They were men of the crowd in the street, who all preferred to hang Lolly.
At daybreak he rose, dressed, and went out. It was Friday morning. The air was fresh and damp. He looked at the Assembly building opposite, and fancied himself speaking from the familiar wide platform within, saying: “I am the brother of Hicks, the murderer, in your jail—I who lied to you, calling you my brethren, protesting one universal bond, who have but one brother and one bond of blood,—to you who are my enemies. His name is Allen Aidee, and your name is Legion.”
People called him abrupt and sensational. It would be a relief to speak so, sharp and harsh, like the breaking of a window glass with one's fist in a stifling room.
He thought of the scores of times he had looked on the crowd of faces from the platform there, and he tried now to put into each picture one more item, namely, Allen sitting far back in the shadow under the gallery. When he had put this item in, it covered up the rest of the picture.
Probably Allen used to go across the river by following the side streets over to Maple Street, and so to the bridge. Alcott left Seton Avenue and walked toward Maple Street through that still sleeping section of the city. On Maple Street, the trolley cars were beginning to run, milk waggons clattered over the rough pavement.
“Poor boy!”
Lolly claimed to have been happy during those four years. After all, the arrangement he had made was characteristic, the very kind of thing he would be apt to do. Alcott wondered why he had never suspected that Allen was lurking near him.
Down Maple Street, then, Allen's regular road must have lain. How often he must have gone over the bridge, his nerves twitching and his head blazing with Alcott's last words! Here was the hurrying muddy river, running high now with the spring floods, mad, headlong, and unclean. Not an inch beyond its surface could one see. A drowned body might float, and if an inch of water covered it, no man would know.