“It might be worse. Go on. Clear this thing up.”
“Well, I’ll tell you the whole story, Captain,” he began. “I don’t hold much with niggers, but I don’t hold neither with getting five thousand men together—real bold-like—and going out and lynching one nigger. And Sunday night when I seen what was doing I was pretty mad. But not half as mad as I was when right in front of my nose a bunch of white-livered sons of bitches got hold of the mayor, who was acting like a man, and strung him up—by God! strung him up to a pole! I was there, Captain, and I pitched in and I fought the dirtiest I knew how—’n’ you know whether we was trained to fight dirty or not. And by ’n’ by I kicked one man in the guts and another in the knee—me getting madder ’n’ madder because all th’ time there was the mayor swinging and twitching up there—but some one else got up the pole ’n’ cut him down before I could get there, ’n’ then some damn cold-blooded skunk of a photographer took a flash-light picture, ’n’ then all of a sudden there’s Sergeant McCarthy of the police beside me, ’n’ he says: ‘By God! Monahan! I didn’t think it of you!’ So there I am in the photograph at headquarters ’s clear as life, and there’s McCarthy to testify I was one of them that lynched th’ mayor.” He paused, an expression of resentment and resignation on his face.
Stacey considered him thoughtfully. “Why don’t you go around to police headquarters, give yourself up, and tell the truth?”
Monahan shook his head. “There wouldn’t anybody believe me, Captain,” he said sullenly. “ ‘Fat story, me lad, with your record!’ they’d say. They’d laugh at me.”
“What do you mean—‘your record’?”
“I’ve been twice in the jug, Captain, since I got back,” the Irishman growled, “and I’ll tell you about that, too, if you’ll listen.
“When I got back from across—and I wish to God I’d never come back!—I got me a job at the packing-house. Well, who should I find for my foreman but a white-livered skunk called Barton? ’N’ I’ll tell you about Barton, too. Barton, he got exempted from the draft as being the sole support of one poor aged mother ’n’ two poor little sisters. Now the truth about that skunk was, so help me God! that he never done one thing for them—not a red cent had he given them for years, Captain! All the little they had come to them from a brother’s son of the old lady.
“But that ain’t all—not half, Captain!”
Monahan paused and thrust his shaggy red head forward. His eyes gleamed dangerously.
“I had a girl, Captain, when I went away,” he went on, in a deep rumbling voice, “and a good girl she was. But this Barton, he comes shining around and shining around, ’n’ she falls for him like a little fool, ’n’ after a while he goes ’n’ marries her,—which he wouldn’t have done, Barton wouldn’t, if it hadn’t been that she had two brothers, big strong up-standing men who sort of urged him on.