From Now On

by Frank L. Packard

Millman had tried to make him go to bed and sleep. Sleep! He could not have slept! He could not even have remained still for five minutes at a stretch! He had been half mad with his anxiety for Teresa. He had wanted to be somewhere where his restless movements would not reach Teresa in her room, and yet somewhere where he could intercept every coming and going of the doctor. And so for hours he had alternately paced up and down this lower hall here, and thrown himself upon this great, wide, sheet-covered divan where he sat now. And in those hours his mind, it seemed, had run the gamut of every emotion a human soul could know. It ached now—physically. His temples throbbed and hurt.

His eyes strayed around the hall, and held on a large sheet-draped piece of furniture over beyond the foot of the staircase. They had served other purposes, these coverings, than to make spectral illusions in the gray of dawn! Beneath that sheet lay the package of banknotes. It made a good hiding place. He had extracted the package from the valise, and had secreted it there during the confusion as they had entered the house. But it seemed to take form through that sheet now, as it had done a score of times since he had put it there, and always it seemed as though a crimson stain that was on the wrapper would spread and spread until it covered the entire package.

That package—and the crimson stain! It seemed to make of itself a curiously appropriate foreground for a picture that spread away into a vista of limitless years: An orphan school, with its cracked walls, and the painted mottoes whose scrolls gaped where the cracks were; a swirl of horses reaching madly down the stretch, a roar of hoarse, delirious shouts, elated oaths around the bookmaker's paying-stand, pinched faces on the outer fringes of this ring; a thirst intolerable, stark pain, the brutal jolting of a boxcar through the nights, hours upon hours of a horror that ended only with the loss of consciousness; walls that reared themselves so high that they seemed to stand sentinels against the invasion of even a ray of sunlight, steel bars, and doors, and bolts that clanged, and clanged, until the sound ate like some cancerous thing into the soul itself; and then wolves, human wolves, ravenous wolves, between two packs of them, the police on the one hand, the underworld on the other, that snarled and tore at him, while he fought them for his life.

All that! That was the price he had paid for that package there—that, and that crimson stain.

He swept his hand across his eyes. His face grew set, and his jaws locked hard together. No, he wasn't sure yet that even that was all—that the package there was even yet finally and irrevocably his—to do with as he liked. There was last night—The Iron Tavern—the police again. Was there a connecting link trailing behind him? What had become of the Scorpion? What story had the man perhaps told? Were the police looking for an unknown man—who was Dave Henderson; and looking for an unknown woman—who was Teresa?

Well, before long now, surely, he would know—when Millman got back. Millman, who had intimated that he had an inside pull somewhere that would get the straight police version of the affair, had gone out immediately after breakfast for that purpose.

That was what counted, the only thing that counted—to know where the police stood. Millman ought to be back now. He had been gone for hours. It was taking him an unaccountably long time!

Millman! He had called Millman a straight crook. He had tried to call Millman something else this morning—for what Millman had done for Teresa and himself last night. Only he wasn't any good at words. But Millman had seemed to understand, though Millman had not said much, either—just a smile in the gray eyes, and a long, steady clasp of both hands on his, Dave Henderson's, shoulders.

There was a footstep on the stairs now. He looked up. It was the doctor coming down. He jumped to his feet, and went eagerly to the foot of the stairs.

“Better!” said the doctor cheerily.