"But isn't it wicked? Why should I wish that done?—to man or woman?—Or to lock some one up for life—that's worse! Why should it amuse me to have people tortured? Who tortured Jim? Poor fellow, he scarcely could have known! Why should they suffer more than he? For the act of one little minute to burn in fire all the rest of one's life. Oh, my good friend, what's the use of pretending? We know perfectly well that some girl's despair may have fired that shot, that if she had a brother or a lover—Can't you stop them, Mr. Herrick? Must they go frothing on in this man-hunt? It's to clear my name? My name's my own; I won't have it put up against any human being's misery! If they catch and kill some unhappy creature for my sake—it will kill me, too. I shall die of it!"
"What you'll do now," said Herrick, "is to come out of here into the sunlight, and get some air before you go back to rehearsal."
She let him walk with her to the stage-door, and before it swallowed her, she abruptly and almost gaily soliloquized, "A man! A man wrote those letters! Does one man send a piece of ribbon to another, and ask him to hang it out of his window? Do you mean, to tell me that it was a man who made that remark about my temper? 'The Arm of Justice' forsooth! There's a female idea of a brigand."
It was plain that she inclined to believe the blackmailer some mercenary trickster, who knew no more of the murder than herself. Some woman, she said. But there were two persons in Joe Patrick's testimony. And Herrick believed there were two in the attempted blackmail. As to their knowledge of Ingham's death, one circumstance appeared to him highly significant; the changed standpoint of the second letter! He said to himself, "The first is obviously sincere; it was written in the genuine hope of getting money out of Ingham by a person who really felt that he or she had a case. And the second is nothing on earth but an attempt to divert suspicion from the murderer by a lot of villainous poppycock. Between the writing of those two letters they lost their case and they lost their nerve. Suppose the first letter had been written by a woman,—by a woman of some cultivation, with a very strong taste for expressing herself picturesquely. But her picturesqueness all streams into one channel—into hatred for Ingham. When she cuts at him, her pen scorches the paper. She has only one sentiment of anything like equal strength—her sympathy with the girl whom Ingham is supposed to have deserted. There, now, is a person whom she thoroughly admires. Was she herself once that girl?"
Herrick was on his way to dine at Christina's by the time that he hazarded this runaway guess, and he told himself that he must pull up a little, now he was on the public street, or he would be holding people with his glittering eye, like the Ancient Mariner.
But one fact continued to strike him. The man whom Joe Patrick had taken up to the fourth floor after the arrival of the red-haired woman did not appear in the narrative.
How if this man himself had written the second letter? The writer had sacrificed the only other persons mentioned—Christina and Nancy—without a scruple, but that curt and silent male it had never occurred to him to sacrifice. He was consistently shielded. Having no feasible way of accounting for him, the writer had not even explained him away. He had simply left him out, hoping that, in the definiteness of the accusation of a woman, he would be forgotten. For this reason he had gone into details of her flight without even touching the great dark points of the moving of Ingham's body and the bolted door. He was too busy pointing: "Look, look, there she goes! The murderess! The woman! I am calling her Christina Hope. But, in any case, a woman. No man has had anything to do with it."
Herrick turned off the avenue into Christina's street. And trying to clear his brain lest its feverish contagion should presently reach hers, he told himself, "You're cracked, my friend. You know nothing whatever. Simply cracked." But he could not cure himself. Right or wrong, his obsession continued. Nonsense or no, there grew steadily within him the notion of that man who had seen all, who knew all, and who had done his work! This figure became strangely potent, and singularly ominous. They were all suffering and struggling here, ridiculously ignorant, ridiculously in pain, and he could laugh at them. Not a sound had escaped him. He had betrayed himself by no melodramatic shadow. "He was so quiet," Joe Patrick had said, "goin' right along about his business—" Yes, he had come upon his business, he had accomplished it, he had vanished, and left no trace behind. Blackmailer, slanderer, murderer, and maybe coward and traitor, there was about him a stillness that had a strange effect. The very blankness of his passage—he looked so like "all gentlemen," neither tall nor short, stout nor thin, light nor dark, thirty, forty, or some other age—why, Beelzebub himself could not have accomplished a more complete disguise! It was as if, going so quietly on such an errand, some evil of devilish mockery looked out from behind that featureless face, as from behind a mask. And about the heart of the big, lean, ruddy youth striding toward his beloved through the warm August evening, the cold breath of superstition lightly breathed. It was, for one instant, as though it were at him the mockery were directed; as though, when that mask should be removed, it would be his blood that would be frozen by the sight. The next moment his strength exulted. Patience! He must be found, that fellow—he had made Christina suffer! The young man's heart winced and then steeled itself upon the phrase. He drew deep into his spirit the horrid degradation that had been breathed upon her; the sickening danger that had struck at her; he saw the thinned line of her cheek, her pallor and her tears, and the dark circles under those dear eyes. He saw and his teeth set themselves. Oh, yes, that featureless and silent fellow should be found! And when that hour came, and Herrick's hand was on that mask, it made him laugh to think how well its wearer should learn that it was not only a woman at whom he had struck!
Immersed in these thoughts Herrick had not noticed a scudding automobile which now passed him so close that he had to spring backward in order to avoid being knocked down. And he was not in the mood when springing backward could be in the least agreeable to him. The rescuer of ladies was thrown into a fuming rage. What, he, he, a free-born American citizen, he, a knight-errant on his way to the queen of love and beauty, he, Bryce Herrick, a presentable young man of the privileged classes to bound into the air like a ball or a mountebank! Made to retreat ignominiously and hurriedly!—actually to—in the language of his childhood—to "skip the gutter" by the menial of upstarts with his horn!—By George, the fellow had not blown his horn!
Herrick came to a raging pause and looked about him for a policeman. He could at least complain to a policeman! Then he discovered that he was within half a block of Christina's corner; her house was on the other side of the street. To come into her presence was to forget everything else. As he reached the corner and started to cross the road he heard the whirr of another motor and then beheld it speeding toward him, some distance off, from the same direction as his first enemy. Determined not to skip the gutter this time he advanced at a dignified pace, deliberately fixing the automobile with the power of the human eye. The wild beast approached headlong, nevertheless, and Herrick, observing that it, too, dispensed with the formality of blowing its horn, stopped dead in its path. He was filled with the immense public spirit of outraged dignity and pure temper. The automobile was a long, low touring-car, gray, with an unfashionable look of hard usage, and there were three roughly dressed men in it. If they thought he would move unless that horn were blown, they were mistaken! He glared pointedly at the number which was streaked, illegibly, with mud. And the truth came to him, that this was no second automobile—it was the same one! And now it was so near that, above the man's raised collar, he could see the eyes of the chauffeur looking straight at him. Then it was he knew that they did not expect him to get out of the way; that they did not intend to blow the horn; nor did they intend to swerve aside. What they intended was to run him down! With inconceivable rapidity the thing had loomed out of the distance and was here; death lunged at him in a flash, bulked right upon him, the wind of it in his angry eyes. The shock of that anger utterly controlled him and took up the challenge; he could not have changed the set of his whole nature and broken his defiance if he would. But from the sidewalk some one screamed. Automatically, he started, and the touring-car, as though rocked by the scream, swayed a hair's breadth to one side. Only a hair's breadth! Herrick felt an impact like the end of things; then a horrible, jarring pain as if his bones were coming out through himself and knocking him to splinters. And then—nothing.