them. Nor was I thinking of things far away. I couldn’t; and I didn’t
want to.
I felt my flashes of home; of my mother and my father. I felt flashes
of Jerry, as he used to be when he was my brother. To see him here
beside me now stopped these old sensations. My mind brought to me the
night he’d come and told me how “Keeban” must have taken away Dorothy
Crewe; it brought me to the police station where, that same night,
he broke away; it brought me to the Flamingo Feather where I danced
with Doris, calling her Cleopatra. It brought me to Caldon’s, where I
happened on her “shoving the queer”; it took me to the Blackstone and
the train and to that supper with her again. It took me to that closet
where I’d kissed her, as I had never kissed any girl before.
Here we were, caught together, with Keeban going once more into the
glass room. He went himself and picked up the rabbits and flung them at
our feet on the floor.
“How about it now?” he said to me. “What’s the order? The lady first?”
I swore at him. He had my nerve, you see. I swore and strained at the
cords on my hands. A lot of good it did me. He laughed.
“All right, Steve!” said Doris to me. “All right!” Quickly but calmly
she said it. Calmly is not the word. It doesn’t do at all. No word
would. “All right, Steve!”
“All right, Doris!” I said in reply. Of course nothing was right,
except one thing; and that was whatever held her to me.
“Margaret’s my name,” she told me; and she touched me. They let her;
they weren’t holding her just then.
“Margaret,” I said. “Thanks. I like that name.”
Keeban nodded to his normals; and they took, and tied her. Then he,
himself, carried her in.
They tied her to the table, much as I had seen they would. They came
out and closed the door. He twisted that cock on the pipe; I saw his
wrist go around and around.
I stood and stared and waited. There was just one thing that I might
try; and it was not yet time for that.
Doris--Margaret--lay on her back, each wrist and each ankle looped to a
leg of the table. She lay looking up at the closed ceiling, not moving
except for the rise and fall of her bosom with breathing. She had tried
her cords and found the uselessness of struggle; so she lay and waited.
I watched her and waited for my moment. I would have known it was not
much to wait for, if I had thought it out. But you don’t think out
affairs like that; when there is only one thing to do, you have to
take a chance on whatever it is. So I stood, with Keeban beside me and
Christina a few feet away and the eleven normals beyond us and between
and I watched the girl on the table breathing.
They watched her, too. Christina, Shirley Scofield,--with what sort of
feelings? And the normals about us, what were they thinking, too? I
didn’t even try to wonder about Jerry who had become Keeban and who was
doing this thing.
My hands, tied together, grasped the top of the back of a chair against
which I leaned; and my muscles went tight to raise it and, spinning, to
swing it upon him and kill him. Yet I knew I would not do that; I might
knock him down; that was all. It would not help my girl at all.
She half turned her head toward me and then, quickly, she faced to the
ceiling again. She wanted to look at me, I thought; and then she had
thought it must seem like an appeal to me, which I could not bear when
I could not help her.
I held on to the back of that chair and waited, watching her bosom rise
and fall. I kept saying to myself something that Teverson told me. When
Costrelman and his butler had been killed by the gas, others in the
room had been affected but had recovered. An under-dose was not deadly,
therefore; that is, if this were the same gas.
I could see nothing; smell nothing; sense nothing going on in that
cabinet; but neither had I when the rabbits had died.
My plan depended entirely upon time. There must be gas in the cabinet,
but not too much gas,--not enough to kill my girl in there.
She breathed more slowly, I thought; I stared and seemed sure of it. At
the same time, Keeban began looking at me. He suspected I was about to
act; and I did it. I lifted that heavy chair behind me and, spinning, I
swung it against the glass side of the cabinet and smashed it through.
I followed it myself and was inside, smashing, kicking, demolishing
glass. A girl screamed.
Keeban started after me; I felt--or I had felt--his hand grabbing me;
but now his clutch was gone. He was away from that break in the glass.
I heard him call and cough, “Beat it! Duck! Don’t suck it in!” Shirley,
for it was Shirley, screamed again.
I thought, “He knows. A little kills. I’ve got it. Cleopatra, Doris,
Margaret; she’s got it, too.” But I had her and I hardly cared. The
rest of them had got away.
My smash of the glass, with Keeban’s yell--and more than that, his
example--had given the start. Now shots were speeding them along. I
didn’t know who was shooting; they were out of the laboratories; and
still they were going away.
I had that ceiling over the glass room open; I did that before I cut my
cords. Now, by sawing against the glass, I freed my wrists and I had
off Doris’s cords.
The fight outside--still I did not know who was fighting--had passed
from that wide room where the elevator was; it went farther or it went
down.
I got out of the glass room and around to that cock in the pipe which
Keeban had turned.
The valve was turned tight; no doubt about it; for I twisted it half a
turn open and twisted it back again to make sure. “He didn’t give you
the gas!” I called to Doris. “It wasn’t turned on!”
Then he came back into the room, bloody and leaping; and he was Jerry!
The change, which I’d given up hoping for, had come over him.
“Steve!” he called to me. “Steve! Come down and see him. I’ve got him.
Christina croaked him cold! And I’ve got him! Come down and see him!”
“Who?” I said; for I was shaky; and in my mind, then, there was only
one of them.
“Keeban!” he told me. “He’s cold, downstairs where Christina croaked
him.”
XXII
A CROAKING AND FINIS.
Doris was up and she was steady. “You didn’t get the gas,” Jerry was
telling her.
She said nothing to him. It was harder for her than for me to
understand what he had done; yet she got it before I did.
“You’re Jerry Fanneal,” she said to him.
“That’s me.”
He went to a window and threw up the sash and flung back the shutter.
He fired three shots in the air.
“You were here--not Harry Vine--just now.”
“He’s been cold for half an hour. That’s what delayed you.”
“What?”
“Christina stopped to croak him, Harry Vine, Keeban. She wouldn’t take
a chance.”
He was wiping blood from his shoulder where he’d been hurt. I was
bloody in several spots and Margaret was wiping that off me.
“Come along,” said Jerry: and he took us downstairs. And there he
lay--himself in duplicate--dead on the floor. He had been stabbed
through the throat.
I bent over him and, with Jerry himself bending beside me, still I got
a shock at seeing him. “Two of you,” I said over and over. “Two of
you.” I was still shaken, you see.
“Two of us!” said Jerry, and he touched that body so identical with his
own. “The difference between us was this: when he was turned loose, he
walked the wrong way across the Lincoln Park grass.”
“Two of you!” I said and straightened, my arm on Jerry’s shoulder. “See
here! When we were boys, with our beds side by side, what was the book
you kept underneath to read in the mornings?”
“The Wonder Clock,” he told me.
“And the story you liked best of all?”
“‘One Good Turn Deserves Another.’”
“Jerry!” I cried to him; and I stood there holding to him, staring down
at Keeban.
“I didn’t kill him,” Jerry said to me. “I came here to get him; I meant
to bag him. Christina came with him but she worked with me. She knew
I was here. She meant to kill him. I didn’t know that till after I’d
stepped out and went at him. She gave him the steel; she wanted to
croak him. She thought he’d get her, if she didn’t.”
Doris said: “He would have. Where’s she now?”
“Gone,” said Jerry; and Doris asked no more.
Jerry ceased to stare down at Keeban. “We were twins, I suppose; that
must be it; and he walked the wrong way across Lincoln Park. That was
all there was to it.” His mind kept going back to that. “Steve,” he
said to me.
“What?” I asked; I thought again he was turned to philosophy; but he
said,
“Upstairs, you swung your chair hard, old top. I thought you’d never do
it.”
“I see now,” I replied. “You were waiting for me to do that.”
He nodded. “You had to make the move; then I could do the rest. You got
to it just in time, old fellow!”
“In time?” I said stupidly. “The pipe wasn’t turned on.”
“Yet you were just in time; in a minute more, they’d got wise that it
wasn’t.”
We heard men downstairs now. “Who’s that?” I said.
“Must be the bulls; his gang,” Jerry glanced at Keeban again, “got out;
all that will ever get. Well, come on, bulls; a lot you can hurt me
now!”
He looked up from his brother and straightened; and I felt for him
perhaps one thousandth of his relief from what had been on him since
that night he came into my room, after the Sparlings’ dance, and said
Keeban had come and gone with Dorothy Crewe.
I put my hand on him while we waited, Doris and he and I, for the
approaching steps of the bulls.
“You can go back to anybody now; you can go back to Dorothy Crewe.”
“I’ll not go back,” he told me.
“You wouldn’t,” I said.
“Are you going back, Steve?”
“Where?” I asked.
“To the bean business and--your Dorothy Crewe?”
“I don’t know about going back to the bean business,” I said. “And I
never had any Dorothy Crewe; but if I had I wouldn’t go back to her.
No; I know that!”
The bulls came on us. We were in the light, but they flashed their own
lanterns in our faces. “Up with ’em!” They had our hands over our heads
at the points of their pistols. And when they saw Jerry, they felt sure
of a haul.
“Here’s _him_!” they called to those behind. “Here’s him who’s wanted
from Chi to the Street! Here’s him!”
“Take a look at the floor,” Jerry advised them. “And when you take me
along, have him with us.”
“How’s this, Mr. Fanneal? How’s this?” And then I reaped one advantage
of my previous notoriety. They knew me; and there, with Jerry beside me
and Keeban on the floor, I tried to tell them.
Of course, they took us to the station for the second telling, which
was not the last by any means. They held Jerry that night; but they did
not hold Margaret and me. Of her, they knew nothing; and what I knew of
her, I did not tell them.
If I told them all the truth about her, one section of this truth ought
to make up for the other; her trying to warn Teverson, and taking the
risk she ran, surely was full compensation for her passing “the queer.”
I felt that; but not being certain that others would so judge, I kept
to myself what I knew. And I kept her to myself, too.
I had her in a cab; and this was no stray taxi, you may be sure. This
was certain to go where I ordered it; and the number I gave was that of
my friend on the Avenue.
“We can both go there and stay,” I said. “That’s one use for friends.”
“No,” said Doris. “Not for me.”
“Oh, yes,” I said; and, being alone with her in the back of that taxi,
I firmly and forcibly held her. Also I kissed her, several times.
“Don’t!” She fought with me; and furiously, too.
“I love you,” I repeated to her. “And you love me. God knows why, but
you kissed me in that closet; and you----”
She told me then and there that none of that counted. She had thought
we were going to be killed, you see, or she never would have shown any
interest in me. Now we weren’t killed, she said; and certainly that was
true. We’d have to go back to our own lines, me to the bean business
and she to “shoving the queer.”
“You can’t do that,” I told her.
“Why not?” she came back at me.
“You’ve no more of the queer to shove. Your father’s taken.”
“And you’re glad of that!” she accused me.
“I’m not glad!” I denied. “I’d do anything to free him.”
“You wouldn’t shove the queer with me!” she retorted.
“Didn’t I do it--just about?”
“But you didn’t want to. You didn’t like it!”
“I never liked anything so much as that trip on the train, except when
I had you later.”
“Well, that’s over now!” she said.
“I guess not. You and I have just started!”
“We’ve not....”
That’s how we argued in that cab. I was wild about her; she did love
me; and after a while I made her remember it. Naturally we had quite a
time; we’d just been under rather a strain together.
I took her to my friend’s that night; and the second day I took her to
the Church Around the Corner and married her. I waited till the second
day so Jerry could be best man.
Jerry has not yet gone back to the bean business; I think he never will
return. One of many results of his finding Keeban is that Jerry found
his mother--an old woman who, when she was young, had twin boys one of
whom wandered away; and for twenty-five years she has known only the
one who turned to crime. Now she knows Jerry; he knows her. Naturally
he’s bewildered a bit about his future.
I am back in the bean business; that’s where I belong. I’m at my desk.
I’ve returned.
But I’ve returned rather like the soldier Kipling sings about who
returned to Hackensack “but not the same.” And I’m not the same for a
similar reason.
“Things ’ave transpired which made me learn,
The size and meanin’ of the game.”
I’ve thought about that a lot, these days. My parents picked up Jerry
and adopted him to “broaden” me and immediately set about the business
of making him as much like ourselves as possible. They succeeded to the
point where we both would have gone through life bean merchants, and
happy at it, but for Keeban.
He’s the one that did things to us.
But for him, the game would have been my club and golf course, the
Drive, the Drake, the other items I’ve mentioned.
I’d have married, I suppose, some girl with my exact previous notions
of the game.
Now, as I’ve mentioned, I’m married to Doris. And I have, I know, the
best wife in the world. Certainly the most interesting.
Some of the family friends, who know the facts, feel there is something
fundamentally wrong with my wife.
There is not; and there never was anything wrong--except counterfeiting.
She doesn’t admit that was wrong. She concedes that now that she’s
married to me there is no actual occasion for anyone in the family
engraving a steel plate but she makes this concession in a way which
suggests that, should occasion ever arise, she will not be without
recourse as a breadwinner.
The interesting part, for me, is I don’t know how much she means it. So
I’m playing that bean business safe to keep the occasions down below
and quite out of her reach.
If one ever blows the lid off, I’ll tell you.
+-------------------------------------------------+
|Transcriber’s note: |
| |
|Obvious typographic errors have been corrected. |
| |
+-------------------------------------------------+