draw his fellow-conspirator up to a level with the window. “I feel just
like I was burglarizing a house,” chuckled Gallegher, as he dropped
noiselessly to the floor below and refastened the shutter. The barn was
a large one, with a row of stalls on either side in which horses and
cows were dozing. There was a haymow over each row of stalls, and at
one end of the barn a number of fence-rails had been thrown across from
one mow to the other. These rails were covered with hay.
In the middle of the floor was the ring. It was not really a ring, but
a square, with wooden posts at its four corners through which ran a
heavy rope. The space inclosed by the rope was covered with sawdust.
Gallegher could not resist stepping into the ring, and after stamping
the sawdust once or twice, as if to assure himself that he was really
there, began dancing around it, and indulging in such a remarkable
series of fistic manœuvres with an imaginary adversary that the
unimaginative detective precipitately backed into a corner of the barn.
“Now, then,” said Gallegher, having apparently vanquished his foe, “you
come with me.” His companion followed quickly as Gallegher climbed
to one of the haymows, and crawling carefully out on the fence-rail,
stretched himself at full length, face downward. In this position, by
moving the straw a little, he could look down, without being himself
seen, upon the heads of whomsoever stood below. “This is better’n a
private box, ain’t it?” said Gallegher.
The boy from the newspaper office and the detective lay there in
silence, biting at straws and tossing anxiously on their comfortable
bed.
It seemed fully two hours before they came. Gallegher had listened
without breathing, and with every muscle on a strain, at least a dozen
times, when some movement in the yard had led him to believe that they
were at the door.
And he had numerous doubts and fears. Sometimes it was that the police
had learnt of the fight, and had raided Keppler’s in his absence, and
again it was that the fight had been postponed, or, worst of all, that
it would be put off until so late that Mr. Dwyer could not get back in
time for the last edition of the paper. Their coming, when at last
they came, was heralded by an advance-guard of two sporting men, who
stationed themselves at either side of the big door.
“Hurry up, now, gents,” one of the men said with a shiver, “don’t keep
this door open no longer’n is needful.”
It was not a very large crowd, but it was wonderfully well selected. It
ran, in the majority of its component parts, to heavy white coats with
pearl buttons. The white coats were shouldered by long blue coats with
astrakhan fur trimmings, the wearers of which preserved a cliqueness
not remarkable when one considers that they believed every one else
present to be either a crook or a prize-fighter.
There were well-fed, well-groomed clubmen and brokers in the crowd, a
politician or two, a popular comedian with his manager, amateur boxers
from the athletic clubs, and quiet, close-mouthed sporting men from
every city in the country. Their names if printed in the papers would
have been as familiar as the types of the papers themselves.
And among these men, whose only thought was of the brutal sport to
come, was Hade, with Dwyer standing at ease at his shoulder,—Hade,
white, and visibly in deep anxiety, hiding his pale face beneath a
cloth travelling-cap, and with his chin muffled in a woollen scarf.
He had dared to come because he feared his danger from the already
suspicious Keppler was less than if he stayed away. And so he was
there, hovering restlessly on the border of the crowd, feeling his
danger and sick with fear.
When Hefflefinger first saw him he started up on his hands and elbows
and made a movement forward as if he would leap down then and there and
carry off his prisoner single-handed.
“Lie down,” growled Gallegher; “an officer of any sort wouldn’t live
three minutes in that crowd.”
The detective drew back slowly and buried himself again in the straw,
but never once through the long fight which followed did his eyes leave
the person of the murderer. The newspaper men took their places in the
foremost row close around the ring, and kept looking at their watches
and begging the master of ceremonies to “shake it up, do.”
There was a great deal of betting, and all of the men handled the
great roll of bills they wagered with a flippant recklessness which
could only be accounted for in Gallegher’s mind by temporary mental
derangement. Some one pulled a box out into the ring and the master of
ceremonies mounted it, and pointed out in forcible language that as
they were almost all already under bonds to keep the peace, it behooved
all to curb their excitement and to maintain a severe silence, unless
they wanted to bring the police upon them and have themselves “sent
down” for a year or two.
Then two very disreputable-looking persons tossed their respective
principals’ high hats into the ring, and the crowd, recognizing in
this relic of the days when brave knights threw down their gauntlets
in the lists as only a sign that the fight was about to begin, cheered
tumultuously.
This was followed by a sudden surging forward, and a mutter of
admiration much more flattering than the cheers had been, when the
principals followed their hats, and slipping out of their great-coats,
stood forth in all the physical beauty of the perfect brute.
Their pink skin was as soft and healthy-looking as a baby’s, and glowed
in the lights of the lanterns like tinted ivory, and underneath this
silken covering the great biceps and muscles moved in and out and
looked like the coils of a snake around the branch of a tree.
Gentleman and blackguard shouldered each other for a nearer view; the
coachmen, whose metal buttons were unpleasantly suggestive of police,
put their hands, in the excitement of the moment, on the shoulders
of their masters; the perspiration stood out in great drops on the
foreheads of the backers, and the newspaper men bit somewhat nervously
at the ends of their pencils.
And in the stalls the cows munched contentedly at their cuds and gazed
with gentle curiosity at their two fellow-brutes, who stood waiting
the signal to fall upon, and kill each other if need be, for the
delectation of their brothers.
“Take your places,” commanded the master of ceremonies.
In the moment in which the two men faced each other the crowd became so
still that, save for the beating of the rain upon the shingled roof and
the stamping of a horse in one of the stalls, the place was as silent
as a church.
“Time!” shouted the master of ceremonies.
The two men sprang into a posture of defence, which was lost as quickly
as it was taken, one great arm shot out like a piston-rod; there was
the sound of bare fists beating on naked flesh; there was an exultant
indrawn gasp of savage pleasure and relief from the crowd, and the
great fight had begun.
How the fortunes of war rose and fell, and changed and rechanged that
night, is an old story to those who listen to such stories; and those
who do not will be glad to be spared the telling of it. It was, they
say, one of the bitterest fights between two men that this country has
ever known.
But all that is of interest here is that after an hour of this
desperate brutal business the champion ceased to be the favorite; the
man whom he had taunted and bullied, and for whom the public had but
little sympathy, was proving himself a likely winner, and under his
cruel blows, as sharp and clean as those from a cutlass, his opponent
was rapidly giving way.
The men about the ropes were past all control now; they drowned
Keppler’s petitions for silence with oaths and in inarticulate shouts
of anger, as if the blows had fallen upon them, and in mad rejoicings.
They swept from one end of the ring to the other, with every muscle
leaping in unison with those of the man they favored, and when a New
York correspondent muttered over his shoulder that this would be the
biggest sporting surprise since the Heenan-Sayers fight, Mr. Dwyer
nodded his head sympathetically in assent.
In the excitement and tumult it is doubtful if any heard the three
quickly repeated blows that fell heavily from the outside upon the
big doors of the barn. If they did, it was already too late to mend
matters, for the door fell, torn from its hinges, and as it fell a
captain of police sprang into the light from out of the storm, with his
lieutenants and their men crowding close at his shoulder.
In the panic and stampede that followed, several of the men stood as
helplessly immovable as though they had seen a ghost; others made a mad
rush into the arms of the officers and were beaten back against the
ropes of the ring; others dived headlong into the stalls, among the
horses and cattle, and still others shoved the rolls of money they held
into the hands of the police and begged like children to be allowed to
escape.
The instant the door fell and the raid was declared Hefflefinger
slipped over the cross rails on which he had been lying, hung for an
instant by his hands, and then dropped into the centre of the fighting
mob on the floor. He was out of it in an instant with the agility of
a pickpocket, was across the room and at Hade’s throat like a dog. The
murderer, for the moment, was the calmer man of the two.
“Here,” he panted, “hands off, now. There’s no need for all this
violence. There’s no great harm in looking at a fight, is there?
There’s a hundred-dollar bill in my right hand; take it and let me slip
out of this. No one is looking. Here.”
But the detective only held him the closer.
“I want you for burglary,” he whispered under his breath. “You’ve got
to come with me now, and quick. The less fuss you make, the better for
both of us. If you don’t know who I am, you can feel my badge under my
coat there. I’ve got the authority. It’s all regular, and when we’re
out of this d——d row I’ll show you the papers.”
He took one hand from Hade’s throat and pulled a pair of handcuffs from
his pocket.
“It’s a mistake. This is an outrage,” gasped the murderer, white and
trembling, but dreadfully alive and desperate for his liberty. “Let me
go, I tell you! Take your hands off of me! Do I look like a burglar,
you fool?”
“I know who you look like,” whispered the detective, with his face
close to the face of his prisoner. “Now, will you go easy as a burglar,
or shall I tell these men who you are and what I _do_ want you for?
Shall I call out your real name or not? Shall I tell them? Quick, speak
up; shall I?”
There was something so exultant—something so unnecessarily savage in
the officer’s face that the man he held saw that the detective knew him
for what he really was, and the hands that had held his throat slipped
down around his shoulders, or he would have fallen. The man’s eyes
opened and closed again, and he swayed weakly backward and forward, and
choked as if his throat were dry and burning. Even to such a hardened
connoisseur in crime as Gallegher, who stood closely by, drinking it
in, there was something so abject in the man’s terror that he regarded
him with what was almost a touch of pity.
“For God’s sake,” Hade begged, “let me go. Come with me to my room and
I’ll give you half the money. I’ll divide with you fairly. We can both
get away. There’s a fortune for both of us there. We both can get away.
You’ll be rich for life. Do you understand—for life!”
But the detective, to his credit, only shut his lips the tighter.
“That’s enough,” he whispered, in return. “That’s more than I expected.
You’ve sentenced yourself already. Come!”
Two officers in uniform barred their exit at the door, but Hefflefinger
smiled easily and showed his badge.
“One of Byrnes’s men,” he said, in explanation; “came over expressly to
take this chap. He’s a burglar; ’Arlie’ Lane, _alias_ Carleton. I’ve
shown the papers to the captain. It’s all regular. I’m just going to
get his traps at the hotel and walk him over to the station. I guess
we’ll push right on to New York to-night.”
The officers nodded and smiled their admiration for the representative
of what is, perhaps, the best detective force in the world, and let him
pass.
Then Hefflefinger turned and spoke to Gallegher, who still stood as
watchful as a dog at his side. “I’m going to his room to get the bonds
and stuff,” he whispered; “then I’ll march him to the station and take
that train. I’ve done my share; don’t forget yours!”
“Oh, you’ll get your money right enough,” said Gallegher. “And, sa-ay,”
he added, with the appreciative nod of an expert, “do you know, you did
it rather well.”
Mr. Dwyer had been writing while the raid was settling down, as he had
been writing while waiting for the fight to begin. Now he walked over
to where the other correspondents stood in angry conclave.
The newspaper men had informed the officers who hemmed them in that
they represented the principal papers of the country, and were
expostulating vigorously with the captain, who had planned the raid,
and who declared they were under arrest.
“Don’t be an ass, Scott,” said Mr. Dwyer, who was too excited to be
polite or politic. “You know our being here isn’t a matter of choice.
We came here on business, as you did, and you’ve no right to hold us.”
“If we don’t get our stuff on the wire at once,” protested a New York
man, “we’ll be too late for to-morrow’s paper, and——”
Captain Scott said he did not care a profanely small amount for
to-morrow’s paper, and that all he knew was that to the station-house
the newspaper men would go. There they would have a hearing, and if the
magistrate chose to let them off, that was the magistrate’s business,
but that his duty was to take them into custody.
“But then it will be too late, don’t you understand?” shouted Mr.
Dwyer. “You’ve got to let us go _now_, at once.”
“I can’t do it, Mr. Dwyer,” said the captain, “and that’s all there is
to it. Why, haven’t I just sent the president of the Junior Republican
Club to the patrol-wagon, the man that put this coat on me, and do
you think I can let you fellows go after that? You were all put
under bonds to keep the peace not three days ago, and here you’re at
it—fighting like badgers. It’s worth my place to let one of you off.”
What Mr. Dwyer said next was so uncomplimentary to the gallant Captain
Scott that that overwrought individual seized the sporting editor by
the shoulder, and shoved him into the hands of two of his men.
This was more than the distinguished Mr. Dwyer could brook, and he
excitedly raised his hand in resistance. But before he had time to do
anything foolish his wrist was gripped by one strong, little hand, and
he was conscious that another was picking the pocket of his great-coat.
He slapped his hands to his sides, and looking down, saw Gallegher
standing close behind him and holding him by the wrist. Mr. Dwyer
had forgotten the boy’s existence, and would have spoken sharply if
something in Gallegher’s innocent eyes had not stopped him.
Gallegher’s hand was still in that pocket, in which Mr. Dwyer had
shoved his note-book filled with what he had written of Gallegher’s
work and Hade’s final capture, and with a running descriptive account
of the fight. With his eyes fixed on Mr. Dwyer, Gallegher drew it out,
and with a quick movement shoved it inside his waistcoat. Mr. Dwyer
gave a nod of comprehension. Then glancing at his two guardsmen, and
finding that they were still interested in the wordy battle of the
correspondents with their chief, and had seen nothing, he stooped and
whispered to Gallegher: “The forms are locked at twenty minutes to
three. If you don’t get there by that time it will be of no use, but if
you’re on time you’ll beat the town—and the country too.”
Gallegher’s eyes flashed significantly, and nodding his head to show he
understood, started boldly on a run toward the door. But the officers
who guarded it brought him to an abrupt halt, and, much to Mr. Dwyer’s
astonishment, drew from him what was apparently a torrent of tears.
“Let me go to me father. I want me father,” the boy shrieked,
hysterically. “They’ve ’rested father. Oh, daddy, daddy. They’re
a-goin’ to take you to prison.”
“Who is your father, sonny?” asked one of the guardians of the gate.
“Keppler’s me father,” sobbed Gallegher. “They’re a-goin’ to lock him
up, and I’ll never see him no more.”
“Oh, yes, you will,” said the officer, good-naturedly; “he’s there in
that first patrol-wagon. You can run over and say good-night to him,
and then you’d better get to bed. This ain’t no place for kids of your
age.”
“Thank you, sir,” sniffed Gallegher, tearfully, as the two officers
raised their clubs, and let him pass out into the darkness.
The yard outside was in a tumult, horses were stamping, and plunging,
and backing the carriages into one another; lights were flashing from
every window of what had been apparently an uninhabited house, and the
voices of the prisoners were still raised in angry expostulation.
Three police patrol-wagons were moving about the yard, filled with
unwilling passengers, who sat or stood, packed together like sheep, and
with no protection from the sleet and rain.
Gallegher stole off into a dark corner, and watched the scene until his
eyesight became familiar with the position of the land.
Then with his eyes fixed fearfully on the swinging light of a lantern
with which an officer was searching among the carriages, he groped
his way between horses’ hoofs and behind the wheels of carriages to
the cab which he had himself placed at the furthermost gate. It was
still there, and the horse, as he had left it, with its head turned
toward the city. Gallegher opened the big gate noiselessly, and worked
nervously at the hitching strap. The knot was covered with a thin
coating of ice, and it was several minutes before he could loosen it.
But his teeth finally pulled it apart, and with the reins in his hands
he sprang upon the wheel. And as he stood so, a shock of fear ran down
his back like an electric current, his breath left him, and he stood
immovable, gazing with wide eyes into the darkness.
The officer with the lantern had suddenly loomed up from behind a
carriage not fifty feet distant, and was standing perfectly still, with
his lantern held over his head, peering so directly toward Gallegher
that the boy felt that he must see him. Gallegher stood with one foot
on the hub of the wheel and with the other on the box waiting to
spring. It seemed a minute before either of them moved, and then the
officer took a step forward, and demanded sternly, “Who is that? What
are you doing there?”
There was no time for parley then. Gallegher felt that he had been
taken in the act, and that his only chance lay in open flight. He
leaped up on the box, pulling out the whip as he did so, and with a
quick sweep lashed the horse across the head and back. The animal
sprang forward with a snort, narrowly clearing the gate-post, and
plunged off into the darkness.
“Stop!” cried the officer.
So many of Gallegher’s acquaintances among the ’longshoremen and mill
hands had been challenged in so much the same manner that Gallegher
knew what would probably follow if the challenge was disregarded. So he
slipped from his seat to the footboard below, and ducked his head.
The three reports of a pistol, which rang out briskly from behind him,
proved that his early training had given him a valuable fund of useful
miscellaneous knowledge.
“Don’t you be scared,” he said, reassuringly, to the horse; “he’s
firing in the air.”
The pistol-shots were answered by the impatient clangor of a
patrol-wagon’s gong, and glancing over his shoulder Gallegher saw its
red and green lanterns tossing from side to side and looking in the
darkness like the side-lights of a yacht plunging forward in a storm.
“I hadn’t bargained to race you against no patrol-wagons,” said
Gallegher to his animal; “but if they want a race, we’ll give them a
tough tussle for it, won’t we?”
Philadelphia, lying four miles to the south, sent up a faint yellow
glow to the sky. It seemed very far away, and Gallegher’s braggadocio
grew cold within him at the loneliness of his adventure and the thought
of the long ride before him.
It was still bitterly cold.
The rain and sleet beat through his clothes, and struck his skin with a
sharp chilling touch that set him trembling.
Even the thought of the overweighted patrol-wagon probably sticking in
the mud some safe distance in the rear, failed to cheer him, and the
excitement that had so far made him callous to the cold died out and
left him weaker and nervous.
But his horse was chilled with the long standing, and now leaped
eagerly forward, only too willing to warm the half-frozen blood in its
veins.
“You’re a good beast,” said Gallegher, plaintively. “You’ve got more
nerve than me. Don’t you go back on me now. Mr. Dwyer says we’ve got
to beat the town.” Gallegher had no idea what time it was as he rode
through the night, but he knew he would be able to find out from a
big clock over a manufactory at a point nearly three-quarters of the
distance from Keppler’s to the goal.
He was still in the open country and driving recklessly, for he knew
the best part of his ride must be made outside the city limits.
He raced between desolate-looking corn-fields with bare stalks and
patches of muddy earth rising above the thin covering of snow, truck
farms and brick-yards fell behind him on either side. It was very
lonely work, and once or twice the dogs ran yelping to the gates and
barked after him.
Part of his way lay parallel with the railroad tracks, and he drove
for some time beside long lines of freight and coal cars as they stood
resting for the night. The fantastic Queen Anne suburban stations were
dark and deserted, but in one or two of the block-towers he could
see the operators writing at their desks, and the sight in some way
comforted him.
Once he thought of stopping to get out the blanket in which he had
wrapped himself on the first trip, but he feared to spare the time, and
drove on with his teeth chattering and his shoulders shaking with the
cold.
He welcomed the first solitary row of darkened houses with a faint
cheer of recognition. The scattered lamp-posts lightened his spirits,
and even the badly paved streets rang under the beats of his
horse’s feet like music. Great mills and manufactories, with only a
night-watchman’s light in the lowest of their many stories, began
to take the place of the gloomy farmhouses and gaunt trees that had
startled him with their grotesque shapes. He had been driving nearly
an hour, he calculated, and in that time the rain had changed to a wet
snow, that fell heavily and clung to whatever it touched. He passed
block after block of trim workmen’s houses, as still and silent as the
sleepers within them, and at last he turned the horse’s head into Broad
Street, the city’s great thoroughfare, that stretches from its one end
to the other and cuts it evenly in two.
He was driving noiselessly over the snow and slush in the street, with
his thoughts bent only on the clock-face he wished so much to see, when
a hoarse voice challenged him from the sidewalk. “Hey, you, stop there,
hold up!” said the voice.
Gallegher turned his head, and though he saw that the voice came from
under a policeman’s helmet, his only answer was to hit his horse
sharply over the head with his whip and to urge it into a gallop.
This, on his part, was followed by a sharp, shrill whistle from the
policeman. Another whistle answered it from a street-corner one block
ahead of him. “Whoa,” said Gallegher, pulling on the reins. “There’s
one too many of them,” he added, in apologetic explanation. The horse
stopped, and stood, breathing heavily, with great clouds of steam
rising from its flanks.
“Why in hell didn’t you stop when I told you to?” demanded the voice,
now close at the cab’s side.
“I didn’t hear you,” returned Gallegher, sweetly. “But I heard you
whistle, and I heard your partner whistle, and I thought maybe it was
me you wanted to speak to, so I just stopped.”
“You heard me well enough. Why aren’t your lights lit?” demanded the
voice.
“Should I have ’em lit?” asked Gallegher, bending over and regarding
them with sudden interest.
“You know you should, and if you don’t, you’ve no right to be driving
that cab. I don’t believe you’re the regular driver, anyway. Where’d
you get it?”