The girl was dead. The white-coated ambulance surgeon who examined her
had shaken his head, and refused to take her in the ambulance. The
morgue waggon had taken the body but a short time after the police
reserves had beaten their way through a mob of thousands to arrest the
white-faced, hysterical prisoner, who cried his innocence through lips
battered by the fist of Cartwright.
In the precinct station the prisoner had collapsed, and Cartwright told
his story. He had heard a slight noise, and swung around in his chair.
At that instant came the flash of the pistol behind him. He heard the
man drop it, and he leaped to grapple with him. Yes, he knew the
prisoner; name was Nelson, a half-baked kid, who had bothered Miss
Reynolds for months. Yes, this was Miss Reynolds’s first engagement; her
first appearance on any stage. He was her manager. No, nothing else.
Emphatically!
The prisoner, brought around roughly, swore that he was innocent. He had
known Miss Reynolds for months, they had been friends in Europe. She had
asked him to be present at her first appearance, and at the end of her
act he had gone to meet her at the stage entrance. It was there that he
was told that she had an engagement with Cartwright. That this made him
wild with jealousy he admitted; he knew Cartwright by reputation, and
Miss Reynolds was but a girl, innocent, unsophisticated.
He had walked around outside the theatre for about fifteen minutes, then
he had decided to go to the box and demand an explanation. The theatre
was in darkness for the knife-throwing act, but he knew his way. His
hand had been on the black velvet hangings when he stopped. And the
revolver flash had come _from the air_ not a foot ahead of him. No, he
could not explain how the shot had been fired. No one could have moved
from the spot where the pistol had been, _because the weapon dropped on
his toe_!
He was taken away to a cell on a charge of murder.
Cartwright, leaving the station when the last of the curious crowd had
drifted away, seemed to have aged ten years since the tragedy. He was
haggard, the grim, hard smile that had been characteristic was gone, his
big hands trembled. He tried in vain to get permission to remove the
girl’s body from the morgue immediately. But the law demanded that the
coroner see it first; and the official was out of town.
Cartwright remembered his political friends. He tried to locate a dozen
over the telephone and failed. Then, by chance, he met the one man in
the city who could help him; the one man among the four millions whom he
could trust: Theodore Rogers, the theatrical lawyer, a friend for thirty
years.
He tried to tell Rogers what he wanted, but his nervousness made his
words a jumble.
“What is it, Jim? What’s the trouble?” Rogers shook him, and he looked
into his eyes anxiously.
Cartwright told him of the shooting. “And, by God, Ted!” he finished
passionately. “I won’t rest a minute till I see that devil in the
electric chair! God! To kill a girl like that!”
The lawyer looked at him curiously. This was not the cool, suave
Cartwright he had known so long.
Cartwright read the look on the lawyer’s face, and the thoughts behind
it. “Not that! I swear it’s not that, Ted!” he choked.
“Come, have a drink,” pleaded Rogers, pulling him toward the lighted
entrance of a rathskeller.
“With that girl on a slab in the morgue?”
“One drink,” insisted Rogers. “You are worse than useless this way.
Come!”
He dragged Cartwright down the steps. The clock over the bar said
half-past two, and the leather-seated booths were in darkness. But
drinks could be had. The barman dozed, and the lone waiter yawned as he
carried a tray toward the booths in the rear. Rogers led the theatrical
man to a seat at the side of the room in front of the bar, ordered
whisky, and waited patiently until Cartwright had gulped down the
liquor.
“Now tell me about it, Jim,” demanded Rogers.
Cartwright, as near the end of the leather seat as he could get, glanced
at the dark booths in the back, then turned and surveyed the front of
the place. The rathskeller was empty, except for the dozing barman and
the waiter, who had gone into one of the front booths to figure his
day’s checks.
“Don’t think--what you’ve been thinking about me and that girl, Ted.”
There was almost pathetic pleading in the manager’s voice; it was
pitched so low that even the lawyer at the other side of the narrow
table could scarcely hear. “She was--a daughter to me--the daughter of
the only woman I ever loved.”
Rogers stared. This from the man Broadway thought it knew!
“Remember twenty years ago?” continued Cartwright, in that same low,
pleading voice. “The girl I took away from Kelly, that drunken burlesque
magician?”
The lawyer nodded, a look of understanding in his eyes.
“You know we loved each other, and we ran away; she, and I, and the six
months’ old kid,” he went on. “You know how she died: killed in the C. &
O. wreck two hours out of Chicago, two hours after we started--and the
kid under her body, alive! I guess that’s what woke me up. All I thought
about after that was making money for the kid. I put her with good
people, and I didn’t tell them who she was, or who I was. When she got
old enough to understand, I adopted her legally. But she never knew who
her father and mother were. I couldn’t tell her about the drunken sot
that died in the Chicago alcoholic ward. A thing like that would have
spoiled her.
“She was born with music in her. I kept her away from me and the people
that knew me. I sent her abroad. And to-night was her try-out! I wanted
to see if she could face the lights, because I wouldn’t have her laughed
at by the highbrows if she couldn’t make good. And she did! God, how
they went wild! I wouldn’t tell a soul that she was my adopted
daughter--until to-morrow. Now----” He fingered his whisky glass with
twitching hands.
Theodore Rogers, whose heart was reputed to be of stone, felt a lump in
his throat. He pushed his gloves from the table, so in bending he would
get the needed instant to hide his feelings. Something made him jerk up
his head! He saw----
The roar of the pistol in his ears deafened him. He cried out as the
long-barrelled gun recoiled across the table and struck him, butt
foremost, on the chest. His glass was crashed to a hundred pieces as the
pistol fell on the table before him. The white shirt front of Cartwright
was black, a small circle of fire glowed in the linen; on his face was
an awful look of horror as his head pitched forward on his arms.
And then Rogers understood what his eyes had first seen; the picture
that had lasted but the hundredth part of a second, perhaps, but which
would be graven on his mind for a lifetime.
He had seen the pistol against Cartwright’s heart, _with nothing to hold
it there_; the recoil of the explosion had driven it across the table
before it fell, _because no human hand had grasped it; no finger had
pulled the trigger_!