A MARKED MAN
Johnny's work at the studio never failed to fascinate him. The noon hours
were pure routine. But at night, when squad calls came thick and
fast--that was the time!
An entire symphony orchestra might be crashing its way through some
magnificent concerto. No matter. The squad operator spoke a few words in
Johnny's ear. He jotted down those words. He pressed a button twice. For
one brief second the air, a thousand miles around, grew tensely silent.
Then _Clang! Clang! Clang!_ And after that, Johnny's voice: "Squads,
attention! Squad 16. A shooting at Madison and Ashland." Ah! There was
power for you; a little press of a button and all the world stood by.
Each night brought to his ears a terse description of some new form of
violence.
"You'd think," he said to Drew once, "that the whole city had turned
criminal."
"But it hasn't," Drew replied thoughtfully. "Only one person in three
hundred is a professional criminal. Don't forget that. If you want to
know what that means, go somewhere and watch a turnstile. Count three
hundred people as they pass through. Then say 'ONE.' Big, like that. That
stands for one crook. Then begin all over again, and count three
hundred." Johnny tried that, and derived a deal of assurance from the
experiment. It gave him the comforting feeling that one might have who
has three hundred friends arrayed solidly behind him, row on row, while a
single enemy stands across the way.
But were these truly ready to stand back of law and justice? "If they are
not," he told himself, "it is because of ignorance. If they do not know
the truth they must be told." Johnny hurried back to the shack as soon as
his work was done, on the night of his curious adventure down by the
slip. He had no desire to go prowling about those abandoned sheds again
that night. He did wish to be abroad the first thing in the morning. He
wanted to discover, if possible, how the would-be assassin had made his
escape. He was also curious to discover whether or not his arrow had gone
with the stranger.
"I am surprised that anyone should attempt to kill me," Drew said, as
they started for the slip early that morning.
"But isn't a police officer's life always in danger?"
"Why, no, I wouldn't say so. Depends, of course, on your record, and the
type of crooks you are assigned to.
"Take the matter of arresting a crook. He doesn't usually resist, unless
you've caught him red-handed in crime. Rather take a chance with the
judge. Figures you've got nothing on him anyway. And I haven't been in on
anything really big. They give those things to older men. Howe and I have
been following pickpockets for months. That was my first and it's my last
assignment as a detective so far.
"Pickpockets are seldom violent. Sneaking is their game. They seldom pack
a gun. If they do, they don't know how to use it."
"That man knew his gun," said Johnny with a shudder.
"Fairly good gun." Drew had thrown the cartridges out of the revolver. He
had hung it on a nail over the head of his bed. There it was destined to
remain until a busy spider had spun a web about it and built him a gauzy
home inside the trigger guard. For all that, neither the spider, the
revolver, nor the former owner of the revolver were destined to rest long
in peace.
"It's plain enough," said Johnny, as they reached the sheds, "why that
assassin was unconscious of my presence. I had been standing silently in
the shadows, a long time, looking for a rat."
"Well," chuckled Drew, "you got one, didn't you?"
"That's what I've been wondering," replied Johnny. "Probably I did;
otherwise why did he drop the gun?"
"Quite so. You traded an arrow for a loaded gun. Not so bad."
"I still have hope of recovering my arrow. The flesh of a man's arm is a
thin target. I put all I had into that shot."
They found some footprints ground into the cinders where the man had
stood. They discovered several breaks in the rusting sides of the shed,
where he might have escaped. And yes, true to Johnny's expectations, they
found the arrow where it had spent its force and dropped a hundred or
more feet from the spot from which it had been fired.
"See!" exclaimed Johnny as he picked it up. "I got him. Blood on the
feathers."
"I never doubted that for a moment," Drew said impressively. "As you
suggested, the arrow must have gone through the fleshy part of his arm.
"He's a marked man!" he exclaimed. "You must keep that arrow. Some day,
perhaps to-morrow, perhaps ten years from now, it may be needed as
evidence."
"Why, I--"
"That arrow mark will leave a scar that matches the width of your arrow
blade. It will have other peculiarities that will tell straight and plain
that the wound was made, not only by an arrow, but by one arrow--this
one. I've seen things far more technical than that, far more difficult to
prove, sway a jury and win a hanging verdict."
So, in the end, the arrow was laid across two nails close to the revolver
above Drew's bed.
And, just by way of providing an easy means of escape if escape were
necessary, the spider ran a line from the thug's revolver to Johnny's
blood-dyed arrow.
"You said something about boxing once," Drew was at the door of the
shack, ready to depart for his day of scouting. "How'd you like to meet
me at the club this evening for a few rounds?"
"Be great!" Johnny exclaimed enthusiastically. "You'll find me rusty,
though. Haven't had gloves on for a long time."
"Here's the address." Drew wrote on a bit of paper, and handed it to
Johnny. "I'll meet you in the lobby at nine o'clock."
"Fine!"
With Drew gone, and only the distant rumble of the city to keep him
company, Johnny sat down in Drew's rocking chair to think. From time to
time his gaze strayed to the wall where the revolver and the arrow hung.
"Life," he thought, "has grown more complicated and--and more terrible.
And yet, what a privilege it is to live!"
For the first time since he arrived on that freighter at midnight, he
felt a desire to be far, far away from this great city and all that it
stood for.
"Power," he murmured, "great power, that is what a city stands for. Great
power, great weakness, great success, gigantic failure, men of
magnificent character, men of no character at all; that's what you find
in a city of three million people."
At once his mind was far away. In his imagination he stood upon a small
and shabby dock. A small and shabby village lay at the back of the dock.
At his feet a dilapidated clinker-built rowboat bumped the dock. Oars
were there, minnows for bait, and fishing tackle. Two miles up the bay
was a dark hole where great muskies waved the water with their fins,
where bass black as coal darted from place to place, while spotted perch,
seeming part of the water itself, hung motionless, watching.
"Ah, to be there!" he breathed. "The peace, the simple joy of it all. To
drop a minnow down there; to cast one far out, then to watch for the move
that means a strike!
"And yet--" He sighed, but did not finish his sentence. On the youth of
to-day a great city exerts an indescribable charm. Johnny would not leave
this city of his boyhood days until he had conquered or had been
conquered.
"It's strange, all this," he mused. "Wonder why that man beat me up there
in the studio? Wonder if Sergeant McCarthey knows any more than he did.
Let me see. Pickpockets, boy robbers, theatre holdup men, safe blowers.
Wonder whose accomplice that man with a hole in his hand is. Who can
tell?"