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THE PRICE
BY
FRANCIS LYNDE
AUTHOR OF
THE TAMING OF RED BUTTE WESTERN, ETC.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS
Published by Arrangement with Charles Scribner's Sons
COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published May, 1911
[Illustration]
To
MR. LATHROP BROCKWAY BULLENE
SOLE FRIEND OF MY BOYHOOD, WHO WILL RECALL BETTER
THAN ANY THE YOUTHFUL MORAL AND SOCIAL SEED-TIME
WHICH HAS LED TO THIS LATER HARVESTING OF CONCLUSION,
THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. AT CHAUDIÈRE'S 1
II. SPINDRIFT 9
III. THE RIGHT OF MIGHT 16
IV. _IO TRIUMPHE!_ 26
V. THE _BELLE JULIE_ 34
VI. THE DECK-HAND 44
VII. GOLD OF TOLOSA 53
VIII. THE CHAIN-GANG 59
IX. THE MIDDLE WATCH 68
X. QUICKSANDS 75
XI. THE ANARCHIST 84
XII. MOSES ICHTHYOPHAGUS 94
XIII. GRISWOLD EMERGENT 110
XIV. PHILISTIA 116
XV. THE GOTHS AND VANDALS 126
XVI. GOOD SAMARITANS 143
XVII. GROPINGS 154
XVIII. THE ZWEIBUND 165
XIX. LOSS AND GAIN 175
XX. THE CONVALESCENT 187
XXI. BROFFIN'S EQUATION 201
XXII. IN THE BURGLAR-PROOF 218
XXIII. CONVERGING ROADS 234
XXIV. THE FORWARD LIGHT 248
XXV. THE BRIDGE OF JEHENNAM 260
XXVI. PITFALLS 274
XXVII. IN THE SHADOWS 286
XXVIII. BROKEN LINKS 295
XXIX. ALL THAT A MAN HATH 312
XXX. THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES 332
XXXI. NARROWING WALLS 347
XXXII. THE LION'S SHARE 354
XXXIII. GATES OF BRASS 368
XXXIV. THE ABYSS 375
XXXV. MARGERY'S ANSWER 384
XXXVI. THE GRAY WOLF 396
XXXVII. THE QUALITY OF MERCY 408
XXXVIII. THE PENDULUM-SWING 416
XXXIX. DUST AND ASHES 428
XL. APPLES OF ISTAKHAR 438
XLI. THE DESERT AND THE SOWN 448
THE PRICE
I
AT CHAUDIÈRE'S
In the days when New Orleans still claimed distinction as the only
American city without trolleys, sky-scrapers, or fast trains--was it
yesterday? or the day before?--there was a dingy, cobwebbed café in an
arcade off Camp Street which was well-beloved of newspaperdom;
particularly of that wing of the force whose activities begin late and
end in the small hours.
"Chaudière's," it was called, though I know not if that were the name of
the round-faced, round-bodied little Marseillais who took toll at the
desk. But all men knew the fame of its gumbo and its stuffed crabs, and
that its claret was neither very bad nor very dear. And if the walls
were dingy and the odors from the grille pungent and penetrating at
times, there went with the white-sanded floor, and the marble-topped
tables for two, an Old-World air of recreative comfort which is rarer
now, even in New Orleans, than it was yesterday or the day before.
It was at Chaudière's that Griswold had eaten his first breakfast in the
Crescent City; and it was at Chaudière's again that he was sharing a
farewell supper with Bainbridge, of the _Louisianian_. Six weeks lay
between that and this; forty-odd days of discouragement and failure
superadded upon other similar days and weeks and months. The breakfast,
he remembered, had been garnished with certain green sprigs of hope; but
at the supper-table he ate like a barbarian in arrears to his appetite
and the garnishings were the bitter herbs of humiliation and defeat.
Without meaning to, Bainbridge had been strewing the path with fresh
thorns for the defeated one. He had just been billeted for a run down
the Central American coast to write up the banana trade for his paper,
and he was boyishly jubilant over the assignment, which promised to be a
zestful pleasure trip. Chancing upon Griswold in the first flush of his
elation, he had dragged the New Yorker around to Chaudière's to play
second knife and fork at a small parting feast. Not that it had required
much persuasion. Griswold had fasted for twenty-four hours, and he would
have broken bread thankfully with an enemy. And if Bainbridge were not a
friend in a purist's definition of the term, he was at least a friendly
acquaintance.
Until the twenty-four-hour fast was in some measure atoned for, the
burden of the table-talk fell upon Bainbridge, who lifted and carried it
generously on the strength of his windfall. But no topic can be
immortal; and when the vacation under pay had been threshed out in all
its anticipatory details it occurred to the host that his guest was less
than usually responsive; a fault not to be lightly condoned under the
joyous circumstances. Wherefore he protested.
"What's the matter with you to-night, Kenneth, old man? You're more than
commonly grumpy, it seems to me; and that's needless."
Griswold took the last roll from the joint bread-plate and buttered it
methodically.
"Am I?" he said. "Perhaps it is because I am more than commonly hungry.
But go on with your joy-talk: I'm listening."
"That's comforting, as far as it goes; but I should think you might say
something a little less carefully polarized. You don't have a chance to
congratulate lucky people every day."
Griswold looked up with a smile that was almost ill-natured, and quoted
cynically: "'Unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have
abundance; but from him that hath not, shall be taken away even that
which he hath.'"
Bainbridge's laugh was tolerant enough to take the edge from his retort.
"That's a pretty thing to fling at a man who never knifed you or
pistoled you or tried to poison you! An innocent by-stander might say
you envied me."
"I do," rejoined Griswold gravely. "I envy any man who can earn enough
money to pay for three meals a day and a place to sleep in."
"Oh, cat's foot!--anybody can do that," asserted Bainbridge, with the
air of one to whom the struggle for existence has been a mere athlete's
practice run.
"I know; that is your theory. But the facts disprove it. I can't, for
one."
"Oh, yes, you could, if you'd side-track some of your own theories and
come down to sawing wood like the rest of us. But you won't do that."
Griswold was a fair man, with reddish hair and beard and the quick and
sensitive skin of the type. A red flush of anger crept up under the
closely cropped beard, and his eyes were bright.
"That is not true, and you know it, Bainbridge," he contradicted,
speaking slowly lest his temper should break bounds. "Is it my fault, or
only my misfortune, that I can do nothing but write books for which I
can't find a publisher? Or that the work of a hack-writer is quite as
impossible for me as mine is for him?"
Bainbridge scoffed openly; but he was good-natured enough to make amends
when he saw that Griswold was moved.
"I take it all back," he said. "I suppose the book-chicken has come home
again to roost, and a returned manuscript accounts for anything. But
seriously, Kenneth, you ought to get down to bed-rock facts. Nobody but
a crazy phenomenon can find a publisher for his first book, nowadays,
unless he has had some sort of an introduction in the magazines or the
newspapers. You haven't had that; so far as I know, you haven't tried
for it."
"Oh, yes, I have--tried and failed. It isn't in me to do the salable
thing, and there isn't a magazine editor in the country who doesn't know
it by this time. They've been decent about it. Horton was kind enough.
He covered two pages of a letter telling me why the stuff I sent from
here might fit one of the reviews and why it wouldn't fit his magazine.
But that is beside the mark. I tell you, Bainbridge, the conditions are
all wrong when a man with a vital message to his kind can't get to
deliver it to the people who want to hear it."
Bainbridge ordered the small coffees and found his cigar case.
"That is about what I suspected," he commented impatiently. "You
couldn't keep your peculiar views muzzled even when you were writing a
bit of a pot-boiler on sugar-planting. Which brings us back to the old
contention: you drop your fool socialistic fad and write a book that a
reputable publisher can bring out without committing commercial suicide,
and you'll stand some show. Light up and fumigate that idea awhile."
Griswold took the proffered cigar half-absently, as he had taken the
last piece of bread.
"It doesn't need fumigating; if I could consider it seriously it ought
rather to be burnt with fire. You march in the ranks of the well-fed,
Bainbridge, and it is your _métier_ to be conservative. I don't, and
it's mine to be radical."
"What would you have?" demanded the man on the conservative side of the
table. "The world is as it is, and you can't remodel it."
"There is where you make the mistake common to those who cry Peace, when
there is no peace," was the quick retort. "I, and my kind, can remodel
it, and some day, when the burden has grown too heavy to be borne, we
will. The aristocracy of rank, birth, feudal tyranny went down in fire
and blood in France a century ago: the aristocracy of money will go down
here, when the time is ripe."
"That is good anarchy, but mighty bad ethics. I didn't know you had
reached that stage of the disease, Kenneth."
"Call it what you please; names don't change facts. Listen"--Griswold
leaned upon the table; his eyes grew hard and the blue in them became
metallic--"For more than a month I have tramped the streets of this
cursed city begging--yes, that is the word--begging for work of any kind
that would suffice to keep body and soul together; and for more than
half of that time I have lived on one meal a day. That is what we have
come to; we of the submerged majority. And that isn't all. The
wage-worker himself, when he is fortunate enough to find a chance to
earn his crust, is but a serf; a chattel among the other possessions of
some fellow man who has acquired him in the plutocratic redistribution
of the earth and the fulness thereof."
Bainbridge applauded in dumb show.
"Turn it loose and ease the soul-sickness, old man," he said
indulgently. "I know things haven't been coming your way, lately. What
is your remedy?"
Griswold was fairly started now, and ridicule was as fuel to the flame.
"The money-gatherers have set us the example. They have made us
understand that might is right; that he who has may hold--if he can. The
answer is simple: there is enough and to spare for all, and it belongs
to all; to him who sows the seed and waters it, as well as to him who
reaps the harvest. That is a violent remedy, you will say. So be it: it
is the only one that will cure the epidemic of greed. There is an
alternative, but it is only theoretical."
"And that?"
"It may be summed up in seven words: 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as
thyself.' When the man who employs--and rules--uses the power that money
gives him to succor his fellow man, the revolution will be indefinitely
postponed. But as I say, it's only a theory."
Bainbridge glanced at his watch.
"I must be going," he said. "The _Adelantado_ drops down the river at
eleven. But in passing I'll venture a little prophecy. You're down on
your luck now, and a bit hot-hearted in consequence; but some day you
will strike it right and come out on top. When you do, you'll be a hard
master; tattoo that on your arm somewhere so you'll be reminded of it."
Griswold had risen with his entertainer, and he put his hands on the
table.
"God do so to me, and more, if I am, Bainbridge," he said soberly.
"That's all right: when the time comes, you just remember my little
fortune-telling stunt. But before we shake hands, let's get back to
concrete things for a minute or two. How are you fixed for the present,
and what are you going to do for the future?"
Griswold's smile was not pleasant to look at.
"I am 'fixed' to run twenty-four hours longer, thanks to your
hospitality. For that length of time I presume I shall continue to
conform to what we have been taught to believe is the immutable order of
things. After that----"
He paused, and Bainbridge put the question. "Well, after that; what
then?"
"Then, if the chance to earn it is still denied me, and I am
sufficiently hungry, I shall stretch forth my hand and take what I
need."
Bainbridge fished in his pocket and took out a ten-dollar bank-note. "Do
that first," he said, offering Griswold the money.
The proletary smiled and shook his head.
"No; not to keep from going hungry--not even to oblige you, Bainbridge.
It is quite possible that I shall end by becoming a robber, as you
paraphrasers would put it, but I sha'n't begin on my friends.
Good-night, and a safe voyage to you."
II
SPINDRIFT
The fruit steamer _Adelantado_, outward bound, was shuddering to the
first slow revolutions of her propeller when Bainbridge turned the key
in the door of the stuffy little state-room to which he had been
directed, and went on deck.
The lines had been cast off and the ship was falling by imperceptible
inches away from her broadside berth at the fruit wharf. Bainbridge
heard the distance-softened clang of a gong; the tremulous murmur of the
screw became more pronounced, and the vessel forged ahead until the
current caught the outward-swinging prow. Five minutes later the
_Adelantado_ had circled majestically in mid-stream and was passing the
lights of the city in review as she steamed at half-speed down the
river.
Bainbridge had no mind to go back to the stuffy state-room, late as it
was. Instead, he lighted a fresh cigar and found a chair on the port
side aft where he could sit and watch the lights wheel past in orderly
procession as the fruit steamer swept around the great crescent which
gives New Orleans its unofficial name.
While the comfortable feeling of elation, born of his unexpected bit of
good fortune, was still uppermost to lend complacency to his
reflections, he yet found room for a compassionate underthought having
for its object the man from whom he had lately parted. He was honestly
sorry for Griswold; sorry, but not actually apprehensive. He had known
the defeated one in New York, and was not unused to his rebellious
outbursts against the accepted order of things. Granting that his
theories were incendiary and crudely subversive of all the civilized
conventions, Griswold the man was nothing worse than an impressionable
enthusiast; a victim of the auto-suggestion which seizes upon those who
dwell too persistently upon the wrongs of the wronged.
So ran Bainbridge's epitomizing of the proletary's case; and he knew
that his opinion was shared with complete unanimity by all who had known
Griswold in Printing House Square. To a man they agreed in calling him
Utopian, altruistic, visionary. What milder epithets should be applied
to one who, with sufficient literary talent--not to say genius--to make
himself a working name in the ordinary way, must needs run amuck among
the theories and write a novel with a purpose? a novel, moreover, in
which the purpose so overshadowed the story as to make the book a mere
preachment.
As a matter of course, the publishers would have nothing to do with the
book. Bainbridge remembered, with considerable satisfaction, that he had
confidently predicted its failure, and had given Griswold plentiful good
advice while it was in process of writing. But Griswold, being quite as
obstinate as he was impressionable, had refused to profit by the
advice, and now the consequences of his stubbornness were upon him. He
had said truly that his literary gift was novelistic and nothing else;
and here he was, stranded and desperate, with the moribund book on his
hands, and with no chance to write another even if he were so minded,
since one can not write fasting.
Thus Bainbridge reflected, and was sorry that Griswold's invincible
pride had kept him from accepting a friendly stop-gap in his extremity.
Yet he smiled in spite of the regretful thought. It was amusing to
figure Griswold, who, as long as his modest patrimony had lasted had
been most emphatically a man not of the people, posing as an anarchist
and up in arms against the well-to-do world. None the less, he was to be
pitied.
"Poor beggar! he is in the doldrums just now, and it isn't quite fair to
hold him responsible for what he says or thinks--or for what he thinks
he thinks," said the reporter, letting the thought slip into speech.
"Just the same, I wish I had made him take that ten-dollar bill. It
might have-- Why, hello, Broffin! How are you, old man? Where the
dickens did you drop from?"
It was the inevitable steamer acquaintance who is always at hand to
prove the trite narrowness of the world, and Bainbridge kicked a chair
into comradely place for him.
Broffin, heavy-browed and clean-shaven save for a thick mustache that
hid the hard-bitted mouth, replaced the chair to suit himself and sat
down. In appearance he was a cross between a steamboat captain on a
vacation, and an up-river plantation overseer recovering from his annual
pleasure trip to the city. But his reply to Bainbridge's query proved
that he was neither.
"I didn't drop; I walked. More than that, I kept step with you all the
way from Chaudière's to the levee. You'd be dead easy game for an
amateur."
"You'll get yourself disliked, the first thing you know," said
Bainbridge, laughing. "Can't you ever forget that you are in the
man-hunting business?"
"Yes; just as often, and for just as long, as you can forget that you
are in the news-hunting business."
"Tally!" said Bainbridge, and he laughed again. After which they sat in
silence until the _Adelantado_ doubled the bend in the great river and
the last outposts of the city's lights disappeared, leaving only a
softened glow in the upper air to temper the velvety blackness of the
April night. The steamer had passed Chalmette when Broffin said:
"Speaking of Chaudière's reminds me: who was that fellow you were
telling good-by as you came out of the café? His face was as familiar as
a ship's figure-head, but I couldn't place him."
The question coupled in automatically with the reporter's train of
thought; hence he answered it rather more fully and freely than he might
have at another time and under other conditions. From establishing
Griswold's identity for his fellow passenger, he slipped by easy stages
into the story of the proletary's ups and downs, climaxing it with a
vivid little word-painting of the farewell supper at Chaudière's.
"To hear him talk, you would size him up for a bloody-minded nihilist of
the thirty-third degree, ready and honing to sweep the existing order of
things into the farthest hence," he added. "But in reality he is one of
the finest fellows in the world, gone a fraction morbid over the
economic side of the social problem. He has a heart of gold, as I happen
to know. He used to spend a good bit of his time in the backwater, and
you know what the backwater of a big city will do to a man."
"I couldn't hold my job if I didn't," was the reply.
"That means that you know only half of it," Bainbridge asserted with
cheerful dogmatism. "You're thinking of the crooks it turns out, 'which
it is your nature to.' But Griswold wasn't looking for the crooks; he
was eternally and everlastingly breaking his heart over the sodden
miseries. One night he stumbled into a cellar somewhere down in the East
Side lower levels, looking for a fellow he had been trying to find work
for; a crippled 'longshoreman. When he got into the place he found the
man stiff and cold, the woman with the death rattle in her throat, and a
two-year-old baby creeping back and forth between the dead father and
the dying mother--starvation, you know, straight from the shoulder. They
say it doesn't happen; but it does."
"Of course it does!" growled the listener. "_I_ know."
"We all know; and most of us drop a little something into the hat and
pass on. But Griswold isn't built that way. He jumped into the breach
like a man and tried to save the mother. It was too late, and when the
woman died he took the child to his own eight-by-ten attic and nursed
and fed it until the missionary people took it off his hands. He did
that, mind you, when he was living on two meals a day, himself; and I'm
putting it up that he went shy on one of them to buy milk for that kid."
"Holy Smoke!--and he calls himself an anarchist?" was the gruff comment.
"It's a howling pity there ain't a lot more just like him--what?"
"That is what I say," Bainbridge agreed. Then, with a sudden twinge of
remorse for having told Griswold's story to a stranger, he changed the
subject with an abrupt question.
"Where are you headed for, Broffin?"
The man who might have passed for a steamboat captain or a plantation
overseer, and was neither, chuckled dryly.
"You don't expect me to give it away to you, and you a newspaper man, do
you? But I will--seeing you can't get it on the wires. I'm going down to
Guatemala after Mortsen."
"The Crescent Bank defaulter? By Jove! you've found him at last, have
you?"
The detective nodded. "It takes a good while, sometimes, but I don't
fall down very often when there's enough money in it to make the game
worth the candle. I've been two years, off and on, trying to locate
Mortsen: and now that I've found him, he is where he can't be
extradited. All the same, I'll bet you five to one he goes back with me
in the next steamer--what? Have a new smoke. No? Then let's go and turn
in; it's getting late in the night."
III
THE RIGHT OF MIGHT
Two days after the supper at Chaudière's and the clearing of the fruit
steamer _Adelantado_ for the banana coast, or, more specifically, in the
forenoon of the second day, the unimpetuous routine of the business
quarter of New Orleans was rudely disturbed by the shock of a genuine
sensation.
To shatter at a single blow the most venerable of the routine
precedents, the sensational thing chose for its colliding point with
orderly system one of the oldest and most conservative of the city's
banks: the Bayou State Security. At ten o'clock, following the precise
habit of half a lifetime, Mr. Andrew Galbraith, president of the Bayou
State, entered his private room in the rear of the main banking
apartment, opened his desk, and addressed himself to the business of the
day. Punctually at ten-five, the stenographer, whose desk was in the
anteroom, brought in the mail; five minutes later the cashier entered
for his morning conference with his superior; and at half-past the hour
the president was left alone to read his correspondence.
Being a man whose mental processes were all serious, and whose hobby was
method, Mr. Galbraith had established a custom of giving himself a
quiet half-hour of inviolable seclusion in which to read and consider
his mail. During this sacred interval the stenographer, standing guard
in the outer office, had instructions to deny his chief to callers of
any and every degree. Wherefore, when, at twenty minutes to eleven, the
door of the private office opened to admit a stranger, the president was
justly annoyed.
"Well, sir; what now?" he demanded, impatiently, taking the intruder's
measure in a swift glance shot from beneath his bushy white eyebrows.
The unannounced visitor was a young man of rather prepossessing
appearance, a trifle tall for his breadth of shoulder, fair, with blue
eyes and a curling reddish beard and mustache, the former trimmed to a
point. So much the president was able to note in the appraisive
glance--and to remember afterward.
The caller made no reply to the curt question. He had turned and was
closing the door. There was a quiet insistence in the act that was like
the flick of a whip to Mr. Galbraith's irritation.
"If you have business with me, you'll have to excuse me for a few
minutes," he protested, still more impatiently. "Be good enough to take
a seat in the anteroom until I ring. MacFarland should have told you."
The young man drew up a chair and sat down, ignoring the request as if
he had failed to hear it. Ordinarily Mr. Andrew Galbraith's temper was
equable enough; the age-cooled temper of a methodical gentleman whose
long upper lip was in itself an advertisement of self-control. But such
a deliberate infraction of his rules, coupled with the stony impudence
of the visitor, made him spring up angrily to ring for the watchman.
The intruder was too quick for him. When his hand sought the bell-push
he found himself looking into the muzzle of a revolver, and so was fain
to fall back into his chair, gasping.
"Ah-h-h!" he stammered. And when the words could be managed: "So that's
it, is it?--you're a robber!"
"No," said the invader of the presidential privacies calmly, speaking
for the first time since his incoming. "I am not a robber, save in your
own very limited definition of the word. I am merely a poor man, Mr.
Galbraith--one of the uncounted thousands--and I want money. If you call
for help, I shall shoot you."
"You--you'd murder me?" The president's large-jointed hands were
clutching the arms of the pivot-chair, and he was fighting manfully for
courage and presence of mind to cope with the terrifying emergency.
"Not willingly, I assure you: I have as great a regard for human life as
you have--but no more. You would kill me this moment in self-defence, if
you could: I shall most certainly kill you if you attempt to give an
alarm. On the other hand, if you prove reasonable and obedient your life
is not in danger. It is merely a question of money, and if you are
amenable to reason----"
"If I'm--but I'm not amenable to your reasons!" blustered the president,
recovering a little from the first shock of terrified astoundment. "I
refuse to listen to them. I'll not have anything to do with you. Go
away!"
The young man's smile showed his teeth, but it also proved that he was
not wholly devoid of the sense of humor.
"Keep your temper, Mr. Galbraith," he advised coolly. "The moment is
mine, and I say you shall listen first and obey afterward. Otherwise you
die. Which is it to be? Choose quickly--time is precious."
The president yielded the first point, that of the receptive ear; but
grudgingly and as one under strict compulsion.
"Well, well, then; out with it. What have you to say for yourself?"
"This: You are rich: you represent the existing order of things. I am
poor, and I stand for my necessity, which is higher than any man-made
law or custom. You have more money than you can possibly use in any
legitimate personal channels: I have not the price of the next meal,
already twenty-four hours overdue. I came here this morning with my life
in my hand to invite you to share with me a portion of that which is
yours chiefly by the right of possession. If you do it, well and good:
if not, there will be a new president of the Bayou State Security. Do I
make myself sufficiently explicit?"
Andrew Galbraith glanced furtively at the paper-weight clock on his
desk. It was nearly eleven, and MacFarland would surely come in on the
stroke of the hour. If he could only fend off the catastrophe for a few
minutes, until help should come. He searched in his pockets and drew
forth a handful of coins.
"You say you are hungry: I'm na that well off that I canna remember the
time when I knew what it was to be on short commons, mysel'," he said;
and the unconscious lapse into the mother idiom was a measure of his
perturbation. "Take this, now, and be off wi' you, and we'll say no more
about it."
The invader of privacies glanced at the clock in his turn and shook his
head.
"You are merely trying to gain time, and you know it, Mr. Galbraith. My
stake in this game is much more than a handful of charity silver; and I
don't do you the injustice to believe that you hold your life so
cheaply; you who have so much money and, at best, so few years to live."
The president put the little heap of coins on the desk, but he did not
abandon the struggle for delay.
"What's your price, then?" he demanded, as one who may possibly consider
a compromise.
"One hundred thousand dollars--in cash."
"But man! ye're clean daft! Do ye think I have----"
"I am not here to argue," was the incisive interruption. "Take your pen
and fill out a check payable to your own order for one hundred thousand
dollars, and do it now. If that door opens before we have concluded, you
are a dead man!"
At this Andrew Galbraith saw that the end was nigh and gathered himself
for a final effort at time-killing. It was absurd; he had no such
balance to his personal credit; such a check would not be honored; it
would be an overdraft, and the teller would very properly-- In the midst
of his vehement protests the stranger sprang out of his chair, stepped
back a pace and raised his weapon.
"Mr. Galbraith, you are juggling with your life! Write that check while
there is yet time!"
A sound of subdued voices came from the anteroom, and the beleaguered
old man stole a swift upward glance at the face of his persecutor. There
was no mercy in the fierce blue eyes glaring down upon him; neither
compassion nor compunction, but rather madness and fell murder. The
summons came once again.
"Do it quickly, I say, before we are interrupted. Do you hear?"
Truly, the president both heard and understood; yet he hesitated one
other second.
"You will not? Then may God have mercy----"
The hammer of the levelled pistol clicked. Andrew Galbraith shut his
eyes and made a blind grasp for pen and check-book. His hands were
shaking as with a palsy, but the fear of death steadied them suddenly
when he came to write.
"Indorse it!" was the next command. The voices had ceased beyond the
partition, and the dead silence was relieved only by the labored
strokes of the president's pen and the tap-tap of the typewriter in the
adjacent anteroom.
The check was written and indorsed, and under the menace of the revolver
Andrew Galbraith was trying to give it to the robber. But the robber
would not take it.
"No, I don't want your paper: come with me to your paying teller and get
me the money. Make what explanation you see fit; but remember--if he
hesitates, you die."
They left the private office together, the younger man a short half-step
in the rear, with his pistol-bearing hand thrust under his coat.
MacFarland, the stenographer, was at his desk in the corner of the
anteroom. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the unwonted thing, the
president's forthfaring with a stranger who had somehow gained access to
the private room during the sacred half-hour, would have made him look
up and wonder. But this was the hundredth time, and Andrew Galbraith's
anxious glance aside was wasted upon MacFarland's back.
Still the president did not despair. In the public lobby there would be
more eyes to see, and perhaps some that would understand. Mr. Galbraith
took a firmer hold upon his self-possession and trusted that some happy
chance might yet intervene to save him.
But chance did not intervene. There was a goodly number of customers in
the public space, but not one of the half-dozen or more who nodded to
the president or passed the time of day with him saw the eye-appeal
which was the only one he dared to make. On the short walk around to the
paying teller's window, the robber kept even step with his victim, and
try as he would, Andrew Galbraith could not summon the courage to forget
the pistol muzzle menacing him in its coat-covered ambush.
At the paying wicket there was only one customer, instead of the group
the president had hoped to find; a sweet-faced young woman in a modest
travelling hat and a gray coat. She was getting a draft cashed, and when
she saw them she would have stood aside. It was the robber who
anticipated her intention and forbade it with a courteous gesture;
whereat she turned again to the window to conclude her small transaction
with the teller.
The few moments which followed were terribly trying ones for the
gray-haired president of the Bayou State Security. None the less, his
brain was busy with the chanceful possibilities. Failing all else, he
was determined to give the teller a warning signal, come what might. It
was a duty owed to society no less than to the bank and to himself. But
on the pinnacle of resolution, at the instant when, with the robber at
his elbow, he stepped to the window and presented the check, Andrew
Galbraith felt the gentle pressure of the pistol muzzle against his
side; nay, more; he fancied he could feel the cold chill of the metal
strike through and through him.
So it came about that the fine resolution had quite evaporated when he
said, with what composure there was in him: "You'll please give me
currency for that, Johnson."
The teller glanced at the check and then at his superior; not too
inquisitively, since it was not his business to question the president's
commands.
"How will you have it?" he asked; and it was the stranger at Mr.
Galbraith's elbow who answered.
"One thousand in fives, tens, and twenties, loose, if you please; the
remainder in the largest denominations, put up in a package."
The teller counted out the one thousand in small notes quickly; but he
had to leave the cage and go to the vault for the huge remainder. This
was the crucial moment of peril for the robber, and the president,
stealing a glance at the face of his persecutor, saw the blue eyes
blazing with excitement.
"It is your time to pray, Mr. Galbraith," said the spoiler in low tones.
"If you have given your man the signal----"
But the signal had not been given. The teller was re-entering the cage
with the bulky packet of money-paper.
"You needn't open it," said the young man at the president's elbow. "The
bank's count is good enough for me." And when the window wicket had been
unlatched and the money passed out, he stuffed the loose bills
carelessly into his pocket, put the package containing the ninety-nine
thousand dollars under his arm, nodded to the president, backed swiftly
to the street door and vanished.
Then it was that Mr. Andrew Galbraith suddenly found speech, opening
his thin lips and pouring forth a torrent of incoherence which presently
got itself translated into a vengeful hue and cry; and New Orleans the
unimpetuous had its sensation ready-made.
IV
_IO TRIUMPHE!_
If Kenneth Griswold, backing out of the street door of the Bayou State
Security and vanishing with his booty, had been nothing more than a
professional "strong-arm man," he would probably have been taken and
jailed within the hour, if only for the reason that his desperate cast
for fortune included no well-wrought-out plan of escape. But since he
was at once both wiser and less cunning than the practised bank robber,
he threw his pursuers off the scent by an expedient in which artlessness
and daring quite beyond the gifts of the journeyman criminal played
equal parts.
Once safely in the street, with a thousand dollars in his pocket and the
packet of bank-notes under his arm, he was seized by an impulse to do
some extravagant thing to celebrate his success. It had proved to be
such a simple matter, after all: one bold stroke; a tussle, happily
bloodless, with the plutocratic dragon whose hold upon his treasure was
so easily broken; and presto! the hungry proletary had become himself a
power in the world, strong to do good or evil, as the gods might direct.
This was the prompting to exultation as it might have been set in words;
but in Griswold's thought it was but a swift suggestion, followed
instantly by another which was much more to the immediate purpose. He
was hungry: there was a restaurant next door to the bank. Without
thinking overmuch of the risk he ran, and perhaps not at all of the
audacious subtlety of such an expedient at such a critical moment, he
went in, sat down at one of the small marble-topped tables, and calmly
ordered breakfast.
Since hunger is a lusty special pleader, making itself heard above any
pulpit drum of the higher faculties, it is quite probable that Griswold
dwelt less upon what he had done than upon what he was about to eat,
until the hue and cry in the street reminded him that the chase was
begun. But at this, not to appear suspiciously incurious, he put on the
mask of indifferent interest and asked the waiter concerning the uproar.
The serving man did not know what had happened, but he would go and find
out, if M'sieu' so desired. "M'sieu'" said breakfast first, by all
means, and information afterward. Both came in due season; and the
hungry one ate while he listened.
Transmuted into the broken English of the Gascon serving man, the story
of the robbery lost nothing in its sensational features.
"Ah! w'at you t'ink, M'sieu'? De bank on de nex' do' is been rob'!" And
upon this theme excited volubility descanted at large. The bank had been
surrounded by a gang of desperate men, with every exit guarded, while
the leader, a masked giant armed to the teeth, had compelled the
president at the muzzle of a pistol to pay a ransom of fifty--one
hundred--five hundred thousand dollars! With the money in hand the gang
had vanished, the masked giant firing the pistol at M'sieu' the
president as he went. Cross-examined, the waiter could not affirm
positively as to the shot. But as for the remaining details there could
be no doubt.
Griswold ordered a second cup of coffee, and while the waiter was
bringing it, conscience--not the newly acquired conscience, but the
conventional--bent its bow and sped its final arrow. It was suddenly
brought home to the enthusiast with sharp emphasis that to all civilized
mankind, save and excepting those few chosen ones who shared his
peculiar convictions, he was a common thief, a bandit, an outlaw. Public
opinion, potential or expressed, is at best but an intangible thing. But
for a few tumultuous seconds Griswold writhed under the ban of it as if
it had been a whip of scorpions. Then he smiled to think how strong the
bonds of custom had grown; and at the smile conscience flung away its
empty quiver.
Now it was over, however, the enthusiast was rather grateful for the
chastening. It served to remind him afresh of his mission. This money
which he had just wrested from the claws of the plutocratic dragon must
be held as a sacred trust; it must be devoted scrupulously to the cause
of the down-trodden and the oppressed. Precisely how it was to be
applied he had not yet determined; but that could be decided later.
Meanwhile, it was very evident that the dragon did not intend to accept
defeat without a struggle, and Griswold set his wits at work upon the
problem of escape.
"It's a little queer that I hadn't thought of that part of it before,"
he mused, sipping his coffee as one who need not hasten until the race
is actually begun. "I suppose the other fellow, the real robber, would
have figured himself safely out of it--or would have thought he
had--before he made the break. Since I did not, I've got it to do now,
and there isn't much time to throw away. Let me see--" he shut his eyes
and went into the inventive trance of the literary craftsman--"the
keynote must be originality; I must do that which the other fellow would
never think of doing."
On the strength of that decision he ventured to order a third cup of
coffee, and before it had cooled he had outlined a plan, basing it upon
a further cross-questioning of the Gascon waiter. The man had been to
the street door again, and by this time the sidewalk excitement had
subsided sufficiently to make room for an approach to the truth. The
story of an armed band surrounding the bank had been a canard. There had
been but one man concerned in the robbery, and the sidewalk gossip was
beginning to describe him with discomforting accuracy.
Griswold paid his score and went out boldly and with studied
nonchalance. He reasoned that, notwithstanding the growing accuracy of
the street report, he was still in no immediate danger so long as he
remained in such close proximity to the bank. It was safe to assume that
this was one of the things the professional "strong-arm man" would not
do. But it was also evident that he must speedily lose his identity if
he hoped to escape; and the lost identity must leave no clew to itself.
Griswold smiled when he remembered how, in fiction of the felon-catching
sort, and in real life, for that matter, the law-breaker always did
leave a clew for the pursuers. Thereupon arose a determination to
demonstrate practically that it was quite as possible to create an
inerrant fugitive as to conceive an infallible detective. Joining the
passers-by on the sidewalk, he made his way leisurely to Canal Street,
and thence diagonally through the old French quarter toward the French
Market. In a narrow alley giving upon the levee he finally found what he
was looking for; a dingy sailors' barber's shop. The barber was a negro,
fat, unctuous and sleepy-looking; and he was alone.
"Yes, sah; shave, boss?" asked the negro, bowing and scraping a foot
when Griswold entered.
"No; a hair-cut." The customer produced a silver half-dollar. "Go
somewhere and get me a cigar to smoke while you are doing it. Get a good
one, if you have to go to Canal Street," he added, climbing into the
rickety chair.
The fat negro shuffled out, scenting tips. The moment he was out of
sight, Griswold took up the scissors and began to hack awkwardly at his
beard and mustache; awkwardly, but swiftly and with well-considered
purpose. The result was a fairly complete metamorphosis easily wrought.
In place of the trim beard and curling mustache there was a rough
stubble, stiff and uneven, like that on the face of a man who had
neglected to shave for a week or two.
"There, I think that will answer," he told himself, standing back before
the cracked looking-glass to get the general effect. "And it is decently
original. The professional cracksman would probably have shaved,
whereupon the first amateur detective he met would reconstruct the beard
on the sunburned lines. Now for a pawnbroker; and the more avaricious he
happens to be, the better he will serve the purpose."
He went to the door and looked up and down the alley. The negro was not
yet in sight, and Griswold walked rapidly away in the direction opposite
to that taken by the obliging barber.
A pawnbroker's shop of the kind required was not far to seek in that
locality, and when it was found, Griswold drove a hard bargain with the
Portuguese Jew behind the counter. The pledge he offered was the suit he
was wearing, and the bargaining concluded in an exchange of the still
serviceable business suit for a pair of butternut trousers, a
second-hand coat too short in the sleeves, a flannel shirt, a cap, and a
red handkerchief; these and a sum of ready money, the smallness of which
he deplored piteously before he would consent to accept it.
The effect of the haggling was exactly what Griswold had prefigured. The
Portuguese, most suspicious of his tribe, suspecting everything but the
truth, flatly accused his customer of having stolen the pledge. And when
Griswold departed without denying the charge, suspicion became
conviction, and the pledged clothing, which might otherwise have given
the police the needed clew, was carefully hidden away against a time
when the Jew's apprehensions should be quieted.
Having thus disguised himself, Griswold made the transformation
artistically complete by walking a few squares in the dust of a loaded
cotton float on the levee. Then he made a tramp's bundle of the
manuscript of the moribund book, the pistol, and the money in the red
handkerchief; and having surveyed himself with some satisfaction in the
bar mirror of a riverside pot-house, a daring impulse to test his
disguise by going back to the restaurant where he had breakfasted seized
and bore him up-town.
The experiment was an unqualified success. The proprietor of the
bank-neighboring café not only failed to recognize him; he was driven
forth with revilings in idiomatic French and broken English.
"_Bête!_ Go back on da levee w'ere you belong to go. I'll been kipping
dis café for zhentlemen! _Scélérat!_ Go!"
Griswold went out, smiling between his teeth.
"That settles the question of identification and present safety," he
assured himself exultantly. Then: "I believe I could walk into the
Bayou State Security and not be recognized."
As before, the daring impulse was irresistible, and he gave place to it
on the spur of the moment. Fouling a five-dollar bill in the mud of the
gutter, he went boldly into the bank and asked the paying teller to give
him silver for it. The teller sniffed at the money, scowled at the man,
and turned back to his cash-book without a word. Griswold's smile grew
to an inward laugh when he reached the street.
"The dragon may have teeth and claws, but it can neither see nor smell,"
he said, contemptuously, turning his steps riverward again. "Now I have
only to choose my route and go in peace. How and where are the only
remaining questions to be answered."
V
THE _BELLE JULIE_
For an hour or more after his return to the river front, Griswold idled
up and down the levee; and the end of the interval found him still
undecided as to the manner and direction of his flight--to say nothing
of the choice of a destination, which was even more evasive than the
other and more immediately pressing decision.
It was somewhere in the midst of the reflective hour that the elate
triumph of success began to give place to the inevitable reaction. The
partition which stands upon the narrow dividing line between vagrancy
and crime is but a paper wall, and any hot-hearted insurrectionary may
break through it at will. But to accept the conditions of vagrancy one
must first embrace the loathsome thing itself. Griswold remembered the
glimpse he had had of himself in the bar mirror of the pot-house, and
the chains of his transformed identity began to gall him. It was to
little purpose that he girded at his compunctions, telling himself that
he was only playing a necessary part; that one needs must when the devil
drives. Custom, habit, convention, or whatever it may be which
differentiates between the law-abiding and the lawless, would have its
say; and from railing bitterly against the social conditions which made
his act at once a necessity and a crime, he began to feel a prickling
disgust for the subterfuges to which the crime had driven him.
Moreover, there was a growing fear that he might not always be able to
play consistently the double rôle whose lines were already becoming
intricate and confusing. To be true to his ideals, he must continue to
be in utter sincerity Griswold the brother-loving. That said itself. But
on the other hand, to escape the consequences of his act, he must hold
himself in instant readiness to be in savage earnest what a common thief
would be in similar straits; a thing of duplicity and double meanings
and ferocity, alert to turn and slay at any moment in the battle of
self-preservation.
He had thought that the supreme crisis was passed when, earlier in the
day, he had pawned the last of his keepsakes for the money to buy the
revolver. But he had yet to learn that there is no supreme crisis in the
human span, save that which ends it; that all the wayfaring duels with
fate are inconclusive; conflicts critical enough at the moment, but
lacking finality, and likely to be renewed indefinitely if one lives
beyond them.
He was confronting another of the false climaxes in the hour of aimless
wanderings on the river front. More than once he was tempted to buy back
his lost identity at any price. Never before had he realized what a
precious possession is the fearlessness of innocency; weighed against
it, the thick packet of bank-notes in the tramp's bundle, and all that
it might stand for, were as air-blown bubbles to refined gold. Yet he
would not go back; he could not go back. To restore the money would be
more than a confession of failure; it would be an abject recantation--a
flat denial of every article of his latest social creed, and a plunge
into primordial chaos in the matter of theories, out of which he could
emerge only as a criminal in fact.
When the conflict of indetermination became altogether insupportable, he
put it aside with the resolution which was the strong thread in the
loosely twisted warp of his character and forced himself to think
concretely toward a solution of the problem of flight. The possession of
the money made all things possible--in any field save the
theoretical--and the choice of dwelling or hiding-places seemed
infinite.