day it's ready. And I'll give you a written order on that pal of mine
for the key, telling him to hand it over to you the day after I'm gone.
You ain't got a thing to worry about. And in payment all you got to do
for me is just the one little favor of getting that little pill made up
and--"
"I'm telling you there's entirely too much risk," interrupted Finburg,
in a timorous sweat of almost over-powering temptation, but still
clinging to safety. "I wouldn't dare risk trying to slip you poison,
Tony--I couldn't."
"Nobody's asking you to."
"What? What's that you're saying, Tony?" The lawyer shoved his peaked
nose between two wattles of the steel.
"I say, nobody's asking you to. Knowing you, I've doped out that part
of it so you won't have to take a chance. Listen, Finburg--there's
a guard here named Isgrid--a Swede or something. And he comes from
down on the East Side, the same as you and me. I've been working on
him. We've got friendly. Maybe him and me both having been born on
the same block over there beyond the Bowery was what made him sort of
mushy towards me--he's one of those big thick slobs. But it ain't for
friendship only that he's willing to help. He wants his bit out of it.
He's aiming to quit this job he's got here and he wants to take a piece
of money with him when he quits. Now, here's what he tells me: He'll be
on the death-watch on me. That last night he'll slip me the pill, see?
Nobody ain't going to suspect him, he says, and even if anybody does,
they ain't going to be able to hang it on him, let alone get you mixed
in with the plant."
"I suppose I'll have to see this man," conceded Finburg; "not that that
means I'm committing myself to this undertaking."
"I thought of that too. Day after tomorrow is Sunday, and Sunday is his
day off. He'll run down to New York and meet you in your office or at
your flat, and you can size him up and talk it over with him."
"It can't do any harm to see the man, I suppose." It was plain that the
lawyer was convincing himself. "Tell him--only, mind you, this is just
an accommodation to you--tell him the address of my rooms and tell him
to be there at ten o'clock."
"One thing more," stated the killer. "Isgrid wants one grand for his
cut."
"One grand--a thousand dollars!"
"That's his lowest price. I had to work on him to cut it down to that.
And, Finburg, you'll have to dig up the thou'. He wants it in advance,
see? You can pay yourself back--afterwards. That's up to you."
"That makes it still more complicated," lamented the wavering Finburg.
"I don't know--I don't know." Figuratively he wrung his hands in an
anguish born of desire and doubt.
"Well, I'll give you till over Sunday to make up your mind, then,"
said Scarra, he secretly being well content with the progress that
had been made. "If by Monday you've decided to go through with your
share of the deal, you can come back here and bring that will with you
and I'll sign it. If you don't show up on Monday I'll know you're too
chicken-hearted for your own good. Remember this, though, Finburg--one
way or another I'm going to get that pill. If you don't want to help,
that's your lookout--you'll only be kissing good-by to what's down
in them safe-deposit vaults on Third Avenue. And if you do--well, I
guess you're wise enough to protect yourself at every angle. It's easy
pickings for you, Finburg--easy pickings. So think it over before you
decide to say no. Well, so long, see you Monday."
He fell back from the grating and to the keeper at the farther end of
the corridor motioned to indicate that his interview with his counsel
was ended and that he was ready to be returned to his cell.
Monday morning, good and early, Mr. Finburg was back again. His mind
had been made up for many hours. In fact it was made up before he left
on Friday afternoon. Only, at the time, he had not cared to say so or
to look so. To wear a mask was one part of Mr. Finburg's professional
attitude. To do things deviously was another. For him always, the
longest way round was the shortest way across. His mind was a maze of
detours, excepting when he was collecting his retainers or pressing for
his principal fees. Then he could be straightforward enough to satisfy
anybody. The practice of the criminal law does this to some of its
practitioners.
It was because of this trait of Mr. Finburg's that certain preliminary
steps in the working-out of his share in the plot were elaborated and
made intricate. Since Friday evening when his train landed him at
the Grand Central, he had been a reasonably busy young man. From the
station he went directly to the Public Library and there, at a table
well apart from any other reader, he consulted a work on toxicology,
with particular reference to the effects of the more deadly poisons.
Before midnight he was in touch with a chemist of his acquaintance
who served as laboratory sharp and chief mixer for a bootlegging
combine specializing in synthetic goods with bogus labels on them.
His real purpose in this inquiry was, of course, carefully cloaked;
the explanation he gave--it referred to experiments which a purely
supposititious client was making with precious metals--apparently
satisfied the expert, who gave information fully.
By virtue of a finely involved ramification of underworld connections,
Mr. Finburg was enabled next to operate through agents. Three separate
individuals figured in the transaction. But no one of the three beheld
more than his particular link in a winding chain and only one of the
three had direct dealings with the principal, and this one remained in
complete ignorance of what really was afoot. All he knew, all he cared
to know, was that, having been dispatched on a mission which seemed to
start nowhere and lead nowhere, he had performed what was expected of
him and had been paid for it and was through. By such deft windings in
and out, Mr. Finburg satisfied himself the trail was so broken that
no investigator ever could piece it together. There were too many
footprints in the trace; and too many of them pointing in seemingly
opposite and contrary directions.
He was quite ready for the man Isgrid when that person came to his
apartment on Sunday morning. Whether Isgrid studied Finburg is of no
consequence to this narrative, but we may be quite assured that Finburg
studied Isgrid, seeing the latter as a stolid, dull person, probably of
Scandinavian ancestry and undoubtedly of a cheap order of mentality.
About Isgrid as interpreted by Finburg, there was nothing to suggest
any personal initiative. He appeared close-mouthed and secretive,
though--in short, a man who being committed to a venture would go
through it with a sort of intent and whole-hearted determination.
This greatly pleased the little lawyer. For the rôle of an unthinking
middleman Isgrid seemed an admirable choice. He had such a dependable
dumb look about him. Nevertheless it suited Mr. Finburg's book that his
conspirings with this man should be marked by crafty play-acting. There
sat the two of them, entirely alone, yet Mr. Finburg behaved as though
a cloud of witnesses hovered to menace him.
He asked Isgrid various questions--leading questions, they would be
called in court--but so phrased that they might pass for the most
unsuspicious of inquiries. Then, being well satisfied by the results of
such cross-examination, the lawyer came to business.
"Look here," he said, pointing, "on this table is a little box with
the lid off. See it? Well, in it are twelve five-grain capsules same
as you'd get from any drug-store if you had a touch of grippe and the
doctor gave you a prescription to be filled. Between ourselves we'll
just say it is a grippe cure that we've got here. Well, one of these
capsules is stronger than the others are. If I'm not mistaken, it's
this one here"--his finger pointed again--"the last one in the bottom
row, the one with a little spot of red ink on it. It's marked that way
so a fellow will be wised up to handling it pretty carefully.
"Now then, I'm going into the next room. I've got a wall safe there
where I keep some of my private papers and other valuables, including
money. I'm going to get a bill--a nice new United States Treasury
certificate for one thousand dollars--out of my safe. It may take me
two or three minutes to work the combination and find the bill. When I
come back, if one or two of those capsules should happen to be missing,
why I'll just say to myself that somebody with a touch of grippe, or
somebody who's got a friend laid up somewhere with the grippe, saw
this medicine here and helped himself to a dose or so without saying
anything about it. It won't stick in my mind; what difference does a
measly little drug-store pill or two mean to me or to anybody else, for
that matter? Inside of ten minutes I'll have forgotten all about it.
"Make yourself at home, please--I'll be back in a jiffy."
He entered the inner room of the two-room flat, closing and snapping
shut the connecting door behind him. When he came back, which was quite
soon, he glanced at the open box. The twelfth capsule, that one which
was red-dotted, and one neighboring capsule had disappeared. Isgrid was
sitting where he had been seated before Finburg's temporary withdrawal.
"See this?" resumed Finburg, and he held up what he was holding in his
hands. "It's a nice slick new one that's never been in circulation.
Well, I've about made up my mind to slip this bill to you. You've been
kind to a party that's in trouble--a party that I've had considerable
dealings with. He's grateful and naturally I'm grateful, too. As
I understand it, you're going to keep on being good to this party.
He's in a bad way--may not live very long, in fact--and we'll both
appreciate any little attentions you might continue to show him. But
this is a hard world--people get careless sometimes; you can't always
depend on them. Not knocking you or anything, but still I'd like to
make certain that you won't go back on any little promise you might
have made to him lately. You get me, I think--just a precaution on my
part. See what I'm going to do next?"
From his desk he took up a pair of scissors and with one swift clip of
their blades sheared the yellow-back squarely in two across the middle.
Isgrid said nothing to this but kept eying him intently.
"Now, then, I put one-half of this bill into my pocket," proceeded
Finburg; "and the other half I'm handing over to you"--doing so.
"Separated this way, these halves are no use to anybody--none to
me, none to you. But paste them together again and you've got a
thousand-dollar bill that's just as good as it ever was. For the time
being, you keep your half and I'll keep my half. I'll have it right
here handy on my person and ready to slip it over to you when the
contract that I've been speaking of is completed.
"Now, I expect to be seeing our sick friend tomorrow. Tonight I'll
be fixing up a document or two for him to sign and I'm going to take
them up to where he is in the morning. I'll tell him of this little
arrangement between us and I'm certain he'll endorse it. I may not
see him again until the twenty-seventh of this month." He dwelt
meaningly upon the date. "It looks as though he couldn't last much
longer than that--not more than a few hours. And on the twenty-seventh,
if the prospects are that he'll pass out within the next twenty-four
hours--which, as I say, is the present outlook--I'll pay him a farewell
visit. If everything has worked out right--if you've done him any
little last favor that he's counting on--why, he'll tip me the word
while we're alone together. You won't have to wait much longer than
that for what's coming to you. Just as soon as he gives me the word
I'll meet you in some private corner that we'll decide on, and hand you
over the other half of your bill. Is everything understood--everything
agreeable to you?"
Still mute, Isgrid nodded. They shook hands on it after Isgrid had
named a suitable place for their rendezvous on the twenty-seventh; then
the silent caller took himself away. All told, he had not contributed a
hundred words, counting in grunts as words, to the dialogue.
Being left alone, Mr. Finburg mentally hugged himself before he set to
the task of drawing up the papers for his client's signature. This same
Sunday he decided not to go to the governor of that near-by state with
any futile plea for executive clemency. He'd tell Scarra, of course,
that he was going; would pretend he had gone. But what was the use of
a man wasting his breath on a quest so absolutely hopeless? He salved
his conscience--or the place where his conscience had been before he
wore it out--with this reflection, and by an effort of the will put
from him any prolonged consideration of the real underlying reason. It
resolved itself into this: Why should a man trifle with his luck? With
Scarra wiped out--and certainly Scarra deserved wiping out, if ever a
red-handed brute did--the ends of justice would be satisfied and the
case might serve as a warning to other criminals. But if that governor
should turn mush-headed and withhold from Scarra his just punishment,
where would Scarra's lawyer be? He'd be missing a delectable chunk of
jack by a hair--that's where he would be.
Let the law take its course!
The law did. It took its racking course at quarter past one o'clock on
the morning of the twenty-eighth.
Those who kept ward on Tony Scarra, considering him as scientists might
consider an inoculated guinea-pig waiting patiently for this or that
expected symptom of organic disorder to show itself, marveled more and
more as the night wore on at the bearing of the condemned man. His,
they dispassionately decided among themselves, was not the rehearsed
but transparent bravado of the ordinary thug. That sort of thing they
had observed before; they could bear testimony that very often toward
the finish this make-believe fortitude melted beneath the lifting
floods of a mortal terror and a mortal anguish, so that the subject
lost the use of his members and the smoothness of his tongue, and
babbled wild meaningless prayers and flapped with his legs and must be
half-dragged, half-borne along on that first, last, short journey of
his through the painted iron door to what awaited him beyond.
Or, fifty-fifty, it might be that imminent dread acted upon him as a
merciful drug which soothed him into a sort of obedient coma wherein he
yielded with a pitiful docility to the wishes of his executioners and
mechanically did as they bid him, and went forth from his cell meek as
a lamb, thereby simplifying and easing for them their not altogether
agreeable duties. These experienced observers had come to count on one
or the other of these manifestations. In Scarra neither of them was
developed.
He seemed defiantly insulated against collapse by some indefinable
power derived from within; it was as though a hidden secret reservoir
of strength sustained him. He gibed the death-watch and he made a joke
of the prison chaplain coming in the face of repeated rebuffs to offer
the sustaining comfort of his Gospels. He betrayed no signs whatsoever
of weakening--and this, to those who officiated at those offices,
seemed most remarkable of all--when they clipped the hair off the top
of his skull for the pad of the electrodes and again, later in the
evening, when they brought him the black trousers with the left leg
split up the inside seam.
All at once though, at the beginning of the second hour after midnight,
when the witnesses were assembled and waiting in the lethal chamber,
his jaunty confidence--if so, for lack of a better description, it
might be termed--drained from him in a single gush. He had called, a
minute or two before, for a drink of water, complaining of a parched
throat. A filled cup was brought to him. Sitting on a stool in his
cell he turned his back upon the bringer and took the draught down at
a gulp, then rose and stood looking through the bars at the keepers,
with a mocking, puzzling grin on his lips and over all his face and in
his eyes a look of expectancy. The grin vanished, the look changed to
one of enormous bewilderment, then to one of the intensest chagrin,
and next he was mouthing with shocking vile words toward the eternity
waiting for him. He resisted them when they went in then to fetch
him out, and fought with them and screamed out and altogether upset
the decorum of the death-house, so that the surviving inmates became
excessively nervous and unhappy.
He did not curse those whose task it was now to subdue and, if
possible, to calm him. He cursed somebody or other--person or persons
unknown--for having deceived him in a vital matter, crying out that
he had been imposed on, that he had been double-crossed. He raved
of a pill--whatever that might mean--but so frightful a state was
he in, so nearly incoherent in his frenzy of rage and distress and
disappointment, that the meaning of what he spoke was swallowed up and
lost.
Anyhow, his sweating handlers had no time to listen. Their task was
to muffle his blasphemy and get him to the chair, which they did.
Practically, they had to gag him with their hands, and one of the men
had a finger bitten to the bone.
Since he continued to struggle in the presence of the audience, the
proceedings from this point on were hurried along more than is common.
His last understandable words, coming from beneath the mask clamped
over the upper part of his distorted face, had reference to this
mysterious double-crossing of which plainly, even in that extremity,
he regarded himself the victim, and on which, as was equally plain,
his final bitter thoughts dwelt. The jolt of the current cut him off
in a panted, choking mid-speech, and the jaw dropped and the body
strained up against the stout breast-harness, and the breath wheezed
and rasped out across the teeth and past the lips, which instantly
had turned purple, and there was a lesser sound, a curious hissing,
whispering, slightly unpleasant sound as though the life were so eager
to escape from this flesh that it came bursting through the pores of
the darkening skin. Also, there was a wisp of rising blue smoke and a
faint, a very faint smell of something burning. There nearly always is;
a feature which apparently cannot be avoided. Still, after all, that's
but a detail.
For absolute certainty of result, they gave Scarra's body a second
shock, and the physicians present observed with interest how certain of
the muscles, notably certain of the neck muscles, twitched in response
to the throb and flow of the fluid through the tissues. But of course
the man was dead. It merely was a simple galvanic reaction--like
eel-meat twisting on a hot griddle, or severed frogs' legs jumping
when you sprinkle salt on them--interesting, perhaps, but without
significance. Except for Scarra's unseemly behavior immediately after
drinking the water, this execution, as executions go, and they nearly
always go so, was an entire success.
Conceded that as to its chief purpose, the plan unaccountably had gone
amiss, Mr. Finburg nevertheless felt no concern over the outcome.
Privately he preferred that it should have been thus--there being no
reason for any official inquiry, naturally there would be no official
inquiry. Happy anticipations uplifted him as, sundry legal formulas
having been complied with, he went as Scarra's heir to Scarra's bank on
Third Avenue and opened Scarra's safe-deposit box.
It would seem that he, also, had been double-crossed. All the box
contained was a neat small kit of burglars' tools. It was indeed a
severe disappointment to Mr. Finburg, a blow to his faith in human
nature. We may well feel for Mr. Finburg.
Of that triumvirate of East Side connivers, there remains the third and
least important member, Isgrid, he who, scheming on his own account
and in his own protection, had played for safety by smuggling to the
late Scarra not number twelve, the poisonous capsule, but number
eleven, the harmless one. Let us not spend all our sympathy upon Mr.
Finburg but rather let us reserve some portion of it for Isgrid.
For this one, he too suffered a grievous disappointment. It befell
when, having patched the parted halves of his thousand-dollar bill,
he undertook to pass it. It was refused, not because it was pasted
together but because it was counterfeit.
THE COWBOY AND THE LADY--AND HER PA
[Decoration]
From up on the first level of the first shelf of the wagon road above
Avalanche Creek came the voice of Dad Wheelis, the wagon-train boss,
addressing his front span. The mules had halted at the head of the
steep grade to twist about in the traces and, with six 'cello-shaped
heads stretched over the rim and twice that many somber eyes fixed
on the abyss swimming in a green haze beneath them, to contemplate
its outspread glories while they got their wind back. It was evident
Dad thought the breathing space sufficiently had been prolonged. On a
beautiful clearness his words dropped down through the spicy dry air.
"Git up!" he bade the sextet with an affectionate violence, and
you could hear his whip-lash where it crackled like a string of
firecrackers above the drooping ears of the lead team. "Git up, you
scenery-lovin' _so-and-soes_!"
There was an agonized whine of tires and hubs growing faint and fainter
and Mrs. Hector Gatling sighed with a profound appreciation.
"How prodigal nature is out here in these Western wilds!" she said.
"Certainly does throw a wicked prod," agreed her daughter, Miss Shirley
Gatling. But her eyes were not fixed where her mother's were.
"Such a climate!" affirmed the senior lady, flinching slightly that the
argot of a newer and an irreverent generation should be invoked in this
cathedral place. "Such views! Such picturesque types everywhere!"
"Not bad-looking mountains across over yonder, at that," said Mr.
Gatling, husband and father of the above, giving his gestured
indorsement to an endless vista of serrated peaks of an average height
of not less than seven thousand feet. "Not bad at all, so long as you
don't have to hoof up any of 'em."
"_Mong père_, he also grows poetic, is it not?" murmured Miss Gatling.
"Now, who'd have ever thunk it, knowing him in his native haunts back
in that dear Pittsburgh!"
Her glance still was leveled in a different direction from the one in
which her elders gazed. Mr. Gatling twisted about so that a foldable
camp-chair creaked under his weight, and looked through his glasses
in the same quarter where his daughter looked. His forehead drew into
wrinkles.
Miss Gatling stood up, a slim, trim figure in her riding-boots and
well-tailored breeches and with a gay little sweater drawn snugly down
inside her waistband and held there by a broad brilliant girdle of
squaw's beadwork. She settled a white sombrero on her bobbed hair and
stepped away from them over the pine-needles and thence down toward the
roaring creek. The morning sunlight came slanting through the lower
tree boughs and picked out and made shiny glitters of the heavy Mexican
silver spurs at her heels and the wide Navaho silver bracelet that was
set on her right wrist. She passed between two squared boulders that
might have been lichened tombs for Babylon's kings.
"Continue, I pray you, dear parents, to sit and invite your souls, if
any," she called back. "I go to make sure they're putting plenty of
cold victuals in the lunch kit. Yesterday noon, you'll remember, we
darn' near starved. For you, the beckon and the lure of the wonderland.
But for me and my girlish gastric juices--chow and lots of it!"
Mr. Gatling said nothing for a minute or two, but he took off his cap
as though to make more room for additional furrows forming on his
brow. A deer-fly alighted where he was baldest and promenaded to and
fro there, across the great open spaces. The thinker too deeply was
abstracted to shoo away the little stranger; he let her promenade.
"Mmph!" he remarked presently. Mrs. Gatling emerged promptly from her
own reverie. It was his commonest way of engaging her attention--that
_mmphing_ sound was. Lacking vowels though it did, its emphasis of
uneasiness was quite apparent to her schooled ears.
"What's wrong, dear?" she asked. "Still sore from all that dreadful
horseback riding?"