Presently, when she had finished the cigarette, Aggie proceeded to her
own chamber and there spent a considerable time in making a toilette
calculated to set off to its full advantage the slender daintiness of
her form. When at last she was gowned to her satisfaction, she went
into the drawing-room of the apartment and gave herself over to more
cigarettes, in an easy chair, sprawled out in an attitude of comfort
never taught in any finishing school for young ladies. She at the same
time indulged her tastes in art and literature by reading the jokes and
studying the comic pictures in an evening paper, which the maid brought
in at her request. She had about exhausted this form of amusement when
the coming of Joe Garson, who was usually in and out of the apartment
a number of times daily, provided a welcome diversion. After a casual
greeting between the two, Aggie explained, in response to his question,
that Mary had gone out to keep an engagement with Dick Gilder.
There was a little period of silence while the man, with the resolute
face and the light gray eyes that shone so clearly underneath the thick,
waving silver hair, held his head bent downward as if in intent thought.
When, finally, he spoke, there was a certain quality in his voice that
caused Aggie to regard him curiously.
“Mary has been with him a good deal lately,” he said, half
questioningly.
“That's what,” was the curt agreement.
Garson brought out his next query with the brutal bluntness of his kind;
and yet there was a vague suggestion of tenderness in his tones under
the vulgar words.
“Think she's stuck on him?” He had seated himself on a settee opposite
the girl, who did not trouble on his account to assume a posture more
decorous, and he surveyed her keenly as he waited for a reply.
“Why not?” Aggie retorted. “Bet your life I'd be, if I had a chance.
He's a swell boy. And his father's got the coin, too.”
At this the man moved impatiently, and his eyes wandered to the window.
Again, Aggie studied him with a swift glance of interrogation. Not being
the possessor of an over-nice sensibility as to the feelings of others,
she now spoke briskly.
“Joe, if there's anything on your mind, shoot it.”
Garson hesitated for a moment, then decided to unburden himself, for he
craved precise knowledge in this matter.
“It's Mary,” he explained, with some embarrassment; “her and young
Gilder.”
“Well?” came the crisp question.
“Well, somehow,” Garson went on, still somewhat confusedly, “I can't see
any good of it, for her.”
“Why?” Aggie demanded, in surprise.
Garson's manner grew easier, now that the subject was well broached.
“Old man Gilder's got a big pull,” he vouchsafed, “and if he caught on
to his boy's going with Mary, he'd be likely to send the police after
us--strong! Believe me, I ain't looking for any trip up the river.”
Aggie shook her head, quite unaffected by the man's suggestion of
possible peril in the situation.
“We ain't done nothin' they can touch us for,” she declared, with
assurance. “Mary says so.”
Garson, however, was unconvinced, notwithstanding his deference to the
judgment of his leader.
“Whether we've done anything, or whether we haven't, don't matter,” he
objected. “Once the police set out after you, they'll get you. Russia
ain't in it with some of the things I have seen pulled off in this
town.”
“Oh, can that 'fraid talk!” Aggie exclaimed, roughly. “I tell you they
can't get us. We've got our fingers crossed.”
She would have said more, but a noise at the hall door interrupted her,
and she looked up to see a man in the opening, while behind him appeared
the maid, protesting angrily.
“Never mind that announcing thing with me,” the newcomer rasped to the
expostulating servant, in a voice that suited well his thick-set figure,
with the bullet-shaped head and the bull-like neck. Then he turned to
the two in the drawing-room, both of whom had now risen to their feet.
“It's all right, Fannie,” Aggie said hastily to the flustered maid. “You
can go.”
As the servant, after an indignant toss of the head, departed along the
passage, the visitor clumped heavily forward and stopped in the center
of the room, looking first at one and then the other of the two with a
smile that was not pleasant. He was not at pains to remove the derby
hat which he wore rather far back on his head. By this single sign, one
might have recognized Cassidy, who had had Mary Turner in his charge
on the occasion of her ill-fated visit to Edward Gilder's office, four
years before, though now the man had thickened somewhat, and his ruddy
face was grown even coarser.
“Hello, Joe!” he cried, familiarly. “Hello, Aggie!”
The light-gray eyes of the forger had narrowed perceptibly as he
recognized the identity of the unceremonious caller, while the lines of
his firmly set mouth took on an added fixity.
“Well?” he demanded. His voice was emotionless.
“Just a little friendly call,” Cassidy announced, in his strident voice.
“Where's the lady of the house?”
“Out.” It was Aggie who spoke, very sharply.
“Well, Joe,” Cassidy went on, without paying further heed to the girl
for a moment, “when she comes back, just tell her it's up to her to make
a get-away, and to make it quick.”
But Aggie was not one to be ignored under any circumstances. Now, she
spoke with some acerbity in her voice, which could at will be wondrous
soft and low.
“Say!” she retorted viciously, “you can't throw any scare into us. You
hadn't got anything on us. See?”
Cassidy, in response to this outburst, favored the girl with a long
stare, and there was hearty amusement in his tones as he answered.
“Nothing on you, eh? Well, well, let's see.” He regarded Garson with a
grin. “You are Joe Garson, forger.” As he spoke, the detective took a
note-book from a pocket, found a page, and then read: “First arrested in
1891, for forging the name of Edwin Goodsell to a check for ten thousand
dollars. Again arrested June 19, 1893, for forgery. Arrested in April,
1898, for forging the signature of Oscar Hemmenway to a series of bonds
that were counterfeit. Arrested as the man back of the Reilly gang, in
1903. Arrested in 1908 for forgery.”
There was no change in the face or pose of the man who listened to the
reading. When it was done, and the officer looked up with a resumption
of his triumphant grin, Garson spoke quietly.
“Haven't any records of convictions, have you?”
The grin died, and a snarl sprang in its stead.
“No,” he snapped, vindictively. “But we've got the right dope on you,
all right, Joe Garson.” He turned savagely on the girl, who now had
regained her usual expression of demure innocence, but with her
rather too heavy brows drawn a little lower than their wont, under the
influence of an emotion otherwise concealed.
“And you're little Aggie Lynch,” Cassidy declared, as he thrust the
note-book back into his pocket. “Just now, you're posing as Mary
Turner's cousin. You served two years in Burnsing for blackmail. You
were arrested in Buffalo, convicted, and served your stretch. Nothing on
you? Well, well!” Again there was triumph in the officer's chuckle.
Aggie showed no least sign of perturbation in the face of
this revelation of her unsavory record. Only an expression of
half-incredulous wonder and delight beamed from her widely opened blue
eyes and was emphasized in the rounding of the little mouth.
“Why,” she cried, and now there was softness enough in the cooing notes,
“my Gawd! It looks as though you had actually been workin'!”
The sarcasm was without effect on the dull sensibilities of the officer.
He went on speaking with obvious enjoyment of the extent to which his
knowledge reached.
“And the head of the gang is Mary Turner. Arrested four years ago for
robbing the Emporium. Did her stretch of three years.”
“Is that all you've got about her?” Garson demanded, with such
abruptness that Cassidy forgot his dignity sufficiently to answer with
an unqualified yes.
The forger continued speaking rapidly, and now there was an undercurrent
of feeling in his voice.
“Nothing in your record of her about her coming out without a friend
in the world, and trying to go straight? You ain't got nothing in that
pretty little book of your'n about your going to the millinery store
where she finally got a job, and tipping them off to where she come
from?”
“Sure, they was tipped off,” Cassidy answered, quite unmoved. And he
added, swelling visibly with importance: “We got to protect the city.”
“Got anything in that record of your'n,” Garson went on venomously,
“about her getting another job, and your following her up again, and
having her thrown out? Got it there about the letter you had old Gilder
write, so that his influence would get her canned?”
“Oh, we had her right the first time,” Cassidy admitted, complacently.
Then, the bitterness of Garson's soul was revealed by the fierceness in
his voice as he replied.
“You did not! She was railroaded for a job she never done. She went in
honest, and she came out honest.”
The detective indulged himself in a cackle of sneering merriment.
“And that's why she's here now with a gang of crooks,” he retorted.
Garson met the implication fairly.
“Where else should she be?” he demanded, violently. “You ain't got
nothing in that record about my jumping into the river after her?” The
forger's voice deepened and trembled with the intensity of his emotion,
which was now grown so strong that any who listened and looked might
guess something of the truth as to his feeling toward this woman of whom
he spoke. “That's where I found her--a girl that never done nobody any
harm, starving because you police wouldn't give her a chance to work. In
the river because she wouldn't take the only other way that was left her
to make a living, because she was keeping straight!... Have you got any
of that in your book?”
Cassidy, who had been scowling in the face of this arraignment, suddenly
gave vent to a croaking laugh of derision.
“Huh!” he said, contemptuously. “I guess you're stuck on her, eh?”
At the words, an instantaneous change swept over Garson. Hitherto, he
had been tense, his face set with emotion, a man strong and sullen,
with eyes as clear and heartless as those of a beast in the wild.
Now, without warning, a startling transformation was wrought. His form
stiffened to rigidity after one lightning-swift step forward, and his
face grayed. The eyes glowed with the fires of a man's heart in a spasm
of hate. He was the embodiment of rage, as he spoke huskily, his voice a
whisper that was yet louder than any shout.
“Cut that!”
The eyes of the two men locked. Cassidy struggled with all his pride
against the dominant fury this man hurled on him.
“What?” he demanded, blusteringly. But his tone was weaker than its
wont.
“I mean,” Garson repeated, and there was finality in his accents, a
deadly quality that was appalling, “I mean, cut it out--now, here, and
all the time! It don't go!” The voice rose slightly. The effect of it
was more penetrant than a scream. “It don't go!... Do you get me?”
There was a short interval of silence, then the officer's eyes at last
fell. It was Aggie who relieved the tension of the scene.
“He's got you,” she remarked, airily. “Oi, oi! He's got you!”
There were again a few seconds of pause, and then Cassidy made an
observation that revealed in some measure the shock of the experience he
had just undergone.
“You would have been a big man, Joe, if it hadn't been for that temper
of yours. It's got you into trouble once or twice already. Some time
it's likely to prove your finish.”
Garson relaxed his immobility, and a little color crept into his cheeks.
“That's my business,” he responded, dully.
“Anyway,” the officer went on, with a new confidence, now that his eyes
were free from the gaze that had burned into his soul, “you've got to
clear out, the whole gang of you--and do it quick.”
Aggie, who as a matter of fact began to feel that she was not receiving
her due share of attention, now interposed, moving forward till her face
was close to the detective's.
“We don't scare worth a cent,” she snapped, with the virulence of a
vixen. “You can't do anything to us. We ain't broke the law.” There came
a sudden ripple of laughter, and the charming lips curved joyously, as
she added: “Though perhaps we have bent it a bit.”
Cassidy sneered, outraged by such impudence on the part of an
ex-convict.
“Don't make no difference what you've done,” he growled. “Gee!” he went
on, with a heavy sneer. “But things are coming to a pretty pass when a
gang of crooks gets to arguing about their rights. That's funny, that
is!”
“Then laugh!” Aggie exclaimed, insolently, and made a face at the
officer. “Ha, ha, ha!”
“Well, you've got the tip,” Cassidy returned, somewhat disconcerted,
after a stolid fashion of his own. “It's up to you to take it, that's
all. If you don't, one of you will make a long visit with some people
out of town, and it'll probably be Mary. Remember, I'm giving it to you
straight.”
Aggie assumed her formal society manner, exaggerated to the point of
extravagance.
“Do come again, little one,” she chirruped, caressingly. “I've enjoyed
your visit so much!”
But Cassidy paid no apparent attention to her frivolousness; only turned
and went noisily out of the drawing-room, offering no return to her
daintily inflected good-afternoon.
For her own part, as she heard the outer door close behind the
detective, Aggie's expression grew vicious, and the heavy brows drew
very low, until the level line almost made her prettiness vanish.
“The truck-horse detective!” she sneered. “An eighteen collar, and a
six-and-a-half hat! He sure had his nerve, trying to bluff us!”
But it was plain that Garson was of another mood. There was anxiety in
his face, as he stood staring vaguely out of the window.
“Perhaps it wasn't a bluff, Aggie,” he suggested.
“Well, what have we done, I'd like to know?” the girl demanded,
confidently. She took a cigarette and a match from the tabouret beside
her, and stretched her feet comfortably, if very inelegantly, on a chair
opposite.
Garson answered with a note of weariness that was unlike him.
“It ain't what you have done,” he said, quietly. “It's what they can
make a jury think you've done. And, once they set out to get you--God,
how they can frame things! If they ever start out after Mary----” He did
not finish the sentence, but sank down into his chair with a groan that
was almost of despair.
The girl replied with a burst of careless laughter.
“Joe,” she said gaily, “you're one grand little forger, all right, all
right. But Mary's got the brains. Pooh, I'll string along with her as
far as she wants to go. She's educated, she is. She ain't like you and
me, Joe. She talks like a lady, and, what's a damned sight harder,
she acts like a lady. I guess I know. Wake me up any old night and ask
me--just ask me, that's all. She's been tryin' to make a lady out of
me!”
The vivaciousness of the girl distracted the man for the moment from
the gloom of his thoughts, and he turned to survey the speaker with a
cynical amusement.
“Swell chance!” he commented, drily.
“Oh, I'm not so worse! Just you watch out.” The lively girl sprang
up, discarded the cigarette, adjusted an imaginary train, and spoke
lispingly in a society manner much more moderate and convincing than
that with which she had favored the retiring Cassidy. Voice, pose and
gesture proclaimed at least the excellent mimic.
“How do you do, Mrs. Jones! So good of you to call!... My dear Miss
Smith, this is indeed a pleasure.” She seated herself again, quite
primly now, and moved her hands over the tabouret appropriately to her
words. “One lump, or two?... Yes, I just love bridge. No, I don't play,”
she continued, simpering; “but, just the same, I love it.” With this
absurd ending, Aggie again arranged her feet according to her liking on
the opposite chair. “That's the kind of stuff she's had me doing,” she
rattled on in her coarser voice, “and believe me, Joe, it's damned near
killing me. But all the same,” she hurried on, with a swift revulsion
of mood to the former serious topic, “I'm for Mary strong! You stick to
her, Joe, and you'll wear diamon's.... And that reminds me! I wish she'd
let me wear mine, but she won't. She says they're vulgar for an innocent
country girl like her cousin, Agnes Lynch. Ain't that fierce?... How can
anything be vulgar that's worth a hundred and fifty a carat?”