buggy and on his way up the footpath, going at a brisker step than the
squire usually traveled. The men on the porch hailed him gravely and
ceremoniously, as befitting an occasion of solemnity. Afterward some of
them recalled the look in his eye; but at the moment they noted it--if
they noted it at all--subconsciously.
For all his haste the squire, as was also remembered later, was almost
the last to enter the door; and before he did enter he halted and
searched the flawless sky as though for signs of rain. Then he hurried
on after the others, who clumped single file along a narrow little hall,
the bare, uncarpeted floor creaking loudly under their heavy farm shoes,
and entered a good-sized room that had in it, among other things, a
high-piled feather bed and a cottage organ--Bristow's best room, now to
be placed at the disposal of the law's representatives for the inquest.
The squire took the largest chair and drew it to the very center of the
room, in front of a fireplace, where the grate was banked with withering
asparagus ferns. The constable took his place formally at one side of
the presiding official. The others sat or stood about where they could
find room--all but six of them, whom the squire picked for his coroner's
jury, and who backed themselves against the wall.
The squire showed haste. He drove the preliminaries forward with a sort
of tremulous insistence. Bristow's wife brought a bucket of fresh
drinking water and a gourd, and almost before she was out of the room
and the door closed behind her the squire had sworn his jurors and was
calling the first witness, who it seemed likely would also be the only
witness--Bristow's oldest boy. The boy wriggled in confusion as he sat
on a cane-bottomed chair facing the old magistrate. All there, barring
one or two, had heard his story a dozen times already, but now it was to
be repeated under oath; and so they bent their heads, listening as
though it were a brand-new tale. All eyes were on him; none were
fastened on the squire as he, too, gravely bent his head,
listening--listening.
The witness began--but had no more than started when the squire gave a
great, screeching howl and sprang from his chair and staggered backward,
his eyes popped and the pouch under his chin quivering as though it had
a separate life all its own. Startled, the constable made toward him and
they struck together heavily and went down--both on their all
fours--right in front of the fireplace.
The constable scrambled free and got upon his feet, in a squat of
astonishment, with his head craned; but the squire stayed upon the
floor, face downward, his feet flopping among the rustling asparagus
greens--a picture of slavering animal fear. And now his gagging screech
resolved itself into articulate speech.
"I done it!" they made out his shrieked words. "I done it! I own up--I
killed him! He aimed fur to break up my home and I tolled him off into
Niggerwool and killed him! There's a hole in his back if you'll look
fur it. I done it--oh, I done it--and I'll tell everything jest like it
happened if you'll jest keep that thing away from me! Oh, my Lawdy!
Don't you hear it? It's a-comin' clos'ter and clos'ter--it's a-comin'
after me! Keep it away----" His voice gave out and he buried his head in
his hands and rolled upon the gaudy carpet.
And now they all heard what he had heard first--they heard the
tonk-tonk-tonk of a cowbell, coming near and nearer toward them along
the hallway without. It was as though the sound floated along. There was
no creak of footsteps upon the loose, bare boards--and the bell jangled
faster than it would dangling from a cow's neck. The sound came right to
the door and Squire Gathers wallowed among the chair legs.
The door swung open. In the doorway stood a negro child, barefooted and
naked except for a single garment, eyeing them with serious, rolling
eyes--and, with all the strength of his two puny arms, proudly but
solemnly tolling a small rusty cowbell he had found in the cowyard.
III
AN OCCURRENCE UP A SIDE STREET
"See if he's still there, will you?" said the man listlessly, as if
knowing in advance what the answer would be.
The woman, who, like the man, was in her stocking feet, crossed the
room, closing the door with all softness behind her. She felt her way
silently through the darkness of a small hallway, putting first her ear
and then her eye to a tiny cranny in some thick curtains at a front
window.
She looked downward and outward upon one of those New York side streets
that is precisely like forty other New York side streets: two unbroken
lines of high-shouldered, narrow-chested brick-and-stone houses, rising
in abrupt, straight cliffs; at the bottom of the canyon a narrow river
of roadway with manholes and conduit covers dotting its channel
intermittently like scattered stepping stones; and on either side wide,
flat pavements, as though the stream had fallen to low-water mark and
left bare its shallow banks. Daylight would have shown most of the
houses boarded up, with diamond-shaped vents, like leering eyes, cut in
the painted planking of the windows and doors; but now it was night
time--eleven o'clock of a wet, hot, humid night of the late summer--and
the street was buttoned down its length in the double-breasted fashion
of a bandmaster's coat with twin rows of gas lamps evenly spaced. Under
each small circle of lighted space the dripping, black asphalt had a
slimy, slick look like the sides of a newly caught catfish. Elsewhere
the whole vista lay all in close shadow, black as a cave mouth under
every stoop front and blacker still in the hooded basement areas. Only,
half a mile to the eastward a dim, distant flicker showed where Broadway
ran, a broad, yellow streak down the spine of the city, and high above
the broken skyline of eaves and cornices there rolled in cloudy waves
the sullen red radiance, born of a million electrics and the flares from
gas tanks and chimneys, which is only to be seen on such nights as this,
giving to the heaven above New York that same color tone you find in an
artist's conception of Babylon falling or Rome burning.
From where the woman stood at the window she could make out the round,
white, mushroom top of a policeman's summer helmet as its wearer leaned
back, half sheltered under the narrow portico of the stoop just below
her; and she could see his uniform sleeve and his hand, covered with a
white cotton glove, come up, carrying a handkerchief, and mop the hidden
face under the helmet's brim. The squeak of his heavy shoes was plainly
audible to her also. While she stayed there, watching and listening, two
pedestrians--and only two--passed on her side of the street: a messenger
boy in a glistening rubber poncho going west and a man under an umbrella
going east. Each was hurrying along until he came just opposite her, and
then, as though controlled by the same set of strings, each stopped
short and looked up curiously at the blind, dark house and at the figure
lounging in the doorway, then hurried on without a word, leaving the
silent policeman fretfully mopping his moist face and tugging at the
wilted collar about his neck.
After a minute or two at her peephole behind the window curtains above,
the woman passed back through the door to the inner, middle room where
the man sat.
"Still there," she said lifelessly in the half whisper that she had come
to use almost altogether these last few days; "still there and sure to
stay there until another one just like him comes to take his place. What
else did you expect?"
The man only nodded absently and went on peeling an overripe peach,
striking out constantly, with the hand that held the knife, at the
flies. They were green flies--huge, shiny-backed, buzzing, persistent
vermin. There were a thousand of them; there seemed to be a million of
them. They filled the shut-in room with their vile humming; they swarmed
everywhere in the half light. They were thickest, though, in a corner at
the back, where there was a closed, white door. Here a great knot of
them, like an iridescent, shimmering jewel, was clustered about the
keyhole. They scrolled the white enameled panels with intricate,
shifting patterns, and in pairs and singly they promenaded busily on the
white porcelain knob, giving it the appearance of being alive and having
a motion of its own.
It was stiflingly hot and sticky in the room. The sweat rolled down the
man's face as he peeled his peach and pared some half-rotted spots out
of it. He protected it with a cupped palm as he bit into it. One huge
green fly flipped nimbly under the fending hand and lit on the peach.
With a savage little snarl of disgust and loathing the man shook the
clinging insect off and with the knife carved away the place where its
feet had touched the soft fruit. Then he went on munching, meanwhile
furtively watching the woman. She was on the opposite side of a small
center-table from him, with her face in her hands, shaking her head with
a little shuddering motion whenever one of the flies settled on her
close-cropped hair or brushed her bare neck.
He was a smallish man, with a suggestion of something dapper about him
even in his present unkempt disorder; he might have been handsome, in a
weakly effeminate way, had not Nature or some mishap given his face a
twist that skewed it all to one side, drawing all of his features out of
focus, like a reflection viewed in a flawed mirror. He was no heavier
than the woman and hardly as tall. She, however, looked less than her
real height, seeing that she was dressed, like a half-grown boy, in a
soft-collared shirt open at the throat and a pair of loose trousers. She
had large but rather regular features, pouting lips, a clear brown skin
and full, prominent brown eyes; and one of them had a pronounced cast in
it--an imperfection already made familiar by picture and printed
description to sundry millions of newspaper readers. For this was Ella
Gilmorris, the woman in the case of the Gilmorris murder, about which
the continent of North America was now reading and talking. And the
little man with the twisted face, who sat across from her, gnawing a
peach stone clean, was the notorious "Doctor" Harris Devine, alias
Vanderburg, her accomplice, and worth more now to society in his present
untidy state than ever before at any one moment of his whole
discreditable life, since for his capture the people of the state of New
York stood willing to pay the sum of one thousand dollars, which tidy
reward one of the afternoon papers had increased by another thousand.
Everywhere detectives--amateurs and the kind who work for hire--were
seeking the pair who at this precise moment faced each other across a
little center-table in the last place any searcher would have suspected
or expected them to be--on the second floor of the house in which the
late Cassius Gilmorris had been killed. This, then, was the situation:
inside, these two fugitives, watchful, silent, their eyes red-rimmed for
lack of sleep, their nerves raw and tingling as though rasped with
files, each busy with certain private plans, each fighting off
constantly the touch of the nasty scavenger flies that flickered and
flitted iridescently about them; outside, in the steamy, hot drizzle,
with his back to the locked and double-locked door, a leg-weary
policeman, believing that he guarded a house all empty except for such
evidences as yet remained of the Gilmorris murder.
* * * * *
It was one of those small, chancy things that so often disarrange the
best laid plots of murderers that had dished their hope of a clean
getaway and brought them back, at the last, to the starting point. If
the plumber's helper, who was sent to cure a bathtub of leaking in the
house next door, had not made a mistake and come to the wrong number;
and if they, in the haste of flight, had not left an area door
unfastened; and if this young plumbing apprentice, stumbling his way
upstairs on the hunt for the misbehaving drain, had not opened the white
enameled door and found inside there what he did find--if this small
sequence of incidents had not occurred as it did and when it did, or if
only it had been delayed another twenty-four hours, or even twelve,
everything might have turned out differently. But fate, to call it by
its fancy name--coincidence, to use its garden one--interfered, as it
usually does in cases such as this. And so here they were.
The man had been on his way to the steamship office to get the tickets
when an eruption of newsboys boiled out of Mail Street into Broadway,
with extras on their arms, all shouting out certain words that sent him
scurrying back in a panic to the small, obscure family hotel in the
lower thirties where the woman waited. From that moment it was she,
really, who took the initiative in all the efforts to break through the
doubled and tripled lines that the police machinery looped about the
five boroughs of the city.
At dark that evening "Mr. and Mrs. A. Thompson, of Jersey City," a quiet
couple who went closely muffled up, considering that it was August, and
carrying heavy valises, took quarters at a dingy furnished room house on
a miscalled avenue of Brooklyn not far from the Wall Street ferries and
overlooking the East River waterfront from its bleary back windows. Two
hours later a very different-looking pair issued quietly from a side
entrance of this place and vanished swiftly down toward the docks. The
thing was well devised and carried out well too; yet by morning the
detectives, already ranging and quartering the town as bird-dogs quarter
a brier-field, had caught up again and pieced together the broken ends
of the trail; and, thanks to them and the newspapers, a good many
thousand wide awake persons were on the lookout for a plump,
brown-skinned young woman with a cast in her right eye, wearing a boy's
disguise and accompanied by a slender little man carrying his head
slightly to one side, who when last seen wore smoked glasses and had his
face extensively bandaged, as though suffering from a toothache.
Then had followed days and nights of blind twisting and dodging and
hiding, with the hunt growing warmer behind them all the time. Through
this they were guided and at times aided by things printed in the very
papers that worked the hardest to run them down. Once they ventured as
far as the outer entrance of the great, new uptown terminal, and turned
away, too far gone and sick with fear to dare run the gauntlet of the
waiting room and the train-shed. Once--because they saw a made-up
Central Office man in every lounging long-shoreman, and were not so far
wrong either--they halted at the street end of one of the smaller piers
and from there watched a grimy little foreign boat that carried no
wireless masts and that might have taken them to any one of half a dozen
obscure banana ports of South America--watched her while she hiccoughed
out into midstream and straightened down the river for the open
bay--watched her out of sight and then fled again to their newest hiding
place in the lower East Side in a cold sweat, with the feeling that
every casual eye glance from every chance passer-by carried suspicion
and recognition in its flash, that every briskening footstep on the
pavement behind them meant pursuit.
Once in that tormented journey there was a sudden jingle of metal, like
rattling handcuffs, in the man's ear and a heavy hand fell detainingly
on his shoulder--and he squeaked like a caught shore-bird and shrunk
away from under the rough grips of a truckman who had yanked him clear
of a lurching truck horse tangled in its own traces. Then, finally, had
come a growing distrust for their latest landlord, a stolid Russian Jew
who read no papers and knew no English, and saw in his pale pair of
guests only an American lady and gentleman who kept much to their room
and paid well in advance for everything; and after that, in the hot
rainy night, the flight afoot across weary miles of soaking cross
streets and up through ill-lighted, shabby avenues to the one place of
refuge left open to them. They had learned from the newspapers, at once
a guide and a bane, a friend and a dogging enemy, that the place was
locked up, now that the police had got through searching it, and that
the coroner's people held the keys. And the woman knew of a faulty catch
on a rear cellar window, and so, in a fit of stark desperation bordering
on lunacy, back they ran, like a pair of spent foxes circling to a
burrow from which they have been smoked out.
Again it was the woman who picked for her companion the easiest path
through the inky-black alley, and with her own hands she pulled down
noiselessly the broken slats of the rotting wooden wall at the back of
the house. And then, soon, they were inside, with the reeking heat of
the boxed-up house and the knowledge that at any moment discovery might
come bursting in upon them--inside with their busy thoughts and the busy
green flies. How persistent the things were--shake them off a hundred
times and back they came buzzing! And where had they all come from?
There had been none of them about before, surely, and now their
maddening, everlasting droning filled the ear. And what nasty creatures
they were, forever cleaning their shiny wings and rubbing the ends of
their forelegs together with the loathsome suggestion of little
grave-diggers anointing their palms. To the woman, at least, these flies
almost made bearable the realization that, at best, this stopping point
could be only a temporary one, and that within a few hours a fresh start
must somehow be made, with fresh dangers to face at every turning.
* * * * *
It was during this last hideous day of flight and terror that the thing
which had been growing in the back part of the brain of each of them
began to assume shape and a definite aspect. The man had the craftier
mind, but the woman had a woman's intuition, and she already had read
his thoughts while yet he had no clue to hers. For the primal instinct
of self-preservation, blazing up high, had burned away the bond of bogus
love that held them together while they were putting her drunkard of a
husband out of the way, and now there only remained to tie them fast
this partnership of a common guilt.
In these last few hours they had both come to know that together there
was no chance of ultimate escape; traveling together the very disparity
of their compared appearances marked them with a fatal and unmistakable
conspicuousness, as though they were daubed with red paint from the same
paint brush; staying together meant ruin--certain, sure. Now, then,
separated and going singly, there might be a thin strand of hope. Yet
the man felt that, parted a single hour from the woman, and she still
alive, his wofully small prospect would diminish and shrink to the
vanishing point--New York juries being most notoriously easy upon women
murderers who give themselves up and turn state's evidence; and, by the
same mistaken processes of judgment, notoriously hard upon their male
accomplices--half a dozen such instances had been playing in flashes
across his memory already.
Neither had so much as hinted at separating. The man didn't speak,
because of a certain idea that had worked itself all out hours before
within his side-flattened skull. The woman likewise had refrained from
putting in words the suggestion that had been uppermost in her brain
from the time they broke into the locked house. Some darting look of
quick, malignant suspicion from him, some inner warning sense, held her
mute at first; and later, as the newborn hate and dread of him grew and
mastered her and she began to canvass ways and means to a certain end,
she stayed mute still.
Whatever was to be done must be done quietly, without a struggle--the
least sound might arouse the policeman at the door below. One thing was
in her favor--she knew he was not armed; he had the contempt and the
fear of a tried and proved poisoner for cruder lethal tools.
It was characteristic also of the difference between these two that
Devine should have had his plan stage-set and put to motion long before
the woman dreamed of acting. It was all within his orderly scheme of the
thing proposed that he, a shrinking coward, should have set his squirrel
teeth hard and risked detection twice in that night: once to buy a
basket of overripe fruit from a dripping Italian at a sidewalk stand,
taking care to get some peaches--he just must have a peach, he had
explained to her; and once again when he entered a dark little store on
Second Avenue, where liquors were sold in their original packages, and
bought from a sleepy, stupid clerk two bottles of a cheap domestic
champagne--"to give us the strength for making a fresh start," he told
her glibly, as an excuse for taking this second risk. So, then, with the
third essential already resting at the bottom of an inner waistcoat
pocket, he was prepared; and he had been waiting for his opportunity
from the moment when they crept in through the basement window and felt
their way along, she resolutely leading, to the windowless, shrouded
middle room here on the second floor.
* * * * *
How she hated him, feared him too! He could munch his peaches and uncork
his warm, cheap wine in this very room, with that bathroom just yonder
and these flies all about. From under her fingers, interlaced over her
forehead, her eyes roved past him, searching the littered room for the
twentieth time in the hour, looking, seeking--and suddenly they fell on
something--a crushed and rumpled hat of her own, a milliner's
masterpiece, laden with florid plumage, lying almost behind him on a
couch end where some prying detective had dropped it, with a big, round
black button shining dully from the midst of its damaged tulle crown.
She knew that button well. It was the imitation-jet head of a hatpin--a
steel hatpin--that was ten inches long and maybe longer.
She looked and looked at the round, dull knob, like a mystic held by a
hypnotist's crystal ball, and she began to breathe a little faster; she
could feel her resolution tighten within her like a turning screw.
Beneath her brows, heavy and thick for a woman's, her eyes flitted back
to the man. With the careful affectation of doing nothing at all, a
theatricalism that she detected instantly, but for which she could guess
no reason, he was cutting away at the damp, close-gnawed seed of the
peach, trying apparently to fashion some little trinket--a toy basket,
possibly--from it. His fingers moved deftly over its slick, wet surface.
He had already poured out some of the champagne. One of the pint bottles
stood empty, with the distorted button-headed cork lying beside it, and
in two glasses the yellow wine was fast going flat and dead in that
stifling heat. It still spat up a few little bubbles to the surface, as
though minute creatures were drowning in it down below. The man was
sweating more than ever, so that, under the single, low-turned gas jet,
his crooked face had a greasy shine to it. A church clock down in the
next block struck twelve slowly. The sleepless flies buzzed evilly.
"Look out again, won't you?" he said for perhaps the tenth time in two
hours. "There's a chance, you know, that he might be gone--just a bare
chance. And be sure you close the door into the hall behind you," he
added as if by an afterthought. "You left it ajar once--this light might
show through the window draperies."
At his bidding she rose more willingly than at any time before. To reach
the door she passed within a foot of the end of the couch, and watching
over her shoulder at his hunched-up back she paused there for the
smallest fraction of time. The damaged picture hat slid off on the floor
with a soft little thud, but he never turned around.