this Bullard murder! Just suppose now that one of us, all by himself,
found the person who did the shooting and got a full confession from
him, whoever he was; and got the gun that it was done with--got the
whole thing--and then turned it loose all over the front page before
that big stiff of a Chief Gotlieb down at Central Station knew a thing
about it. Beating the police to it would be the best part of that job.
That's the way they do things in New York. In New York it's the
newspapers that do the real work on big murder mysteries, and the police
take their tips from them. Why, some of the best detectives in New York
are reporters. Look what they did in that Guldensuppe case! Look at what
they've done in half a dozen other big cases! Down here we just follow
along, like sheep, behind a bunch of fat-necked cops, taking their
leavings. Up there a paper turns a man loose, with an unlimited expense
account and all the time he needs, and tells him to go to it. That's the
right way too!"
By that the others knew Ike Webb was thinking of what Vogel had told
him. Vogel was a gifted but admittedly erratic genius from the
metropolis who had come upon us as angels sometimes do--unawares--two
weeks before, with cinders in his ears and the grime of a dusty
right-of-way upon his collar. He had worked for the sheet two weeks and
then, on a Saturday night, had borrowed what sums of small change he
could and under cover of friendly night had moved on to parts unknown,
leaving us dazzled by the careless, somewhat patronizing brilliance of
his manner, and stuffed to our earlobes with tales of the splendid,
adventurous, bohemian lives that newspaper men in New York lived.
"Well, I know this," put in little Pinky Gilfoil, who was red-headed,
red-freckled and red-tempered: "I'd give my right leg to pull off that
Bullard story as a scoop. No, not my right leg--a reporter needs all the
legs he's got; but I'd give my right arm and throw in an eye for good
measure. It would be the making of a reporter in this town--he'd have
'em all eating out of his hand after that." He licked his lips. Even the
bare thought of the thing tasted pretty good to Pinky.
"Now you're whistling!" chimed Ike Webb. "The fellow who single-handed
got that tale would have a job on this paper as long as he lived. The
chief would just naturally have to hand him more money. In New York,
though, he'd get a big cash bonus besides, an award they call it up
there. I'd go anywhere and do anything and take any kind of a chance to
land that story as an exclusive--yes, or any other big story."
To all this the major, it appeared, had been listening, for now he spoke
up in a pretty fair imitation of his old impressive manner:
"But, young gentlemen--pardon me--do you seriously think--any of
you--that any honorarium, however large, should or could be sufficient
temptation to induce one in your--in our profession--to give utterance
in print to a matter that he had learned, let us say, in confidence?
And suppose also that by printing it he brought suffering or disgrace
upon innocent parties. Unless one felt that he was serving the best ends
of society--unless one, in short, were actuated by the highest of human
motives--could one afford to do such a thing? And, under any
circumstances, could one violate a trust--could one violate the common
obligation of a gentleman's rules of deportment----"
"Major," broke in Ike Webb earnestly, "the way I look at it, a reporter
can't afford too many of the luxuries you're mentioning. His duty, it
seems to me, is to his paper first and the rest of the world afterward.
His paper ought to be his mother and his father and all his family. If
he gets a big scoop--no matter how he gets it or where he gets it--he
ought to be able to figure out some way of getting it into print. It's
not alone what he owes his paper--it's what he owes himself. Personally
I wouldn't be interested for a minute in bringing the person that killed
Rod Bullard to justice--that's not the point. He was a pretty shady
person--Rod Bullard. By all accounts he got what was coming to him. It's
the story itself that I'd want."
"Say, listen here, major," put in Pinky Gilfoil, suddenly possessed of a
strengthening argument; "I reckon back yonder in the Civil War, when you
all got the smoke of battle in your noses, you didn't stop to consider
that you were about to make a large crop of widows and orphans and
cause suffering to a whole slue of innocent people that'd never done you
any harm! You didn't stop then, did you? I'll bet you didn't--you just
sailed in! It was your duty--the right thing to do--and you just went
and did it. 'War is hell!' Sherman said. Well, so is newspaper work
hell--in a way. And smelling out a big story ought to be the same to a
reporter that the smoke of battle is to a soldier. That's right--I'll
leave it to any fellow here if that ain't right!" he wound up,
forgetting in his enthusiasm to be grammatical.
It was an unfortunate simile to be making and Pinky should have known
better, for at Pinky's last words the old major's mild eye widened and,
expanding himself, he brought his chair legs down to the floor with a
thump.
"Ah, yes!" he said, and his voice took on still more of its old ringing
quality. "Speaking of battles, I am just reminded, young gentlemen, that
tomorrow is the anniversary of the fall of Vicksburg. Though
Northern-born, General Pemberton was a gallant officer--none of our own
Southern leaders was more gallant--but it has always seemed to me that
his defense of Vicksburg was marked by a series of the most lamentable
and disastrous mistakes. If you care to listen, I will explain further."
And he squared himself forward, with one short, plump hand raised, ready
to tick off his points against Pemberton upon his fingers.
By experience dearly bought at the expense of our ear-drums, the members
of the Evening Press staff knew what that meant; for as you already
know, the major's conversational specialty was the Civil War--it and its
campaigns. Describing it, he made even war a commonplace and a tiresome
topic. In his hands an account of the hardest fought battle became a
tremendously uninteresting thing. He weeded out all the thrills and in
their places planted hedges of dusty, deadly dry statistics. When the
major started on the war it was time to be going. One by one the
youngsters got up and slipped out. Presently the major, booming away
like a bell buoy, became aware that his audience had dwindled. Only Ike
Webb remained, and Ike was getting upon his feet and reaching for the
peg where his coat swung.
"I'm sorry to leave you right in the middle of your story, major; but,
honestly, I've got to be going," apologized Ike. "Good night, and don't
forget this, major"--Ike had halted at the door--"when a big story comes
your way freeze to it with both hands and slam it across the plate as a
scoop. Do that and you can give 'em all the laugh. Good night again--see
you in the morning, major!"
He grinned to himself as he turned away. The major was a mighty decent,
tender-hearted little old scout, a gentleman by birth and breeding,
even if he was down and out and dog-poor. It was a shame that Devore
kept him skittering round on little picayunish jobs--running errands,
that was really what it was. Still, at that, the old major was no
reporter and never would be. He wouldn't know a big story if he ran into
it on the big road--it would have to burst right in his face before he
recognized it. And even then the chances were that he wouldn't know what
to do with it. It was enough to make a fellow grin.
Deserted by the last of his youthful compatriots--which was what he
himself generally called them--the major lingered a moment in heavy
thought. He glanced about the cluttered city room, now suddenly grown
large and empty. This was the theater where his own little drama of
unfitness and failure and private mortification had been staged and
acted. It had run nearly a month now, and a month is a long run for a
small tragedy in a newspaper office or anywhere else. He shook his head.
He shook it as though he were trying to shake it clear of a job lot of
old-fashioned, antiquated ideals--as though he were trying to make room
for newer, more useful, more modern conceptions. Then he settled his
aged and infirm slouch hat more firmly upon his round-domed skull,
straightened his shoulders and stumped out.
At the second turning up the street from the office an observant
onlooker might have noticed a small, an almost imperceptible change in
the old man's bearing. There was not a sneaky bone in the major's
body--he walked as he thought and as he talked, in straight lines; but
before he turned the corner he glanced up and down the empty sidewalk in
a quick, furtive fashion, and after he had swung into the side street a
trifle of the steam seemed gone from his stiff-spined, hard-heeled gait.
It ceased to be a strut; it became a plod.
The street he had now entered was a badly lighted street, with long
stretches of murkiness between small patches of gas-lamped brilliance.
By day the houses that walled it would have showed themselves as shabby
and gone to seed--the sort of houses that second cousins move into after
first families have moved out. Two-thirds of the way along the block the
major turned in at a sagged gate. He traversed a short walk of seamed
and decrepit flagging, where tufts of rank grass sprouted between the
fractures in the limestone slabs, and mounted the front porch of a house
that had cheap boarding house written all over it.
When the major opened the front door the tepid smell that gushed out to
greet him was the smell of a cheap boarding house too, if you know what
I mean--a spilt-kerosene, boiled-cabbage, dust-in-the-corners smell.
Once upon a time the oilcloth upon the floor of the entry way had
exhibited a vivid and violent pattern of green octagons upon a red and
yellow background, but that had been in some far distant day of its
youth and freshness. Now it was worn to a scaly, crumbly color of
nothing at all, and it was frayed into fringes at the door and in places
scuffed clear through, so that the knot-holes of the naked planking
showed like staring eyes.
Standing just inside the hall, the major glanced down first at the floor
and then up to where in a pendent nub a pinprick of light like a captive
lightning-bug flickered up and down feebly as the air pumped through the
pipe; and out of his chest the major fetched a small sigh. It was a sigh
of resignation, but it had loneliness in it too. Well, it was a
come-down, after all these peaceful and congenial years spent among the
marble-columned, red-plushed glories of the old Gaunt House, to be
living in this place.
The major had been here now almost a month. Very quietly, almost
secretly, he had come hither when he found that by no amount of
stretching could his pay as a reporter on the Evening Press be made to
cover the cost of living as he had been accustomed to live prior to that
disastrous day when the major waked up in the morning to find that all
his inherited investments had vanished over night--and, vanishing so,
had taken with them the small but sufficient income that had always been
ample for his needs.
In that month the major had seen but one or two of his fellow lodgers,
slouching forms that passed him by in the gloom of the half-lighted
hallways or on the creaky stairs. His landlady he saw but once a
week--on Saturday, which was settlement day. She was a forlorn, gray
creature, half blind, and she felt her way about gropingly. By the droop
in her spine and by the corners of her lips, permanently puckered from
holding pins in her mouth, a close observer would have guessed that she
had been a seamstress before her eyes gave out on her and she took to
keeping lodgers. Of the character of the establishment the innocent old
major knew nothing; he knew that it was cheap and that it was on a quiet
by-street, and for his purposes that was sufficient.
He heaved another small sigh and passed slowly up the worn steps of the
stairwell until he came to the top of the house. His room was on the
attic floor, the middle room of the three that lined the bare hall on
one side. The door-knob was broken off; only its iron center remained.
His fingers slipped as he fumbled for a purchase upon the metal core;
but finally, after two attempts, he gripped it and it turned, admitting
him into the darkness of a stuffy interior. The major made haste to open
the one small window before he lit the single gas jet. Its guttery flare
exposed a bed, with a thin mattress and a skimpy cover, shoved close up
under the sloping wall; a sprained chair on its last legs; an old
horsehide trunk; a shaky washstand of cheap yellow pine, garnished forth
with an ewer and a basin; a limp, frayed towel; and a minute segment of
pale pink soap.
Major Stone was in the act of removing his coat when he became aware of
a certain sound, occurring at quick intervals. In the posture of a plump
and mature robin he cocked his head on one side to listen; and now he
remembered that he had heard the same sound the night before, and the
night before that. These times, though, he had heard it intermittently
and dimly, as he tossed about half awake and half asleep, trying to
accommodate his elderly bones to the irregularities of his hot and
uncomfortable bed. But now he heard it more plainly, and at once he
recognized it for what it was--the sound of a woman crying; a wrenching
succession of deep, racking gulps, and in between them little moaning,
panting breaths, as of utter exhaustion--a sound such as might be
distilled from the very dregs of a grief too great to be borne.
He looked about him, his eyes and ears searching for further explanation
of this. He had it. There was a door set in the cross-wall of his
room--a door bolted and nailed up. It had a transom over it and against
the dirty glass of the transom a light was reflected, and through the
door and the transom the sound came. The person in trouble, whoever it
might be, was in that next room--and that person was a woman and she was
in dire distress. There was a compelling note in her sobbing.
Undecided, Major Stone stood a minute rubbing his nose pensively with a
small forefinger; then the resolution to act fastened upon him. He
slipped his coat back on, smoothed down his thin mane of reddish gray
hair with his hands, stepped out into the hall and rapped delicately
with a knuckled finger upon the door of the next room. There was no
answer, so he rapped a little harder; and at that a sob checked itself
and broke off chokingly in the throat that uttered it. From within a
voice came. It was a shaken, tear-drained voice--flat and uncultivated.
"Who's there?" The major cleared his throat. "Is it a woman--or a man?"
demanded the unseen speaker without waiting for an answer to the first
question.
"It is a gentleman," began the major--"a gentleman who----"
"Come on in!" she bade him--"the door ain't latched."
And at that the major turned the knob and looked into a room that was
practically a counterpart of his own, except that, instead of a trunk, a
cheap imitation-leather suitcase stood upright on the floor, its sides
bulging and strained from over-packing. Upon the bed, fully dressed,
was stretched a woman--or, rather, a girl. Her head was just rising from
the crumpled pillow and her eyes, red-rimmed and widely distended,
stared full into his.
What she saw, as she sat up, was a short, elderly man with a solicitous,
gentle face; the coat sleeves were turned back off his wrists and his
linen shirt jutted out between the unfastened upper buttons and
buttonholes of his waistcoat. What the major saw was a girl of perhaps
twenty or maybe twenty-two--in her present state it was hard to
guess--with hunched-in shoulders and dyed, stringy hair falling in a
streaky disarray down over her face like unraveled hemp.
It was her face that told her story. Upon the drawn cheeks and the
drooped, woful lips there was no dabbing of cosmetics now; the
professional smile, painted, pitiable and betraying, was lacking from
the characterless mouth, yet the major--sweet-minded, clean-living old
man though he was--knew at a glance what manner of woman he had found
here in this lodging house. It was the face of a woman who never
intentionally does any evil and yet rarely gets a chance to do any
good--a weak, indecisive, commonplace face; and every line in it was a
line of least resistance.
That then was what these two saw in each other as they stared a moment
across the intervening space. It was the girl who took the initiative.
"Are you one of the police?" Then instantly on the heels of the query:
"No; I know better'n that--you ain't no police!"
Her voice was unmusical, vulgar and husky from much weeping. Magically,
though, she had checked her sobbing to an occasional hard gulp that
clicked down in her throat.
"No, ma'am," said Major Stone, with a grave and respectful courtesy, "I
am not connected with the police department. I am a professional
man--associated at this time with the practice of journalism. I have the
apartment or chamber adjoining yours and, accidentally overhearing a
member of the opposite sex in seeming distress, I took it upon myself to
offer any assistance that might lie within my power. If I am intruding I
will withdraw."
"No," she said; "it ain't no intrusion. I wisht, please, sir, you'd come
in jest a minute anyway. I feel like I jest got to talk to somebody a
minute. I'm sorry, though, if I disturbed you by my cryin'--but I jest
couldn't help it. Last night and the night before--that was the first
night I come here--I cried all night purty near; but I kept my head in
the bedclothes. But tonight, after it got dark up here and me layin'
here all alone, I felt as if I couldn't stand it no longer. Honest, I
like to died! Right this minute I'm almost plum' distracted."
The major advanced a step.
"I assure you I deeply regret to learn of your unhappiness," he said.
"If you desire it I will be only too glad to summon our worthy landlady,
Miss--Miss----" he paused.
"Miss La Mode," she said, divining--"Blanche La Mode--that's my name. I
come from Indianapolis, Indiana. But please, mister, don't call that
there woman. I don't want to see her. For a while I didn't think I
wanted to see nobody, and yit I've known all along, from the very first,
that sooner or later I'd jest naturally have to talk to somebody. I knew
I'd jest have to!" she repeated with a kind of weak intensity. "And it
might jest as well be you as anybody, I guess."
She sat up on the side of the bed, dangling her feet, and subconsciously
the major took in fuller details of her attire--the cheap white slippers
with rickety, worn-down high heels; the sleazy stockings; the
over-decorated skirt of shabby blue cloth; the soiled and rumpled waist
of coarse lace, gaping away from the scrawny neck, where the fastenings
had pulled awry. Looped about her throat and dangling down on her flat
breast, where they heaved up and down with her breathing, was a double
string of pearls that would have been worth ten thousand dollars had
they been genuine pearls. A hand which was big-knuckled and thin held a
small, moist wad of handkerchief. About her there was something
unmistakably bucolic, and yet she was town-branded, too, flesh and
soul. Major Stone bowed with the ceremonious detail that was a part of
him.
"My name, ma'am, is Stone--Major Putnam Stone, at your service," he told
her.
"Yes, sir," she said, seeming not to catch either his name or his title.
"Well, mister, I'm goin' to tell you something that'll maybe surprise
you. I ain't goin' to ast you not to tell anybody, 'cause I guess you
will anyhow, sooner or later; and it don't make much difference if you
do. But seems's if I can't hold in no longer. I guess maybe I'll feel
easier in my own mind when I git it all told. Shet that door--jest close
it--the lock is broke--and set down in that chair, please, sir."
The major closed the latchless door and took the one tottery chair. The
girl remained where she was, on the side of her bed, her slippered feet
dangling, her eyes fixed on a spot where there was a three-cornered
break in the dirty-gray plastering.
"You know about Rodney G. Bullard, the lawyer, don't you?--about him
bein' found shot day before yistiddy evenin' in the mouth of that
alley?" she asked.
"Yes, ma'am," he said. "Though I was not personally acquainted with the
man himself, I am familiar with the circumstances you mention."
"Well," she said, with a sort of jerk behind each word, "it was me that
done it!"
"I beg your pardon," he said, half doubting whether he had heard
aright, "but what was it you said you did?"
"Shot him!" she answered--"I was the one that shot him--with this thing
here." She reached one hand under the pillow and drew out a
short-barreled, stubby revolver and extended it to him. Mechanically he
took it, and thereafter for a space he held it in his hands. The girl
went straight on, pouring out her sentences with a driven, desperate
eagerness.
"I didn't mean to do it, though--God knows I didn't mean to do it! He
treated me mighty sorry--it was lowdown and mean all the way through,
the way he done me--but I didn't mean him no real harm. I was only
aimin' to skeer him into doin' the right thing by me. It was
accidental-like--it really was, mister! In all my life I ain't never
intentionally done nobody any harm. And yit it seems like somebody's
forever and a day imposin' on me!" She quavered with the puny passion of
her protest against the world that had bruised and beaten her as with
rods.
Shocked, stunned, the major sat in a daze, making little clucking sounds
in his throat. For once in his conversational life he couldn't think of
the right words to say. He fumbled the short pistol in his hands.
[Illustration: "I WAS THE ONE THAT SHOT HIM--WITH THIS THING HERE."
--_Page 164._]
"I'm goin' to tell you the whole story, jest like it was," she went on
in her flat drone; and the words she spoke seemed to come to him from a
long way off. "That there Rodney Bullard he tricked me somethin'
shameful. He come to the town where I was livin' to make a speech in a
political race, and we got acquainted and he made up to me. I was
workin' in a hotel there--one of the dinin' room help. That was two
years ago this comin' September. Well, the next day, when he left, he
got me to come 'long with him. He said he'd look after me. I liked him
some then and he talked mighty big about what he was goin' to do for me;
so I come with him. He told me that I could be his----" She hesitated.
"His amanuensis, perhaps," suggested the old man.
"Which?" she said. "No; it wasn't that way--he didn't say nothin' about
marryin' me and I didn't expect him to. He told me that I should be his
girl--that was all; but he didn't keep his word--no, sir; right from the
very first he broke his word to me! It wasn't more'n a month after I got
here before he quit comin' to see me at all. Well, after that I stayed a
spell longer at the house where I was livin' and then I went to another
house--Vic Magner's. You know who she is, I reckin?"
The major half nodded, half shook his head.
"By reputation only I know the person in question," he answered a bit
stiffly.
"Well," she went on, "there ain't so much more to tell. I've been sick
lately--I had a right hard spell. I ain't got my strength all back yit.
I was laid up three weeks, and last Monday, when I was up and jest
barely able to crawl round, Vic Magner, she come to me and told me that
I'd have to git out unless I could git somebody to stand good for my
board. I owed her for three weeks already and I didn't have but nine
dollars to my name. I offered her that, but she said she wanted it all
or nothin'. I think she wanted to git shet of me anyway. Mister, I was
mighty weak and discouraged--I was so! I didn't know what to do.