THE BLACK HAND
THE Summer was well on toward September. Billy’s first business that
Monday morning in June when he made his final break with boyhood was to
go to Mr. Smith’s Tum-wah Valley office for instructions. Here Mr. Smith
came every morning to see how his big concerns were going in earth and
rock, before he took them up in his town offices in the mystic symbolism
of paper and figures, and business policy and confidence,—all that vast
idealism which is so much more really the business of the world than are
the products of the earth we live on.
From the open door of the artistic, vine-covered log building Billy
could look up the steep hill to Tuk-wil-la (hazel-nuts), Mr. Smith’s
summer home, set in the edge of the forest overlooking the little valley
and the broad Lake Kal-lak-a-la-chuck.
Mr. Smith’s instructions were brief. “I told you it would be no picnic,
Billy. This is your stunt: take your shovel and go to work with those
Dagos on the grade. Learn all of ’em, the look of the face, walk, and
whatever you can pick up of their talk. You’ll have to slouch along and
be a Dago yourself. Mind, I don’t want any tattling,—just to know if
they are plotting any mischief, that’s all. And don’t come near me
unless you’re called. Treat me as you see them treat me. See?”
“I’ll try,” Billy answered. He went to the foreman for his tools, and
set to work.
The hard work, the long hours, and Billy’s youth unaccustomed to labor
left him at night little more than a log to roll into bed, sleep
heavily, and go dully off in the morning to another day of digging. It
was no wonder that the strange situation of being engaged to marry a
young woman and already entered upon his life obligation of providing
her home, and yet not knowing where she was, did not weigh upon him as
much as he had thought it would.
But as he became hardened to his labor, her problem grew more obtrusive,
and he longed to hear from her. He puzzled over the one, the only letter
he had received, trying by many readings to understand it, but it
revealed less and less meaning. That she had received a letter
purporting to be from him instructing her to take the money from his
club fund, go away, and not write for four weeks, and even then not
reveal her location,—this he gathered. But how she came by such a letter
which he had never written, how she could be deceived in the writing,
how she got the desk drawer open,—these and many other questions would
have become unendurable had he not been so engrossed with his new life.
Through the papers he had seen that her father had failed in business,
that Mr. Alvin Short was the chief creditor, and that the home had been
sold. It also transpired that Mr. Fisher’s business record was not one
of which any son-in-law could be proud.
Billy could never recover from his disgust at the camp feeding where the
dirty crew bolted better food than they were accustomed to in silent
haste, and yet complained. It was some time before the well-bred boy
could mentally detach himself and imagine he was in his own home; but he
partly accomplished this feat at last, and ate with better appetite.
He found one among them, an American whose better upbringing had
somewhat survived the tramping that had gone with the bottle. He was now
“doing his yearly stunt” at work, he said, putting by enough to keep him
out of “the poor house, or the chain gang, or whatever is the fashion
for the gentry of the road in the town I strike next Winter.”
At one corner of the table they ate together, and sometimes talked a
little, while the rest fed. But he was a philosopher, and Billy learned
from him many things that set him thinking. “Billy, a man must fight and
wait,” the man broke out suddenly one day, “before he can fight and
win.” They were lying under a _madroño_ tree, resting after the midday
meal.
“You’ll have to switch on the light; I don’t get a glimmer,” Billy
replied lazily.
“Anybody can fight, when he has to; even a dog does; but few of us have
the grit to fight and hold on. You’re just beginning life, my boy; hold
on.”
“I mean to do that.”
“Not to this! It is a dog’s life—to slave for another man, feed, sleep,
wake, and do it all over again. I shall not do it much longer. But
you—don’t form the quitting habit; hold, and all the time search for
something better. Then your fight tells. See?”
“Yes. But what’s the matter with you? Why don’t you do a little holding
yourself?”
The man’s eyes darkened and he frowned. “Too late.”
“It’s never too late.”
The man jerked himself up, and energy flashed in the weak face. “Not too
late for you. Opportunity will pass your way many times. Catch her every
time—hold her. By Heaven! With your face and body, your clean mind and
good brain, you can do anything,—be a young god. Billy, a fellow at the
open door of life doesn’t suspect his power, doesn’t use a fraction of
it.” He reached his hand up to the summer sky. “Up there, down here,” he
dug his foot into the fecund earth, “a thousand million possibilities
wait for us to draw them forth with our minds.”
“And you?” Billy asked as the other looked off gloomily.
He wheeled almost angrily. “I? I have ruined my chances. It takes a
clear eye, a steady hand, and a clean heart—mind you, a clean heart—to
see and hear the secrets up there, down here.” Again he indicated earth
and sky. “Under desert skies, miles from any human habitation, I’ve
watched the stars march from purple twilight to golden morning, and
heard things—whispers right out of heaven that would have been triumph
for me if—if I had been fit.”
The foreman called, and they took up their shovels; and Billy’s was no
longer heavy. But the man settled into his habitual silent, uneven
effort.
Side by side they worked till mid-afternoon, when the Smiths’ machine
appeared in the distance, May Nell alone in the tonneau. Billy’s first
impulse was to straighten and greet her, but it flashed across him that
the men must not know of his acquaintance with the daughter of the
“boss.” “Stand in front of me, will you?” he asked of the man, and bent
to re-tie his shoe.
“What did you do that for?” the tramp inquired as the machine flew by.
“Do you know her? If you do, don’t let any devilish pride keep you from
standing in her presence, a man, clean-faced or dirty.”
Billy grinned. “That’s all right; it’s part of my game.”
“I don’t get you.”
“It’s not because my face is dirty, or that she would care—she’s pure
gold—but because it’s part of my job to do that.”
“All right; you know your cards; I don’t.”
Billy’s eyes twinkled. “This is the fight,” he waved his hand around
toward the sweating, bending crew; “and not letting her see me is the
holding on. See?”
The philosopher smiled. “You’ve caught on, all right.”
That night after work, and supper, and when Billy was trudging down the
hill to get the car for home, he met the machine again. He tried to
dodge it for workmen were passing, some lounging along the dusty road in
groups.
[Illustration: “What do you mean, Billy Boy, by refusing to speak to
me?”]
May Nell saw him and ordered the driver to stop. “What do you mean,
Billy Boy, by refusing to speak to me? I saw you this afternoon. Your
shoe didn’t need—”
“Miss Smith, I—”
She stiffened as if struck.
“Miss Smith, circumstances alter cases,” Billy added quietly.
She was conscious of the slower gait of the dark passers, their smiles
and frank curiosity.
“I’m sorry I can’t tell you any more, lady,” he finished with a comical
imitation of the obsequious attitude of the foreign workman to his
employers. “I tell-a the Big-a Boss.”
She laughed and ordered the machine on, but he saw the perplexity in her
face as she sped away.
Billy turned to meet a leering, grinning Italian face. “Boss-a girl vera
good look-a.” He gave Billy a nudge that permitted no resentment, since
Billy had encouraged familiarity from the workmen. “You lika?”
Billy ached to “spoil his face.” Instead, “Be prepared” came instantly
to his mind. He pointed to the palatial home on the hill, Tuk-wil-la.
“Queens! Understand?”
The man nodded.
Billy stooped and gathered a handful of the dust at his feet and pointed
to himself. “Me. Understand?”
Again the man nodded, but with a queer look, half credulity, half
suspicion, and trudged on.
Billy had not grown up in the vineyard country of California without
learning something of Italian peasantry, and he had not worked a week
before he knew the men had a grievance. He got an Italian primer and a
phrase book, and utilized his time on the car, which was nearly two
hours each day, for studying, with the result of being shortly able to
catch the drift of most that was said around him. So it was that as the
Summer passed he learned and reported enough of their crude plottings to
keep Mr. Smith on his guard.
When Billy arrived home a second letter from Erminie awaited him, and
again behind his locked door he read it, wondering as he tore it open,
that he did not feel the same excited hurry as over the first one. It
was the unsatisfactory letter of one unaccustomed to correspondence and
without the natural gift for it, yet it was surprising enough.
“DEAREST BILLY:
“Here is five dollars more. I’ll be able to pay up soon now, for
Cousin Will got me a job. It has seemed a long time to wait, six
weeks; but I’m doing just as you said in that letter of instruction,
Billy.
“I want to tell you again, Billy, that I would rather have faced it
out with you, because I wasn’t afraid to stand up to anybody about
that night, with you so splendid to me. It’s all right. Whatever you
say goes about that business.
“I can’t understand yet how it was you knew all about the circular,
and had it all planned out—what I was to do—before you went on the
scout. None of us knew about it, the dodger I mean, till Saturday
night. And how was it, Billy, that you had me send the key to a
place away over in North City? I didn’t know any of your friends
lived over there. The way I put it up is that some one there is to
act in the club _pro tem_, for you this Summer, while you are
working.
“I like my work just fine. Such a jolly bunch, hayseeds of course,
but I’m getting so I don’t mind that. And they’re all so nice to me,
especially the boys. But Cousin Will don’t let any of ’em get funny.
They all think I’m his steady.
“I’m sending a letter to ma in this. Please mail it. I expect she’s
about crazy. I sent one to the home number. I had to do that, Billy,
if you did tell me not to. That wasn’t a bit like you, Billy. But
the letter came back. If this goes to the general delivery maybe
she’ll get it. You’ll send it, won’t you, Billy? She’s lost her
home, you know; I saw it in the paper. Or Will did.
“So long, dear Billy. Don’t forget me, though I’m not worth
remembering. I think a lot of you. If I amount to anything it’ll be
a lot because of you.
“Cousin Will is dandy to me, so thoughtful,—lots like you, only he’s
a hayseed too; but I don’t mind that; I’m getting used to it. He’s
twenty-four.
“Your loving Erminie.”
Billy stared at the sheet a long time, turning it over and over, and
scrutinizing the envelope as if he might make it tell him something
more. What could it all mean? Who had sent her that letter? Planned her
movements so carefully and forged his name? And the money? He didn’t see
yet how she could have got it out of the drawer at school even if she
did have a key.
Twenty-four! An old fellow that Will was. He wasn’t really her cousin
either. Billy set his teeth and wished he were free to set out on a
search for her. The letter was postmarked Portland, Oregon. The other
had been the same. But of course the place where she was must be the
country, and some distance too, or she would not call the people
hayseeds.
Suddenly the task of finding a girl somewhere in the State of Oregon
with nothing but that postmark to guide him revealed to him its
hopelessness; and too restless to sleep he went out and walked,—faster
and faster, without realizing it, going south.
With every step the puzzle grew worse. Only one grain of comfort showed:
Erminie’s letter would prove him no thief. Why, yes! that really
fastened the proof on him, and worse, showed that he was taking care of
her. That was no way out of the tangle.
Who could be using his name for this business? Of course, no one but the
Kid, and he was too cunning to be caught. And where was that key? Would
some of the boys get it, and never know where it came from? And the desk
drawer—whose would it be when September found that silent old pile
ringing again with a thousand student voices?
At length he found himself in the southernmost park of the city, not so
very far from Tum-wah. Exhausted, he threw himself on one of the
benches, drawing well within the shadows that he might, unmolested, go
over again all the matters that troubled him.
While he mused, he became gradually conscious of voices approaching, and
he was sensible of some ominous import in them. He knew they were
Italians. Instantly he dropped to the grass and crept behind the bench,
intending to go on as soon as they passed.
They were quarrelling, but speaking in guarded tones, vehemently. Billy
heard broken bits, “More, more,” and “Thousand dollars,” in English; and
in Italian, names of places he knew were in Italy. But nothing excited
him till he heard, “the boss,” and “in the lake!”
The Black Hand! That had put its mark on Mr. Smith! Well, even the Black
Hand might find its mate in a white one!
Billy was not so frightened as he might have been, had he known less of
their ways, these hotheaded Latins that live in America, but not _of_ it
till a second generation binds them to the soil. He knew their
allegiance to hates and friendships rooted in the land they had left;
and perhaps what he had heard was only a scheme to “even up” somewhere,
and concerned Mr. Smith only so far as the fact that the money they
earned came from him.
The men went by slowly, halting once or twice, and Billy crept
cautiously out and followed them at a distance till they came under one
of the park lamps that revealed them perfectly. Billy knew them; one was
the man who had chaffed him about May Nell.
He hurried around by the gate on the other side and took a car for home,
where he called up Mr. Smith at Tuk-wil-la.
“It sounds important, Billy. Out with it.”
“It’s not to be told over the wire. But please don’t leave your house
to-night—”
“To-night? It’s twelve o’clock. You’ve got me out of bed.”
“Well, let me see you in the morning before you leave the house, then;
it may be nothing,—what I have to tell,—and it may be a good deal.”
“All right, boy. Don’t worry yourself. Nothing is as bad in the morning
as it seems at night. Good-night.”
But in spite of that bit of truth Billy went to bed to dream of swarthy
banditti, Italian caves, beautiful maids held for ransom, and
hair-breadth escapes known only to dreams.
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