The detective pondered seriously upon all these things as he sat there.
He wondered that as yet the boy should have done nothing to indicate
his partners in a crime so far beyond his own scope. More than all, he
wondered how the little printer's devil should know or care anything
about the insurance of the theatre, and what the question of the
insurance had to do with his surreptitious entrance and the theft of
the diamonds and other portable valuables.
The fire had been at first supposed to be the result of accident or
of carelessness on the part of the theatre's employees, until Peter
Bateman's story had suggested to the police the possibility that theft
had necessitated that sequence of pillage, which is incendiarism. Thus
the detective had believed that the theatre had been robbed by some
gang of thieves, of whom Ned was but the humble tool, and then fired
to conceal the traces of the more profitable crime. Now this conclusion
was shaken,--and again and again he asked himself in perplexity and
doubt what the question of the insurance could have had to do with the
crime.
The more he thought of it the more he was convinced that this was to
be a singular and difficult case. Properly worked up it would reflect
much credit on the officer who should finally bring it to a successful
issue. Once in the course of his varied speculations on the subject he
came very close indeed to the truth; he canvassed the possibility that
the theatre was burned from motives of malice or revenge, for Gorham
was a man who made and kept bitter enemies. But the fact that any
fool must know that so large and valuable a property was always amply
insured would, he thought, prevent antagonism or reprisal from taking
that form, since the loss would fall most heavily upon the various
companies who had assumed the risk,--vague, unimagined corporations,
beyond the scope of malice or antagonism, foreign to the thought of an
incendiary.
Still meditating aimlessly about the question of insurance, he began
to wonder if Gorham were not actually a gainer rather than a loser by
the fire. The theatre's furnishings were getting shabby and out of
style; much of the scenery was old; the site had become, by reason of
one of those swift expansions of the commercial section of the town, so
common in our growing southwestern cities, more valuable by far than
the building itself; the season had not been very prosperous,--too much
legitimate drama to cope successfully with spectacular opposition. The
smaller theatres drew the crowds, and light opera was the vogue. More
than all, there was of record a rather heavy mortgage on the structure
itself, which showed that the owner had needed money in considerable
emergencies. Taken all in all, Gorham was doubtless in better financial
case now, a richer man to-day than yesterday.
All at once the detective began to put two and two methodically
together. Gorham, by reason of the heavy insurance, had profited by
the burning of the theatre. The boy, who was known to have secretly
entered the house, presumably for the purpose of theft, had unwittingly
manifested a tumult of excited interest upon the sheer mention of
the insurance of the building,--a matter usually absolutely alien
to one of his age, his class, and his ignorance; when in a state
of obviously alert suspicion he became aware that this incongruity
had been observed, he grew so restive under surveillance, evidently
recognizing its menace, that the officer, not wishing to make an arrest
prematurely, was obliged to withdraw, and only shadow him from afar.
_Insurance!_ Had the boy indeed done nothing to indicate the
perpetrator of the crime!
The car was now passing the ruins of the theatre. The smoke, still
curling slowly into the air, had a certain luminous quality, reflected
from the dying embers. Red lanterns here and there marked the lines
of the débris, where the brick walls had fallen across the sidewalks
and street, blocking the way, and served as a warning to the benighted
passer-by. One of these lanterns cast a dull flush upon the gilded
mask of Folly high on the frescoed wall, still grotesquely leering
down upon the melancholy scene. As the lurid glare gradually faded in
the distance, the detective, his conclusion reached at last, silently
nodded his head, decisively, aggressively.
For this astute person had come to believe that Gorham had himself
fired his own theatre!
He believed the boy, entering for the purpose of theft and concealed
among the scenery, had accidentally gained a knowledge of the manager's
crime,--else why should a lad of his years, a mere child, feel an
interest in so remote a subject as the details of the insurance of
the building? He doubtless went or was sent there with the object of
stealing, nefarious enough! but burning the building could work an
advantage to no one but the owner, who would get the big insurance
money! Thus the detective deduced that Gorham himself had committed
the crime which in double-dealing, joining with the "star," the
manager of the theatrical company, and the insurance companies, he now
pretended to cause to be investigated by the police.
The detective's anxiety to discover the printer's devil in seeking to
communicate with some criminal, some noted "crook," on the subject of
the theatre, changed to an alert expectation. He believed the boy would
seek to communicate with Gorham,--he would make use of his knowledge of
the crime in an effort to extort money.
When Ned at last left the car the detective had become so cautious as
to follow only at a very considerable distance, so extra-hazardous had
his surveillance become, so alertly suspicious seemed the boy. Down and
down Ned took his way, through streets that grew more dirty and dingily
lighted as he went. The tall, gloomy tenement houses on either hand,
for miles, it seemed, apparently leaned toward each other across the
way, to limit the sky and exclude the air from the sad purlieus below.
Some women were quarreling in shrill, shrewish accents on a corner;
one reeled as she walked, and hard by there was a saloon that exuded
a dim glow of untrimmed kerosene lamps, a pervasive odor of beer and
whiskey, and a series of dirty, frowzy customers of both sexes at all
hours of the day and night. It had a more remote trade, too; now and
then a child, tangle-haired, begrimed, unnaturally sharp of eye and
tongue, yet still suggestive of that universal promise of youth,--dim,
dim, not a possibility, hardly a dream, only intimating a higher
purpose in its creation,--scuttled out with a pitcher of beer, bearing
it carefully away to some drink-sodden wretch in a forlorn attic. The
clouds had thickened; they seemed to Ned to-night, though never before,
to resemble the clouds of sin and sorrow and suffering that hang over
the homes of the wicked and weak, and to prefigure the bursting of the
vials of wrath. And search the sky as he would, he could discern no
star.
When he had toiled up four flights of a dark, rickety staircase, and
opened a door in the rear of the mansard roof, the sudden contrast
of the scene within smote upon his quivering nerves, his quickened
perceptions, as if he had never before beheld it. The floor was scoured
white, and throughout the atmosphere was the pungent aroma of coarse
yellow soap. The clean patchwork quilts on the two beds were as gay
with many colors as Joseph's coat. The monkey-stove sought to atone for
its many misdeeds emblazoned on the smoke-blackened walls, and glowed
to a scarlet hue, and upon it simmered the savory dish of onion stew
that he loved. His sickly, puny little sister, seated on a home-woven
rug in the centre of the floor, found plenteous entertainment in
banging a tin cup with an iron spoon, while her mother was busied in
the task of wrapping hundreds of bonbons in gayly fringed papers, for
this work for the candy factory could be done at home, and the care
of the child prevented her from going out to secure better paid work
elsewhere.
"That child is the bane of yer life," her neighbors sometimes said,
with a species of antagonism toward the hindrance, born, it seemed,
only to be a clog and a dead-weight. "Ye had better sen' it to the
'sylum, or somewher's, an' git some use of yerself."
Ned's mother returned no comment, no reply, to these suggestions;
sometimes it seemed as if she had some impediment in her speech,
so silent she had become, so taciturn with her neighbors. The
fact that she was country-bred was shown abundantly in her stolid
uncommunicativeness, her vague terror of all the ways of the great city
outside of these four walls, her old-fashioned code of manners and
morals, and the painfully wrought and maintained cleanliness of her
surroundings. No slight task it was, to be sure, to "pack" the water
which plentifully drenched floors, tables, pots, kettles, windows,
up four flights of steep stairs from the hydrant in the yard! Small
wonder that poverty and dirt are so often concomitant. It had been an
evil day for her and her simple, untutored husband when some vague,
distorted ambition had moved him to despise the small havings of a
country-side blacksmith and seek to become a "horse-shoer" among the
often mythical advantages of a large town. He had little of the canny
thrift characteristic of his Scotch nationality. He was an open-handed,
jovial, florid, red-haired, fiery-tempered man,--over sanguine and
credulous. The many deceptions practiced upon greenhorns, the greater
expense of living, the fierce competition of an already crowded trade,
baffled and bewildered the sturdy fellow. He worked as long as he
had work, but when he was idle he began to drink more and more, and
perhaps at last it was no great misfortune to his family when one of
the pestilences which decimate the tenement region laid this once fair
stalk of wheat low with the "cheat." He left his wife, Ned, and the
puny, sickly little girl as remote, as alien from their old, country
home, as if that haven of humble, hearty comfort were in a foreign
planet. They lived as best they might on the boy's wages and the few
jobs of coarse washing that she could get to do at home. It was the
pride of both mother and son that they had maintained this precarious
existence on these slender means now for more than a year, and in this
fact they saw a glad augury for the future.
Her face always wore, however, an apprehensive, appealing expression,
although Ned remembered when it had been otherwise. As she turned
it toward him now all her perseverance, her self-sacrifice, her
deprivations, her honest, persistent uprightness, her mingled fears
and faith in some fair future for him touched his heart with a potent
force. He cast but one glance at her and burst instantly into tears.
"What ails ye, sonny?" she asked soothingly, and with an intonation
that promised partisanship, earnest and loving; for sometimes he came
home with great griefs of editorial tyranny, or fault-finding and
injustice in the composing-rooms, or the guying of some facetiously
disposed junior reporter, or in a revolt of indignation against the
pressure of new and severe regulations--when his partisan mother would
straightway vilify his enemies (for the nonce), till he would be sorry
for them and rouse himself to protest and remonstrate in their defense.
But now Ned shook his head and would say nothing.
His silence evidently alarmed her. She perceived that his trouble
was far more serious than the usual misadventures in the day's work.
Once or twice she urged him to speak, but in vain. She looked at him
apprehensively for a moment longer, and not without anger. Then as
if appreciating the futility of remonstrance, she turned away to the
table, took up a flaunting red and gilded paper, and with mechanical
swiftness and dexterity twisted the fringed ends.
"Boys are hard to know how to deal with," she remarked. "They can't
l'arn no sense, and they ain't got no instinct. A boy ought ter know
by nature that he hev got two friends what can't wish him nothing but
well. One is his God in Heaven, and the t'other is his mother on
earth,--and them is the ones he trusts the least an' trusts the last."
"The harm is done now," sobbed Ned.
"Undo it, then," said his mother sternly.
Ned walked to the window, and heavily leaning against the sill, looked
out at the gloomy night. When he had first lost the fear that he
had been "spotted" by the detective he had felt almost glad of the
discovery that the insurance companies only would sustain the loss by
the fire, for these, being corporations vague to his mind, impersonal,
of presumably illimitable wealth, did not appeal very strongly to his
limited experience for sympathy. He was glad that the manager whom he
had defrauded would not suffer from the villainy he had witnessed.
This feeling had served in some sort to blunt his conscience and numb
his sense of his own wrong-doing. Now, however, among the familiar
surroundings of home,--sacred as an altar, a temple, even though only
an attic in the tenement district,--he regained his normal poise; he
realized how his mother would regard it. He winced from the sheer
recollection of the old-fashioned phrase with which she was wont to
characterize such shifty dealings. "Stealin', an' nothin' shorter!"
It was indeed theft. She would think that he had stolen the price of
admission to the theatre as absolutely as if he had picked Manager
Gorham's pocket. What did it matter to him whose was the loss in the
burning of the beautiful theatre! The fact remained. He was a thief.
The aspect of dishonesty had never been so odious to him as now.
Hitherto he had carried his mother's teaching in one hand and his
trusty conscience in the other, and with a fair accord between them he
had gone triumphantly through the multiform temptations which assail a
small boy struggling for a living amidst the turmoils of a great town.
Now it was all over. He could never again feel aught but contempt for
himself. In his poignant pang of despair he had a strong impulse to
confess to his mother. He glanced over his shoulder at her, but she
had gone back wearily but unfalteringly to her work, and he relapsed
once more to staring dismally out over the roofs about him, mostly on a
lower level than the windows of this "sky parlor."
Scores of chimney-pots loomed up close at hand. Despite their smoky,
gloomy, unsocial aspect, this insensate crew served in some sort as
company for the boy. They were always there,--they saw him depart
in the morning, they waited for him to come home at night. They had
stories to tell him. He loved a vague, fanciful sense of community
interests with the unknown firesides below them. He pictured to himself
the families clustered about these invisible hearths. Every fantastic
wreath of soot-bespangled smoke curling out from these grimy tubes
indited for him an idyl on the fair page of the sky. What tragic, or
poetic, or romantic episodes were kindled with the homely fires cooking
the supper--and ended in smoke!
When winds were abroad and went rioting about the chimney-pots,
whistling and singing, the smoke affected too a jovial mien, and came
rushing and rollicking up to join its boisterous playfellows, who now
would sweep vast clouds of it aside in tenuous dispersal in the air,
and now would roll up great curling lengths of it like so many yards
of dusky ribbon, tucking it back into the chimney-pots whence it had
sought to issue forth. What roaring farces in the house-top regions
these wild days! What sense of hilarity, of joyous motion, of jocund
voice! "Ha! ha! ha!" said the winds. "What a high old time!"
Whenever the moon was up, weird, dark shadows would haunt the
chimney-pots, and go skulking slyly over the roofs, and Ned's
imagination would conjure into the air beings far more strange than his
simple mythical friends whom he had placed in order about their unknown
hearths below. If it were in the glad summer-time these gruesome shapes
would so far abandon their port of terror as to dance with the misty
images of the smoke to the music of a brass band, which played in a
city square, distant indeed, but not altogether out of earshot. In the
winter the snow-covered roofs reflected the silvery lunar sheen and
shimmered. The chimney-pots were often begirt with zones of icicles.
Grotesque gargoyles of frozen slush and sleet blocked the water-spouts
and hung far over the eaves. A star with a chill crystalline
palpitation would look down. Far, far away the deep, mellow tones of
the cathedral bells would ring out the Angelus. And winter or summer he
loved it all, for his heart was light, his conscience clear, and this
was Home!
But now the atmosphere was murky; the clouds were low; the swift gleams
of lightning were beginning to quiver among the chimney-pots, that
seemed in the uncertain fluctuations to move, to wince, to start aside,
to draw back as in fright. Suddenly resonant torrents were beating upon
the roof; the tin gutters clamored; the mutterings of thunder swelled
to sonorous emphasis.
Ned felt all at once refreshed, elated,--a sense often induced by a
rain-fall long delayed. Perhaps the interval of rest had calmed his
nerves; and had restored his jaded faculties. A new idea suddenly
sprang into his mind.
He did not hesitate; he turned briskly, got down from a shelf an
ink-bottle,--nearly empty from evaporation rather than exhausted by
service,--tore a blank page from an old copy-book which he had used in
his short attendance at the public school, and proceeded at once to
indite some straggling characters. He had addressed an envelope before
he looked up at his mother, who was silently watching him.
"I want some money out o' my wages," he said stoutly, assuming an
air as of a moneyed man who demands what is his own by rights. Then,
"Tain't fur no harm," he added reassuringly.
He had feared her questions, which he was resolved he would not answer.
Without a word, however, she pointed at the drawer of the table. If he
would not voluntarily give her his confidence she would not attempt to
coerce it. She did not even ask nor look to see what sum he took.
The envelope was sealed, and presently Ned was flying along through
street after street with the rain pelting in his face and the wind
bantering him for the loan of his hat. He did not care! His heart was
so much lighter! He saw from afar the great red and blue bottles in
the illuminated windows of a drug-store, and here he paused and went
within and with much circumspection bought a postage-stamp; then he
plunged out in the rain again, making straight for a certain box under
a gleaming lamp in the distance that sent its quivering shafts of light
far through the gloom.
He brought up under the lamp-post, agitated, anxious, but still
unswerving. He looked about him expectantly, watchfully,--it might
have seemed even fearfully to one noting his attitude from a distance.
But he had no longer any fear. The moment was fraught with peculiar
importance to him. He had posted many letters for employers, but never
one for himself, and never before nor after one like this. A man beyond
the furthest limits of the lamp's aureola of misty light had paused
too, breathing hard. He was not used to running so far nor running so
fast. He thought the boy's look and attitude very suspicious, as Ned,
realizing the supreme significance of the moment and the value of this
letter to him, slowly and solemnly dropped it into the box, and then
swiftly scudded off down the street.
When the letter-carrier next came to this box the detective was lurking
in its vicinity. He whispered a request and mentioned a name, but the
postman shook his head with all the dignity of one invested with a
little brief authority, and it seemed that "the regulations" were the
only words his tongue would deign to frame. "Why, what harm can it
do to let me see the outside of the letters?" insisted the detective
plausibly. The postman's head wagged to and fro more slowly under the
well applied force of argument.
"The handwriting on the outside of the envelope alone will tell me
all that I want to know; it is a very important crime which I am
investigating."
The postman's head ceased to vibrate. Yet he was slow and thoughtful
as he laid his hand on the box. As the detective waited eagerly for
it to be opened he looked rather like a fox,--so keen, and so crafty,
and so alertly expectant. The letters, as they were slowly shuffled
before his eyes, he perceived belonged unmistakably to commercial
correspondence,--neat, compact, evidently the work of practiced
scribes,--except only one; this was blurred and smirched, with a
crumpled envelope and a wildly diagonal address, which moreover was
grievously misspelled. He stared with breathless interest and curiosity
at the scrawling characters:--
Manger A. J. Gorm
Manger Gorm's Theter.
In less than half an hour the detective was in close conference with
his chief. "That is all," he said, concluding his account of these
incidents. "I think I have caught the boy communicating with the
criminal. The criminal is the owner himself,--and that letter in my
opinion is the boy's attempt to extort money from Gorham by threatening
to blab all he knows."