THE STORY
A half-hour later a telephone bell pealed in the office of the Courier.
"You're wanted, Mr. Harkins," called an assistant. The city editor
hurried to the instrument. "Hello!" he called.
"Hello! That you, Harkins? All right, this is Glenwood. Well, we've got
him. Working on him now. Be there by twelve, sooner if possible. Have
everything ready. Good-by."
The office of Dr. Erastus Wentworth was a scene of animation. By rare
good luck, Slade had found the medical gentleman in an adjacent
restaurant immediately after the cab drew up at the building which
contained his office. Dick and Slade had assisted the dazed O'Byrn
upstairs, when Slade, fuming with impatience, set out on a search for
the physician, which was fortunately soon rewarded.
They placed O'Byrn on a sofa and he immediately lapsed into dreamland.
"Doctor," said Dick, "this man has a job to turn out tonight that would
feaze many a fellow in his sober senses. He's simply got to do it
tonight. It will take an hour, perhaps a half or so more. It must be
started at midnight. I know it looks hopeless, but you don't know the
man. If you only start his brain half-working it's worth a couple of
normal ones under full head. What do you think?" He was pacing the
floor in keen excitement. Slade stood near, silent, with burning eyes.
"Bad!" commented the doctor, dryly. "How much has he had?"
"Not so much," returned Slade. "He got a nasty bump; it helped."
"Well, we'll try," said the doctor, and was soon busy. Micky was
sufficiently oblivious not to wince at the sting of the hypodermic
needle, piercing his bared arm, forcing into his system the powerful
solution of strychnine, the influence of which must be invoked to
reinforce the mechanism of the numbed brain. Dick looked at the
Irishman, sprawled supine upon the office sofa, still with closed
eyes. It looked hopeless enough and Dick despaired.
A little later the physician was preparing with infinite care a mixture
which he finally seemed to have ready to his satisfaction. He approached
the prostrate man.
"Rank poison," he said grimly to Glenwood, "but desperate cases require
desperate remedies. I fancy this will complete the job of galvanizing
your friend for the time you require. Probably he won't exactly
scintillate, but I think he will do." He administered the stuff to
O'Byrn, who, half-conscious already despite his relaxed attitude,
swallowed it obediently.
"Now in a few minutes," said the doctor, "you can start with him. But
remember one thing," he cautioned Glenwood, "this brace is wholly
artificial. It won't last. A little later and I couldn't have done much
for you anyway. He'll run along like a machine for a while, that's all.
Get all you can from him while you can, for there'll be a reaction."
"That's what we've got to do anyway," replied Dick grimly. "It's a case
of racing the clock with us from now on."
A little later they descended the stairs, O'Byrn stumbling heedlessly
down, assisted by Glenwood. The cabman had waited under instructions.
"The Courier office in a hurry," Dick ordered, and assisted Micky
inside. Slade followed. He had resolved to be in at the death.
As the cab rolled rapidly south, Dick spoke to the man opposite him, now
rousing to a dull consciousness of his surroundings.
"Micky," he demanded, "have you got that story, all of it?" There was an
assenting nod.
"Now listen to me, Micky," continued Dick, leaning forward in the
dimness, fixing the other's stolid eyes with his own dominant ones,
"you're going to turn out that story and it's going to be the story of
your life. You won't feel like it, but you're going to do it and it's
going to be a dandy. Now get your brain working. Think of that story,
every stage of it, from the time you first started out for it till you
finished. Fix it in your head, and when the time comes, just spout it.
_Don't-think-of-anything-but-that-story!_ Do you understand?"
There was but a single word of response, a little thick, but inspiring
of confidence. "Sure."
Dick sat back with a long sigh. His hands were trembling with
excitement. A moment later the cab drew up in front of the Courier
office.
The elevator sprang upward. As its door was flung back for the trio to
emerge, the big editorial clock chimed the hour of midnight. Harkins
met them with white face and eyes that revealed the strain of the long
hours of suspense. Behind him stared many other eyes, in which shone an
overwrought glitter that came of the infectious tension of the
situation.
"Well, O'Byrn!" Harkins' voice crackled with acrid authority. "Where's
your story?"
The tone had the effect of a whip lash, awakening the habit of swift
obedience born of long training. Micky had stood dumb with blank eyes,
to which the scene and the actors seemed strangely remote, like a vague
dream. But his chief's question pierced his numbed brain like sharp
steel. There was an instinctive attempt to gather his deadened forces.
His hand swiftly sought an outer pocket and produced a few penciled
fragments which he threw upon a table. "There," he said.
"These!" exclaimed Harkins, hastily scanning them. "Well, where are the
rest? Did you lose them?"
Dick interposed. "You forget, Mr. Harkins," he suggested. "He doesn't
have to carry a notebook. Micky, where's the rest of it?"
"Why," he answered confusedly, "I remembered it."
"Well, do you remember it now?" persisted Harkins.
"No," wearily, "not just now." Then, again with that strange gathering
of struggling forces, though the words came as if he talked in his
sleep, "I'll remember it--after I get started." And he walked straight
to his desk, eyes dead ahead like a somnambulist's, unheedful of the men
who watched him silently with drawn, anxious faces. It is doubtful if he
saw them. Dropping limply into his chair he reached mechanically for his
copy paper.
"Not that way, Micky," said Dick softly, interposing his hand. "There
isn't time. You must dictate it. Here's a man waiting for you."
Micky turned dull eyes toward the stenographer who sat nearby in
readiness, pencil in hand. An expression of helplessness replaced the
apathy in O'Byrn's face, as his gaze shifted to Dick. In his trance-like
state he could not comprehend. They wanted the story, yet would not let
him write it. There was a pathetic questioning in his look.
"Listen, Micky," said Dick very distinctly, bending over him. "It's not
far from press-time. We've got to hurry. There's a relay of
stenographers waiting for you. Now you go ahead and dictate your story
just as if you were writing it yourself. Get your mind right on it. Talk
your introduction, covering the main points, then start at the beginning
and go through to the finish. Get everything in and talk it as it comes
to you, but have it right. Don't be afraid of going too fast. They'll
get it all. Talk it just as you'd talk it to me and get it all. You
understand? Now, boy, _get into it_!" He placed the packet of
Shaughnessy's papers, which O'Byrn had entrusted to him, in his hand.
Dick stepped back, raising his hand to quiet them all as they crowded
around, staring at the motionless man in the chair. "Get back!" Dick
whispered fiercely. "Get him rattled now and it's all up. Can't you
see?" They softly moved aside and intense quiet fell, in which the
measured ticking of the big clock sounded unbelievably loud. They
watched the meagre figure in the chair with an odd fascination. O'Byrn,
as if fairly hypnotized by Glenwood's words, was bending forward, hands
pressed tightly against his temples, eyes closed and brow contracted in
the supreme effort to marshal the dormant resources of his brain. So he
sat, without word or motion, while the moments crawled by and the
suspense grew into actual pain for every watcher in that great room.
Once Harkins, with an expression of keen torture, slowly lifted a
clenched hand and let it fall silently, an impetuous word restrained by
a warning gesture from Glenwood, who had not once taken his piercing
eyes from O'Byrn's face. Even as he gazed, the face of the other seemed
curiously to change, as if a dead thing were stirring into life. It was
as if Glenwood's iron will reinforced O'Byrn's weaker one, infusing into
it the power of concentration, helping it to rise superior to deadening
influences, to assert itself in a hard-won triumph of mind over matter.
At last Micky raised his head, looking straight into Dick's eyes, which
shone with satisfaction, for they read coherence in O'Byrn's own. The
day was saved and there was a universal sigh of relief. O'Byrn extended
his hand. Reading the gesture aright, Dick placed in it the notes which
shortly before had been produced for Harkins' inspection. Micky looked
them over briefly, scanned the damning packet a moment, and turned to
the waiting stenographer.
Then came the story which swept the town that morning in a mighty wind
that drove a monstrous tidal wave of public indignation thundering over
an illicit crew and blotted out a corrupt municipal history. Yes and
more, for the waters encroached even to foul halls in the capitol and
washed them clean. It was a story involving so scathing an arraignment
of those in high places that hardened veterans in the great room,
listening to its steady flow from the lips of the drowsy man in the
chair, gasped and looked at each other in momentary incredulity;
momentary, because every astounding disclosure was fortified by the most
incontrovertible of proofs. Micky had been a veritable sleuth hound on
the track of that story. His scent had been unerring and in the
marshaling of his verified facts he had shown positive genius. There was
nothing asserted that collected statements and figures did not prove; no
man arraigned, from Judge Boynton down, who was not pilloried in the
proof. Noisome legislative deals, heretofore blanketed by
respectability, were laid bare in exposed horror. The city government
was savagely assailed. The vesture of fair seeming in the present
campaign was torn away and there was revealed rottenness. The growth of
graft, in repulsive forms, under the sinister genius of Shaughnessy, was
claimed and proved and the telling ruined some flourishing careers. So
on to the end, the arraignment transcending the expectation of all in
its ugly features, as indeed it had Micky's own. It left no doubt of the
swift dynamic effect upon the election, now close at hand. Truly it was
the story of a lifetime.
He told it from beginning to end always in that strange, monotonous
voice, as if he were muttering in his sleep, his eyes at times fixed
absently on the stenographer, at others half-closed or turning blankly
toward the ceiling. He seemed wholly unconscious of his surroundings
after his task was begun, being absorbed in dreamy contemplation of his
theme. As the physician had said, his brain was working like an
insensate machine, driven for a while by the force of powerful
stimulants. Yet always his wonderful memory, an instinctive force with
him, was a potent line that led his groping mind unerringly through the
gloomy labyrinth of the brain. At times he would falter for a moment,
but once more grasping the thread was off again. So, unmindful of
anything save the task he was mechanically pursuing, he swept on toward
the end. Stenographers quietly relieved one another, typewriters rattled
madly at the other end of the room, Harkins and an assistant fairly flew
in the preparation of the copy; boys hurried by with it, take by take,
everywhere was the sharp hum of the belated machinery, at last in
motion. O'Byrn never noticed, but went serenely, logically, sleepily on,
dictating as he would have written it. One might imagine he saw himself,
as one detached, writing as he proceeded.
But now the fuel had spent its force. He was growing horribly drowsy,
yet struggled on, impelled by a latent sense of duty. At last he
faltered in the middle of a sentence and stopped short. His chin sank on
his breast.
Someone was shaking him, he numbly felt a dash of something cold and wet
in his face and opened his eyes. He tried to wipe away the water that
trickled down his cheeks, when somebody's handkerchief was passed over
them and he heard a voice, familiar yet far away.
"Wake up, Micky!" it appealed. "You can't give up now, you're almost
through!"
"All right, Dick," he sighed wearily. "Where was I?"
Dick prompted him and he resumed at the break, still in the same even,
expressionless monotone, and continued until the dark shadows again
gathered before his eyes and he swayed in his chair. Dick's voice again
rang its sharp rally in his ears and he braced desperately, dictating
the closing paragraphs. "That's all," he murmured. The receding
footfalls of the stenographer sounded. Then came Dick's voice, a ghost
of a voice from the other side of the world.
"Now you can sleep," it said.
Then returned again the shadows and silence.