CONFERENCE BETWEEN MR. HACKLEY, THE DOG MAN, AND MR. RYAN, THE BOSS
At half past six o'clock, or thereabouts, James Hackley dragged slowly
up Main Street. He was garbed in his working suit of denim blue, trimmed
with monkey wrench and chisel, and he wore, further, an air of
exaggerated fatigue. A rounded protuberance upon his cheek indicated
that the exhilaration of the quid was not wanting to his inner man, but
the solace he drew from it appeared pitifully trifling. Now and then he
would pause, rest his person against a lamp-post, or the front of some
emporium, and shake his head despondently, like one most fearful of the
consequences of certain matters.
Since four o'clock that afternoon, in fact, Mr. Hackley had been out
upon a reluctant stint of lawn-mowing, reluctant because he hated all
work with a Titanic hatred and sedulously cultivated the conviction that
his was a delicate health. In view of the magnificent windfall in
connection with the killing of his dog, it had not been his design to
accept any more retainers for a long time to come. That occurrence had
lifted him, as by the ears, from the proletariat into the capitalistic
leisure class; and the map of the world had become but the portrait of
his oyster.
But at noon as he lolled upon his rear veranda, chatting kindly with
his wife as she hung the linen of quality upon her drying lines, a lady
had knocked upon his door, beautiful and insistent, to wheedle his will
from him. It was only a tiny bit of a lawn, she had reiterated
imploringly, hardly a constitutional to cut, and there was not one tall
fellow in all Hunston whom she would permit to touch it but Hackley.
Dead to all flattery as he was, his backbone ran to water at the
clinging beauty of her smile, and so incredibly betrayed him into
yielding. And now, at hard upon half after six o'clock, post-meridian,
the dangerous dews of night already beginning to fall, he leaned against
a lamp-post, a physical wreck, with a long block and a half still
separating him from the comforts of home.
At the next corner but one above rose the red brick Ottoman, its
inviting side stretching for many yards down the street towards him.
Windows cut it here and there along its length, and over their green
silk half-curtains, poured forth a golden light which was hospitality
made visible. Yet, so strange are the ways of life, the proprietor of
all these luxuries, who stood at the furthest window, beyond Hackley's
range, did not look happy in their possession. His eyes gleamed
fiercely; his heavy chin protruded savagely, as though deliberately
insulting Main Street and the northward universe. Even his small derby,
which he seldom doffed save at the hour for taps, contrived to bespeak a
certain ferocity.
The Ottoman bar was bare of customers, all Hunston now verging towards
its evening meal. Ryan rested his elbow upon its polished surface, and
glared into the twilight. He was, as luck had it, in a terrible
ill-humor. For he knew himself to-day for a man who had been physically
flouted, a boss whose supremacy had been violently assailed, a king who
felt his throne careen sickeningly beneath him.
Last night, when four men whom he had never seen before, three of them
masked, had borne him off on a long wild drive, and dropped him at ten
o'clock in a lonely bit of country eight miles from the Academy Theatre,
there had at least been action to give point to his choler. All but out
of his mind with passion, he had besought them all, singly or quadruply,
to descend from their carriage and meet him in combat, thirsting sorely
to kill or be killed. But they had only laughed at him, silently, and
galloped away, leaving him screaming out futile curses on the empty
night air.
Two hours later, when he had got back to Hunston, after an interminable
nightmare of running over rough ground with unaccustomed limbs, and
stumbling heavily to earth, and rising up to struggle again, he had
learned to what uses his enemies had put that absence. Smith had related
the story in the fastness of his office, and in wholly different guise
from that which it wore next morning in the columns of his newspaper.
And Ryan, listening, had slowly calmed, calmed to the still fury of
implacable hate.
But he and Smith had quarreled violently. He was for publishing the
story of his taking off in type as black as the dastardly act. Smith had
a difficult time in holding him down, however much he pointed out that
Ryan had no shadow of proof against his new adversary on the yacht, and
that public sympathy in an affair of this sort was always with the
successful. In the end Smith had carried his point, because he was, of
those two men, both the more wise and the more resolute. But this
morning they had conferred again and quarreled even more bitterly.
Yet Ryan, plotting in the window of his splendid gin-palace, his eye
always sweeping the evening street as though a-search, was not thinking
of the young editor now. Two other policies for the days to come
monopolized his attention. One of these was crushing victory at the
polls. The other was revenge. Probably in thinking of these, he put them
at the moment in reverse order.
"Damn him!" he suddenly exploded: and it was not little Hare that he
cursed. "Damn his soul!"
In the next breath, the boss suddenly ducked, and disappeared from the
half-curtained window altogether. A moment later, he appeared outside
his swinging door, yawning and stretching himself, as one who, wearied
with the tedium of life indoors, would see what beguilement might await
him abroad.
The boss looked first up the street and permitted his beady eye to range
casually over the view. Then his gaze came slowly down and rested in
time upon the person of James Hackley, now almost directly opposite. The
boss's countenance lit up with a smile of pleased surprise.
"Why, hello, Jim!" he called out. "Where you been hidin' yourself
lately? Ain't seen you for a week o' Sundays. Come across and pass the
time of day!"
Mr. Hackley, who had been debating whether or not he should pause for
inspiration at the Ottoman, and had just virtuously declared for the
negative, shambled over.
Ryan eyed him sympathetically. "You look kind o' played out, Jim. What
you been doin' with yourself? Come in and take a drop of somethin' to
hearten you up some. On the house."
"Well," said Mr. Hackley, unable to resist the novel fascination of
liquoring gratis, "just a weeny mite for to cut the dust out o' my
windpipe."
Ryan went behind the bar and served them himself, selecting with care a
bottle which he described as the primest stuff in the house. From this
he poured Hackley a remarkably stiff potation, slightly wetting the
bottom of his own glass the while. The bottle he left standing ready on
the bar.
"Here's how, friend Jim!"
Whatever Mr. Hackley's foibles, he was a man at his cups. His platform
was the straight article uncontaminated by ice or flabby
sparkling-water; and chasers and the like of those he left to
schoolboys.
"Ain't took a drink for days," he said, holding up his glass to the
electric light and squinting through it. "Cut it out religious, I have.
Been settin' around the house, an' settin', under physic'an's orders,
tryin' fer to get my health back so's I could go to moldin' agin. But
Lordamussy, what's the use of torkin'! I ain't no more fitten fer work
than a noo-born baby. Well, here's luck, Ryan!"
He set his glass down and involuntarily smacked his lips. The fiery
liquid percolated through him down to his very toes. He felt better at
once, more ambitious, less conscious of his constitution. And
simultaneously, he lost something of that indolent good-nature which was
the badge of all his sober hours.
Ryan regarded him with friendly anxiety. "You gotter be more careful
with yourself, honest! Here--strengthen your holt a little. One little
swallow ain't no help to a man as beat out as you are."
"As yer like, Dennis," said Mr. Hackley, listlessly. "What I reely need
is a good long rest, like in a 'orspittle."
Kindly Mr. Ryan filled the small glass almost to the brim; and Hackley,
though he had modestly stipulated for "on'y a drap" tossed it all off
thirstily at a single practised toss.
"That'll fix you up nice. But ain't I glad," said his host with a sly
chuckle, "that nobody sees you taking these drinks on the quiet, which
_we_ know you need bad for your health."
Mr. Hackley set down his glass again, this time with something of a
bang. "How's that?" he demanded suspiciously.
Ryan laughed deprecatingly. While doing so, he manipulated the tall dark
bottle again.
"Shuh!" said he. "It's only the boys' fun, of course. Don't you mind
_them_, Jim."
"What're you drivin' at?" asked Hackley, bristling a bit. "If you got
anything worth sayin' to me, spit it out plain, I say."
"Well," laughed Ryan, "if some of the boys was to see you in here
putting away a harmless drink or so, o' course they'd say that you was
gettin' up your Dutch courage. He, he!"
"Dutch courage!" cried Mr. Hackley, indignantly. "An' wot the hell fer?"
"Sh! Not so loud, Jim. Why, it's only their little joke, o' course.
They'd say you was gettin' up your nerve to meet them two friends of
yours from New York! Hey? He, he!"
"Wot friends?" asked Hackley again, hotly.
Ryan observed the mounting color on the other's cheek and brow, and his
eye, which was like a small, glossy shoe-button, gleamed.
"Why, that 'un that killed that dog o' yours, and put you to sleep
before the crowd, and that 'un that sent Mamie Orrick to Gawd knows
where. But shucks! Drop it, Jim. I wouldn't have allooded to it, on'y I
thought you'd see the fun of the thing."
It takes a philosopher to perceive humor in taunts at his own personal
courage, and Mr. Hackley, with three drinks of the Ottoman's choicest
beneath his tattered waistcoat, was not that kind of man at all.
He leaned forward against the bar with a belligerence suggesting that he
wished to push it over, pinning his pleasant-spoken host to the wall,
and pounded the top of it till the glasses tingled.
"Fill her up with the same!" he ordered loudly, looking suddenly, and
for the first time, very much like the rough-looking customer who had
tackled Peter Maginnis in defense of his dog. "An' I'll have you know,
_Mister_ Ryan--I'll have you know, my fine, big, bouncin' buck, that Jim
Hackley ain't afeared of anythink that walks."
Ryan filled her up again, though this time more conservatively. He was a
keen man and an excellent judge of what was enough.
"Shuh! Don't _I_ know that, Jim! Why, after that big bloke licked the
stuffin' out of you the other night, the boys said: 'Well, that's the
last o' that little differculty! Jim Hackley'll never foller that up
none,' they says. And what'd I say?"
"Well, what'd you say?"
"I says, 'Hell!' I says. 'You boys don't _know_ Jim Hackley!'"
"I'll interdooce myself to 'em!" said Hackley savagely. "And whoever
says that Maginnis licked me's a liar. You hear me? Tripped my toe on a
rock, I did, and banged all the sense outen my head--"
"I understand, Jim," interrupted Ryan suavely. "Just what I told the
boys. O' course, just between you an me, I have been kinder took by
surprise that you've waited so long to get your evens. Why, this morning
when the piece came out in the _Gazette_, tellin' the whole town that
the feller's side-partner was that yellow cur-dog Stanhope, I says to
the boys, first thing: 'Boys, we gotter watch Jim Hackley mighty careful
to-day,' says I. 'I'm afeard there'll be gun-play before sunset.'
'Gun-play!' says they. 'F'om Hackley! Hell,' says they. 'You boys,' says
I, 'don't know old Jim like I do!' And then o' course,--he, he!--as the
whole day slipped by and nothin' doin' at all--why, o' course, I won't
deny that they ain't been jollyin' me some."
Hackley leaned far over the bar, and shook his fist in the boss's face.
"I ain't a man," he shouted, "to be pushed an' a-nagged at in a deal
like this. I takes my time, I makes my plans, I decides on the ways I'll
do it. Do yer pipe to that? An' now I've got ever'think fixed and I'm
ready. Do yer see!"
The boss, who had retreated a step before that menacing fist, glanced
out of the window and instantly started, this time with an amazement
that was genuine.
"Why, blast my eyes," he cried, raising a pudgy arm, "if there ain't
that dog Stanhope now!"
Hackley, following the pointing finger, peered over the green silk
curtain out into the darkening street. A young man, tall and rather
thin, in a blue suit and wide gray-felt hat, was walking slowly and with
a slight limp up the cross street, evidently heading for the Palace
Hotel.
The two men watched him intently, in a moment of perfect silence. Then
the boss, who was not without a certain dramatic sense, said slowly:
"_Mamie Orrick's old friend_!"
A baleful light leaped into Hackley's eyes. He broke away from the bar
with a movement that was like a wrench, and started for the door.
"I'll fix him," he muttered dourly. "Fix him _good_."
But Ryan, who wanted something much better than that, sprang around the
bar like lightning, and caught Hackley roughly by the shoulder, at the
door.
"What, here in the square!" he hissed sharply. "With the po-lice in
sight a'most! Why, you fool, it'll mean the pen for you as sure as your
name's Jim Hackley!"
Hackley paused, his resolution unsettled by the other's superior
knowledge of the law.
"No, no, Jim--it won't do," went on Ryan with bland decisiveness. "What
you want is the two of them together, hey?--on a nice dark stretch o'
road, and old Orrick and a few good fellows along to help. You ain't the
only one that's got it in for Stanhope, are you? An' you want Maginnis
too, I guess? Come on in the orfice and talk about it over a seegar."