inform Gallegher, when he condescended to return, that his services were
no longer needed. Gallegher had played truant once too often.
Unconscious of this, he remained with his new friend until late the same
evening, and started the next afternoon toward the _Press_ office.
* * * * *
As I have said, Gallegher lived in the most distant part of the city,
not many minutes' walk from the Kensington railroad station, where
trains ran into the suburbs and on to New York.
It was in front of this station that a smoothly shaven, well-dressed man
brushed past Gallegher and hurried up the steps to the ticket office.
He held a walking-stick in his right hand, and Gallegher, who now
patiently scrutinized the hands of every one who wore gloves, saw that
while three fingers of the man's hand were closed around the cane, the
fourth stood out in almost a straight line with his palm.
Gallegher stopped with a gasp and with a trembling all over his little
body, and his brain asked with a throb if it could be possible. But
possibilities and probabilities were to be discovered later. Now was the
time for action.
He was after the man in a moment, hanging at his heels and his eyes
moist with excitement.
He heard the man ask for a ticket to Torresdale, a little station just
outside of Philadelphia, and when he was out of hearing, but not out of
sight, purchased one for the same place.
The stranger went into the smoking-car, and seated himself at one end
toward the door. Gallegher took his place at the opposite end.
He was trembling all over, and suffered from a slight feeling of nausea.
He guessed it came from fright, not of any bodily harm that might come
to him, but of the probability of failure in his adventure and of its
most momentous possibilities.
The stranger pulled his coat collar up around his ears, hiding the lower
portion of his face, but not concealing the resemblance in his troubled
eyes and close-shut lips to the likenesses of the murderer Hade.
They reached Torresdale in half an hour, and the stranger, alighting
quickly, struck off at a rapid pace down the country road leading to the
station.
Gallegher gave him a hundred yards' start, and then followed slowly
after. The road ran between fields and past a few frame-houses set far
from the road in kitchen gardens.
Once or twice the man looked back over his shoulder, but he saw only a
dreary length of road with a small boy splashing through the slush in
the midst of it and stopping every now and again to throw snowballs at
belated sparrows.
After a ten minutes' walk the stranger turned into a side road which led
to only one place, the Eagle Inn, an old roadside hostelry known now as
the headquarters for pothunters from the Philadelphia game market and
the battleground of many a cock-fight.
Gallegher knew the place well. He and his young companions had often
stopped there when out chestnutting on holidays in the autumn.
The son of the man who kept it had often accompanied them on their
excursions, and though the boys of the city streets considered him a
dumb lout, they respected him somewhat owing to his inside knowledge of
dog and cock-fights.
The stranger entered the inn at a side door, and Gallegher, reaching it
a few minutes later, let him go for the time being, and set about
finding his occasional playmate, young Keppler.
Keppler's offspring was found in the woodshed.
"Tain't hard to guess what brings you out here," said the
tavern-keeper's son, with a grin; "it's the fight."
"What fight?" asked Gallegher, unguardedly.
"What fight? Why, _the_ fight," returned his companion, with the
slow contempt of superior knowledge. "It's to come off here to-night.
You knew that as well as me; anyway your sportin' editor knows it. He
got the tip last night, but that won't help you any. You needn't think
there's any chance of your getting a peep at it. Why, tickets is two
hundred and fifty apiece!"
"Whew!" whistled Gallegher, "where's it to be?"
"In the barn," whispered Keppler. "I helped 'em fix the ropes this
morning, I did."
"Gosh, but you're in luck," exclaimed Gallegher, with flattering envy.
"Couldn't I jest get a peep at it?"
"Maybe," said the gratified Keppler. "There's a winder with a wooden
shutter at the back of the barn. You can get in by it, if you have some
one to boost you up to the sill."
"Sa-a-y," drawled Gallegher, as if something had but just that moment
reminded him. "Who's that gent who come down the road just a bit ahead
of me--him with the cape-coat! Has he got anything to do with the
fight?"
"Him?" repeated Keppler in tones of sincere disgust. "No-oh, he ain't no
sport. He's queer, Dad thinks. He come here one day last week about ten
in the morning, said his doctor told him to go out 'en the country for
his health. He's stuck up and citified, and wears gloves, and takes his
meals private in his room, and all that sort of ruck. They was saying in
the saloon last night that they thought he was hiding from something,
and Dad, just to try him, asks him last night if he was coming to see
the fight. He looked sort of scared, and said he didn't want to see no
fight. And then Dad says, 'I guess you mean you don't want no fighters
to see you.' Dad didn't mean no harm by it, just passed it as a joke;
but Mr. Carleton, as he calls himself, got white as a ghost an' says,
'I'll go to the fight willing enough,' and begins to laugh and joke. And
this morning he went right into the bar-room, where all the sports were
setting, and said he was going into town to see some friends; and as he
starts off he laughs an' says, 'This don't look as if I was afraid of
seeing people, does it?' but Dad says it was just bluff that made him do
it, and Dad thinks that if he hadn't said what he did, this Mr. Carleton
wouldn't have left his room at all."
Gallegher had got all he wanted, and much more than he had hoped for--so
much more that his walk back to the station was in the nature of a
triumphal march.
He had twenty minutes to wait for the next train, and it seemed an hour.
While waiting he sent a telegram to Hefflefinger at his hotel. It read:
Your man is near the Torresdale station, on Pennsylvania
Railroad; take cab, and meet me at station. Wait until I come.
Gallegher.
With the exception of one at midnight, no other train stopped at
Torresdale that evening, hence the direction to take a cab.
The train to the city seemed to Gallegher to drag itself by inches. It
stopped and backed at purposeless intervals, waited for an express to
precede it, and dallied at stations, and when, at last, it reached the
terminus, Gallegher was out before it had stopped and was in the cab and
off on his way to the home of the sporting editor.
The sporting editor was at dinner and came out in the hall to see him,
with his napkin in his hand. Gallegher explained breathlessly that he
had located the murderer for whom the police of two continents were
looking, and that he believed, in order to quiet the suspicions of the
people with whom he was hiding, that he would be present at the fight
that night.
The sporting editor led Gallegher into his library and shut the door.
"Now," he said, "go over all that again."
Gallegher went over it again in detail, and added how he had sent for
Hefflefinger to make the arrest in order that it might be kept from the
knowledge of the local police and from the Philadelphia reporters.
"What I want Hefflefinger to do is to arrest Hade with the warrant he
has for the burglar," explained Gallegher; "and to take him on to New
York on the owl train that passes Torresdale at one. It don't get to
Jersey City until four o'clock, one hour after the morning papers go to
press. Of course, we must fix Hefflefinger so's he'll keep quiet and not
tell who his prisoner really is."
The sporting editor reached his hand out to pat Gallegher on the head,
but changed his mind and shook hands with him instead.
"My boy," he said, "you are an infant phenomenon. If I can pull the rest
of this thing off to-night it will mean the $5,000 reward and fame
galore for you and the paper. Now, I'm going to write a note to the
managing editor, and you can take it around to him and tell him what
you've done and what I am going to do, and he'll take you back on the
paper and raise your salary. Perhaps you didn't know you've been
discharged?"
"Do you think you ain't a-going to take me with you?" demanded
Gallegher.
"Why, certainly not. Why should I? It all lies with the detective and
myself now. You've done your share, and done it well. If the man's
caught, the reward's yours. But you'd only be in the way now. You'd
better go to the office and make your peace with the chief."
"If the paper can get along without me, I can get along without the old
paper," said Gallegher, hotly. "And if I ain't a-going with you, you
ain't neither, for I know where Hefflefinger is to be, and you don't,
and I won't tell you."
"Oh, very well, very well," replied the sporting editor, weakly
capitulating. "I'll send the note by a messenger; only mind, if you lose
your place, don't blame me."
Gallegher wondered how this man could value a week's salary against the
excitement of seeing a noted criminal run down, and of getting the news
to the paper, and to that one paper alone.
From that moment the sporting editor sank in Gallegher's estimation.
Mr. Dwyer sat down at his desk and scribbled off the following note:
I have received reliable information that Hade, the Burrbank
murderer, will be present at the fight to-night. We have
arranged it so that he will be arrested quietly and in such a
manner that the fact may be kept from all other papers. I need
not point out to you that this will be the most important piece
of news in the country to-morrow. Yours, etc.,
Michael E. Dwyer.
The sporting editor stepped into the waiting cab, while Gallegher
whispered the directions to the driver. He was told to go first to a
district-messenger office, and from there up to the Ridge Avenue Road,
out Broad Street, and on to the old Eagle Inn, near Torresdale.
* * * * *
It was a miserable night. The rain and snow were falling together, and
freezing as they fell. The sporting editor got out to send his message
to the _Press_ office, and then lighting a cigar, and turning up
the collar of his great-coat, curled up in the corner of the cab.
"Wake me when we get there, Gallegher," he said. He knew he had a long
ride, and much rapid work before him, and he was preparing for the
strain.
To Gallegher the idea of going to sleep seemed almost criminal. From the
dark corner of the cab his eyes shone with excitement, and with the
awful joy of anticipation. He glanced every now and then to where the
sporting editor's cigar shone in the darkness, and watched it as it
gradually burnt more dimly and went out. The lights in the shop windows
threw a broad glare across the ice on the pavements, and the lights from
the lamp-posts tossed the distorted shadow of the cab, and the horse,
and the motionless driver, sometimes before and sometimes behind them.
After half an hour Gallegher slipped down to the bottom of the cab and
dragged out a lap-robe, in which he wrapped himself. It was growing
colder, and the damp, keen wind swept in through the cracks until the
window-frames and woodwork were cold to the touch.
An hour passed, and the cab was still moving more slowly over the rough
surface of partly paved streets, and by single rows of new houses
standing at different angles to each other in fields covered with
ash-heaps and brick-kilns. Here and there the gaudy lights of a
drug-store, and the forerunner of suburban civilization, shone from the
end of a new block of houses, and the rubber cape of an occasional
policeman showed in the light of the lamp-post that he hugged for
comfort.
Then even the houses disappeared, and the cab dragged its way between
truck farms, with desolate-looking glass-covered beds, and pools of
water, half-caked with ice, and bare trees, and interminable fences.
Once or twice the cab stopped altogether, and Gallegher could hear the
driver swearing to himself, or at the horse, or the roads. At last they
drew up before the station at Torresdale. It was quite deserted, and
only a single light cut a swath in the darkness and showed a portion of
the platform, the ties, and the rails glistening in the rain. They
walked twice past the light before a figure stepped out of the shadow
and greeted them cautiously.
"I am Mr. Dwyer, of the _Press_," said the sporting editor,
briskly. "You've heard of me, perhaps. Well, there shouldn't be any
difficulty in our making a deal, should there? This boy here has found
Hade, and we have reason to believe he will be among the spectators at
the fight to-night. We want you to arrest him quietly, and as secretly
as possible. You can do it with your papers and your badge easily
enough. We want you to pretend that you believe he is this burglar you
came over after. If you will do this, and take him away without any one
so much as suspecting who he really is, and on the train that passes
here at 1.20 for New York, we will give you $500 out of the $5,000
reward. If, however, one other paper, either in New York or
Philadelphia, or anywhere else, knows of the arrest, you won't get a
cent. Now, what do you say?"
The detective had a great deal to say. He wasn't at all sure the man
Gallegher suspected was Hade; he feared he might get himself into
trouble by making a false arrest, and if it should be the man, he was
afraid the local police would interfere.
"We've no time to argue or debate this matter," said Dwyer, warmly. "We
agree to point Hade out to you in the crowd. After the fight is over you
arrest him as we have directed, and you get the money and the credit of
the arrest. If you don't like this, I will arrest the man myself, and
have him driven to town, with a pistol for a warrant."
Hefflefinger considered in silence and then agreed unconditionally. "As
you say, Mr. Dwyer," he returned. "I've heard of you for a thoroughbred
sport. I know you'll do what you say you'll do; and as for me I'll do
what you say and just as you say, and it's a very pretty piece of work
as it stands."
They all stepped back into the cab, and then it was that they were met
by a fresh difficulty, how to get the detective into the barn where the
fight was to take place, for neither of the two men had $250 to pay for
his admittance.
But this was overcome when Gallegher remembered the window of which
young Keppler had told him.
In the event of Hade's losing courage and not daring to show himself in
the crowd around the ring, it was agreed that Dwyer should come to the
barn and warn Hefflefinger; but if he should come, Dwyer was merely to
keep near him and to signify by a prearranged gesture which one of the
crowd he was.
They drew up before a great black shadow of a house, dark, forbidding,
and apparently deserted. But at the sound of the wheels on the gravel
the door opened, letting out a stream of warm, cheerful light, and a
man's voice said, "Put out those lights. Don't youse know no better than
that?" This was Keppler, and he welcomed Mr. Dwyer with effusive
courtesy.
The two men showed in the stream of light, and the door closed on them,
leaving the house as it was at first, black and silent, save for the
dripping of the rain and snow from the eaves.
The detective and Gallegher put out the cab's lamps and led the horse
toward a long, low shed in the rear of the yard, which they now noticed
was almost filled with teams of many different makes, from the Hobson's
choice of a livery stable to the brougham of the man about town.
"No," said Gallegher, as the cabman stopped to hitch the horse beside
the others, "we want it nearest that lower gate. When we newspaper men
leave this place we'll leave it in a hurry, and the man who is nearest
town is likely to get there first. You won't be a-following of no hearse
when you make your return trip."
Gallegher tied the horse to the very gate-post itself, leaving the gate
open and allowing a clear road and a flying start for the prospective
race to Newspaper Row.
The driver disappeared under the shelter of the porch, and Gallegher and
the detective moved off cautiously to the rear of the barn. "This must
be the window," said Hefflefinger, pointing to a broad wooden shutter
some feet from the ground.
"Just you give me a boost once, and I'll get that open in a jiffy," said
Gallegher.
The detective placed his hands on his knees, and Gallegher stood upon
his shoulders, and with the blade of his knife lifted the wooden button
that fastened the window on the inside, and pulled the shutter open.
Then he put one leg inside over the sill, and leaning down helped to
draw his fellow-conspirator up to a level with the window. "I feel just
like I was burglarizing a house," chuckled Gallegher, as he dropped
noiselessly to the floor below and refastened the shutter. The barn was
a large one, with a row of stalls on either side in which horses and
cows were dozing. There was a haymow over each row of stalls, and at one
end of the barn a number of fence-rails had been thrown across from one
mow to the other. These rails were covered with hay.
In the middle of the floor was the ring. It was not really a ring, but a
square, with wooden posts at its four corners through which ran a heavy
rope. The space enclosed by the rope was covered with sawdust.
Gallegher could not resist stepping into the ring, and after stamping
the sawdust once or twice, as if to assure himself that he was really
there, began dancing around it, and indulging in such a remarkable
series of fistic manoeuvres with an imaginary adversary that the
unimaginative detective precipitately backed into a corner of the barn.
"Now, then," said Gallegher, having apparently vanquished his foe, "you
come with me." His companion followed quickly as Gallegher climbed to
one of the hay-mows, and, crawling carefully out on the fence-rail,
stretched himself at full length, face downward. In this position, by
moving the straw a little, he could look down, without being himself
seen, upon the heads of whomsoever stood below. "This is better'n a
private box, ain't it?" said Gallegher.
The boy from the newspaper office and the detective lay there in
silence, biting at straws and tossing anxiously on their comfortable
bed.
It seemed fully two hours before they came. Gallegher had listened
without breathing, and with every muscle on a strain, at least a dozen
times, when some movement in the yard had led him to believe that they
were at the door.
And he had numerous doubts and fears. Sometimes it was that the police
had learnt of the fight, and had raided Keppler's in his absence, and
again it was that the fight had been postponed, or, worst of all, that
it would be put off until so late that Mr. Dwyer could not get back in
time for the last edition of the paper. Their coming, when at last they
came, was heralded by an advance-guard of two sporting men, who
stationed themselves at either side of the big door.
"Hurry up, now, gents," one of the men said with a shiver, "don't keep
this door open no longer'n is needful."
It was not a very large crowd, but it was wonderfully well selected. It
ran, in the majority of its component parts, to heavy white coats with
pearl buttons. The white coats were shouldered by long blue coats with
astrakhan fur trimmings, the wearers of which preserved a cliqueness not
remarkable when one considers that they believed every one else present
to be either a crook or a prize-fighter.
There were well-fed, well-groomed club-men and brokers in the crowd, a
politician or two, a popular comedian with his manager, amateur boxers
from the athletic clubs, and quiet, close-mouthed sporting men from
every city in the country. Their names if printed in the papers would
have been as familiar as the types of the papers themselves.
And among these men, whose only thought was of the brutal sport to come,
was Hade, with Dwyer standing at ease at his shoulder--Hade, white, and
visibly in deep anxiety, hiding his pale face beneath a cloth
travelling-cap, and with his chin muffled in a woollen scarf. He had
dared to come because he feared his danger from the already suspicious
Keppler was less than if he stayed away. And so he was there, hovering
restlessly on the border of the crowd, feeling his danger and sick with
fear.
When Hefflefinger first saw him he started up on his hands and elbows
and made a movement forward as if he would leap down then and there and
carry off his prisoner single-handed.
"Lie down," growled Gallegher; "an officer of any sort wouldn't live
three minutes in that crowd."
The detective drew back slowly and buried himself again in the straw,
but never once through the long fight which followed did his eyes leave
the person of the murderer. The newspaper men took their places in the
foremost row close around the ring, and kept looking at their watches
and begging the master of ceremonies to "shake it up, do."
There was a great deal of betting, and all of the men handled the great
rolls of bills they wagered with a flippant recklessness which could
only be accounted for in Gallegher's mind by temporary mental
derangement. Some one pulled a box out into the ring and the master of
ceremonies mounted it, and pointed out in forcible language that as they
were almost all already under bonds to keep the peace, it behooved all
to curb their excitement and to maintain a severe silence, unless they
wanted to bring the police upon them and have themselves "sent down" for
a year or two.
Then two very disreputable-looking persons tossed their respective
principals' high hats into the ring, and the crowd, recognizing in this
relic of the days when brave knights threw down their gauntlets in the
lists as only a sign that the fight was about to begin, cheered
tumultuously.
This was followed by a sudden surging forward, and a mutter of
admiration much more flattering than the cheers had been, when the
principals followed their hats and, slipping out of their great-coats,
stood forth in all the physical beauty of the perfect brute.
Their pink skin was as soft and healthy-looking as a baby's, and glowed
in the lights of the lanterns like tinted ivory, and underneath this
silken covering the great biceps and muscles moved in and out and looked
like the coils of a snake around the branch of a tree.
Gentleman and blackguard shouldered each other for a nearer view; the
coachmen, whose metal buttons were unpleasantly suggestive of police,
put their hands, in the excitement of the moment, on the shoulders of
their masters; the perspiration stood out in great drops on the
foreheads of the backers, and the newspaper men bit somewhat nervously
at the ends of their pencils.
And in the stalls the cows munched contentedly at their cuds and gazed
with gentle curiosity at their two fellow-brutes, who stood waiting the
signal to fall upon and kill each other, if need be, for the delectation
of their brothers.
"Take your places," commanded the master of ceremonies.
In the moment in which the two men faced each other the crowd became so
still that, save for the beating of the rain upon the shingled roof and
the stamping of a horse in one of the stalls, the place was as silent as
a church.
"Time," shouted the master of ceremonies.
The two men sprang into a posture of defense, which was lost as quickly
as it was taken, one great arm shot out like a piston-rod; there was the
sound of bare fists beating on naked flesh; there was an exultant
indrawn gasp of savage pleasure and relief from the crowd, and the great
fight had begun.
How the fortunes of war rose and fell, and changed and rechanged that
night, is an old story to those who listen to such stories; and those
who do not will be glad to be spared the telling of it. It was, they
say, one of the bitterest fights between two men that this country has
ever known.
But all that is of interest here is that after an hour of this
desperate, brutal business the champion ceased to be the favorite; the
man whom he had taunted and bullied, and for whom the public had but
little sympathy, was proving himself a likely winner, and under his
cruel blows, as sharp and clean as those from a cutlass, his opponent
was rapidly giving way.