had started to go home began slipping off their overcoats, and every one
stood with his eyes fixed on the door.
It was kicked open from the outside, and in the doorway stood a
cab-driver and the city editor, supporting between them a pitiful little
figure of a boy, wet and miserable, and with the snow melting on his
clothes and running in little pools to the floor. "Why, it's Gallegher,"
said the night editor, in a tone of the keenest disappointment.
Gallegher shook himself free from his supporters, and took an unsteady
step forward, his fingers fumbling stiffly with the buttons of his
waistcoat.
"Mr. Dwyer, sir," he began faintly, with his eyes fixed fearfully on the
managing editor, "he got arrested--and I couldn't get here no sooner,
'cause they kept a-stopping me, and they took me cab from under
me--but--" he pulled the notebook from his breast and held it out with
its covers damp and limp from the rain--"but we got Hade, and here's Mr.
Dwyer's copy."
And then he asked, with a queer note in his voice, partly of dread and
partly of hope, "Am I in time, sir?"
The managing editor took the book, and tossed it to the foreman, who
ripped out its leaves and dealt them out to his men as rapidly as a
gambler deals out cards.
Then the managing editor stooped and picked Gallegher up in his arms,
and, sitting down, began to unlace his wet and muddy shoes.
Gallegher made a faint effort to resist this degradation of the
managerial dignity; but his protest was a very feeble one, and his head
fell back heavily oh the managing editor's shoulder.
[Illustration: "Why, it's Gallegher," said the night editor.]
To Gallegher the incandescent lights began to whirl about in circles,
and to burn in different colors; the faces of the reporters kneeling
before him and chafing his hands and feet grew dim and unfamiliar, and
the roar and rumble of the great presses in the basement sounded far
away, like the murmur of the sea.
And then the place and the circumstances of it came back to him again
sharply and with sudden vividness.
Gallegher looked up, with a faint smile, into the managing editor's
face. "You won't turn me off for running away, will you?" he whispered.
The managing editor did not answer immediately. His head was bent, and
he was thinking, for some reason or other, of a little boy of his own,
at home in bed. Then he said quietly, "Not this time, Gallegher."
Gallegher's head sank back comfortably on the older man's shoulder, and
he smiled comprehensively at the faces of the young men crowded around
him. "You hadn't ought to," he said, with a touch of his old impudence,
'"cause--I beat the town."
BLOOD WILL TELL
David Greene was an employee of the Burdett Automatic Punch Company. The
manufacturing plant of the company was at Bridgeport, but in the New
York offices there were working samples of all the punches, from the
little nickel-plated hand punch with which conductors squeezed holes in
railroad tickets, to the big punch that could bite into an iron plate as
easily as into a piece of pie. David's duty was to explain these
different punches, and accordingly when Burdett Senior or one of the
sons turned a customer over to David he spoke of him as a salesman. But
David called himself a "demonstrator." For a short time he even
succeeded in persuading the other salesmen to speak of themselves as
demonstrators, but the shipping clerks and bookkeepers laughed them out
of it. They could not laugh David out of it. This was so, partly because
he had no sense of humor, and partly because he had a
great-great-grandfather. Among the salesmen on lower Broadway, to
possess a great-great-grandfather is unusual, even a great-grandfather
is a rarity, and either is considered superfluous. But to David the
possession of a great-great-grandfather was a precious and open delight.
He had possessed him only for a short time. Undoubtedly he always had
existed, but it was not until David's sister Anne married a doctor in
Bordentown, New Jersey, and became socially ambitious, that David
emerged as a Son of Washington.
It was sister Anne, anxious to "get in" as a "Daughter" and wear a
distaff pin in her shirt-waist, who discovered the revolutionary
ancestor. She unearthed him, or rather ran him to earth, in the
graveyard of the Presbyterian church at Bordentown. He was no less a
person than General Hiram Greene, and he had fought with Washington at
Trenton and at Princeton. Of this there was no doubt. That, later, on
moving to New York, his descendants became peace-loving salesmen did not
affect his record. To enter a society founded on heredity, the important
thing is first to catch your ancestor, and having made sure of him,
David entered the Society of the Sons of Washington with flying colors.
He was not unlike the man who had been speaking prose for forty years
without knowing it. He was not unlike the other man who woke to find
himself famous. He had gone to bed a timid, near-sighted, underpaid
salesman without a relative in the world, except a married sister in
Bordentown, and he awoke to find he was a direct descendant of "Neck or
Nothing" Greene, a revolutionary hero, a friend of Washington, a man
whose portrait hung in the State House at Trenton. David's life had
lacked color. The day he carried his certificate of membership to the
big jewelry store uptown and purchased two rosettes, one for each of his
two coats, was the proudest of his life.
The other men in the Broadway office took a different view. As Wyckoff,
one of Burdett's flying squadron of travelling salesmen, said, "All
grandfathers look alike to me, whether they're great, or
great-great-great. Each one is as dead as the other. I'd rather have a
live cousin who could loan me a five, or slip me a drink. What did your
great-great dad ever do for _you_?"
"Well, for one thing," said David stiffly, "he fought in the War of the
Revolution. He saved us from the shackles of monarchical England; he
made it possible for me and you to enjoy the liberties of a free
republic."
"Don't try to tell _me_ your grandfather did all that," protested
Wyckoff, "because I know better. There were a lot of others helped. I
read about it in a book."
"I am not grudging glory to others," returned David; "I am only saying I
am proud that I am a descendant of a revolutionist."
Wyckoff dived into his inner pocket and produced a leather photograph
frame that folded like a concertina.
"I don't want to be a descendant," he said; "I'd rather be an ancestor.
Look at those." Proudly he exhibited photographs of Mrs. Wyckoff with
the baby and of three other little Wyckoffs. David looked with envy at
the children.
"When I'm married," he stammered, and at the words he blushed, "I hope
to be an ancestor."
"If you're thinking of getting married," said Wyckoff, "you'd better
hope for a raise in salary."
The other clerks were as unsympathetic as Wyckoff. At first when David
showed them his parchment certificate, and his silver gilt insignia with
on one side a portrait of Washington, and on the other a Continental
soldier, they admitted it was dead swell. They even envied him, not the
grandfather, but the fact that owing to that distinguished relative
David was constantly receiving beautifully engraved invitations to
attend the monthly meetings of the society; to subscribe to a fund to
erect monuments on battle-fields to mark neglected graves; to join in
joyous excursions to the tomb of Washington or of John Paul Jones; to
inspect West Point, Annapolis, and Bunker Hill; to be among those
present at the annual "banquet" at Delmonico's. In order that when he
opened these letters he might have an audience, he had given the society
his office address.
In these communications he was always addressed as "Dear Compatriot,"
and never did the words fail to give him a thrill. They seemed to lift
him out of Burdett's salesrooms and Broadway, and place him next to
things uncommercial, untainted, high, and noble. He did not quite know
what an aristocrat was, but he believed being a compatriot made him an
aristocrat. When customers were rude, when Mr. John or Mr. Robert was
overbearing, this idea enabled David to rise above their ill-temper, and
he would smile and say to himself: "If they knew the meaning of the blue
rosette in my button-hole, how differently they would treat me! How
easily with a word could I crush them!"
But few of the customers recognized the significance of the button. They
thought it meant that David belonged to the Y. M. C. A. or was a
teetotaler. David, with his gentle manners and pale, ascetic face, was
liable to give that impression.
When Wyckoff mentioned marriage, the reason David blushed was because,
although no one in the office suspected it, he wished to marry the
person in whom the office took the greatest pride. This was Miss Emily
Anthony, one of Burdett and Sons' youngest, most efficient, and
prettiest stenographers, and although David did not cut as dashing a
figure as did some of the firm's travelling men, Miss Anthony had found
something in him so greatly to admire that she had, out of office hours,
accepted his devotion, his theatre tickets, and an engagement ring.
Indeed, so far had matters progressed, that it had been almost decided
when in a few months they would go upon their vacations they also would
go upon their honeymoon. And then a cloud had come between them, and
from a quarter from which David had expected only sunshine.
The trouble befell when David discovered he had a
great-great-grandfather. With that fact itself Miss Anthony was almost
as pleased as was David himself, but while he was content to bask in
another's glory, Miss Anthony saw in his inheritance only an incentive
to achieve glory for himself.
From a hard-working salesman she had asked but little, but from a
descendant of a national hero she expected other things. She was a
determined young person, and for David she was an ambitious young
person. She found she was dissatisfied. She found she was disappointed.
The great-great-grandfather had opened up a new horizon--had, in a way,
raised the standard. She was as fond of David as always, but his tales
of past wars and battles, his accounts of present banquets at which he
sat shoulder to shoulder with men of whom even Burdett and Sons spoke
with awe, touched her imagination.
"You shouldn't be content to just wear a button," she urged. "If you're
a Son of Washington, you ought to act like one."
"I know I'm not worthy of you," David sighed.
"I don't mean that, and you know I don't," Emily replied indignantly.
"It has nothing to do with me! I want you to be worthy of yourself, of
your grandpa Hiram!"
"But _how_?" complained David. "What chance has a twenty-five
dollar a week clerk----"
It was a year before the Spanish-American War, while the patriots of
Cuba were fighting the mother country for their independence.
"If I were a Son of the Revolution," said Emily, "I'd go to Cuba and
help free it."
"Don't talk nonsense," cried David. "If I did that I'd lose my job, and
we'd never be able to marry. Besides, what's Cuba done for me? All I
know about Cuba is, I once smoked a Cuban cigar and it made me ill."
"Did Lafayette talk like that?" demanded Emily. "Did he ask what have
the American rebels ever done for me?"
"If I were in Lafayette's class," sighed David, "I wouldn't be selling
automatic punches."
"There's your trouble," declared Emily. "You lack self-confidence.
You're too humble, you've got fighting blood and you ought to keep
saying to yourself, 'Blood will tell,' and the first thing you know, it
_will_ tell! You might begin by going into politics in your ward.
Or, you could join the militia. That takes only one night a week, and
then, if we _did_ go to war with Spain, you'd get a commission, and
come back a captain!"
Emily's eyes were beautiful with delight. But the sight gave David no
pleasure. In genuine distress, he shook his head.
"Emily," he said, "you're going to be awfully disappointed in me."
Emily's eyes closed as though they shied at some mental picture. But
when she opened them they were bright, and her smile was kind and eager.
"No, I'm not," she protested; "only I want a husband with a career, and
one who'll tell me to keep quiet when I try to run it for him."
"I've often wished you would," said David.
"Would what? Run your career for you?"
"No, keep quiet. Only it didn't seem polite to tell you so."
"Maybe I'd like you better," said Emily, "if you weren't so darned
polite."
A week later, early in the spring of 1897, the unexpected happened, and
David was promoted into the flying squadron. He now was a travelling
salesman, with a rise in salary and a commission on orders. It was a
step forward, but as going on the road meant absence from Emily, David
was not elated. Nor did it satisfy Emily. It was not money she wanted.
Her ambition for David could not be silenced with a raise in wages. She
did not say this, but David knew that in him she still found something
lacking, and when they said good-by they both were ill at ease and
completely unhappy. Formerly, each day when Emily in passing David in
the office said good-morning, she used to add the number of the days
that still separated them from the vacation which also was to be their
honeymoon. But, for the last month she had stopped counting the days--at
least she did not count them aloud.
David did not ask her why this was so. He did not dare. And, sooner than
learn the truth that she had decided not to marry him, or that she was
even considering not marrying him, he asked no questions, but in
ignorance of her present feelings set forth on his travels. Absence from
Emily hurt just as much as he had feared it would. He missed her, needed
her, longed for her. In numerous letters he told her so. But, owing to
the frequency with which he moved, her letters never caught up with him.
It was almost a relief. He did not care to think of what they might tell
him.
The route assigned David took him through the South and kept him close
to the Atlantic seaboard. In obtaining orders he was not unsuccessful,
and at the end of the first month received from the firm a telegram of
congratulation. This was of importance chiefly because it might please
Emily. But he knew that in her eyes the great-great-grandson of Hiram
Greene could not rest content with a telegram from Burdett and Sons. A
year before she would have considered it a high honor, a cause for
celebration. Now, he could see her press her pretty lips together and
shake her pretty head. It was not enough. But how could he accomplish
more. He began to hate his great-great-grandfather. He began to wish
Hiram Greene had lived and died a bachelor.
And then Dame Fortune took David in hand and toyed with him and spanked
him, and pelted and petted him, until finally she made him her favorite
son. Dame Fortune went about this work in an abrupt and arbitrary
manner.
On the night of the 1st of March, 1897, two trains were scheduled to
leave the Union Station at Jacksonville at exactly the same minute, and
they left exactly on time. As never before in the history of any
Southern railroad has this miracle occurred, it shows that when Dame
Fortune gets on the job she is omnipotent. She placed David on the train
to Miami as the train he wanted drew out for Tampa, and an hour later,
when the conductor looked at David's ticket, he pulled the bell-cord and
dumped David over the side into the heart of a pine forest. If he walked
back along the track for one mile, the conductor reassured him, he would
find a flag station where at midnight he could flag a train going north.
In an hour it would deliver him safely in Jacksonville.
There was a moon, but for the greater part of the time it was hidden by
fitful, hurrying clouds, and, as David stumbled forward, at one moment
he would see the rails like streaks of silver, and the next would be
encompassed in a complete and bewildering darkness. He made his way from
tie to tie only by feeling with his foot. After an hour he came to a
shed. Whether it was or was not the flag station the conductor had in
mind, he did not know, and he never did know. He was too tired, too hot,
and too disgusted to proceed, and dropping his suit case he sat down
under the open roof of the shed prepared to wait either for the train or
daylight. So far as he could see, on every side of him stretched a
swamp, silent, dismal, interminable. From its black water rose dead
trees, naked of bark and hung with streamers of funereal moss. There was
not a sound or sign of human habitation. The silence was the silence of
the ocean at night. David remembered the berth reserved for him on the
train to Tampa and of the loathing with which he had considered placing
himself between its sheets. But now how gladly would he welcome it! For,
in the sleeping-car, ill-smelling, close and stuffy, he at least would
have been surrounded by fellow-sufferers of his own species. Here his
companions were owls, water-snakes, and sleeping buzzards.
"I am alone," he told himself, "on a railroad embankment, entirely
surrounded by alligators."
And then he found he was not alone.
In the darkness, illuminated by a match, not a hundred yards from him
there flashed suddenly the face of a man. Then the match went out and
the face with it. David noted that it had appeared at some height above
the level of the swamp, at an elevation higher even than that of the
embankment. It was as though the man had been sitting on the limb of a
tree. David crossed the tracks and found that on the side of the
embankment opposite the shed there was solid ground and what once had
been a wharf. He advanced over this cautiously, and as he did so the
clouds disappeared, and in the full light of the moon he saw a bayou
broadening into a river, and made fast to the decayed and rotting wharf
an ocean-going tug. It was from her deck that the man, in lighting his
pipe, had shown his face. At the thought of a warm engine-room and the
company of his fellow-creatures, David's heart leaped with pleasure. He
advanced quickly. And then something in the appearance of the tug,
something mysterious, secretive, threatening, caused him to halt. No
lights showed from her engine-room, cabin, or pilot-house. Her decks
were empty. But, as was evidenced by the black smoke that rose from her
funnel, she was awake and awake to some purpose. David stood
uncertainly, questioning whether to make his presence known or return to
the loneliness of the shed. The question was decided for him. He had not
considered that standing in the moonlight he was a conspicuous figure.
The planks of the wharf creaked and a man came toward him. As one who
means to attack, or who fears attack, he approached warily. He wore high
boots, riding breeches, and a sombrero. He was a little man, but his
movements were alert and active. To David he seemed unnecessarily
excited. He thrust himself close against David.
"Who the devil are you?" demanded the man from the tug. "How'd you get
here?"
"I walked," said David.
"Walked?" the man snorted incredulously.
"I took the wrong train," explained David pleasantly. "They put me off
about a mile below here. I walked back to this flag station. I'm going
to wait here for the next train north."
The little man laughed mockingly.
"Oh, no you're not," he said. "If you walked here, you can just walk
away again!" With a sweep of his arm, he made a vigorous and peremptory
gesture.
"You walk!" he commanded.
"I'll do just as I please about that," said David.
As though to bring assistance, the little man started hastily toward the
tug.
"I'll find some one who'll make you walk!" he called. "You _wait_,
that's all, you _wait_!"
David decided not to wait. It was possible the wharf was private
property and he had been trespassing. In any case, at the flag station
the rights of all men were equal, and if he were in for a fight he
judged it best to choose his own battleground. He recrossed the tracks
and sat down on his suit case in a dark corner of the shed. Himself
hidden in the shadows he could see in the moonlight the approach of any
other person.
"They're river pirates," said David to himself, "or smugglers. They're
certainly up to some mischief, or why should they object to the presence
of a perfectly harmless stranger?"
Partly with cold, partly with nervousness, David shivered.
"I wish that train would come," he sighed. And instantly, as though in
answer to his wish, from only a short distance down the track he heard
the rumble and creak of approaching cars. In a flash David planned his
course of action.
The thought of spending the night in a swamp infested by alligators and
smugglers had become intolerable. He must escape, and he must escape by
the train now approaching. To that end the train must be stopped. His
plan was simple. The train was moving very, very slowly, and though he
had no lantern to wave, in order to bring it to a halt he need only
stand on the track exposed to the glare of the headlight and wave his
arms. David sprang between the rails and gesticulated wildly. But in
amazement his arms fell to his sides. For the train, now only a hundred
yards distant and creeping toward him at a snail's pace, carried no
headlight, and though in the moonlight David was plainly visible, it
blew no whistle, tolled no bell. Even the passenger coaches in the rear
of the sightless engine were wrapped in darkness. It was a ghost of a
train, a Flying Dutchman of a train, a nightmare of a train. It was as
unreal as the black swamp, as the moss on the dead trees, as the ghostly
tug-boat tied to the rotting wharf.
"Is the place haunted!" exclaimed David.
He was answered by the grinding of brakes and by the train coming to a
sharp halt. And instantly from every side men fell from it to the
ground, and the silence of the night was broken by a confusion of calls
and eager greeting and questions and sharp words of command.
So fascinated was David in the stealthy arrival of the train and in her
mysterious passengers that, until they confronted him, he did not note
the equally stealthy approach of three men. Of these one was the little
man from the tug. With him was a fat, red-faced Irish-American. He wore
no coat and his shirt-sleeves were drawn away from his hands by garters
of pink elastic, his derby hat was balanced behind his ears, upon his
right hand flashed an enormous diamond. He looked as though but at that
moment he had stopped sliding glasses across a Bowery bar. The third man
carried the outward marks of a sailor. David believed he was the tallest
man he had ever beheld, but equally remarkable with his height was his
beard and hair, which were of a fierce brick-dust red. Even in the mild
moonlight it flamed like a torch.
"What's your business?" demanded the man with the flamboyant hair.
"I came here," began David, "to wait for a train-----"
The tall man bellowed with indignant rage.
"Yes," he shouted; "this is the sort of place any one would pick out to
wait for a train!"
In front of David's nose he shook a fist as large as a catcher's glove.
"Don't you lie to _me_!" he bullied. "Do you know who I am? Do you
know _who_ you're up against? I'm----"
The barkeeper person interrupted.
"Never mind who you are," he said. "We know that. Find out who _he_
is."
David turned appealingly to the barkeeper.
"Do you suppose I'd come here on purpose?" he protested. "I'm a
travelling man----"
"You won't travel any to-night," mocked the red-haired one. "You've seen
what you came to see, and all you want now is to get to a Western Union
wire. Well, you don't do it. You don't leave here to-night!"
As though he thought he had been neglected, the little man in
riding-boots pushed forward importantly.
"Tie him to a tree!" he suggested.
"Better take him on board," said the barkeeper, "and send him back by
the pilot. When we're once at sea, he can't hurt us any."
[Illustration: In front of David's nose he shook a fist as large as a
catcher's glove.]
"What makes you think I want to hurt you?" demanded David. "Who do you
think I am?"
"We know who you are," shouted the fiery-headed one. "You're a
blanketty-blank spy! You're a government spy or a Spanish spy, and
whichever you are you don't get away to-night!"
David had not the faintest idea what the man meant, but he knew his
self-respect was being ill-treated, and his self-respect rebelled.