Tongues of Flame (MacFarlane)/Chapter 23
POPULAR imagination connected Adam John irrevocably with that bullet-crushed rib and vertebra, and Harrington saw that in this state of the public mind a fair trial for the Indian was impossible. He was brooding at his desk, slightly embittered at the uni versa] hardness of heart, when Lahleet rushed in, laboring under great excitement.
"Now, will you believe me?" she cried, eyes snapping; and, as once before, from the red silken hand-bag she plucked out a crumpled paper and flung it on his desk.
But Henry held off his hands this time. "What's this? Another stolen document? Lahleet!" His voice was thick with reproach.
"'Business strategy!'" sneered the girl. "I came by it at least as legitimately as Boland is coming by Hurricane Island."
"Hurricane Island?" inquired Henry, and curiosity overcoming scruples, he took up the paper.
For a moment there was silence, as with some pretense of deliberation, he flattened out two typewritten pages—silence save for the crackling of the linen bond—and then sudden explosive utterance: "A lease of Hurricane Island from the Edgewater & Eastern Railway Company to the Boland Cedar Company! By heavens!" he cried in outraged tones. With leaping glances Harrington gutted the pages of their meaning and his eyes lighted with understanding. "The Edgewater & Eastern is a fiction," he divined excitedly. "It was created to get the island away from Adam John. The minute this paper railroad got a legal title it leased it to Boland."
He noted the date. "They could hardly wait to execute the document; and then, when, that same afternoon, Adam John shot Hogan, they were afraid to put it on record. It would look too bald—too—oh, Lord! Lahleet, this is rotten, rotten! Wherever you got it, it's rotten. But—it saves the life of Adam John," he assured solemnly, shaking the document till it rattled. "If Tom Scanlon thinks he can put over a thing like this on me, on this community—upon Mr. Boland, I'll fool him!"
Anxiety took wing from the worried face of Lahleet Marceau. "Now, Henry," she beamed admiringly, "now you are your real self again."
Harrington frowned confidently. "My real self? Don't you doubt it. I've been my real self all the time. This is just a rotten scheme of Scanlon's and Quackenbaugh's, maybe. I'll bust it even if I have to drag them both before Mr. Boland and expose them. Lahleet, you're a wonder! All you have to do now is to go back to your school and wait; and you won't have to wait very long either. I'm going to walk sixteen steps around the corner right now and make somebody sick."
Sixteen steps around the corner was the office of Thomas Scanlon, Chief Counsel. "Read that!" exclaimed Henry, bursting in upon him.
Scanlon's sparse brows were elevated in surprise and his astonished features mirrored some very quick thinking. "I have read it," he exclaimed grumpily. "In fact, I wrote it myself. Where the devil did you get it?"
"No matter!" Harrington's tone was stern and his gray eyes got a steely glint in them, as he accused. "Scanlon! You, not Adam John, murdered Sheriff Hogan!"
Scanlon twisted uneasily. "Not me," he scowled with a deep flush. "The old man hatched that scheme."
"You mean to tell me," cried the outraged young man, "that Mr. Boland not only knew about this crooked scheme to trick a poor Indian out of his land, but that he actually devised it himself?"
"That's the God's truth, Harrington," asserted the Chief Counsel solemnly.
Eyes blazing indignant disbelief, but without another word to Scanlon, Harrington turned on his heel and went across the hall, face white and determined. When he was finally permitted to enter the private office, Mr. Boland was just hanging up the telephone. He extended his hand and it was velvet-soft: he offered a cigar and his manner was graciously hospitable—deliberate, unhurried and unrestrained.
But Henry was not this time to be put off his course by mere purring placidities. He gave back a pressure less responsive than he had ever given back to the clinging fingers of John Boland; he declined his perfecto with something less of urbanity than it had been offered; and he flung down the once more crumpled pages of the lease upon the glass-topped table and demanded firmly: "Mr. Boland, do you approve of this?"
That gentleman, betraying not the slightest perception that Harrington's manner was unusual, took up the document with curiosity as if he had never seen it before—which was perhaps the truth. He read it carefully from the first line to the last and then from under his beetling brows looked at Henry. "Seems sound," he observed meditatively.
"Sound?" gasped that young man.
"It'll hold, I judge," declared Mr. Boland, as with satisfaction at a good piece of legal carpentry.
"Hold!" cried Henry, feelings unbottled. "Do you mean that you are satisfied with that document, Mr. Boland? Do you mean that it seems commendable to you? That you do not see the iniquity of it? Do not see that it is a mere trick—a subterfuge? That it may conform to the letter of the law, but that it is a gross perversion of the spirit of it? That it makes the law a mockery, a pretense, a sham? That it makes of Jim Hogan not an officer of the law but a highway robber? And that he wasn't any more sacred because he was your highway robber?"
Mr. Boland sat suddenly rigid, his features hard as some glacier-chiseled face upon the Devonian rock. "My highway-robber?" he rebuked cuttingly. "You are not so happy in your choice of words today."
"I'm not happy—I'm not happy about anything this morning, Mr. Boland," Henry confessed, letting down a little. "I'm very much distressed. I'm all shot to Pieces and that's the truth. Why, Mr. Boland, you amaze me! You strike me silly when you stand for a thing like this. It looks to me wrong, all wrong, every bit of it wrong. Or—am I?" Harrington wiped his brow and sank into a chair to sit gazing with a bewildered air at Mr. Boland.
"You are!" assured Mr. Boland with emphasis, as he returned Harrington's scrutiny calmly.
"But think, Mr. Boland," Henry pleaded desperately. "What an opportunity to emphasize respect for law in the abstract! What a dramatic contrast! John Boland against Adam John—a white empire builder with all his millions and his mighty dreams against one little half-breed Indian, with his little dreams and his beautiful faith in that piece of parchment which Uncle Sam had given him. And suppose you had bowed to the parchment—all your enterprise halted by that—scrap of paper? It would have been wonderful! It was your chance to be sublime!"
Mr. Boland condescended to smile at such naive enthusiasm. "You are a sentimentalist, Henry," he allowed; then proceeded to differ. "It couldn't have been sublime because it wouldn't be morall to permit a great program like ours to be held up by the obstinacy of one ignorant little Indian. It is due to the crude inadequacy of the law that we have to resort to this, as you say, subterfuge."
"It was a murderous subterfuge," groaned Henry, sinking low in his chair, utterly depressed by the opacity of Mr. Boland's mind upon the subject.
"Most unfortunate, that affair," agreed Mr. Boland with fine regret. "But we have to be men of stout heart, Henry—stout heart, if we would accomplish big things."
The expression upon the Boland countenance was once more entirely benign. There remained but to dramatize the conviction that he had won another victory. He did that by taking up the lease from his glass-topped table. Methodically he smoothed its rumplings, asking no questions as to how they came there; deliberately, affectionately almost, he folded the document and creased the folds; then casually handed it back to Henry—this indisputable evidence of a transaction that was fraud and a killing that was murder. This was his advertisement that he felt his project secure and believed that Henry Harrington had no menace in him. Henry accepted the document silently and lifted his eyes, marveling.
But there could be still another dramatic emphasis. Mr. Boland imparted it by rising and reaching for his hat, with Henry still sitting confounded. "You don't mind my leaving you?" suggested Old Two Blades. "Stay here as long as you like. It's as good a place to think it out as any."
"Not in the least," said Henry politely, and was left staring as, after an affectionate pressure upon his shoulder, Mr. Boland, still wearing his benignest smile, carrying his gloves and gold-headed cane, looking dapper as his slender, elegantly tailored figure looked always dapper, crossed the room and went out by his private exit to a private stairway that led downward to a covered court from which there was inconspicuous egress to the street.
Just why the architect should have been instructed to provide this private getaway for J. B. from his office, Harrington did not speculate; but slowly rose and addressed the door as if it were the man who had just gone through it.
"Mr. Boland," he began in a low firm voice, "I know that you are wrong, utterly and everlastingly wrong. Unjustly, cruelly and murderously wrong . . . underneath all your blandness. Why is it that I cannot tell you so as forcefully as I feel it?" The door did not answer. "But do not mistake my dumbness. As solemnly as I can assure you of anything, I tell you now that this project shall never go through." If Henry had ever meant anything in his life, he meant this. "Why is it," he mused, "that I can't talk to him? It must be because he is Billie's—Billie!" He interrupted himself. "Billie, I'll get Billie to help me. She'll make him see it!" But he interrupted himself again. "By the Almighty!" he breathed. "I can't go to Billie and point out with a diagram and an x-marks-the-spot that her father has connived at a low fraud and is accessory to a murder."