Tongues of Flame (MacFarlane)/Chapter 27
I'D have said it couldn't happen," panted Henry, once more in his office, breathless and noting a slight disposition to fall to pieces. "Did they know him better than I did," he speculated, "—Scanlon, Madden and the bunch; or am I right about him after all? Anyway, it's a fight. That's clear."
And Henry Harrington was supremely at home in a fight. The first blow, he decided, should be delivered at Shell Point. He dictated a telegram to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, embodying forcefully his changed views on the matter, and took the precaution of having Miss Mayberry take that telegram to the main office instead of sending it out over the company wire; but did not know that the manager at the main office took also a precaution; he carried it first to Mr. Boland's back door. Now Mr. Boland's idea of autocracy did not extend to holding up interstate communications, but he took account of what this message said, and just as his strategy demanded that instant steps be taken to make that message futile, so his organization policy required immediate punishment for the traitor who had sent it. For days, as the treachery itself had begun to take head and rise, the form of that punishment had been preparing. The plan was ready and the Boland power was always mobilized. The short sharp order went forth to Scanlon. "Thumbs down," it said, "definitely and finally and smashingly down—on that bright and audacious young gladiator, Henry Harrington."
This order was issued while Henry was delivering his second defiance by gleefully supervising Thorpe and the office boys as they piled waste baskets high with papers, pertaining to Boland litigation, and carted them into Scanlon's room. With a grateful sense of decks cleared for aggressive action in the next important matter, Harrington was just taking up from his desk that venire of one hundred citizens of Socatullo County from which tomorrow would be chosen the Adam John jury, when Thorpe reëntered apparently with something important on the tip of his tongue; but before he could get it off Scanlon himself had come charging in. He had got his orders.
The last time Henry had talked to the Chief Fixer, Scanlon had been mellow and mild, gently, incredulously reproachful. That day he had been one finger of the velvet glove, but now he was the boniest knuckle of the mailed fist. Disguises were off; dissimulations were dead; euphemisms were in the discard. He came to gloat; envy, jealousy, malevolence, hate, were all in his manner. "You young fool!" he exulted.
"Yes," admitted Harrington coolly; "I've been a fool."
"After all we've done for you! You ingrate! You—you traitor!"
Harrington straightened and paled, but did not strike, although his pose was the immobility of a coiled spring, and his voice was lowered dangerously. "I'm getting a little sensitive about those two compliments, Scanlon," he remarked acidly, "because they don't apply to me. There are ingrates and traitors, however, in Mr. Boland's organization; and I expect to make it clear to him who some of them are. As one step to that end, I shall be on my way in half-an-hour to the courthouse to have myself entered as attorney-of-record for Adam John."
Scanlon's yellow eyes gleamed.
"Take some bail along with you, then," he taunted, "because while you are in Charlie Hunt's office I'll be in Jeff Younger's, swearing out a warrant for your arrest for stealing twenty thousand dollars!"
"You cur!" Harrington's pose was momentarily shattered; he swayed forward and flexed his arms while his teeth ground in sudden rage; then he sneered: "So that would be your game, eh? You would like to smut me, wouldn't you? Well, go to it. . . . Charge me. . . . Try me. . . . Damned if I wouldn't like to know who got that twenty thousand dollars anyway. You know it has occurred to me, Scanlon, in the last few hours that maybe you and Quackenbaugh stepped on shore and gathered that coin in, while I was in the woods. You never did make such an awful lot of fuss about it, if you remember."
Scanlon started as if stung and his face purpled with rage; but, as if unwilling to trust himself to rejoinder on that subject, he jeered coarsely, "Why, say, Boland won't make two bites of you. Not two bites. Here goes for one of 'em right now," and with one final, blasting glance he heaved himself toward the door, banging it behind him viciously.
Harrington watched him go, laughing contemptuously. The room echoed and grew still. "So all they have is cheap threats," he grinned. "Movie stuff! Put me in jail. Highway robbery, eh? Ha, ha!" In this community? With the people strong for him as they had grown in the last two years to be. Why, the fools! The idiots! They would get themselves laughed out of the court of public opinion in an hour.
But Thorpe was in again bursting with that information which Scanlon's coming had damned up in his throat. "Say, chief; there's an awful row up about that McKenzie's Tongue bill," he reported excitedly. "The very devil's broke loose. The merchants of all three towns are getting up on their hind legs about it, and the chamber of commerce has called a mass meeting for two o'clock in the opera house."
Harrington still smiled, but more grimly. "Beat me to the opera house, eh?"
"Yes; and Madden and Clayton are going to be there to tell them all about it."
"I'll make monkeys of 'em," boasted Harrington; with one of his fighting grins: "They'll be lucky if they don't get themselves tarred and feathered for putting Socatullo County in a disgraceful position like that before the State. Anything else, Thorpe?"
"No, no!" stammered the Sergeant, staring as if a little confused at his chief's enormous display of self-confidence. "Except that Mr. Moody just phoned that he would like an appointment with you at 12:15."
Henry glanced at the brass clock on the mantel. It was 12:05 now. "It will suit me better if Moody can come in right away," he told his chief clerk shortly.
Moody, Assistant Secretary of Boland General and a sort of financial factotum of Boland personally, was presently announced and came in, sleek, sandy, slightly bald, a man of medium height and medium weight, a medium man all over.
"Your stock accounts are in a pretty bad way, Henry. There's nothing really paid for, you know," began the assistant secretary, gently reproving as a man of accounts and contracts will be when time and terms have been violated. "You were always so keen to make new contracts for purchasing new blocks of stock that you never bothered to close up old contracts."
"But Mr. Boland always encouraged me to bite off more and more," defended Henry.
"Yes, I know, I know," assented Mr. Moody, slightly pained, "but you recall how those contracts all read. When payments are not made on the agreed dates the whole purchase price becomes immediately due—and"
To cut it short—they stripped Henry that morning of every dollar of his holdings in the Boland corporations; and the twenty-three thousand odd he chanced to have in bank as the turn-over of a deal in timber they practically wiped out by attaching the account for twenty thousand dollars and two years interest.
Furthermore, that afternoon at the opera house the people of the three towns made a total wreck of their popular idol. Ingrate, traitor, Judas—were the mildest words they hurled at Henry Harrington. Even Billie was there accusing; and when the mad riot was over and Henry, dazed and battered in spirit, ventured on a personal appeal to her to at least understand him, it was evident that God had answered her prayer to make her firm.
"You went against your own town!" she said scornfully.
"But that's just what I didn't do," protested Harrington, almost crying in his desperation. "I'm the only person here that didn't go against his own town. Billie, believe me, I'm the only person that hasn't gone against your father in this other matter. I'm truer to him than any of the others, just as I'm truest to you when you think"
It was her manner that interrupted him—the manner of utter incapacity to believe. "Perhaps when you see how much your madness is making us all suffer, you will decide to be sane again," she reproached bitterly, but with a tremulous note so prominent in her voice that at last it quavered almost pitifully as she concluded, "I wonder—oh, I wonder how much of this it will take to bring you to your senses?"
"You—you wonder?" Henry breathed in amazement, marveling in part that she could still be blindly partisan as the others, and in part that she did not see that he was suffering too. He was almost angry with her and backed away confounded, shaking his head like a man who struggles with the contradictions of a bad dream. Yet, after a moment, it was persistently, patiently a love-light in the distraught eyes which followed that haughty, tremulous slenderness into the dispersing crowd. "Isn't that hopeless—isn't that hopeless?" he murmured to himself. "She loves me and . . . isn't that hopeless?" He sank into a chair at the front of the emptying hall and meditated dismally. Billie! . . . She could have been of help to him. Instead she had added to his burden which was already fairly heavy. Well, dear girl! she had been very much put out with him. And—she couldn't understand—not yet. It was environment that blinded her, of course; but—well—something might happen to the environment. This thought pounced into his mind almost as if he knew what ere so very long would be bulletined in the windows of the Telegraph office, what would be in the headlines of extras of the Blade, the Star and the Constitution which newsboys would be crying so excitedly about the streets.
"Dear girl! . . . Dear girl! . . ." His voice vibrated tenderly, and the echo of it died. He heard the banging of distant heavy doors. He seemed quite alone in the building. He might be locked in—if he did not stir himself and get out—if the janitor did not notice. Well, he did not mind—gloomy old hole—gloom in his soul—as well there as anywhere!
But—there came a touch upon his shoulder.
It was Lahleet.
"You were grand!" she whispered tumultuous in her emotion. "Sublime!" And as she wrung his hand strength came back to him, and he rose up, remembering his next duty—to enter himself as attorney of record in the defense of Adam John.
Lahleet, clinging to his arm for comfort, went with him, but at the courthouse door he was arrested for murder—Henry Harrington for the murder of an unknown person "a human being," on Hurricane Island.
"But you didn't!" the soul of the Indian girl raged in protest.
"Of course, I didn't, but hush!" Harrington commanded fiercely, as he feared she was about to blurt out confession. "The point is—I let them think I did. Now hush! Not one word! Besides, it's all a farce," he soothed. "They can't prove I killed him. They know they can't. It's only a temporary frame-up to keep me from defending Adam John. I'll be out on bail in an hour."
Now bail was not obligatory in murder cases, but, perhaps as carrying out the game of baiting Henry Harrington to his doom, Judge Allen had fixed bail in advance; and the hasty telephoning which Henry began to do from the Sheriff's office did not disclose any one who was willing to risk fifty thousand cash or one hundred thousand bond to pledge the person and presence of the prisoner. There was one who might have, but that one was not appealed to.
While this telephoning was going on Lahleet was speculating wildly as to just who did kill that man.
She had heard a shot, had seen the man fall, found the smoking pistol in the path not half a dozen yards away, but of him who fired it and dropped it—by accident, no doubt—she saw and knew nothing. For two years, with that sclf-centered absorption of which her nature was capable, she had not cared.
Now she did care, now she set all her cunning to find out; but she hinted nothing of this to Harrington, For some reason which she did not quite fathom, he had fiercely frowned down her first impulse to aid him openly and this made her wilfully secretive as to her further intentions.