Tongues of Flame (MacFarlane)/Chapter 28
HENRY grew discouraged with his telephoning.
"We'll try what Thorpe can do personally," he said in hollow tones; and Deputy Lunt "took him across"—across the bridge of sighs to the county jail. There Jailor White honored Henry by conducting him in person to a cell of the upper tier—a cell de luxe, with a window looking northward, but a cell nevertheless—just one cubicle of an iron-grated cage.
The footsteps of the jailor receded along the corridor, and Harrington sat down on the edge of the bed with face bowed into his hands. "I'll put you in jail!" Mr. Boland had gnashed at him. Well, he was in jail all right! They had stripped him and damned him and jailed him. He didn't believe it possible but they had.
Some movement of the man in the next cell attracted his attention and he glanced at him indifferently, a smallish, dark man with beady eyes that glittered as they gazed while an expression of slow, stupefied amazement was photographed on his oddly stamped features.
"Adam John!" cried Henry springing up. "Hello, Adam!" He offered his hand, but through the double grill of steel their fingers only could touch.
"How do?" inquired Adam politely.
"Rotten!" said Henry. "They've framed me—so I can't defend you tomorrow."
"You defend . . . you talk judge?" Adam John's sparse eyebrows were lifted with astonishment; he was learning for the first time that this amazing good fortune had been in store for him. But the animated expression settled swiftly into disappointment since Henry Harrington was, like himself, a prisoner behind this grill of steel. Curiosity over that unbelievable contingency presently got the better of his natural taciturnity.
"How come?" he blurted, employing his army idiom.
"They charge me with murder," explained Henry with a gesture of disgust, "with killing that unknown devil on your island—the man in the blue shirt who was annoying Lahleet. Adam, I owe you an apology for getting you into this mess. The town is crazy. There is no justice in it," he avowed dejectedly. "They'll send you up for life tomorrow."
"Not send me up," protested Adam with a shake of the head. "Me tell truth to jury."
Henry gazed thoughtfully at that grave mask of faith and felt his heart bleed for this naive child-man. He had just had an experience of telling the truth to a Socatullo County jury—rather a large jury—and had failed to produce conviction in a single mind. "I wish you luck, Adam," he said. "Things have got away from me all right." And he drew up his hands in a gesture of helplessness. "Of course, I'm still hoping, "he confided presently from where he sat on the bed, elbows on knees, head in hand. But at eight o'clock Sergeant Thorpe came in and killed the hope.
"Not a thing doing, chief," he confessed sorrowfully. "God! It's fierce the way they are."
"They?" challenged Henry.
"Everybody."
"Suppose I may as well give up the idea for tonight," conceded Henry. "Get me the venire of the Adam John jury, and I'll see if we can't figure out somebody on it who might give the poor devil a ghost of a chance." He said this in a whisper that Adam John might not hear.
"Aw right, sir. Anything else?" The sergeant made this inquiry solicitously, with devoted eagerness, as if his own anxiety to be helpful might somehow compensate his chief for a world's cold injustice.
"Nope," said Henry indifferently. Everything on that desk seemed now so unimportant that he could have swept the whole mess into the waste basket. Yet there were interest-piquing documents upon it—new ones that had arrived since he departed from it.
Thorpe hurried out, greatly cast down. It was not his faith in the community which had been shattered. Thorpe was hard-boiled as to that. His confidence in community enthusiasms and loyalties had begun to languish the day he returned from the war and was long since stiff in death. It was his faith in his chief as a sort of superman that had been sickeningly jarred.
Harrington's head was in his hands again. The weight of the thing was beginning to tell. Everybody had failed him, except Lahleet. Everybody. Even—even . . . But his eyes brightened, his face lost its gray look. Not everybody. No! He wouldn't believe that Billie Suddenly he was exulting. The murder charge! Why, they'd done the very thing that would melt Billie up and bring her to him. Something swelled in his heart. Something mounted in his throat. The fools—they had defeated themselves. The idiots—they had overplayed their hands. Let Billie but hear that he was in actual jeopardy, restrained of his liberty, in danger of being branded for life, and she would realize at last what black sinks of iniquity some of his traducers were. Imperiously she would command Scanlon, even her father to lay off, and she would fly to his rescue. Henry got quite a fine thrill out of contemplating her coming. He expected her at any moment.
"This'll bring her; this'll bring her," he exulted, and his gesture comprehended the steel bars surrounding him. "That murder charge'll get her." He shook himself in a kind of ecstasy as if already he felt Billie's arms about his neck. He closed his eyes in that anticipatory rapture; and they were still closed when slouching footsteps came methodically along the corridor and the shadow of a man loomed against the grill work of Harrington's cell.
"Lady to see you, sir!" announced the guard.
"Lady?" Harrington gulped the word and a tide of tingling emotions boiled up in him.
"Thank God!" But when he had followed the trusty down to the visitors' room it was not Billie but Lahleet. The girl saw his stunned look, his slackening lip, his swift endeavor to recompose his features, and understood perfectly; yet like that savage stoic she could be was only sadly imperturbable.
"There isn't a chance in the world for bail," she told him sadly, looking up out of large concerned eyes. "Not a chance. The story in the Star about the murder charge and the chamber of commerce meeting are both perfectly terrible." The girl drew a rumpled paper from under her arm, smoothing out the wrinkles which her anger had crushed into it. It was the first extra of the Star that night.
Henry's eyes drank in the scare-head: "Murder Mystery Solved—Henry Harrington accused—Astonishing Revelation."
"They can convict you, Henry," breathed Lahleet awesomely as she saw his eye at the end of the column.
Harrington wavered like a tree in a blast. "I believe you," he whispered hoarsely, and sank slowly into achair. "I believe you!" At last he too was frightened. Lahleet could barely repress a cry. It seemed so awful to see him frightened.
"Oh, Henry, you never can stand it. Nobody could. Your nerve will break—you'll go insane, you'll" She was wringing her hands and crying.
Harrington was pretty white, pretty desperate, but he shook his head doggedly. "It looks bad though," he admitted, "for the time being."
Lahleet found consolation by slipping one hand timidly into his. Harrington, unaware, sat scowling at the wall.
"Thanks, Lahleet; awfully good of you to come," he remembered to say when it was time for her to go, "but there's only one hope now. Billie! She'll come—the first thing in the morning. Once let her know about this murder charge and let her have the night to think it over, and she'll show 'em! That's where Scanlon overplayed his hand all right. She'll show 'em. She'll come the first thing in the morning."
Again the mask of Lahleet's face was sadly imperturbable; but: "That china doll will never come near him," she was scorning as she went down the steps. "He's spoiled now for her. He—he isn't ornamental any more," she sneered vindictively; and was thinking proudly: "What will save him is for me to find out who killed that man." But that was going to be a desperate quest—to find out in time. There were clues—that she knew of. Since parting with Henry in the sheriff's office she had started work on these, but now must wait. Yet it was oh, so hard to wait; so dangerous. These silly people—why, they might, they might do anything—they might even storm the jail.
Mourning over her love that was not only unrequited but unperceived—restless, wrathful, indomitable Lahleet drifted out of the jail, into the parked area surrounding the courthouse and sat down upon a bench. The hour was something after nine o'clock. A haze of fog shut out the stars, leaving the heavens unillumined save where the line of stacks of Boland mills and waste-consumers glowed faintly, proclaiming how day and night, night and day, the orderly processes of Old Two Blades' money-making, civilization-building machinery went on and on, indifferent to all minor human concerns.
A sort of silence of exhaustion hung in the air, as if after a day of considerable excitement the town was at length composing itself for slumber. Into this stillness there broke abruptly a hoarse shouting, strident cries and bawlings, beginning at a common center and then spreading and singling out through the streets.
Hurrying across the lawn to the sidewalk Lahleet bought the second extra which the Edgewater Star had issued that evening; and under the glare of an are light read the new headline: McKenzie Tongue Project Not Lost! Eagerly her eyes ravished the column of its contents, and two minutes later she was breathlessly imploring the night jailer: "Please—oh, please! I have something so important for Mr. Harrington to see."
And even night jailers are human.
"Oh, Henry, look at this!" she cried before the cell door.
"Lemme look at it first—see you ain't got no saws or dope or somethin' in there," demanded the trusty, taking the newspaper from her hand, but after inspection, he accommodatingly held his own electric torch so that Harrington could read the Star's second big scoop of the day—read that all was not lost with the McKenzie's Tongue Project; that immediately after the chamber of commerce meeting, Senator Madden and Assemblyman Clayton had raced back by automobile to the state capital; that at 6:15 p. m. Assemblyman Vannice of Wilson County who had voted against the bill had moved to reconsider; that, most astoundingly, not to say suspiciously, this motion to reconsider had been carried by two votes; the votes of that same Jerry Cunningham and George Lamont who Senator Murphy had explained to Henry were under bonds of gratitude to the Boland interests.
Henry read this much and then something in him burst; in his brain something slipped. It had been a day of nerve-strains and bitter disappointments, succeeding three other days of nerve-strains and disappointment. He had borne all rather well but there is a limit to human self-control—especially to a man who has gone through what Henry Harrington had overseas where they had given him the sobriquet of Hellfire.
"It was a job!" he shrieked wildly, livid with wrath, his face contorting. "It was a job! They had the votes all the time. It was a trick to get me in bad at home so they could do this to me—this!" He stood for a moment shuddering at the awful nightmare of that afternoon meeting while his mental processes took account of that depth of devilishness by which he had been tricked into a position where the town—his town—that he loved and believed in—had turned against him.
"Ah-h-h-h!" he screamed like an insane man and raged from end to end of his cell. "The crooks! The damn, dirty, disgusting crooks! They double-crossed me! They double-crossed me! Let me out of here!" he bawled and, seizing the grill work of his door, shook it till it rattled and clanged discordantly. But the puniness of his strength made him rage again. He flung himself against the iron bars; he roared, he shouted vituperations; he bawled mad challenges and then began to plead. "Let me out, jailor! Let me out. They've jobbed me, I oughtn't to be here at all." His hands clutched at his throat as if he were strangling, as if he felt a rope about his neck. "The devils," he panted. "The devils! They'll get me in the funny house."
Protests had begun to rise in the cages. Cries of "Aw, shut your trap!" "Can it!" "Gag him!" "Slug him!" "Take the D. T. to the dungeon!" resounded from both tiers. The whole prison was in an uproar.
"Now, see what you done!" the trusty reproved Lahleet. He had marked Henry's outburst with no great perturbation but signs of severe disapproval. "You put him plumb off his nut."
"Oh, Henry! Henry!" implored the girl in tearful tones. "You'll hurt yourself. See—your forehead's all bleeding."
But Harrington's frenzy had already passed, he sat again upon his bed, trembling and coughing, feeling weak and overcome, wondering what had happened to him.
"Hey? . . . Hey?" he asked, peering crazily. "What's happened? What's all the row about?"
"You're batty in the belfry—that's what's happened," reproved the trusty gruffly. "Better get onto yourself; or I'll begin to figure if somebody ain't been slippin' you some hootch."
"Me? . . . Oh!" Henry was staring at the blood on his hands where he had wiped them across his lacerated brow. Realization came to him. "Oh!"—in a very regretful voice. "I'm sorry."
"Henry!" The girl's tone was still tearful, freighted with love and an agony of concern.
"Lahleet!" he responded, bitter in his self-reproach, and coming forward thrust a penitent hand through to her. "Forgive me! I'm all right now but I . . . I guess I must have been out for a moment."
"Out is r-r-right!" muttered the guard sardonically.
"It's been an awful day, Lahleet! An awful three or four days, if you know what I mean."
"Yes, yes, I know," she whispered although barely able to make a sound; for as its real significance dawned upon her, the girl had grown dumb with grief and horror at the unbelievable thing which she had seen—"But, oh, Henry, you must hold onto yourself or"
"or I'll go off my head altogether," he finished the sentence for her. "Nope. I'm over it now—just kind of weak and ashamed of myself for blowing off before you. Thank you for bringing me the paper though. That's one more thing I needed to know about this gang of crooks." He picked up the crumpled newspaper from the floor.