Tongues of Flame (MacFarlane)/Chapter 37
BUT John Boland was not the only person who this day had looked with longing at the barless window on the jail's mansard roof. The whole harried populace of Edgewater was gazing at it or thinking about it. In the fickle masses, with their usual directness of speech and tendency to directness of action—never bothering to be consistent, scorning to dissemble, frank, tidal, pertinent, a mine was laid.
Now the spark was struck. While the homeless were still at their food a large touring-car with men in it and one woman had roared into the town, picked its way amid the street debris that was beginning to clear up, and come to a halt before the ceurthouse. At first nobody paid particular attention. Lots of crowded automobiles were roaring into the town; yet this particular car rewarded special scrutiny. The woman in it was Lahleet much elated.
In the next jump-seat to Lahleet, sat a man whose expression was the very opposite. He looked intensely dissatisfied and wore a sullen scowl. He was tallish and well set-up with a Vandyke beard, and in placid moments might have been handsome, yet his eyes were cunning and about them was a network of betraying lines—to any who had skill to read them.
Lahleet leaped out of the car and hurried into the courthouse. "Mr. White! Mr. White! Oh, Mr. White!" she clamored, dancing impatiently before that astonished but easy-going official. Take me to Mr. Harrington quick—quick! I have wonderful news for him, wonderful! He didn't do it, Mr. White! Everybody will know he didn't do it now."
Jailor White, cool and phlegmatic, was tantalizingly immobile, looking down at the little woman whose dark eyes were ablaze with such an eager, happy light. Her ardor was most persuasive; also quite convincing.
"Darn me if I ever thought he did," conceded Jailor White, reversing himself quite shamelessly.
"Oh, you—you good man!" beamed Lahleet, and seizing his elbows was almost for hugging him. "But hurry . . . hurry! I always knew Mr. Harrington didn't do it, of course; but I want to run quick and tell him that everybody is going to know it now."
By main strength of personality, the little woman was herding the jailor toward the first steel door. She leaped three steps ahead of him up the iron stairway to the second tier, then turned, her finger to her lips. "Whish-h-h-h!" she commanded. "I want to surprise him. Give me the key. I want to unlock. . . . I want to let him out myself."
Jailor White found his hands strangely weak against those wresting fingers. The girl, noiseless as the hopping of a bird, flitted down the corridor. Noiselessly she slipped the huge key into the massive lock; softly she was turning—had the handle ready to yicld before Harrington was aware that anyone was there; for, dull and dejected after his sleepless night, he sat brooding with his hands over his ears. Not even what the missionary of the Indians had come to say had cheered him up, because it pulled not one single stone from the barrier which kept him from the woman he loved, who would never need him more than at this moment.
"Hen-ree!" Lahleet burst out, unable to contain herself longer, and flung the door wide; but, instead of rushing in, stepped back and waited in the corridor. "You are free!" she cried wildly. "You are free! They are coming to let you out. You didn't kill the man. Everybody knows you didn't do it now."
Harrington had started up, staring dumbly.
"They've got the man that did!" Lahleet concluded, then stamped her foot, impatient for him to understand.
Henry was the more bewildered. "But you—then you" he stammered. The truth crashed into his mind. Neither had Lahleet killed the unknown in the ferns! A vast sickening sense of oppression lifted from him; and in the same instant he saw that she had never known that he thought she had—and that she must never be permitted to know it.
But her naive impatience could not endure that trifling interval of time which it took Harrington to do this much of thinking. She went bounding through the door and into his arms. "Henry!" she sobbed. "Henry!" and was crying on his breast.
He clasped her tight—a dear little burden—and then, tenderly, like a father, lowered her to the floor beside him and raised questioning eyes to White.
"Search me!" proclaimed the jailor with honest bewilderment. "I don't know a thing. She carried me off my feet. It must be all right though. She's about the last one to kid herself, that piece!"
"Of course, it's all right, you big goose!" Lahleet half-pouted, dashing the back of her hand across her eyes and then looking slyly at Henry. "They'll be coming to let you out in a minute."
"But who did kill him?" Harrington demanded dazedly.
"They'll tell you—they'll tell you in a minute," effervesced the girl, her natural love of sensation and climax asserting itself.
"But it was you that found out who, of course," divined Henry.
"Oh, yes—of course!" admitted little Miss Marceau, with impish pride.
Harrington, quite coming to, seized her arms and shook her joyously from head to foot. "You," he realized, "you got me out of this mess!" Then he held her off and gazed at her up and down, estimatingly, admiringly; so that the girl for a moment had an enraptured feeling that he was seeing her for the first time—really seeing her. She felt this more as he flung an arm about her and gave her a succession of ecstatic pressures while they walked behind Jailor White, along the corridor and down the stair.
But though Henry's arm was round Lahleet, they were proxy pressures that he gave her, for his mind was already racing up the hill to Billie. He had one of those delicious moments of feeling immensely strong—very rare in this last week. He saw himself as a huge and towering trec, snatched at by the storm, smashed at by lightning bolts; but the storm was over, the thunderings past, and he still stood—triumphant! In a few minutes he could be offering himself to Billie, not furtively but boldly, a bright and shining pillar for her to lean upon.
Henry was thinking thoughts like this as they sat in White's office waiting for something . . . for what? Oh, yes; the official deliverance. It was to come. Lahleet had said so. His mind, his eyes came back from distance and he turned to speak to Lahleet; but—why . . . where was she?
"She—she just sort of stepped out," remembered Jailor White, in answer to Henry's look of complete mystification.
"The little devil!" muttered Henry in the hollow tones of chagrin and self-reproach. "My mind just went off for one minute and she—she gets huffy and"
A confusion of voices echoed out of the tunnel of the causeway from the courthouse. It was the officers who had come with Lahleet. One of them was a United States Marshal. The three men in the tonneau represented among them the Secret Service of the United States and an international detective agency, while the fourth with the Vandyke beard was the man they had run down and captured—with the recent assistance of a woman—and after a chase that was more than twenty-four months long, a master criminal—one with a most unusual relationship to confidence men on one side and yeggmen upon the other—making him the most dangerous felon of his brand in all the country.
Behind them had arrived another car with local officers and a local prisoner.
"My old friend! Count Ulric!" exulted Henry, recognizing the beard. "Why—which materialization of yours is this Count? Where on earth did you come from?"
Count Ulric only scowled.
"That Indian teacher-girl put 'em on his trail," elucidated District Attorney Younger, who was one of the local officers with the party. "She dug up the clue that hung bracelets on Scanlon, too."
But Henry was already staring, astounded at the spectacle of the Chief Fixer in manacles.
"Scanlon killed that fellow on the island—killed him cold, Henry!" volunteered Younger.
"Scanlon!" barked Harrington, instantly livid with rage. "You—you did this to me? . . . You—you hound of hell!"
The Chief Fixer's face took on a grayer look, and weakly a wide tongue licked his flabby lips; but he kept his glance straight, yellow eyes aglow with sullen fire. "'At's right. Bawl me out, Harrington!" he said. "I'm going; you're coming," he recognized dejectedly. "When I got into a jam I played it crooked; when you got in the same fix, you played it straight, and the straight play wins . . . sometimes."
Harrington was astounded by the callous cynicism of the man. "But I'd never harmed you!" he protested.
"You were a living insult to me," denounced Scanlon, "—by being straight when I was crooked. Besides, I saw you stepping into my shoes and a man keeps always trying to save himself. Nothing else matters—once he's been crooked. That's how I got these"—he lifted his irons. "Ulric was threatening to double-cross me; and so I was doubling him. I had him tipped off about the gold and I went there to kill him. That was desperate; but I'd been brought to it. Only the Burns man got himself up to look so much like Ulric that I plugged him instead; and Ulric got the gold."
"Careful. Anything you say can be used against you Scanlon," warned Younger.
"Then use it!" challenged Scanlon brazenly. "Do you think I don't know what I'm up against? It'll be the chair for me, but I'll take this double-crossing ——— with me. If they'll only let me hear his death yell first, I'll bump off to sweet music."
The next moment, however, Scanlon's air of bravado was abandoned for one of chastened earnestness, as he said:
"But one last word, Harrington; and not for me either—for Old Two Blades. John thinks he's right all the time. He figured some moral statute of limitations must have run against what was done back yonder about the survey. He figured he was God A'mighty's silent partner—and not so damn silent either."
Harrington, who had been listening with both interest and amazement, relieved himself of a quick gesture of contempt; for in those jail days of his he had come to hold John Boland as personally culpable—more culpable than anybody else, besides accusing him of a colossal cruelty to his own daughter.
"All the same, Harrington," answered Scanlon to that gesture, "old J. B. has never looked crooked to himself."
"I'll make him look crooked—even to himself," Harrington flamed out.
But by this time the officers had completed the formality of releasing one man and incarcerating two, and Jailor White came up to shake hands with Henry, who thanked him for his courtesies which had been numerous. Then Harrington turned toward the Courthouse, eager to get outside, with District Attorney Younger falling into stride beside him.
"I was getting pretty darned tired of being kicked around like a houn' dog, Younger," he was making talk, when tumultuous sounds began to issue from the causeway, a far-away murmuring that grew nearer quickly. Henry was surprised to hear his name rising above the clamor—his name—wild cries of "Harrington! Where's Harrington?" chantings of "We want Henry!" and the like.
He felt the district attorney squeeze his arm; strange sensations began to heave his breast; his throat grew lumpy and his knees a bit uncertain; his heart was leaping wildly as this volume of clamorous sound grew louder. As he rounded the turn from the jail a milling mass which had been pressing toward the sheriff's office sighted and dashed upon him, led by Gaylord and Schuler. Somehow these two had got there and inevitably gravitated to the front. They rushed upon Henry, seizing his hands and shaking them.
"I knew you didn't do it," cried Gaylord, bluff and unabashed even in apology; "I knew it all the time, except for a little while when I was off my nut."
"Henry, we gave you an awful deal," lamented Schuler tearfully.
"Oh, Henry!" A soft hand, but hearty, smote him upon the back. It was President Amelia Hutton of the Woman's Club; somehow she too had got into the front wave. The feather upon her hat was much awry but her eyes gleamed with suspicious brightness.
The corridor now seemed to contain none but old-time personal friends, each struggling to reach his side, shouting congratulations, mumbling shamefaced apologies, manifesting combined emotions of shame, joy and exultation.
Henry was exultant and joyous too. This was something like. It was something as he had pictured it. Resent these people now—be churlish with them—that was not in Henry Harrington. It had never been. They had been duped—that was all—tools, as he had been a tool—victims, as he had been a victim. Besides, he had had yesterday the satisfaction of heaping coals of fire upon the heads of these people of Edgewater, who had treated him so outrageously; and it is a law of the heart to soften toward the enemy it succors.
Every manifestation of regret was balm to his bruises and it gratified him immensely when with an air of proprietorship his townspeople surrounded him. They seized his arms, they pulled at his hands, they got behind and pushed him, shouldered him toward the front door. "We've come to take you out, Henry." "We're a committee to take you out," they cried.
Henry reached the space between the front pillars riding on the shoulders of his delirious, repentant friends. The Greek porch of wide stone slabs and the long granite steps were crowded; the nearer courthouse yard was filling and the conical tents of the houseless began to look like dunce-caps of khaki, afloat in a sea of upturned faces. It appeared that all Edgewater had suddenly gravitated hither; for the news had broadcasted rapidly from the moment when loiterers upon the curb had noted the arrival of the well known Scanlon and the unknown Ulric, both in irons, and learned from the local officers the meaning of what they saw.