Tongues of Flame (MacFarlane)/Chapter 5
HARRINGTON gazed at this agitated mass of human being, his expression one of supreme disgust.
"I warned you," he shrugged irritably. "Why do you come back to me?"
"Because you are the only man that don't fly off the handle," urged the shivering hulk. "You can stop 'em. Nobody else can. They're coming—they're coming after me now!" he howled, fear-stricken eyes rolling wildly as a thunder of feet began on the stairs.
"You're not worth saving, Hornblower," Harrington denounced sharply; "but come on! I won't let them hurt you."
The huge cowering shyster held back but Henry seized him contemptuously by a fat wrist and dragged his protesting bulk behind him through the door and out to the head of the stairs as the mob came storming up. It was headed by Gaylord, by Schuler and by George Hughes, president of the State Bank, two blocks down. The faces of all three were angry and determined, like the mass of features framed in behind them on the stair.
A mob! A murderous mob, headed by first citizens, in broad daylight, hot and unashamed!
"We're going to hang the " announced the banker.
"He deserves it," agreed Henry fiercely. "Clear the stair! I'll bring him down."
The fluid mind of the mob welcomed an addition to its leadership, shouting with raucous joy to those outside:
"Henry's bringing him down! Henry Harrington's bringing him!"
Once upon the curb, Henry appeared to note the convenient juxtaposition of that lumber pile and the cross-arm of the electric light pole.
"Henry! Henry! Are you throwing me down?" bleated Hornblower, hanging back.
"Shut up," said Harrington, and twisting the arm he held, he shoved the bulk of the man ahead of him toward the lumber pile. The crowd jeered and hooted.
Hornblower, losing faith in Harrington's ability to save him if he still planned to, flung himself on the attorney's shoulders. "There's something I got to tell you, Henry—if they're going to bump me off like this!" he panted. "Something important—it'll make you rich, Henry; it'll make a lot of things right that don't seem that way now. Stall, Henry, stall! I got to have time to think!"
But Harrington's features wore the solemn mask of one upon a determined business bent. "Get up there!" he commanded, impelling Hornblower at the lumber pile.
"Time! I got to have time to think, Henry!" Hornblower wailed as Henry stepped up beside him. "Don't let 'em croak me like this—not before I tell you what this town has got a right to know."
But Harrington dared not take his mind off the mob. Its passion was too hot. One slip and he would lose his slight ascendancy. Already Gaylord, Schuler, Hughes and others had clambered on the lumber pile. They were engaged in throwing the yellow line of the sisal rope over the arm of the telegraph pole and a minute later a score of men were fighting for a hold upon the end as it fell into the crowd. Henry, one hand protectingly upon Hornblower's shoulder, lifted the other in an appeal for silence.
"Men!" His trained voice rang out high and sharp as it had upon parade grounds and marches.
The crowd ceased its mouthing for an instant and would have listened to him at least briefly but that Schuler, who was too impatient, struck off Henry's protecting hand from Hornblower's shoulder; at the same moment Gaylord flung the noose about the mountebank's neck.
At this interference Henry's face went white. His steel-gray eyes became two gleams of wrath and his left hand straightened with a snap that brought his clenched fist in violent contact with the point of Gaylord's jaw. The president of the First National dropped as if he had been shot, while Harrington snatched the noose from the neck of Hornblower and in impulsive defiance flung it over his own head.
"Now," he challenged hotly, "you fools! If you want to hang anybody hang me! There are fifty hands on that rope out there," he dared, "if you've got as much nerve as you think you have, swing me up!"
But the crowd did not want to hang Henry Harrington. The swaying bight of the rope slackened rather than tightened.
But the leaders on the lumber pile were not to be balked.
"Damn you, Harrington!" muttered the astounded Schuler, and was reaching to snatch off the noose when over the heads of all there rasped a new voice of command—a voice that all the three towns were accustomed to obey.
Unnoticed the open automobile of John Boland, moving slowly down the street, had become imbedded like an island amid the eddies of humanity, with its occupants perforce amazed spectators of what was taking place. The magnate was standing up now beside his driver indignantly erect.
"What are you about, my friends and neighbors, fellow townsmen!" he shouted, words fair enough but with a timbre of rebuke in them before which the maddest paused. "Do you want to smirch the reputation of the whole country?" Mr. Boland's reproach was keen. "Do you want to dignify this scalawag's hypocritical claims?
"If he has unsettled any titles in his wicked and foolish talk this afternoon, hanging him wouldn't quiet them. Only the courts can do that—and they will do it, my friends, never fear. Have faith in the law! Let us show our right to the protection of law by showing our respect for the law."
Harrington had checked them; but Mr. Boland shamed them. By long habit, his townspeople saw as he wished them to see.
For five minutes his reproofs and reproaches flowed on, until the heads of the leaders were bowed like naughty children.
Henry, caught with the rope about his neck, felt suddenly the biggest fool of all. He flung the noose from him quickly and turned upon Hornblower. "Go, you muck!" he said sternly. "And go fast!"
But some dregs of manliness had been stirred up from the bottom of Hornblower's nature.
"You saved me," he gulped hoarsely. "Boland didn't. He's as big a faker as I am and bigger, only there's a nut streak in me that keeps me from getting away with it the way he does. Look at him now—bluff you all—bluff you to a standstill. But some day I'll get the truth out. I would have told it to you this morning if you'd gone partners with me. I would have screamed it to 'em all before I'd let 'em—let 'em croak me," and his eyes rolled fearsomely toward the noose still hanging empty from the cross-arm. "But now," he gloated craftily, "now the brainstorm is over and I don't have to tell anybody till I get good and ready."
Henry was freshly indignant. "Go, you miserable faker," he rasped, "before I lose my self-control and kick you."
"Hard words, Henry," complained Hornblower, "when a man's trying to be grateful to you for saving his life. Just for that you'll be the last man I'll tell, Henry, the very last; and the time'll come when you'd rather have something on John Boland than on any man in the world. See if it don't! Then you'll think of it and ask me on your bended knees and damned if I know whether I'll tell you even then—unless it's to save your neck, the way you saved mine today."
"The buzzard!" summed up Henry, as he watched the man clamber down and waddle off, then was flushed with confusion to see that Mr. Boland was beckoning to him. When he discovered that Miss Billie Boland and her mother were upon the back seat of the car and must also have been witnesses of what had occurred, he blushed the deeper.
Yet once he arrived at the side of the automobile, nothing in their reception of him tended to increase the young man's sense of shame. On the contrary, the ladies, white-faced, rather devoured him with their eyes at the same time that they murmured inarticulate expressions of admiration.
"I am sincerely grateful to you for a very heroic act, Harrington," announced Mr. Boland, his voice still ringing with something of the excitement which had been in it when he made his speech. "You saved our people from a terrible thing—terrible!"
"I only did what it occurred to me to do at the moment," stammered Harrington, perceiving that this first speech which John Boland had ever addressed to him personally was exactly in keeping with his conception of the man—big, frank, self-contained, honorable and far-seeing. "I am afraid I must have appeared very ridiculous."
"Ridiculous? I should say not!" gasped Mrs. Boland, whose full bosom was still billowing like a sea.
"You were won-der-ful!" glowed Billie, color coming again into her cheeks, and she gave Henry a full-orbed glance.
"I was right," he said to himself; "her eyes are blue!" All the world had blurred save only this vision directly in front of him.
"You did what only a brave and resourceful man would have dared to do," insisted Mr. Boland. "Furthermore, you appear to have been the one person who saw this preposterous scalawag in a true perspective of absolute unimportance. That shows a cool mind and a penetrating one, Mr. Harrington. You make me feel that Boland General has been overlooking something." For the first time his thin lips relaxed into a tolerable approach to a dry and benevolent smile.
Henry, hearing only vaguely, heard enough to know he should contrive a modest smile himself and essayed to do so.
"Guess we could make a place for Mr. Harrington at our little family dinner party tonight, mother, couldn't we?" the magnate inquired over his shoulder. "You met Mr. Harrington at the club, Billie? I have been hearing some pretty fine things about Mr. Harrington this afternoon from Judge Allen, and what we have just seen makes me feel that we've been kind of behindhand in getting acquainted."
"Why, of course," intervened Billie, her lips taking on a wilful expression; "Mr. Harrington must come to the dinner and stay for my party—if he will forgive the tardiness and informality of our invitation." The expression of appeal with which the beautiful eyes lighted, under those so perfectly arched brows, made Harrington feel that he would forgive anything from them.
"I—I should be delighted, of course," beamed Henry, seeing no one but Billie.
"We dine at seven," announced Mrs. Boland, from somewhere off on the distant edge of the world.