Chapter II

The girl was dead. The white-coated ambulance surgeon who examined her had shaken his head, and refused to take her in the ambulance. The morgue waggon had taken the body but a short time after the police reserves had beaten their way through a mob of thousands to arrest the white-faced, hysterical prisoner, who cried his innocence through lips battered by the fist of Cartwright.

In the precinct station the prisoner had collapsed, and Cartwright told his story. He had heard a slight noise, and swung around in his chair. At that instant came the flash of the pistol behind him. He heard the man drop it, and he leaped to grapple with him. Yes, he knew the prisoner; name was Nelson, a half-baked kid, who had bothered Miss Reynolds for months. Yes, this was Miss Reynolds’s first engagement; her first appearance on any stage. He was her manager. No, nothing else. Emphatically!

The prisoner, brought around roughly, swore that he was innocent. He had known Miss Reynolds for months, they had been friends in Europe. She had asked him to be present at her first appearance, and at the end of her act he had gone to meet her at the stage entrance. It was there that he was told that she had an engagement with Cartwright. That this made him wild with jealousy he admitted; he knew Cartwright by reputation, and Miss Reynolds was but a girl, innocent, unsophisticated.

He had walked around outside the theatre for about fifteen minutes, then he had decided to go to the box and demand an explanation. The theatre was in darkness for the knife-throwing act, but he knew his way. His hand had been on the black velvet hangings when he stopped. And the revolver flash had come _from the air_ not a foot ahead of him. No, he could not explain how the shot had been fired. No one could have moved from the spot where the pistol had been, _because the weapon dropped on his toe_!

He was taken away to a cell on a charge of murder.

Cartwright, leaving the station when the last of the curious crowd had drifted away, seemed to have aged ten years since the tragedy. He was haggard, the grim, hard smile that had been characteristic was gone, his big hands trembled. He tried in vain to get permission to remove the girl’s body from the morgue immediately. But the law demanded that the coroner see it first; and the official was out of town.

Cartwright remembered his political friends. He tried to locate a dozen over the telephone and failed. Then, by chance, he met the one man in the city who could help him; the one man among the four millions whom he could trust: Theodore Rogers, the theatrical lawyer, a friend for thirty years.

He tried to tell Rogers what he wanted, but his nervousness made his words a jumble.

“What is it, Jim? What’s the trouble?” Rogers shook him, and he looked into his eyes anxiously.

Cartwright told him of the shooting. “And, by God, Ted!” he finished passionately. “I won’t rest a minute till I see that devil in the electric chair! God! To kill a girl like that!”

The lawyer looked at him curiously. This was not the cool, suave Cartwright he had known so long.

Cartwright read the look on the lawyer’s face, and the thoughts behind it. “Not that! I swear it’s not that, Ted!” he choked.

“Come, have a drink,” pleaded Rogers, pulling him toward the lighted entrance of a rathskeller.

“With that girl on a slab in the morgue?”

“One drink,” insisted Rogers. “You are worse than useless this way. Come!”

He dragged Cartwright down the steps. The clock over the bar said half-past two, and the leather-seated booths were in darkness. But drinks could be had. The barman dozed, and the lone waiter yawned as he carried a tray toward the booths in the rear. Rogers led the theatrical man to a seat at the side of the room in front of the bar, ordered whisky, and waited patiently until Cartwright had gulped down the liquor.

“Now tell me about it, Jim,” demanded Rogers.

Cartwright, as near the end of the leather seat as he could get, glanced at the dark booths in the back, then turned and surveyed the front of the place. The rathskeller was empty, except for the dozing barman and the waiter, who had gone into one of the front booths to figure his day’s checks.

“Don’t think--what you’ve been thinking about me and that girl, Ted.” There was almost pathetic pleading in the manager’s voice; it was pitched so low that even the lawyer at the other side of the narrow table could scarcely hear. “She was--a daughter to me--the daughter of the only woman I ever loved.”

Rogers stared. This from the man Broadway thought it knew!

“Remember twenty years ago?” continued Cartwright, in that same low, pleading voice. “The girl I took away from Kelly, that drunken burlesque magician?”

The lawyer nodded, a look of understanding in his eyes.

“You know we loved each other, and we ran away; she, and I, and the six months’ old kid,” he went on. “You know how she died: killed in the C. & O. wreck two hours out of Chicago, two hours after we started--and the kid under her body, alive! I guess that’s what woke me up. All I thought about after that was making money for the kid. I put her with good people, and I didn’t tell them who she was, or who I was. When she got old enough to understand, I adopted her legally. But she never knew who her father and mother were. I couldn’t tell her about the drunken sot that died in the Chicago alcoholic ward. A thing like that would have spoiled her.

“She was born with music in her. I kept her away from me and the people that knew me. I sent her abroad. And to-night was her try-out! I wanted to see if she could face the lights, because I wouldn’t have her laughed at by the highbrows if she couldn’t make good. And she did! God, how they went wild! I wouldn’t tell a soul that she was my adopted daughter--until to-morrow. Now----” He fingered his whisky glass with twitching hands.

Theodore Rogers, whose heart was reputed to be of stone, felt a lump in his throat. He pushed his gloves from the table, so in bending he would get the needed instant to hide his feelings. Something made him jerk up his head! He saw----

The roar of the pistol in his ears deafened him. He cried out as the long-barrelled gun recoiled across the table and struck him, butt foremost, on the chest. His glass was crashed to a hundred pieces as the pistol fell on the table before him. The white shirt front of Cartwright was black, a small circle of fire glowed in the linen; on his face was an awful look of horror as his head pitched forward on his arms.

And then Rogers understood what his eyes had first seen; the picture that had lasted but the hundredth part of a second, perhaps, but which would be graven on his mind for a lifetime.

He had seen the pistol against Cartwright’s heart, _with nothing to hold it there_; the recoil of the explosion had driven it across the table before it fell, _because no human hand had grasped it; no finger had pulled the trigger_!