Chapter XX: The Magnet

A stout man, rather flabby and down at the heel, had been standing for some time in the Cincinnati post office deeply interested, apparently, in his copy of the _Times Star_. Also he appeared to be rather nearsighted, to judge by the way he held his paper. Only some one close to him would have seen that he wasn’t reading the paper at all, and that his eyes, anything but nearsighted, watched furtively all who came and went at the window marked General Delivery.

The day was hot. The post office was airless. Now and then a bead of sweat rolled down the flabby man’s face. Now and then a fly sought, and found a landing place on his stubbly cheek. He let the sweat roll. He let the fly hum and forage.

An old colored mammy of the “befo’-de-wah” type waddled past the window, then an anæmic, half-grown girl, and an Italian laborer. These gone, the flabby man with the newspaper cast a final glance about the room. No one visible. He drew a long breath. He stepped up to the window with alacrity.

He spoke a name. The clerk sifted through a handful of letters, tossed one of these aside.

“Where were you expecting it from?”

“Chicago.”

The clerk shoved the letter through the window, turned his back. The flabby man also turned, slowly. He was still the only one in the neighborhood of the wicket. He had chosen the right time.

He was safe in the room of a small office of the neighborhood before he opened his mail. The envelope, addressed “James R. Henderson,” contained a brief note with no address at all. It read:

Fishing good and plenty of bait at the old grounds.

The flabby man read this with great satisfaction. With an even greater satisfaction, however, he read an inclosure from the same envelope. This was a newspaper clipping with a San Francisco date line. It stated that the body of a man found in the harbor there had been identified as that of Taylor Leamy, recently escaped from San Pedro Prison, and once known as the king of the slick engineers, one of the most notorious mining swindlers the country had ever known.

The flabby man had lost some of his flabbiness when he had completed his reading. He closed his eyes. He raised his face with a beatific smile.

“Well, well, well,” he droned. “I feel pretty chipper for a drowned man at that!”

His mood changed. He glanced about him at the sultry and meager little office. One would have said that the office was personal. He spat at it. His erstwhile flabby face took on a look of ferocious triumph.

“Good night for you!” he gritted. “I’ll show ’em whether I’m dead or not. Money! Suckers! A million dollars’ worth of stock! And Taylor Leamy hisself again!”

* * * * *

About the same time that this monologue was in course of delivery, there was a dialogue in progress in the back room of a saloon in East St. Louis. It was a sordid place, where this dialogue was staged--dank and dark, acrid with the effluvia of stale beer and the smell of cold tobacco smoke--but it suited admirably the parties to the conversation. There were sleeping rooms upstairs that could be reached by a flight of stairs from the room itself. The windows of most of these rooms were convenient to the houses next door. Underneath, there was a cellar, also available through an interior stairway, but with a semisecret exit through an adjoining cellar and thence into a vacant lot.

“It’s a neat little dump,” said one of the speakers ironically, with a glance for the squalor about him.

He was rather a dandified youth, dark and well barbered; but dandified only according to certain standards. The new cap he wore was pressed down too close to his ears. His necktie, also new, was green and purple.

The man across the table from him was not so neat, although the clothing he wore still had the creases of the store it had come from. It was the man’s face, though, that would have kept almost any one from remarking what he wore--a face that was white, exceedingly bitter. It was the face of a monkey that had been bleached and otherwise mistreated.

“It’s better’n stir,” protested monkey-face, getting the other’s irony. “And how in hell am I goin’ to change it wit’ the bulls and the stools of the whole world layin’ fer me?”

The other brought from his pocket a paper which he carefully unfolded and flattened on the table. The paper was a poster. It was headed “$300 REWARD.” Then there were a pair of portraits, full face and profile. Under this was the information that the portraits were those of Edward Rogers, alias Trick O’Ray, safe blower, escaped from San Pedro, et cetera, et cetera.

The other compared the portraits with the face of the man opposite him. He refolded the paper complacently.

“He thought of that, too, Trick,” said he.

“Who?”

“Three Sevens!”

“Was it him that sent you?”

“Who else? He says to me: ‘There’s only two birds in the country that I’ll trust with this job. One of ’em’s Eddie Yarmouth, and he’s still in stir out in old San Pedro,’ he says. ‘The other’s Trick O’Ray.’ Get me?”

“It’s all right fer you to talk, Mike,” said Trick, with a gust of temperament. “But you seen for yourself.” He was referring to the poster.

“’At’s what I’m telling you, Tricky. Three Sevens, he says, ‘Bring Trick a fake birthmark, bring him some woman clothes--some of Violet’s’, he says. ‘She won’t need her old ones any more.’”

“For the love of----”

Trick had suddenly clenched, not his fist, but his whole body. A spasm of black passion came into his face.

“What?” he whispered.

“I thought you knew,” said Mike.

“What?”

“Everybody’s wise.”

“Wise _me_!”

“About Violet’s takin’ up with Benny Jarvis.”

“Him!”

“Sure, he comes to Chicago, sees her. Mebbe he don’t know she’s yours.”

“Cut it!” said Trick hoarsely. “He was my pal in San Pedro.”

“What’s the answer?”

“I’m comin’ to Chi to kill him.”

“But first,” said Mike, “you’ll turn this job. What use’ll Violet be to you, anyhow, if you’re broke?”

* * * * *

By a coincidence which was not strange if all the facts were known--Chicago had become the magnetic pole for yet another late dweller in San Pedro, within the same week. The thing befell when the steamer _Chihuahua_, from Vera Cruz, had barely made her berth in the North River, New York.

A small messenger boy beat the first ship-news reporter up the gangplank and began to bark a name. He didn’t pronounce it very well:

“Seenyore Edwardo Cortinnys Y. Ottero!”

A tall and slender man with classic features and a black beard who had already joined the line of passengers waiting to leave the boat called the boy.

“I am,” he said, with a slow and precise English, “Señor Cortinez.”

“Seenyore Edwardo----” the boy began again, studying the address.

“Si, Señor Eduardo Cortinez y Otero!”

“Sign here,” said the boy.

The tall man with the black beard made a mark on the book that might have been a signature or not, staggered the boy with the gift of a Mexican peso which later turned out to be bad, gave a glance about him, opened his message, and read it at a glance.

It took him but a glance to read it, for the message consisted of but two words, and one of these words was presumably the signature:

Official Max.

The message must have been clear, though, as well as brief. As soon as the gentleman of the black beard had read it he crumpled it into a tight ball. He dropped it into the muddy, churning water between ship and piling. He did this casually, one would have said absent-mindedly; but, at the same time, his eyes were flicking hither and yon, and the muscles of his cheek were twitching, even as a cat’s tail twitches at a moment of high tension.

Fear also can serve as a magnetic force, as much as love, or greed, or jealousy.

The recent Count Wolf could have attested to that. Max was to have met him here in New York. And there must have been a reason, good and sufficient, why Max should have wired him from Chicago. As a matter of fact, the reason was amply stated in that one word: “Official.” In the vocabulary of both Max and the count, otherwise Señor Eduardo Cortinez y Otero, that one word meant police, Federal agents, judges, prison.

Count Wolf had had enough of “official” for a while. He was going to Chicago as swiftly as he could. He prayed heaven--or hell--that nothing should delay him.

As a matter of fact, all these men--Leamy, Trick O’Ray, Ben Jarvis, and now Count Wolf, were fleeing as lovers elect to keep some mystic rendezvous. Always it happens like that in the affairs of men.