Chapter XXII: The Underworld

It was Jim Bartow, the man who had occupied cell No. 1 of the punishment block, back there in San Pedro. Not a bad sort. He had tried crime as an experiment. The experiment had failed.

Craig answered a signal, and without haste, with all that elaborate but stealthy watchfulness which Craig himself had learned was as much a part of the lives of the hunted in big towns as it was in the jungle, he and Bartow were outside.

“This way,” said Bartow.

He led the way down a narrow passage at the side of the building they had left. They came into a dark yard. Here Bartow listened long. He beckoned Craig to follow.

There was much of the jungle beast about this guide, Craig reflected. His shoulders sloped. His strength and agility were disguised by an apparent looseness and weakness of build. It was the head that made a difference. Bartow’s head also contained a sort of thinking machine, said Craig to himself, and it was working now.

“I came there to warn another pal of mine,” said Bartow, after a while. “I got the tip straight that the bulls were out to-night for an old-fashioned clean-up, all over the town, on account of that mess you was in to-day over at the wood yard. You’re great.”

From the back yard of the saloon they had come into the rear areaway of a block of tenement buildings. They went through the basement of these into a shabby and shadowy street. They crossed this to a vacant lot. At the next street they stopped. Not more than a couple of hundred yards away a patrol wagon had halted near the curb. Policemen were piling out of it.

“The tip was straight,” breathed Bartow.

Craig didn’t speak.

Bartow, by a roundabout course, had brought Craig to a tumble-down shanty in the corner of a vacant lot. There he lit a lantern and started to make coffee over a smelly oil stove.

“Me, I’m no good,” Bartow explained indulgently. “I got started too late. The live ones, like in every other line, are specialists these days. Am I right or am I wrong? The yeggs are yeggs. The Dutch-house-men are Dutch-house-men. But you--holy smoke! I been reading what the papers been printing about you--you’re an all-round genius.”

“I hope you lay off the crooked stuff, Bartow,” said Craig, out of his reflection.

“Sure.”

“What are you doing now?”

“Night watchman.” And Bartow vaguely indicated the cabin and the vacant lot beyond. “It’s a political job.”

“Political?”

“Sure.” He gave Craig a survey of the situation. Almost every one would be taken care of, until after election. The election was going to be close. The reformers were getting together. “All any one has to do to get a job,” said Bartow, “is to see Artie the lawyer.”

“Who’s he?”

“The man who hands out all the jobs and looks out for the ’bos and the crooks.”

“That’s me,” said Craig.

Bartow laughed. “I guess you won’t be broke for long,” he said. “Still, you’d better see Artie if you’re thinking of staying in Chicago for a while. He’ll see that the dicks leave you in peace, at least until after election.”

It was early morning when Craig found the Jake Exchange Bar, which Bartow had informed him was the throne room of the lawyer he had come to seek. The bar was a heavy and glittering oasis in the midst of a crowded but dull and squalid neighborhood. And, early as it was, Artie was there, like a good magistrate, ready to straighten out the human tangles of the night.

Craig looked at him with interest--a small man with a keen but degenerate face, a sagging lower lip and flapping ears, a big, soft, pendulous nose; only his eyes were hard, glittering hard, and small and cynical, and yet with something very human back of them--his vast fund of purely human wisdom, perhaps.

Artie was leaning against the bar in a disconsolate attitude as Craig drew near him. Artie hadn’t raised his head, but Craig knew that he had been observed. Craig even felt a certain liking for this chancellor of the underworld. At least, here was an intelligence.

There _was_ an underworld, Craig told himself, a little later on. Artie had given him a card with a name scribbled on it, and this was to serve him as a passport should the guardians of the law try to lay hands on him.

He passed through crowded streets. He saw the cars crowded with those who were going to work. Other crowds were about him--intent, clean, human, faithful, brave. And these were the people on whom that underworld battened--these girls and boys, men and women, who worked--worked--worked! They didn’t know it, but he would be fighting for them, from now on, forever. So he told himself. And it was from this thought that his courage came.

Then Craig took an elevator to a small anteroom on one of the upper floors of a skyscraper. From beyond the door there came a click of typewriters, a vague smell of paper and ink. An office boy, with an eye for Craig’s old clothes, asked him whom he wanted to see.

“The man who wrote this,” said Craig, and he showed the pages of the Sunday story he had read.

“What do you want to see him for?”

“To give him a better story.”

“You got to see the Sunday editor,” said the boy, “and he ain’t here.”

Craig was about to turn away, when a tall young man with sandy hair and hazel eyes stepped from the elevator. The young man looked at Craig with a friendly but frank curiosity.

“Who is it for?” he asked.

“The Sunday editor,” Craig answered for himself.

“What do you want to see him about?”

“I had a story.”

“What sort of a story?”

“About”--Craig smiled--this man not much older than himself was easy to talk to--“well, all about this matter of San Pedro, and the mob at Fairhaven. You see, I’m the man----” Craig paused. “May I ask who you are?”

The office boy almost fainted--twice: once when he heard Craig’s statement, again when he heard Craig’s question.

Said the young man with the gray eyes and the sandy hair: “I’m Courtney.”

“Connected with the paper?”

“Why, yes. I happen to own it. Come on in.”

It wasn’t merely an inheritance of great wealth that had made Richard Courtney a man of prominence in the newspaper business, any more than it was the good salaries he paid that made his paper a power in politics. A year or so of journalism made cynics out of most men. It had made no cynic of Courtney. His interest in humanity had survived a half dozen years of exceedingly active politics.

With an air of nonchalance he conducted Craig through a large room where young men sat in their shirt sleeves hammering at the typewriters Craig had heard.

Some of them looked up, then went on with their work. It was nothing new for the chief to come in with a man in old clothes. He was always doing that. He had all sorts of friends. And some said it was a pose. But stories often resulted--queer stories of obscure tragedy, or humor, or of the underside of movements in mines and wheat fields, forests and shipping.

The chief and his caller disappeared into the former’s private office. They hadn’t been there long before the buzzer rang. The office boy who answered the call came back and summoned the boy in the anteroom. The boy from the anteroom entered the private office and stood at awed attention. The chief and the ragged caller were smoking, had the appearance of friends.

“Benny,” said the chief, “what did this gentleman say about himself just now at the door?”

“Nuttin’,” said Benny, with prompt intuition.

“You’ll make a good newspaperman, Benny,” said the chief seriously. “If any one asks you, tell them the same thing. Go tell Mr. Barden that I said he’s to raise your pay. That’s all. And now----” The chief had turned again to Craig.

“I’d feel better about this,” said Craig, after a time, “if I were earning my own money. I want to work. I’m crazy to work. I’m an engineer--or expect to be one. I don’t want gifts.”

“Gifts,” said Courtney. “Are you aware what a story like this will be worth to a property like mine?”

“No, I was thinking only of its value to the community and myself. Meanwhile, I want to work.”

Courtney regarded his visitor thoughtfully. He said:

“Work for me for a week or a month. There’s no time to lose, if we are to get Wolf up from Mexico, locate Leamy, and bring him back. Anyway, to do the thing right you’ll need more money in the next thirty days or so than you could ever earn and be honest.”

“How do you know”--Craig hesitated for a moment before completing the question--“that I am honest?”

“How do you know”--Courtney also hesitated--“that I’m honest myself?”

“It’s a case of trust,” said Craig. “When I came here, I was merely trusting myself and people in general. I was going to tell my story, tell what I was trying to do, what I had done in the past, and expected to do in the future.”

“That was a good scheme, too,” said Courtney. “It always is, if a fellow’s straight. But so few of us are straight enough. And, anyway, you can always do that later on if things don’t go the way we expect them to. Is it all understood?”

“I think so.”

“Let me repeat: First, to the cashier with your order for funds. Second, what you need in the way of clothes and things. Third, a room at the Ritz-Astor----”

“As Daniel Craig.”

“As Daniel Craig, and fourth, a conference to-night--formal dress--in suite No. 53 with the district attorney. From this time on none of us must ever be seen together.”

Those friends were right who said that all of Richard Courtney’s brains were not under the hats of high-priced editors. Craig felt that this was the truth as he stepped into the street. He had Courtney’s money in his pocket. In exchange for this Courtney had only his word. Yet Courtney had somehow divined that he, Craig--escaped convict, “Napoleon of the Underworld”--held that given word more precious than his eyes.