Chapter XXIV: In the Throes

From that first interview of his with the field marshals of the reform movement, Craig had slipped back again into the camp of the enemy. There was that girl named Violet, whom Bartow had incidentally mentioned to him as a friend of Trick O’Ray. Through her he had learned of the hiding place of Ben Jarvis.

Dangerous business, with danger lurking around a dozen corners; a nether region, sure enough, where all was darkness, figuratively speaking, and the nerves of the inhabitants thereof were what might be expected of the nerves of those who live in the dark. Each one uncertain as to what the next minute might show; each one ready to strike his neighbor; with friends and foes all intermingled; no man or woman fully trustful of any one but himself or herself.

Something of an event, though, the arrival of this distinguished stranger known and honored as Three Sevens.

It didn’t matter very much where he came from, or what his remote ancestors were. He was young. He was good to look at. He apparently had all the money in the world. He was famous. He had emptied a prison single-handed. Here he was, still at large, defying arrest, with all the audacity of a pirate walking the streets of old Charleston.

It wasn’t only the audacity, though, that appealed to Violet’s heart. Here was a gentleman. Where did she get it--that hankering for politeness and consideration? Where did the flower, her namesake, get its hankering for sun and air? Violet was young. Violet was comely.

There was another lady--a lady, perhaps, the other way round. That is to say, well-bred, educated, beautiful, costumed like a Fifth Avenue heiress. The lady who was the friend of Max, who was the friend of Count Wolf. And yet, so they said, a lady who would have poisoned one’s wine as quickly as anybody, should that be necessary--either on her own account or on account of any one with sufficient power or sufficient money to get her to act.

“_La Marebello_”--the Marebello--some even called her the Princess Marebello!

With her also Craig became acquainted. In her also it is just possible that Craig may also have awakened some faint murmur of long-forgotten voices. How strange, when he was so young, that he should hold so aloof from flattery, from wooing.

It was she who told Craig not only about Max and Count Wolf, and where the latter could be reached, and most hastily brought to Chicago; she gave him also queer bits of information from high official sources, things that ensnared his reputation, gave him moments of uneasiness, made him hasten his plans.

For example, she told him that Artie, the lawyer, had been arrested.

“By the police?”

No, not by the police, but by the detectives attached to the district attorney’s office, and that the maneuver had thrown a scare into certain persons.

“The crooks?”

No; the police; especially the head of the police system; to be particular, into the stout person of Captain Fleyenhall.

“Who’s Fleyenhall?”

Didn’t he know? What a baby he was! Ah, my dear little Three Sevens! Why, Fleyenhall was the real ruler of the police department, the minister plenipotentiary--the Marebello could use words like that--of all the crooked politicians.

There was even a third woman, a retired little widow in a retired little street, who had lost all her money once in a crooked mining scheme, with the crookedness whereof the widow, needless to say, had nothing to do. And it was to her house that the once wealthy and powerful Taylor Leamy, reported dead in San Francisco as the result of a drowning accident, but none the less very much alive, was directed to seek lodging. Lodging the widow gave him. It was a quiet retreat--just such a retreat as Leamy loved when lying low, waiting for the big money to come his way again.

Complicated, yet simple, the problem that confronted Craig. He was at times like a keeper in a cage of wild animals--one of those so-called “happy families,” where polar bear and tropic snake, the big cats and fear-crazed apes are congregated under the will--the cruel will and the fateful will--of the animal god, man.

Craig felt himself such a keeper, more than once, with full knowledge that a little flinching, a slight misstep, would spill his blood in the sawdust.

More often, though, when he closed his eyes, he saw himself at the center of a whirling vortex. It was like one of those photographs of a tailless comet, or of a spiral nebula where a brand-new world is taking shape.

And now into the whirling nebula of this new universe that was forming for him, there had entered the greatest force of all forces--greater than the forces that swing the stars through space--love! Otherwise, would the nebula have been there at all? Probably not in his case, at any rate, nor in the case of any man.

He carried Joan’s photograph with him wherever he went. She had sent it to him. It was his fetish, his lucky charm.

It made him sure of himself when he was luring Count Wolf up from his retreat beyond the Mexican border, enticing Leamy from his hiding place in Cincinnati, getting Trick O’Ray to crawl out of his rat hole over there in East St. Louis, and then preventing Trick from taking the life instantly of the too gallant Ben Jarvis, who had held up and shot the new warden on the very day of his escape from San Pedro.

Craig actually was accomplishing a work that no ordinary detective could have accomplished.

Those men he was after knew that their days of utility to the real ruler of the underworld were past. Prison had soured and embittered them. They were no longer the gay and gallant creatures they had been in the past: older, shrewder, wickeder, more avid and desperate of success. They were flecks in the nebula, and they themselves were electric and as devoid of mercy as shooting stars as they neared the vortex. It took a power like Craig’s to set them in motion, direct their orbits to the lines of eventual order.

No stool pigeon could have moved very far in this business without getting shot or dirked.

Nor, as Craig was increasingly aware, were these criminals he was after the dominant elements in this tightening whirl of movement of which he was the vortex.

There was the political campaign which had come to be, to a large measure, a part of the same labor of creation. It was a hot campaign. It was vital. So several million human beings were regarding it--themselves like stardust in motion--part of a planetary movement in which they were all engaged, but over which they had no control. You could see it by the way they read their papers as they swung from workshop to home, from home to workshop, or pressed around the soap-box orators in the streets at night, or jawed each other in saloons and clubs.

Caught in the same movement were others whose presence in it had not been divined by either Craig’s friends, Courtney and Colonel Bird on the one hand, or Craig’s enemies--the crooked politicians, and big Captain Fleyenhall--on the other.

The governors of two sovereign States were wrangling--still in secret, so far as the public was concerned--as to whether or not Craig should be extradited. Not Craig, but Thomas Masters, No. 3777, on the rolls of San Pedro.

Ex-Warden Green, of San Pedro, had himself been arrested by an officer of the district attorney’s office, and had then been released on his promise to go home, with his double-barreled shotgun; but it was only to be picked up again in a friendlier fashion by another detective, from police headquarters this time, who advised him to stay in town.

Green also was whirling around that vortex, which was Daniel Craig. He was to whirl faster yet before long.

It was Artie the lawyer who was going to see to that. Artie himself was whirling to a certain extent, as if he himself had been caught in the drag of some planetary current that was spinning him to an unknown destination.

Yet Artie wasn’t altogether blind as to what was going on, either. In fact, it was his knowledge of what might be going on a little later that had caused Artie to cast off the moorings of a lifetime and join the aforesaid whirl.

Secretly Artie was getting ready to abandon the crooks and all their works. Not merely because Artie had had a bad hour with Colonel Bird. Nor was it merely because Artie believed that the reformers were going to carry the present campaign. Often enough in the past he had followed the boss into temporary retirement. Such retirements always were temporary. There had always been compensations, moreover, for any reversal that might befall at the polls. It was nothing so big as a political campaign that could have shifted Artie from his safe and comfortable berth at the Jake Exchange.

No, it was a little thing. After all, it isn’t the storm that wrecks the ship tied up at the wharf. It’s the dropped match, or a rat, or an inch of faulty insulation.

The little thing in Artie’s case was a certain young man he had always known as Brewster, who had come to him first as a shivering but fairly decent country boy, confessing that he had killed a man, on his sister’s account, and asking what he should do. He had advised the boy. Now the boy was a wreck.

The whole scene had come back to Artie one night while he was sitting in the presence of Captain Fleyenhall sipping champagne.

Artie was no fool; not in the ordinary sense of the word. That night, as he had sat there sipping champagne, a certain fact had kept knocking at the door of that inner chamber of his consciousness where he kept so many secrets locked in. But he had to find out for sure the boy’s real name.

There were great forces in motion, assuredly. And even more than Craig himself perceived, was he the vortex of them. So far as he was concerned, he had directed some of these forces with wisdom and care.

It was coming toward five o’clock, at a season of the year when this meant early twilight. In the corridors of the office building the lights had already been turned on, but the only light in the office itself was that of the afterglow that came in through the western windows. Craig turned from one of these windows in response to a knock at the door. Who was it? He had a hand on the revolver in the side pocket of his coat as he stepped over to the door and threw it open.

At first all that his eyes would tell him was that a girl was standing there. Beyond this he could scarcely believe his eyes. He had been thinking of Joan. Here she was. It was too much like magic.

“Joan!”

He stepped back. She entered. It was she who closed the door. She looked at him for a moment in silence. She was as if short of breath. But almost instantly she smiled slightly. She put a hand to her breast.

“I was frightened,” she confessed.

“Come over and sit down,” he said. She followed him toward a chair. His mind was in a riot. So it was really she. This was no magic after all, other than the magic of all natural events. “I didn’t know that you were in Chicago.”

“We just arrived,” she said.

“You and your father?”

“Yes.”

“I shall be glad to see him.”

“We came on your account.”

“On my account? How did you find me here?”

“You were in danger,” gasped Joan.

“I’ve been living in danger.”

“I know.”

“And your father?” Craig asked.

“He was delayed. I think he may have been delayed for a purpose. I was in the room waiting for him when the telephone rang. I answered. It was some one who said he was--it sounded like Artie----”

“Artie the lawyer.”

“He wanted to talk to father. I told him who I was. He said: ‘For Heaven’s sake, get word to Craig that----’ He was speaking so rapidly and softly, as if he were in a hurry and afraid that he would be overheard--that Banson--Benson----”

“Bannister?”

“That was it; that Bannister was coming to kill you.”

“Here?”

“He gave me the address. That was all I could remember distinctly; all I prayed not to forget.”

“Where were you and your father?”

She named a hotel.

“How did Artie the lawyer know you were there?”

“Father has been in communication with him.”

“About?”

“Your pardon. There’s a man in San Pedro who told us about the boy who shot Beekman; said that we could get confirmation from this man.”

Craig spoke softly and reverently. “Heaven bless you and your father for the greatest people in the world! I love you both so I’d die for you. Only, never has life been so precious to me, Joan; all sky, Joan, like the view from this window. Let me tell you now, while there’s yet time. I’ve been counting on a pardon--just how I wasn’t sure. But I have friends who believe in me, and there’s a whole empire down in the Southwest that they’re going to send me to, an empire to conquer, reconstruct. It’s mostly sky, and rock, as yet. But in my mind I’ve seen it transformed. You and I--Joan, do you love me?”

“I--I----”

He knelt down in front of her. He took her hands. She lowered her face like a bashful child. One of his own hands crept up her arm.

“Now,” said he, “nothing can happen to me. I’m as safe as Achilles, and even the heel is immune. Hurry back to your hotel before your father has a chance to worry about you. Tell him what has happened, of course. Tell him that I shall hope to see him to-night, or to-morrow morning.”

“You’ll not come with me now?”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“This is the time, almost the hour, when I am to wipe out the rest of the debt in the red ledger.”

“No, no! Come with me!”

“Joan!”

“But I’m frightened.”

“You need not be. What have I just been telling you? Aren’t you my guardian angel? Haven’t you just put me on my guard?”

“But this Bannister!”

“Will be surprised.”

“You know him?”

“Count Wolf, late of San Pedro.”

“Count Wolf, of the red ledger?”

“The same.”

“Daniel, let us call the old debts off.”

“Joan!”

They had been standing in the twilight, the deepening twilight, lit ineffectually by the glimmer that came in from the hall and the last green glow of the west, where a single white star blazed. Craig drank in the poetry of the girl’s presence here with him at an hour like this. They were like cave dwellers, with a cave far up a mountainside. Here in the heart of the big city the noises that reached them were hushed and small. The voices of the multitude and of the machines--trolleys and motors, trains and ships--were but as the chirping of crickets and the booming of frogs.

Craig put out his hand, and the electric light was on. As if it also were in response to his touch, a door leading into an inner office opened and a strongly built young man appeared. He blinked at Craig and Miss Gracie.

“I beg your pardon,” he began.

“That’s all right, Smith,” laughed Craig softly.

The man called Smith disappeared. Craig smiled at Joan.

“That ought to assure you,” he said. “Mr. Smith is of the district attorney’s staff. I have help at hand in case of emergency. But I am to do this myself--to give Courtney his big story----”

“Courtney?”

Craig explained. It was Courtney who had put these offices at his disposition. They were directly over the offices of Courtney’s paper. A special stairway had even been cut from that inner room to the floor below.

“My trap,” said Craig. “Let Wolf come. But you, Joan----”

“You mean that that bandit was coming to see you here, anyway?”

“Yes, and others.”

“But he intends to kill you.”

“He must have got wind of what was going on. He’ll not kill me. But hurry, Joan.”

“And leave you?”

“You must. I shan’t be alone--not for long. Count Wolf, who has been going under the name of Bannister, was to meet Leamy here, with the idea of robbing him. Wolf expects to rob Leamy, Leamy expects to rob the supposed Bannister. Trick O’Ray’s coming to crack this safe. Ben Jarvis comes to blackmail me. But I’ve been working with the district attorney. Listen!”

In response to his abrupt command they both turned and looked in the direction of the door leading to the outer corridor. They heard the faint rasp of a key in the lock. Then, before either of them could move or utter a word, the door slowly opened.