Chapter XXV: Ghosts

It was as if the voice were a harbinger of the rather more ghostly things that were to follow. As a matter of fact, the voice was one that Craig recognized. The recognition brought dismay with it rather than fear--perhaps disgust rather than dismay. It was the voice of the ex-warden of San Pedro. It was followed by Green himself. He came into the room slowly. His eyes had never wavered from Craig, but he had also seen that a girl was there. Craig hadn’t moved.

Said Green:

“Try anything this time, and a wild bullet may hit this little friend of yours.”

That would hold him.

“What do you want?” asked Craig.

“What do I want?” And Green’s voice was shaking with his pent-up emotion. “Oh, Heaven! Now, what do I want!”

“Don’t!” cried Craig.

There was fear in his cry this time, all right, but it was fear for Joan. She had stepped between Craig and the big ex-warden as calmly as a mother would have stepped between a child and a vicious dog.

“Get back!” panted Green. “Or, by thunder----”

He stopped as he saw who it was. The rage and the triumph in his face took on an infusion of dirty mirth.

“What do you want?” Joan demanded in turn.

“A pretty howdy-do!” droned Green through his beard. “You and this here con together, eh? Just as I suspected! Warden’s gal! Highfalutin’ society folks! Why, now I have got you to rights, both of you, and damn me if I wouldn’t just as leave shoot one as t’other, or both--and good riddance. Stand aside.”

“Green!”

The ex-warden gave a slight jerk. Craig’s voice had snapped like a pistol shot.

“Hold up your hands,” said Green.

“First, I’ll remind you of your own daughter,” said Craig, softly and rapidly, between closed teeth. “Have you forgotten about her?”

“You shut up. Are you goin’ to resist arrest?”

“Would you like to see her again?”

“Shut up!”

“She’s here.”

“I’ll show----”

There was no telling what Green would have done next. Those private dreams of his were dancing in his brain. He was asking himself if this wasn’t “resisting arrest.” Only, there was a witness--and such a confusing witness! Again, he knew himself to be somewhat unnerved by that surprising reference that Craig had made to a family secret. But surprise is dangerous to a man of Green’s type--apt to startle the mad tiger of his nature into a premature leap.

“She’s here,” said Craig steadily.

Then, there was another ghostly voice--it must have sounded ghostly to Green, all right, to judge from the way he took it.

“Father!”

She came in from the middle office. Courtney had seen that she should be there, Green’s lost daughter Amy, she who called herself “Mrs. Beekman.”

Green had the look about him of one who has been surprised in the dark by a flash of light or an unexpected noise. He still held his weapon presented. He still kept his eyes on Craig. But he had heard that voice. The Lord only knows what memories it may have awakened!

“Amy!” he gasped.

Craig, watching his opportunity, and knowing that death was still, so to speak, an invisible onlooker in the room, ready to take a hand at any moment, stepped swiftly forward and in a flash secured the warden’s weapon.

“You won’t need it,” said Craig.

But it is doubtful if the warden heard him. Green was looking at this apparition of his daughter, Amy--Mrs. Beekman. Almost any one would have found that lady ghostly, not to say ghastly--white-faced, unhealthy, stricken with her own tragic memories. She tried to smile at her father. Her flat breast heaved. Any one could see that a sob or a few tears would have been of the greatest relief to her, but neither came.

“How’d you git here?” asked Green.

Such is the language of real emotion.

“Mr. Courtney--he’s the gentleman I’ve been working for--thought I ought to tell you----”

The ex-warden of San Pedro here got a fresh grip on himself. He turned from the pale girl roughly. Perhaps it was too much for him to see those twin dreams of his fading so rapidly. His voice was a throaty growl as he spoke to Craig:

“So you’ve dragged my daughter into this, too, have you? Thought to save yourself! I’ll show you! I’ll show you!” He spoke to his daughter. “And you! Stayed away from me all this time only to show up now to fight for this dirty crook! What do you mean by lettin’ him use you? Hadn’t you fallen low enough already--brought enough disgrace on me--you--you----”

No one else was speaking or trying to speak. Craig, with a dawning knowledge of what might have been on the way, himself was spellbound. So was Joan Gracie. She also may have guessed. Certainly the daughter of Samuel Green must have known. Only the father himself was altogether blind, altogether unsuspecting.

Through the door from the inner office came Artie the lawyer. Craig remembered certain hints that Courtney had dropped from time to time. And Artie was followed by a youth even more pallid than this sister of his. It was she who whispered his name.

“Brewster!”

Green echoed the name with his mouth open.

“Brewster!”

He slowly turned. Father and son were looking at each other, the father numbed, transfixed, the boy merely nervous and diffident.

“Hello, governor!”

The boy tried an assumption of nonchalance. He pulled himself together. He made a step forward briskly to where Green stood, ready to shake hands with him, ready to embrace him--do anything filial.

But whatever his intentions were they were to be deferred. He hadn’t taken two steps before his wandering, rather embarrassed, furtive eyes found Craig. Craig had backed against a window, Joan at his side. All this was a very fast little drama, with something about it that neither the speech nor the action quite conveyed. Somehow, as an imaginative witness would have said, as if there were actors and elements there that were invisible, that were ghostly, the ghost, perhaps, of the murdered Beekman.

And there was something ghostly in the face of Daniel Craig. He looked at the boy Brewster, and the boy Brewster looked at him. There was no great difference in their ages, but suddenly it was as if Brewster were shriveled and old, Craig towering. But Craig was towering with an odd mixture of both triumph and pity. He choked out a whisper:

“You don’t have to tell!”

“What?”

It was a cry from the heart of Green, as if he were beginning to comprehend. Brewster was mute. He let his sister speak.

She told how she had met Mr. Beekman, and gave a flitting glimpse of their romance--he the handsome stranger coming to town on some local contracting job, and how he had sympathized with her. Said this pale, hollow-eyed girl: “He was the only man that ever understood me.” And then the local job was done, and Mr. Beekman had gone over to the Stonehill construction work, and forgot his promises, and forgot to write to her, and everything.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” queried Green hoarsely, through his beard.

“I was afraid of you,” said the girl.

“When I tried to bring you up God-fearin’----”

“You always laughed whenever I cried----”

Green wasn’t laughing now. He recalled what Craig had said about Green’s never laughing again.

So Amy had confided her story to her brother, Brewster, and Brewster had conceived that he was acting as any man should when he filched one of his father’s own revolvers----

“They might ’a’ thought it was me,” said Green, looking at Brewster.

The boy sniffed and worked his shoulders, meaning thereby to indicate that he would have looked out for that end of it all right. And Brewster went over to Stonehill merely intending to frighten Mr. Beekman and make him come back.

Green, shaken, as if emptied of his bigness and strength, turned to where Craig stood. At last Green was seeing the story whole, putting into it those several things that Craig had said to him on occasion.

“And you knowed my boy done it?”

Craig nodded.

“Why--why----”

Said Courtney: “It looked like the hand of Providence.”

It must have looked like Providence to Craig--some sort of divine intervention--when he saw entering the office just now from the same door by which Courtney had come, two men whom, of all the men in the world, he just then most desired to see. One of them was Colonel Bird, the district attorney. The other was Major Gracie. Old friends they were, and now brought together in a cause that had become vital to both of them. They had called to see Courtney, had learned that Courtney was here. His private secretary had seen that they found him without loss of time.

There was a momentary interruption when they came into the room. Gracie was surprised to see his daughter. She ran to greet him. Bird and Courtney exchanged a word.

But that other drama--the drama of the former warden of San Pedro and his family, a drama in which Craig had been destined to play so bitter a rôle--was tumbling forward, clumsily yet swiftly, of its own momentum, and would know no interference.

Green himself was as a man who has been stricken with paralysis of brain as well as body. He put out his hands as if he didn’t see very well. His big back was bowed as if he were expectant of a lash. Then, suddenly, he tried to bully it through.

“It’s all a frame-up--a lie,” he proclaimed hoarsely.

His daughter Amy slowly and sadly--and, one would have said, accusingly--shook her head.

“You’re tryin’ to save a dirty convict,” coughed Green.

“He saved me!” said Brewster, with a touch of the dramatic, as he pointed at Craig.

“But he put you up to it!” snarled Green.

“Yes, he did not!” said the boy, his voice going shrill with a touch of hysteria. “He tried to steer me right. But I shot Beekman!”

“Yes,” said the girl, in her commonplace accents, “Brewster came back and told me what he had done, and then we both decided it would be better to run away----”

That was about all, except a confirmatory detail here and there from the boy, and from the girl, and from the ex-warden of San Pedro himself. Green had suffered a paralyzing shock, one perhaps destined to win him back his immortal soul. Green was beginning to heave. He shambled as he walked. He groped for a chair. He sat down in it. By and by he dropped his face into his hands. He was silent.

As if by degrees, and without the cognizance of the others in the office, the ex-warden’s daughter and his derelict son joined him where he sat, thus forming a little family group of their own. Later the boy was to stand trial, and be acquitted. Almost any lawyer could have got him off; and Courtney had hired a good one.

But at this present moment, the others there in the office had divers things to think about. Major Gracie and his daughter had to have a word of explanation on their own account--how she happened to be there, where he had been. Artie the lawyer had reports to make to Courtney and Colonel Bird.

And, there for an interval, Craig was as if all alone. He had turned. He faced the sky. He had heard his innocence proven here in the presence of the only friends he had on earth or cared to have. It made his own breast heave.

Then it was as if the strength of a storm had been confined in him, had become a mere potentiality of strength, as he turned from the window, and faced the others. He was sober. He felt a certain solemnity. He had a strange sense that this was some higher, better Daniel Craig who had now taken possession of himself--his mind and his voice.

“I am still Three Sevens,” he said pleasantly.

“You are Daniel Craig,” said Colonel Bird, with a combination of that pettiness and strength that characterized him.

“I still have a debt to pay,” said Craig.

Here Courtney spoke up, almost as if an accusation had been brought against him:

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Craig, old man; but if you refer to--why, confound it--he’s helped us put the scoundrels on the run; hasn’t he, colonel?”

Craig smiled. His smile took in Joan Gracie without singling her out, which might have been embarrassing. But of all those there, Joan was possibly the only one besides Craig who guessed the nature of the debt to which Craig referred. It was Major Gracie who spoke next:

“You’re Daniel Craig, sir; and I have the honor to tell you so, officially.”

Craig took time to think. Perhaps he was seeing wrong. Perhaps all debts were balanced. But there was no conviction in his mind too great for thought.

“I’ve got to finish what I started out to do,” he said.

“Oh, you mean the plan to trap those crooks!” said Artie.

“Yes.”

“Nothing doing.”

“They got the tip?”

“Not about what you were going to do.”

“But your own tip that Wolf was coming here to kill me?”

“That was because the Wolf was being trailed by a New York detective and was feeling ugly and thought you might have squealed.”

“But the others?”

“Like the count himself. Captain Fleyenhall,” said Artie, taking the rest of his audience into his confidence, “learned what Mr. Craig, and you, Mr. Courtney, and Colonel Bird, were planning to do here to-night. It was Fleyenhall’s plan to nip your plan by arresting your men himself, downstairs, and thus turn the tables on you----”

“Clever,” said Courtney.

“But not clever enough,” said Artie. “Fleyenhall couldn’t pull anything like that. He’s nothing but a big, thick-headed cop. Every crook in town knew what he was up to the moment he called in his men.”

“And you mean?” said Colonel Bird.

“The crooks have scattered.”

“And our pet plan spoiled,” said the colonel.

“Fleyenhall’s also,” said Courtney. “That’s one satisfaction--in spoiling our plan--Craig’s plan--they spoiled their own.”

Craig had looked from one to the other. Wasn’t that the spinner in his skull at work again?

But now Craig was looking altogether at Joan, and she was looking altogether at him. Let the others think what they would. She understood. Craig spoke again:

“Not the highest gift of Heaven will do me any good unless I’ve settled the account in full. Later on, I’ll pay back the money that Courtney has advanced. There are other small debts here and there that I’ll have to pay. But there are still these four men of prey at large--Leamy and Count Wolf, Trick O’Ray and Ben Jarvis. I’ll go and get them.”

It was not with the voice of the old Craig, but with the voice of this newer Craig, that he spoke now as he turned to Courtney:

“You’ll have your story, and you’ll have it here!”

“You mean----”

“----that since my men haven’t kept their appointment, I’ll go out and fetch them.”

“Can you?”

“I will.”

“They may be gone.”

“I know where.”

“It’s now six o’clock.”

“I’ll have the last of them here--by midnight!”

Craig heard himself saying this. What was he promising? It wasn’t a promise. It was a prophecy.

He turned to Colonel Bird.

“Now that the police aren’t likely to interfere----”

“I’ll put the screws to them if they try it,” said the district attorney. “What with Artie’s affidavit.”

Craig had a quick smile for Artie. He completed what he had to say to Colonel Bird:

“You may have your own detectives there in the back room, as we originally planned----”

All this as if there was some higher intelligence using his voice, using his brain, as there unquestionably was, but, nevertheless and always, this higher intelligence his very own.

It was a little vision of Joan as he had last seen her--hands clasped, a light in her eyes--that stood out in the jumble of other visions that were with him as he left the room. He comprehended the emotion of hers, a commingling of fear and faith, of tenderness and awe. And he comprehended all this as if they were already one--as if they already had been married--as possibly they had in the alchemy of souls.

He went down in the elevator and noticed nothing and heard no sound not necessary to what lay ahead of him. His concentration was perfect, as in the case of a man possessed. He called a taxi, gave an address.