Delphi Collected Works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Illustrated) (Series Four Book 26)

by Edgar Rice Burroughs

  The searching eyes of the plain-clothes man had not failed to detect the little shudder of horror that had been the visible reaction in the girl to the sudden recollections induced by mention of that unpleasant affair, and while he had no reason whatever to suspect her or another of any criminal responsibility for the man’s death, yet he made a mental note of the effect his words had had upon her.

  Had she not been an inmate of the house at the time the thing occurred? And was it not just possible that an excellent police case might be worked up about her later if the exigencies of the service demanded a brilliant police coup to distract the public’s attention from some more important case in which they had blundered?

  For a moment the girl was silent. How badly he had frightened her with his threat Mr. Doarty had not the faintest conception, nor, could he have guessed the pitiable beating of her heart, would he have been able to conjecture the real cause of her alarm. That the policeman would assume criminal guilt in her should she allow her perturbation to become too apparent she well knew, and so, for the moment of her silence, she struggled to regain mastery of herself. Nor was she unsuccessful.

  “It wouldn’t get you anything,” she said, “to follow that lay, for the report of the coroner’s physician shows that Mr. — that the man died of heart disease. But, cutting out all this foolishness, I’ll swear a complaint against Farris if you want me to — if you thing that it will get you anything. Though, and you can take it from me who knows, it’s more likely to get you a prairie beat out Brighton way — there’s many a bull pullin’ his box tonight out in the wilderness who thought that he could put one over on Abe Farris — and Farris is still doin’ business at the old stand.”

  As they talked they had been walking toward the street, and now Doarty crossed over to the corner with the girl and pulled for the wagon.

  “What did it stand you to forget the guy’s name? he asked, after they had stood in silence for a time awaiting the wagon’s tardy arrival.

  “They offered me a hundred,” she replied.

  “An’, of course, you didn’t take it,” he ventured, grinning.

  The girl made no response.

  “The newspapers sure suffered an awful shock when they found the old bloke was one of the biggest stockholders in two State Street department stores,” continued Mr. Doarty reminiscently.

  “They say his family routed the advertising manager of every paper in the city out of bed at one o’clock in the morning, and that three morning papers had to pull out the story after they had gone to press with it, and stick in a column obituary tellin’ all about what he had done for his city and his fellow man, with a cut of his mug in place of the front page cartoon — gee! But it must be great to have a drag like that.”

  “Yes,” said the girl in a faint voice.

  Faintly in the distance a gong clanged.

  “Them guys is sure takin’ their time,” observed Mr. Doarty.

  A little crowd had gathered about the couple at the police-box, only mildly curious, for an arrest is no uncommon thing in that section of town; and when they discovered that no one had been cut up, or shot up, and that the prisoner was scandalously sober they ceased even to be mildly curious. By the time the wagon arrived the two were again alone.

  At the station the girl signed a complaint against one Abe Farris, and was then locked up to insure her appearance in court the following morning.

  Officer Doarty, warrant in hand, fairly burned the pavement back to Farris’s. It had been many a month since he had made an arrest which gave him as sincere personal pleasure as this one. He routed Farris out of bed and hustled him into his clothes. This, he surmised, might be the sole satisfaction that he would derive, since the municipal court judge before whom the preliminary hearing would come later in the morning might, in all likelihood, discharge the defendant.

  If the girl held out and proved a good witness there was a slight chance that Farris would be held to the Grand Jury, in which event he would derive a certain amount of unpleasant notoriety at a time when public opinion was aroused by the vice question, and the mayor in a most receptive mood for making political capital by revocation of a few saloon licenses.

  All this would prove balm to Mr. Doarty’s injured sensibilities.

  Farris grumbled and threatened, but off to the station he went without even an opportunity to telephone for a bondsman. That he procured one an hour later was no fault of Mr. Doarty, who employed his most persuasive English in an endeavor to convince the sergeant that Mr. Farris should be locked up forthwith, and given no access to a telephone until daylight. But the sergeant had no particular grudge against Mr. Farris, while, on the other hand, he was possessed of a large family to whom his monthly pay check was an item of considerable importance. So to Mr. Farris, he was affable courtesy personified.

  Thus it was that the defendant went free, while the injured one remained behind prison bars.

  Farris’s first act was to obtain permission to see the girl who had sworn to the complaint against him. As he approached her cell he assumed a jocular suavity that he was far from feeling.

  “What you doin’ here, Maggie?” he asked, by way of an opening.

  “Ask Doarty.”

  “Didn’t you know that you’d get the worst of it if you went to buckin’ me?” queried Farris.

  “I didn’t want to do it,” replied the girl; “ though that’s not sayin’ that some one hadn’t ought to do it to you good an’ proper — you got it comin’ to you, all right.”

  “It won’t get you nothin’, Maggie.”

  “Maybe it’ll get me my clothes — that’s all I want.”

  “Why didn’t you say so in the first place, then, and not go stirrin’ up a lot of hell this way?” asked Farris in an injured tone. “Ain’t I always been on the square with you?”

  “Sure! You been as straight as a corkscrew with me.”

  “Didn’t I keep the bulls from guessin’ that you was the only girl in the place that had any real reason for wantin’ to croak old — the old guy?” continued Mr. Farris, ignoring the reverse English on the girl’s last statement.

  A little shiver ran through the girl at mention of the tragedy that was still fresh in her memory — her own life tragedy in which the death of the old man in the hallway at Farris’s had been but a minor incident.

  “What you goin’ to tell the judge?” asked Farris after a moment’s pause.

  “The truth — that you kept me there against my will by locking my clothes up where I couldn’t get ‘em,” she replied.

  “I was only kiddin — you could ‘a’ had ’em any old time. Anyways, there wasn’t no call for your doin’ this.”

  “You got a funny way of kiddin’; but even at that, I didn’t have any idea of peachin’ on you — he made me,” said the girl.

  “Who? Doarty?”

  The girl nodded. “Sure — who else? He’s got it in for you.”

  Farris turned away much relieved, and an hour later a colored man delivered a package at the station for Maggie Lynch. It contained the girl’s clothes, and an envelope in which were five germ-laden but perfectly good, ten- dollar bills.

  The matron smiled as she opened the envelope.

  “Some fox,” she said.

  “Some fox, is right,” replied the girl.

  2. AND WIRES ARE PULLED

  The Rev. Theodore Pursen sat at breakfast. With his right hand he dallied with iced cantaloupe. The season was young for cucumis melo; but who would desire a lean shepherd for a fat flock? Certainly not the Rev. Theodore Pursen. A slender, well-manicured left hand supported an early edition of the “Monarch of the Mornings,” a sheet which quite made up in volume of sound and in color for any lack of similarity in other respects to the lion of poetry and romance.

  On the table in his study were the two morning papers which the Rev. Pursen read and quoted in public — the Monarch was for the privacy of his breakfast table.

  Across from the divine sat his young
assistant, who shared the far more than comfortable bachelor apartments of his superior.

  The Rev. Pursen laid down the paper with a sigh.

  “Ah me,” he said.

  His assistant looked up in polite interrogation.

  “This is, indeed, an ungrateful world,” continued Mr. Pursen, scooping a delicious mouthful from the melon’s heart.

  “Here is an interview with an assistant State attorney in which he mentions impractical reformers seeking free advertising and cheap notoriety. In view of the talk I had with him yesterday I cannot but believe that he refers directly to me

  “It is a sad commentary upon the moral perspective of the type of rising young men of today, which this person so truly represents, that ulterior motives should be ascribed to every noble and unselfish act. To what, indeed, are we coming?”

  “Yes,” agreed the assistant, “whither are we drifting?”

  “But was it not ever thus? Have not we of the cloth been ever martyrs to the cause of truth and righteousness?”

  “Too true,” sighed the assistant, “we have, indeed.”

  “Yet, on the other hand,” continued Mr. Pursen, “there is an occasional note of encouragement that makes the fighting of the battle worth while.”

  “For example?” suggested the assistant.

  Mr. Pursen turned again to the “Monarch of the Mornings.”

  “Here is a quarter of a column devoted to an interview with me on the result of my investigation of conditions in supposedly respectable residence districts. The article has been given much greater prominence than that accorded to the misleading statements of the assistant State attorney. I am sure that thousands of people in this great city are even this minute reading this noticeable heading — let us hope that it will bear fruit, however much one may decry the unpleasant notoriety entailed.”

  Mr. Pursen held up the newspaper toward his assistant, who read, in type half an inch high:

  “PURSEN PILLORIES POLICE”

  “The ointment surrounding the fly, as it were,” suggested the assistant.

  Mr. Pursen looked quickly at the young man, but discovering no sign of levity in his expression, handed the paper across the table to him and resumed his attack upon the cantaloupe. A moment later the telephone-bell sounded from the extension at Mr. Pursen’s elbow.

  “Yes?” inquired Mr. Pursen.

  “Hello. Dr. Pursen?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Doarty.”

  “Oh, yes; good morning, officer,” greeted Mr. Pursen.

  Mr. Doarty came right to the point. He knew when to beat about the bush and when not to.

  “You been tryin’ to close up Farris’s place for six months; but you ain’t never been able to get the goods on him. I got ’em for you, now.”

  “Good,” exclaimed Mr. Pursen. “ Tell me about it.”

  Mr. Doarty unburdened himself.

  “The girl will be in court this morning to appear against Farris,” he concluded. “You’d better get to her quick, before they do, and stick until she’s called. She’ll need bolstering.”

  “I’ll come down right away,” replied Mr Pursen. “Good-by, and thank you.”

  “And say,” said Doarty, “you can give it out that you tipped me off to the whole thing — I’d just as soon not appear in it any more than I can help.”

  “Just so,” replied Mr. Pursen, and hung up the receiver.

  As he turned back his assistant eyed him questioningly.

  “My friend Mr. Doarty has started something which be is experiencing difficulty in terminating,” guessed Mr. Pursen shrewdly.

  At a quarter before ten the clergyman entered the court-room. He had no difficulty in locating the girl he sought, though the room was well filled with witnesses, friends, and relatives of the various prisoners who were to have their preliminary hearings, and the idle curious.

  “I am the Rev. Mr. Pursen,” he said with smiling lips as he took her hand.

  The girl looked him squarely in the eyes.

  “I come as a friend,” continued Mr. Pursen. “I wish to help you. Tell me your story and we will see what can be done.”

  There were three young men with the clergyman. They had met him, by appointment, at the entrance to the courtroom. The girl eyed them.

  “Reporters?” she asked.

  “Representatives of the three largest papers,” replied Mr. Pursen. “You will be quite famous by tomorrow morning,” be added playfully.

  When Mr. Pursen had introduced himself a great hope had sprung momentarily into the girl’s heart — a longing that three months at Farris’s had all but stifled. Vain regrets seldom annoyed her now. She had attained a degree of stoicism that three months earlier would have seemed impossible; but with contact with one from that other world which circumstances had forbidden her ever again to hope to enter — with the voicing of a kind word — with the play of a smile that was neither carnal nor condescending came a sudden welling of the desire she had thought quite dead — the desire to put behind her forever the life that she had been living.

  For an instant a little girl had looked into the eyes of the Rev. Mr. Pursen, prepared to do and be whatever Mr. Pursen, out of the fullness of brotherly love, should counsel and guide her to do and be; but Mr. Pursen saw only a woman of the town, and to such were his words addressed with an argument which he imagined would appeal strongly to her kind. And it was a woman of the town who answered him with a hard laugh.

  “Nothing doing,” she said.

  Mr. Pursen was surprised. He was pained. He had come to her as a friend in need. He had offered to help her, and she would not even confide in him.

  “I had hoped that you might wish to lead a better life,” he said, “and I came prepared to offer you every assistance in securing a position where you might earn a respectable living. I can find a home for you until such a position is forthcoming. Can you not see the horrors of the life you have chosen? Can you not realize the awful depths of degradation to which you have come, and the still blacker abyss that yawns before you if you continue along the downward path? Your beauty will fade quickly — its lifeblood sapped by the gnawing canker of vice and shame, and then what will the world hold for you? Naught but a few horrible years of premature and hideous old age.”

  “And the way to start a new and better life,” replied the girl in a level voice, “is to advertise my shame upon the front pages of three great daily newspapers — that’s your idea, eh?”

  Mr. Pursen flushed, very faintly.

  “You misunderstand me entirely,” he said. “I abhor as much as any human being can the necessity which compels so much publicity in these matters; but it is for the greatest good of the greatest numbers that I labor — that all of us should labor. If the public does not know of the terrible conditions which prevail under their very noses, how can we expect it to rouse itself and take action against these conditions?

  “No great reform is ever accomplished except upon the clamorous demand of the people. The police — in fact all city officials — know of these conditions; but they will do nothing until they are forced to do it. Only the people who elect them and whose money pays them can force them. We must keep the horrors of the underworld constantly before the voters and tax-payers until they rise and demand that the festering sore in the very heart of their magnificent city be cured forever.

  “What are my personal feelings, or yours, compared with the great good to the whole community that will result from the successful fruition of the hopes of those of us who are fighting this great battle against the devil and his minions? You should rather joyfully embrace this opportunity to cast off the bonds of hell, and by enlisting with the legion of righteousness atone for all your sinful past by a self-sacrificing act in the interest of your fellow man.”

  The girl laughed, a rather unpleasant, mirthless laugh.

  “My ‘fellow man’!” She mimicked the preacher’s oratorical style. “It was my fellow man who made me what I am; it
was my fellow man who has kept me so! it is my fellow man who wished me to blazon my degradation to the world as a price for aid.”

  As she spoke, the vernacular of the underworld with its coarse slang and vile English slipped from her speech like a shabby disguise that has been discarded, and she spoke again as she had spoken in her other life, before constant association with beasts and criminals had left their mark upon her speech as upon her mind and morals; but as the first flush of indignation passed she slipped again into the now accustomed rut.

  “To hell with you and your fellow men,” she said. “ Now beat it.”

  Mr. Pursen’s dignity bad suffered a most severe shock. He glanced at the three young men. They were grinning openly. He realized the humiliating stories they would write for their respective papers. Not at all the kind of stories he had been picturing to himself, in which the Rev. Mr. Pursen would shine as a noble Christian reformer laboring for the salvation of the sinner and the uplift of the community. They would make horrid jokes of the occurrence, and people would laugh at the Rev. Mr. Pursen.

  A stinging rebuke was upon his lips. He would make this woman realize the great gulf that lay between the Rev. Mr. Pursen and such as she. He would let her see the loathing with which a good man viewed her and her kind; but as he opened his mouth to speak, his better judgment came to his rescue. The woman would doubtless make a scene — her sort had a decided penchant for such things — she might even resort to physical violence.

  In either event the resultant newspaper stories would be decidedly worse than the most glaring exaggerations which the three young men might concoct from the present unfortunate occurrence.

  So the Rev. Mr. Pursen stifled his true emotions, and with a sorrowful shake of his head turned sadly from his thankless task; and, indeed, why should a shepherd waste his valuable time upon a worthless sheep that preferred to stay astray? It was evident that he had lost sight entirely of the greater good that would follow the conviction of Farris, for he had not even mentioned the case to the girl or attempted to encourage her to make the most of this opportunity to bring the man to justice.