The same corpulent official was seated behind the desk at the police station; but on this occasion he woke up promptly. “The chief had better handle this,” he said, and went to the telephone.
“Where's this chap to go?” asked one of the policemen.
“We're full up,” said the sergeant. “Put him in with Charlie Swift. The chief'll be over in a few minutes.”
So once more Samuel was led into a cell, and heard the door clang upon him.
He was really not much alarmed this time, for he knew it was not his fault, and that he could prove it. But he was sick with horror at the fate of the unhappy girl. He began pacing back and forth in his cell.
Then suddenly from one corner growled a voice: “Say, when are you going to get quiet?”
“Oh, I beg pardon,” said Samuel. “I didn't know you were here.”
“What are you in for?” asked the voice.
“For murder,” said Samuel.
And he heard the cot give a sudden creak as the man sat up. “What!” he gasped.
“I didn't do it,” the boy explained hastily. “She killed herself.”
“Where was this?” asked the man.
“At the Continental Hotel.”
“And what did you have to do with it?”
“I took her there.”
“Who was she?”
“Why—she called herself Mary Smith.”
“Where did you meet her?”
“Up at 'Fairview.'”
“At 'Fairview'!” exclaimed the other.
“Yes,” said Samuel. “The Lockman place.”
“ALBERT Lockman's place?”
“Yes.”
“How did she come to be there?”
“Why, she was—a friend of his. She was there to dinner.”
“What!” gasped the man. “How do you know it?”
“I work there,” replied Samuel.
“And how did she come to go to the hotel?”
“Master Albert turned her out,” said Samuel. “And it was raining, and so I took her to a hotel.”
“For the love of God!” exclaimed the other; and then he asked quickly, “Did you tell the sergeant that?”
“No,” said the boy. “He didn't ask me anything.”
The man sprang up and ran to the grated door and shook it. “Hello! Hello there!” he cried.
“What's the matter?” growled a policeman down the corridor.
“Come here! quick!” cried the other; and then through the grating he whispered, “Say, tell the cap to come here for a moment, will you?”
“What do you want?” demanded the policeman.
“Look here, O'Brien,” said the other. “You know Charlie Swift is no fool. And there's something about this fellow you've put in here that the cap ought to know about quick.”
The sergeant came. “Say,” said Charlie. “Did you ask this boy any questions?”
“No,” said the sergeant, “I'm waiting for the chief.”
“Well, did you know that girl came from Albert Lockman's place?”
“Good God, no!”
“He says she was there to dinner and Lockman turned her out of the house. This boy says he works for Lockman.”
“Well, I'm damned!” exclaimed the sergeant. And so Samuel was led into a private room.
A minute or two later “the chief” strode in. McCullagh was his name and he was huge and burly, with a red face and a protruding jaw. He went at Samuel as if he meant to strike him. “What's this you're givin' us?” he cried.
“Why—why—” stammered Samuel, in alarm.
“You're tryin' to tell me that girl came from Lockman's?” roared the chief.
“Yes, sir!”
“And you expect me to believe that?”
“It's true, sir!”
“What're you tryin' to give me, anyhow?” demanded the man.
“But it's true, sir!” declared Samuel again.
“You tell me she was there at dinner?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Come! Quit your nonsense, boy!”
“But she was, sir!”
“What do you expect to make out of this, young fellow?”
“But she was, sir!”
Apparently the chief's method was to doubt every statement that Samuel made, and repeat his incredulity three times, each time in a louder tone of voice and with a more ferocious expression of countenance. Then, if the boy stuck it out, he concluded that he was telling the truth. By this exhausting method the examination reached its end, and Samuel was led back to his cell.
“Did you stick to your story?” asked his cellmate.
“Of course,” said he.
“Well, if it is true,” remarked the other, “there'll be something doing soon.”
And there was. About an hour later the sergeant came again and entered. He drew the two men into a corner.
“See here, young fellow,” he said to Samuel in a low voice. “Have you got anything against young Lockman?”
“No,” replied Samuel. “Why?”
“If we let you go, will you shut up about this?”
“Why, yes,” said the boy, “if you want me to.”
“All right,” said the sergeant. “And you, Charlie—we've got you dead, you know.”
“Yes,” said the other, “I know.”
“And there's ten years coming to you, you understand?”
“Yes, I guess so.”
“All right. Then will you call it a bargain?”
“I will,” said Charlie. “You'll skip the town, and hold your mouth?”
“I will.”
“Very well. Here's your own kit—and you ought to get through them bars before daylight. And here's fifty dollars. You take this young fellow to New York and lose him. Do you see?”
“I see,” said Charlie.
“All right,” went on the sergeant. “And mind you don't play any monkey tricks!”
“I'm on,” said Charlie with a chuckle.
And without more ado he selected a saw from his bag and set to work at the bars of the window. The sergeant retired; and Samuel sat down on the floor and gasped for breath.
For about an hour the man worked without a word. Then he braced himself against the wall and wrenched out one of the bars; then another wrench, and another bar gave way; after which he packed up his kit and slipped it into a pocket under his coat. “Now,” he said, “come on.”
He slipped through the opening and dropped to the ground, and Samuel followed suit. “This way,” he whispered, and they darted down an alley and came out upon a dark street. For perhaps a mile they walked on in silence, then Charlie turned into a doorway and opened the door with a latch key, and they went up two flights of stairs and into a rear room. He lit the gas, and took off his coat and flung it on the bed. “Now, make yourself at home,” he said.
“Is this your room?” asked Samuel.
“Yes,” was the reply. “The bulls haven't found it, either!”
“But I thought we were to go out of town!” exclaimed the other.
“Humph!” laughed Charlie. “Young fellow, you're easy!”
“Do you mean you're not going?” cried Samuel.
“What! When I've got a free license to work the town?”
Samuel stared at him, amazed. “You mean they wouldn't arrest you?”
“Not for anything short of murder, I think.”
“But—but what could you do?”
“Just suppose I was to tip off some newspaper with that story? Not here in Lockmanville—but the New York Howler, we'll say?”
“I see!” gasped Samuel.
Charlie had tilted back in his chair and was proceeding to fill his pipe. “Gee, sonny,” he said, “they did me the greatest turn of my life when they poked you into that cell. I'll get what's coming to me now!”
“How will you get it?” asked the boy.
“I'm a gopherman,” said the other.
“What's that?” asked Samuel.
“You'll have to learn to sling the lingo,” said Charlie with a laugh. “It's what you call a burglar.”
Samuel looked at the man in wonder. He was tall and lean, with a pale face and restless dark eyes. He had a prominent nose and a long neck, which gave him a peculiar, alert expression that reminded Samuel of a startled partridge.
“Scares you, hey?” he said. “Well, I wasn't always a gopherman.”
“What were you before that?”
“I was an inventor.”
“An inventor!” exclaimed Samuel.
“Yes. Have you seen the glass-blowing machines here in town?”
“No, I haven't.”
“Well, I invented three of them. And old Henry Lockman robbed me of them.”
“Robbed you!” gasped the boy amazed.
“Yes,” said the other. “Didn't he rob everybody he ever came near?”
“I didn't know it,” replied Samuel.
“Guess you never came near him,” laughed the man. “Say—where do you come from, anyhow? Tell me about yourself.”
So Samuel began at the beginning and told his story. Pretty soon he came to the episode of “Glass Bottle Securities.”
“My God!” exclaimed the other. “I thought you said old Lockman had never robbed you!”
“I did,” answered Samuel.
“But don't you see that he robbed you then?”
“Why, no. It wasn't his fault. The stock went down when he died.”
“But why should it have gone down when he died, except that he'd unloaded it on the public for a lot more than it was worth?”
Samuel's jaw fell. “I never thought of that,” he said.
“Go on,” said Charlie.
Then Samuel told how he was starving, and how he had gone to Professor Stewart, and how the professor had told him he was one of the unfit. His companion had taken his pipe out of his mouth and was staring at him.
“And you swallowed all that?” he gasped.
“Yes,” said Samuel.
“And you tried to carry it out! You went away to starve!”
“But what else was there for me to do?” asked the boy.
“But the Lord!” ejaculated the other. “When it came time for ME to starve, I can promise you I found something else to do!”
“Go on,” he said after a pause; and Samuel told how he had saved young Lockman's life, and what happened afterwards.
“And so he was your dream!” exclaimed the other. “You were up against a brace game, Sammy!”
“But how was I to know?” protested the boy.
“You should read the papers. That kid's been cutting didoes in the Tenderloin for a couple of years. He wasn't worth the risking of your little finger—to say nothing of your life.”
“It seems terrible,” said Samuel dismayed.
“The trouble with you, Sammy,” commented the other, “is that you're too good to live. That's all there is to your unfitness. You take old Lockman, for instance. What was all his 'fitness'? It was just that he was an old wolf. I was raised in this town, and my dad went to school with him. He began by cheating his sisters out of their inheritance. Then he foreclosed a mortgage on a glass factory and went into the business. He was a skinflint, and he made money—they say he burned the plant down for the insurance, but I don't know. Anyway, he had rivals, and he made a crooked deal with some of the railroad people—gave them stock you know—and got rebates. And he had some union leaders on his pay rolls, and he called strikes on his rivals, and when he'd ruined them he bought them out for a song. And when he had everything in his hands, and got tired of paying high wages, he fired some of the union men and forced a strike. Then he brought in some strike-breakers and hired some thugs to slug them, and turned the police loose on the men—and that was the end of the unions. Meanwhile he'd been running the politics of the town, and he'd given himself all the franchises—there was nobody could do anything in Lockmanville unless he said so. And finally, when he'd got the glass trade cornered, he formed the Trust, and issued stock for about five times what the plants had cost, and dumped it on the market for suckers like you to buy. And that's the way he made his millions—that's the meaning of his palace and all the wonders you saw up there. And now he's dead, and all his fortune belongs to Master Albert, who never did a stroke of work in his life, and isn't 'fit' enough to be a ten-dollar-a-week clerk. And you come along and lie down for him to walk on, and the more nails he has in his boots the better you like it! And there's the whole story for you!”
Samuel had been listening awe-stricken. The abysmal depths of his ignorance and folly!
“Now he's got his money,” said the other—“and he means to keep it. So there are the bulls, to slam you over the head if you bother him. That's called the Law! And then he hires some duffer to sit up and hand you out a lot of dope about your being 'unfit'; and that's called a College! Don't you see?”
“Yes,” whispered Samuel. “I see!”
His companion stabbed at him with his finger. “All that was wrong with you, Sammy,” he said, “was that you swallowed the dope! That's where your 'unfitness' came in! Why—take his own argument. Suppose you hadn't given up. Suppose you'd fought and won out. Then you'd have been as good as any of them, wouldn't you? Suppose, for instance, you'd hit that son-of-a-gun over the head with a poker and got away with his watch and his pocketbook—then you'd have been 'fitter' than he, wouldn't you?”
Samuel had clutched at the arms of his chair and was staring with wide-open eyes.
“You never thought of that, hey, Sammy? But that's what I found myself facing a few years ago. They'd got every cent I had, and I was ready for the scrap heap. But I said, 'Nay, nay, Isabel!' I'd played their game and lost—but I made a new game—and I made my own rules, you can bet!”
“You mean stealing!” cried the boy.
“I mean War,” replied the other. “And you see—I've survived! I'm not pretty to look at and I don't live in a palace, but I'm not starving, and I've got some provisions salted away.”
“But they had you in jail!”
“Of course. I've done my bit—twice. But that didn't kill me; and I can learn things, even in the pen.”
There was a pause. Then Charlie Swift stood up and shook the ashes out of his pipe. “Speaking of provisions,” he said, “these midnight adventures give you an appetite.” And he got out a box of crackers and some cheese and a pot of jam. “Move up,” he said, “and dip in. You'll find that red stuff the real thing. My best girl made it. One of the things that bothered me in jail was the fear that the bulls might get it.”
Samuel was too much excited to eat. But he sat and watched, while his companion stowed away crackers and cheese.
“What am I going to do now?” he said half to himself.
“You come with me,” said Charlie. “I'll teach you a trade where you'll be your own boss. And I'll give you a quarter of the swag until you've learned it.”
“What!” gasped Samuel in horror. “Be a burglar!”
“Sure,” said the other. “What else can you do?”
“I don't know,” said the boy.
“Have you got any money?”
“Only a few pennies. I hadn't got my wages yet.”
“I see. And will you go and ask Master Albert for them?”
“No,” said Samuel quickly. “I'll never do that!”
“Then you'll go out and hunt for a job again, I suppose? Or will you start out on that starving scheme again?”
“Don't!” cried the boy wildly. “Let me think!”
“Come! Don't be a summer-boarder!” exclaimed the other. “You've got the professor's own warrant for it, haven't you? And you've got a free field before you—you can help yourself to anything you want in Lockmanville, and the bulls won't dare to lift a finger! You'll be a fool if you let go of such a chance.”
“But it's wrong!” protested Samuel. “You know it's wrong!”
“Humph!” laughed Charlie. And he shut the top of the cracker box with a bang and rose up. “You sleep over it,” he said. “You'll be hungry to-morrow morning.”
“That won't make any difference!” cried the boy.
“Maybe not,” commented the other; and then he added with a grin: “Don't you ask me for grub. For that would be charity; and if you're really one of the unfit, it's not for me to interfere with nature!”
And so all the next day Samuel sat in Charlie's room and faced the crackers and cheese and the pot of jam, and wrestled with the problem. He knew what it would mean to partake of the food, and Charlie knew what it would mean also; and feeling certain that Samuel would not partake upon any other terms, he left the covers off the food, so that the odors might assail the boy's nostrils.
Of course Samuel might have gone out and bought some food with the few pennies he had in his pocket. But that would have been merely to postpone the decision, and what was the use of that? And to make matters ten times worse, he owed money to the Stedmans—for he had lived upon the expectation of his salary!
In the end it was not so much hunger that moved him, as it was pure reason. For Samuel, as we know, was a person who took an idea seriously; and there was no answer to be found to Charlie's argument. Doubtless the reader will find a supply of them, but Samuel racked his wits in vain. If, as the learned professor had said, life is a struggle for existence, and those who have put money in their purses are the victors; and if they have nothing to do for the unemployed save to let them starve or put them in jail; then on the other hand, it would seem to be up to the unemployed to take measures for their own survival. And apparently the only proof of their fitness would be to get some money away from those who had it. Had not Herbert Spencer, the authority in such matters, stated that “inability to catch prey shows a falling short of conduct from its ideal”? And if the good people let themselves be starved to death by the wicked, would that not mean that only the wicked would be left alive? It was thoughts like this that were driving Samuel—he had Bertie Lockman's taunts ringing in his ears, and for the life of him he could not see why he should vacate the earth in favor of Bertie Lockman!
So breakfast time passed, and dinner time passed, and supper time came. And his friend spread out the contents of his larder again, and then leaned over the table and said, “Come and try it once and see how you like it!”
And Samuel clenched his hands suddenly and answered—“All right, I'll try it!”
Then he started upon a meal. But in the middle of it he stopped, and set down an untasted cracker, and gasped within himself—“Merciful Heaven! I've promised to be a burglar!”
The other was watching him narrowly. “Ain't going to back out?” he asked.
all.”
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