Part 25

Cardello’s eyes bulged from their sockets. His face went as white as paper. Panic, terror, pulled his lips back in a ghastly grin from his chattering teeth. He rose heavily to his feet and stood swaying.

“Guisseppi!” he breathed scarcely above a whisper. “_Guisseppi!_”

Guisseppi’s lips curled.

“Yes,” he replied. “The boy you ruined, betrayed, sent to death on the gallows.”

“No, no, Guisseppi. The _police_ got you. I was your friend.”

“Liar! But for you, I would be happy; my father and mother would not bear the black disgrace of a son hanged on the gallows.”

“Why have you come back from the dead, Guisseppi? Why should you haunt your old pal?”

“I have a score to settle with you.”

“In the name of God the Father, go back to the grave! Leave me in peace.”

Guisseppi raised his weapon.

“I have come to kill you,” he said.

Cardello fell upon his knees.

“Spare me, Guisseppi!” he screamed, stretching out imploring arms. “Mercy, Guisseppi, mercy! Don’t—”

There was a crash—a leap of fire.

A wisp of blue smoke drifted above a billiard table.

_III._

The police dragnet for the slayer of Cardello was far flung, and zest was added to the man hunt by the offer of $1,000 reward. Throughout the Italian quarter, Basco spread the story of Guisseppi’s recrudescence and his ghostly revenge.

The superstitious residents accepted the weird tale with simple faith. Fear of the phantom became rife. Children remained indoors after dark. Pedestrians quickened their pace when passing lonely spots at night. Turning a corner suddenly, they half-expected to come face to face with Guisseppi’s ghost, wry-necked from the hangman’s noose.

Policeman Rafferty, traveling beat in the neighborhood of Death Corners, was told time and again that Guisseppi’s ghost had murdered Cardello. Yes, it was true. Basco had seen the phantom. Others in the colony had seen it slipping like a shadow through some deserted street at night. There was no doubt that Guisseppi had come back from the dead.

Policeman Rafferty laughed. When had ghosts started in bumping off live folks? That was what he would like to know. How could the poor simpletons believe such stuff? Funny lot of jobbies, these dagoes!

But when Policeman Rafferty had heard the story of Guisseppi’s ghost for the thousandth time, he scratched his head and did a little thinking, not forgetting the $1,000 reward. Guisseppi was dead. Of course. He had been hanged, and the newspapers had been full of the stories of his execution. So Guisseppi couldn’t have killed Cardello. That was out of the question. But could it be possible that dead Guisseppi had a living double? Hah!

Policeman Rafferty got in touch with his favorite stool-pigeon without delay. Shortly thereafter, that worthy laid before him a piece of information which Policeman Rafferty was welcome to for just what it was worth and no more. Guisseppi’s ghost had been seen oftenest in the immediate neighborhood of Guisseppi’s father’s residence. If the fool copper thought he could put a pinch over on a ghost, he might do well to search Guisseppi’s old home.

So Policeman Rafferty eased himself one day through a narrow passageway, burst in suddenly at the kitchen door and started to search the premises.

He found Guisseppi whiffing a cigaret in a front room.

* * * * *

“Yes, I killed Cardello,” said Guisseppi quietly. “I’ll go with you.”

“But who are you?” asked the policeman. “You can’t be Guisseppi. They topped that boy on the gallows.”

“I’m Guisseppi, all right. They brought me back to life with a pulmotor.”

Policeman Rafferty’s jaw dropped.

“Back to life?”

“Yes. I was as dead as stone. I was gone absolutely for an hour.”

“Gone? Gone where?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere. I remember standing on the trap. Then it seemed I was falling for a long time, falling—from a star—or a high mountain top—through miles of emptiness into midnight blackness. There wasn’t any pain. I seemed to land on a deep soft cushion of feathers. I could _feel_ the darkness. It seemed to whirl and billow round me. I couldn’t see myself—or feel myself. But I knew, somehow, I was there in the heart of the darkness. I suddenly found myself on a broad road stretching away into night.”

“Must ha’ been the road to hell,” remarked Policeman Rafferty.

“Maybe so. Along this road, I glided with the swiftness of a bird on the wing. I didn’t know where I was going—”

“You were bound for hell,” said Rafferty.

“I heard music away off in the dark; wonderful orchestra music, violins, ’cellos, wind pipes. It grew louder. I never heard such beautiful music. Through the solid blackness ahead, I saw a great mountain peak standing up, red and shining, against the sky.

“Around me came a glare of bright lights. I was blinded by streaks and splashes of color, darting, rolling, weaving into each other, changing all the time. Reds, purples, greens, blues, rolled over me in great, flashing waves. Flaring colors swirled around me in blazing whirlwinds. I was drowned in gorgeousness. It was as if a cyclone had wrecked a thousand rainbows and buried me beneath their ruins.”

“What were these lights?”

“Search me. I don’t know. I heard a loud, clear call out of the distance. I pushed through the storm of colors. Across a dark plain, I reached the shining, red mountain. I climbed up until I stood on the peak. I felt fine. Something struck me as a joke. I began laughing. Then, bending close above me, I saw the faces of my mother and father and the doctors.”

“Well, Guisseppi,” said Policeman Rafferty, “gettin’ hung once would ha’ been an elegant sufficiency for most men. They’d be leery about takin’ a second chance. You must be stuck on dropping through a trap—eh?”

“Yes, they’ll hang me again, all right. That’s a cinch. You might think me a fool for walking with my eyes open right into this second scrape—”

“A hog,” corrected Rafferty.

“I don’t know. I came back from the dead to kill Cardello. And I killed him. I hated that fellow. I’d like to have tortured the life out of him, killed him by inches. His cries of agony would have been wine to me. It’s hell to be hanged. I ought to know. But I can go back to the gallows now with a light heart. I got Cardello, and I’m ready to take my medicine.”

Policeman Rafferty bit a generous chew from his plug of tobacco.

“You Eye-talians,” he remarked reflectively, “are a nutty bunch.”

_IV._

The court room was crowded. Guisseppi’s strange story had been spread to the four winds by the newspapers, and everybody was eager to see this man who had passed through the mystic portals of death.

“My client will plead guilty to the Cardello murder,” said Guisseppi’s lawyer. “I take it your honor will agree with me that having paid the penalty of the law for his former crime, he can not again be hanged for that old offense.”

“I do agree with you,” replied the judge. “The sentence was that on a certain day at a certain hour, he be hanged by the neck until dead. This sentence was carried out. He was hanged. He was officially pronounced dead. It is not for me to say whether death was absolute. Perhaps a spark of life remained which was fanned back to full flame. Possibly his soul actually left the body and was recalled by some cryptic means we do not fully understand.

“But, whatever the truth, his return to life creates a unique situation. I know of no precedent of which the law ever has taken cognizance. So far as I know, this case is the first of its kind in history. Since the sentence pronounced upon this man has been carried out legally in every detail, it is my decision that he can not again be hanged for the crime for which he already has paid the penalty.”

“There is one other point which your honor failed to consider,” said Guisseppi’s lawyer. “It is an axiom of law that a man can not, for the same crime, be placed in jeopardy twice. A man can be placed in no greater jeopardy than when, with a hangman’s noose around his neck, he is dropped through the trap-door of a gallows. So, whether Guisseppi was actually dead or whether a faint flicker of life remained, he is forever immune from further punishment for the crime for which he was placed in this great jeopardy.”

“Your point may be well taken,” replied the judge.

“Now, your honor, we come to the Cardello murder charge. It is at the prisoner’s own desire and against my better judgment that I enter a plea of guilty and throw him upon the mercy of the court. There are perhaps some extenuating circumstances. But he is willing to take whatever punishment the court may see fit to inflict. In view of all the circumstances of this extraordinary case, I make a special plea for mercy.”

“I will answer your plea,” returned the judge, “by ordering the case stricken from the docket and the prisoner discharged from custody.”

A murmur of amazement broke the tense hush of the crowded chamber. Guisseppi’s lawyer gasped.

“Am I to understand, your honor—”

“This is not mercy but law,” the judge continued. “This man is legally dead. He is without the pale of all law. A dead man can commit no crime. No provision in the whole range of jurisprudence recognizes the possibility of a dead man’s committing a crime. No man, in the purview of the law, can return from the dead. If we assume that this man was dead, he will remain dead forever in the eyes of the law. If by a miracle he has returned to life and committed murder, there is no punishment within the scope of the statutes that can be decreed against him.

“He is the super-outlaw of all history. Forever beyond the reach of law, the statutes are powerless to deal with him or punish him in any way. If he should shoot down every member of the jury that convicted him, if he should walk into court and kill the judge before whom his case was tried, the law could do nothing to him. He could spend his days as a bandit, robbing, plundering, murdering, and the law could not touch him. Legally he is a ghost, a shadow, an apparition, with no more reality than the beings in a dream. So far as the law is concerned, he does not exist. He can no more be imprisoned, hanged, punished or restricted in his actions than a phantom that exists only in the imagination.”

“A most wonderful construction of the law,” declared Guisseppi’s attorney in happy bewilderment at the turn of events.

“It is less a construction of law as it exists than an admission there is no law applicable to a man legally dead yet actually alive, a man who under the law does not exist. This boy, physically alive but legally dead, has murdered a man with deliberate purpose and malice aforethought. There is no doubt about that. If the law recognized his existence, he should be hanged. Justice demands that he be executed. But he is in some fourth-dimensional legal state beyond the reach of justice. The law is powerless to deal with him. As the administrator of the law, my hands are tied. There is nothing left for me but to set him at liberty.”

Despite the decision of the court that under the law he had no existence, Guisseppi left the chamber smiling and happy, acutely conscious of joyous life in every fibre of his being.

* * * * *

Policeman Rafferty was filled with righteous anger when he learned that he could not collect the $1,000 reward. In answer to his indignant questions, he was told the reward was offered for the arrest of “the person or persons guilty of the murder of Cardello,” and since Guisseppi was neither a person or anything else that the law recognized as existing, he was not guilty of the crime.

Moreover, it was hinted to him that in capturing Guisseppi, he had arrested nobody. In the end, Policeman Rafferty had to laugh in spite of himself.

“The money’s mine, all right,” he said philosophically. “Only I don’t get it.”

_V._

Rosina Stefano sat alone in the little parlor of her home in one of the quaint side-streets of the Italian quarters, picturesque with its jumble of weather-stained frame dwellings and exotic little shops.

It was a chill, dreary night outside. A piping wind made fantastic noises about eaves and gables, and shook the windows as with ghostly hands. A lamp, burning under a blue shade, filled the chamber with eerie shadows. A coal fire was dying to embers in the open grate. There was a knock at the door.

“_Entre!_”

Guisseppi threw open the door and stood upon the threshold smiling.

“Rosina!”

The girl rose from her chair and stared fixedly at him out of frightened eyes. With a quick gesture, as if for protection against some supernatural menace, she made the sign of the cross.

“I have come back to you, Rosina.” Guisseppi took a step toward her and threw open his arms.

Rosina shrank back.

“Do you not still love me?”

Her lips framed a “No” for answer in a terror-stricken whisper.

“Come, my little sweetheart, embrace me.”

“No, no, Guisseppi!” Her voice was a tremulous cry. “You are dead!”

“Dead? Certainly I am not dead. I am alive and well, and I love you just as I always loved you.”

“You are only a ghost.”

“Don’t be foolish, little one. Do I look like a ghost? Me? Come into my arms and see how strong they are. Lay your head on my breast and feel the beating of my heart. And every beat of my heart is for you.”

Rosina stood motionless. There flashed through her mind old grewsome stories of vampires that lured their victims into their power with love traps and sucked their blood. Momentary horror froze her blood.

“O Guisseppi,” she exclaimed, “why have you risen from the dead? Why do you come back to haunt me?”

“Poor girl, do not talk like that. I tell you I am alive—tingling to my finger tips with life and love for you. If I were dead, I should still love you. Death could not kill my love for you. Have you forgotten everything? I thought you loved me. You have often told me so. I believed you would always love me, be true to me forever. Now I find you changed and cold.”

“I did love you, Guisseppi. To the depths of my being I loved you.” Her words came in a passionate torrent in her liquid native tongue. “You were my earth and heaven, my life, my soul’s salvation. All day my thoughts were of you. I dreamed of you at night. There was nothing I would not have done for you. There was nothing I would not have given you. I could have lived for you always. I could have died for you. Did I not come to see you every day in jail? Did I not bring you constantly dishes I had cooked myself with utmost care? Was not I close beside you in the court room every day of the long trial?

“I did everything to soothe and comfort you through all those terrible days. Was it nothing that I remained constant when you were locked in a cell condemned to death? I was true to the very trap-door of the hangman. What greater proof could a woman give of her love than to remain true to a man sentenced as a felon to the eternal disgrace of the gallows?”

She paused for a moment, erect, motionless, her face aflame, seemingly transfigured like the wonder woman of a vision.

“Ah, yes,” she went on; “then there was no one like my Guisseppi; no eyes so bright, no lips so tender, no face so dear. You were my god. Can I ever forget the songs you used to sing to me in the happy days before ‘Devil’ Cardello crossed your life. Your voice was divine. Every note thrilled me. I loved it. To me it was the music of the stars. Nothing in all the world was so beautiful as your voice. But now your voice has changed. There is no longer any music in it. As you speak to me, it seems a voice from the sepulchre.”

Guisseppi raised an arresting hand. He threw back his head. He smiled again.

“My voice has changed? Listen, _cara mia_.”

Slowly he began to sing an old Italian serenade. The ballad told of a knight of old who had bade a lily-white maid farewell and gone off to the wars and who, wounded and left for dead on the battlefield, was nursed back to life and returned to find his lady unchanged in her devotion against rivals and temptations.

Soft in the opening cadences, Guisseppi’s voice grew in volume and power. It brought out in shades and nuances of wonderful beauty all the charm and romance of the ancient tale—the sadness of farewell, the clash of battle, the wounded soldier’s dreams of his sweetheart as life seemed ebbing, the gladness of his homecoming, his happiness in reunited love.

Into the music, Guisseppi threw all the ardor and passion of his own love. There were notes like tears in his voice when, in minor strain, he sang the sorrows and dreams of the soldier; and the final crescendo passage, vivid with renewed love, was a burst of joyous melody straight from his heart.

“_And you loved me still the same!_” The words rose like incense from an altar. They fluttered about Rosina’s ears like a shower of rose leaves.

The girl listened, spellbound. Never in happier days had she heard Guisseppi sing with such compelling sweetness. There seemed a new and wonderful quality in his voice. With his magical music, he was like a conjurer bending her spirit to his subtle enchantments.

On a golden cloud, she was transported to the sunny shores of Italy. A cavalier sang the serenade in the moonlight to his mandolin and, leaning from her latticed balcony, she dropped a rose to him. The bay of Naples spread its crinkled azure before her. Against the dark, star-spangled crystal of the night, sculptured Vesuvius upheld its canopy of smoke.

As the music steeped her senses, she fancied she could feel its golden filaments being drawn about her, binding her more and more closely in a fairy chain. As if under the charm of melodious hypnotism, her old love returned. All the tenderness and passion of her heart went out again to Guisseppi. The siren influence of his voice was transforming her. Her strength of will was crumbling. She stood swaying, helpless, her eyes glowing with rekindled love.

Suddenly the song ended. The spell was broken. Rosina passed a languid hand over her eyes as if to brush away a film of sleep. She seemed to wake from a trance. Guisseppi stood before her radiant, smiling.

“Now will you believe I am alive? Could a dead man sing like that?”

A look of awe overspread Rosina’s face.

“You never sang like that before.”

“This is the first time my life and happiness were ever at stake on a song.”

“The Guisseppi I used to know could not sing like that. You are not Guisseppi. You are a spirit. Some demon has taught you how to sing so beautifully. You have come back with this new devil’s voice of yours to lure my soul to hell.”

“Ah, Rosina, how can you delude yourself with such foolish fancies. Do you not see me here solid in flesh and blood?”

“I see you, but I know you are only a shadow from the grave.”

“If your eyes deceive you, your ears can not. You have heard me sing.”

“That was some devil’s necromancy.”

Guisseppi fell on his knees before her and stretched out his arms in supplication.

“I love you, Rosina. That is all I can say. The hangman’s noose was not able to strangle my love for you. Your love is more to me now than it ever was before. The world has turned cold to me. You are my only hope, my refuge. I need you. I want you with all my soul.”

The girl shook her head sorrowfully. Her eyes rested upon him with sadness that was touched with renunciation.

“It can never be,” she said firmly. “How you are here, I do not know. You are dead; of that I am sure. My love for you was buried in the grave that was dug for you. You are not the boy I once loved. You are something strange and different. I am afraid of you. It is only with horror that I could fancy the kisses of a dead man on my lips. The thought of a ghost’s endearments fills me with loathing. Go back to the dead. I can love and reverence those who are gone, but there is no love anywhere in all the world for the dead returned from the grave.”

She turned away and stood with her head bowed in her hands.

Slowly Guisseppi struggled to his feet. He staggered weakly against the wall and buried his face in his arms.

“And you, Rosina!” he sobbed.

This was the final, crushing blow. He felt now that he was indeed dead—dead at the grave of his lost love.

_VI._

A taxicab stood in the narrow street near Rosina’s home, its driver ready at the wheel, its engine purring. Behind the drawn blinds, sat Guisseppi, aflame with excitement, peering eagerly through the curtains from time to time.

Guisseppi was desperate. There was no place for the dead among the living. He had learned that clearly. As a “living dead man,” all his experiences had been tragic. He regretted his resuscitation. He longed for the peace of the grave.

His old friends had fallen away from him. Many believed him a spirit damned, who, by some strange dispensation, was spared to life for yet a little while to make more exquisite the final agony reserved for him. Others were intelligent enough to know the truth, but even these were repelled by a certain unwholesomeness, a savor of the sepulchre, that seemed to cling about him.

The girls he had known in his old, gay days would have nothing to do with him. As handsome as ever, as romantic, with a voice as musical and appealing, he was in their imagination enveloped in an atmosphere of the charnel-house, and the curse of hell was branded on his brow.

His relatives held aloof. Between him and even his mother and father he was conscious that a thin shadow had gradually crept, and the tenderness of their love had been cooled by a ghostly fear of this eerie son who had been down among the dead and read with dead eyes the mysteries beyond the tomb.

He had been unable to find employment. It was as if every business house had up a sign, “No dead men need apply.”

In despair and desperation, he fell into his old ways of banditry. He soon had placed to his record a long series of bold robberies. For several of his first lawless exploits, the police arrested him. But invariably the judges before whom he was arraigned set him at liberty.

So after a while the police refused to arrest him. What was the use? This ghost-man would only be set free again.