CHAPTER VI
The detective pondered seriously upon all these things as he sat there. He wondered that as yet the boy should have done nothing to indicate his partners in a crime so far beyond his own scope. More than all, he wondered how the little printer's devil should know or care anything about the insurance of the theatre, and what the question of the insurance had to do with his surreptitious entrance and the theft of the diamonds and other portable valuables.
The fire had been at first supposed to be the result of accident or of carelessness on the part of the theatre's employees, until Peter Bateman's story had suggested to the police the possibility that theft had necessitated that sequence of pillage, which is incendiarism. Thus the detective had believed that the theatre had been robbed by some gang of thieves, of whom Ned was but the humble tool, and then fired to conceal the traces of the more profitable crime. Now this conclusion was shaken,--and again and again he asked himself in perplexity and doubt what the question of the insurance could have had to do with the crime.
The more he thought of it the more he was convinced that this was to be a singular and difficult case. Properly worked up it would reflect much credit on the officer who should finally bring it to a successful issue. Once in the course of his varied speculations on the subject he came very close indeed to the truth; he canvassed the possibility that the theatre was burned from motives of malice or revenge, for Gorham was a man who made and kept bitter enemies. But the fact that any fool must know that so large and valuable a property was always amply insured would, he thought, prevent antagonism or reprisal from taking that form, since the loss would fall most heavily upon the various companies who had assumed the risk,--vague, unimagined corporations, beyond the scope of malice or antagonism, foreign to the thought of an incendiary.
Still meditating aimlessly about the question of insurance, he began to wonder if Gorham were not actually a gainer rather than a loser by the fire. The theatre's furnishings were getting shabby and out of style; much of the scenery was old; the site had become, by reason of one of those swift expansions of the commercial section of the town, so common in our growing southwestern cities, more valuable by far than the building itself; the season had not been very prosperous,--too much legitimate drama to cope successfully with spectacular opposition. The smaller theatres drew the crowds, and light opera was the vogue. More than all, there was of record a rather heavy mortgage on the structure itself, which showed that the owner had needed money in considerable emergencies. Taken all in all, Gorham was doubtless in better financial case now, a richer man to-day than yesterday.
All at once the detective began to put two and two methodically together. Gorham, by reason of the heavy insurance, had profited by the burning of the theatre. The boy, who was known to have secretly entered the house, presumably for the purpose of theft, had unwittingly manifested a tumult of excited interest upon the sheer mention of the insurance of the building,--a matter usually absolutely alien to one of his age, his class, and his ignorance; when in a state of obviously alert suspicion he became aware that this incongruity had been observed, he grew so restive under surveillance, evidently recognizing its menace, that the officer, not wishing to make an arrest prematurely, was obliged to withdraw, and only shadow him from afar.
_Insurance!_ Had the boy indeed done nothing to indicate the perpetrator of the crime!
The car was now passing the ruins of the theatre. The smoke, still curling slowly into the air, had a certain luminous quality, reflected from the dying embers. Red lanterns here and there marked the lines of the débris, where the brick walls had fallen across the sidewalks and street, blocking the way, and served as a warning to the benighted passer-by. One of these lanterns cast a dull flush upon the gilded mask of Folly high on the frescoed wall, still grotesquely leering down upon the melancholy scene. As the lurid glare gradually faded in the distance, the detective, his conclusion reached at last, silently nodded his head, decisively, aggressively.
For this astute person had come to believe that Gorham had himself fired his own theatre!
He believed the boy, entering for the purpose of theft and concealed among the scenery, had accidentally gained a knowledge of the manager's crime,--else why should a lad of his years, a mere child, feel an interest in so remote a subject as the details of the insurance of the building? He doubtless went or was sent there with the object of stealing, nefarious enough! but burning the building could work an advantage to no one but the owner, who would get the big insurance money! Thus the detective deduced that Gorham himself had committed the crime which in double-dealing, joining with the "star," the manager of the theatrical company, and the insurance companies, he now pretended to cause to be investigated by the police.
The detective's anxiety to discover the printer's devil in seeking to communicate with some criminal, some noted "crook," on the subject of the theatre, changed to an alert expectation. He believed the boy would seek to communicate with Gorham,--he would make use of his knowledge of the crime in an effort to extort money.
When Ned at last left the car the detective had become so cautious as to follow only at a very considerable distance, so extra-hazardous had his surveillance become, so alertly suspicious seemed the boy. Down and down Ned took his way, through streets that grew more dirty and dingily lighted as he went. The tall, gloomy tenement houses on either hand, for miles, it seemed, apparently leaned toward each other across the way, to limit the sky and exclude the air from the sad purlieus below. Some women were quarreling in shrill, shrewish accents on a corner; one reeled as she walked, and hard by there was a saloon that exuded a dim glow of untrimmed kerosene lamps, a pervasive odor of beer and whiskey, and a series of dirty, frowzy customers of both sexes at all hours of the day and night. It had a more remote trade, too; now and then a child, tangle-haired, begrimed, unnaturally sharp of eye and tongue, yet still suggestive of that universal promise of youth,--dim, dim, not a possibility, hardly a dream, only intimating a higher purpose in its creation,--scuttled out with a pitcher of beer, bearing it carefully away to some drink-sodden wretch in a forlorn attic. The clouds had thickened; they seemed to Ned to-night, though never before, to resemble the clouds of sin and sorrow and suffering that hang over the homes of the wicked and weak, and to prefigure the bursting of the vials of wrath. And search the sky as he would, he could discern no star.
When he had toiled up four flights of a dark, rickety staircase, and opened a door in the rear of the mansard roof, the sudden contrast of the scene within smote upon his quivering nerves, his quickened perceptions, as if he had never before beheld it. The floor was scoured white, and throughout the atmosphere was the pungent aroma of coarse yellow soap. The clean patchwork quilts on the two beds were as gay with many colors as Joseph's coat. The monkey-stove sought to atone for its many misdeeds emblazoned on the smoke-blackened walls, and glowed to a scarlet hue, and upon it simmered the savory dish of onion stew that he loved. His sickly, puny little sister, seated on a home-woven rug in the centre of the floor, found plenteous entertainment in banging a tin cup with an iron spoon, while her mother was busied in the task of wrapping hundreds of bonbons in gayly fringed papers, for this work for the candy factory could be done at home, and the care of the child prevented her from going out to secure better paid work elsewhere.
"That child is the bane of yer life," her neighbors sometimes said, with a species of antagonism toward the hindrance, born, it seemed, only to be a clog and a dead-weight. "Ye had better sen' it to the 'sylum, or somewher's, an' git some use of yerself."
Ned's mother returned no comment, no reply, to these suggestions; sometimes it seemed as if she had some impediment in her speech, so silent she had become, so taciturn with her neighbors. The fact that she was country-bred was shown abundantly in her stolid uncommunicativeness, her vague terror of all the ways of the great city outside of these four walls, her old-fashioned code of manners and morals, and the painfully wrought and maintained cleanliness of her surroundings. No slight task it was, to be sure, to "pack" the water which plentifully drenched floors, tables, pots, kettles, windows, up four flights of steep stairs from the hydrant in the yard! Small wonder that poverty and dirt are so often concomitant. It had been an evil day for her and her simple, untutored husband when some vague, distorted ambition had moved him to despise the small havings of a country-side blacksmith and seek to become a "horse-shoer" among the often mythical advantages of a large town. He had little of the canny thrift characteristic of his Scotch nationality. He was an open-handed, jovial, florid, red-haired, fiery-tempered man,--over sanguine and credulous. The many deceptions practiced upon greenhorns, the greater expense of living, the fierce competition of an already crowded trade, baffled and bewildered the sturdy fellow. He worked as long as he had work, but when he was idle he began to drink more and more, and perhaps at last it was no great misfortune to his family when one of the pestilences which decimate the tenement region laid this once fair stalk of wheat low with the "cheat." He left his wife, Ned, and the puny, sickly little girl as remote, as alien from their old, country home, as if that haven of humble, hearty comfort were in a foreign planet. They lived as best they might on the boy's wages and the few jobs of coarse washing that she could get to do at home. It was the pride of both mother and son that they had maintained this precarious existence on these slender means now for more than a year, and in this fact they saw a glad augury for the future.
Her face always wore, however, an apprehensive, appealing expression, although Ned remembered when it had been otherwise. As she turned it toward him now all her perseverance, her self-sacrifice, her deprivations, her honest, persistent uprightness, her mingled fears and faith in some fair future for him touched his heart with a potent force. He cast but one glance at her and burst instantly into tears.
"What ails ye, sonny?" she asked soothingly, and with an intonation that promised partisanship, earnest and loving; for sometimes he came home with great griefs of editorial tyranny, or fault-finding and injustice in the composing-rooms, or the guying of some facetiously disposed junior reporter, or in a revolt of indignation against the pressure of new and severe regulations--when his partisan mother would straightway vilify his enemies (for the nonce), till he would be sorry for them and rouse himself to protest and remonstrate in their defense.
But now Ned shook his head and would say nothing.
His silence evidently alarmed her. She perceived that his trouble was far more serious than the usual misadventures in the day's work. Once or twice she urged him to speak, but in vain. She looked at him apprehensively for a moment longer, and not without anger. Then as if appreciating the futility of remonstrance, she turned away to the table, took up a flaunting red and gilded paper, and with mechanical swiftness and dexterity twisted the fringed ends.
"Boys are hard to know how to deal with," she remarked. "They can't l'arn no sense, and they ain't got no instinct. A boy ought ter know by nature that he hev got two friends what can't wish him nothing but well. One is his God in Heaven, and the t'other is his mother on earth,--and them is the ones he trusts the least an' trusts the last."
"The harm is done now," sobbed Ned.
"Undo it, then," said his mother sternly.
Ned walked to the window, and heavily leaning against the sill, looked out at the gloomy night. When he had first lost the fear that he had been "spotted" by the detective he had felt almost glad of the discovery that the insurance companies only would sustain the loss by the fire, for these, being corporations vague to his mind, impersonal, of presumably illimitable wealth, did not appeal very strongly to his limited experience for sympathy. He was glad that the manager whom he had defrauded would not suffer from the villainy he had witnessed. This feeling had served in some sort to blunt his conscience and numb his sense of his own wrong-doing. Now, however, among the familiar surroundings of home,--sacred as an altar, a temple, even though only an attic in the tenement district,--he regained his normal poise; he realized how his mother would regard it. He winced from the sheer recollection of the old-fashioned phrase with which she was wont to characterize such shifty dealings. "Stealin', an' nothin' shorter!" It was indeed theft. She would think that he had stolen the price of admission to the theatre as absolutely as if he had picked Manager Gorham's pocket. What did it matter to him whose was the loss in the burning of the beautiful theatre! The fact remained. He was a thief.
The aspect of dishonesty had never been so odious to him as now. Hitherto he had carried his mother's teaching in one hand and his trusty conscience in the other, and with a fair accord between them he had gone triumphantly through the multiform temptations which assail a small boy struggling for a living amidst the turmoils of a great town. Now it was all over. He could never again feel aught but contempt for himself. In his poignant pang of despair he had a strong impulse to confess to his mother. He glanced over his shoulder at her, but she had gone back wearily but unfalteringly to her work, and he relapsed once more to staring dismally out over the roofs about him, mostly on a lower level than the windows of this "sky parlor."
Scores of chimney-pots loomed up close at hand. Despite their smoky, gloomy, unsocial aspect, this insensate crew served in some sort as company for the boy. They were always there,--they saw him depart in the morning, they waited for him to come home at night. They had stories to tell him. He loved a vague, fanciful sense of community interests with the unknown firesides below them. He pictured to himself the families clustered about these invisible hearths. Every fantastic wreath of soot-bespangled smoke curling out from these grimy tubes indited for him an idyl on the fair page of the sky. What tragic, or poetic, or romantic episodes were kindled with the homely fires cooking the supper--and ended in smoke!
When winds were abroad and went rioting about the chimney-pots, whistling and singing, the smoke affected too a jovial mien, and came rushing and rollicking up to join its boisterous playfellows, who now would sweep vast clouds of it aside in tenuous dispersal in the air, and now would roll up great curling lengths of it like so many yards of dusky ribbon, tucking it back into the chimney-pots whence it had sought to issue forth. What roaring farces in the house-top regions these wild days! What sense of hilarity, of joyous motion, of jocund voice! "Ha! ha! ha!" said the winds. "What a high old time!"
Whenever the moon was up, weird, dark shadows would haunt the chimney-pots, and go skulking slyly over the roofs, and Ned's imagination would conjure into the air beings far more strange than his simple mythical friends whom he had placed in order about their unknown hearths below. If it were in the glad summer-time these gruesome shapes would so far abandon their port of terror as to dance with the misty images of the smoke to the music of a brass band, which played in a city square, distant indeed, but not altogether out of earshot. In the winter the snow-covered roofs reflected the silvery lunar sheen and shimmered. The chimney-pots were often begirt with zones of icicles. Grotesque gargoyles of frozen slush and sleet blocked the water-spouts and hung far over the eaves. A star with a chill crystalline palpitation would look down. Far, far away the deep, mellow tones of the cathedral bells would ring out the Angelus. And winter or summer he loved it all, for his heart was light, his conscience clear, and this was Home!
But now the atmosphere was murky; the clouds were low; the swift gleams of lightning were beginning to quiver among the chimney-pots, that seemed in the uncertain fluctuations to move, to wince, to start aside, to draw back as in fright. Suddenly resonant torrents were beating upon the roof; the tin gutters clamored; the mutterings of thunder swelled to sonorous emphasis.
Ned felt all at once refreshed, elated,--a sense often induced by a rain-fall long delayed. Perhaps the interval of rest had calmed his nerves; and had restored his jaded faculties. A new idea suddenly sprang into his mind.
He did not hesitate; he turned briskly, got down from a shelf an ink-bottle,--nearly empty from evaporation rather than exhausted by service,--tore a blank page from an old copy-book which he had used in his short attendance at the public school, and proceeded at once to indite some straggling characters. He had addressed an envelope before he looked up at his mother, who was silently watching him.
"I want some money out o' my wages," he said stoutly, assuming an air as of a moneyed man who demands what is his own by rights. Then, "Tain't fur no harm," he added reassuringly.
He had feared her questions, which he was resolved he would not answer. Without a word, however, she pointed at the drawer of the table. If he would not voluntarily give her his confidence she would not attempt to coerce it. She did not even ask nor look to see what sum he took.
The envelope was sealed, and presently Ned was flying along through street after street with the rain pelting in his face and the wind bantering him for the loan of his hat. He did not care! His heart was so much lighter! He saw from afar the great red and blue bottles in the illuminated windows of a drug-store, and here he paused and went within and with much circumspection bought a postage-stamp; then he plunged out in the rain again, making straight for a certain box under a gleaming lamp in the distance that sent its quivering shafts of light far through the gloom.
He brought up under the lamp-post, agitated, anxious, but still unswerving. He looked about him expectantly, watchfully,--it might have seemed even fearfully to one noting his attitude from a distance. But he had no longer any fear. The moment was fraught with peculiar importance to him. He had posted many letters for employers, but never one for himself, and never before nor after one like this. A man beyond the furthest limits of the lamp's aureola of misty light had paused too, breathing hard. He was not used to running so far nor running so fast. He thought the boy's look and attitude very suspicious, as Ned, realizing the supreme significance of the moment and the value of this letter to him, slowly and solemnly dropped it into the box, and then swiftly scudded off down the street.
When the letter-carrier next came to this box the detective was lurking in its vicinity. He whispered a request and mentioned a name, but the postman shook his head with all the dignity of one invested with a little brief authority, and it seemed that "the regulations" were the only words his tongue would deign to frame. "Why, what harm can it do to let me see the outside of the letters?" insisted the detective plausibly. The postman's head wagged to and fro more slowly under the well applied force of argument.
"The handwriting on the outside of the envelope alone will tell me all that I want to know; it is a very important crime which I am investigating."
The postman's head ceased to vibrate. Yet he was slow and thoughtful as he laid his hand on the box. As the detective waited eagerly for it to be opened he looked rather like a fox,--so keen, and so crafty, and so alertly expectant. The letters, as they were slowly shuffled before his eyes, he perceived belonged unmistakably to commercial correspondence,--neat, compact, evidently the work of practiced scribes,--except only one; this was blurred and smirched, with a crumpled envelope and a wildly diagonal address, which moreover was grievously misspelled. He stared with breathless interest and curiosity at the scrawling characters:--
Manger A. J. Gorm Manger Gorm's Theter.
In less than half an hour the detective was in close conference with his chief. "That is all," he said, concluding his account of these incidents. "I think I have caught the boy communicating with the criminal. The criminal is the owner himself,--and that letter in my opinion is the boy's attempt to extort money from Gorham by threatening to blab all he knows."