Tongues of Flame (MacFarlane)/Chapter 22
THE news of the tragedy ran like a flame through the streets of the town. Within five minutes the Blade had it bulletined; men were telephoning it home to their wives, and Sergeant Thorpe, a man of discernment and sympathy, was communicating it to his chief in his committee room at the State Capitol.
"Terrible!" groaned Henry. "Hogan had a wife and a whole raft of kids, didn't he?"
"Six," said Thorpe, "and the town is wild. They're raising a regular army; they'll get Adam John at daylight, but the worst of it is, he's sure to get some more of them first."
"Of course he is, the obstinate fool!" But Henry was suddenly conscience-stricken. "The poor devil!" he ejaculated, beginning to remember. Self-reproaches stabbed him. He was thinking: "I ought to have given Adam John more time, made sure that he understood about the law. I'm to blame for this, in a way. Really, I am."
The voice of Sergeant Thorpe broke in: "If they take him alive, they're going to lynch him in front of the courthouse for an example to the whole radical element, Salzberg and his crowd, Soderman and his Bolsheviks, and these stubborn Indians too that are always ducking the white man's law."
"But they mustn't do that, Thorpe," insisted Henry, autocratically, exactly as if he had the power to command. And he very nearly did, such was his standing in the community by this time. "See Scanlon at once; tell him I'm driving down, and, for God's sake, to hold things until I come."
"I'll tell him," said Thorpe, then volunteered: "But he and Edmunds are egging 'em on—if you ask me. You'll have to hurry, chief."
"Hurry? . . . I'll fly!" promised Harrington; and roaring up the hills and dipping into the valleys, swinging round perilous curves, and dashing madly over straightaways, he drove the seventy miles that lay between the State Capitol and Edgewater.
Harrington found the courthouse corridors packed with excited men, breathing vengeance, loud in denunciation, loud in demand to be led instantly to Hurricane Island—demanding, on his appearance, that he, Henry Harrington, become their leader; but he put them off and made his way to the inner office of the late sheriff. Under-Sheriff Jordan was there, ostensibly in command; but the real commanders were about him, Tom Scanlon, Dan Edmunds, Steve Quackenbaugh and Jim Gaylord, stout upholders of the law, all four of them. In a moment like this greetings were dispensed with.
"Ain't this the devil, Henry?" demanded Scanlon.
"It's awful," confessed Harrington, with a shake of his head. "I'm sure sorry for poor old Jim."
"'S what comes of coddling these lazy Indians anyway," declared Quackenbaugh, with venom; and, it was true that Adam John, take it all the way through, had caused Quackenbaugh a good deal of trouble.
"'S what comes of coddling law-breakers of any kind, white or Indian," amended Gaylord. "You take that Socialist, Salzberg; he's still fighting the title case, and Soderman, Bolshevik to the core—no more respect for our institutions than anything. We've tried every way to pacify him about that power site, everything short of giving the property back to him."
Scanlon looked impatient. This was no time for academic discussion. "The point is this one Indian and what he did this afternoon," the Chief Counsel affirmed. "The whole county's up. I've been sort of holding them until you got here, Henry; but the boys are wild about Jim and rarin' to go."
"I'll make that unnecessary," said Harrington with quiet decision. "I'll go out and get the Indian myself. I saved his life once, he'll mind me like a dog. Pledge me your word that if I bring this man in, you will defend his life as you would your own." Henry thrust out his hand. Each man took it, reluctantly, perhaps, but each took it.
"We've got to keep our word to Henry," recognized Gaylord, first to speak after Harrington left.
"How the dickens can we?" inquired the under-sheriff. "The boys are all het up. They'll hang that Indian as soon as they get an eye on him."
"We've got to get the crowd dispersed somehow," perceived Edmunds.
"Strategy," suggested Tom Scanlon, skilled in subtleties. "Let 'em go after the Indian, but not yet. Pass the word along, Jordan, that you start in an hour. Edmunds has got a dozen boats waiting. You've got thirty cars volunteered. Start 'em in two coveys. They'll go out and thrash around all night; and by the time they find out that we tricked 'em a little, they'll be cooled off enough to be glad we did it."
Fiften minutes after Under-Sheriff Jordan had notified his impatient cohorts of an hour's postponement in the advance upon Hurricane Island, Henry Harrington, in the pitchy black of a moonless and starless night, was standing at the mouth of Cub Creek. A brooding silence lay upon the channel and the shadowy bulk of the Edgewater & Eastern's island. This silence Henry wakened with a shout. No answer came; but when he had twice repeated the call: "Adam! Adam John-n-n!" an owl hooted on the island. At least he had attracted the attention of an owl, and the owl was of an inquiring mood.
"Who? . . . who? . . ." demanded the bird of the night.
"Harrington! Henry Harrington!" sharp and clear, slightly irritated, went the answer to the owl.
The bird hooted once more, but on a descending cadence, as if its thirst for information had been satisfied. A minute or so later, Harrington heard another sound—a bass drumlike note, echoing from low upon the water; it was the casual beat of a paddle upon the side of a dug-out canoe. But it was not Adam John who stepped lightly out when a keel grated upon the gravel at the mouth of the creek. It was Lahleet. This was their first encounter since that angry parting of two weeks ago in Henry's office. But there was no stiffness in her manner.
For one thing she was too overcome by anxiety, too grateful for his coming. Besides, in very truth, she had never lost faith in Harrington. Within an hour after her impetuous, wrathful little soul had emptied itself in vitriolic denunciation on his head, she had been ready to trust him fully once more, believing that she read him more truly than he read himself. She thought, too, that by her maneuver of leaving the fate of the Shell Point Indians in his hands entirely, she saved him as well as them, by raising an issue so acute that it was bound to make clear to his conscience the wickedness of John Boland.
His appearance here and now she took as confirmation of her faith; she construed it at once as friendly, and after her naive fashion met him entirely without restraint or any sense of the necessity of apology or explanation.
"Is the sheriff dead?" she asked anxiously, laying hold upon Henry's arm.
"Yes," Harrington answered sorrowfully. "Take me to Adam John, will you?"
When Harrington found Adam John, he was in the lodge, standing beside the table on which lamplight struggled through a smoking chimney. A rifle lay where once the golden twentics had glittered. The Indian was at attention; but the expression of that absurdly twisted and pasty yellow face with its features only half emerged, was stolid, obstinate and a little defiant. "Adam—Adam John!" reproached Harrington, with a lump in his throat. "You have killed Sheriff Hogan."
The Indian swallowed, after which a sigh escaped him, as of relief at a suspense that had been ended. Then he sulked: "Sheriff shoot first."
"But that was an accident—a shot in the air. You made an awful mistake, Adam John. They're calling you a Bolshevik, an anarchist. They say you are a coward to shoot a man from ambush. I know that you are not a coward. I want you to prove it. The courthouse in Edgewater is surrounded by a mob clamoring for your blood. I want you, unarmed, to go back with me tonight, to walk right through that mob and surrender to Under-Sheriff Jordan. I have seen you dare death before and I want you to dare it tonight. Will you?"
The Indian's ferret eyes brightened at the challenge; but he hesitated, features working. "Me go," he announced presently.
"You must realize fully what you are doing, Adam," warned Harrington. "They call you a murderer. They say you were sore at the law and took your grudge out heartlessly on poor Jim Hogan—Jim, with a wife and six kids.
"If you come in, I want you to say to the officers that you are not a lawless person and that to prove it, you are willing to submit your cause to a jury—all the facts—just the way they appear to you. It is a very solemn thing that I ask of you, Adam, because if they decide that you are guilty, you will be sentenced to hang." Hang! How terribly the word echoed in in this little lodge where an adolescent citizen had dreamed his crude but happy dreams. "Are you up to that, old fellow—what I have proposed? Or is it too much?" Harrington's tone was affectionate and considerate.
Adam John was thoughtful; he took time to review his first acceptance. "If you say that right thing, me do it," he decided, drawing himself up proudly. Then his features began to work as if he struggled to bring to birth some inchoate, half-formed idea that motivated his actions. "Me fight once for that," he labored, pointing upward toward the peak of his lodge where both men knew a fog-faded emblem floated in the night. "Mebbe so that flag fight for me now. . . . You think so, mebbe?"
Harrington was touched by this notion of the flag as a symbol of the guarantees of this nation to its citizens. That was not a bad idea at all; the badness only entered when Adam undertook to assist the flag by pumping a bullet into the stomach of the sheriff.
"Those man come with flag. They fakers, robbers. Flag no rob . . . you think so, Lieutenant?"
"You bet your life not, Adam," averred Henry, feeling more and more sorrow, more and more affection for stupid, mistrusting yet trustful Adam John. "The flag will give you a square deal—never doubt it."
As Adam John and Henry were driving into Edgewater, a most unusual succession of blinding lights of motorcars streamed by them; but the streets of the town were deserted and the courthouse was silent.
About eight o'clock next morning, however, the streets of the town began to be filled with some scores of wearied, disgusted and sheepish men who clamored and questioned and swore and tried to explain themselves in various ways. Two of their leaders, George Miller and Danny Simpson, thought to compare notes with Harrington himself.
"And so," concluded Miller, "we shot up the shack at daylight and then burned it."
"Burned it?" Harrington's tone was incisive. His brows were lifted and frowning.
"To the ground. Nothing left but ashes. Just burned it, to—to kind of relieve their feelings, the boys did."
This residence that Adam John had built by his own hands and dreamed his dreams in, burned to ashes by sworn deputies. That was another operation of the law that a mere Siwash would find difficult to understand.
"But that was an act of lawlessness," frowned Henry. "What right had you to burn Adam John's house?"
"What right! The damned killer. Why didn't we have the right? It'll throw the fear of God into others of 'em too."
Harrington looked into the indignant faces thoughtfully and was silent, smothering something.
"Henry, you know, is a kind of a nut about this law-and-order stuff," elucidated Miller to Simpson as they went down the steps.
As soon as the banks were open, Henry sent Thorpe out for some currency. It was lying on his desk when Lahleet came in. He greeted her with a cordial smile but hers was a trifle wan. She was worn and anxious.
"You know what they did?" asked Henry.
"I saw the smoke—the savages!"
"Anyway, it helped them to vent their rage cheaply. There is no more talk of lynching; and our only consideration now is Adam John's defense. Here!" Henry shifted the paper-weight and took up and laid down before the girl's astonished eyes five one-hundred-dollar bills. "Take this down to Stacey Thompson and give it to him as a retainer. Don't tell him where it came from. I think it best for both of us that I should not appear in the matter, but I am going to see that Adam John has a fair trial. Promise him any fee he may demand. It will be forthcoming."
The girl's soul was in her eyes. She held her hand off from the money and then accepted it, timidly at first, then fondling the bills. "Henry!" Her tone was tremulous with gratitude. "I will pay you back."
"You've done that already, Lahleect," answered Henry; "with your friendship—with your trust. Run along now and get Stacey Thompson hooked up. There isn't a jury in the world will convict Adam John of raurder with Stacey defending."
In the course of the same morning, two leaders of the marine division of the sheriff's army drifted upstairs to talk with Harrington, perhaps to make sure he had been entirely innocent in turning their expedition into a wild-goose chase. Henry had satisfied them as easily as the others and listened to them casually.
"What do you know, Henry!" blurted Bingo Ellis. "Some of the gang found a grave on the island. Not exactly fresh, but not so old, neither."
"'Twas me saw it first," explained Ivan Olson. "'Somebody's been digging here, sometime; wonder what for,' I says, and begun scratching just with one of those entrenchment spades that some guy brought along out of his army kit. Well, we went down and there was a blue flannel shirt, and a fellow inside of it."
"Fellow with a lot of yellow whiskers."
Harrington was considerably excited by this information but concealed any unnatural interest admirably. "Yellow whiskers?" he observed as in wonderment, remembering the blond goatee of Count Eckstrom and his mysterious double.
"Nothing left but bones and whiskers, flannel and corduroys, just like a lumber jack, but silk underclothes. What do you know about that?"
"Did you examine the body for identifications of any kind?" asked Henry, yet managed to ask it casually.
"Nothing identifying, no," answered Ivan. "Marks had been cut off the clothes, pockets empty, only thing was a broken rib and busted backbone, like a bullet had crashed through him from front to back."
"Been dirt done on that island, all right—not so long ago either," opined Bingo. "It must have been the Siwash. I expect there's more graves there, if we'd take a look. Oh, that Indian's a bad one. Probably he's been killing people and burying them out there right along."
"Not probably—no," objected Henry. "Remember, I know Adam John. He's not that kind of an Indian."
It was late when Lahleet got back to Harrington's office—four in the afternoon.
"Did you retain Thompson?" asked Henry, eagerly.
"Just. He has been at home asleep all day."
"Well, I be darned! Thompson was in that bunch. Well, that won't hurt," decided Henry on reflection. "Makes him solid with the town, and when he fights for Adam John it will have all the more force. But, say, did you hear they found a grave out there on the island?"
"Yes," said Lahleet—so quickly, so quietly, so resignedly, that Harrington felt himself instantly warned off the subject by every instinct of chivalry.
Consequently he did not tell her that already he had rushed out to the island to examine the grave and every shred of its contents for clues to the mystery of the stolen twenty thousand and had found none.