Tongues of Flame (MacFarlane)/Chapter 34
AT SIX o'clock the mob forgot to go home to dinner; by seven o'clock when it was hungry as well as embittered, when that venom which had distilled itself first in the veins of Titmarsh had had time to duplicate itself in several thousand venous systems; when the men were mad and the women were madder, when leadership had been unable to assert itself; when the mob was a headless monster that flung its writhing coils around first one city block and then another; when it was an angry flood that sloshed through the streets from the courthouse on the south to the docks upon the north—then it was that this instinct to avenge itself upon the property of John Boland, when it could not reach his person, cropped out again.
It broke out first down by the waterfront, opposite Whitman Avenue, where loomed a huge warehouse with the name of John Boland—a wooden warehouse and highly inflammable, for nearly everything in Edgewater was wooden that could be wooden; and highly inflammable because the chief product of Boland General was lumber made from resinous timber.
"Burn it!" somebody shouted hoarsely. "Burn the damn thing!"
How was it done? And so quickly? Nobody knew quite. Somebody found a barrel of tar on the dockside; somebody's hands rolled it against the side of the building; somebody's axe broke it in; several somebodies flung pieces of splintered lumber at the oozing mass; then a particular somebody struck a match. That somebody was Adolph Salzberg.
For a moment the crowd had been still, as sensing that something pregnant and sensational was afoot.
The match flickered, the tar caught, smoked, smoldered and flared up. A cheer rose from the crowd. The blaze shot up at the corner of the warehouse like a swift-climbing vine of fire, like a spurt of flame, mounting to the eaves. The cheers grew wilder. The ivy of fire crept both ways along the eaves, its branches like elfin sprites of flickering yellow that balanced dancingly on the gutters and then of a sudden became huge birds with mighty sun-like wings that flapped every way at once. There was a smoke, wide sheets of smoke creeping and curling from between the shingles; then there was a crackling, volleys of cracklings, a vast barrage of cracklings and swiftly one huge explosion of fire. The whole warehouse was enveloped in fierce flame, sweeping upward into the night.
It and its contents went roaring up to the sky and the crowd cheered frantically, delighted with the spectacle, delighted with itself—so delighted that somebody—rolled another barrel of tar against another warehouse. It burned as brilliantly as the other; and there was more cheering and more frantic delight. The mob spread out and grew busy—busier and busier. More warehouses were kindling; and then piles of lumber began to go—huge fields of lumber—acres and acres of lumber leaping into red flame. Wharves and docks began to blaze and ships at these docks to take fire. When hawsers burned in two the ships went adrift, gigantic torches reeling tipsily on the inlet.
The Mary Boland, especially, burned well, and the north-bound breeze wafted her across the channel, into a dock, into a lumber pile—and within half an hour the whole waterfront of Socatullo was burning brilliantly, as brilliantly as burned the waterfront of Edgewater. Other ships aflame drifted Wahpeetahway and docks there too were burning. Mills were burning—mills on both sides of the inlet. The Boland lath mill went. It was the largest, the most perfectly equipped lath mill in all the world. It burned beautifully.
Gaylord and Schuler had been trying to check this incendiary passion, "Don't burn up the mills. You burn up your jobs, you damn fools!" they shouted, fighting their way through the crowds.
"Aw, let 'em burn! They're Boland's, ain't they?" retorted men with torches of flaming waste, with buckets of kerosene or fish oil in their hands, and went on kindling new fires.
The match factory, the paper mill, the salmon cannery and the drying frames on which were stretched thousands of desiccating carcasses of Alaska cod, began to go—filling the air with a heavy odor of incinerating flesh.'
The waterfront on the Edgewater side was now ablaze from end to end. Vast sheets of flame, clouds and billows of flame, torrential canopies of fire swept up into the night. They flaunted their blazing banners at the darkness overhead. Boland General was burning up.
Revenge! The mob was getting its revenge. It cheered itself hoarse—cheered and rushed about from one scene of conflagration to another.
But there was one who saw who neither cheered nor rushed about. Henry Harrington, through the barred windows of his cell, gazed at that mounting wall of flame half a mile away and was enough dismayed by the sight—yet his heart was too sick to be made sicker. He was rather numb tonight about a good many things. Copies of the Star extras had, of course, penetrated to the jail. He knew what had happened—to Adam John—to Judge Allen—to John Boland—knew why that wall of flame was rising. He knew it was insanity. It distressed him—yet only mildly, impersonally, as it were. He was a sort of burned-out ruin himself tonight and dumbly drank in the spectacle of the conflagration, conscious all the while of that dull pain at his heart which it seemed must never leave; for the next day after his love had died, he had been surprised to find it alive again. This was because he had subconsciously accepted Lahleet's hypothesis, so sympathetically and mendaciously planted in his mind, purely to anesthetize his suffering—the theory that Billie believed him guilty. Eventually he confessed it aloud to himself: "She thinks I'm guilty . . . They've made her believe it. . . . She's just so shocked she can't think what to do. . . . That makes her doubt me all along the line." From this moment forward, Henry thought he had originated this idea, so that when later Lahleet advanced a totally different hypothesis he saw no reason to doubt her single-mindedness.
So tonight as the flames burned up John Boland's fortune, while Henry languished, seemingly forgotten, in a cell, he could mutter doggedly, lyrically: "I love her! I love her!" But abruptly the languishing one closed his eyes and opened them again, for something most unexpected had happened. While his gaze was focused on those distant cliffs of fire, the line of his vision had been broken by a something—a something on the hiproof of the jail, a few feet below his window—a human figure, silhouetted for the moment and then crouching flat. The appearance of a human figure there would have been startling enough—especially since Henry thought he recognized it—but his power to register vivid sensation was temporarily depleted by overuse. He watched this figure casually almost, creeping upward to his window, and flattening there, while hands worked at the sash with tools that presently enabled the man to remove and lay it on the sloping shingles beside him.
"Hello, Adam! What do you think you're doing?" Henry demanded in a low tone. Adam's answer was a grunt and the appearance of a tiny blue flame that appeared to jet almost out of his hand. Some furtive, some perverse instinct of Henry's made him careful to hover close to those bars in such a way that the blue flame would be invisible to eyes peering out at the lurid sky from cells behind, quite as the flattened figure of Adam John was invisible. Along the bars, top and bottom this blue flame went licking, until, lo, at a touch Adam John had plucked out four of them.
"Can beat it now," he whispered laconically in that forever gassy-hoarse voice of his.
Henry, who had been fascinated by the acetylene tongue at its work, seemed to rouse to full consciousness with a bang. "No, no, Adam!" he objected with decision. "Thanks, old man, but—when I go out of here, it'll be through the front door. The folks that put me in will have to come and take me out."
This was not bravado, exactly; it was not conscience entirely. It was the faint resurgence of an old hope. Henry still dreamed of being vindicated. He doted on it. Honor seemed all that was left. Some docks and mills burning up were nothing to this young man—at least nothing so much. A far greater conflagration had been going on in his own heart all day and thus far into the night and there was something there that refused to incinerate. Vindication, not liberty, was what he craved.
"No?" Adam John had grunted, nonplused, but submissive, as always, to Harrington's slightest whim, "No?"—as if he could not understand, and yet was reconciled.
"I don't blame you though for lighting out, Adam John!" Henry assured him. "You keep under cover now till I can go to the bat for you. You got a rotten deal when I promised you a square one. This whole thing's going to untangle, and untangle darn quick. I can see that much in the light of that burning mill over there."
Adam John grunted.
"Where's Lahleet?" Henry whispered.
"Mebbe so she go Salisheuttes—fishing up coast." Adam John speculated. "Salisheuttes own everything—own all dis now; own every darn t'ing."
"The Salisheuttes!" ejaculated Henry, visioning a few tepees and lodges of smelly fish Indians. "There's a turnover for your life. It seems as if God was giving these people the laugh!"
But Adam John did not linger to philosophize. He had done what he came there to do. There was a sudden move on his part, a flattening against the shingles, then an alert lifting of his head.
"Goo'-by," he blurted and was gone before Henry could even say: "Thanks, you well-meaning old scout."
The conflagration raged on—raged wider and more fiercely. The people of Edgewater watched for hours with grim satisfaction while John Boland's possessions burned to ashes. Yet every tide that floods must also ebb. Eventually, bodies wearied and spirits commenced to sag, the dramatic gorgeousness of the scene somehow to pale.
By midnight the destroying mob had become a thin line stretched for two miles along the blazing waterfront, a line which showed a tendency to break and knot in haggard, worn-out groups, no longer potential, resolved by the lassitude of exhaustion and the subsidence of emotions into mere spectators. The spectacle, so long inspiring, began instead to seem awesome. Men gazed solemn-eyed at red clouds glowing where they had worked at desk or bench, some of them for all of their adult lives. There was some recurrence of hysteria—women weeping quietly who had wept violently some hours before. A hue of thought began to tinge the minds of gazers, misgivings to arise. The people of Edgewater were beginning to reflect—to regret even, to wonder if—if all had been as lost as it seemed before the mad impulse to destroy had come to them.
Even nature experienced a revulsion, for, while the citizens of Edgewater were thus doubting themselves, there came a change of the wind—an ominous change. The watchers on the roofs across the inlet noted it first. Sparks no longer fell on them. The flames were going straight up. By one o'clock these roaring columns, pillaring the sky, were all leaning toward Edgewater. Yes, a breeze, an unmistakable breeze was bearing down from the northwest. Gentle enough at first, when it encountered all this vast whirl of heated air, the breeze quickened freakishly into a gale, a devastating blast that had breathed but once upon that blazing waterfront of Edgewater when from it there surged toward the town a mile-long billow of flame. Frightfully this rolled into the wide avenue and scorched the cheeks of spectators so that the line of them broke and gave up the cross-streets in hurrying groups. Proud, as vaunting itself on this victory, it leaped and flaunted after their heels.
Immediately, the sides of wooden buildings and the window casings of brick ones on the town side of Inlet Avenue, commenced to smoke and blister. Within a minute incipient blazes broke out along that barrier of buildings—a score of blazes, fifty of them! Stores, shops, flats and homes of Edgewater were breaking into flame.
Fire! Fire! The town was kindling as that first warehouse had kindled, with incredible rapidity. Fires by squads and fires by platoons were organizing themselves in one long regimentall front of flame. Tardily the little fire department, totally disorganized by the mob, was endeavoring to function, rushing to and fro with a thousand volunteer aids—regulars on the roofs of stores with hose, volunteers on the roofs of houses with buckets and wet sacks. Their efforts were futile, comic. This wall of flame, advancing remorseless and irresistible from the waterfront, was dooming the town of Edgewater to ashes as the people of Edgewater had doomed the works of John Boland to the same.
A new kind of panic seized upon the people, a panic in their souls. They stared inert, helpless. First the ground taken out from under them and now the roof burned down over their heads; it was as if God had struck them. Why lift a hand to avert this final blow, why stir a step to fly from that punishment which seemed prepared for them? "Vengeance is Mine." They had taken their own vengeance on Boland and the fires they kindled had flared back to take a fateful vengeance on the little all that was left them.
But this attitude passed. Everybody ran to save what he might—and then to escape. The doors of stores were flung open. Stocks, furniture, fittings were hurried into the streets, to be, within a few minutes, abandoned. The flames raced too rapidly.
In the residence district there was more time—there were more open spaces; for every home in Edgewater had its lawn in front, its garden in the rear. Householders began frantically carrying out their possessions into the streets. Automobiles were being employed; trucks, touring-cars with tops thrown off, and sedans and limousines with windows lowered and household furnishings thrust frantically through the frames, were all piled high or stuffed full and making trips into the park around the courthouse or to the vacant ground at the edges of the town.
Great prices were offered for means of transportatation; great prices demanded by shameless profiteers. Horses were hurriedly hitched to wagons; wheelbarrows were trundled out of gardeners' houses and from contractors' stores; articles of furniture with casters on them, a sofa that would roll, a davenport, a baby's bed—all such vehicles were piled high with most precious personal possessions, hastily and often absurdly selected, and trundled frantically along the pavement. The gas plant blew up with a mighty roar that knocked houses flat, people flat; but the people rose and stumbled on, their pathway lighted by the flames that burned a block or two away.
Mothers wept, babies cried, fathers scolded; boys shouted one to another, girls giggled hysterically; everybody was frantic, everybody was exhausted but everybody kept going, for the tongues of flame licked hungrily. The red monster had roared down the main streets; it leaped from house to house, from cottage to cottage. The smoke hung in the air, a huge black pall, a few hundred yards above the town, making a somber reflector for the flames, illuminations that revealed men and women as insects—crawling, puny, helpless entities, struggling against the ultimate.
It was one wide stage, but many dramas were going forward upon it at once—comedies some of them, tragedies some—as, for instance: Adolph Salzberg was moving his goods from out his rented cottage. In the presence of what was happening all Salzberg's philosophies fell away from him. He was a mere homeless insect as other human beings were.
From somewhere he had obtained possession of a bony horse and a rickety wagon. Into this, aided by his wife, he was madly hurrying the few little sticks of furniture that were his and the two children that God had given and for whom at times he had been none too grateful. Adolph was very excited, very human, very tender tonight as he rushed in and out of the little cottage; Hulda, his wife, was more excited. She was large and her flesh was soft. She stumbled from the cottage to the wagon, lumbering, panting—turning a moment to look at the flames advancing and then with groans of fresh distress, heaving toward the cottage again.
But once as Hulda turned cottageward, she cried out sharply, "Oh, Adolph! Der pain! Der pain!" then thrust a hand to her side and sat down upon the curb. Adolph, as he wrestled with his loading, noted his wife sitting down, and that she appeared to be in distress. Before he could get to her, she was lying down on the strip of grass between the wooden walk and the wooden curb—both of which would presently take fire and burn.
"Mama!" he called. "Mama! Don't lay down dere. I get you a bed to lay on!" But when Salzberg knelt beside her and felt tenderly over that large, soft body, lo it was pulseless.
"Mama!" he called so loudly that she must hear. "Mama! I get you up from dere."
But he knew she did not hear him. Frantically he dumped the part of their houschold effects from the old wagon and made a superhuman effort to lift the body of his wife to the place he had prepared for it, talking to it sobbingly all the while. "I lift you up dere, mama. I haf you up dere in a jiff!" But he was not equal to the task. And everybody was busy—too busy with his own concerns, too busy with bird cages and green onyx clocks and family heirlooms, to consider the particular embarrassment of a broken-hearted man entirely undemonstrative in his grief. But there came a step beside him, a low exclamation and a crisp voice that said heartily: "I'll help you, Adolph!"
Scarce looking up, though grateful, Adolph knew that hands less large but equally tender with his own lifted that dear treasure to its place and helped him compose it as for a comfortable sleep.
Salzberg murmured fervent thanks and looked up to ejaculate in amazement: "Py Gott! Henry Harrington!"
"The fire is coming fast," said Henry; "get along with you."
Salzberg put his children beside him on the seat, and clucked to the old horse and drove away—away from the cliffs of fire—away toward the open country—through the pungent bitter smoke, with its smell of burning codfish—Salzberg who had kindled that first warehouse down on the dock near seven hours before.
"Dam' dis man, Boland," he sobbed. "Dam' de Supreme Court. Dam' me! Dam' every t'ing but my two modderless little kids!" Salzberg, clucking thickly to the old horse, stretched a sheltering arm around his children.
"Now, wouldn't that break your heart!" exclaimed Harrington, but stood gazing after for only a minute; for he had run head-on into this Salzberg tragedy while on most personal business bent, and was immediately under way once more, pointing his course to the edge of town and up the side-hill by a short cut through scrubby fir trees to the bluff on which Humboldt House had been reared so proudly. "Billie! My Lord, what an awful blow it's been to her! Why didn't I think of that side of it before," he was reproaching himself as he plunged upward. "She wasn't to blame. She didn't know her father was an old cormorant. She'll need me now," he panted, forgetting everything but that the girl he loved would now be a crushed and broken flower, prideless, disillusioned, needing only him. "She'll want me . . . she'll want me something awful!" he perceived eagerly, with all a lover's reviving faith.
Occasionally as he climbed, he glanced backward at that lurid sea of flames, a vast, yellow world blazing in the middle of night, and shuddered each time he looked, for his capacity to feel emotions was coming back to him once more. Newly impelled by these and by tenderer ones which kindled momently, he resumed, after each pause, his upward climb, more breathless than before, naturally unaware that some ten minutes earlier, say about the time when he was lifting the the body of Hulda Salzberg, a coupé had rolled madly down the roadway from Humboldt House to the town.
Daring desperately the very edge of the advancing wall of flames, this car reached the courthouse square, dashed upon the curb, bounded recklessly across the lawn and brought up quivering at the very entrance to the jail. Jailor White heard a clanging of his bell and answered it in person. As he set his iron gate ajar, two female figures, cloaked from head to foot, crowded in upon him and the slenderer of them instantly and boldly turned back the cowl-like collar, revealing the pale, agitated features of Miss Billie Boland.
"Oh!" she moaned, and reached out excited hands to the jailor. "Your prisoners!" she clamored, then choked: "They'll burn—they'll burn like rats in a trap."
Jailor White, who had started and stared wonder ingly, was quick to recover his poise and replied with that courteous consideration he always paid a lady. "Nope," he reassured confidently. "We won't burn, Miss Boland. Too much open space around us; besides, we got the whole staff on the roof with wet sacks and buckets of water. Not a chance, Miss Billie!"
"Oh!" gasped the girl, breathing quickly: "Are you sure?"
"Absolutely, miss!"
"Oh, such a relief!" She stood hesitant.
Jailor White had, in his treatment of Henry Harrington, already shown that he was a man of sympathetic heart and now he displayed a discerning mind as well. "Want—want to see anybody?" he asked, obligingly.
But Miss Boland's face betrayed a fresh alarm. "No! Oh, no!" she insisted hastily. "And you—" her hand went out imploringly—"you wouldn't tell any . . . anybody that I came? . . . That won't be necessary, will it?" Her anxiety was very great and very appealing.
Again Jailor White showed discernment. He perceived that this last was very maidenly anxiety indeed and the chivalry of his rough heart was stirred by this spectacle of the yesterday proud daughter of the tonight ruined and harried John Boland rushing downward through a wall of fire, full of fear for her lover; and then, when reassured, as full of alarm lest he might know that she had come.
"Nope; not necessary 'tall, Miss Boland. I've forgot bigger things 'n this in my day to oblige a lady."
"Thank you; oh, thank you, Mr. " Billie stammered gratefully.
"White is my name, Miss Boland; just plain Larry White."
"Thank you, Mr. White," Billie murmured, and pressed the jailor's hand fervently, then fled out the door and down the steps faster than her maid could follow; and it was not fear of the flames that made her hasten.
Henry, panting at last to the top of the bluff, was really relieved to find Humboldt House still standing. The mob had not rushed up here then. But the house seemed dark; yet he knew it had a private electric plant and surmised the curtains were tightly drawn; however, the front he realized must be illumined by the conflagration. Under cover of a cedar hedge and furtively for strategic reasons rather than through remembering that his status was that of a prisoner illegally at large, he made his way round the house, there to be halted abruptly, for the wide veranda not twenty yards away was at least half as light as day and alive with people, thirty or forty perhaps, standing along the rustic rail in groups, staring gloomily and talking in low, dejected voices. These, of course, would be the families of Boland executives, who had been burned out down below.
Their presence, so close to him, gave Henry an odd sort of start. Scanlon was there, no doubt; and Quackenbaugh—the men who had conspired to ruin him. He found his teeth gritting, his wild rage at them heightening. He edged nearer, still keeping close under the shadow of the hedge, and was rewarded by making out Old Two Blades himself, a little apart, his privacy respected by the others, standing motionless like a pelican on a rock, gazing downward into the vast pit of flame; and beside him, sunk into a chair, sat the considerable bulk of his wife, swaying occasionally as with inconsolable grief.
"Napoleon watching the burning of Moscow!" muttered Henry, gloating in spite of himself.
But Billie! Where was she? He strained his eyes for a sight of her, his ears for a tone of her voice; but got neither. Satisfied that she was not upon the veranda, he moved around the corner of the house to get a view of that small balcony which looked out from her own suite in the northeast gable.
"Poor, poor girl! She's just too crushed to see anybody at all," he reasoned. "Nobody would know how to talk to her but me anyway. . . . I could do a Romeo and climb up to that balcony," he decided, contemplating the mass of creepers that grew past it to the roof.
Henry had not heard a car shoot under the porte-cochère because the whole length and bulk of the house lay between. It was the coupé coming back. Still breathless from her visit to the jail, Billie's instinct was to avoid those groups upon the piazza, to avoid her grimly brooding father and her steadily weeping mother, to avoid the very house itself. Plucking at her maid to follow, she turned out, past the fountain playing in the court, toward the pergola in the rose garden. From there she could stare at that fascinating holocaust below from which no one could take an eye and give herself up to that whirlpool muddle of bitter and bewildering reflections which seemed to constitute her entire mind tonight.
Harrington, concealed by a pillar of that same pergola, was gazing speculatively at the balcony, then wistfully at the windows which he knew were hers, when there was wafted into his nostrils a faint but delicious perfume, a distinctive, delicate, bewitching fragrance that was as much personality as it was the distilled scent of flowers. He inhaled it and stood enraptured. It was Billie! She was near—she was somewhere round him in the night. The faint breeze breathed of her. His heart leaped; his nerves tingled; he could barely repress a cry of delight. Billie! Suddenly he shrank. She was there—just on the other side of the tamarack pillar. She was passing—screened from him only by the rose vines; he made out her figure clearly in that lurid half light. He could have reached out and touched her; but—caution! He must not alarm her. And, gods of ill luck, there tagged her maid after her. Her heels clicked faintly on the vitrified bricks; his were noiseless on the cushion of the lawn, and he followed after her.
Billie trailed listlessly to the very end of the pergola and sat down upon a bench of split logs where he had dreamed with her a score of times. The maid came on and sat down upon the same bench, but at a little distance, on the end nearer the house; the end that was between him and her. He had to keep behind the two of them.
"If—if she were only alone," he sighed, twisting his hands nervously, and speculating whether the maid could be trusted.
"You may go, Nana," Billie announced unexpectedly, and while her voice thrilled him, it melted him by its inarticulate sadness.
The maid, after solicitously turning up the collar of the cloak about her young mistress's neck, went obediently back to the house. Harrington advanced to the very end of the bench. He had but to lean forward to lay a hand upon her shoulder. He could hear her sigh. And he could see her perfectly now. Poor, dear, bewildered girl! She had been made to suffer so. What if she had left him succorless? She was entirely surrounded by lying sycophants who had persuaded her that white was black. It was so impossible to reproach her now. She looked frail to him and wasted—as frail as he had felt till freedom gave him strength once more.
But as he considered in what way he would best announce his presence and what he would best do first for her, the realization came to him abruptly that he was not free. He was not free—he was merely out—by the grace of Adam John's acetylene torch, out to attend to certain responsibilities which the catastrophe had forced upon him, and only one of which his presence here in the garden advanced.
He felt a great pity for her as she bowed there—a great yearning for her. He wanted to take her tenderly in his arms, offer his strong young strength to bulwark her in this hour of awful calamity; but what had he to offer—really? There was nothing in him to bulwark, to comfort her; the sight of him would only shame her—shock her with the perception that, besides the other things which she believed of him, he was also a coward who had broken from his jail.
The town was burning up—but not the complaint against him. He was still under charges, under a cloud, under the ban of the law, the ban of his townsmen, the ban of . . . her. Until circumstances lifted that ban, he could be of no use at all. He must wait—as he had proudly boasted to her that he would wait. Now he dared not reveal himself; he could only stand a moment and yearn for her with more exquisite pain than ever, waft her a kiss that she must not see, lift above her bent head a prayer of which she could not know, and then slip away to set himself about that other important piece of business which had led him first to leave his cell and make a perilous way downward to the ground by the route which Adam John had taken.
For this next enterprise Henry needed high-powered transportation and the parking space behind Humboldt House was full of it. By a circuitous movement he was quickly among these cars. Selecting one with a full tank and ignition key in place, he felt justified in commandeering it. Forty miles away was a vast army encampment, a divisional headquarters, with warchouses full of supplies and barracks full of able-bodied men, and just before three o'clock of that fiery morning, Harrington, having driven as he had never driven before, drew up before the sentry at the main gate entrance. Something that he said to the sentry brought the officer of the guard quickly. Something that he said to the officer of the guard caused that functionary to hurry past another sentry to an orderly dozing outside the door of a man who wore two stars on his collar when not sound asleep in his pajamas, as he was at the present moment.
"Who? What!" roared the general, when his orderly, by the Pullman porter's expedient of plucking at the sheet, had twigged him into wakefulness. "Who? . . . Hellfire Harrington! Wants to see me? Well, why the devil don't you bring him in here? What do you keep him waiting for?"
"He's here, sir," the orderly had the presence of mind to observe.
"Hellfire!" ejaculated the roused general, but not profanely; tenderly rather; and there ensued the spectacle of a man in pajamas leaping up, an oldish man with gray hair sticking out of his head at forty angles, leaping up and flinging his arms around Harrington and shouting: "Hellfire! You young !" The rest of his greeting was unprintable.
Harrington, yielding to the embrace, although embarrassed, presently put the old general affectionately but firmly from him. "You haven't heard what they have been doing to me," he replied.
"Haven't I?" snapped the general, irascibly. "Just got round to read a week's papers last night before I went to bed. Been so damned disgusted I could hardly sleep. I was going to drive over there this morning and get you out of that jail if I had to take the whole division with me. Murder! Embezzlement! Betrayal of constituency! The fools! They ought to see you where I've seen you. Hellfire, you young first-class !" The general became censorable again. "But they came to their senses and let you out, eh? And you came rushin' right over here like a boy to his dad, to tell your old general about it. Doggone you, Hank Harrington, I could just about cry over you and kick you all over this damned camp. What do you want—besides aJackson, tumble out that Scotch!"
Henry explained to the general his misapprehensions and told him what he wanted, then leaped into his borrowed car and hurried away with still another notion in his head.