Tongues of Flame (MacFarlane)/Chapter 39
BUT Hornblower's acid observation, like his presence, went unnoticed in the crowd; for after one more dazed moment a cheer had gone up.
"Hurrah! Hurrah for the Siwashes!"
The unbelievable had happened. Relief—mercy had come from where whites had least right to expect mercy. Men and women turned to look at each other and read in the faces before them confirmation of what they felt in their own hearts. There was shouting, there was shaking of hands, and pounding upon backs. Husbands and wives fell into each other's arms and wept. They had back the land their homes had stood on. Everybody was laughing, everybody was crying; some people were singing and it is just possible that some were praying. The crowd spread out as if seized with a sudden impulse to scatter the good news; householders felt all at once a desire to rush out and look at their lots again to make sure that they were there.
Neither were their benefactors forgotten. There was a rush of the more exuberant youth for Chief Charlie. "Let me kiss you, Charlie," one hilarious reveler cried, and the venerable Indian grected the proposal with a jagged grin. Immediately two lusties swung the old man to their shoulders, while crowding admirers slapped him playfully on the back, chucked him in the ribs, pulled at his arms, pinched him and otherwise manhandled his dignity with rude, bear-like manifestations of joy and good will. Within a minute his bearers had started down the steps with him.
Other joy-mad celebrants swung up the other chiefs to their shoulders. They even laid violent but approving hands upon the Reverend Jedediah Collins, and him also, laughing, they bore aloft. They caught up squaws and papooses, and headed a promenade that streamed like a human waterfall down the broad steps and along the concrete walk with the crowd milling in behind and forming a serpentine in the street, with shouts and cheers and songs and a more organized manifestation of the popular rejoicing.
For once in Edgewater the Siwash had his due.
Presently the tumult of good feeling subsided. The old chiefs, permitted to resume their feet and their gravity, gathered once more around their spiritual Moses and looked up into his face as meekly content with what his leadership had brought them to. Yet this resumption of satisfied impassive calm was almost immediately broken in upon. This was because, before anyone else in Edgewater knew that Henry Harrington was to be exonerated of the murder charge, John Boland knew—for he had heard what the detectives said to Scanlon in his library, and when he read confession in the consummate scoundrel's face, he backed away from him with horror burning in his eyes, his stunned mind trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. Then he too accused Scanlon—but weakly, for he was weak. "And you—you let me do what I have done!" He gasped this charge and sat trembling. He had ceased to be any longer a self-confident man. His head sank weakly prone upon his library table and it lay there some time. It was lying there, a wrinkled, parchment face, like some grotesque paper-weight amid the litter of the desk, when, well, say, when Lahleet stepped so excitedly out of the automobile in front of the courthouse to be followed so sullenly by Count Ulric. But about the time when Lahleet was leading Henry from his cell, John Boland's head had got back upon his shoulders again. He was sitting up—by a supreme effort of the will, he was standing up; he was walking toward the door, then down the steps and out between the statues of Lewis and Clark. He had started for the jail but he never got there, being caught in this jam on the courthouse pavement within a dozen feet of the porch to find himself presently staring up into the face of Henry Harrington at a distance of no more than a dozen feet.
Held, perforce, a single unnoticed figure in this human mosaic, he witnessed Henry's vindication. With mortification scalding deeper every moment, his state of mind was violently upheaved. What—what was that this missionary fellow was saying? What—what was that he was proposing? The people—the people were to get their titles back! Mr. Boland's mind kindled and his heart leaped.
The Salisheuttes had become merciful to the townspeople. God in His heaven! Was there to be mercy also for him? The bare possibility struck a kind of mellowness into him that he had seldom known before—a sort of preparedness of soul as for some great spiritual light to break.
And so, when at length the abating crowd hysteria gave him his chance, he laid a hand, trembling in its eagerness on Chief Charlie's shoulder, and his voice, an oldish voice, husky with anxiety, importuned quaveringly: "You mean, Chief Charlie, that you were joking with me? That—that you will give me my land back too?"
The old Indian started and looked offense, then surprise, then sardonic gratification. His glance was one which sifted and weighed and found utterly wanting for a time, then seemed at length to discover in the strained features before him something that might be worthy at least of deliberation—say, before a referee.
"You askum that boy!" he directed bluntly, pointing with the short stem of his pipe; and, lo, there before Mr. Boland, looking at him level, was a half-breed with sloe-black eyes and twisted, half-emerged features.
Quite possibly Old Two Blades had never seen this man before; yet he recognized him intuitively—Adam John! Yes: whether assuming a breakdown of police power or sensing that atmosphere of general amnesty which had begun to spread itself abroad, or proudly indifferent to the chance he took—however it was, here was Adam John, standing among the Salisheuttes as if naively he expected that justice would be done to him automatically when it was done to them.
As Mr. Boland gazed at his patient features, mildly curious rather than hotly resentful, a sense that he had committed an enormity upon this inarticulate half-breed grew up in him swiftly. He recalled with shame how ruthlessly the mighty mass of his power and the trained cunning of his brain had been employed to crush this one superfluous little Indian. And now before this same insignificant Siwash the issues of his fortune were made to tremble.
Adam John had become the arbiter of John Boland's destiny. It had been left to him to say. It seemed as if God were mocking him.
Standing thus, harried by the look of the sloe-black eyes in this twisted intent face before him, illumination broke upon John Boland's mind. Wrongs, wrongs, wrongs! He perceived that he had wrought great, tremendous wrongs!
For the first time John Boland saw himself in a true perspective, his life as a vaster wreck than his fortune. All at once he wanted, not an opportunity to reconstruct the fortune, but respite in which to reconstruct the life—to undo some of its awful mistakes. It was the coldest, cruelest, meanest thing that could be conceived—what he had done to this boy! All at once he didn't want his acres back—didn't want anything, but just this stupid-looking half-breed's forgiveness. It was an odd craving to come to him but it came; it was there and demanding expression.
"Adam! Adam John!" he labored throatily, reaching toward him. "Can I make it right with you?" His feeling was deep enough that the light in his recessed eyes was dimmed and his long chin trembled. "Will you say so, Adam?"
But Adam John was cannily suspending judgment on this apparent penitence of the man who had dealt with him so ruthlessly. "Mebbe so—you keep off—my island?" he questioned gravely.
"Why—sure! Surely!" J. B.'s voice broke with the sudden surge of emotion that was sweet as he had ever known. "It's yours, boy; yours, of course!" he gulped, grateful tears streaming from the deep sockets of his eyes, while his groping hands found at length the hands of Adam John and shook them with all the energy of which he was capable. "I have no right there—never had any, I see now. I haven't got any right now anywhere," he conceded brokenly, with a new accession of humility.
Chief Charlie had been overlooking this dialogue from a higher step with a sort of paternal interest, and he appeared to see in this speech of Boland's evidence of a very genuine repentance, and to be touched by it. His seamed old countenance began to beam and there was a brightening moisture in his own opaque orbs. "Salisheuttes give you land back!" he grunted, and managed a smile, beautiful in its ugliness.
"Back?" cried Mr. Boland, incredulous now that he had got the very thing he had been asking for. "Back?"
"Mebbe so, you not squash little Indian now any more—mebbe so?" speculated the old chief.
"You rebuke me, Charlie! You rebuke me utterly!" cried Mr. Boland in anguish. At the same time he disengaged one of his hands from Adam John to reach up and grasp Chief Charlie's gnarled old claw. The chief took it heartily and it was a grotesque picture that they made, John Boland, sartorially correct as ever, overcome with emotion and supported fraternally between a half-breed in overalls and an old baboon in a rusty frock coat.
"You will need to see Henry Harrington, Mr. Boland," suggested the kindly voice of the Reverend Jedediah Collins, who from his six feet of stature had also been interestedly overlooking this spectacle of the magnate before the mercy seat. "He will act for my people. They will give him a power of attorney."
See Henry Harrington! Boland had stripped Henry Harrington of everything that once-glowing young man possessed, and now he was being told that if he wanted to get back anything that he himself had possessed, he must receive it from this same Henry Harrington.
Two days before, that would have been the bitterest punishment devisable for him; now it only reminded him that to see Henry Harrington was what he had set out to do. But when he turned to look for him, that young man had disappeared.