The Ne'er-Do-Well Part 4

"I'm glad you got him, but you'd better get together and rehea.r.s.e before the police--" He stopped abruptly once more, then looked up curiously.

"What is it?" questioned the man from Missouri.

Padden pointed silently to the lapel of the fellow's vest, which he had turned back. A nickeled badge was pinned upon it. "He's no thief; he's a detective--a plain-clothes man!"

"Wha'd I tell you!" Higgins exulted. "I can smell 'em!"

The crowd looked nonplussed, with the exception of Jefferson Locke, who became calmer than at any time since the waiter had first whispered into his ear.

"We didn't know who he was," he began, hurriedly, "You must square it for us, Padden. I don't care what it costs." He extended a bulky roll of bank-notes toward the gray-haired man. "These boys can't stand this sort of thing, and neither can I. I've got to sail at ten o'clock this morning."

"Looks to me like you've croaked him," said the proprietor, ignoring the proffered money.

"It's worth a thousand dollars to me not to miss my boat."

"Wait a minute." Padden emptied the unconscious man's pockets, among other things of some telegrams and a legally folded paper.

The latter he opened and scanned swiftly, then turned his little eyes upon Locke without a word, whereupon that gentleman, with equal silence, took from his inside pocket a wallet, and selected a bill, the denomination of which he displayed to the; proprietor before folding it inside the bundle he held.

"Here! It may cost you something."

Padden nodded and accepted the money, saying:

"Oh, I guess I can fix it. I know the right doctor." He regained his feet, then warned the onlookers: "But you'll have to keep your traps closed, understand?"

"Will he die?" asked Ringold, fearfully, his back still against the door.

"Not a chance. But if he does he'll never know who hit him. You see, we picked him up in the alley and brought him in." Padden winked meaningly. "It happens right along in this part of town. Do you get me? I'll keep these." He indicated the badge and papers in his hand. "Now go out as if nothing had come off. Drop in again the next time you're in town. I'll take care of the supper checks."

As the partly sobered visitors struggled into their overcoats Padden drew Locke aside, and, nodding toward Higgins, who was still talkative, said:

"If you want to catch that ten o'clock boat you'd better stick close to your friend; I know him."

"Thanks!" Locke glanced at the prostrate figure, then inquired in a low tone: "On the level, will he make it?"

"Hard to tell. Just the same, if I was you I'd change my sailing-- he might come to."

"You chaps have done me a big favor to-night," said Locke, a little later, when he and his companions were safely out of the Austrian Village, "and I won't forget it, either. Now let's finish the evening the way we began it."

Anderson, Rankin, and Burroughs, to conceal their nervousness, pleaded bodily fatigue, while Anthony also declared that he had enjoyed himself sufficiently for one night and intended to go home and to bed. "That episode rather got on my nerves," he acknowledged.

"Mine, too," a.s.sented Locke. "That's why you mustn't leave me. I just won't let you. Remember, you agreed to see me off."

"'S'right, fellows," Higgins joined in. "We agreed to put him aboard and we must do it. Don't break up the party, Kirk."

"I don't want to go home," Ringold muttered.

"It's a breach of hospitality to go home," Higgins insisted.

"Besides, after my b.l.o.o.d.y 'ncounter with that limb of the law I need a stimulant. You must look after me."

"I shall tuck you in your little bed," Kirk told him. But Higgins would hear to nothing of the sort, protesting that he was in honor bound to conduct his old friend Locke to the steamer, and Anthony feared that without his protection some harm might befall his irresponsible and impulsive companion. Candor requires it to be said that he did hesitate, arguing long with the limp-legged Higgins; but Locke was insistent, the others grew impatient of the delay, and in the end he allowed himself to be persuaded.

It is often through just such sudden, inconsequent decisions, influenced perhaps by the merest trifles, that a man's life is made great or small; just such narrow forkings of the trail may divert him into strange adventurings, or into worlds undreamed of.

Kirk Anthony, twenty-six years old, with a heritage at hand, and with an average capacity for good or evil, chose the turning that led him swiftly from the world he knew into an alien land.

Numbed as they were by the excesses of the evening, it did not take the young men long to lose all clear and vivid remembrance of this recent experience; for the time had come when Nature was offering her last resistance, and their brains were badly awhirl.

Of all the four, Jefferson Locke was the only one who retained his wits to the fullest--a circ.u.mstance that would have proved him the owner of a remarkably steady head had it not been for the fact that he had cunningly subst.i.tuted water for gin each time it came his turn to drink. It was a commentary upon the state of his companions that they did not notice the limpid clearness of his beverage.

Dawn found them in an East Side bas.e.m.e.nt drinking-place frequented by the lowest cla.s.ses. Ringold was slumbering peacefully, half overflowing the wet surface of a table; Anthony had discovered musical talent in the bartender and was seated at a battered piano, laboriously experimenting with the accompaniment to an Irish ballad; Higgins and Locke were talking earnestly. It was the slackest, blackest hour in an all-night dive; the nocturnal habitues had slunk away, and the day's trade had not yet begun.

Higgins, drawn and haggard beneath his drunken flush, was babbling incessantly; Locke, as usual, sat facing the entrance, his eyes watchful, his countenance alert. In spite of the fact that he had constantly plied his companion with liquor in the hope of stilling his tongue, Higgins seemed incapable of silence, and kept breaking forth into loud, garbled recitals of the scene at Padden's, which caused the Missourian to s.h.i.+ver with apprehension. To a sober eye it would have been patent that Locke was laboring under some strong excitement; for every door that opened caused him to start, every stranger that entered made him quake. He consulted his watch repeatedly, he flushed and paled and fidgeted, then lost himself in frowning meditation.

"Grandes' fellow I ever met," Higgins was saying for the hundredth time. "Got two faults, tha's all; he's modesht an' he's lazy--he won't work."

"Anthony?"

"Yes."

Locke stirred himself, and, leaning forward, said: "You and he are good friends, eh?"

"Best ever."

"Would you like to play a joke on him?"

"Joke? Can't be done. He's wises' guy ever. I've tried it an'

always get the wors' of it. Yes, sir, he's wise guy. Jus' got two faults: he won't work an'--"

"Look here! Why don't you make him work?"

"Huh?" Higgins turned a pair of bleared, unfocusable eyes upon the speaker.

"Why don't somebody make him work?"

The lean-faced youth laughed moistly.

"Tha's good joke."

"I mean it."

"Got too much money. 'S old man puts up reg'lar."

"Listen! It's a shame for a fine fellow like him to go to the dogs." Higgins nodded heavily in agreement. "Why don't you send him away where he'll have to rustle? That's the joke I meant."

"Huh?" Again the listener's mind failed to follow, and Locke repeated his words, concluding: "It would make a new man of him."

"Oh, he wouldn't work. Too lazy."

"He'd have to if he were broke."

"But he AIN'T broke. Didn't I tell you 's old man puts up reg'lar?

Fine man, too, Misser Anthony; owns railroads."