The Empty Sack Part 36

Emboldened by his concentration on her story and herself, she took out the roll of bills from her bag, enlarging on her plea.

"You see, sir, it was this way. After my father had to leave the bank last fall, Teddy had to be our chief support, just on his eighteen a week. My two little sisters left school and went to work; but that didn't bring in much. Then there were the taxes, and the mortgages, and the expenses of my father's funeral, besides six of us having to eat-"

"You were working, too, weren't you?"

"Yes, sir; I was posing. But I only earned six a week."

"Only?"

Based on a memory of his own of something Junia had said-"a mousey little thing with a veneer of modesty, but mercenary isn't the word for her"-there was an implication in this "Only?" which escaped Jennie's simplicity.

"Yes, sir; that was all. Somehow I couldn't get the work. n.o.body seemed to want me."

He pointed at her roll of bills.

"Then where did you get the money you're holding in your hand?"

The question was unexpected and confounding. She must either answer it truly or not answer it at all. If she answered it truly, she not only exposed Bob, but she exposed herself to the utmost rigor of his wrath.

She didn't care about herself; she didn't care much about Bob; she cared only about Teddy. The utmost rigor of this man's wrath would send him to jail as easily as she could brush a fly through an open window. She could say nothing. She could only look at him helplessly, with lips parted, eyes s.h.i.+mmering, and the hot color flooding her face pitiably.

It was the kind of situation in which no man with the heart of a man could be hard on any little girl; besides which, Collingham looked on this silent confession as providential. It would enable him to reason with Bob, if it ever came to that, and tell him what he, the father, knew at first hand and from his own experience. Otherwise he brought no moral judgment to bear on poor Jennie, and condemned her not at all.

"Just wait a minute," he said, in a kindly tone, getting up as he spoke.

"I'll go and straighten the thing out."

Left alone, Jennie had these concluding words to strengthen her. He would straighten the thing out. That meant probably that Teddy wouldn't have to go to jail, and beyond this relief she didn't look. It would be everything. Nothing else would matter. He might be dismissed from the bank; they might starve; but the great thing would be accomplished.

It was a half hour or more before he returned, and when he did he looked worried. "Troubled" would perhaps be a better word, since even Jennie could see that his thoughts were farther away and deeper down than the incidents on the surface. He spoke almost absent-mindedly.

"I find there's been a leakage for some little time past, and they've had difficulty in fixing where the trouble was. Now I'm sorry to say it looks as if it was your brother. There's hardly any doubt about that-"

"You see, sir," she pleaded, "it was so hard for him not to be able to do anything when my father was so ill and my mother worried and the bills piling up-they stopped our credit nearly everywhere-and the tax people-they were the worst of all."

"Yes, yes; I quite understand. And I've told them not to press the matter further. Flynn and Jackman, the two men you saw yesterday, are out for the minute; but when they come in they are to report to me. I don't suppose we can take your brother back; but I'll see what I can do for him elsewhere." He rose to end the interview, so that Jennie rose, too. "You can keep that money," he added, nodding toward her roll of bills. "You were not responsible, and there's no reason at all why you should pay."

When Jennie protested, he merely escorted her to the door, which he held open.

"No, don't thank me," he insisted. "Please! Just make your mind easy as to your brother. The matter shall not go any farther. I don't know what I can do for him as yet-the circ.u.mstances make it difficult; but I shall find something."

So, blinded with tears, Jennie made her way toward the lift, calling down on Bob's father as well as on his mother all the blessings she was able to invoke.

Late that afternoon, Teddy, on the floor of his hut, woke with a start from a doze. He hadn't meant to doze, but he had slept little on the preceding night, and was lulled, moreover, by a sense of his security.

The day had not been as exciting as the day before. Nothing having happened during all those hours, he was growing convinced that nothing would. In its way, safety was becoming irksome. He began to ask himself whether the spirit of adventure didn't summon him to go forth as a tramp that night.

So he dozed-and so he waked, with a start. The start was possibly due to a consciousness even in his sleep that there were people in the road. He was frightened before he could put his eye again to the peephole.

Luckily the pistol was at hand, and _the other thing_ might now have to be done.

As a matter of fact it seemed likely. Two burly figures had already left the highway, Flynn tramping along the flicker of path, and Jackman picking his steps through the oozy mud a little to Flynn's right and a little behind him. There was no secrecy about their approach, and apparently no fear.

"They don't suspect that I've got a gun," Teddy commented to himself.

"Lobley can't have told them."

They were talking to each other, and, though Teddy could not make out their words, he heard Flynn's gurgle of a laugh. To his fevered imagination, it was a diabolic laugh, suggestive of handcuffs and torture.

The thought of handcuffs frenzied him. Of the sacrilegious touch on his person, the links set the final mark. Rather than submit to them he would shoot anyone, preferably himself. For shooting himself the minute had come, and he decided to do it through the temple. The aim through the heart might miscarry; there was no chance of miscarriage through the brain. All that remained for him now was to know the moment when.

"Don't shoot till you see the whites of their eyes."

Some trick of memory brought the tag back to him. He knew that it applied to the shooting of an enemy, but in this case it suited himself.

He couldn't see the whites of their eyes as yet, for through the gra.s.ses and over the slimy ground they advanced but slowly. That gave him the longer to live. He might live for three minutes, possibly for five. Even a minute was something.

But he was ready. He couldn't say that he had no fear, because he was all fear; but for the very reason that he was all fear, he was frozen, numb. Only, the hand that held the pistol shook. He couldn't control it.

All the more, then, must he do it through the brain, since he found by experiment that he could steady the muzzle against his temple. He didn't dare so to hold it long, lest that impulse of acting before he thought might deprive him of these last precious seconds of life. So he let the thing rest on the peephole, pointing outward, like a gun on board s.h.i.+p.

He found, too, that this steadied his eye. He could squint along the barrel right at the two big figures lumbering through the mora.s.s.

"Don't shoot till you see the whites of their eyes."

Flynn looked up, a laugh on his lips at this absurd adventure. The boy saw the whites of his eyes, and, as far as he himself knew, his mind went blank. He always declared that he heard no sound. He only saw Flynn throw up his arms with a kind of stifled shout-stagger-try to regain his lost balance-and go tumbling, face downward, into the long gra.s.s.

Jackman fell, too, though not so p.r.o.ne but that he could partially raise himself, half supported by his left arm, while, without being able to face toward the road, he waved his right to the motors flas.h.i.+ng by.

For Teddy mind-action ceased. He was nothing but mad instinct. He knew he must have fired-must have fired twice-that the hand that was to shoot into his temple had betrayed him. He knew, too, that he couldn't shoot into his temple-that great as was his terror of the handcuffs, his terror of this thing was worse. Flinging the pistol across the floor, his one impulse was to save himself.

As he had foreseen, his mind, once it began to work, worked quickly. He saw that the gra.s.s growing up to the door of the shack was tall, and hardly beaten down by his footsteps. Lying flat like a lizard, he wriggled his way into it. The very yielding of the swampy bottom beneath his weight was in his favor. By a sense, such as that which had waked him up, he knew that motors were stopping in the road, that people were leaping out, that Flynn and Jackman were the objects of everyone's concern, and that, in the mystery as to what had happened to them, no one's attention was as yet directed to himself. He made for the back of the shack, writhing his way round the two corners, and heading out toward the center of the marsh. It was needful to do this, since the shanty and its neighborhood would soon be explored, and he must, if possible, be lost in the swampy tracklessness.

Though progress of necessity was slow, he was amazed at the distance he was putting between himself and danger. Oh, if it was only night! If a thundercloud would only come up and darken the sky! But it was the brilliant, pitiless suns.h.i.+ne of an August afternoon, with not a shred of atmosphere to help him. Still he writhed and writhed and writhed his way onward, making the pace of a snake when half of its body is dead. He was no longer Teddy Follett; he was no longer so much as an animal. He was one big agony of mind, which becomes an agony of body; and yet he was eager to live.

He began to think that he might live. He seemed as far away from the peril behind him as the woods thing that gives its hunter the slip in the green depths of the covert. Dogs might be able to track him, but not men alone; and while they were bringing up the bloodhounds he might....

And then he heard a shout that struck through him like paralysis.

"There he is! I see him!"

"Where? Where?"

"That line behind the shack-don't you see?-a little streak right through the gra.s.s."

"No; I don't see anything."

"Come along and I'll show you. Come along, boys. We'll get him. He's only going on his belly."

"Yes, and be croaked, like this poor guy! Don't forget that the bird over there can give you a dose of lead."

So Flynn was dead! That was the meaning of that. Teddy had killed a man.

Perhaps he had killed two men. He hadn't taken time to think of it before; but now that he did, he lay stricken in every muscle of his frame, his face in the mud, and his fingers dug into the queachy roots of the sedges.