The Turn of the Balance

I

Four miles from town, where a white pike crosses a mud road, is Lulu Corners. There is little at this cross-roads to inspire a name less frivolous, nothing indeed but a weather-beaten store, where the people of the neighborhood wait for the big yellow trolley-cars that sweep across the country hourly, sounding their musical air-whistles over the fields. Half a mile from the Corners two unmarried sisters, Bridget and Margaret Flanagan, for twenty years had lived alone in a hovel that was invaded by pigs and chickens and geese. Together, these aged women, tall, bony and masculine, lived their graceless, squalid lives, untouched by romance or tragedy, working their few acres and selling their pork, and eggs and feathers in the city. The nearest dwelling was a quarter of a mile away, and the neighbors were still farther removed by prejudices, religious and social. Thus the old women were left to themselves. The report was that they were misers, and the miserable manner of their lives supported rather than belied this theory; there was a romantic impression in a country-side that knew so little romance, that a large amount of money was hidden somewhere about the ugly premises.

On an evening in late October, Bridget Flanagan was getting supper. The meal was meager, and when she had made it ready she placed a lamp on the table and waited for Margaret, who had gone out to fasten the shanty in which the barn-yard animals slept. Margaret came in presently, locked the door, and the sisters sat down to their supper. They had just crossed themselves and heaped their plates with potatoes, when they heard a knock at the door.

"Who can that be, sister?" said Bridget, looking up.

"I wonder now!" said Margaret in a surprise that was almost an alarm.

The knocking was repeated.

"Mary help us!" said Bridget, again making the sign of the cross. "No one ever came at this hour before."

The knocking sounded again, louder, more insistent.

"You go on to the door, sister," said Bridget, "and let them in,–whoever they may be, I dunno."

Margaret went to the door, shot back the bolt, and pulled on the knob. And then she turned and cast a look of terror at her sister. Some one was holding the door on the other side. The strange resistance of this late and unknown visitor, who but a moment before had wanted to come in, appalled her. She pressed her knee against the door, and tried to lock it again. But now the door held against her; she strained and pushed, then turned and beckoned her sister with frightened eyes. Bridget came, and the two women, throwing their weight against the door, tried to close it; but the unknown, silent and determined one was holding it on the other side. This strange conflict continued. Presently the two old women glanced up; in the crack, between the door and the jamb, they saw a club. Slowly, slowly, it made way against them, twisting, turning, pushing, forcing its way into the room. They looked in awful fascination. The club grew, presently a foot of it was in the room; then a hand appeared, a man's hand, gripping the club. They watched; presently a wrist with a leather strap around it; then slowly and by degrees, a forearm, bare, enormous, hard as the club, corded with heavy muscles and covered with a thick fell of black hair, came after it. Then there was a final push, an oath, the door flew open, and two masked men burst into the room.

Three hours later, Perkins, a farmer who lived a quarter of a mile away, hearing an unusual sound in his front yard, took a lantern and went out. In the grass heavy with dew, just inside his gate, he saw a woman's body, and going to it, he shed the rays of his lantern into the face of Bridget Flanagan. Her gray hair was matted, and her face was stained with blood; her clothes were torn and covered with the mud through which she had dragged herself along the roadside from her home. Perkins called and his wife came to the door, holding a lamp above her head, shading her eyes with her hand, afraid to go out. When he had borne Bridget indoors, Perkins took his two sons, his lantern and his shot-gun, and went across the fields to the Flanagans'. In the kitchen, bound and gagged, Margaret lay quite dead, her head beaten in by a club. The two old women must have fought desperately for their lives. The robbers, for all their work, as Perkins learned when Bridget almost miraculously recovered, had secured twenty-three silver dollars, which the sisters had kept hidden in a tin can–the fatal fortune which rumor had swelled to such a size.

Perkins roused the neighborhood, and all night long men were riding to and fro between Lulu Corners and the city. A calm Sunday morning followed, and then came the coroner, the reporters and the crowds. While the bell of the little Methodist church a mile away on the Gilboa Pike was ringing, Mark Bentley, the sheriff, dashed up behind a team of lean horses, sweating and splashed with mud from their mad gallop. Behind him came his deputies and the special deputies he had sworn in, and, sitting in his buggy, holding his whip in a gloved hand, waving and flourishing it like a baton, Bentley divided into posses the farmers who had gathered with shot-guns, rifles, pitchforks, axes, clubs, anything, placed a deputy at the head of each posse and sent them forth. Detectives and policemen came, and all that Sunday mobs of angry men were beating up the whole country for miles. Some were mounted, and these flew down the roads, spreading the alarm, leaving women standing horror-stricken in doorways with children whimpering in their skirts; others went in buggies, others plodded on foot. And all day long crowds of women and children pressed about the little house, peering into the kitchen with morbid curiosity. The crowd swelled, then shrank, then swelled again. The newspapers made the most of the tragedy, and under head-lines of bold type, in black ink and in red, they told the story of the crime with all the details the boyish imaginations of their reporters could invent; they printed pictures of the shanty, and diagrams of the kitchen, with crosses to indicate where Margaret had fallen, where Bridget had been left for dead, where the table and the stove had stood, where the door was; and by the time the world had begun a new week, the whole city was in the same state of horror and fear, and breathed the same rage and lust of vengeance that had fallen on Lulu Corners.

II

Four days before the Sunday of the tragedy Archie Koerner finished his year's imprisonment and passed from the prison within the walls to the larger prison that awaited him in the world outside. The same day was released another convict, a man aged at fifty, who had entered the prison twenty years before. The judge who had sentenced him was a young man, just elevated to the bench, and, intoxicated by the power that had come to him so early in life, had read the words, "twenty years," in the statute book, and, assuming as axiomatic that the words were the atonement for the crime the man had committed, without thinking, had pronounced these words aloud, and then written them in a large book. From there a clerk copied them on to a blank form, sealed it with a gilt seal, and, like the young judge, forgot the incident. The day the man was released he could no longer remember what crime he had committed. He was old and shattered, and had looked forward to freedom with terror. Time and again he had asked his guard to report him, so that he might be deprived of his good time and have the day of release postponed. The guard, however, knowing that the man's mind was gone, had refused to do this, and the man was forced out into the world. Having no family, no friends and no home, he clung to Archie as to the last tie that bound him to the only life he knew. Archie, of course, considered him an incubus, but he pitied him, and when they had sold their railroad tickets to a scalper, they beat their way back to the city on a freight-train, Archie showing the old man how it was done.

At eleven o'clock on Friday morning they entered Danny Gibbs's saloon. Archie was glad to find the place unchanged–the same whisky barrels along the wall, the opium pipe above the bar, the old gray cat sleeping in the sun. All was familiar, save the bartender, who, in fresh white jacket, leaned against the bar, a newspaper spread before him, and studied the form sheets that were published daily to instruct men how to gamble on the races.

"Where's Dan?" asked Archie.

The bartender looked at him superciliously, and then concluded to say:

"He's not here."

"Not down yet, heh?" said Archie. "Do you know a certain party called–" Archie glanced about cautiously and leaned over the bar, "–called Curly?"

The bartender looked at him blankly.

"He's a friend of mine–it's all right. If he comes in, just tell him a certain party was asking for him. Tell Dan, too. I've just got home–just done my bit."

But even this distinction, all he had to show for his year in prison, did not impress the bartender as Archie thought it should. He drew from his waistcoat pocket a dollar bill, carefully smoothed it out, and tossed it on to the bar.

"Give us a little drink. Here, Dad," he said to the old convict, "have one." The old man grinned and approached the bar. "Never mind him," said Archie in a confidential undertone, "he's an old-timer."

The old convict had lost the middle finger of his right hand in a machine in the prison years before, and now, in his imbecility, he claimed the one compensation imaginable; he used this mutilation for the entertainment of his fellows. If any one looked at him, he would spread the fingers of his right hand over his face, the stub of the middle finger held against his nose, his first and third fingers drawing down the lower lids of his eyes until their whites showed, and then wiggle his thumb and little finger and look, now gravely, now with a grin, into the eyes of the observer. The old convict, across whose sodden brain must have glimmered a vague notion that something was required of him, was practising his one accomplishment, his silly gaze fixed on the bartender.

When the bartender saw this his face set in a kind of superstitious terror.

"Don't mind him," said Archie; "He's stir simple."

The bartender, as he set out the whisky, was reassured, not so much by the patronage as by Archie's explanation that he had just come from prison. He had been at Danny Gibbs's long enough to know that a man is not to be judged solely by his clothes, and Archie, as a man reduced to the extremity of the garb the state supplied, might still be of importance in their world. While they were drinking, another man entered the saloon, a short, heavy man, and, standing across the room, looked, not at Archie and Dad, but at their reflections in the mirror behind the bar. Archie, recognizing a trick of detectives, turned slightly away. The man went out.

"Elbow, eh?" said Archie.

"Yep," said the bartender. "Cunningham."

"A new one on me. Kouka here yet?"

"Oh, yes."

"Flyin'?"

"Yep."

"Well," said Archie, "give 's another. I got a thirst in the big house anyway–and these rum turns." He smiled an apology for his clothes. They drank again; then Archie said:

"Tell Dan I was here."

"Who shall I say?" inquired the bartender.

"Dutch."

"Oh, yes! All right. He'll be down about one o'clock."

"All right. Come on, Dad," said Archie, and he went out, towing his battered hulk of humanity behind him. At the corner he saw Cunningham with another man, whom he recognized as Quinn. When they met, as was inevitable, Quinn smiled and said:

"Hello, Archie! Back again?"

"Yes," said Archie. He would have kept on, but Quinn laid a hand on his arm.

"Hold on a minute," he said.

"What's the rap?" asked Archie.

"Well, you'd better come down to the front office a minute."

Cunningham had seized the old man, and the two were taken to the Central Police Station. They were charged with being "suspicious persons," and spent the night in prison. The next morning, when they were arraigned before Bostwick, the old man surprised every one by pleading guilty, and Bostwick sentenced him to the workhouse for thirty days. But Archie demanded a jury and asked that word be sent to his attorney.

"Your attorney!" sneered Bostwick, "and who's your attorney?"

"Mr. Marriott," said Archie.

The suggestion of a jury trial maddened Bostwick. He seemed, indeed, to take it almost as a personal insult. He whispered with Quinn, and then said:

"I'll give you till evening to get out of town–you hear?"

Archie, standing at attention in the old military way, said:

"Yes, sir."

"You've got to clear out; we don't want you around, you understand?"

"I understand, sir."

"All right," said Bostwick.

After Archie had bidden good-by to the old convict, who was relieved to get back to prison again, and after he had been photographed for the rogues' gallery–for his confinement and his torture had made him thin and so changed his appearance and his figure that his Bertillon measurements were even more worthless than ever–he was turned out.

Archie, thus officially ordered on, was afraid to go back to Gibbs's, and when he went out of the Central Station that Saturday morning he turned southward into the tenderloin. He thought it possible that he might find Curly at some of the old haunts; at any rate, he might get some word of him.

The morning was brilliant, the autumnal sun lay hot and comforting on his back, and there was a friendliness in the hazy mellow air that was like a welcome to Archie, the first the world had had for him. Though man had cast him out, nature still owned him, and a kind of joy filled his breast. This feeling was intensified by the friendly, familiar faces of the low, decrepit buildings. Two blocks away, he was glad to see the old sign of Cliff Decker's saloon, with the name painted on the window in crude blue letters, and, pictured above it, a preposterous glass of beer foaming like the sea. More familiar than ever, was old man Pepper, the one-eyed, sitting on the doorstep as if it were summer, his lame leg flung aside, as it were, on the walk before him, his square wrinkled face presenting a horrid aspect, with its red and empty socket scarcely less sinister than the remaining eye that swept three quarters of the world in its fierce glance. On another step two doors away, before a house of indulgence frequented only by white men, sat a mulatto girl, in a clean white muslin dress, her kinky hair revealing a wide part from its careful combing. The girl was showing her perfect teeth in her laugh and playing with a white poodle that had a great bow of pink ribbon at its neck. Across the street was Wing Tu's chop-suey joint, deserted thus early in the day, suggesting oriental calm and serenity.

On the other corner was Eva Clason's place, and thither Archie went. He had some vague notion of finding Curly there, for it was Eva who, on that morning, now more than a year ago, in some impotent, puny human effort to stay the fate that had decreed him as the slayer of Benny Moon, had tried to give Curly a refuge.

The place wore its morning quiet. The young bartender, with a stupid, pimpled face, was moping sleepily at the end of the bar; at Archie's step, he looked up. The step was heard also in the "parlor" behind the bar, revealing through chenille portières its cheap and gaudy rugs and its coarse-grained oaken furniture, upholstered in plush of brilliant reds and blues. One of the two girls who now appeared had yellow hair and wore a skirt of solid pink gingham that came to her knees; her thin legs wore open-work stockings, her feet bulged in high-heeled, much-worn shoes. She wore a blouse of the same pink stuff, cut low, with a sailor collar, baring her scrawny neck and the deep hollows behind her collar bones. In her yellow fingers, with a slip of rice paper, she was rolling a cigarette. The other girl, who wore a dress of the same fashion, but of solid blue gingham, splotched here and there with starch, was dark and buxom, and her low collar displayed the coarse skin of full breasts and round, firm neck. The thin blonde came languidly, pasting her cigarette with her tongue and lighting it; but the buxom brunette came forward with a perfunctory smile of welcome.

"Where's Miss Clason?" Archie asked.

"She's gone out to Steve's," said the brunette. The thin girl sank into a chair beside the portières and smoked her cigarette. The brunette, divining that there was no significance in Archie's visit, and feeling a temporary self-respect, dismissed her professional smile and became simple, natural and human.

"Did you want to see her?" she asked.

"Yes, I'm looking for a certain party."

"Who?"

"Well, you know him, maybe–they call him Curly; Jackson's his name."

The girl looked at Archie, exchanged glances with the bartender; and then asked:

"You a friend o' hisn?"

"Yes, I just got home, and I must find him."

"Oh," said the girl, wholly satisfied. She turned to the bartender. "Was Mr. Jackson in to-day, Lew? He's around, in and out, you know. Comes in to use the telephone now and then."

Archie was relieved.

"Tell him Dutch was in, will you?" he said.

"Sure," replied the girl.

"Maybe he's in at Hunt's," said the thin girl, speaking for the first time.

"I was going there," said Archie.

"I can run in and ask for you," said the brunette, in the kindly willingness of the helpless to help others. "Or, hold on,–maybe Teddy would know."

"Never mind," said Archie, "I'll go in to Hunt's myself."

"I'll tell Mr. Jackson when he comes in," said the brunette, going to the door with Archie. "Who did you say?"–she looked up into Archie's face with her feminine curiosity all alive.

"Dutch."

"Dutch who?"

"Oh, just Dutch," said Archie, smiling at her insistence. "He'll know."

"Oh, hell!" said the girl, "what's your name?"

Archie looked down into her brown eyes and smiled mockingly; then he relented.

"Well, it's Archie Koerner. Ever hear of me before?"

The girl's black brows, which already met across her nose, thickened in the effort to recall him.

"You're no more wiser than you was; are you, little one?" said Archie, and walked away.

He had reserved Hunt's as a last resort, for there, in a saloon which was a meeting place for yeggs, Hunt himself being an old yegg man who had stolen enough to retire on, Archie was sure of a welcome and of a refuge where he could hide from the police for a day, at least, or until he could form some plan for the future.

Hunt was not in, but Archie found King's wife, Bertha Shanteaux, in the back room. She was a woman of thirty-five, very fleshy, and it seemed that she must crush the low lounge on which she sat, her legs far apart, the calico wrapper she wore for comfort stretching between her knees. She was smoking a cigar, and she breathed heavily with asthma, and, when she welcomed Archie, she spoke in a voice so hoarse and of so deep a bass that she might well have been taken for a man in woman's attire.

"Why, Dutch!" she said, taking her cigar from her lips in surprise. "When did you get home?"

"Yesterday morning," said Archie. "I landed in with an old con, went up to Dan's–then I got pinched, and this morning Bostwick gave me the run."

"Who made the pinch?"

"Quinn and some new gendy."

"Suspicion?"

"Yes."

"Huh," said Bertha, beginning to pull at her cigar again.

"Where's John?"

"Oh, he went up town a while ago."

"Is Curly here?"

"Yes, he's around. Just got in the other day. What you goin' to do?"

"Oh, I'm waiting to see Curly. I've got to get to work and see if I can't make a dollar or two. I want to frame in with some good tribe."

"Well, Curly hasn't been out for a while. He'll be glad to see you."

"Is Gus with him?"

"Oh, no. Gus got settled over in Illinois somewhere–didn't you hear? The boys say he's in wrong. But wait! Curly'll show up after a while."

"Well, I'm hipped, and I don't want to get you in trouble, Mrs. Shanteaux, but if Kouka gets a flash at me, it's all off."

"Oh, you plant here, my boy," she said in a motherly way, "till Curly comes."

The tenderloin awoke earlier than usual that day, for it was Saturday, and the farmers were in town. In the morning they would be busy in Market Place, but by afternoon, their work done, their money in their pockets, they would be free, and beginning at the cheap music halls, they, especially the younger ones, would drift gradually down the line, and by night they would be drinking and carousing in the dives.

Children, pale and hollow-eyed, coming with pitchers and tin buckets to get beer for their awaking elders, seemed to be the first heralds of the day; then a thin woman, clutching her dirty calico wrapper to her shrunken breast, and trying to hide a bruised, blue and swollen eye behind a shawl, came shuffling into the saloon in unbuttoned shoes, and hoarsely asked for some gin. A little later another woman came in to borrow enough oil to fill the lamp she carried without its chimney, and immediately after, a man, ragged, dirty, stepping in old worn shoes as soft as moccasins, flung himself down in a chair and fell into a stupor, his bloodless lips but a shade darker than his yellow face, his jaws set in the rigidity of the opium smoker. Archie looked at him suspiciously and shot a questioning glance at Bertha.

"The long draw?" he said in a low tone, as she passed him to go to the woman who had the lamp.

"Umph huh," said Bertha.

"I thought maybe he might be–"

"No," she said readily. "He's right–he's been hanging around for a month.–Some oil?" she was saying to the woman. "Certainly, my dear." She took the lamp.

"Where's your husband now?" she asked.

"Oh, he's gone," the woman said simply. "When the coppers put the Silver Moon Café"–she pronounced it "kafe"–"out of business and he lost his job slinging beer, he dug out."

Archie, beginning to fear the publicity of midday, had gone into the back room again. Presently Bertha joined him.

"Thought it was up to me to plant back here," he said, explaining his withdrawal. "There might be an elbow."

"Oh, no," said Bertha, in her hoarse voice, picking up the cigar she had laid on a clock-shelf and resuming her smoking, "we're running under protection now. That dope fiend in there showed up two months ago with his woman. They had a room in at Eva's for a while, but they stunk up the place so with their hops that she cleaned 'em out–she had to have the room papered again, but she says you can still smell it. They left about five hundred paper-back novels behind 'em. My God! they were readers! Nothing but read and suck the bamboo all the time; they were fiends both ways. One's 'bout as bad as the other, I guess."

She smoked her cigar and ruminated on this excessive love of romanticistic literature.

"When Eva gave 'em the run," she went on later, "the coppers flopped the moll–she got thirty-sixty, and Bostwick copped the pipe to give to a friend, who wanted a ornament for his den. Since then her husband comes in here now and then–and–why, hello there! Here's some one to see you, Curly!"

Archie sprang to his feet to greet Curly, who, checking the nervous impulse that always bore him so energetically onward, suddenly halted in the doorway. The low-crowned felt hat he wore shaded his eyes; he wore it, as always, a little to one side; his curls, in the mortification they had caused him since the mates of his school-days had teased him about them, were cropped closely; his cheeks were pink from the razor, and Archie, looking at him, felt an obscure envy of that air of Curly's which always attracted. Curly looked a moment, and then, with a smile, strode across the room and took Archie's hand. Archie was embarrassed, and his face, white with the prison pallor, flushed–he thought of his clothes, quite as degrading as the hideous stripes he had exchanged for them, and of his hair, a yellow stubble, from the shaving that had been part of his punishment. But the grip in which Curly held his hand while he wrung his greeting into it, made him glad, and Bertha, going out of the room, left them alone. The strangeness there is in all meetings after absence wore away. Curly sat there, his hat tilted back from his brow, leaned forward, and said: