Children of the Whirlwind - Leroy Scott (read aloud .TXT) 📗

of criminals; and he knew that nothing so roused Barlow as opposition from a man he considered in his power. Close beside the Chief he saw the gloating, malignant face of Gavegan; Casey, who had been restless since the beginning of the scene, had moved to the window and was gazing down into Center Street.

For a moment Larry did not reply. Barlow mistook Larry's silence for wavering, or the beginning of an inclination to yield.

"You turn that over in your noodle," Barlow drove on. "You're going to go crooked, anyhow, so you might as well go crooked in the only way that's safe for you. I'm going to have Gavegan and Casey watch you, and if in the next few days you don't begin to string along with Barney and Old Jimmie and that bunch, and if you don't get me word that your answer to my proposition is 'yes,' hell's going to fall on you! Now get out of here!"

Larry got out. He was liquid lava of rage inside; but he had had enough to do with police power to know that it would help him not at all to permit an eruption against a police official while he was in the very heart of the police stronghold.

He walked back toward his own street in a fury, beneath which was subconsciously an element of uneasiness: an uneasiness which would have been instantly roused to caution had he known that Barney Palmer had this hour and more been following him in a taxicab, and that across the street from the car's window Barney's sharp face had watched him enter Police Headquarters and had watched him emerge.

Home reached, Larry briefly recounted his experience at Headquarters to Hunt and the Duchess. The painter whistled; the Duchess blinked and said nothing at all.

"Maggie was more right than she knew when she first said you were facing a tough proposition!" exclaimed Hunt. "Believe me, young fellow, you're certainly up against it!"

"Can you beat it for irony!" said Larry, pacing the floor. "A man wants to go straight. His pals ask him to be a crook, and are sore because he won't be a crook. The police ask him to be a crook, and threaten him because he doesn't want to be a crook. Some situation!"

"Some situation!" repeated Hunt. "What're you going to do?"

"Do?" Larry halted, his face set with defiant determination. "I'm going to keep on doing exactly what I've been doing! And they can all go to hell!"


CHAPTER X


For several days nothing seemed to be happening, though Larry had a sense that unknown forces were gathering on distant isothermal lines and bad weather was bearing down upon him. During these days, trying to ignore that formless trouble, he gave himself with a most rigid determination to his new routine - the routine which he counted on to help him into the way of great things.

Every day he saw Maggie; sometimes he was in her company for an hour or more. He had the natural hunger of a young man to talk to a young woman; and, moreover, it is a severe strain for a man to be living under the same roof with the girl he loves and not to be on terms of friendship with her. But Maggie maintained her aloofness. She spoke only when she was pressed into it, and her speech was usually no more than a "yes" or a "no," or a flashing phrase of disdain.

At times Larry had the feeling that, for all her repression, Maggie would have been glad to be more free with him. And he knew enough of human nature not to be too disheartened by her attitude. Had he been a nonentity to her, she would have ignored him. Her very insults were proof that he was a positive personality with real significance in her life. And so he counseled himself to have patience and await a thawing or an awaking. Besides, he kept repeating to himself, there would be small chance of effecting a conversion in this militant young orthodoxist of cynicism until he had proved the soundness of contrary views by his own established success.

And thus the days drifted by. But on the fifth day after his interview with Barlow things began to happen. First of all, he noticed in a morning paper that Red Hannigan and Jack Rosenfeldt, members of his old outfit and suggested by Old Jimmie as participants in his proposed new enterprise, had just been arrested by Gavegan and Casey on the charge of alleged connection with the sale of fraudulent mining stock.

Second, on his return at the end of the afternoon, he saw standing before the house a taxicab with a trunk beside the chauffeur. In the musty museum of a room behind the pawnshop he found Hunt and the Duchess and Old Jimmie and Barney; and also Maggie, coming down the stairway, hat and coat on and carrying a suitcase. A sharp pain throbbed through him as he recognized the significance of Maggie's hat and coat and baggage.

"Maggie - you're going away?" he exclaimed.

"Yes."

She had paused at the foot of the stairway, and at sight of him had gone a little pale and wide-eyed. But in an instant she had recovered her accustomed flair; there came a proud lift to her head, a flash of scorn into her dark eyes.

"At last I'm leaving this street for good," she said. "I told you that some day I was going out into the world and do big things. The time's come - I'm graduated - I'm going to begin real work. And I'm going to succeed - you see!"

"Maggie!" he breathed. Then impulsively he started toward her authoritatively. "Maggie, I'm not going to let you do anything of the sort!"

But swiftly Barney had stepped in between them, Old Jimmie just behind him.

"Keep out of this!" Barney snapped at Larry, a reddish blaze in his eyes. "Maggie's going away and you can't stop her. D'you think her father is going to let her stay down here any longer, where you can spout your preaching at her! - and you all the time a stool and a squealer!"

"What's that?" cried Larry.

"I called you a stool!" repeated the malignantly exultant Barney, alert for any move on the part of the suddenly tensed Larry. "And you are a stool! Didn't I see you myself go into Headquarters with Casey and Gavegan where you sold yourself to Chief Barlow!"

"Why, you damned - "

Even before he spoke Larry launched a furious swing straight from the hip at Barney's twisted face. But Barney had been expecting exactly that, and was even the quicker. He caught Larry's wrist before it was fairly started, and thrust a dull-hued automatic into Larry's stomach.

"Behave; damn you," gritted Barney, "or I'll blow your damned guts out! No - go ahead and try to hit me. I'd like nothing better than to kill you, you rat, and have a good plea of self-defense!"

Larry let his hands unclench and fall to his sides. "You've got the drop on me, Barney - but you're a liar."

"You bet I got the drop on you! And not only with my gun. I've got it on you about being a stool. Everybody knows you are a stool. And what's more, they know you are a squealer!"

"A squealer!" Larry stiffened again.

"A stool and a squealer!" Barney fairly hurled at Larry these two most despised epithets of his world. "You've done your job swell as a stool, and squealed on Red Hannigan and Jack Rosenfeldt and turned them up for the police!"

"You believe I had anything to do with their arrest?" exclaimed Larry.

Barney laughed in his derision.

"Of course we believe it," put in Old Jimmie, his seamed, cunning face now ruthlessly hard. "And what's more, we know it!"

"And what's still more," Barney taunted, "Maggie believes it, too!"

Larry turned to Maggie. Her face was now drawn, with staring eyes.

"Maggie - do you believe it?" he demanded.

For a moment she neither spoke nor moved. Then slowly she nodded.

"But, Maggie," he protested, "I didn't do it! Barlow did ask me to be a stool, but I turned him down! Aside from that, I know no more of this than you do!"

"Of course you'd deny it - we were waiting for that," sneered Barney. "Jimmie, we've wasted enough time here. Take Maggie's bag and let's be moving on."

Old Jimmie picked up Maggie's suitcase, and slipping a hand through her arm led her across the room. She did not even say good-bye to Hunt or the Duchess, or even glance at them; but went out silently, her drawn, staring look on Larry alone.

Barney backed after them, his automatic still held in readiness. "I'm letting you down damned easy, Brainard," he said, hate glittering in his eyes. "But there's some who won't be so nice!"

With that he closed the door. Until that moment both Hunt and the Duchess had said nothing. Now the Duchess spoke up:

"I'm glad they've taken Maggie away, Larry. I've seen the way you've come to feel about her, and she's not the right sort for you."

But Larry was still too dazed by the way in which Maggie had walked out of his life to make any response.

"But there's a lot in what Barney said about there being some who wouldn't be easy on you," continued the Duchess. "That word had been brought me before Barney showed up. So I had this ready for you."

From a slit pocket in her baggy skirt the Duchess drew out a pistol and handed it to Larry.

"What's this for?" Larry asked.

"I was told that word had gone out to the Ginger Buck Gang to get you," answered the Duchess. "Barney has some secret connection with the Ginger Bucks. His saying that you were a stool and a squealer is not the only thing he's got against you; he's jealous of you on account of everything - especially Maggie. So you'll need that gun."

"What's this I've fallen into the middle of?" exclaimed Hunt. "A Kentucky feud?"

"It's very easy to understand when you know the code," Larry explained grimly. "Down here when an outfit thinks one of its members has squealed on them, it's their duty to be always on the watch for their chance to finish him off. I'm to be finished off - that's all."

"Say, young fellow, the life of a straight crook doesn't seem to be getting much simpler! Why, man, you hardly dare to stir from the house! What are you going to do?"

"Going to go around my business, always with the pleasant anticipation of a bullet in my back when some fellow thinks it safe for him to shoot."

The three of them discussed this latest development over their dinner, which they had together up in Hunt's studio. But despite all their talk of his danger, a very real and near danger, Larry's mind was more upon Maggie who had thus suddenly been wrenched out of his life. He remembered her excited, boastful talk of their first evening. Her period of schooling was indeed now over; she was now committed to her rosily imagined adventure, in which she saw herself as a splendid lady. And with Barney Palmer as her guiding influence! . . .

Dinner had been finished and Hunt was trying to give Larry such cheer as "Buck up, young