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

They'll make a wonder of a team! I mean that she'll work under him with the rest of us. I've been thinking about it a long while. Mebbe you haven't guessed it, but we've been coaching her for the part, and she's just about ripe. She's got the looks, and we can dress her right for whatever job's on hand. Oh, Larry'll put over some great things with Maggie!"

If Hunt felt that there was anything cynically unpaternal in this father planning for his daughter a career of crime, he gave no sign of it. His attention was just then all on Maggie. He saw her eyes grow yet more bright at these last sentences of her father: bright with the vision of approaching adventure.

"The idea suits you, Maggie?" he asked.

"Sure. It'll be great - for Larry is a wonder!"

Barney Palmer suddenly rose, his face twisted with anger. "I'm all fed up on this Larry, Larry, Larry! Come on, Jimmie. Let's get uptown."

Wise Old Jimmie saw that Barney was near an outburst. "All right, Barney, all right," he said promptly. "Not much use waiting any longer, anyhow. If Larry comes, we'll fix it with the Duchess to meet him tomorrow."

"Then so-long, Maggie," Barney flung at her, and that swagger ex-jockey, gambler, and clever manipulator of the confidence of people with money, slashed aside the shabby burlap curtains with his wisp of a bamboo walking-stick, and strode out of the room.

"Good-night, daughter," and Old Jimmie crossed and kissed her. She kissed him back - a perfunctory kiss. Maggie had never paused to think the matter out, but for some reason she felt little real affection for her father, though of course she admired his astuteness. Perhaps her unconscious lack of love was due in part to the fact that she had never lived with him. Ever since she remembered he had boarded her out, here and there, as he was now boarding her at the Duchess's - and had only come to visit her at intervals, sometimes intervals that stretched into months.

"Barney is rather sweet on you," remarked Hunt after the two were gone.

"I know he is," conceded Maggie in a matter-of-fact way.

"And he seems jealous of Larry - both regarding you, and regarding the bunch."

"He thinks he can run the bunch just as well as Larry. Barney's clever all right, and has plenty of nerve - but he's not in Larry's class. Not by a million miles!"

Hunt perceived that this daring, world-defying, embryonically beautiful model of his had idealized the homecoming nephew of the Duchess into her especial hero. Hunt said no more, but painted rapidly. Night had fallen outside, and long since he had switched on the electric lights. He seemed not at all finicky in this matter of light; he had no supposedly indispensable north light, and midday or midnight were almost equally apt to find him slashing with brush or scratching with crayon.

Presently the Duchess entered. No word was spoken. The Duchess, noteworthy for her mastery of silence, sank into a chair, a bent and shrunken image, nothing seemingly alive about her but her faintly gleaming, deep-set eyes. Several minutes passed, then Hunt lifted the canvas from the easel and stood it against the wall.

"That's all for to-day, Maggie," he announced, pushing the easel to one side. "Duchess, you and this wild young thing spread the banquet- table while I wash up."

He disappeared into a corner shut off by burlap curtains. From within there issued the sound of splashing water and the sputtering roar of snatches of the Toreador's song in a very big and very bad baritone.

Maggie put out a hand, and kept the Duchess from rising. "Sit still - I'll fix the table."

Silently the Duchess acquiesced. Maggie had never felt any tenderness toward this strange, silent woman with whom she had lived for three years, but it was perhaps an indication of qualities within Maggie, whose existence she herself never even guessed, that she instinctively pushed the old woman aside from tasks which involved any physical effort. Maggie now swung the back of a laundry bench up to form a table-top, and upon it proceeded to spread a cloth and arrange a medley of chipped dishes. As she moved swiftly and deftly about, the Duchess watching her with immobile features, these two made a strangely contrasting pair: one seemingly spent and at life's grayest end, the other electric with vitality and giving off the essence of life's unknown adventures.

Hunt stepped out between the curtains, pulling on his coat. "You'll find that chow in my fireless cooker will beat the Ritz," he boasted. "The tenderest, fattest kind of a fatted calf for the returned prodigal."

Maggie started. "The prodigal! You mean - Larry is coming?"

"Sure," grinned Hunt. "That's why we celebrate."

Maggie wheeled upon the Duchess. "Is Larry really coming?"

"Yes," said the old woman.

"But - but why the uncertainty about when he was coming back? Father and Barney thought he was due to get out yesterday."

"Just a mistake we all made about his release. His time was up this afternoon."

"But you told Barney and my father you hadn't heard from him."

"I had heard," said the Duchess in her flat tone. "If they want to see him they can see him to-morrow."

"When - when will he be here?"

"Any minute," said the Duchess.

Without a word Maggie whirled about and the next moment she was in her room on the floor below. She did not know what prompted her, but she had a frantic desire to get out of this plain shirt-waist and skirt and into something that would be striking. She considered her scanty wardrobe; her father had recently spoken of handsome gowns and furnishings, but as yet these existed only in his words, and the pseudo-evening gowns which she had worn to restaurant dances with Barney she knew to be cheap and uneffective.

Suddenly she remembered the things Hunt had given her, or had loaned her, the evening four months earlier when he had taken her to an artists' masquerade ball - though to her it had been a bitter disappointment when Hunt had carried her away before the unmasking at twelve o'clock. She tore off the offending waist and skirt, pulled from beneath the bed the pasteboard box containing her costume; and in five minutes of flying hands the transformation was completed. Her thick hair of burnished black was piled on top of her head in gracious disorder, and from it swayed a scarlet paper flower. About her lithe body, over a black satin skirt, swathing her in its graceful folds, clung a Spanish shawl of saffron-colored background with long brown silken fringe, and flowered all over with brown and red and peacock blue, and held in place by three huge barbaric pins jeweled with colored glass, one at either hip and upon her right shoulder, leaving her smooth shoulders bare and free. With no more than a glance to get the hasty effect, she hurried up to the studio.

Hunt whistled at sight of her, but made no remark. Flushed, she looked back at him defiantly. The Duchess gave no sign whatever of being aware of the transformation.

Maggie with excited touches tried to improve her setting of the table, aquiver with expectancy and suspense at the nearness of the meeting - every nerve of audition strained to catch the first footfall upon the stairs. Hunt, watching her, could but wonder, in case Larry was the clever, dashing person that had been described, what would be the outcome when these two natures met and perhaps joined forces.


CHAPTER IV


While the preparations for dinner were going on in the studio, down below Larry turned a corner and swung up the narrow street toward the pawnshop. He halted and peered in before entering; in doing this he was obeying the caution that was his by instinct and training.

Leaning over the counter within, and chatting with his grandmother's assistant was Casey, one of the two plain-clothesmen who had arrested him. Larry drew back. He was not afraid of Casey, or of Gavegan, Casey's partner, or of the whole police force, or of the State of New York; they had nothing on him, he had settled accounts by having done his bit. All the same, he preferred not to meet Casey just then. So he went down the street, crossed the cobbled plaza along the water-front, and slipped through the darkness among the trucks out to the end of the pier. Under his feet the East River splashed sluggishly against the piles, but out near the river's center he could see the tide swirling out to sea at six miles an hour, toward the great shadowy Manhattan Bridge crested with its splendid tiara of lights.

He stretched himself and breathed deeply of the warm free spring. It tasted good after two long years of the prison's sealed air. He would have liked to shed his clothing and dive down for a brisk fight with the tingling water. Larry had always taken pleasure in keeping his body fit. He had not cared for the gymnasiums of the ward clubs where he would have been welcome; in them there had been too much rough horseplay and foulness of mouth, and such had always been offensive to him. And though he had ever looked the gentleman, he had known that the New York Athletic Club and other similar clubs were not for him; they pried a bit too much into a candidate's social and professional standing. So he had turned to a club where really searching inquiries were rarely made; for years he had belonged to a branch of the Y.M.C.A. located just off Broadway, and had played handball and boxed with chunky, slow-footed city detectives who were struggling to retain some physical activity, and with fat playwrights, and with Jewish theatrical managers, and with the few authentic Christians who occasionally strayed into the place and seemed ill at ease therein. He had liked this club for another reason; his sense of humor had often been highly excited by the thought of his being a member of the Y.M.C.A.

Having this instinct for physical fitness, he had not greatly minded being a coal-passer during the greater part of his stay at Sing Sing; better that than working in the knitting mills; so that now, though underfed and under weight, he was active and hard-muscled.

Larry Brainard could not have told why, and just when, he had turned to devious ways. He had never put that part of his life under the microscope. But the simple facts were that he had become an orphan at fifteen and a broker's clerk at nineteen after a course in a business college; and that experiences with wash-sales and such devious and dubious practices of brokers, his high spirits, his instinct for pleasure, his desire for big winnings - these had swept him into a wild crowd before he had been old enough to take himself seriously, and had started him upon a brilliant career of adventures and unlawful money- making in whose excitement there had been no let-up until his arrest. He had never thought about such technical and highly academic subjects as right and wrong up to the day when Casey and Gavegan had slipped the handcuffs upon him. To laugh, to dance, to plan and direct clever coups, to spend the proceeds gayly and lavishly - to challenge the police with another daring coup: that had been life to him, a game that was all excitement.

And now, after two years in which there had