V
“They Want to Take the Law Into Their Own Hands.”
The cell was an upper room of the town hall, with a heavy wooden door and a single tiny window. The walls were of bare, unplastered brick, the floor of concrete and the ceiling of whitewashed planks. An oil lamp burned in a bracket. The only furniture was an iron bunk hinged to the wall just below the window, a wire-bound straight chair and an unpainted table. On top of this last stood a bowl and pitcher, with playing-cards scattered around them.
Constable O’Bryant locked me in and peered through a small grating in the door. He was all nose and eyes and wide lips, like a sardonic Punchinello.
“Look here,” I addressed him suddenly, for the first time controlling my frayed nerves; “I want a lawyer.”
“There ain’t no lawyer in town,” he boomed sourly.
“Isn’t there a Judge Pursuivant in the neighborhood?” I asked, remembering something that Susan had told me.
“He don’t practise law,” O’Bryant grumbled, and his beaked face slid out of sight.
I turned to the table, idly gathered up the cards into a pack and shuffled them. To steady my still shaky fingers, I produced a few simple sleight-of-hand effects, palming of aces, making a king rise to the top, and springing the pack accordion-wise from one hand to the other.
“I’d sure hate to play poker with you,” volunteered O’Bryant, who had come again to gaze at me.
I crossed to the grating and looked through at him. “You’ve got the wrong man,” I said once more. “Even if I were guilty, you couldn’t keep me from talking to a lawyer.”
“Well, I’m doing it, ain’t I?” he taunted me. “You wait until tomorrow and we’ll go to the county seat. The sheriff can do whatever he wants to about a lawyer for you.”
He ceased talking and listened. I heard the sound, too—a hoarse, dull murmur as of coal in a chute, or a distant, lowing herd of troubled cattle.
“What’s that?” I asked him.
O’Bryant, better able to hear in the corridor, cocked his lean head for a moment. Then he cleared his throat. “Sounds like a lot of people talking, out in the square,” he replied. “I wonder—”
He broke off quickly and walked away. The murmur was growing. I, pressing close to the grating to follow the constable with my eyes, saw that his shoulders were squared and his hanging fists doubled, as though he were suddenly aware of a lurking danger.
He reached the head of the stairs and clumped down, out of my sight. I turned back to the cell, walked to the bunk and, stepping upon it, raised the window. To the outside of the wooden frame two flat straps of iron had been securely bolted to act as bars. To these I clung as I peered out.
I was looking from the rear of the hall toward the center of the square, with the war memorial and the far line of shops and houses seen dimly through a thick curtain of falling snow. Something dark moved closer to the wall beneath, and I heard a cry, as if of menace.
“I see his head in the window!” bawled a voice, and more cries greeted this statement. A moment later a heavy missile hit the wall close to the frame.
I dropped back from the window and went once more to the grating of the door. Through it I saw O’Bryant coming back, accompanied by several men. They came close and peered through at me.
“Let me out,” I urged. “That’s a mob out there.”
O’Bryant nodded dolefully. “Nothing like this ever happened here before,” he said, as if he were responsible for the town’s whole history of violence. “They act like they want to take the law into their own hands.”
A short, fat man spoke at his elbow. “We’re members of the town council, Mr. Wills. We heard that some of the citizens were getting ugly. We came here to look after you. We promise full protection.”
“Amen,” intoned a thinner specimen, whom I guessed to be the preacher.
“There are only half a dozen of you,” I pointed out. “Is that enough to guard me from a violent mob?”
As if to lend significance to my question, from below and in front of the building came a great shout, compounded of many voices. Then a loud pounding echoed through the corridor, like a bludgeon on stout panels.
“You locked the door, Constable?” asked the short man.
“Sure I did,” nodded O’Bryant.
A perfect rain of buffets sounded from below, then a heavy impact upon the front door of the hall. I could hear the hinges creak.
“They’re trying to break the door down,” whispered one of the council.
The short man turned resolutely on his heel. “There’s a window at the landing of the stairs,” he said. “Let’s go and try to talk to them from that.”
The whole party followed him away, and I could hear their feet on the stairs, then the lifting of a heavy window-sash. A loud and prolonged yelling came to my ears, as if the gathering outside had sighted and recognized a line of heads on the sill above them.
“Fellow citizens!” called the stout man’s voice, but before he could go on a chorus of cries and hoots drowned him out. I could hear more thumps and surging shoves at the creaking door.
Escape I must. I whipped around and fairly ran to the bunk, mounting it a second time for a peep from my window. Nobody was visible below; apparently those I had seen previously had run to the front of the hall, there to hear the bellowings of the officials and take a hand in forcing the door.
Once again I dropped to the floor and began to tug at the fastenings of the bunk. It was an open oblong of metal, a stout frame of rods strung with springy wire netting. It could be folded upward against the wall and held with a catch, or dropped down with two lengths of chain to keep it horizontal. I dragged the mattress and blankets from it, then began a close examination of the chains. They were stoutly made, but the screw-plates that held them to the brick wall might be loosened. Clutching one chain with both my hands, I tugged with all my might, a foot braced against the wall. A straining heave, and it came loose.
At the same moment an explosion echoed through the corridor at my back, and more shouts rang through the air. Either O’Bryant or the mob had begun to shoot. Then a rending crash shook the building, and I heard one of the councilmen shouting: “Another like that and the door will be down!”
His words inspired additional speed within me. I took the loose end of the chain in my hand. Its links were of twisted iron, and the final one had been sawed through to admit the loop of the screw-plate, then clamped tight again. But my frantic tugging had widened this narrow cut once more, and quickly I freed it from the dangling plate. Then, folding the bunk against the wall, I drew the chain upward. It would just reach to the window—that open link would hook around one of the flat bars.
The noise of breakage rang louder in the front of the building. Once more I heard the voice of the short councilman: “I command you all to go home, before Constable O’Bryant fires on you again!”
“We got guns, too!” came back a defiant shriek, and in proof of this statement came a rattle of shots. I heard an agonized moan, and the voice of the minister: “Are you hit?”
“In the shoulder,” was O’Bryant’s deep, savage reply.
My chain fast to the bar, I pulled back and down on the edge of the bunk. It gave some leverage, but not enough—the bar was fastened too solidly. Desperate, I clambered upon the iron framework. Gaining the sill, I moved sidewise, then turned and braced my back against the wall. With my feet against the edge of the bunk, I thrust it away with all the strength in both my legs. A creak and a ripping sound, and the bar pulled slowly out from its bolts.
But a roar and thunder of feet told me that the throng outside had gained entrance to the hall at last.
I heard a last futile flurry of protesting cries from the councilmen as the steps echoed with the charge of many heavy boots. I waited no longer, but swung myself to the sill and wriggled through the narrow space where the bar had come out. A lapel of my jacket tore against the frame, but I made it. Clinging by the other bar, I made out at my side a narrow band of perpendicular darkness against the wall, and clutched at it. It was a tin drainpipe, by the feel of it.
An attack was being made upon the door of the cell. The wood splintered before a torrent of blows, and I heard people pushing in.
“He’s gone!” yelled a rough voice, and, a moment later: “Hey, look at the window!”
I had hold of the drainpipe, and gave it my entire weight. Next instant it had torn loose from its flimsy supports and bent sickeningly outward. Yet it did not let me down at once, acting rather as a slender sapling to the top of which an adventuresome boy has sprung. Still holding to it, I fell sprawling in the snow twenty feet beneath the window I had quitted. Somebody shouted from above and a gun spoke.
“Get him!” screamed many voices. “Get him, you down below!”
But I was up and running for my life. The snow-filled square seemed to whip away beneath my feet. Dodging around the war memorial, I came face to face with somebody in a bearskin coat. He shouted for me to halt, in the reedy voice of an ungrown lad, and the fierce-set face that shoved at me had surely never felt a razor. But I, who dared not be merciful even to so untried an enemy, struck with both fists even as I hurtled against him. He whimpered and dropped, and I, springing over his falling body, dashed on.
A wind was rising, and it bore to me the howls of my pursuers from the direction of the hall. Two or three more guns went off, and one bullet whickered over my head. By then I had reached the far side of the square, hurried across the street and up an alley. The snow, still falling densely, served to baffle the men who ran shouting in my wake. Too, nearly everyone who had been on the streets had gone to the front of the hall, and except for the boy at the memorial none offered to turn me back.
I came out upon a street beyond the square, quiet and ill-lit. Along this way, I remembered, I could approach the Gird home, where my automobile was parked. Once at the wheel, I could drive to the county seat and demand protection from the sheriff. But, as I came cautiously near the place and could see through the blizzard the outline of the car, I heard loud voices. A part of the mob had divined my intent and had branched off to meet me.
I ran down a side street, but they had seen me. “There he is!” they shrieked at one another. “Plug him!” Bullets struck the wall of a house as I fled past it, and the owner, springing to the door with an angry protest, joined the chase a moment later.
I was panting and staggering by now, and so were most of my pursuers. Only three or four, lean young athletes, were gaining and coming even close to my heels. With wretched determination I maintained my pace, winning free of the close-set houses of the town, wriggling between the rails of a fence and striking off through the drifting snow of a field.
“Hey, he’s heading for the Croft!” someone was wheezing, not far behind.
“Let him go in,” growled another runner. “He’ll wish he hadn’t.”
Yet again someone fired, and yet again the bullet went wide of me; moving swiftly, and half veiled by the dark and the wind-tossed snowfall, I was a bad target that night. And, lifting my head, I saw indeed the dense timber of the Devil’s Croft, its tops seeming to toss and fall like the black waves of a high-pent sea.
It was an inspiration, helped by the shouts of the mob. Nobody went into that grove—avoidance of it had become a community habit, almost a community instinct. Even if my enemies paused only temporarily I could shelter well among the trunks, catch my breath, perhaps hide indefinitely. And surely Zoberg would be recovered, would back up my protest of innocence. With two words for it, the fantasy would not seem so ridiculous. All this I sorted over in my mind as I ran toward the Devil’s Croft.
Another rail fence rose in my way. I feared for a moment that it would baffle me, so fast and far had I run and so greatly drained away was my strength. Yet I scrambled over somehow, slipped and fell beyond, got up and ran crookedly on. The trees were close now. Closer. Within a dozen yards. Behind me I heard oaths and warning exclamations. The pursuit was ceasing at last.
I found myself against close-set evergreens; that would be the hedge of which Susan Gird had told me. Pushing between and through the interlaced branches, I hurried on for five or six steps, cannoned from a big tree-trunk, went sprawling, lifted myself for another brief run and then, with my legs like strips of paper, dropped once more. I crept forward on hands and knees. Finally I collapsed upon my face. The weight of all I had endured—the séance, the horrible death of John Gird, my arrest, my breaking from the cell and my wild run for life—overwhelmed me as I lay.
Thus I must lie, I told myself hazily, until they came and caught me. I heard, or fancied I heard, movement near by, then a trilling whistle. A signal? It sounded like the song of a little frog. Odd thought in this blizzard. I was thinking foolishly of frogs, while I sprawled face down in the snow. …
But where was the snow?
There was damp underneath, but it was warm damp, like that of a riverside in July. In my nostrils was a smell of green life, the smell of parks and hothouses. My fists closed upon something.
Two handfuls of soft, crisp moss!
I rose to my elbows. A white flower bobbed and swayed before my nose, shedding perfume upon me.
Far away, as though in another world, I heard the rising of the wind that was beating the snow into great drifts—but that was outside the Devil’s Croft.