The Man With the Mole/Chapter 2

HE Sperry house was in the Berkshires. They had an apartment in New York also, but the Berkshire place, at Swiftbrook Bowl, was kept open usually until Christmas, though Mrs. Cairns had gone South with the first approach of fall. A street railway connected with the manufacturing town of Longfield, which was four hours from New York by the express trains.

As Sperry sped through the dusk, out of the grounds and down the road toward the car line, he saw, clear through the almost naked trees, the headlight of an approaching trolley, and raced to make connection with it, barely accomplishing his end.

In his pocket was the slim remnant of the twenty-five dollars he had drawn from the bank, some six dollars in all. His first intention of seeking his mother and attempting to establish with her his innocence, died away in hopelessness. He could raise a little money on the jewelry he wore, but not nearly enough, even if he knew where she was. His balance in the bank would undoubtedly be appropriated: at any rate checks would not be honored, and, if he dared to go where he could cash a check, he was in no mind to have them returned “No Funds.” It would only add to his apparent dishonesty. Also, it would help them to trace him. By now the butler would have roused the police at Longfield; they would be on the alert, stations would be watched, the very trolley he was on would be searched as soon as the telephones got working!

To-morrow the threatened publicity would contain the additional news that he had murdered his stepfather. He was an outcast, a fugitive. There would be a reward on his head. One faint hope lingered, that he had not killed Cairns. He would know that by the papers. And, if that crime was spared him, he was not going to be caught, already condemned, and be put away without an attempt to establish his innocence.

Remington, the paying teller, had lied. To what end? He had been discharged. And how could he prove the man a liar, how discredit the rest of the damning evidence? Sperry burned to find Remington, to choke the truth out of him. That would mean his own immediate arrest. But there were others back of Remington. Hilliard and Burnside had been taken in by the evidence. It was Cairns who was at the bottom of all this! Yet Cairns had, undeniably, plenty of money. His balance at the bank was large. Sperry was helpless—practically penniless. And he was an outlaw.

Sperry groaned. Some one, a man he knew, leaned over from the seat back of him and asked him if he was ill.

This would not do. He forced a smile. “Ulcerated tooth,” he said. “Got to have it fixed to-morrow.”

The man said something commiserating and sat back again.

Sperry forced his wits to work coherently, dispassionately. The attack on Cairns, the forgery, his mother’s attitude—he could not help those for the time. He had to get away or he would be irretrievably condemned, branded. If he had only taken his own roadster! But there would not have been time for that. They could have cut him off or traced him.

Swiftbrook Bowl, that fashionable resort, lay closer to New York than Longfield. And there was another station between the Bowl and Longfield. A plan formed itself.

He swung off at a corner, about a quarter of a mile from this station, Langley Dale, and struck up an unlit side road as the trolley sped away. In half a mile he hit the railroad near a siding and dodged into a thicket. Night had practically fallen and he was safe for the present. Twenty minutes later the express for New York, ignoring Langley Dale, roared past him. Thirty minutes after that a local chugged through, bound in the opposite direction. It reached the station and stayed there for what seemed to Sperry a long time as he watched from his concealment the red tail light.

Perhaps they were searching it for him? Then the red light began to back toward him with much snorting of the engine. He crouched low, shivering. The train came to a standstill opposite him and he could see the people through the lighted windows, carefree, save for their delay, eager to get home. And he was homeless! A sense of despair seemed to numb him and he shook it off.

There was the sound of a train panting up the grade the other side of the Dale. No other passenger was due for two hours. This must be the freight he had hoped for. Probably a long line of empties going back to New York, great coal trucks, a car or two. Hope revived. It would come in between him and the local that had been backed on to the siding to let it pass.

He lay low till the searching headlight lifted over the crest of the grade, flared down the right of way, and passed him. The freight was gathering speed now but Sperry would have tried for it had it been going twice as fast. Better to trip, to fall and be mangled, than caught, arrested, prosecuted, and condemned—a swift sequence that would inevitably follow.

Steel coal trucks were passing him, punt-shaped. The train seemed slowing down a little. He jumped and found a footing and a grip for his hands on the cold rim of a truck as he flung himself upward. In a moment he had scuttled over the edge and slid down the sloping end into a rubble of coal dust.

For the present he was safe. Hobos at this time were rarities. There would be no search of the train as it lumbered on through the darkness. Somewhere in the yards of upper Manhattan he could get off, round about midnight. He would find a subway and get far downtown in New York. There his plans ceased, save that vaguely he resolved on smothering his identity, and—if Cairns was only still alive—somehow hanging on until, by hook or crook—for surely fortune must turn some time—he could reinstate himself. If Cairns were dead? He would wait till morning for that, he tried to tell himself, huddled in the empty truck, jolted unmercifully, bruised, flung headlong with the changing motions of the train, grimed, cold, and, as the night wore on, hungry.

The vision of Cairns lying in the rug with the crimson and the ink streaking the pale face in fantastic patterns, would not leave him.

At two in the morning he found himself far downtown in Manhattan. He had bought himself two drinks of whisky and two sandwiches in a saloon on the East Side, near the river, and stopped the numbness that had begun to turn to a poignant ache between his shoulders. He could not afford to risk pneumonia from exposure. That meant a hospital and recognition, when the dirt had been cleansed from him. As soon as he could find a cheap lodging house and get some sleep, he realized that he must change his clothes. Filthy as they were from his trip, their cut and the quality of their cloth had already made him an object of suspicion. In this neighborhood they were shrewd of eye, and Sperry already felt that he had been sized up for what he was, a defaulter from his caste, a gentleman gone wrong; not a master crook, but an amateur, one to whom a reward might be attached. He managed to get some of the muck from his face and hands in the lavatory of the saloon, thankful for the sanitary paper towel. Then he went out into the streets to look for a bed.

It was bitterly cold. The searching wind blew off the river, and Sperry was glad now of the good texture of his clothes. But he ached intolerably and he longed for some shelter where he could rest and think. His thoughts would not co-ordinate. They were a jumble of what had happened, and wild conjectures as to what had led up to his entanglement. Silent, furtive figures slunk by him, slid into nauseous alleys or into such side-doors of protected saloons as he had found his own way. Some of them staggered into the uninviting doorway of rooming houses advertising “Beds for Men Only. 25c and up.”

Fastidious, more from habit than present consciousness, Sperry hesitated to enter these caravanseries of the poor. His imagination, far too vivid to ease his present plight, conjured up horrors abovestairs. Further, he could not shake off the idea that he was being trailed.

“It’s absurd,” he told himself again and again. “If they had managed in some manner to spread the net so far already, they would not hesitate to draw in the folds.” But he was out of place here, a palpable misfit, and therefore to be suspected, to be watched, to be exploited for what there might be in it. To hide successfully in such a neighborhood he must be one of those who dwelt here and dodged the law and defied it, knowing the manners and the codes of the underworld. Yet he must have some place to hide away, to sleep, to wait the coming of the morning and the announcement of the newspapers.

A vicious gust of wind, flung down a side street, pierced him as a spear might have stabbed him to the vitals. He suddenly felt sick in mind and body. “What’s the use?” he asked himself bitterly, his overstrung nerves reacting. Then came the rebound. He must brace up, put on a bold front, and accept the conditions of his surroundings: he must assume a toughness and demand a bed with a swagger and a tone that would deceive any one who might want to pry into his identity. He still had most of his six dollars, and he could pay for a room to himself. Another drink would bolster his courage. The reek of it on his breath would give him, as it were, a local color.

Down an alley he saw a figure come out from a door near a distant corner, a door above which a light burned dimly. Another entered. Here was traffic, a saloon. He hurried down the alley. Close to the door was piled a clutter of empty boxes, an array of refuse and ash cans. Some one was groping among these as Sperry passed, but that person did not look at him.

“Some penniless devil looking for cast-off food,” thought Sperry, and the impulse came to ask the man in for a drink and some food. But he could not do that, he told himself. He must look out for his own safety first. The man might be inquisitive. As he reached the door a burly figure came out, lurching a little as if intoxicated. Sperry saw the face under the lamp.

The upper part was shaded with the brim of a derby hat. The lower showed a firm chin and a thin-lipped mouth under a prominent nose. To the right of the lips was a prominent mole, almost black in that light, curiously, distinctively shaped. Sperry stood aside as the man passed in the direction he himself had come. Casually he watched him as he went, wondering idly if he would safely avoid the cans and boxes. The man with the mole almost brushed Sperry, and Jack was aware of a shaded glitter of searching eyes upon him, that, somehow, did not accord with the drunken gait.

Then a figure leaped from the medley of ash and refuse containers, leaped swiftly, and silently, just as the burly man went by. And, by the lamp, Sperry saw the hand of the bum he had thought of inviting to a drink, shift to a hip pocket, saw a glint of nickel, and, in sheer instinct, he flung himself upon the would-be killer, gripping the wrist of the hand that was freeing the pistol, and cruelly twisting it as he flung his forearm round the man’s neck, forcing back his chin.

The gun clattered to the cobbles of the alley. The burly man with the mole had turned with a swift precision that belied intoxication and instantly shot a short, hard punch to the projecting jaw. The killer crumpled in Sperry’s grasp and slid to the ground. The other coolly picked up the gun and put it into his pocket, nodding to Sperry.

“Thanks,” he said. “I owe you something for that, pal.”