MRS1 The Under Dogs (15 page)

"For us," said Bill, "he is only a voice on the telephone."

There was a silence in the kitchen.

After a while Bill went on, holding up his cupped hand in a primitive forceful gesture: "A voice," he repeated, "but he
has
us; like that."

Cliff got up with a muttered curse, and went to the window.

"Oh, well," said Pap presently, with a silly-sounding laugh; "what's the use o' grousin'? We're well fed here, and the bulls can't touch us."

Cliff whirled around. "Well fed?" he cried. "With your cooking! Oh, my God! ... It's all right for you to talk. Your day is over. This place is Paradise alongside anything else you could expect. But look at me! look at me!..."

"I don't see much," muttered Pap.

"I been tied up in this damn stable for a month with nothin' to do," cried Cliff, "and I'm fed up with it! Just a little bit more, and I'll squeeze that old ——'s windpipe under my thumbs upstairs."

"Oh no, you won't," said Bill stolidly, "you'll just take it out in talk when she can't hear you."

"Why don't you walk out?" asked Jessie, pointing to the open door. "It's only skinning over a few fences."

"Because I got nine years unexpired time at Sing-Sing," said Cliff sullenly. "The boss would have me back there before to-morrow night."

"Can't you hide?"

"Not from him!"

And Big Bill nodded his head.

Cliff came towards Jessie with glittering eyes. "But it's somepin to have you here," he said. "You and me is young, we could make it up to each other. We wouldn't mind where we was then, eh?" He pressed close to her. "Oh, my God! but you look good to me, kid!"

"Cut it out, Hutch," said Bill, this time without any heat. "You ac' like a child. You know you gotta cut it out. Why can't you face it?"

"You mean you'd split on me, you damned informer," cried Cliff.

"I do," said Bill coldly. "Ain't I got the feelings of a man myself?"

Cliff lashed out against him. Bill sat stolidly filling his pipe, refusing to be drawn. The febrile Pap could not keep out of it, and the two became involved in a wordy altercation during which they forgot all prudence.

Suddenly the door opened, and Mrs. Pullen walked in, with Skinny Sam at her heels, grinning with a devilish malice. A chilling silence fell on the room. It was like the unexpected entrance of teacher, but there was a danger in the air infinitely more dreadful than a threat of the strap. And Mrs. Pullen never said a word; merely looked them up and down with her basilisk eyes.

She turned to Jessie saying: "You can go to your room."

"Yes, ma'am," said Jessie.

They turned out of the room. Jessie never saw Cliff again.

Mrs. Pullen and Jessie ascended the usual narrow, enclosed stairway to the main hall of the house. Jessie could have found her way around that house blindfold, it conformed so exactly to type. There was no light in the hall, and through the fanlight over the front door came a faint glow from the street lights. There were some old numerals painted on the fanlight, and Jessie read them backwards: 723.

"723 Varick Street," she said to herself; "I can send my address out to my friends if I want."

Mrs. Pullen opened the door of the rear room on the second floor, and stood beside it with a key in her hand just like a jailer. When Jessie passed in, she closed the door without a word, and, locking it, descended the stairs.

Even the philosophic Jessie was moved to anger. "Inhuman wretch!" she thought. "She deserves to have her windpipe squeezed!"

Before lighting the gas, she went to the window to reconnoitre. "This is not much better than Woburn," she thought. The sky was obscured by low-hanging clouds which reflected the lights of the city in a faint pinkish glow. All Jessie could see from the window was a sort of darkish huddle. The rear tenement was distinguishable; also the tenement it abutted on, the one they had reached from the side street. There were about three houses facing the side street; and beyond them was a big dim yard, such as might be used for the storage of building materials. The block was closed in by the backs of the buildings on the next North and South Street, some hundreds of feet away.

Jessie then lighted up and looked around her. It was just such a room as might have been found in scores of the second-rate lodging houses of that run-down neighbourhood. It had no character; it contained not a single object upon which the imagination could seize. But Jessie was relieved on the whole; it was well enough; the bed was clean. At least, she did not appear to be expected to share her room, and that was a blessed privilege.

She lay on the bed with her hands under her head, staring at the ceiling. What a day, what a day it had been! And what a dangerous haven she had come to anchor in! She went over and over that scene in the kitchen. Life in the raw, assuredly. Her thoughts revolved principally about the figure of Big Bill Combs—the other two were negligible. Bill looked like a brute, and no doubt he was a brute; nevertheless, every word he uttered was charged with a certain massive dignity. Such as he was, he was the most nearly human thing in that terrible household, and she must make friends with him if she could.

Jessie had a stout heart, but she also had clear sight, and she could not disguise from herself the imminence of the danger in which she stood. She was aghast at it. In that house all the ordinary decencies of life that one took for granted were cast aside; and all the safeguards of an ordered life. One could not expect justice any more than kindness or mercy. Only unbridled savagery. She experienced what it meant to be an outlaw; to have every hand raised against her. She was absolutely at the mercy of this inhuman woman who was accountable to nobody except the powerful unseen one behind her. Jessie was appalled at the ingenuity of this pair who made a business of stealing the victims of the law in order to obtain slaves who had no recourse on earth from their tyranny.

While she lay there suddenly, out of absolute quiet came the sound of a scuffle below. It was only a slight scuffle, and soon over. It was followed by that most dreadful of sounds, a man's voice broken and gasping with terror, whining, moaning, imploring for mercy. She heard only the one voice, as if the poor wretch was faced by dumb enemies. The voice was silenced by a single, dull blow, and not another sound was to be heard.

Next morning Cliff Hutchins was gone, but there was presently a new-comer. The household was at breakfast in the dreary sitting-room over the kitchen. Mrs. Pullen was at the table, consequently everybody looked glum, excepting Skinny Sam, who was exercising his wit, much to his own satisfaction. Occasionally Mrs. Pullen gave him a fond look. Pap carried the dishes in and out, and between whiles sat down to eat with the others. Jessie kept her face averted from him, for his table manners were not pretty.

A little bell sounded through the house. By now Jessie was familiar with the door bell and the telephone, and this was neither. It had a disconcerting effect on the gang; they stopped eating, and listened in suspense. Mrs. Pullen went swiftly to one of the windows looking to the rear.

The bell continued to ring. "Something's wrong," she said curtly. "Sam, look into the street and see if the front is watched. If it is, all make for the roof."

Sam ran out, and the others pushed out into the hall uncertainly. Then the bell stopped, and a breath of relief escaped from all. They drifted back into the sitting-room. Mrs. Pullen was still at the window.

Presently she said coolly: "It's Abell," and returned to her chair. The meal was resumed.

There were steps on the stairs, and a man came into the room carrying a small satchel. He was different from the others. With his keen, shrewd face and careful dress, he looked like a prosperous young attorney. But at present his face was as white as paper, and he had a reckless, apathetic look, either from fatigue, or from some powerful emotion. He dropped the satchel on the table near to Mrs. Pullen's hand, and came around to a seat on the other side, next to Jessie. Sunk deep within himself, he scarcely seemed to see her. There was something in his clean, thin profile touchingly young.

"Another one!" thought Jessie. "Poor soul!"

"What did you hold the sliding door open for?" demanded Mrs. Pullen harshly.

"It slipped its trolley," was the indifferent reply. "It ought to be fixed."

"You attend to that, Sam," said Mrs. Pullen.

Food was pushed towards the new-comer, but nobody paid any particular attention to him. He seemed little disposed to eat.

"Where you been since twelve o'clock last night?" said Mrs. Pullen.

"On the streets. I was chased. I couldn't lead them here, could I?"

"That's a lie," said Mrs. Pullen. "You forget I've read the papers. There was no discovery until two hours later."

"What do I care what's in the papers," said Abell, shrugging. "When they haven't got the facts they'll make up anything at all."

"But if you had been seen, they'd have that fact, wouldn't they?"

"Well, I thought I was chased," said Abell.

"You been to see your family," said Mrs. Pullen accusingly.

The young fellow raised his white face sharply and met her gaze. "Yeh, likely, ain't it," he said with bitterly curling lip, "that I'd go to them straight from a robbery with the stuff in my hands. They're making out in a sort of way without me. Do you think I'm going to drag them down to my level? ... It's a fact I thought I was followed, and I wouldn't come back for that reason. It's a fact, too, that I went up there where they lived, and I walked past the house and looked at the windows. That's as near as I'm likely to get."

"How much is in here?" asked Mrs. Pullen, indicating the satchel.

"I didn't count it."

Mrs. Pullen opened the satchel, and took out packages of bills, and rolls of coins in paper. She counted it in a glance almost, and compared the total with the newspaper she had. From her grunt one might have thought she was disappointed to find that Abell was not trying to hold out on her. Abell sneered.

Presently Mrs. Pullen got up, taking the satchel, and made to leave the room. Abell jumped up, too, his white face working painfully.

"Kate," he stammered, "will you let me talk to him this morning?"

"Tell me what it is," she said with a disagreeable smile, "and I'll talk for you."

"Ask him," he said, forgetting everybody else in the room, "ask him if he'll let me go now. In six months I've brought in seventy-six thousand dollars. Isn't that the price of a man's freedom? Two tricks a week on an average is too much to ask of a man; my nerves are shot to pieces. And anyhow I couldn't keep it up. Every theatre in town is laying for me now. In the next night or two I'll get a bullet through my head!"

Jessie thought: "So this is the nervy thief who has been sticking up the theatrical box-offices."

Mrs. Pullen said: "That sort of talk don't go with him."

"Well, then, ask him if he won't give me assistance," cried Abell desperately. "A scout, just to watch that I don't get plugged from behind."

"That doubles the risk for the organisation," remarked Mrs. Pullen.

"Ah! you don't care what
my
risk is!"

"Oh, I'll ask him," said Mrs Pullen indifferently, and went out.

Jessie supposed from this talk that she had gone to telephone the boss. Mrs. Pullen's room adjoined hers in the front, and the telephone was in there. But Jessie had already learned that the telephone was in a closet, only the bell outside, that it might be heard through the house. When Mrs. Pullen retired into the closet, and shut the door, not a sound could be heard in Jessie's room, or in the hall outside.

"Don't you wisht you could hear the number?" Sam asked Abell with a sneer.

"That wouldn't do him no good," remarked Pap. "He always waits in a pay station for her to call him up, and every couple of days he changes to another."

"Well, I'll use my influence for you, Abie," said Sam derisively.

"Sam," said Abell with a deadly quietness, "when they push me too far, and I go bugs, the first thing I'm going to do is to kill you. I won't put a bullet through you neither. That's too clean. I'll slit you."

Sam's shallow eyes bolted, and he showed his teeth.

"And I hope I'll be there to see it," said Bill Combs in his bass growl.

"Me, too!" added Pap shrilly.

Sam shot poisonous sidelong glances at them, but held his tongue.

When Mrs. Pullen returned to the room, Abell asked eagerly: "What did he say?"

"He didn't say nothing," Mrs. Pullen said coolly. "He don't listen to that stuff."

Abell's chin dropped on his breast.

Whatever her private feelings towards her might be, it was absolutely necessary for Jessie to insinuate herself into Mrs. Pullen's good graces. Unless she could induce them to trust her, to give her a little more rope, she, Jessie, was helpless. She therefore lost no opportunity of propitiating "Black Kate" (as they called her behind her back) but was always met with a contemptuous rebuff. As when, Mrs. Pullen getting up to leave the room again, Jessie said:

"Is there any work I can do around the house to help out?"

To which Mrs. Pullen replied with a hard stare: "You'll get your work when I'm ready to give it to you."

She called Sam, and they went out. Pap had retired to the kitchen, and as Abell was sunk within himself, Jessie and Bill Combs were, to all intents and purposes, alone in the room.

"What makes her so sore at me?" Jessie asked of Bill: "What have I done?"

"She ain't got nothin' against you particular," said Bill in his heavy way; "she hates women—that is women as is younger than herself. And she's just takin' it out on you. She wouldn't have you here at all, on'y she got orders from above."

"Wasn't there ever a girl in the house before?" asked Jessie.

"Oh, yes, they was a girl here before," said Bill evasively.

"What become of her?"

"Don't ask me questions, sis," growled Bill. "It's onhealthy. You just keep your eyes and your ears open around here, and you'll learn plenty to make you wise."