Part 40 (1/2)

”Chuck the cops into the Hackensack, and then we can do as we like.”

”Lynch him! Lynch him! Lynch him!”

Teddy didn't care whether they lynched him or not. In as far as he could form a wish he wished they would; but then he was past forming wishes.

They could string him up to the telegraph pole or burn him alive just as they felt inclined; for he had traveled beyond fear.

Just then the crowd parted, the police van drove up, and his protectors dragged him to its shelter. Even then there was a new sensation in store for him. The parting of the crowd showed Flynn lying by the roadside, also waiting for the van. He was on his back, his knees drawn up, his mouth dropped open. Waistcoat and s.h.i.+rt had been torn apart, and Teddy saw a red spot.

He started back. Except for the groan when he had been kicked in the face, it was the only time he opened his lips.

”I didn't do that!” he cried, so loud that a jeer broke from the crowd.

A policeman shook him by the arm.

”Say, sonny, you didn't do that?”

Appalled by the sight of the dead man, Teddy could do no more than stupidly shake his head.

”Then who in h.e.l.l did? Tell us that.”

But the boy collapsed, his head sagging, his knees giving way under him.

When he returned to consciousness he was lying in the dark, jolting, jolting, jolting, on the floor of the police van.

At the station he was pulled out again. He could stand now, and walk, though not very well. Hands supported him as he stumbled up the steps and into a room where a man in uniform sat behind a desk, while three or four police and half a dozen unexplained hangers-on stood about idly.

”A live one,” the policeman who led Teddy called out, jocosely, as they approached the desk.

”Looks like a dead one,” the man behind the desk replied, with the same sense of humor. ”Looks like he'd been dead and buried and dug up again.”

The allusion to Teddy's hatless, mud-caked appearance raised a laugh.

The man behind the desk dipped his pen in the ink bottle and drew up a big ledger.

”Name?”

Teddy could just articulate. ”Edward Scarborough Follett.”

”Gee, whiz! Guess you'll have to spell it out.”

Teddy spelled slowly, as if the letters were new to him. Having done this, he was asked no more questions. Explanations came from the officer who had ”run him in” and who produced the automatic pistol picked up on the floor of the shack. When it was stated in addition that Teddy was charged with shooting and killing Peter Flynn, whom all of them knew and to whom they were bound by ties of professional solidarity, the boy felt the half-friendly indifference with which the spectators had seen him come in change to sullen hostility.

The formulas fulfilled, he was seized more roughly than before, to be half led, half pushed, along a dim hall and down a dimmer flight of steps to a worn, stone-flagged bas.e.m.e.nt pervaded by dankness and a smell of disinfectants. The corridor into which they turned was long and straight and narrow like a knife-cut through a cheese. On the left a blank stone wall was the blanker for its whitewash; on the right, a row of little doors diminished down the vista to the size of pigeonholes.

Pressed close to the square foot of grating inset in each door was a human face eager to see who was coming next, while the officer was greeted with howls of rage or whining pet.i.tions or strings of ugly words.

They stopped at the first open door, and after one glance within Teddy started back.

”Don't put me in there, for Jesus' sake!”

The cry was involuntary, since he knew he would be put in there in any case.