Part 8 (1/2)

Laurence no longer read aloud to him, but instead gave Flint such books as he could find covering his particular study, and these were devoured and pored over, and more begged for. Flint would go without new clothes, neat as he was, and without tobacco, much as he liked to smoke,--to buy books upon lepidoptera.

He helped my mother with her flowers and her vegetables, but refused to have anything to do with her chickens, remarking shortly that hens were such fools he couldn't help hating them. Madame said she liked to have him around, for he was more like some un.o.btrusive jinnee than a mere mortal. She declared that John Flint had what the negroes call a ”growing hand”--he had only to stick a bit of green in the ground and it grew like Jonah's gourd.

Since he had begun to hobble about, he had gradually come to be accepted by the town in general. They looked upon him as one who shared Father De Rance's madness, a tramp who was a hunter of bugs. It explained his presence in the Parish House; I fancy it also explained to some why he had been a tramp!

Folks got used to him, as one does to anything one sees daily. The pleasant conservative soft-voiced ladies who liked to call on Madame of an afternoon and gossip Christianly, and drink tea and eat Clelie's little cakes on our broad shady verandah, only glanced casually at the bent head and shoulders visible through the screened window across the garden. They said he was very interesting, of course, but painfully shy and bashful. As for him, he was as horribly afraid of them as they would have been of him, had they known. I could not always save myself from the sin of smiling at an ironic situation.

Judge Mayne had at first eyed the man askance, watching him as his own cats might an interloping stray dog.

”The fellow's not very prepossessing,” he told me, of an evening when he had dined with us, ”but I've been on the bench long enough to be skeptical of any fixed good or bad type--I've found that the criminal type is any type that goes wrong; so I shouldn't go so far as to call this chap a bad egg. But--I hope you are reasonably sure of him, father?”

”Reasonably,” said I, composedly.

”Laurence tells me Madame and Mary Virginia _like_ the fellow. H'm!

Well, I've acquired a little faith in the intuition of women--some women, understand, and some times. And mark you, I didn't say _judgment_. Let us hope that this is one of the times when faith in intuition will be justified.”

Later, when he had had time to examine the work progressing under the flexible fingers of the silent workman, he withdrew with more respect.

”I suppose he's all right, if you think so, father. But I'd watch out for him, anyway,” he advised.

”That is exactly what I intend to do.”

”Rather he fell into your hands than mine. Better for him,” said the judge, briefly. Then he launched into an intimate talk of Laurence, and in thus talking of the boy's future, forgot my helper.

That was it, exactly. The man was so un.o.btrusive without in the least being furtive. Had so little to say; attended so strictly to his own business, and showed himself so utterly and almost inhumanly uninterested in anybody else's, that he kept in the background. He was there, and people knew it; they were, in a sense, interested in him, but not curious about him.

One morning in early autumn--he had been with us then some eight or nine months--I went over to his rooms with a New York newspaper in my hand. It had news that set my heart to pounding sickeningly--news that at once simplified and yet complicated matters. I hesitated as to whether or not I should tell him, but decided that whatever effect that news might produce, I would deal with him openly, above board, and always with truth. He must act and judge for himself and with his eyes open. On my part there should be no concealment.

The paper stated that the body of a man found floating in the East River had been positively identified by the police as that of Slippy McGee. That the noted crook had gotten back into New York through the cunning dragnet so carefully spread for him was another proof of his daring and dexterity. How he met the dark fate which set him adrift, battered and dreadful, in the East River, was another of those underworld crimes that remain unsolved. Cunning and dangerous, mysterious in his life, baffling all efforts to get at him, he was as evilly mysterious in his death. There was only one thing sure--that this dead wretch with the marks of violence upon him was Slippy McGee; and since his breath had ceased, the authorities could breathe easier.

He read it deliberately; then re-read it, and sat and stared at the paper. A slow grim smile came to his lips, and he took his chin in his hand, musingly. The eyes narrowed, the face darkened, the jaw thrust itself forward.

”Dead, huh?” he grunted, and stared about him, with a slow, twisting movement of the head. ”Well--I might just as well be, as buried alive in a jay-dump at the tail-end of all creation!” Once again the Powers of Darkness swooped down and wrestled with and for him; and knowing what I knew, sick at heart, I trembled for him.

”What am _I_ doing here, anyhow?” he snarled with his lips drawn back from his teeth. ”Piddling with bugs--_Me!_ Patching up their d.i.n.ky little wings and stretching out their dam' little legs and feelers--me being what I am, and they being what they are! Say, I've got to quit this, once for all I've got to quit it. I'm not a _man_ any more. I'm a dead one, a he-granny cutting silo for lady-worms and drynursing their interesting little babies. My G.o.d! _Me!_” And he threw his hands above his head with a gesture of rage and despair.

”Hanging on here like a b.o.o.b--no wonder they think I'm dead! If I could just make a getaway and pull off one more good job and land enough--”

”You couldn't keep it, if you did land it--your sort can't. You know how it went before--the women and the sharks got it. There'd be always that same incentive to pull off just one more to keep you going--until you'd pulled yourself behind bars, and stayed there. And there's the drug-danger, too. If you escaped so far, it was because so far you had the strength to let drugs alone. But the drugs get you, sooner or later, do they not? Have you not told me over and over again that 'nearly all dips are dopes'? That first the dope gets you--and then the law? No. You can't pull off anything that won't pull you into h.e.l.l. We have gone over this thing often enough, haven't we?”

”No, we haven't. And I haven't had a chance to pull off anything--except leaves for bugs. _Me!_ I want to get my hand in once more, I tell you! I want to pull off a stunt that'll make the whole bunch of bulls sit up and bellow for fair--and I can do it, easy as easy. Think I've croaked, do they? And they can all snooze on their peg-posts, now I'm a stiff? Well, by cripes, I just want half of a half of a chance, and I'll show 'em Slippy McGee's good and plenty alive!”

”Come out into the garden, my son, and feel that you are good and plenty alive. Come out into the free air. Hold on tight, a little while longer!”

I laid my hand upon his shoulder compellingly, and although he glared at me, and ground his teeth, and lifted his lip, he came; unwillingly, swearing under his breath, he came. We tramped up and down the garden paths, up and down, and back again, his wooden peg making a round hole, like a hoofmark, in the earth. He stared down at it, spat savagely upon it, and swore horribly, but not too loudly.

”I want to feel like a live man!” he gritted. ”A live man, not a one-legged mucker with a beard like a Dutch bomb-thrower's, puttering about a skypilot's backyard on the wrong side of everything!”

”Stick it out a little longer, John Flint; hold fast!”

”Hold fast to what?” he demanded savagely. ”To a bug stuck on a needle?”