Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man Part 8

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?"

"Yes. And to me who trusts you. To Madame who likes you. To the dear child who put bug and needle into your hand because she knew it was good work and trusted your hand to do it. And more than all, to that other Me you're finding--your own true self, John Flint! Hold fast, hold fast!"

He stopped and stared at me.

"I'm believing him again!" said he, grievously. "I've been sat on while I was hot, and my number's marked on me, 23. I'm hoodooed, that's what!"

Tramp, tramp, stump, stump, up and down, the two of us.

"All right, devil-dodger," said he wearily, after a long sullen silence. "I'll stick it out a bit longer, to please you. You've been white--the lot of you. But look here--if I beat it some night ... with what I can find, why, I'm warning you: don't blame _me_--you're running your risks, and it'll be up to _you_ to explain!"

"When you want to go, John Flint--when you really and truly want to go, why, take anything I have that you may fancy, my son. I give it you beforehand."

"I don't want anything given to me beforehand!" he growled. "I want to take what I want to take without anybody's leave!"

"Very well, then; take what you want to take, without anybody's leave!

I shall be able to do without it, I dare say."

He turned upon me furiously:

"Oh, yes, I guess you can! You'd do without eating and breathing too, I suppose, if you could manage it! You do without too blamed much right now, trying to beat yourself to being a saint! Of course I'd help myself and leave you to go without--you're enough to make a man ache to shoot some sense into you with a cannon! And for G.o.d's sake, _who_ are you pinching and sc.r.a.ping and going without _for_? A bunch of hickey factory-shuckers that haven't got sense enough to talk American, and a lot of mill-hands with beans on 'em like bone b.u.t.tons!

They ain't worth it. While I'm in the humor, take it from me there ain't anybody worth anything anyhow!"

"Oh, Mr. Flint! What a shame and a sin!" called another voice. "Oh, Mr. Flint, I'm ashamed of you!" There in the freedom of the Sat.u.r.day morning sunlight stood Mary Virginia, her red Irish setter Kerry beside her.

"I came over," said she, "to see how the baby-moths are getting on this morning, and to know if the last hairy gentleman I brought spins into a coc.o.o.n or buries himself in the ground. And then I heard Mr.

Flint--and what he said is unkind, and untrue, and not a bit like him.

Why, everybody's worth everything you can do for them--only some are worth more."

The wild wrath died out of his face. As usual, he softened at sight of her.

"Oh, well, miss, I wasn't thinking of the like of you--and him," he jerked his head at me, half apologetically, "nor young Mayne, nor the little Madame. You're different."

"Why, no, we aren't, really," said Mary Virginia, puckering her brows adorably. "We only _seem_ to be different--but we are just exactly like everybody else, only _we_ know it, and some people never can seem to find it out--and there's the difference! You see?" That was the befuddled manner in which Mary Virginia very often explained things.

If G.o.d was good to you, you got a little glimmer of what she meant and was trying to tell you. Mary Virginia often talked as the alchemists used to write--cryptically, abstrusely, as if to hide the golden truth from all but the initiate.

"Come and shake hands with Mr. Flint, Kerry," said she to the setter.

"I want you to help make him understand things it's high time he should know. n.o.body can do that better than a good dog can."

Kerry looked a trifle doubtful, but having been told to do a certain thing, he obeyed, as a good dog does. Gravely he sat up and held out an obedient paw, which the man took mechanically. But meeting the clear hazel eyes, he dropped his hand upon the shining head with the gesture of one who desires to become friends. Accepting this, Kerry reached up a nose and nuzzled. Then he wagged his plumy tail.

"There!" said Mary Virginia, delightedly. "Now, don't you see how horrid it was to talk the way you talked? Why, Kerry _likes_ you, and Kerry is a sensible dog."

"Yes, miss," and he looked at Mary Virginia very much as the dog did, trustingly, but a little bewildered.

"Aren't you sorry you said that?"