The Empty Sack Part 40

"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 shirt 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.

"Ah, go in wid you!"

A shove sent him over the threshold with such force that he fell on the wooden bunk which was all the dog hole contained, while the door clanged behind him.

All that night he lay in a stupor induced by misery. No one came near him; no food or drink was offered him. Thirst made him slightly delirious, which was a relief. Now and then, when his real consciousness partially returned he muttered, half aloud:

"I didn't do it. My hand might have done it-but that wasn't me."

The crepuscular light of morning was not very different from the darkness of night, but it brought his senses back to him sluggishly.

Bruised as he was in body, he was still more bruised in mind, and could render to himself no more than a vague account of what had happened yesterday. When a tin of water and a hunk of bread were mysteriously pushed into the cell, he consumed them like an animal, lying down again on the bunk. Without water for a wash, his face and hair were still caked with the mud which also stiffened his clothing.

"My G.o.d! what's that?"

Not having seen him before, the guard who summoned him to court was startled by the apparition that crawled to the threshold of the cell when the door was unlocked. The semblance to a boy was little more exact than that of a snow man to a man.

"Ah! my G.o.d! my G.o.d! Sure you can't go into court like that. They wouldn't know you was a human bein', let alone a prisoner. Wait a bit, and I'll get you somethin' to wash up in."

There followed a little rough kindliness, scouring and brushing and combing the lad into something less like a monstrosity. Teddy submitted as a child does and with a child's indifference to cleanliness.

So, too, he submitted in court, hardly knowing where he was or the significance of these formalities. Apart from the relief he got from his own reiterations, "I didn't do it, I didn't do it," the proceedings were a blur to him. When he was led out again down more steps, along more corridors, and cast into another stale and disinfected cell, he took it with the same brutish insensibility. He didn't know that the new cell was in that part of the House of Detention known as Murderers' Row, nor did he heed the hoa.r.s.e questions whispered through the next-door grating, and which he could barely catch as they stole along the wall.

"Say, who'd ye do in? Did he croak right off? My guy didn't croak till three weeks after I give him the lead, and now they can't send me to the chair nohow. In luck, ain't I?"

To Teddy, this uncanny recitation was no more than the other sounds which smote the auditory nerve but hardly penetrated to the brain. They were all abnormal sounds, sprung of abnormal conditions, breaking in on a silence which was otherwise that of the sepulcher. Footsteps clanked-and then all was still; a door banged-and then all was still; a raucous voice shouted out a curse-and then all was still. The stillness was as ghostly as the sound, only that, as far as Teddy was concerned, so little reached his ma.s.sacred perceptions.

The rattle of keys and the clanging of the door! He looked up from the bunk on the edge of which he was sitting listlessly.

"Lady to see you!"

This guard was young, smart, debonair, with a twinkle in his eye, and the first who didn't treat a comrade's murderer with instinctive animosity. Teddy got up and followed him in the stupefied bewilderment with which he had done everything else that day. Lady to see him! The words seemed to refer to something so far back in his history that he could hardly recall what it was. Once upon a time there had been a mother, a Jennie, a Gussie, and a Gladys; but they were now remote and shadowy.

Along corridors, up steps, and then along more corridors he tramped, till they stopped at an open door-and there he saw Jennie. In a room unspeakably bare and forbidding in spite of a table and half a dozen chairs she waited for him with a smile. He, too, did his best to smile, but his lower lip, swollen with the kick that had caught him in the mouth, made the effort nothing but a rictus.

For this, Jennie had been prepared by the snapshot in the paper. All the while she had been on the way to him she had been saying to herself that she must show no sign of horror or surprise. Even though she would follow the cue of her poor demented mother and pretend that he was in prison as a martyr, she would take no pitying or tragic note. She went forward, therefore, and threw her arms about him with the same offhand, unsentimental pleasure which she would have shown in meeting him after a brief absence at any time.

"You darling Ted! We're so glad to have found you. I thought I'd just run down and bring you some clean clothes."

It was better done than she thought she had the strength for, perhaps because his need was greater than she had supposed possible. Could she have dreamt beforehand that Teddy would ever look like this, she would have screamed from fright. But now that he did, she rose to the fact, seemingly taking it for granted, actually taking it for granted, through some hitherto unsuspected histrionic force. Within a minute of his arrival they were seated near each other, in a curious make-believe that the conditions were not terrible.

With this familiar presence beside him, Teddy's mind resumed functioning, possibly to his regret. Home was close to him again, while the loved faces came back to life.

"How's ma?"

The question was indistinct because, now that it came to making conversation, he found that his tongue was thickened in addition to his swollen lip. Jennie replied that their mother's health was never better.

"I suppose"-he balked a little but forced himself onward-"I suppose she feels pretty bad-over me."

"No, she doesn't. She told me to tell you so." She was determined to speak truthfully in this respect, so that if their mother's dementia could do him any good, he shouldn't fail of it. "She told me to say that you were not to be sorry for anything you'd done, no matter how they punished you."