The Lash Part 7

"Yes," admitted Micky. "I didn't know it was so late. I forgot to wind my watch, anyway. What time is it?" He moved toward her, his timepiece in his hand. It was an old silver hunting-case affair. In fumbling with the spring to open it, the rear cover opened, disclosing the faded picture of a woman. Micky held it out to the girl.

"My mother," he said simply. "She died when I was little." Maisie looked at the sweet face and patient eyes a moment, then her look sought Micky's face. It held an unwonted gravity, the blue eyes were a little misty. He leaned over her, his gaze bent upon the dial of her smart little watch.

"Eight forty-five, eh?" he exclaimed. "Whew! it is late." He set his watch and then began winding it. "That case is loose, I must get it fixed," he pursued. He glanced again at the girl's timepiece, then whimsically shook his own. "Not much like yours, is it?" he said, with a sorry smile. "Poor little turnip! But it'll be buried with me, Maisie, I'll never have another. I don't want another. You see,--she gave it to me."

He sank into a chair, his face in the shadow. "I can see it now," he pursued in a low voice, "just as if it was yesterday. How tickled I was!

and so was she, to see me so. There were just us two, and now--I'm alone. Oh! it's years ago, but it's one of those things that'll hurt every time I remember it--now she's gone--will hurt till I go, too! Of course it didn't cost her much, poor little woman. It couldn't; she didn't have it. How she managed to save the few poor dollars for it, G.o.d knows; I can't figure it. But she did, and one day when I got in from selling my papers, she met me and gave it to me. And I was only a kid, Maisie, and I up and bellered like a calf, with my arms around her,--and she cried, too; and it wasn't very long,--" his voice broke for a moment,--"it wasn't very long after that,--it was dark and cold I remember, and snowflakes in the air,--and I was crying and trying to pull away from them while they were leading me away--from--her grave."

It was very still. The girl averted her eyes; they were full of tears.

O'Byrn sat in the shadow, his head bent. In a moment he resumed.

"I've knocked around from pillar to post since then, Maisie, from one end of the land to the other. I've lived high and low, from glad rags to just plain rags. I could always get a job--and I could always lose it.

Oh, yes, I might as well be frank," with a bitter laugh. "It's whisky--a heritage. Not all the time--fits that I can't help--every now and then--like bad dreams, only worse--they're real! It's at those times that the old feeling grips me, too,--to keep movin'. Why, I usually wake up where everything's strange--and I have to ask 'em where I am. I've been on the road to something worth while so often--and always kicked it over. And it cropped out in me so young! You'd be surprised--"

"Oh, don't!" she cried. He stared at her mutely. "What makes you say such horrible things about yourself?" she pursued pa.s.sionately, a quiver in her voice. "Do you want me to believe--"

"The truth," he interrupted, gently. "Only the truth. Of course, I haven't known you long, but it seems like all my life. I'd feel like a yellow dog, somehow, if I shouldn't tell you. But then, we won't say anything more about it. I'm not to blame, exactly; it was a present.

We'll go back, there isn't much to tell. It's always been the newspaper business with me. Odds and ends at first, then they found I could write, and I've been at it ever since. I wasn't much on education, but I've picked up quite a lot, and I've seen the country. Oh, I've had my dreams. Maybe I could do something sometime--if--" He broke off abruptly.

She sprang up, coming quickly to him. Her little hand sought his arm.

"Micky," she breathed softly, with shining eyes, "do it! You can; it's in you; if you will only leave off--and you can--you must! Think of her, Micky,--she cried over you--perhaps she's crying yet! Make her smile, instead! Oh, what makes me talk to you like this, only knowing you a few weeks? What right--"

He caught her hand as she moved slowly away and drew her back. "What right?" he echoed warmly. "The best in the world! It does me good!

You're a true friend, you are, and you can see what a mess I've made of my life and how I could do better if I would--or could, for you don't know what I have to fight against, Maisie." He drew a chair for her close to his own. "But then, I'm young yet," he pursued, with a rather sorry smile. "Time yet, perhaps, for dreams. Dreams!" he repeated, with a queer, half-shamed look, "how the fellows at the office would laugh to hear me say that! They'd say I'd gone bug-house."

"Dreams?" she repeated softly, a divine smile in her wistful eyes, "why, Micky, we're all dreamers. Between here and the store--the store and here, day after day, don't you suppose they help me; the dreams? Doesn't it help your work--your old humdrum work, whatever it is, without any beginning or ending--doesn't it help to mix a little dreaming with it?

Of course, it doesn't really help me--I'm a poor, silly little thing--but it can help you, Micky--it can help you!"

"'Poor, silly little thing!'" he repeated after her, his eyes moistening. "Don't, Maisie, it makes me feel like a fool! Why, I'm not fit to speak to you, girl! The life I've lived--Oh, the road is where I belong, after all! And the dreams--why, they're just dreams, that's all.

I'd only have to try to realize them to prove it--and I'm afraid. Yes, when I haven't been drunk, I've been afraid."

She winced at the word, while he, unheeding, stared gloomily at the carpet. "What--" she began hesitantly, and stopped. He looked up, comprehending.

"To write," he said simply. "To write instead of scribble. Oh, I can see things--and I can feel 'em. Seems to me that I could do it--but it looms up so that I don't dare try. And sometimes I get into the proper mood, and get squared away--and then--" He broke off with a despairing gesture.

"I don't know much about those things, of course," she said, "but I like to read what I can, and it seems to me that feelin' like you do about it--I mean it's lookin' so big to you--that you ought to be all the more able to do it."

He stared at her. This subtle viewpoint had never struck him before. "By George, it takes a girl, after all, to hit the nail square," he told her. "I never thought of it. But say,--why--it's encouraging, it is!"

"Sure it is." She smiled at him. "You want to get busy."

He stared wide-eyed in sudden reverie, his eyes wistful, his freckled face softened with something that contrasted oddly enough with his ordinary reckless, devil-may-care att.i.tude toward the world. His better side was uppermost; somehow this girl could always summon it. But now, as she watched him mutely, a swift shadow darkened his face.

"Yes," he told her, "perhaps I ought to be encouraged by the way I feel about it, and get busy. I could if I was built right, but I'm not, Maisie. I can't get settled and I haven't any balance wheel. It's 'off again, on again, gone again' with me. I can't get fairly into a place before the old itch to keep moving bothers me, and with the other, the combination keeps me shifting. Why, I seem to be a whole bunch of fellows mixed up in a free-for-all, sometimes," he added, with a forlorn smile. "Other fellows can get down to a steady grind and climb; I can't.

G.o.d knows I want to, sometimes." He gave her a queer look; she did not seem to notice.

"And then," he pursued, "I've never had a home, you know, not since the poor little mother died. Of course, that wasn't much of a home to look at, but she was there, and I've never had one since. Oh, it's been so lonesome sometimes; you don't know. It's the man who goes jumping over the world alone, here today and there tomorrow, that knows what lonesomeness is. It's that, I tell you, that's raised the devil with me.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems to me that if it had been with me like it is with others I'd have been different. I've known fellows inclined the same way as I am, but they settled down and got homes, and now--why, they've got me beat out of sight."

"Well," she queried eagerly, "why don't you--" and stopped suddenly, her cheeks crimsoning, for Micky's disturbed face had with her unthinking words grown suddenly tense with purpose. A flash of realization had revealed to him his great need, the influence to anchor him and hold him fast against the restless, turbid tide that sought to sweep him away.

Why, he needed--her! On the word of this slip of a girl hung his opportunity for a new and better world; a world for two, two who might work, one for the other,--and climb; a world in which dreams might come true. In a moment it would have all been poured forth in broken, incoherent phrase, the sum of Micky's illumining dream and his desire.

But the girl, with the unerring instinct of her s.e.x, divined the situation and in quick alarm frustrated O'Byrn's intention, though very gently.

"Well," she said, smiling at him brightly, "we've had a good talk, haven't we? I'm glad you told me about--everything. I know you'll win, it's in you. And now--I know you won't mind--but it's gettin' late, and I have to get up early, you know."

So Micky, effectually forestalled, went away with settled gloom shadowing his freckled face. For a long time after he had gone the girl sat by the window, the light turned low; young eyes staring sombrely out upon the darkened street; young, fearful soul oppressed by the soft encroaching shadow of the divinest of life's mysteries.

CHAPTER VIII

AN EVENING CALL

It was early in the evening and some of the Courier's reportorial staff were in the office, waiting for late a.s.signments. As often happened when a few moments of leisure allowed, there was an animated group in the corner, with O'Byrn occupying the center. The political situation was beginning to grow warmer, so it naturally followed that Shaughnessy was the subject of conversation.

Micky had just been indulging in what d.i.c.k Glenwood called one of his "bursts of indiscriminate philosophy." "This game of politics," he declared, "is getting to be a science in solitaire. It's up to you to play it alone and use the rest of 'em for p.a.w.ns, if you want to win out.

Now, look at Shaughnessy. He fools his bowers, right and left. He annexes the whole graft. His gang of four-flushers think it's a divvy, but the boss has the wad and they're gettin' one-half of one per cent handouts. What a graft it is! I read in a paper the other day of a sign in front of an eat-joint in a Western boom town. It read:

MEALS, 25 CENTS.

SQUARE MEALS, 50 CENTS.

GORGE, 75 CENTS.

But Shaughnessy's doin' a lot better than that. He's gettin' gorged without payin' for it."

"Where did he hail from?" asked Peters. "Isn't indigenous, is he?"

"Please remember, Pete," remarked d.i.c.k, in a pained tone, "that kind of vocabulary is barred outside your copy writing, and even then must never be used unless you've lost your book of synonyms. You positively must never throw verbal lugs into us like that. As for Shaughnessy, he isn't whatever you call it. He came here from the devil knows where a dozen years ago and annexed Goldberg, the gentleman that's so popular with Micky. Mr. Shaughnessy had enjoyed a good ward training somewhere and was quick to catch onto the possibilities of that section of the town.

His connection with politics has always been of the quietest nature, but he's popularly supposed to rule the roost. They say, too, he's long on aspirations and hopes humbly for the ultimate possession of the state."

"Newspapers are dead against him," observed Mead; "at least, all that count."

"Two of 'em weren't till lately," responded d.i.c.k dryly. "He had 'em bought, body and soul, till they had a row with him on a question of patronage and did a chameleon change for political virtue. He's got his own Messenger--good name for that organ. He's the owner of that sheet, though he doesn't figure in the firm name. There's the Courier, of course, and our rival over the way must have fought him from the first, but the good in this city mostly died young, I guess."

"'Tisn't that," put in Micky, from the midst of a placid cloud of cigar smoke. "There's enough of the decent element in this place to shelve Shaughnessy, if you could rouse it. But it's doing a Rip Van Winkle that it's going to take a big gob of dynamite to jar it out of. Some day that will happen, and the decent element will be on top for a year or two. Then it will fall asleep at the switch and do another century, while the gang rings in again. Oh, it'll happen, for a little while, the reform stunt. It always does. But it won't last long, and then it's the gang that we have always with us. Boss rule? It's explained easily enough. Your decent element is troubled with trances; the gang's got insomnia."

"So you think Shaughnessy'll get what's coming to him some day?" mused d.i.c.k. "Where's your dynamite?"

"Right here!" a.s.serted O'Byrn, bracing in his chair and vigorously banging his desk. "Here or in some other good newspaper office in this town. Do you know the reason of Shaughnessy's success here? It's because he never shows his hand. He's a gilt-edged daisy, that fellow. If he had been doing his business in the open they'd have had him behind bars long ago. But he's doing his directing from the wings. You and I know that if we pick out a reputable man, hap-hazard, from the decent element we've been speaking of, and begin talking to him of Shaughnessy, he'll laugh and chase up the street, saying that the papers have Shaughnessy on the brain. It's a fact that a lot of people don't look on that Irish scoundrel as anything more than a cheap ward boss, with little influence in the city at large. There's reason enough for the view. The newspapers have poured out columns of abuse of Shaughnessy in the past few years, but sum it all up and it's composed wholly of vague generalities.

They've never brought anything home to him that was worth the bringing, never a thing that would jug him for a minute. The average voter here holds him too cheap. That fact, coupled with the natural majority he controls, always tips his scales right. Tell your voter-at-large that it was Shaughnessy who engineered the queer, rotten deals that have figured in this town--yes, and the legislature,--deals whose parentage they can't trace, and the voter would give you the laugh."

"He'd have a right to," commented Kirk. "Go slow, Micky. Shaughnessy's a good organizer, and maybe he's put some cheap ones through, but he's limited."

"So is the flyer," retorted Micky, "but it'll jerk you along some. Don't you foolish yourself about that mick, Andy. He's a deep one. He's got a side to him that's working overtime. It's an underground system, and any lucky guy in this business that tumbles into it will see things that'll fill his paper next day with facts, not surmises, facts that'll set 'em all gapin'. That's the dynamite that'll explode some day and it'll blow Shaughnessy into stripes and behind the bars. Of course, there'll be a new boss after a while, but it won't be Shaughnessy."

The city editor summoned them just then and the conference was abruptly terminated. Soon afterward Micky and d.i.c.k descended together in the elevator and walked up the avenue toward the point where their paths separated. They were still talking of Shaughnessy.