Van Bibber and Others Part 13

The city editor stared at him grimly. "Wouldn't you like a type-writer, and Conway to write the story for you, and a hot supper sent after you?" he asked.

"No; Gallegher will do," Bronson said.

Gallegher had his overcoat on and a night-hawk at the door when Bronson came down the stairs and stopped to light a cigar in the hallway.

"Go to Moyamensing," said Gallegher to the driver.

Gallegher looked at the man to see if he would show himself sufficiently human to express surprise at their visiting such a place on such a night, but the man only gathered up his reins impa.s.sively, and Gallegher stepped into the cab, with a feeling of disappointment at having missed a point. He rubbed the frosted panes and looked out with boyish interest at the pa.s.sing holiday-makers. The pavements were full of them and their bundles, and the street as well, with wavering lines of medical students and clerks blowing joyfully on the horns, and pushing through the crowd with one hand on the shoulder of the man in front. The Christmas greens hung in long lines, and only stopped where a street crossed, and the shop fronts were so brilliant that the street was as light as day.

It was so light that Bronson could read the clipping the city editor had given him.

"What is it we are going on?" asked Gallegher.

Gallegher enjoyed many privileges; they were given him princ.i.p.ally, I think, because if they had not been given him he would have taken them. He was very young and small, but st.u.r.dily built, and he had a general knowledge which was entertaining, except when he happened to know more about anything than you did. It was impossible to force him to respect your years, for he knew all about you, from the number of lines that had been cut off your last story to the amount of your very small salary; and there was an awful simplicity about him, and a certain sympathy, or it may have been merely curiosity, which showed itself towards every one with whom he came in contact. So when he asked Bronson what he was going to do, Bronson read the clipping in his hand aloud.

"'Henry Quinn,'" Bronson read, "'who was sentenced to six years in Moyamensing Prison for the robbery of the Second National Bank at Tacony, will be liberated to-night. His sentence has been commuted, owing to good conduct and to the fact that for the last year he has been in very ill health. Quinn was night watchman at the Tacony bank at the time of the robbery, and, as was shown at the trial, was in reality merely the tool of the robbers. He confessed to complicity in the robbery, but disclaimed having any knowledge of the later whereabouts of the money, which has never been recovered. This was his first offence, and he had, up to the time of the robbery, borne a very excellent reputation. Although but lately married, his married life had been a most unhappy one, his friends claiming that his wife and her mother were the most to blame. Quinn took to spending his evenings away from home, and saw a great deal of a young woman who was supposed to have been the direct cause of his dishonesty. He admitted, in fact, that it was to get money to enable him to leave the country with her that he agreed to a.s.sist the bank-robbers. The paper acknowledges the receipt of ten dollars from M.J.C. to be given to Quinn on his release, also two dollars from Cash and three from Mary."

Gallegher's comment on this was one of disdain. "There isn't much in that," he said, "is there? Just a man that's done time once, and they're letting him out. Now, if it was Kid McCoy, or Billy Porter, or some one like that--eh?" Gallegher had as high a regard for a string of aliases after a name as others have for a double line of K.C.B.'s and C.S.L.'s, and a man who had offended but once was not worthy of his consideration. "And you will work in those bloodhounds again, too, I suppose," he said, gloomily.

The reporter pretended not to hear this, and to doze in the corner, and Gallegher whistled softly to himself and twisted luxuriously on the cushions. It was a half-hour later when Bronson awoke to find he had dozed in all seriousness, as a sudden current of cold air cut in his face, and he saw Gallegher standing with his hand on the open door, with the gray wall of the prison rising behind him.

Moyamensing looks like a prison. It is solidly, awfully suggestive of the sternness of its duty and of the hopelessness of its failing in it. It stands like a great fortress of the Middle Ages in a quadrangle of cheap brick and white dwelling-houses, and a few mean shops and tawdry saloons. It has the towers of a fortress, the pillars of an Egyptian temple; but more impressive than either of these is the awful simplicity of the bare, uncompromising wall that shuts out the prying eyes of the world and encloses those who are no longer of the world. It is hard to imagine what effect it has on those who remain in the houses about it. One would think they would sooner live overlooking a graveyard than such a place, with its mystery and hopelessness and unending silence, its hundreds of human inmates whom no one can see or hear, but who, one feels, are there.

Bronson, as he looked up at the prison, familiar as it was to him, admitted that he felt all this, by a frown and a slight shrug of the shoulders. "You are to wait here until twelve," he said to the driver of the nighthawk. "Don't go far away."

Bronson and the boy walked to an oyster-saloon that made one of the line of houses facing the gates of the prison on the opposite side of the street, and seated themselves at one of the tables from which Bronson could see out towards the northern entrance of the jail. He told Gallegher to eat something, so that the saloon-keeper would make them welcome and allow them to remain, and Gallegher climbed up on a high chair, and heard the man shout back his order to the kitchen with a faint smile of antic.i.p.ation. It was eleven o'clock, but it was even then necessary to begin to watch, as there was a tradition in the office that prisoners with influence were sometimes released before their sentence was quite fulfilled, and Bronson eyed the "released prisoners' gate" from across the top of his paper. The electric lights before the prison showed every stone in its wall, and turned the icy pavements into black mirrors of light. On a church steeple a block away a round clock-face told the minutes, and Bronson wondered, if they dragged so slowly to him, how tardily they must follow one another to the men in the prison, who could not see the clock's face.

The office-boy finished his supper, and went out to explore the neighborhood, and came back later to say that it was growing colder, and that he had found the driver in a saloon, but that he was, to all appearances, still sober. Bronson suggested that he had better sacrifice himself once again and eat something for the good of the house, and Gallegher a.s.sented listlessly, with the comment that one "might as well be eatin' as doin' nothin'." He went out again restlessly, and was gone for a quarter of an hour, and Bronson had re-read the day's paper and the signs on the wall and the clipping he had read before, and was thinking of going out to find him, when Gallegher put his head and arm through the door and beckoned to him from the outside. Bronson wrapped his coat up around his throat and followed him leisurely to the street. Gallegher halted at the curb, and pointed across to the figure of a woman pacing up and down in the glare of the electric lights, and making a conspicuous shadow on the white surface of the snow.

"That lady," said Gallegher, "asked me what door they let the released prisoners out of, an' I said I didn't know, but that I knew a young fellow who did."

Bronson stood considering the possible value of this for a moment, and then crossed the street slowly. The woman looked up sharply as he approached, but stood still.

"If you are waiting to see Quinn," Bronson said, abruptly, "he will come out of that upper gate, the green one with the iron spikes over it."

The woman stood motionless, and looked at him doubtfully. She was quite young and pretty, but her face was drawn and wearied-looking, as though she were a convalescent or one who was in trouble. She was of the working cla.s.s.

"I am waiting for him myself," Bronson said, to rea.s.sure her.

"Are you?" the girl answered, vaguely. "Did you try to see him?" She did not wait for an answer, but went on, nervously: "They wouldn't let me see him. I have been here since noon. I thought maybe he might get out before that, and I'd be too late. You are sure that is the gate, are you? Some of them told me there was another, and I was afraid I'd miss him. I've waited so long," she added. Then she asked, "You're a friend of his, ain't you?"

"Yes, I suppose so," Bronson said. "I am waiting to give him some money."

"Yes? I have some money, too," the girl said, slowly. "Not much."

Then she looked at Bronson eagerly and with a touch of suspicion, and took a step backward. "You're no friend of hern, are you?" she asked, sharply.

"Her? Whom do you mean?" asked Bronson.

But Gallegher interrupted him. "Certainly not," he said. "Of course not."

The girl gave a satisfied nod, and then turned to retrace her steps over the beat she had laid out for herself.

"Whom do you think she means?" asked Bronson, in a whisper.

"His wife, I suppose," Gallegher answered, impatiently.

The girl came back, as if finding some comfort in their presence.

"_She's_ inside now," with a nod of her head towards the prison. "Her and her mother. They come in a cab," she added, as if that circ.u.mstance made it a little harder to bear. "And when I asked if I could see him, the man at the gate said he had orders not. I suppose she gave him them orders. Don't you think so?" She did not wait for a reply, but went on as though she had been watching alone so long that it was a relief to speak to some one. "How much money have you got?"

she asked.

Bronson told her.

"Fifty-five dollars!" The girl laughed, sadly. "I only got fifteen dollars. That ain't much, is it? That's all I could make--I've been sick--that and the fifteen I sent the paper."

"Was it you that--did you send any money to a paper?" asked Bronson.

"Yes; I sent fifteen dollars. I thought maybe I wouldn't get to speak to him if she came out with him, and I wanted him to have the money, so I sent it to the paper, and asked them to see he got it. I give it under three names: I give my initials, and 'Cash,' and just my name-- 'Mary.' I wanted him to know it was me give it. I suppose they'll send it all right. Fifteen dollars don't look like much against fifty-five dollars, does it?" She took a small roll of bills from her pocket and smiled down at them. Her hands were bare, and Bronson saw that they were chapped and rough. She rubbed them one over the other, and smiled at him wearily.

Bronson could not place her in the story he was about to write; it was a new and unlooked-for element, and one that promised to be of moment.

He took the roll of bills from his pocket and handed them to her. "You might as well give him this too," he said. "I will be here until he comes out, and it makes no difference who gives him the money, so long as he gets it."

The girl smiled confusedly. The show of confidence seemed to please her. But she said, "No, I'd rather not. You see, it isn't mine, and I _did_ work for this," holding out her own roll of money. She looked up at him steadily, and paused for a moment, and then said, almost defiantly, "Do you know who I am?"

"I can guess," Bronson said.

"Yes, I suppose you can," the girl answered. "Well, you can believe it or not, just as you please"--as though he had accused her of something--"but, before G.o.d, it wasn't my doings." She pointed with a wave of her hand towards the prison wall. "I did not know it was for _me_ he helped them get the money until he said so on the stand. I didn't know he was thinking of running off with me at all. I guess I'd have gone if he had asked me. But I didn't put him up to it as they said I'd done. I knew he cared for me a lot, but I didn't think he cared as much as that. His wife"--she stopped, and seemed to consider her words carefully, as if to be quite fair in what she said--"his wife, I guess, didn't know just how to treat him. She was too fond of going out, and having company at the house, when he was away nights watching at the bank. When they was first married she used to go down to the bank and sit up with him to keep him company; but it was lonesome there in the dark, and she give it up. She was always fond of company and having men around. Her and her mother are a good deal alike. Henry used to grumble about it, and then she'd get mad, and that's how it begun. And then the neighbors talked too. It was after that that he got to coming to see me. I was living out in service then, and he used to stop in to see me on his way back from the bank, about seven in the morning, when I was up in the kitchen getting breakfast. I'd give him a cup of coffee or something, and that's how we got acquainted."

She turned her face away, and looked at the lights farther down the street. "They said a good deal about me and him that wasn't true."

There was a pause, and then she looked at Bronson again. "I told him he ought to stop coming to see me, and to make it up with his wife, but he said he liked me best. I couldn't help his saying that, could I, if he did? Then he--then this come," she nodded to the jail, "and they blamed _me_ for it. They said that I stood in with the bank-robbers, and was working with them; they said they used me for to get him to help them." She lifted her face to the boy and the man, and they saw that her eyes were wet and that her face was quivering.

"That's likely, isn't it?" she demanded, with a sob. She stood for a moment looking at the great iron gate, and then at the clock-face glowing dully through the falling snow: it showed a quarter to twelve.

"When he was put away," she went on, sadly, "I started in to wait for him, and to save something against his coming out. I only got three dollars a week and my keep, but I had saved one hundred and thirty dollars up to last April, and then I took sick, and it all went to the doctor and for medicines. I didn't want to spend it that way, but I couldn't die and not see him. Sometimes I thought it would be better if I did die and save the money for him, and then there wouldn't be any more trouble, anyway. But I couldn't make up my mind to do it. I did go without taking medicines they laid out for me for three days; but I had to live--I just _had_ to. Sometimes I think I ought to have given up, and not tried to get well. What do you think?"

Bronson shook his head, and cleared his throat as if he were going to speak, but said nothing. Gallegher was looking up at the girl with large, open eyes. Bronson wondered if any woman would ever love him as much as that, or if he would ever love any woman so. It made him feel lonesome, and he shook his head. "Well?" he said, impatiently.

"Well, that's all; that's how it is," she said. "She's been living on there at Tacony with her mother. She kept seeing as many men as before, and kept getting pitied all the time; everybody was so sorry for her. When he was took so bad that time a year ago with his lungs, they said in Tacony that if he died she'd marry Charley Oakes, the conductor. He's always going to see her. Them that knew her knew me, and I got word about how Henry was getting on. I couldn't see him, because she told lies about me to the warden, and they wouldn't let me. But I got word about him. He's been fearful sick just lately. He caught a cold walking in the yard, and it got down to his lungs.

That's why they are letting him out. They say he's changed so. I wonder if I'm changed much?" she said. "I've fallen off since I was ill." She pa.s.sed her hands slowly over her face, with a touch of vanity that hurt Bronson somehow, and he wished he might tell her how pretty she still was. "Do you think he'll know me?" she asked. "Do you think she'll let me speak to him?"

"I don't know. How can I tell?" said the reporter, sharply. He was strangely nervous and upset. He could see no way out of it. The girl seemed to be telling the truth, and yet the man's wife was with him and by his side, as she should be, and this woman had no place on the scene, and could mean nothing but trouble to herself and to every one else. "Come," he said, abruptly, "we had better be getting up there.

It's only five minutes of twelve."

The girl turned with a quick start, and walked on ahead of them up the drive leading between the snow-covered gra.s.s-plots that stretched from the pavement to the wall of the prison. She moved unsteadily and slowly, and Bronson saw that she was shivering, either from excitement or the cold.

"I guess," said Gallegher, in an awed whisper, "that there's going to be a sc.r.a.p."

"Shut up," said Bronson.

They stopped a few yards before the great green double gate, with a smaller door cut in one of its halves, and with the light from a big lantern shining down on them. They could not see the clock-face from where they stood, and when Bronson took out his watch and looked at it, the girl turned her face to his appealingly, but did not speak.

"It will be only a little while now," he said, gently. He thought he had never seen so much trouble and fear and anxiety in so young a face, and he moved towards her and said, in a whisper, as though those inside could hear him, "Control yourself if you can," and then added, doubtfully, and still in a whisper, "You can take my arm if you need it." The girl shook her head dumbly, but took a step nearer him, as if for protection, and turned her eyes fearfully towards the gate. The minutes pa.s.sed on slowly but with intense significance, and they stood so still that they could hear the wind playing through the wires of the electric light back of them, and the clicking of the icicles as they dropped from the edge of the prison wall to the stones at their feet.