Local Color Part 6

"Well, what is her story?" asked the magistrate.

"Judge, to tell you the truth it ain't her story so much as it's somethin' I seen. And if I'm makin' a sucker of myself I'd rather not say too much about that yet."

"Oh, go ahead," a.s.sented the magistrate, whose name was Voris. "There's no danger of the case being called while you're gone, because, as I understand you, there isn't any case to call. Go ahead, but remember this while you're gone--I don't like all this mystery. I'm going to want to know all the facts before I'm done."

"Thank you, sir," said Schwartzmann, getting himself outside the railed inclosure. "I'll be back in less'n no time, Your Honour."

He wasn't, though. Nearly an hour pa.s.sed before an attendant brought Magistrate Voris word that Officer Schwartzmann craved the privilege of seeing His Honour alone for a minute or two in His Honour's private chamber. The magistrate left the bench, suspending the business of the night temporarily, and went; on the way he was mentally fortifying himself to be severe enough if he caught a plain-clothes man trying to trifle with him.

"Well, Schwartzmann?" he said shortly as he entered the room.

"Judge," said the detective, "the woman wasn't lyin'. She told me her sister was sick alone in their flat without n.o.body to look after her and that her brother was dead. I don't know about the brother--at least I ain't sure about him--but the sister was sick. Only she ain't sick no more--she's dead."

"Dead? What did she die of?"

"She didn't die of nothin'--she killed herself with gas. She turned the gas on in the room where she was sick in bed. The body was still warm when I got there. I gave her first aid, but she was gone all right. She wasn't nothin' more than a sh.e.l.l anyhow--had some wastin' disease from the looks of her; and I judge it didn't take but a few whiffs to finish her off. I called in the officer on post, name of Riordan, and I notified the coroner's office myself over the telephone, and they're goin' to send a man up there inside of an hour or so to take charge of the case.

"And so, after that, feelin' a sort of personal interest in the whole thing, as you might say, I broke the rules some more. When I found this here girl dead she had two pieces of paper in her hand; she'd died holdin' to 'em. One of 'em was a letter that she'd wrote herself, I guess, and the other must 'a' been a letter from somebody else--kind of an official-lookin' letter. Both of 'em was in French. I don't know exactly why I done it, unless it was I wanted to prove somethin' to myself, but I brought off them two letters with me and here they are, sir. I'm hopin' to get your court interpreter to translate 'em for me, and then I aim to rush 'em back over there before the coroner's physician gets in, and put 'em back on that bed where I found 'em."

"I read French--a little," said the young magistrate. "Suppose you let me have a look at them first."

Schwartzmann surrendered them and the magistrate read them through.

First he read the pitiably short, pitiably direct farewell lines the suicide had written to her half-sister before she turned on the gas, and then he read the briefly regretful letter of set terms of condolence, which a clerk in a consular office had in duty bound transcribed. Having read them through, this magistrate, who had read in the newspapers of Liege and Louvain, of Mons and Charlevois, of Ypres and Rheims, of the Masurien Lakes and Poland and Eastern Prussia and Western Flanders and Northern France; who had read also the casualty reports emanating at frequent intervals from half a dozen war offices, reading the one as matters of news and the other, until now, as lists of steadily mounting figures--he raised his head and in his heart he silently cursed war and all its fruits. And next day he went and joined a league for national preparedness.

"Schwartzmann," he said as he laid the papers on his desk, "I guess probably your prisoner was telling the whole truth. She did have a brother and he is dead. He was a French soldier and he died about a month or six weeks ago--on the Field of Honour, the letter says. And this note that the girl left, I'll tell you what it says. It says that she heard what the doctor said about her--there must have been a doctor in to see her some time this evening--and that she knows she can never get well, and that they are about out of money, and that she is afraid Marie--Marie is the sister who's in yonder now, I suppose--will do something desperate to get money, so rather than be a burden on her sister she is going to commit a mortal sin. So she asks G.o.d to forgive her and let her be with her brother Paul--he's the dead brother, no doubt--when she has paid for her sin. And that is all she says except good-bye."

He paused a moment, clearing his throat, and when he went on he spoke aloud, but it was to himself that he spoke rather than to the detective: "Field of Honour? Not one but two out of that family dead on the Field of Honour, by my way of thinking. Yes, and though it's a new name for it, I guess you might call Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue a Field of Honour, too, and not be so very far wrong for this once. What a h.e.l.lish thing it all is!"

"How's that, sir?" asked Schwartzmann. "I didn't quite get you." He had taken the two papers back in his own hands and was shuffling them absently.

"Nothing," said the magistrate. And then almost harshly: "Well, what do you want me to do about the woman in the pen yonder?"

"Well, sir," said the other slowly, "I was thinkin' that probably you wouldn't care to tell her what's just come off in the flat--at least not in court. And I know I don't want to have to tell her. I thought maybe if you could stretch the rules so's I could get her out of here without havin' to make a regular charge against her and without me havin' to arraign her in the regular way----"

"d.a.m.n the rules!" snapped Voris petulantly. "I'll fix them. You needn't worry about that part of it. Go on!"

"Well, sir, I was thinkin' maybe that after I found somebody to take these letters back where they belong, I could take her on home with me--I live right down here in Greenwich Village--and keep her there for the night, or anyhow till the coroner's physician is through with what he's got to do, and I'd ask my wife to break the news to her and tell her about it. A woman can do them things sometimes better'n a man can.

So that's my idea, sir."

"You're willing to take a woman into your home that you picked up for streetwalking?"

"I'll take the chance. You see, Your Honour, I seen somethin'

else--somethin' I ain't mentioned--somethin' I don't care to mention if you don't mind."

"Suit yourself," said the other. "I suppose you'll be looking up the newspaper men before you go. This will make what they call a great heart-interest story."

"I don't figure on tellin' the reporters neither," mumbled Schwartzmann, as though ashamed of his own forbearance.

The magistrate found the detective's right hand and started to shake it. Then he dropped it. You might have thought from the haste with which he dropped it that he also was ashamed.

"I'll see you don't get into any trouble with the inspector," he said.

Then he added: "You know of course that this brother was a French soldier?"

"Sure I know it--you told me so."

"You're German, aren't you?" asked Voris. "German descent, I mean?"

"I don't figure as that's got anythin' to do with the case," said the plain-clothes man, bristling.

"I don't either, Schwartzmann," said the magistrate. "Now you go ahead and get that woman out of this hole."

Schwartzmann went. She was where he had left her; she was huddled up, shrinking in, against the bars, and as he unlatched the iron door and swung it in and beckoned to her to come out from behind it, he saw, as she came, that her eyes looked at him with a dumb, questioning misery and that her left hand was still gripped in a hard knot against her breast. He knew what that hand held. It held a little, cheap, carved white crucifix.

I see by the papers that those popularly reputed to be anointed of G.o.d, who are princ.i.p.ally in charge of this war, are graciously pleased to ordain that the same shall go on for quite some time yet.

CHAPTER III

THE SMART ALECK

Cap'n Buck Fluter, holding his watch in the approved conductor's grip, glanced back and forth the short length of the four-five accommodation and raised his free hand in warning:

"All aboard!"

From almost above his head it came:

"If you can't get a board get a scantlin'!"

Cl.u.s.tered at the White or shady end of the station, the sovereign Caucasians of Sw.a.n.go rocked up against one another in the unbridled excess of their merriment. Farther away, at the Coloured or sunny end of the platform, the a.s.sembled representatives of the African population guffawed loudly, though respectfully. To almost any one having the gift of spontaneous repartee it might have occurred to suggest the advisability of getting a plank provided you could not get a board. It took Gash Tuttle to think up scantling.

The humourist folded his elbows on the ledge of the window and leaned his head and shoulders out of the car, considering his people whimsically, yet benignantly. He wore attire suitable for travelling--a dented-in grey felt hat, adhering perilously to the rearmost slope of his scalp; a mail-order suit of light tan, with slashed seams and rows of b.u.t.tons extending up the sleeves almost to the elbows; a hard-surfaced tie of pale blue satin; a lavender s.h.i.+rt, agreeably relieved by pink longitudinal stripings.

Except his eyes, which rather protruded, and his front teeth, which undoubtedly projected, all his features were in a state of active retreat--only, his nose retreated one way and his chin the other. The a.s.surance of a popular idol who knows no rival was in his pose and in his poise. Alexander the Great had that look--if we may credit the likenesses of him still extant--and Napoleon Bonaparte had it, and David Garrick, to quote a few conspicuous examples.

Alone, of all those within hearing, Cap'n Buck Fluter did not laugh.

Indeed, he did not even grin.

"All right, black boy," he said. "Let's go from here!"

The porter s.n.a.t.c.hed up the wooden box that rested on the earth, flung it on the car platform and projected his person nimbly after it. Cap'n Buck swung himself up the step with one hand on the rail. The engine spat out a mouthful of hot steam and the wheels began to turn.

"Good-by, my honeys, 'cause I'm gone!" called out Mr. Tuttle, and he waved a fawn-coloured arm in adieu to his courtiers, black and white.

"I'm a-goin' many and a-many a mile from you. Don't take in no bad money while your popper's away."