George Kibbe Turner

“ Death never lies so very far from the path of the good thief, even in his hours of pleasure—as the walls of old Jasper Hall could abundantly testify if they could but speak. A dispute over a dance between members of the Hectic Club, a few barks of the cannon outside the entrance, a scurry of feet, a dead man on the sidewalk, and inside—dancing still, perhaps—his widow.
They dance, the women of the thieves, perhaps more for excitement, to forget—more as an act of bravado, even, than the good thieves themselves. ”

“ For now, with the end of the war, all these men—all these ex-magazine writers, and lady writers and ex-newspapermen— will go back to their homes, scattered through every hamlet, every city, every county in the country—sore, irritated, out of a job, hating me as no man was ever hated before; and scattering, like the last bomb in a Fourth of July fireworks, through every congressional district of this broad land, this false, damnable, unprintable, but for that very reason irrefutable fabrication of the speculations of my secretary's aunt in the bean market. ”

“ Women were not the primary interest of John Schmaar; yet this does not mean he was insensible to their charms, nor that he was immune to the intimate appeal of a pretty woman—flushed, crying, helpless, alone. He felt the soft warmth of her arm under his palm. When she shook her head, the fragrance of her hair—the faint, costly fragrance of some individual perfume—came to his nostrils. The girl was a charmer—all that could be desired. The last of modern delicacies—rare, costly, exquisite—that money makes for men's delight! ”

“ The whole thing, of course, was being turned into a game. It was a great joke.
“But look!” said the Bannerman girl, talking loud. “This will have to be done right, wont it? So there's no hole in it?”
Schmaar nodded, looking at them with a little smile—wondering how Aileen would turn this corner.
“Well, now—how can it be—how can it be a bet,” asked Billie Bannerman, “if nobody knows what it is? Somebody's got to know what it is. Somebody's got to decide, or it's no bet at all!”
“Ask her—it's her funeral!” said John Schmaar. ”

“ So I want to say right here, Mister Mayor, that the police for one would be glad if your honor could find some way to put a crimp in the big thugs and dips and second-story workers that are all the time gypping the city of both its spare change and its reputation. Not meaning to mix in or push my beak into your business, Mister Mayor, but why wouldn't it do for you to name a kind of citizens' guard up against this kind of thing? The women, like you say, are always strong for the reputation of the home and the home town. ”

“ That even, he said at last, the ship might not reach New York on time. That we might be losing all this money—my father dead—except for him, what he would or would not do. And I myself become a murderess,” she said, breaking down again, “of my father!”
“Don't! Don't, Miss Sophie!” I said to her. “He's bluffing you! He wouldn't dare!”
“I have so much fear—so much fear of him always!” she cried, shuddering. “From the first! He could do anything! This alone is not all—the worst! Always, when we are alone, I fear him. He is so—so insulting! ”

“ John Schmaar, listening to him, felt the sense of apprehension of the unreal the unseen, the incredible sweep over him again like a rush of blood to the head of a man in anger. Here they were whispering, in this little thicket in the moonshine, stalking a woman—a soft indoor creature of laces and tulles and satins—through the night, with desperate chances of death for more than one hanging upon the outcome!
“We can't go out there,” the Westerner was saying, “—into the open. She'd see us. There's only one thing—I can think of.” ”

“ The Morning Truth, on the other hand turned an entirely new light upon the apprehension which was now holding the people of Chibosh enthralled. The top of its front page was ornamented with a portrait which many thousands recognized at first glance; the portrait of a man of tremendous force, with a neck and jaw still heavier than old Mike Boogan's, and a steady, relentless gaze—the quite-often-published likeness of Francis X. Doheney, the great detective. ”

“ John Schmaar still watched her—took inventory, as he did with everyone, man or woman, with whom he had dealings. A fragile, exquisite thing, light as a hothouse flower in the hand of a buyer—and just about as costly for its weight. A thing made for money, as truly as an orchid.
She certainly was exquisite. No wonder that big Westerner—that Babe Gladden, as they called him—was so crazy over her. ”

“ THE dance of the Hectic Club was warming up well—both the bodies and the souls of its patrons as they looked down upon it—the slowly turning shoulders of the women, spotted with the green and yellow confetti, their very smooth or very ornate hair, their overbright complexions, their smiles and supple movements as they clung to the black coats of the heavier-moving men. Light, joyous young creatures, full of the exhilaration of the time—that time of color and warm odors and the glad insanity and forgetfulness of the jazz. ”

“ The huge national publicity drive, which was to end the Great War, was on—the drive for the conservation of the bean. On every wall, in every newspaper, upon every tongue was the slogan: Beans for Our Boys. Six million school children were working every evening on their national prize essays on The Message of the Bean. Beautiful artists' models of every type were seen on every billboard, bending tenderly over flowering beans. Upon every woman's page in the press appeared the model menus for beanless days. ”

“ Such was the People's Political Forum, the so-called Phantom Factory of Mayor True, which, having put him over at the last election, now ruled through him the great city of Chibosh—an advanced example of that immense new power, that new invisible government of the world, which all have felt since the last great war, as it leads onward cities, nations, continents, mankind to the new democracy for God and the good by the use of the printed word. ”

“ Having read this letter, standing beside him in the glass hothouse of the prize-winning babies of Chibosh, the wife of the chief executive of that great teeming city a sturdy, heavy-faced figure—was pounding her husband; pounding him upon his head, his face, his unprotected Roman nose, as he leaned forward, amazed, undefended, trying to protect the innocent, yelling, defenseless Roman-nosed infant in his arms from her ill-controlled blows. And meanwhile she was calling—as they understood her—something about the motto and subject of the evening, Justice for All Women. ”

“ Excited cries came from the crowd outside the woods.
"Hi, yi, yi, yi!" yelled the dare-devil; "missed me, missed me."
With a yell of beastly anger the murderer pushed out to follow him, the ground of the swamp growing more and more uncertain under his feet. At last, lunging forward at a little clump of grass, he missed his calculations and splashed down on all fours into the soft treachery of the deepest part of the marsh. His terrible gun, falling with him, was choked solid with mud—become in an instant a ridiculous and bedraggled thing. ”

“ But as a student of the milk supply of the great city of Chibosh I am also aware that there is a shortage in the milk supply in this city needed to nourish properly its children—a shortage, sir, artificially produced in a great majority of cases by the milk trust, for which this milk-bathing attorney, this man Peters, has been the paid employe. And as a man with red blood in my veins it makes me boil to think that in these days such perversion of food supplies can go on, when all about us we physicians note child malnutrition. ”

“ There was some one calling to him sharply—the voice of that Westerner Gladden, the poor fool.
“Look out! Look out! She'll beat you!”
IT was a close thing; Schmaar could see that—especially with this burden he was bearing—with this moonlight pressing down upon his lungs, his head. He could feel it quite clearly, on his head. It made him very dizzy, most unsteady, at the edge of this thing—this deep brown hole in the earth which lay beside him—quiet, out of the raging wind, full of moonshine, like a quiet lighted pit. ”

“ Therefore, Resolved that together with all the true womanhood of the United States, we hasten to stand beside our brave courageous sister, her fellow and sister members of Union 250 and the Octo Automobile Company, without reserve and without restraint, for the grand principle of equal pay for equal work among the sexes; And Resolved, also, that we register our opinion that in this generous rivalry in equality between man and woman, the woman will not be found wanting. ”

“ John Schmaar perceived the queer coincidence—he remembered again in a flash that earlier time when he was a boy.
A groan went up around the table.
“Too high! Too high!” screamed Billie Bannerman.
“This is excruciating,” exclaimed the Hunter girl. “Excruciating!”
John Schmaar's hand went out to the spread cards, and cut—his ten-spot!
A groan went up.
“The gent wins!” the Bannerman girl exclaimed, letting her shoulders and arms sink in mock despair. And the rest groaned with her. But Schmaar kept his eyes on Aileen Dulcifer, watching her, seeing if she would even now wake up. ”

“ VI IT WAS Saturday upon the front pages of Chibosh. There was a novelty in murder in the great city. A woman, not having secured her divorce, had succeeded, it was alleged, in obtaining her freedom by pounding glass in her husband's ear while he slept. The great gripping issue of the million-dollar dog was fading, and by tomorrow would be gone from the eyes and hearts and memories of the citizen voters of the great city. But not before having achieved its higher purpose—the triumph of the plain honest people and their representative, Mayor True. ”

“ Eloise Hunter, the lean one with the big eyes, who played up to the men so hard, was there that afternoon, as was a new man, a Captain Armitage, one of the stiff, silent kind who sit still and let the women talk to them—which this Hunter girl was always glad to do. Having quite a trick at that sort of thing, she was telling over again for his benefit the story of the Lovers' Leap, and the self-sacrificing Indian maid.
“Right here,” she said, rolling up her big eyes at him. “She stood right here where we are now. A hundred years ago—in the moonlight! I can imagine perfectly! ”

“ A sense of resentment, of injustice, came over his fine sensitive face. What right had John Bunyan Jones—what right had Ben Bumpus Boone—always so ostentatiously their friends—to withhold their private information from the Government's publicity agents from the accredited agents of a country at war; and give it to this distant woman—this aunt of John Bunyan Jones, in the Sandwich Islands? This wealthy woman, whom no one ever knew; whom no one would ever see. Who now lay dead—so suddenly dead, in Honolulu! ”

“ He had more and more the sense of laboring unreality which comes to any man whose powers are strained beyond their rightful use. And in addition, too, there was always, constantly growing now, that dizziness.
The path he was on was not of course upon the very edge, but near enough for John Schmaar to see perfectly the great fall beneath him—the still trees below, protected from the wind, the still moonlight on the brown stones: and out beyond, upon the river, where the wind struck again beyond the protection of the cliff, he could see a tiny turbulence in the water, in the wake of the moon. ”

“ She, the quiet, strong, sturdy, domestic wife, in modest-colored but substantial clothes, and an almost homemade hat. He, strong, honest, serious, sincere. His silk hat placed beside him upon the nearest resting place, a scale for weighing babies, his frock coat open, he held the last and chief prize winner of the day—the most comical baby in Chibosh—in his right arm, with a practiced and confident ease, while in his left hand he held the short typewritten speech, which spoke feelingly, though in simple terms, of the simple joys of home, of babies—of one home but many babies. ”

“ The police discipline was perfect. The great hall, blazing with flags, held an expectant and resolute body of citizens of Italian and American birth, who, though not unnaturally nervous, showed themselves unaffected by any threats which would keep them from doing honor to a great national enthusiasm. It was without doubt the greatest single demonstration in ail the history of the international ward politics of this great American metropolis. ”

“ Still the hunted man stood there, grim, speechless, desperate, peering out between the trees. Before him sat the huddled figure of the boy; behind him the practically impassable branch of the swamp. The semi-circle of men stood irresolutely at the edge of the woods.
At last there was a little shout of recognition from the younger fellows in the gathering. "Here's Birnie White."
The town dare-devil, a young, athletic fellow, with a handsome, rather dissipated face, had arrived. He felt at once that something was expected of him, and listened in silence to the features of the situation. ”

“ She stood there for a moment, staring.
“The great sacrifice, huh?” said Schmaar to himself, watching her. “How do you like it, now you've got it?”
He watched to see the change come into her face with realization.
“Funny—isn't it?” he said to himself, watching her from under his thick eyelids, with her lips open and her eyes staring—going through the thing in her fuddled mind. “Laugh—why don't you!” he said to himself, remembering how things had changed, how ten minutes ago they had all been laughing at him!
“Well,” she said, with a hard, obstinate look at Schmaar, “that's settled!” ”

“ There was one widow dancing that night, Flick Kramer, the woman of Black Tony Vachris—a white-faced girl, with a wide, thin line of reddened lips, who danced with all the more abandon and bravado among the heavy men and their slender thin-faced girls from her knowledge of the danger that was on—until at last, toward dawn, “the wireless” from police head quarters brought in the news of what had happened in the Jersey meadows. ”

“ John Schmaar asked her, taking out his check-book. “You can pay me when you're married to him,” he assured her, laughing,
She couldn't do that—she couldn't sell herself. She couldn't marry him—even if there were any possibility of truth in what he said—which there wasn't.
“You wont have to sell yourself, maybe,” he said, looking up—and perceiving her eyes fastened hungrily on the check-book.
Why—what did he mean, she wanted to know again. But her eyes were less frightened now, A dimple was back playing in the smooth cheek.
“He's rich,” he told her. ”

“ In a paroxysm of anger she dashed the Morning Truth, the great paper of all the people of Chibosh, in tattered fragments to the floor. “So this is politics!” she cried. “What you have to go through in politics!”
The two others bowed their heads in silent confirmation.
“Well, what's next? What's in yours?” the questioner asked aggressively of the second reader, the young woman with the curly, closely cut black hair and the eager, critical, uncompromising eyes of youth, who was holding a smaller journal in her hand, the widely circulated Peoples Pictures. ”

“ But beyond and around all this rises the wide, bare face of the country, which they will never know—the great patches of second-growth woods, the mountain pastures sown thick with stones, the barren acres of the hillside farmer—a desolate land, latticed with gray New England roads, dotted with commonplace or neglected houses, and pitted with the staring cellars of the abandoned homes of disheartened and defeated men. ”