Leroy Scott

“ Crouched with Mary beneath one of the windows, Clifford heard voices within: the even, well modulated tones of Morgan, the gruffly resonant bass of Bradley. Clifford's conscious senses were all strained to catch the faintest word; but at the same time, a part of him rejoiced over this marvelous opportunity. Most successful detective work is careful, thoughtful, patient, sometimes dull, routine--just routine, and nothing more. But now and again, through what seems sheer good luck, the key, the very heart, the entire substance, of a case is laid in the police official's hands. ”

“ I got my first job.
"Think of that, Aldrich!" He held a trembling fist in David's face, and laughed harshly. "I had to become a disguise, I had to lie, I had to commit forgery, to get a chance to be honest! Oh, isn't this a sweet world we're living in!
"And ever since, my life has been one great lie! A lie for honesty! But the lie has done for me what truth could not do. I'm respected in a small way. I'm successful in a small way. But, man, how that smallness chafes me! How I am shackled! I should be respected, be successful, in a large way. I'm cleverer than most of the men in my line. ”

“ Every day or two, at the pleasure of ocean mails, there comes a letter, bearing him fresh assurance of her love. But writ in fear of the censor’s eye, it gives no hint of what she does, no whisper of what may be her danger. Of that he can only guess. And after each such letter he strains to peer beyond time’s curtain. After each such letter a hope that will not die breathes daringly in the ear of his heart that to him may yet be granted the fulness of bliss—that Freedom may yet be won for Sonya’s people—that she may come to him! ”

“ But while she dreamed thus, shaping a magnificent destiny—an independent, self-engineered young woman, so very, very confident of the great future she was going to achieve through the supremacy of her own will and her own abilities—no slightest surmise came into her mind that Barney Palmer was making plans by which her will was to count as naught and by which he was to be the master of her fate, and that the furtive, yielding Old Jimmie was also dreaming a patient dream in which she was to be a mere chess-piece which was to capture a long-cherished game. ”

“ Grappling each other they went staggering about the great muted room. The table, with its champagne glasses, its silver-and-glass épergne of terraced fruit, went toppling over. The next moment a splendid if incongruous buhl cabinet was a wreck and its ostentatious exhibit of cut-glass was a thousand fragments upon the floor. And still the two men-beasts swayed about in their destructive fury.
A minute of this mad straining of muscle against muscle, and that part of Clifford’s rage which was unbridled madness disappeared—though the rage itself remained. His head began to clear. ”

“ Nelly’s pace had slowed into a walk, and even then the gale at times almost swept the poor horse staggering from the road. The rain drove down in ever denser sheets. The occasional flashes of lightning served only to emphasize the blackness. So dense was it, it seemed a solid. The world could not seem blacker to a toad in the heart of a stone. The instants of crackling fire showed Katherine the river, below her in the valley, leaping, surging, almost out of its banks—the trees, writhing and wrestling, here and there one jaggedly discrowned. ”

“ She read a little each day; she listened to Mary's concert in the drawing-room below her—for Mary dared to continue playing despite Matilda's absence, since it was known that Matilda's niece was in the house, though Mary never showed her face; she listened for snatches of the conversation of Jack and Mary and Mr. Pyecroft when they passed her door; at times she stood upon a chair at one of her windows and cautiously peered through the little panes in her shutters, like the lens of a camera, down into the sunny green of Washington Square. ”

“ William Hawkins always looked the part of a reticent man of affairs.
If there was one quality that particularly distinguished Clifford from other police officials, it was his humanness: his recognition that accidents of birth and of environment make the average criminal, and not a perverse native instinct; and his disposition to give the criminal a chance to become a man where possible. But as he gazed across the tables at the cold lean mask of a face of Hawkins, all that was relentless and indomitable in Clifford surged up and assumed control of him. ”

“ I don't want to win by bribing a traitor!"
"It's a case where it would be wrong not to bribe—if you want to use so harsh a word," said Baxter, his face tinged the least bit with red. "It is either to satisfy Mr. Foley or to lose a summer's work and have the men and their families suffer from the loss of a summer's wages. It's a choice between evils. I'll leave to the gentlemen here, which is the greater."
"Oh, give your conscience a snooze, Driscoll!" growled Murphy.
"I think Baxter's reasoning is good," said Bobbs. Isaacs corroborated him with a nod. ”

“ Since his talk with Helen David's hope of conquering the future had been constantly high. He did not underestimate the struggle before him, but strength and courage had been flowing into him since food and shelter had ceased to be worries, and he now felt that under Helen's inspiration he could do anything. One of his aims he had already achieved, Helen's respect, though how still seemed to him a miracle. His heart yearned even more eagerly than ever for something higher than friendship, but he knew this desire to be, as always, unattainable. ”

“ There had been many women in Peter Loveman’s life, but Nina Cordova, all of whose flaws he knew and at whom he was ever laughing, Nina was the only woman he had ever loved.
Thus, as the car spun noiselessly through the heavy night, the shrewd, tireless brain schemed on and on—as that brain would scheme on and on, brilliantly, fascinated by its schemes and their working out, until death should bring its blankness.... ”

“ The plan which had swiftly developed from Dick Sherwood's idea required that she should tell much that was the truth and much that was not truth, and required that she should play with every faculty and every attraction she possessed upon Barney's tremendous vanity and upon his jealous admiration of her. She had to make him believe more in her as a pal than ever before; she had to make him want her more as a woman than ever before. And at this moment she felt herself thrillingly equal to this vampire role her over-stimulated sense of justice had commanded her to undertake. ”

“ She stared at him, silent, shrinking, stricken with consternation.
“I see you cannot deny it!”
“It’s—false,” came from her dry lips.
“You lie!”
“It’s false! It’s false!”
“Of course you deny it. A woman would not hesitate at another lie, whose trade it is to make friends and sell them to their death. God, what shall I do to you? You woman Judas!”
It was less the fear of the fate she thought she saw in his rageful face than the frantic desire to escape this awful accusation from the man she loved, that prompted her to cry out desperately: “It’s false! You’ve been deceived! I’m innocent!” ”

“ Katherine clambered in, and the drooping animal doddered along a street thickly overhung with the exuberant May-green of maples.
She gazed with ardent eyes at the familiar frame cottages, in some of which had lived school and high-school friends, sitting comfortably back amid their little squares of close-cropped lawn. She liked New York with that adoptive liking one acquires for the place one chooses from among all others for the passing of one’s life; but her affection remained warm and steadfast with this old town of her girlhood.
“Oh, but it feels good to be back in Westville again!” ”

“ They went up a narrow stairway, then a broad one, stealthily following the guidance of the lantern's white finger, pausing breathless at every three or four steps to reach forth with their ears for any possible stir of life—Kate tense and alert with excitement, David giddied by a choking, throbbing, unshaped emotion. After a dozen of these pauses, when to David the rubadub of his heart seemed to resound through the house, Kate led him across deep rugs and through a broad doorway hung with tapestries. ”

“ THE RETURN OF MARY REGAN
Suddenly all conjectures concerning Bradley were swept utterly from his mind. Down the gilded red-carpeted stairway that led from what the Grand Alcazar termed its “ballroom de luxe,” there came—though this was not the figure Clifford first noted—a short, full-bodied, ornately dressed man, with a bald crown and a smile of engaging amiability. Beside him, and a half-head taller,—and this is what Clifford first saw,—walked a slender young woman, in an evening coat of rose velvet, her rounded throat gleaming a dusky marble from the soft shadows of the furred collar. ”

“ Life is a composite of contradictions—a puzzle to the wisest of us: the lily lifting its graceful purity aloft may have its roots in a dunghill. Samson's dead lion putrefying by a roadside is ever and again being found to be a storehouse of wild honey. We are too accustomed to the ordinary and the obvious to consider that beauty or worth may, after bitter travail, grow out of that which is ugly and unpromising.
Thus no one who looked on Maggie Carlisle and Larry Brainard at their beginnings, had even a guess what manner of persons were to develop from them or what their stories were to be. ”

“ CHAPTER VIII THE EDITOR OF THE EXPRESS Katherine stumbled down into the dusty, quivering heat of the Square. She was still awed and dumfounded by her discovery; she could not as yet realize its full significance and whither it would lead; but her mind was a ferment of thoughts that were unfinished and questions that did not await reply.
How had a man once so splendid come to sell his soul for money or ambition? What would Westville think and do, Westville who worshipped him, if it but knew the truth? ”

“ Lillian Drew sprang up, as livid as if the hand had indeed cracked upon her cheek, and glared at the flame of hatred and wrath that was Kate Morgan. Rage, abetted by liquor, had taken away every thought, every desire, save to strike this girl down. Her hands clenched; but blows make only a passing hurt. All her life she had used words; words, if you have the right sort, are a better weapon—their wound is deep, permanent. ”

“ And then they found Peter Loveman: he was alive, but unconscious. Not far from him Mr. Morton picked up a morocco wallet, which he slipped into his pocket, Clifford not seeing this. And then Clifford and Mary found Jack: he also was alive and also unconscious. Strangely enough, his clothes were but little disordered, and there was not a visible scratch upon him. Lying with his pallid face toward the sky, the hair falling back from his forehead, he looked handsome and boyish and irresistibly likable and endowed with qualities which go to make an unusual man. ”

“ Genius, maybe—perhaps great genius. And doubtless you will achieve all you say. But for a man with divine gifts, to devote those divine gifts to gigantic schemes for selfish gain, which means to the despoilment, to the misery, to the crushing down, of his fellows—I repeat, such a man is the most despicable man I ever met!”
The paleness of Drexel’s face began to redden with anger. ”

“ Old Jimmie said no more. And having asserted his supremacy over at least one of the two, Barney relented and condescended to talk, lounging back in his chair with that self-conscious grace which had helped make him a figure of increasing note in the gayer restaurants of New York.
It did not enter into Barney's calculations, present or for the future, to make Maggie the mistress of any man. Not that Barney was restrained by moral considerations. The thing was just bad business. Such a woman makes but comparatively little; and what is worse, if she chooses, she makes it all for herself. ”

“ David had neither the strength nor the spirit to reply to this man as he had replied to the owner of the department store in One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street. When he reached the open air he walked a few paces, then paused and leaned against the front of a building. He felt an utter exhaustion—there was not another effort in him. He was like a horse, driven to the last ounce of its strength, that lies down in its tracks to die; the whip can only make it quiver, cannot make it rise. ”

“ CHAPTER VI THE LADY LAWYER When old Hosie had withdrawn with his expectorative plunder, Katherine sat down at the desk and gazed thoughtfully out of her window, taking in the tarnished dome of the Court House that rose lustreless above the elm tops and the heavy-boned farmhorses that stood about the iron hitch-racks of the Square, stamping and switching their tails in dozing warfare against the flies. ”

“ Tom glared at Foley till the walking delegate had covered half the distance to the ladder, then he turned back to his supervision, trying to hide the fires of his wrath. But his soul flamed within him. All that Foley had just threatened, openly and by insinuation, was within his power of accomplishment. Tom knew that. And every other man in the union was as much at his mercy,—and every man's family. And many had suffered greatly, and all, except Foley's friends, had suffered some. ”

“ And what did it mean, her being in company with dapper little Peter Loveman?—man-about-town, and carrying behind that round, amiable smile the shrewdest legal brain of its variety in New York.
Clifford had in reality been standing in the gilded lobby for no more than a minute, though his mind had traversed so wide a space, when a gray-and-black town-car, with a long hood that suggested power ample for a racer, slowed down at the curb and a young man stepped out and hurried into the Grand Alcazar. Fifth Avenue tailors and hatters and haberdashers had equipped him with their best and costliest. ”

“ Courage, confidence, quickness of wit, all the qualities on which she had prided herself, were now entirely gone, and she was just a white, limp figure that wanted to run away: a weak figure in which swirled thoughts almost too spasmodically powerful for so weakened a vessel not to be shattered under their wild strain: thoughts of her amazingly discovered real father—of how she was the very contradiction of her father's dream—of Larry—of the cunning Jimmie Carlisle whom till this day she had believed her father—of Barney Palmer. ”