George Kibbe Turner

“ In spite of what Monahan had told him about these women being all alike, he knew this one was straight through and through every way. If she wasn't—if he couldn't trust her—then he never wanted to see another woman again.
They went all over the thing they were working together—sitting up rather close, talking low, so that the Vernon girl couldn't get on to what they were saying if she happened to think she'd like to listen in. And that girl—that Flame Carney—had more sense and quick wit about her than any woman Kane had ever run against. ”

“ It is always well toward midnight before the dance really starts to warm up beneath the paper streamers in the bare old ugly hall and the holiday temper begins to show itself in the vivacity of talk and cries and well-liberated emotions. ”

“ They dance, they say, the underworld—the good thieves and the bad and their women—partly to forget, largely because life becomes so dull and tasteless between the periodic excitements of their profession—making the dance an institution, like gambling, or the “hop” or “snow” for the older and more worn, an established institution of the underworld—a fact which brings the underworld and its woman into much closer and more ardent fellowship in the pleasures of life than the upper world and its wife perhaps ever attain. ”

“ The professional bondsmen they most favor or who most cultivate their profitable business. The more social and friendly of the police—but out for pleasure strictly and not duty—ununiformed, of course. The little gamblers and the big gamblers with their wives—too fat from restaurant-eating, lit up with diamonds like cut-glass chandeliers. All these and many more—of even higher standing in New York politics or legal machinery—join in with the good thieves and their merry women to make Easter Monday in old Jasper Hall the maddest, gladdest season of the year. ”

“ You ought to be in the bull-pen—not dancing round with civilized people. For fifty cents I'd smash you—big as you are!”
John Kane, feeling the warning clutch of Flame Carney on his arm, held himself back, realized through his sudden, pained confusion that something untoward was going on.
“Oh, look what's here!” cried the Greek in a sharp, jeering voice to a crowd of men that had some way gathered round him. And he came up, almost laying his pointing finger on the smeared scar upon Kane's right cheek. “What'd I tell you?” ”

“ There are others, also, who are not averse to loosening up with them in that great moral democracy of the annual dance of the good thieves. The pols are there—with and without their wives—smiling, laughing and shaking hands most heartily with a profane gladness contrasting sharply with their somber black suits. ”

“ THE dance of the Hectic Club on every Easter Monday evening is an occasion of great joy, attended by many and varied joy-makers, in addition to the good thieves. Next to the dance of the big gamblers, it is perhaps the gayest of all dances in the eternally gay underworld. ”

“ And The Carney, whose tribal and family traditions on marriage ran back, without his knowledge of the fact, some hundreds or thousands of years before the good thieves of New York or New York itself existed, saw to it that she stayed with him alone. And although she went in and out among the women of the good thieves, without reflection upon or questioning of their moral standing, she still kept for herself the inheritances in the matter of women's morals of the Red Carneys. ”

“ It's her scheme—not mine, you understand,” said Monahan, putting his position on record. “And you don't have to do it, understand, unless you want to.”
John Kane felt the hungry, resentful eyes of the girl always on him—saw the strain and tension of the waiting grow on her.
“Go ahead,” he answered. “Please.”
“I'll say this,” the chief went on, looking over now at the girl herself—taking his own time: “You're right. It's the only chance in the world you've got—always assuming you're telling the truth—and the only way to get a man from the department inside that bunch of yours in that time. ”

“ Slip Blaney sat looking down at them, considering.
“They'll be bringing out some new confetti and streamers the next dance or two,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“You go down and pass round the word to one or two of your bunch that that scar on his face is phony—and what he really is. They'll see it's a phony-looking scar. I can, from here.”
“All right,” said the Greek, listening.
“Then you go and get some girl you know—your own woman, if you say so—and get a handful of confetti or that other paper stuff—those little ribbons; and when you go by them dancing sometime, you bump them. ”

“ He had hardly stopped speaking when dim figures sprang up from the side of the raised road, two of them apparently lifting up motor-cycles.
“The dicks, you rat!” cried Joe the Greek, and, drawing his cannon, so-called, suddenly, while the attention of the man with whom he had been quarreling was leveled out before him, shot him through the head. Then the shooter was off the seat of the still moving truck—back through the detached hood, and had swung free with his still smoking automatic into the darkness beside the wheels. ”

“ THEY stood and then sat facing each other in the border of that tiny side-room—the untried young cop and this woman of the good thieves, the sister of this condemned murderer—natural enemies, thrown together in their strange enterprise by one of the crazy chances which govern the wild, abnormal daily life of the underworld.
“Now, listen,” said the girl promptly, “let's get in right to start with—so there'll be no mistakes.”
“That's right,” assented Kane, watching her, sizing her up—as all men do all women always. ”

“ The fugitive stopped, passed the warm weapon into the detective's hand, looked round, and, without a word from either, had plunged through the darkness down the raised bank into the edge of the great meadows—in which at night there would have been not one chance in ten of locating a man at all wise in his movements. ”

“ The girl didn't say anything—or show anything in her face. Just said, “Thank you, Joe,” and sat there studying him—doing her stunt at acting just the same as he did. And the thought came to John Kane watching them: How'd you like to live in a world like this, where everybody's watching each other day and night—to stop getting the double cross or the knife in the back any hour? He could see the Greek studying him out of the corners of his eyes. The man was going on now, telling the girl about the dance Monday night. ”

“ And then he went into that gaudy bedroom of the Greek and looked round to see where he would set up this little telephone—this instrument for listening in.
There was a woman's dresser on the wall next to their room, one of those fancy ones with a big, swinging oval mirror. And Kane, hurrying all the time for fear they might walk in on him, took out his little bit and got through the base-board, and ran a wire up in back of the dresser and put the little receiver in there, just below where the mirror would swing back. ”

“ He had a chance to practise on the Greek's woman how he'd act when the Greek finally showed up. There was one thing he made up his mind he'd work. Being a big thief, like that Scar Henry, feeling ugly after what he'd gone through, he didn't have to put himself out much for anybody else—or do much talking. If he wanted to shut up, he could play the grouch and get away with it. And when the Greek didn't come toward eleven o'clock, Kane told them he was going to call it a day, and went back and got his listening-machine all ready for him when he did show up. ”

“ She knew what she must do—telephone to the good thieves' lawyer, who would reach the good thieves' professional bondsmen—their politicians—pull the many strings of justice and politics and business which the good thief, in a jam in New York, has already arranged in advance to have pulled for him.
A YEAR is a long time in the life of a woman situated as Flame Carney was—even if relatively short in the course of a trial for murder. But now the end of Lent was here again, and the annual ball of the Hectic Club on Easter Monday but a week off ”

“ There's a good getaway in the back of this place here you wouldn't know about as I do, being longer in the business. He'd have got away from you, I'm afraid,” said Slip Blaney, his speech and his smile both growing easier.
“I'll tell you how I happened to get here, boys,” he said when no one spoke, and smiled again his ingratiating smile at Zimmer, who stood nearest to him, now with his gun slightly lowered, “so you can get how it is done. There was a bad man,” he said, looking down, indicating Joe the Greek with the toe of his shoe. ”

“ Working all the time with Blaney—to railroad The on through to the chair.”
“But Blaney—why should he be out to bump off The?”
“How do I know? What reason has he had for all the rest he's framed up that got in his way somewhere? A man's life means no more to that man than an alley cat's.”
“That's right,” said Flame Carney, remembering all the other things that went round the underworld about that murderer.
“They wanted him dead—both of them—I know that,” said Vida Vernon. “And they had big help—the silk people, who take Blaney's word naturally on anything—wouldn't they?” ”

“ John Kane barely nodded, watching him. “Do you see?” his superior asked him. “She gets you in as a good thief—somebody this Greek would know is right.”
“Yes.”
“On the other hand, she can't make you out as some local crook—somebody that gang would know. So what does she do? And quite a slick idea, too,” said Monahan. “She thinks up this Scar Henry, who was a side-partner of this brother of hers when he was out a year working through Colorado. Is that right?” he asked the girl.
“Yes,” she said, her lips barely moving.
“But who's known all over as a big thief. ”

“ He's not much—the shape he's got himself into now. Any decent guy could handle him—pound the story out of him.”
“Yes,” objected Flame Carney; “and have him deny it all when we brought him in to the governor or the district attorney.”
“I told you you wouldn't do it!” exclaimed Vida Vernon, resentful at being stooped at the edge of a possible solution.
“Do what?”
“Wouldn't go through with it, not to save your life—or The's. You're too good. You're real business,” she asserted in angry disappointment, “is picking the spots off of Spotless Town.” ”

“ Flame Carney might have broken down entirely if she had been a soft thing, a mere domestic woman, and not a Red Carney, and schooled carefully in the unwritten laws which govern the lives of the women of the good thieves. ”

“ There's only just one thing we can do now. Slip a man in there with me.”
“That's sure,” said Vida Vernon, still looking at her surprised—with that baby stare that light blondes have.
“All right,” said Flame Carney. “I'll have one there to-morrow night some way.”
THE first weeks of the man in brand-new police equipment are full of bewilderments and anxieties. So many things must be done—so many more avoided. There are so many forces, normal and abnormal, focusing upon him. But this experience of John Kane was certainly most difficult to understand—not to say stand still under. ”

“ AND then she went on and told her what she and Kane were going to do—what they knew would happen and a lot more they didn't know—getting her fixed to keep her mouth shut till after that ball.
“But if he gets you in there,” said the Vernon girl, drawing back again, “you know what he'll do. He'll croak you there in the hall or outside. Pull that old stunt of a dance-fight.”
“How—you fool?” asked Flame Carney. “Unless he's going to kill us all. Have some sense. See how he stands—if we all stick, even if he knows we are trimming him! We're safe—all of us. ”

“ Kane answered, shifting up a little, thinking she was slamming the police again, “if you wanted to.”
“You're a man—I'll say that for you!” said Flame Carney, her face flushing up. And then she turned onto other things—especially the fixing-up of that scar on his face.
It was getting a little dull, he thought, in addition to that dab the Vernon girl had wiped off the corner of it. It looked a little dim and ragged in spite of all the Carney girl could do. But what was there to do about it? Kane had to go ahead just the same, whether it was go or not. ”

“ Flame Carney, caught up into the bright excitement of the swell dance of the good thieves, lost herself half deliberately, like the rest—did not even notice when it was that her brother slipped away.
“A CARAVAN from Arabia” might seem to the uninitiated eye a big, tarpaulined, unpoetical motor-truck. Yet silk may be the loading of motor-trucks as it was long years ago of the camels ”

“ He'll have some news for you to-night. He's going to get what Blaney's dug up about you to-day,” she said to the supposed Scar Henry'. “He'll be full of that when he gets back—and of hootch, too, probably. And he'll talk his arm off to me—about everything. And, after that, to-morrow—if not to-night—you can jump in and confront him with what you heard him say, and you can beat it out of him and drag him over to the police or the district attorney's office. He's a rat at heart, and he's worse now—almost on the verge of tears.”
“Will you stick—when we get him up there?” Flame Carney asked her. ”

“ But I was in a hurry and I had to shoot quick—the way you do sometimes in this life when you're on duty.
“You saw that boys,” said Slip Blaney, going on, looking from one policeman to another, moistening his lips. “Or you did, anyhow,” he told Zimmer. “And it's damned lucky for me that I've got you here to testify for me. They're hard on a cop—these reformers especially. They raise hell if you make the least slip of your foot, as we all do sometimes. So we've all of us dicks got to stick together in a jam. ”

“ THE widows, so-called, of the good thieves are more inglorious figures than the widows of sailors and soldiers killed in action—but their emotions are not necessarily less poignant, even if, so to speak, less recognized by the strict letter of the law; and their creation by death by violence is not—counted relatively as to numbers—so much more infrequent. ”