"Sure," said Wales, "with pleasure."
There was relief in Mason's eyes and in his manner, as there was relief in Marriott's mind.
"That makes it all right, Joe," he said, and Mason smiled gratefully.
Marriott left the jail happy. His faith was restored. The universe resumed its order and its reason. After all, he said to himself, justice will triumph. He felt now that he could await the preliminary hearing with calmness. Wales's identification of Mason made it certain that he could establish an alibi for him; he must depend on Gibbs for the others, but somehow he did not care so much for them; they had not appealed to him as Mason had, whether because of his conviction that they were guilty or not, he could not say. The hearing was set for Thursday at two o'clock, but Marriott looked forward to it with the assurance that as to Mason, at least, there was no doubt of the outcome.
VII
Although Fallen had told the police they could set Archie free, the police did not set him free.
"It's that fellow Kouka," Archie explained to Marriott. "He's got it in for me; he wants to see me get the gaff."
That afternoon Archie was legally charged with being a "suspicious person." The penalty for being thus suspected by the police was a fine of fifty dollars and imprisonment in the workhouse for sixty days.
Marriott was angry; the business was growing complicated. He began to fear that he would never get away on his vacation; he was filled with hatred for Fallen, for Kouka, because just now they personified a system against which he felt himself powerless; finally, he was angry with Archie, with Dillon, even with Mason, for their stupidity in getting into such desperate scrapes.
"They're fools--that's what they are," he said to himself; "they're crazy men." But at this thought he softened. When he recalled Mason in his cell at the jail, and Archie in the old prison at the Central Station, his anger gave way to pity. He resolved to give up his vacation, if necessary, and fight for their release. He determined to demand a jury to try Archie on this charge of suspicion; he knew how Bostwick and all the attaches of the police court disliked to have a jury demanded, because it made them trouble. As he walked up the street he began to arrange the speech he would make in Archie's defense; presently, he noticed that persons turned and looked at him; he knew he had been talking to himself, and he felt silly; these people would think him crazy. This dampened his ardor, crushed his imagination and ruined his speech. He began to think of Mason again; he would have to let Archie's case go until after Mason had had a hearing; he must do one thing at a time.
Archie had been able to endure the confinement as long as Mason and Dillon and Mandell and Squeak were there; the five men had formed a class by themselves; they had a certain superiority in the eyes of the other prisoners, who were confined for drunkenness, for disturbance, for fighting, for petty thefts and other insignificant offenses. But when his companions were taken away, when his own hope of liberty failed, he grew morose. The city prison was an incredibly filthy place. The walls dripped always with dampness. High up, a single gas-jet burned economically in its mantle, giving the place the only light it ever knew. A bench ran along the wall below it, and on this bench the prisoners sat all day and talked, or stretched themselves and slept; now and then, for exercise, they tried chinning themselves from the little iron gallery that ran around the cells of the upper tier. Twice a day they were fed on bologna and coffee and bread. At night they were locked in cells, the lights were put out, and the place became a hideous bedlam. Men snored from gross dissipations, vermin crawled, rats raced about, and the drunken men, whose bodies from time to time were thrown into the place, went mad with terror when they awoke from their stupors, and cursed and blasphemed. The crawling vermin and the scuttling rats, the noises that suggested monsters, made their delirium real. The atmosphere of the prison was foul, compounded of the fumes of alcohol exhaled by all those gaping mouths, of the feculence of all those filthy bodies, of the foul odors of the slop-pails, of the germs of all the diseases that had been brought to the place in forty years. Archie could not sleep; no one could sleep except those who were overcome by liquor, and they had awful nightmares.
His few moments of relief came when the turnkey, a man who had been embruted by long years of locking other men in the prison, opened the door, called him with a curse and turned him over to Kouka. Then the respite ended. He was subjected to new terrors, to fresh horrors, surpassing those physical terrors of the night by infinity. For Kouka and Quinn took him into a little room off the detectives' office, closed and locked the door, and then for two hours questioned him about the robbery of the post-office at Romeo, about countless other robberies in the city and out of it; they accused him of a hundred crimes, pressed him to tell where he had stolen the revolver. They bent their wills against his, they shook their fingers under his nose, their fists in his face; they told him they knew where he had got the revolver; they told him that his companions had confessed. He was borne down and beaten; he felt himself grow weak and faint; at times a nausea overcame him--he was wringing with perspiration.
The first day of this ordeal he sat in utter silence, sustained by dogged Teutonic stubbornness. That afternoon they renewed the torture; still he did not reply.
The morning of the second day, though weakened in body and mind, he still maintained his stubbornness; that afternoon they had brought McFee with a fresh will to bear on him. By evening he told them he had stolen the revolver in Chicago. He did this in the hope of peace. It did gain him a respite, but not for long. The next morning they told him he had lied and he admitted it; then he gave them a dozen explanations of his possession of the revolver, all different and all false. Then, toward evening, Kouka suddenly fell upon him, knocked him from his chair with a blow, and then, as he lay on the floor, beat him with his enormous hairy fists. Quinn, the only other person in the room, stood by and looked on. Finally, Quinn grew alarmed and said:
"Cheese it, Ike! Cheese it!"
Kouka stopped and got up.
Archie was weeping, his whole body trembling, his nerves gone. That night he lay moaning in his hammock, and the man in the cell under him and the man in the cell next him, cursed him. In the morning they took him again up to the detective's office; this was the morning of the third day. Archie was in a daze, his mind was no longer clear, and he wondered vaguely, but with scarcely any interest, why it was that Kouka looked so smiling and pleasant.
"Set down, Arch, old boy," Kouka said, "and let me tell you all about it."
And then Kouka told him just where he had stolen the revolver, and when, and how--told him, indeed, more about the hardware store and the owners of it than Archie had ever known. And yet Archie did not seem surprised at this. He felt numbly that it was no longer worth while to deny it--he wondered why he ever had denied it in the first place. It did not matter; nothing mattered; there was no difference between things--they were all the same. But presently his mind became suddenly clear; he was conscious that there was one unanswered question in the world.
"Say, Kouka," he said, "how did you tumble?"
Kouka laughed. He was in fine humor that morning.
"Oh, it's no use, my boy," he said; "it's no use; you can't fool your Uncle Isaac. You'd better 'ave taken his advice long ago--and been a good boy."
"That's all right," said Archie, a strange calm having come to him because of the change in the world, "but who put you wise?"
Kouka looked at Quinn and smiled, and then he said to Archie:
"Oh, what you don't know won't hurt you."
Then he had Archie taken back to the prison, but before they locked him up Kouka gave him a box of cigarettes he had taken from a prostitute whom he had arrested the night before, and he left Archie leaning against the door of the prison smoking one of the cigarettes.
"What have they been doing to you?" asked a prisoner.
"The third degree," said Archie laconically.
The knowledge which Kouka preferred to shroud in mystery had been obtained in a simple way. Glancing over the records in the detective's office, he had by chance come across an old report of the robbery of a hardware store. Kouka had taken the revolver found on Archie to the merchant, and the merchant had identified it. That evening Marriott read in the newspapers conspicuous accounts of the brilliant work of Detective Kouka in solving the mystery that had surrounded a desperate burglary. The articles gave Kouka the greatest praise.
VIII
The United States court-room had been closed ever since court adjourned in May, but when it was thrown open for the hearing of the case against Dillon and Mason and the rest, it was immediately imbued with the atmosphere of federal authority. This atmosphere, cold, austere and formal, smote Marriott like a blast the moment he pushed through the green baize doors.
The great court-room was furnished in black walnut; the dark walls immediately absorbed the light that came through the tall windows. On the wall behind the bench was an oil portrait of a former judge; Marriott could see it now in the slanting light--the grave and solemn face, smooth-shaven, with the fine white hair above it, expressing somehow the older ideals of the republic. On the wall, laureled Roman fasces were painted in gilt. The whole room was somber and gloomy, suggesting the power of a mighty government poised menacingly above its people; there were hints of authority and old precedents in that atmosphere.
The reason the room held this atmosphere was that the judge who ordinarily sat on the bench had been appointed to his position for life, and there were no real checks on his power. For twenty years before he had been appointed this man had been the attorney for great corporations, had amassed a fortune in their promotion and defense, and, as a result, his sympathies and prejudices were with the rich and powerful. He knew nothing of the common currents and impulses of humanity, having never been brought in contact with the people; the almost unlimited power he wielded, and was to wield until he died, made him, quite naturally, autocratic, and he had impressed his character on the room and on all who held official positions there. The clerks, commissioners and assistant prosecutors whom he appointed imitated him and acquired his habits of thought, for they received his opinions just as they received his orders.
Marriott sat at the table and waited, and while he waited looked about.
He looked at Wilkison, the commissioner; the judge had appointed him to his place; the amount of fees he received depended entirely on the number of cases the district attorney and his assistants brought before him; consequently, there being two commissioners, he wished to have the good will of the district attorney, and always reached decisions that would please him.
Dalrymple, the assistant district attorney, was a good-looking young man with a smooth-shaven, regular face that might have been pleasant, but, because of his new importance, it now wore a stern and forbidding aspect. He was dressed in new spring clothes; the trousers were rolled up at the bottoms, showing the low tan shoes which just then had come again into vogue. He wore a pink flannel shirt of exquisite texture; on this flannel shirt was a white linen collar. This combination produced an effect which was thought to give him the final touch of aristocracy and refinement. When he was not talking to Wilkison or to Fallen, he was striding about the court-room with his hands in his trousers pockets. Once he stopped, drew a silver case from his pocket and lighted a cigarette made with his monogram on the paper.
Marriott turned from Dalrymple with disgust; he looked beyond the railing, and there, on the walnut benches, sat Gibbs, with a retinue that made Marriott smile. They must have come in when Marriott was preoccupied, for he was surprised to see them. Gibbs sat on the end of one bench, as uncomfortable and ill at ease as he would have been in a pew at church. He was shaved to a pinkness, his hair was combed smooth, and he was very solemn. Marriott could easily see that the atmosphere of the court-room oppressed and cowed him; he had lost his native bearing, and had suddenly grown meek, humble and afraid. Marriott knew none of the others; there were half a dozen men, none of them dressed as well as Gibbs, with strange visages, marked by crime and suffering, all the more touching because they were so evidently unconscious of these effects. The heads ranged along the bench were of strange shapes, startlingly individual in one sense, very much alike in another. They were all solemn, afraid to speak, bearing themselves self-consciously, like children suddenly set out before the public. On one bench sat a young girl, and something unmistakable in her eyes, in her mouth, in the clothes she wore--she had piled on herself all the finery she had--told what she was. Her toilet, on which she had spent such enormous pains, produced the very effect the womanhood left in her had striven to avoid.
Marriott smiled, until he detected the deep concern which Gibbs was trying to hide; then his heart was touched, as the toilet of the girl had touched it. Marriott knew that these people were the witnesses by whom Gibbs expected to establish an alibi for Dillon and Squeak and Mandell; the sight of them did not reassure him; he had again that disheartening conviction of the utter lack of weight their appearance would carry with any court; he did not credit them himself, and he began to feel a shame for offering such witnesses. He was half decided, indeed, not to put them forward. But his greater concern came with the thought of Mason, whom he believed to be innocent; where, he suddenly wondered, was the reporter Wales?
But just at this moment the green baize doors of the court-room swung inward and suddenly all the people in the court-room--Dalrymple, Fallen, Wilkison, Marriott, Gibbs, the clerks and the reporters, the bailiff and the group Gibbs had brought up with him from the under world--forgot the distinctions and prejudices and hatreds that separated them, yielded to the claims of their common humanity and became as one in the eager curiosity which concentrated all their interest on the entering prisoners.
They came in a row, chained together by handcuffs, in charge of deputy marshals. They were marched within the bar, still wearing the hats they could not remove. The United States marshal himself and another deputy came forward and joined the deputies in charge of the prisoners. The officers took off their hats for them, and when they took chairs at the table, stood close beside them, as if to give the impression that the prisoners were most dangerous and desperate characters, and that they themselves were officials with the highest regard for their duty.
Wilkison, with great deliberation, was seating himself at the clerk's desk. Ordinarily he held hearings in an anteroom, but as this hearing would be reported in the newspapers he felt justified in using the court-room; besides, he could then test some of the sensations of a judge.
"Aren't you going to unhandcuff these men?" said Marriott to the marshal.
The marshal merely smiled in a superior official way, and the smile completed the rage that had seized on Marriott when the deputies stationed themselves behind the prisoners. Marriott felt in himself all the evil and all the hatred that were in the hearts of these officers; he felt all the hatred that was gathering about these prisoners; it seemed that every one there wished to revenge himself personally on them. Fallen, sitting beside Dalrymple, had an air of directing the whole proceeding, as if his duties did not end with the apprehension of his prisoners, but required him to see that the assistant district attorney, the commissioner and the rest did their whole duty. He sat there with the two rosy spots on his plump cheeks glowing a deeper red, his blue eyes gloating. Marriott restrained himself by an effort; he needed all his faculties now.
"The case of the United States _versus_ Dillon and others." Wilkison was officially fingering the papers on his desk. "Are the defendants ready for hearing?"
"We're ready, yes," said Marriott, plainly excluding from his words and manner any of the respect for the court ordinarily simulated by lawyers.
Mason, sitting beside him, and Dillon and the rest followed with eager glances every movement, listened to every word. They forgot the handcuffs, and fastened their eyes on Fallen standing up to be sworn.
When the oath had been administered, Dalrymple put the stereotyped preliminary questions and then asked him who the defendants were. Fallen pointed to them one after another and pronounced their names as he did so. When he had done this Dalrymple turned, looked at Marriott with his chin in the air, and said pertly:
"Take the witness."
Marriott was surprised and puzzled; the suspicions that he had all along held were increased.