With an air of relief, Glassford turned, and wrote in his docket. On his broad, shining forehead drops of perspiration were glistening.
"The prisoner will be remanded," he said.
Archie faced about and held out his left wrist toward Danner. The handcuffs clicked, Marriott turned, glanced at Archie, but he could not bear to look in his white face. Then he heard Danner's feet and Archie's feet falling in unison as they passed out of the courtroom.
XXIII
Danny Gibbs, having recovered from the debauch into which Archie's fate had plunged him, sat in his back room reading the evening paper. His spree had lasted for a week, and the whole tenderloin had seethed with the excitement of his escapades. Now that it was all over and reason had returned, he had made new resolutions, and a certain moral rehabilitation was expressed in his solemn demeanor and in the utter neatness of his attire. He was clean-shaven, his skin glowed pink from Turkish baths, his gray hair was closely trimmed and soberly parted, his linen was scrupulously clean; he wore new clothes of gray, his shoes were polished and without a fleck of dust. His meditations that evening might have been profoundly pious, or they might have been dim, foggy recollections of the satisfaction he had felt in heaping scathing curses on the head of Quinn, whom he had met in Eva Clason's while on his rampage. He had cursed the detective as a representative of the entire race of policemen, whom he hated, and Quinn had apparently taken it in this impersonal sense, for he had stood quietly by without resenting Gibbs's profane denunciation. But whatever Gibbs's meditations, they were broken by the entrance of a woman.
She was dressed just as she had always been in the long years Gibbs had known her, soberly and in taste; she wore a dark tailor suit, the jacket of which disclosed at her full bosom a fresh white waist. She was gloved and carried a small hand-bag; the bow of black ribbon on her hat trembled with her agitation; she was not tall, but she was heavy, with the tendency to the corpulence of middle years. Her reddish hair was touched with gray here and there, and, as Gibbs looked at her, he could see in her flushed face traces of the beauty that had been the fatal fortune of the girlhood of Jane the Gun.
"Howdy, Dan," she said, holding out her gloved hand.
"Hello, Jane," he said. "When'd you come?"
"I got in last night," she said, laying her hand-bag on the table.
"Give me a little whisky, Dan." She tugged at her gloves, which came from her moist hands reluctantly. Gibbs was looking at her hands,--they were as white, as soft and as beautiful as they had ever been. One thing in the world, he reflected in the saddened philosophy that had come to him with sobriety, had held unchanged, anyway.
"I said a little whisky, Dan!" she spoke with some of her old imperiousness.
"No," he said resolutely, "you don't need any. There's nothing in it."
He was speaking out of his moral rehabilitation. She glanced at him angrily; he saw that her brown eyes, the brown eyes that went with her reddish hair and her warm complexion, were flaming and almost red. He remembered to have seen them flame that dangerous red before. Still, it would be best to mollify her.
"There ain't any more whisky in town," he said, "I've drunk it all up."
She laughed as the second glove came off with a final jerk.
"I heard you'd been hitting the pots. Isn't it a shame! The poor kid!
I heard it's a kangaroo."
Gibbs made no comment.
"He was a raw one, too, wasn't he?"
"Well, he's a young Dutchman--he filled in with the mob several moons back."
"What was the rap?"
"He boosted a rod, and they settled him for that; he got a stretch.
Then he was in when they knocked off the peter in that P. O. down in Indiana."
"That's what I couldn't get hip to; Mason wasn't--"
"No, not that time; they had him wrong; but you know what them elbows are."
"They must have rapped hard."
"Yes, they gave them a five spot. But the Dutch wasn't in on that Flanagan job, neither was Curly. That was rough work--the cat, I s'pose."
Jane, her chin in her hands, suddenly became intent, looking straight into Gibbs's eyes.
"Dan, that's what I want to get wise to."
Her cheeks flamed to her white temples, her breast rose tumultuously, and as she looked at Gibbs her eyes contracted, the wrinkles about them became deeper and older, and they wore the hard ugly look of jealous suspicion. But presently her lip quivered, then slowly along the lower lashes of her eyes the tears gathered.
"What's the matter, Jane?"
"You don't know what I've stood for that man!" she blazed out. "I could settle him. I could send him to the stir. I could have him touched off!" She had clenched her fist, and, at these last words, with their horrible possibility, she smote it down on the table. "But he knew I wouldn't be a copper!" She ended with this, and fumbling among a woman's trinkets in her hand-bag, she snatched out a handkerchief and hastily brushed away the tears. Gibbs, appealed to in all sorts of exigencies, was at a loss when a woman wept. She shook with weeping, until her hatred was lost in the pity she felt for herself.
"I never said a word when you flew me the kite to keep under cover that time he plugged Moon."
"No, you were good then."
"Yes," she said, looking up for approval, "I was, wasn't I? But this time--I won't stand for it!"
"I'm out o' this," said Gibbs.
"Well," she went on, "his mouthpiece wrote me not to show here. But I was on at once. Curly knew I was hip from the start"--her anger was rising again. "It was all framed up; he got that mouthpiece to hand me that bull con, and he's even got McFee to--"
"McFee!" said Gibbs, starting at the name of the inspector. "McFee!
Have you been to him?"
"Yes, I've been to him!" she said, repeating his words with a satirical curl of the lip. "I've been to him; the mouthpiece sent me word to lay low till he sprung him; Curly sent me word that McFee said I wasn't to come to this town. Think I couldn't see through all that? I was wise in a minute and I just come, that's what I did, right away. I did the grand over here."
"What was it you thought they had framed up?" asked Gibbs innocently.
"I can't follow you."
"Aw, now, Dan," she said, drawing away from the table with a sneer, "don't you try to whip-saw me."
"No, on the dead!"
"What was it? Why, some moll, of course; some tommy."
Gibbs leaned back and laughed; he laughed because he saw that this was simply woman's jealousy.
"Look here, Jane," he said, "you know I don't like to referee these domestic scraps--I know I'll be the fall guy if I do--but you're wrong, that's all; you've got it wrong."
She looked at him, intently trying to prove his sincerity, and anxious to be convinced that her suspicions were unfounded, and yet by habit and by her long life of crime she was so suspicious and so distrustful--like all thieves, she thought there were no honest people in the world--that her suspicions soon gained their usual mastery over her, and she broke out:
"You know I'm not wrong. I went to see McFee."
"What did he say?" asked Gibbs, with the interest in anything this lord that stood between him and the upper world might say.
"Why, he said he wouldn't say nothing."