Part 24 (2/2)

”It was Maginnis I sold the _Gazette_ to, you know--Peter Maginnis. I wouldn't have sold it to anybody else. You'll find him at the hotel eating supper.”

Varney, looking at him, knew then what it was that Smith thought he owed to him and Maginnis.

He went back up the stairs and the two men shook hands in rather an agitated silence.

CHAPTER XIV

CONFERENCE BETWEEN MR. HACKLEY, THE DOG MAN, AND MR. RYAN, THE BOSS

At half past six o'clock, or thereabouts, James Hackley dragged slowly up Main Street. He was garbed in his working suit of denim blue, trimmed with monkey wrench and chisel, and he wore, further, an air of exaggerated fatigue. A rounded protuberance upon his cheek indicated that the exhilaration of the quid was not wanting to his inner man, but the solace he drew from it appeared pitifully trifling. Now and then he would pause, rest his person against a lamp-post, or the front of some emporium, and shake his head despondently, like one most fearful of the consequences of certain matters.

Since four o'clock that afternoon, in fact, Mr. Hackley had been out upon a reluctant stint of lawn-mowing, reluctant because he hated all work with a t.i.tanic hatred and sedulously cultivated the conviction that his was a delicate health. In view of the magnificent windfall in connection with the killing of his dog, it had not been his design to accept any more retainers for a long time to come. That occurrence had lifted him, as by the ears, from the proletariat into the capitalistic leisure cla.s.s; and the map of the world had become but the portrait of his oyster.

But at noon as he lolled upon his rear veranda, chatting kindly with his wife as she hung the linen of quality upon her drying lines, a lady had knocked upon his door, beautiful and insistent, to wheedle his will from him. It was only a tiny bit of a lawn, she had reiterated imploringly, hardly a const.i.tutional to cut, and there was not one tall fellow in all Hunston whom she would permit to touch it but Hackley.

Dead to all flattery as he was, his backbone ran to water at the clinging beauty of her smile, and so incredibly betrayed him into yielding. And now, at hard upon half after six o'clock, post-meridian, the dangerous dews of night already beginning to fall, he leaned against a lamp-post, a physical wreck, with a long block and a half still separating him from the comforts of home.

At the next corner but one above rose the red brick Ottoman, its inviting side stretching for many yards down the street towards him.

Windows cut it here and there along its length, and over their green silk half-curtains, poured forth a golden light which was hospitality made visible. Yet, so strange are the ways of life, the proprietor of all these luxuries, who stood at the furthest window, beyond Hackley's range, did not look happy in their possession. His eyes gleamed fiercely; his heavy chin protruded savagely, as though deliberately insulting Main Street and the northward universe. Even his small derby, which he seldom doffed save at the hour for taps, contrived to bespeak a certain ferocity.

The Ottoman bar was bare of customers, all Hunston now verging towards its evening meal. Ryan rested his elbow upon its polished surface, and glared into the twilight. He was, as luck had it, in a terrible ill-humor. For he knew himself to-day for a man who had been physically flouted, a boss whose supremacy had been violently a.s.sailed, a king who felt his throne careen sickeningly beneath him.

Last night, when four men whom he had never seen before, three of them masked, had borne him off on a long wild drive, and dropped him at ten o'clock in a lonely bit of country eight miles from the Academy Theatre, there had at least been action to give point to his choler. All but out of his mind with pa.s.sion, he had besought them all, singly or quadruply, to descend from their carriage and meet him in combat, thirsting sorely to kill or be killed. But they had only laughed at him, silently, and galloped away, leaving him screaming out futile curses on the empty night air.

Two hours later, when he had got back to Hunston, after an interminable nightmare of running over rough ground with unaccustomed limbs, and stumbling heavily to earth, and rising up to struggle again, he had learned to what uses his enemies had put that absence. Smith had related the story in the fastness of his office, and in wholly different guise from that which it wore next morning in the columns of his newspaper.

And Ryan, listening, had slowly calmed, calmed to the still fury of implacable hate.

But he and Smith had quarreled violently. He was for publis.h.i.+ng the story of his taking off in type as black as the dastardly act. Smith had a difficult time in holding him down, however much he pointed out that Ryan had no shadow of proof against his new adversary on the yacht, and that public sympathy in an affair of this sort was always with the successful. In the end Smith had carried his point, because he was, of those two men, both the more wise and the more resolute. But this morning they had conferred again and quarreled even more bitterly.

Yet Ryan, plotting in the window of his splendid gin-palace, his eye always sweeping the evening street as though a-search, was not thinking of the young editor now. Two other policies for the days to come monopolized his attention. One of these was crus.h.i.+ng victory at the polls. The other was revenge. Probably in thinking of these, he put them at the moment in reverse order.

”d.a.m.n him!” he suddenly exploded: and it was not little Hare that he cursed. ”d.a.m.n his soul!”

In the next breath, the boss suddenly ducked, and disappeared from the half-curtained window altogether. A moment later, he appeared outside his swinging door, yawning and stretching himself, as one who, wearied with the tedium of life indoors, would see what beguilement might await him abroad.

The boss looked first up the street and permitted his beady eye to range casually over the view. Then his gaze came slowly down and rested in time upon the person of James Hackley, now almost directly opposite. The boss's countenance lit up with a smile of pleased surprise.

”Why, h.e.l.lo, Jim!” he called out. ”Where you been hidin' yourself lately? Ain't seen you for a week o' Sundays. Come across and pa.s.s the time of day!”

Mr. Hackley, who had been debating whether or not he should pause for inspiration at the Ottoman, and had just virtuously declared for the negative, shambled over.

Ryan eyed him sympathetically. ”You look kind o' played out, Jim. What you been doin' with yourself? Come in and take a drop of somethin' to hearten you up some. On the house.”

”Well,” said Mr. Hackley, unable to resist the novel fascination of liquoring gratis, ”just a weeny mite for to cut the dust out o' my windpipe.”

Ryan went behind the bar and served them himself, selecting with care a bottle which he described as the primest stuff in the house. From this he poured Hackley a remarkably stiff potation, slightly wetting the bottom of his own gla.s.s the while. The bottle he left standing ready on the bar.

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