Money to Burn. An Adventure Story

Front matter

MONEY TO BURN

MONEY TO BURN

An Adventure Story

I. Queer Streets

MONEY TO BURN

CHAPTER I

BY night, the most silent spots in all the five boroughs of Greater New York are those places which are most crowded by day. When evening has fallen, the money market's gold-crammed cañons, lately echoing to the hoarse cries of the greedy, are deserted by all except watchmen in ambush, sedulously concealed. The warehouse district that, since morning, has resounded with the clamor of drays and the shouts of drivers, is changed to paths of druids' graveyards whose tombs are towers. The outstretched water front, from Audubon Park on the Hudson, around the Battery, and up through the East River and the Harlem to McComb's Dam Bridge—those suntime scenes of an immense activity broadcast to the world's remotest corners—become, with darkness, leagues of desert—just so much solemn stillness and so many mute miles; nor is there any rod throughout that lonely course more lonely than the streets that bound Atlantic Basin on the Brooklyn side and look across Buttermilk Channel—now a channel of ink—to Fort Columbus and Castle William beyond it on what was once the Governor's Isle.

Few lights there, yet plenty of shadows. Scarce anybody visible, yet the sense of many lives skulking near by, which would add to civilization's security by remaining invisible and torpid forever.

When young Stone turned out of Conover Street, he seemed on the edge of a city killed by the explosion of some gigantic gas shell. After he had walked a hundred yards, he began to feel that stealthy beasts were creeping in to feed upon the dead.

“Where you goin'?”

He came up short before a deep doorway from the comparative security of which two policemen peered out at him. He could distinguish their caps and nothing more; he understood that the law's officers are safer in pairs when they keep their nocturnal vigils in such quarters.

“I'm out for a walk,” said Dan.

It was a natural excursion for him. He worked hard all day over his books at the medical school, or over such public-ward patients as he was permitted to attend in the hospital; by evening he wanted fresh air, and this night he had sought it at the waterside. He had to study so intently that there was small opportunity for the cultivation of friendship, and so he walked alone. He liked the smell of tar and the neighborhood of ships as only an inlander can, and so—though this particular spot was new to him—he often explored the wharves. Nevertheless, as he gave those policemen his entirely veracious explanation, he realized that it could not sound entirely convincing to its auditors.

It wasn't.

“Let's have a look at you.”

A flash lamp shot its rays from the policeman's fist to the wanderer's face.

The face of an enthusiast. Blue eyes that smiled, but that, even when smiling, could hint of zealous faiths and determined defense of them. A mouth that smiled also and smiled like the eyes. Fresh complexion—frank expression—light hair that fought its way toward freedom under a soft hat. Impossible to suspect such a chap of evil intent here, yet equally impossible to consider such a chap safe in such a district.

“Well, this here's no place for a quiet stroll,” said the policeman.

“The quiet's desavin', me boy,” his companion added.

“I can take care of myself,” said Stone.

The second policeman grunted. “The East River's full o' lads that thought the same. Run along uptown wid yez, or somebody'll be goin' fishin' for yez in the mornin'.”

Dan made some pretense at obedience, but he soon turned back again and resumed his walk by the water. It was full of motionless ships, their masts and funnels dimly visible—ships that had come in yesterday with cargoes of furs and laces, of sugar and coffee, spices and cocoa from distant ports, ships that would sail to distant ports to-morrow with American chemicals and copper, medicines and machinery, coal and oil and hardware.

For the next fifteen minutes he met nobody. Then, up a narrow street to his left, a door opened and closed again. There had been a faint glow and a howl. A whining dog limped toward Stone and, with that canine instinct which recognizes dog lovers at the first encounter, nestled against his already pausing feet.

Dan bent to stroke the cur. It whimpered.

“Hurt?” asked Stone.

He felt the animal. One of its forelegs was broken.

There was a corner lamp some distance forward. He lifted the dog and bore it thither. A brutal kick had probably done the damage. Dan read that in the meek eyes turned up to his. He found a bit of wood, relic of some box dropped and broken by a van, and whittling the stick and ripping his handkerchief, he improvised a splint.

The dog held quiet with understanding patience. When the operation was complete, Stone felt a damp muzzle kissing his hand.

“If that was your home,” said Dan, “I think I'll take you back there. Perhaps the sight of what they've done will make it safer for you than outside.”

Carefully carrying his bundle, he made his way hack to the point whence, he thought, the glow had issued. It was an apparently vacant warehouse, but Stone knocked at the smaller of its doors.

No answer.

He couldn't well take his charge home with him. His third-rate boarding house opened to much that he disapproved of, but the angular landlady set her face sternly—and it was a flint face—against dogs. She owned a cat, which was her sole comfort, and one of the hundred hardships of her lodgers. Nothing to be done in that respect. Moreover, Stone was the sort of person who, the more impulsively he has embarked upon an enterprise, the more deliberately and determinedly he persists in it.

He knocked again.

Still no answer.

Well, he was going through with this thing. If the dog had chosen to decamp, that would be another matter. There was a good deal to be said against returning him to the scene of his injury; but there was more to be said against turning an injured cur loose to the mercies of street urchins such as must, by day, infest a neighborhood like this. Dan wished the animal would run away; the animal lay quiet in his arms, so he knocked a third time.

Now louder. And now a response.

The echoes of his knuckle blows rolled up the dark and empty street. They caromed from the black walls of one side to the black walls farther along on the other, and, as they lessened with distance, there came a shuffling step from behind that portal before which the medical student was standing—a shuffling step first; and then a whispered and hesitant, but entirely audible, voice demanded:

“Who's there?”

II. “Cross-eyed” Johnson

CHAPTER II

“CROSS-EYED” JOHNSON

A MOMENT before Stone had been wishing that the dog would decamp and relieve him of his self-imposed duty. The dog fled now, yet too late to save its preserver from the necessity of going forward.

At sound of that low voice behind the door, Dan's little patient jumped out of its physician's arms and scuttled, on three legs, but with significant speed, up the thoroughfare, where darkness instantly engulfed it. In that canine mind, any one of the street's thousand dangers was evidently preferable to another encounter with the man who had just spoken. For Stone, pursuit was obviously useless. There was no overtaking the fugitive; yet so affected was he by its determination to escape that he poised upon the edge of giving chase. He was ready to make that enterprise an excuse for his own departure when a bolt was shot back and the door opened.

No retreat now. Dan stood his ground.

At first, scarcely anything was to he seen there. A bullet-shaped head—a head like a modern elongated bullet stood on end, with wide ears flanking it, or like those conical spikes, balanced by steel wings, which airmen dropped in the later raids of the World War. What illumination was vouchsafed came from back of this man who now confronted him.

“I ast you who you was.”

Stone rejoiced that the dog had escaped; anyhow, dogs knew best where their comparative safety lay. The tone of this inquisitor was thick. His breath was heavy with bad liquor.

Said Dan: “A pup ran out of here a few minutes ago. Somebody kicked it2”

The fellow in the doorway swayed. “Well, it was my dawg. This is a free country—or used to be. I guess I got a right to kick my own dawg, ain't I?”

“Its leg's broken,” Stone explained. His anger—always quick to rise against cruelty—he did his best to put down. “I set the leg. I was bringing him back to you.”

Whether protest was not entirely absent from that reply and was felt and feared by the dog owner, or whether the man really experienced some remorse at learning the extent of the injuries he had inflicted, it was difficult to say. In either event, he suffered a sudden and palpable change of heart. His tone softened.

“Leg broken? I'm sorry. Where is he?”

“As soon as he heard you coming he beat it.”

The bullet-headed man hesitated: “You ain't an agent of that association for cruelty to animals?”

“I'm not.”

“Well then, don't worry about that there dawg. I know him, an' he knows me. See? He knows my little ways don't mean nothin', an' he'll be back when his bread basket's empty. I am sort o' quick tempered sometimes, but I get right over it. I'm much obliged to you for settin' that leg o' his. Come on in.”

There was absolutely no reason in the world why such an invitation should be accepted by a hard-working, sober-living medical student whose sole ambition lay strictly within the limits of his chosen profession and whose scarcely indulged hobby was—of all things conceivable—the study of that Spanish-American church architecture no true example of which he had ever seen. Dan knew that this neighborhood was a precarious one. He knew that he faced a man subject to a form of brutality that Stone, for his part, always found especially repellent. Nevertheless, he was that kind of young American who finds a compelling reason for any course in the very fact that there is no reason apparent.

“Thanks,” he said, “I will come in for a minute. I've been walking a good way, and Fm tired.”

He was curious, too. He stepped inside. The other man bolted the door.

“If you're done up,” he croaked, “I can give you a drop of somethin'.”

They now stood under a dreary hanging lamp. Dan could see that his host was burly, flushed, and watery eyed; the host, on the other hand, studied Stone's face and evidently found it as reassuring as the policemen had done.

“It's the real stuff,” he continued with a wavering smile that gave added proof, if added proof were required, of the efficacy of his own liquor. “Just got it in from Rum Row out there, an' I'm sellin' it cheaper'n any other bar in N'York.”

Dan shook his tow-colored head. Only that afternoon he had been helping, in hospital, to treat the case of a longshoreman who had succumbed to wood-alcohol poisoning through use of some “real stuff.” However, since Stone seemed to have stumbled upon one of the many water-front dives that cater to the thirst of wharf workers and sailors ashore, no good could come from rousing antagonism by casting suspicion on the wares thus offered; so he said only:

“No thanks. I'm off the stuff. But I don't mind taking a cigar.”

The dealer led the way down a shadowy hall and into a little room that must once have been the outer office of some legitimate business concern. What had been the cashier's cage was now lengthened and, relieved of its wire mesh, made a quite practical bar with an impressively labeled array of bottles on the shelves behind it. There were two or three tables in the room, but only one of these was occupied. At it sat three men. Two of these were engaged in a loud and muddled controversy. It was postponed at Dan's entrance, but, after a glance in his direction, its participants paid him no further compliment of attention. He took a chair near them.

“I'll get you that smoke,” said the dive manager, “an' you'll find it A 1.” He shuffled behind the bar.

A member of the trio at the neighboring table was asking a companion: “When do you sail?”

Stone heard the answer. “Two weeks from last Wednesday.”

The barkeeper returned, bringing, not a box but a handful of cigars that were as dark as the night outside.

“Try one of these here,” he said. “Real Cuban, an' never paid a cent of duty, neither. That's why I can afford to sell 'em at fifteen cents per.”

A glance told Dan that there was no choice among the handful. He selected at random, and while the dive manager retreated behind the desk, there polishing glasses with a dirty towel and occasionally filling and emptying one for his own uses, he lighted the weed.

Awful stuff. Dan coughed over it. He began to cast about for some pretense whereby, without giving offense, he might escape before this alleged tobacco choked him.

“When'd you say you sailed, Mr. Johnson?”

The customer that had inquired, a moment since, about that date of sailing had drunkenly repeated the question. Idly Dan looked again at his neighbors.

The fellow to whom the queries were addressed was of just the type that would have been expected to frequent this place. He had a broad, weather-beaten face, and a bad cast in one eye. By the way in which he wore his clothes it was clear that they were the shore clothes of a sailor; and by the awkward movement of his roughened fist as he raised his glass, it was equally clear that he had raised it quite often enough this evening.

“I told you once. We're scheduled to get away a fortnight from last Wednesday.” He pronounced the “sch” of “scheduled” as if it were “sh” only, and he spoke with a rising inflection.

Dan hit off an inch from the less dangerous end of his cigar and dropped that inch inconspicuously under his table. There was, he reflected, something queer about the questioner and about the silent man of the party. The latter seemed to be the questioner's particular friend. They somehow appeared to have made the acquaintance of the man called Johnson recently, and the acquaintance seemed to have a common taste for liquor as its foundation.

Well, that was not unusual, and the manager of this place gave no hint of sharing Stone's feelings about Johnson's table mates, though, to be sure, the manager was fonder of his stock than he ought to be, and perhaps this dulled the fine edge of that caution which is requisite to succeed in such a trade. What, anyhow, roused Dan's doubts?

Their subjects were unshaven men in suits that had seen hard usage. Both were muscular and both uncouth. They ought to belong here—and yet they didn't. They were not seafaring men; they were not longshoremen. Stone could bring to mind no calling indigenous to this section of the city which they gave token of pursuing. They lolled in their chairs as if they had drunk as much as their cross-eyed companion, hut, even as Dan was seeking to appraise them, he saw the silent fellow quietly lower his glass beneath their table edge and let quite half the contents trickle to the rusty carpet.

“Have 'nother drink,” the inquisitive stranger urged his sailor guest.

Johnson laughed in a silly manner. A hiccup interrupted his laughter. “Had 'bout 'nough,” he said.

“Not near. None of us have. Come on an' liquor up.”

Johnson looked at the tempter out of his one good eye. It was rather glassy, but Dan saw in it, or thought he saw, a struggling mistrust. The generous person was in the act of summoning the barkeeper; he raised a beckoning hand. Across the table Johnson pulled it down.

“Don' want 'nother drop.”

The man who had not spoken nudged his neighbor. That one clasped Johnson's restraining fingers with a vast good fellowship.

“Say,” he wheedled, “why won't you tell us what the old tub's carryin'?”

“If blue-nosed Goldthwaite heard you speak disrespectful of the Hawk,” said Johnson, “he'd throw you—throw you across that bar there.”

“Well, anyway, what's he goin' to have aboard of her, matey?”

There was a moment's pause, during which it could be seen the sailor was making desperate endeavor to gather his wits together. Then, as if repeating a lesson learned by heart, he growled:

“Condensed milk for the West Indies. I said so before, an' I say it again.”

This must be the topic over which they had been wrangling when Dan entered.

“Milk nothin',” mocked the inquisitor.

Johnson sat back in his chair. “Do you mean I'm a liar?”

The man who had hitherto been silent spoke now. He spoke hurriedly and soothingly. “Course he don't. Come on an' have li'l' drink.”

“Course he does,” Johnson stubbornly persisted. Then rage flamed. “What business of you chaps is it what we carry? Eh, what? I don't like yer. I don't like yer looks, an' I've 'alf a mind2”

He made it a whole mind then and there. He threw his empty glass in the face opposite him, leaped up, overset the table, and then jumped it with a knife raised in his right fist.

Everybody was afoot. The dive manager hurdled his bar. Stone darted forward. The cautious man called:

“Don't hurt him, Tom!”

They were all three too late. The threatened customer picked up his chair and brought it down upon Johnson's head—brought Johnson down, too, down to the floor.

“You fool!” yelled the cautious man. “You fool!”

He shot across the room and up the hall. His friend was at his heels. Before any of the three who were left behind could move to stop retreat, the outer door was unbolted. It opened; it closed. The fight had been successful.

“Prohibition-enforcement agents?” asked Stone as he bent above the supine Johnson. “After evidence?”

The violator of the eighteenth amendment mopped his low brow. “They wouldn't never have made this kind of trouble if they was,” he said. “They'd have just pinched me right off.”

Johnson opened his crossed eye. “Am I much hurt?”

A quick examination brought Dan's negative verdict. “But you're slated for a few days in hospital,” he said.

“I don't mind that.” Johnson gave a glare at the doorway through which his recent enemies had made good their escape. “I only wish I'd got my knife into one of 'em. They didn't learn anything from me, eh?” That opened eye almost disappeared under the bridge of his nose. “Well, my lad, don't you go a-thinkin' things. The reason they didn't get anything out o' me was because there ain't nothin' to be got—that's why!”

III. Deadly Weapons

CHAPTER III

AFTER squeamish days of infernal weather, the British tramp steamer Hawk—nine hundred tons, Captain Goldthwaite, New York to West Indian ports—limped across an unruffled sea, blue and transparent. There, where the waters of the Atlantic and the Caribbean meet, morning had dawned like the unfolding of a pale-pink rose. Far away off the old tub's starboard quarter, a silver-gray blot against the glittering azure of the sky increased in size; gradually it seemed to descend to the world's rim until it detached itself from the heavens; Mount Diablo of Santo Domingo.

The Hawk groaned at sight of it like a man with sore corns, but the cranky screw continued, however unsteadily, its revolutions. The heat was intense and the direct summer sun cast a shadowless glare over peeling stack, suspicious deck, paint-hungry sides. A sinister craft; as regiments contract the temperament of their colonels, so do merchant vessels assume a likeness to their commanders—sullen, ominous, a discord in that marine symphony, Captain Goldthwaite's ocean peddler advertised its master's character to air and wave.

Below, in the cabin forward, Dan Stone's straight blue eyes grew bluer. His open smile widened.

“Oh, she's a rum ship, all right,” he grinned.

The Greek philosopher who advised us to know ourselves counseled the impossible. The briefest experience suffices for a practical understanding of nature. A kitten need fall only once into the water and be rescued; it will dread drowning ever thereafter. A baby needs few tumbles before he realizes that heights are best avoided. Yet, though the wasp born yesterday can to-day design and build its intricate nest, the longest life and the hardest study are not long enough or hard enough to furnish man with self-comprehension. He may acquire all the lore of the scholar, all the arts of business, but he will never thoroughly read his own mind and his own heart. He will tell his child that the attraction of gravity draws the loosened apple to the ground, but he can master nothing except the broadest principles of that inevitable law of cause and effect as it determines his own history. A Sicilian slave throws away his worn-out sandal and thereby becomes a Roman general. Proceeding leisurely to his office, a rich New York broker pauses to buy a cravat that has attracted him from a haberdasher's window, and so starts in motion a train of events that, five years later, makes him a pauper. Dan Stone set the broken leg of a dog in Brooklyn; that act sent him southward aboard the Hawk.

“That's what she is,” he repeated, “a rum ship.”

He had, in his capacity of acting ship's doctor, just concluded the professional portion of his call on the tramp's only passenger. Seen by daylight, or by so much of it as the cabin permitted to enter. Stone presented a picture of the physically well-proportioned man; but so nicely balanced were his muscles that no gaze save a trained one would have marked him out for owning the unusual strength—the quick movement and long endurance—which he really possessed.

Anybody not both anatomist and psychologist must have been preoccupied with his impetuous face, his frank glance that was too ready to accept the rest of the world on its own terms, and his boyishly unruly hair, tow colored and irreconcilably rebellions to the brushes; and anybody with a knowledge of the Hawk's captain would have wondered how Stone came to be his medico and how long he could stand that tyrant's gaff.

From his bunk, the passenger echoed his physician's last word. “Rum?” He nearly pulled himself to a sitting posture. “Is that what she is?”

The Hawk was no floating fortress of free speech. Though few of the hands on that British boat understood the English tongue, Stone glanced beyond the cabin door to make sure that he wasn't overheard. Then he glanced back at his mysterious patient.

“I don't mean liquor, Mr. Hoagland. Her liquor's milk, all right, condensed milk, to be dropped here, there, and everywhere till we dump the last at Port of Spain; only I bet it's curdled by now. I just meant she was—well, what Captain Goldthwaite or any of his fellow countrymen would mean when they used the word that I used in the way I used it. She's rum.”

This patient was the only other American aboard, and if Stone's presence furnished him with material for speculation, he was a puzzle to Stone. The acting doctor rarely indulged the vice of personal questions, but he found it hard to understand why so well-groomed a man—well groomed even in his illness—should have chosen this manifestly disreputable tramp when, as a hundred signs gave testimony to even this fresh-water physician, he was accustomed to ocean liners. However, the urbane Mr. Hoagland had kept largely to himself, and until stricken with ptomaine poisoning, mostly confined his conversation to the tempestuous captain and the latter's malicious mate.

The Hawk, if she had made much more bad weather, would have been in real danger of foundering. During the storm which had swooped down upon them within an hour of their dropping Sandy Hook—which had, indeed, only yesterday subsided—she shipped veritable seas that seemed to push her completely beneath the surface of the ocean and hold her there until, miraculously, she wriggled back to life.

Though possibly ignorant of her captain's temper, Hoagland, who must have had some choice of boat, should have gleaned from the most cursory observation a general idea of the Hawk's sea qualities before ever he came aboard of her. Larger, more comfortable, and far swifter boats touched at all the ports at which the Hawk called, though their sailings might be fairly infrequent. It seemed to the doctor that Hoagland's haste must, therefore, have been to leave America rather than to arrive at his destination. Did he have to hurry from his country for his country's good?

“You're some doctor!” said he now; he was a wiry little man with thin hair and a snub nose. His eyes, of a gray that generally veiled their alertness by staring into vacancy, now turned with frank questioning directly on the figure in the door way. “Why d'you pick a tub like this?”

It was exactly the query that Dan Stone, M. D.-minus, would have liked to put to Hoagland. However, he answered it easily enough. “Because I'm not really a doctor yet.”

“No diploma?”

“Third year and working my way through. First summer I was a second-rate hotel clerk at a third-rate seaside resort. Last year I was a hospital orderly. Two weeks ago the mate of this boat got in a scrap, and I happened along when he needed some first aid. The Hawk wanted a doctor and asked no questions; I wanted a job and didn't ask any, either. So here I am.”

It was his way to make light of his own hardships. He honestly laughed at them now. He didn't like to talk about himself, and so he neglected to add that, nursing a dream about some day setting up practice in these latitudes, he wanted to better his already nearly perfect knowledge of Spanish, and that he wanted, also, to see something of West Indian ecclesiastical architecture.

“Well,” persisted his patient, “hut why do you call it a rum ship?”

Dan laughed again. He thought of the Hawk's rats, which scuttled over him when he tried to sleep. He was bunking with a crew that had no notion of personal cleanliness; even now he could smell the stench of their quarters; they never volunteered to police the place; its deck was a mass of filth, swabbed only when his threats of violence moved his messmates to sullen effort. But he laughed, because he had found that the easiest way of supporting tyranny, and all he said was:

“You wouldn't call it a champagne one, would you?”

Rum it was, because rum furnished its commander with the chiefest of his preoccupations. Congressmen from the farm and senators that have never gone deeper than the Leviathan's dining room have devised some well-intentioned laws for sailor folk; so has his Britannic majesty's Parliament; but when a ship's master is far at sea and his boat returns only once in five years to its home port, that master may become a master indeed. If he is a bully born, with a hatred of humanity because he can abuse it, and if he overstokes his temper with the fuel of alcohol, his ship will be as much a floating hell as ever was any slaver's in the Middle Passage; and Captain Goldthwaite was exactly the sort of devil to meet all these requirements and enjoy them.

For Stone, things had begun to go wrong when the Goddess of Liberty stolidly watched the Hawk pass her pedestal. The bull-necked, blue-nosed captain had coveted the liberal graft to be acquired by surrendering his cabin to the unexpected and eleventh-hour passenger; but once his cabin was surrendered, he fell into an abiding rage because he had to occupy the mate's instead. Cross-eyed Johnson, the mate, cursed at having to bunk with the engineer, whom he hated, and Dan, who had been promised a couch in the engineer's quarters, was contemptuously housed with the doubtful West Indian crew.

Being there, he was promptly treated as belong ing. Almost the first warmth, when she nosed her way into the Gulf Stream, proved too much for the Hawk's so-called cold-storage locker. The beef went bad and half the ship's company with it. Hoagland, the solitary passenger, fell a victim. Dan saved himself by subsisting on pilot biscuit and coffee, yet that he saved the others was not charged to his credit. Captain Goldthwaite's habit was to regard as less than human any being that lived forward; twice already he had raised his drunken but powerful hands against the doctor.

“It's my own fault,” Dan reflected; “I ought to have known better. I did. I knew Johnson was a brute the minute I saw him, and he as good as told me what his captain was. I've only myself to blame for ever shipping on this boat; but I won't take any man's fist and not come back at him. The day that Goldthwaite touches me,” Stone quietly vowed, “I'll first knock him down and then leave the ship if I have to swim till I go under.”

Now Hoagland, with a wry smile that drew his thin face into deep wrinkles, was answering Dan's latest question with another:

“No, I wouldn't call it a champagne ship, but I might say it was a milk punch. What do you make of the captain?”