Book II
I
All day long Archie Koerner and Curly Jackson had ridden in the empty box-car. They had made themselves as comfortable as they could, and had beguiled the time with talk and stories and cigarettes. Now and then they had fallen asleep, but not for long, for their joints ached with the jolting of the train, and, more than all else, there was a constant concern in their minds that made them restless, furtive and uneasy. The day was warm, and toward noon the sun beat down, hotter and hotter; the car was stifling, its atmosphere charged with the reminiscent odors of all the cargoes it had ever hauled. Long before daylight that morning they had crawled into the car as it stood on a siding in a village a hundred miles away. Just before dawn the train came, and they heard the conductor and brakeman moving about outside; now and then they caught the twinkle of their lanterns. Then the car was shunted and jolted back and forth for half an hour; finally the train was made up, and pulled out of the sleeping village they were so glad to get away from. With the coming of the dawn, they peeped out to see the sun come up over the fields. They watched the old miracle in silence until they saw a farmer coming across the field with a team. The farmer stopped, watched the train go by, then turned and began to plow corn.
“Pipe the Hoosier,” Curly had said, the sight of a human being relieving the silence imposed by nature in her loneliness. “We call ’em suckers. He’ll be plowing all day, but next winter he’ll be sitting by a fire—and we’ll—we’ll be macing old women for lumps at the back doors.”
Archie was not much affected by Curly’s sarcastic philosophy; he had not yet attained to Curly’s point of view.
Two days before, at evening, they had left the city and spent the first half of the night on foot, trudging along a country road; then a freight-train had taken them to a little town far to the south, where, in the small hours of the morning, they had broken into a post-office, blown open the safe with nitroglycerin, and taken out the stamps and currency. Curly considered the venture successful, though marred by one mishap: in the explosion the currency had been shattered and burned. But he had carefully gathered up the remnants, wrapped them in a paper, and stowed them away in his pocket with the stamps. The next day they hid in a wood. Curly made a fire, cooked bacon, and brewed tea in a tomato can, and these, with bread, had made a meal for them. Then he had carefully sorted the stamps, and had hidden in the ground all the five- and ten-cent stamps, preserving only those of the one- and two-cent denominations. After that he had lain down on the grass and slept.
While Curly slept, Archie sat and examined with an expert’s loving interest and the fascination of a boy a new revolver he had stolen from a hardware store in the city three days before. Curly at first had opposed the theft of the revolver, but had finally consented because he recognized Archie’s need; Archie had had no revolver since he was sent to the workhouse. The one he had when he was arrested had been confiscated—as it is called—by the police, and given by Bostwick to a friend, a lawyer who had long wanted a revolver to shoot burglars in case any should break into his home. Curly had consented to Archie’s stealing the revolver, but he had commanded him to take nothing else, and had waited outside while Archie went into the hardware store. Archie had chosen a fine one, a double-acting, self-cocking revolver of thirty-eight caliber, like those carried by the police. He had been childishly happy in the possession of this weapon; he had taken it out and looked at it a hundred times, and had been tempted when they were alone in the woods to take a few practice shots, but when Curly ordered him not to think of such nonsense, he drew the cartridges, aimed at trees, twigs, birds, and snapped the trigger. Every little while in the box-car that day he had taken it out, looked at it, caressed it, turned it over in his palm, delicately tested its weight, and called Curly to admire it with him. He thought much more of the revolver than he did of the stamps and blasted currency they had stolen, and Curly had spoken sharply to him at last and said:
“If you don’t put up that rod, I’ll ditch it for you.”
Archie obeyed Curly, but when he had restored the revolver to his pocket, he continued to talk of it, and then of other weapons he had owned, and he told Curly how he had won the sharp-shooter’s medal in the army.
But finally, in his weariness, Archie lost interest even in his new revolver, and when Curly would not let him go to the door of the car and look out, lest the trainmen should see them and force them into an encounter, Archie had fallen asleep in a corner.
It was a relief to Curly when Archie went to sleep, for in addition to his joy in his revolver, Archie had been excited over their adventure. Curly was in many ways peculiar; he was inclined to be secretive; he frequently worked alone, and his operations were as much a mystery to his companions and to Gibbs as they were to the police. He had had his eye on the little post-office at Trenton for months; it had called to him, as it were, to come and rob it. It had advantages, the building was old; an entrance could be effected easily. He had stationed Archie outside to watch while he knocked off the peter, and Archie had acquitted himself to Curly’s satisfaction. The affair came off smoothly. Though it was in the short summer night, no one had been abroad; they got away without molestation. Now, as they drew near the city, Curly felt easy.
Late in the afternoon Curly saw signs of the city’s outposts—the side-tracks were multiplying in long lines of freight-cars. Then Curly wakened Archie, and when the train slowed up, they dropped from the car.
It was good to feel once more their feet on the ground, to walk and stretch their tired, numb muscles, good to breathe the open air and, more than all, good to see the city looming under its pall of smoke. They joined the throngs of working-men; and they might have passed for working-men themselves, for Curly wore overalls, as he always did on his expeditions, and they were both so black from the smoke and cinders of their journey, that one might easily have mistaken their grime for that of honest toil.
They came to the river, pressed up the long approach to its noble bridge, and submerged themselves in the stream of life that flowed across it, the stream that was made up of all sorts of people—working-men, clerks, artisans, shop-girls, children, men and women, the old and the young, each individual with his burden or his care or his secret guilt, his happiness, his hope, his comedy or his tragedy, losing himself in the mass, merging his identity in the crowd, doing his part to make the great epic of life that flowed across the bridge as the great river flowed under it—the stream in which no one could tell the good from the bad, or even wish thus to separate them, in which no one could tell Archie or Curly from the teacher of a class in a Sunday-school. Here on the bridge man’s little distinctions were lost and people were people merely, bound together by the common possession of good and bad intentions, of good and bad deeds, of frailties, errors, sorrows, sufferings and mistakes, of fears and doubts, of despairs, of hopes and triumphs and heroisms and victories and boundless dreams.
Beside them rumbled a long procession of trucks and wagons and carriages, street-cars moved in yellow procession, ringing their cautionary gongs; the draw in the middle of the bridge vibrated under the tread of all those marching feet; its three red lights were already burning overhead. Far below, the river, growing dark, rolled out to the lake; close to its edge on the farther shore could be descried, after long searching of the eye, the puffs of white smoke from crawling trains; vessels could be picked out, tugs and smaller craft, great propellers that bore coal and ore and lumber up and down the lakes; here and there a white passenger-steamer, but all diminutive in the long perspective. Above them the freight-depots squatted; above these elevators lifted themselves, and then, as if on top of them, the great buildings of the city heaved themselves as by some titanic convulsive effort in a lofty pile, surmounted by the high office buildings in the center, with here and there towers and spires striking upward from the jagged sky-line. All this pile was in a neutral shade of gray,—lines, details, distinctions, all were lost; these huge monuments of man’s vanity, or greed, or ambition, these expressions of his notions of utility or of beauty, were heaped against a smoky sky, from which the light was beginning to fade. Somewhere, hidden far down in this mammoth pile, among all the myriads of people that swarmed and lost themselves below it, were Gusta and Dick Ward, old man Koerner and Marriott, Modderwell and Danner, Bostwick and Parrish, and Danny Gibbs, and Mason, and Eades, but they were lost in the mass of human beings—the preachers and thieves, the doctors and judges, and aldermen, and merchants, and working-men, and social leaders, and prostitutes—who went to make up the swarm of people that crawled under and through this pile of iron and stone, thinking somehow that the distinctions and the grades they had fashioned in their little minds made them something more or something less than what they really were.