Chapter XXXI The Broken Web
With the death of Peter Bolton there was an immediate slackening of the tension in the commercial exchanges. The shock of his sudden end turned men’s minds for a little from the market-place, and when they turned back it was not the same. The enginery of evil that he had set in motion to crush Wharton Kendrick ran slower and slower, and at last came to a stop.
“The El Dorado Bank has thrown up the sponge,” said Partridge when I met him at noon. “They were acting for Bolton more than for themselves in this deal. Now that the old fox has gone, they have lost stomach for the fight.”
And with this assurance, I walked the street with the buoyancy of heart that follows a hard-won victory.
I was still in exultant frame of mind when I came a few minutes later upon the personification of Gloom. It was Parks. His mouth was drawn down into an expression of somber weariness of the world. A piece of court-plaster ornamented his cheek; and his right eye was swollen and discolored until it resembled nothing so much as an overripe tomato.
“Why, what’s the matter?” I asked with exuberant spirit. “You look like the day after the fight.”
He looked resentfully at me, with a sad shake of the head.
“Sir,” he exclaimed, “it is unfair to jest. I have suffered the burial of my hopes. I am done with the affairs of life.”
“What!” I cried. “Have you given up the revolution? Have you abandoned the battle for the rights of the people?”
“The people be damned!” responded Parks angrily. “Why should I give my life to fight for those who won’t fight for themselves? Why should I scheme for the slaves who have not the sense to follow the leaders who point the way to emancipation? We perfect our plans to free them from the oppressions of a capitalistic government, and when we call on them to take arms and follow us they fall to robbing Chinamen. When I appeal to them to follow me to the City Hall instead of the wash-house, the response I get is a black eye. That’s my reward for devotion to the rights of the people.”
“It must have been a most demonstrative meeting,” I replied without a trace of sympathy, “and it did one good thing, for it knocked some sense into you.”
“Hampden,” said Parks, with a lofty air that made a comic contrast with his flaming eye, “I forgive you the expression. But I assure you I retract nothing of my views. What I have learned is that the great era for which I have worked can not be brought about by men who understand neither their wrongs nor their rights. We must educate them until they see the truth.”
“Oh, then I suppose you are on your way to the City Hall to get your leather-lunged orator out of jail to resume his teachings?”
Parks flushed angrily.
“Kearney?” he cried. “He can rot in his cell for anything I will do to get him out. I refuse, sir, to voice the suspicions that I have been forced to entertain, but he is a hindrance, not an aid to the cause of the people. They must be taught the large truths, not the little truths, if they are to act wisely. Let us not mention his name.”
I left Parks at the corner of Kearny and Merchant Streets, and walking down to the door of the City Prison, applied for permission to see the prisoner I had captured in the final riot above the Mail docks. The death of Peter Bolton made it likely that I could induce him to answer the questions he had flouted the previous night.
I was admitted without difficulty, and found the cages filled with scores of men herded together into brutal contiguousness.
It was impossible to examine the prisoner before these cell-mates, but by the exercise of diplomacy I secured the privilege of talking with him in the comparative quiet of the Receiving Hospital. The man was brought shambling in, cast an impudent glance at me, and then looked sullenly at the floor. His pale face and sunken eyes and cheeks betrayed the opium smoker, and his manner was that of the hoodlum.
“You had better make a clean breast of it,” I exhorted him. “I suppose you know that Bolton is dead.”
“Yep,” he said uneasily. “The old rooster that done for him was in here. He didn’t look like he’d nerve enough to kill a cat.”
“Well, I warn you that you have no one to protect you now, and your only chance of getting off with a light punishment is to answer my questions and tell the truth.”
“Ask what you like, cully,” he replied with an impudent leer. “You can bet I’m too fly to give up anything I ain’t wanting you to know. I ain’t a-goin’ to split on the man that paid me, even if he has gone to the morgue. I’m game, I am.” And he straightened himself with a pitiful exhibition of the criminal’s pride.
“Oh, you needn’t be afraid of giving away Bolton’s secrets,” I said. “I know more about them than you do.” And I mentioned several incidents of his employment that made his eyes open and his face pale with the fear that he was caught beyond escape. “What I want you to tell me is what Bolton was doing with Big Sam?”
The spy looked sullenly at the floor, and shook his head. And it was not until I had threatened to put a charge of attempt to murder against him that he replied:
“Well, I don’t see as there’s any harm in tipping it off to youse on that. The old rat’s game was to get Big Sam to put up money for them crazy bunko-men on the Council of Nine. He done it, too. I’ll bet he got the coolie to put up as much as he gave himself.”
“Did you take the money from Big Sam to Bolton?”
“Me? Not much! They was too fly to let me get my nippers on it. I was plain messenger-boy—that’s what I was—and I carried a lot of talk about what the Council was going to do. You knows all that game. If youse want it, I can give youse a yard of it now.”
I could well believe that this creature was not trusted with any of the purposes that these men had in their alliance. So I turned to the question:
“What was that Chinese paper in the pocket of the overcoat you left with me that night you tried to kill me when I chased you out of Mr. Kendrick’s yard?”
“Oh, youse is the feller that got that coat, are you? Well, that paper was just an order or ticket that would let me into Big Sam’s tong house when the tong was meeting—so as I could see him without losing time. It wasn’t no use to me; but Big Sam let on he was giving me first cousin to the Mint when he passed it over.”
Nothing more was to be got out of this man, so I left the fetid prison, and followed up the line of inquiry by seeking Big Sam.
I found him just entering the store that led to his dwelling. He received me with courtesy, but there was a trace of suspicion in his eyes as he invited me to follow him to his office.
“I suppose I do not bring news in telling you that our mutual acquaintance, Mr. Peter Bolton, is no more,” I said, as we entered the oriental hall. In that room with its intricate ornamentation, its grotesque carvings and garish hangings, Peter Bolton and the troubled city of San Francisco seemed thousands of miles away, and I felt like a traveler in Cathay, who had come overseas bearing news of distant countries.
“You are not the first to tell me,” said Big Sam. “I had the regret of hearing it some hours ago.”
“It was a sad loss to the Council of Nine,” I said, watching narrowly if the name brought any change of expression to his face. But no shadow crossed the yellow mask with which he concealed his thoughts.
“I am not familiar with Mr. Bolton’s relations with society,” said Big Sam blandly. “But I’m sorry to have lost a good customer.”
It was hopeless to study that changeless mask—hopeless to seek to match the Oriental in guile. So I abandoned the task and asked bluntly:
“Now that Peter Bolton is dead, and the Council of Nine is in jail, and the conspiracy is smashed beyond repair, would you mind telling me why you contributed money to such a harebrained scheme?”
“Your question makes an unwarranted assumption,” said Big Sam dryly. “I know nothing about contributing money to Councils of Nine, or other harebrained revolutionists.”
“Oh,” I said, “you need not fear that I am asking this in the character of a public prosecutor. It is merely a feeling of private curiosity. In protecting Mr. Kendrick’s affairs I have learned most of the inside history of the movement. And I should really like to know what led a man of your intelligence to further a cause that was apparently so opposed to his interests.”
Big Sam looked at me in silence with calm and unflinching gaze for two or three minutes, and I suspected that the expediency of my mysterious disappearance was canvassed behind the inscrutable veil of his eyes. Then a sarcastic smile stole about the corners of his mouth, and he said:
“I am sorry to disappoint you. I must plead ignorance of the circumstances you mention. If Mr. Bolton was the representative of criminal or treasonable designs, I do not know it. But if it will be of any assistance or satisfaction to you, I will describe a hypothetical case. Let us suppose that an harassed race had found an insecure footing—say in Sumatra. Suppose that the head man of this harassed race had been approached by the leader of a revolutionary party, with whom he had been in business relations. This leader, or backer, or whatever you wish to call him, we may suppose, insists on the prospects of success of the revolutionary movement—enlarges on the certainty of disturbances to come among the classes of the people most opposed to this alien race, and urges its head man to raise up friends in the revolutionary party by a contribution of money. I put it to you, Mr. Hampden, would it be worth this man’s while—in Sumatra, you understand—to pay enough to secure toleration for his race, in case its enemies came into possession of the government?”
“Candidly—since you ask my opinion—it was the most unpromising investment I could have suggested.”
Big Sam was so far nettled by my judgment on his hypothetical case that he dropped his diplomatic pretense, and said:
“A judgment after the fact, Mr. Hampden, when it is easy to be wise. Yet even now it is not difficult to see that bitterness and division have been sown among the enemies of my race. Action against us has been postponed for years—perhaps for all time. The mass of your people—especially beyond the mountains—are shocked at the excesses of the past week, and will oppose the demands made by your disorderly classes. Like all the weak, we must conquer by the division of those who could harm us. The division has come.”
“I think you mistake its extent,” I said. “The riots may have roused a prejudice in the Eastern States against the demand for the exclusion of your race. But it is only a temporary check. It will not be five years before there is a law on the statute books forbidding the coming of your people.”
Big Sam looked over my head, with the far-away gaze of one who was looking to the distant future. Then he sighed and spoke:
“Perhaps you are right. You must understand the temper of your people much better than I. But it will be as it will. If we are permitted to come unchecked, we shall build up on this coast a great Chinese State that will change the face of the world. We are adaptable, as you know. We are arming ourselves with the methods and machinery of western progress. Put a state of ten million of Chinese on this coast, and from this vantage point we shall break down the barriers between Orient and Occident, put the productive forces of the West into the hands of my people in China, add what is best in your life to the superior qualities of our institutions, and make China the leader instead of the hermit of the world.”
Big Sam’s face was calm with the self-possession of his race, as he described this vision, but his eyes glowed with magnetic fire, and his voice thrilled with enthusiasm as he spoke.
“A magnificent plan—but there are difficulties,” I said.
“Difficulties, yes—but only such as the intellect and energy of man may overcome. The old order in China is tottering to its fall. The dynasty of usurpers is held in place only by the arm of the foreigner. Its strength is typified by its head—a child and a woman!” Big Sam spoke thus of the baby Emperor and the Empress Dowager, with an infinite scorn. “It needs but the man with the resources behind him to rouse China to herself—to show to the nations a new and magnificent civilization—more splendid and solid than the world has ever seen.”
I was stirred to admiration at his dream.
“I believe,” I said heartily, “that you are the man to do it, if it could be done by a single man. But I warn you now that the white race will never surrender California, except at the compulsion of arms.”
Big Sam sighed again, but his face retained its impassive calm.
“In that case I shall live and die a Chinese merchant—Big Sam, the King of Chinatown, as your people are kind enough to call me.”
There was something of pathos in this descent from the heights of his great projects. He had given me a glimpse of the purposes nearest his heart, had shown me something of the real man that lay behind the disguise of his impassive face and every-day pursuits. But he closed the door of his soul with a sudden contraction of his eyes, and said in a matter-of-fact tone:
“And now are you tired of the girl I intrusted to you? Is she still a convalescent?”
“Why, we have no thought of surrendering her,” I said, in some surprise that he should renew the subject. “She is improving rapidly. She is able to walk about, and is considered a most tractable patient.”
“That is very satisfactory,” began Big Sam, but I interrupted:
“There is only one question agitating us about her. She seems so much above the women of your race we see about us that we should like to know something of her history.”
Big Sam bowed courteously, as though I had offered him a compliment.
“I see that you are looking for a romance,” he said. “Well, possibly I can gratify you. I had supposed myself that she sprang from a low parentage—or at highest from the shopkeeper class—though, as you say, she seems much above the Chinese women you are privileged to see. She came hither from an orphan home in Canton, and was said to be of unknown parentage. I have made further inquiries, however, and have just received a letter from a friend in Canton with a few details that may please you. The girl is the daughter of a mandarin, descended from a long line of scholars. But her father, mother, brothers and all known relatives perished in the plague, their fortune was confiscated, and the girl—then an infant—was turned over to the keeping of the orphanage.”
“That is very interesting. Is there any chance of establishing her rights?”
“Not the slightest. But you will be glad to hear that I shall soon have a home for her among her own people.” Big Sam was, as usual, coming to his point by indirection.
“I trust it is one you can recommend,” I said bluntly.
“It is one that exactly fills the conditions under which the girl was taken,” he responded dryly. “A reputable man of her own race—a merchant—wishes to make her his wife.”
“He is well-to-do, I assume.”
“Naturally, or he would not be able to meet the demands of the tongs.”
“Has he another wife?” I asked, with mistrust of the Chinese domestic arrangements.
“None.”
“In that case, I think he may be ready to offer his credentials in something less than a month.”
“He will find it difficult to repress his impatience,” said Big Sam gravely. “He is a widower.”
And with a bow of ceremony he dismissed me.