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 it”
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 mind”
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!”