Shot With Crimson. George Barr McCutcheon
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Shot With Crimson - George Barr McCutcheon страница 3
Название: Shot With Crimson
Автор: George Barr McCutcheon
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 4064066200374
isbn:
Carstairs tossed off the contents of the glass, and reached out his hand for the check. Zimmerlein already had it in his fingers.
'“I'll sign it, old chap,” he said. “Give me your pencil, Peter.”
“None of that, Zimmie. I ordered the—”
“Run along, old man, your wife—He's coming, Mrs. Carstairs,” called out Zimmerlein.
As Carstairs turned away, Zimmerlein scratched his name across the check, and handed it back to the steward.
“Under no circumstances are you to call up Bushleigh,” fell in low, distinct tones from his lips. “Do you understand?”
Peter's hand shook. His face was livid.
“Yes, sir,” he muttered. “What shall I say to Mr. Carstairs?”
“Say that no one answers,” said the other, and walked away.
The company had recovered its collective and individual power of speech. Every one was talking,—loudly, excitedly, and in some cases violently. Some were excoriating the Germans, others were bitterly criticizing the Government for its over-tenderness, and still others were blaming themselves for not taking the law in their own hands and making short work of the “soap-boxers,” the “pacifists,” and the “obstructionists.” Little Mr. Cribbs was the most violent of them all. He was for organizing the old-time Vigilantes, once so efficacious in the Far West, and equipping them with guns and ropes and plenty of tar and feathers.
“Nothing would please me more than to lead such a gang,” he proclaimed. “Lead 'em right into these foul nests where——What's that, Judge?”
“I repeat—How old are you, Cribbs?”
“Oh, I guess I'm old enough to shoot a gun, or pull a rope or carry a bucket of tar,” retorted the young man.
“I'll put it the other way. How young are you?”
“I'm twenty-nine.”
“I see. And how did you escape the draft?”
“They haven't reached my number yet,” said Mr. Cribbs, with dignity.
“Well, that's good. There's still hope,” said the Judge, grimly. “They need just such fire-eaters as you over there in France with Pershing.”
Carstairs turned to Zimmerlein, who was being helped into his fur-coat by one of the attendants.
“Can't we take you to the city, Zimmerlein? There is plenty of room in the car.”
“No, thank you, Carstairs. I'm going in by train. Mr. and Mrs. Prior will drop me at the station. Good night. Oh, here's Peter. What did you hear?”
“I could get no answer, Mr. Zimmerlein,” said the steward steadily. “Wires may be down, sir.”
“Good night, Mrs. Carstairs.” Zimmerlein held out his hand. She hesitated an instant, and then took it. Her gaze was fixed, as if fascinated, on his dark, steady eyes.
CHAPTER II
HOARSE, raucous-voiced newsboys were crying the “extras” soon after midnight. They were doing a thriving business. The destruction of the great Reynolds plant, more spectacular and more appalling than any previous deed perpetrated by the secret enemies of the American people, was to drive even the most sanguine and indifferent citizen to a full realizaton of the peril that stalked him and his fellow-man throughout the land. Complacent security was at last to sustain a shock it could not afford to scorn. Up there in the hills of Jersey a bombardment had taken place that rivalled in violence, if not in human toll, the most vivid descriptions of shell-carnage on the dripping fronts of France.
Huge but vague headlines screamed into the faces of quick-breathing men and wide-eyed women the first details of the great disaster across the River.
Night-farers, threading the streets, paused in their round of pleasure to gulp down the bitter thing that came up into their throats—a sick thing called Fear. From nearly every doorway in the city, some one issued forth, bleak-eyed and anxious, to hail the scurrying newsboys. The distant roar of the shells had roused the millions in Manhattan; windows rattled, the frailer dwellings rocked on thin foundations. It was not until the clash of heavy artillery swept up to the city on the wind from the west that the serene, contemptuous denizens of the greatest city in the world cast off their mask of indifference and rose as one person to ask the vital question: Are the U-Boats in the Harbour at last?
An elderly man, two women, and a sallow-faced man of thirty sat by the windows at the top of a lofty apartment building on the Upper West Side. For an hour they had been sitting there, listening, and looking always to the west, out over the dark and sombre Hudson. Father, mother, daughter and son. The first explosion jarred the great building in which they were securely housed.
“Ah!” sighed the old man, and it was a sigh of relief, of satisfaction. The others turned to him and smiled for the first time in hours. The tension was over.
Farther down-town two men in one of the big hotels silently shook hands, bade each other a friendly good-night for the benefit of chance observers, and went off to bed. The waiting was over.
Two night watchmen met in front of one of the biggest office buildings in New York, within hearing of the bells of Trinity and almost within sound of the sobbing waters of the Bay. Their faces, rendered almost invisible behind the great collars that protected them from the shrill winds coming up the canyons from the sea, were tense and drawn and white, but their eyes glittered brightly, fiercely, in the darkness. They too had been waiting.
In a dingy apartment in Harlem, three shifty-eyed, nervous men, and a pallid, tired, frightened woman rose suddenly from the lethargy of suspense and grinned evilly, not at each other but at the rattling, dilapidated window looking westward across the sagging roofs of the squalid district. One of the men stretched forth a quivering hand and, with a hoarse laugh of exultation, seized in his fingers a strange, crudely shaped metallic object that stood on the table nearby. He lifted it to his lips and kissed it! Then he put it down, carefully, gingerly,—with something like fear in his eyes. Scraps of tin, pieces of iron and steel, strands of wire, wads of cotton and waste, and an odd assortment of tools littered the table. Harmless appearing cans, and bottles, and dirty packages, with a mortar and pestle, a small chemist's scales, funnels and graduates stood in innocent array along a shelf attached to the wall, guarded,—so it seemed,—by sinister looking tubes and retorts.
The woman, her eyes gleaming with a malevolent joy that contrasted strangely with the dread that had been in them a moment before, lifted her clenched hands and hissed out a single word:
“Christ!”
They, too, had been waiting.
Thousands there were in the great city whose eyes glistened that night,—thousands who had not been waiting, for they knew nothing of the secret that lay secure and safe in the breasts of the few who were allowed to strike. Thousands who СКАЧАТЬ