Sherlock Holmes: Complete Novels & Stories in One Volume. Arthur Conan Doyle

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СКАЧАТЬ "You go and see him, my lad," said he as he took his leave. "It's not the police but you that he'll hate if you don't! Now, take a friend's advice and go at once!"

      It chanced that on the same evening McMurdo had another more pressing interview which urged him in the same direction. It may have been that his attentions to Ettie had been more evident than before, or that they had gradually obtruded themselves into the slow mind of his good German host; but, whatever the cause, the boarding-house keeper beckoned the young man into his private room and started on the subject without any circumlocution.

      "It seems to me, mister," said he, "that you are gettin' set on my Ettie. Ain't that so, or am I wrong?"

      "Yes, that is so," the young man answered.

      "Vell, I vant to tell you right now that it ain't no manner of use. There's someone slipped in afore you."

      "She told me so."

      "Vell, you can lay that she told you truth. But did she tell you who it vas?"

      "No, I asked her; but she wouldn't tell."

      "I dare say not, the leetle baggage! Perhaps she did not vish to frighten you avay."

      "Frighten!" McMurdo was on fire in a moment.

      "Ah, yes, my friend! You need not be ashamed to be frightened of him. It is Teddy Baldwin."

      "And who the devil is he?"

      "He is a boss of Scowrers."

      "Scowrers! I've heard of them before. It's Scowrers here and Scowrers there, and always in a whisper! What are you all afraid of? Who are the Scowrers?"

      The boarding-house keeper instinctively sank his voice, as everyone did who talked about that terrible society. "The Scowrers," said he, "are the Eminent Order of Freemen!"

      The young man stared. "Why, I am a member of that order myself."

      "You! I vould never have had you in my house if I had known it—not if you vere to pay me a hundred dollar a week."

      "What's wrong with the order? It's for charity and good fellowship. The rules say so."

      "Maybe in some places. Not here!"

      "What is it here?"

      "It's a murder society, that's vat it is."

      McMurdo laughed incredulously. "How can you prove that?" he asked.

      "Prove it! Are there not fifty murders to prove it? Vat about Milman and Van Shorst, and the Nicholson family, and old Mr. Hyam, and little Billy James, and the others? Prove it! Is there a man or a voman in this valley vat does not know it?"

      "See here!" said McMurdo earnestly. "I want you to take back what you've said, or else make it good. One or the other you must do before I quit this room. Put yourself in my place. Here am I, a stranger in the town. I belong to a society that I know only as an innocent one. You'll find it through the length and breadth of the States, but always as an innocent one. Now, when I am counting upon joining it here, you tell me that it is the same as a murder society called the Scowrers. I guess you owe me either an apology or else an explanation, Mr. Shafter."

      "I can but tell you vat the whole vorld knows, mister. The bosses of the one are the bosses of the other. If you offend the one, it is the other vat vill strike you. We have proved it too often."

      "That's just gossip—I want proof!" said McMurdo.

      "If you live here long you vill get your proof. But I forget that you are yourself one of them. You vill soon be as bad as the rest. But you vill find other lodgings, mister. I cannot have you here. Is it not bad enough that one of these people come courting my Ettie, and that I dare not turn him down, but that I should have another for my boarder? Yes, indeed, you shall not sleep here after to-night!"

      McMurdo found himself under sentence of banishment both from his comfortable quarters and from the girl whom he loved. He found her alone in the sitting-room that same evening, and he poured his troubles into her ear.

      "Sure, your father is after giving me notice," he said. "It's little I would care if it was just my room, but indeed, Ettie, though it's only a week that I've known you, you are the very breath of life to me, and I can't live without you!"

      "Oh, hush, Mr. McMurdo, don't speak so!" said the girl. "I have told you, have I not, that you are too late? There is another, and if I have not promised to marry him at once, at least I can promise no one else."

      "Suppose I had been first, Ettie, would I have had a chance?"

      The girl sank her face into her hands. "I wish to heaven that you had been first!" she sobbed.

      McMurdo was down on his knees before her in an instant. "For God's sake, Ettie, let it stand at that!" he cried. "Will you ruin your life and my own for the sake of this promise? Follow your heart, acushla! 'Tis a safer guide than any promise before you knew what it was that you were saying."

      He had seized Ettie's white hand between his own strong brown ones.

      "Say that you will be mine, and we will face it out together!"

      "Not here?"

      "Yes, here."

      "No, no, Jack!" His arms were round her now. "It could not be here. Could you take me away?"

      A struggle passed for a moment over McMurdo's face; but it ended by setting like granite. "No, here," he said. "I'll hold you against the world, Ettie, right here where we are!"

      "Why should we not leave together?"

      "No, Ettie, I can't leave here."

      "But why?"

      "I'd never hold my head up again if I felt that I had been driven out. Besides, what is there to be afraid of? Are we not free folks in a free country? If you love me, and I you, who will dare to come between?"

      "You don't know, Jack. You've been here too short a time. You don't know this Baldwin. You don't know McGinty and his Scowrers."

      "No, I don't know them, and I don't fear them, and I don't believe in them!" said McMurdo. "I've lived among rough men, my darling, and instead of fearing them it has always ended that they have feared me—always, Ettie. It's mad on the face of it! If these men, as your father says, have done crime after crime in the valley, and if everyone knows them by name, how comes it that none are brought to justice? You answer me that, Ettie!"

      "Because no witness dares to appear against them. He would not live a month if he did. Also because they have always their own men to swear that the accused one was far from the scene of the crime. But surely, Jack, you must have read all this. I had understood that every paper in the United States was writing about it."

      "Well, I have read something, it is true; but I had thought it was a story. Maybe these men have some reason in what they do. Maybe they are wronged and have no other way to help themselves."

      "Oh, Jack, don't let me hear you speak so! That is how he speaks—the other one!"

      "Baldwin—he speaks like that, does he?"

      "And СКАЧАТЬ