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Title: Alleys of Darkness
Author: Robert E. Howard
A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook
eBook No.: 0609051.txt
Language: English
Date first posted: December 2006
Date most recently updated: December 2006
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Alleys of Darkness
Robert E. Howard
WHEN THE GONG ended my fight with Kid Leary in the Sweet Dreams
Fight Club, Singapore, I was tired but contented. The first seven
rounds had been close, but the last three I’d plastered the Kid all
over the ring, though I hadn’t knocked him out like I’d did in
Shanghai some months before, when I flattened him in the twelfth
round. The scrap in Singapore was just for ten; another round and I’d
had him.
But anyway, I’d shaded him so thoroughly I knowed I’d justified
the experts which had made me a three to one favorite. The crowd was
applauding wildly, the referee was approaching, and I stepped forward
and held out my glove hand—when to my utter dumfoundment, he brushed
past me and lifted the glove of the groggy and bloody Kid Leary!
A instant’s silence reigned, shattered by a nerve-racking scream
from the ringside. The referee, Jed Whithers, released Leary, who
collapsed into the rosin, and Whithers ducked through the ropes like a
rabbit. The crowd riz bellowing, and recovering my frozen wits, I gave
vent to lurid langwidge and plunged outa the ring in pursuit of
Whithers. The fans was screaming mad, smashing benches, tearing the
ropes offa the ring and demanding the whereabouts of Whithers, so’s
they could hang him to the rafters. But he had disappeared, and the
maddened crowd raged in vain.
I found my way dazedly to my dressing-room, where I set down on a
table and tried to recover from the shock. Bill O’Brien and the rest
of the crew was there, frothing at the mouth, each having sunk his
entire wad on me. I considered going into Leary’s dressing-room and
beating him up again, but decided he’d had nothing to do with the
crooked decision. He was just as surprised as me when Whithers
declared him winner.
Whilst I was trying to pull on my clothes, hindered more’n helped
by my raging shipmates, whose langwidge was getting more appalling
every instant, a stocky bewhiskered figger come busting through the
mob, and done a fantastic dance in front of me. It was the Old Man,
with licker on his breath and tears in his eyes.
“I’m rooint!” he howled. “I’m a doomed man! Oh, to think as I’ve
warmed a sarpint in my boozum! Dennis Dorgan, this here’s the last
straw!”
“Aw, pipe down!” snarled Bill O’Brien. “It wasn’t Denny’s fault.
It was that dashety triple-blank thief of a referee—”
“To think of goin’ on the beach at my age!” screamed the Old Man,
wringing the salt water outa his whiskers. He fell down on a bench and
wept at the top of his voice. “A thousand bucks I lost—every cent I
could rake, scrape and borrer!” he bawled.
“Aw, well, you still got your ship,” somebody said impatiently.
“That’s just it!” the Old Man wailed. “That thousand bucks was
dough owed them old pirates, McGregor, McClune & McKile. Part of what
I owe, I mean. They agreed to accept a thousand as part payment, and
gimme more time to raise the rest. Now it’s gone, and they’ll take the
ship! They’ll take the Python! All I got in the world! Them old
sharks ain’t got no more heart than a Malay pirate. I’m rooint!”
The crew fell silent at that, and I said: “Why’d you bet all that
dough?”
“I was lickered up,” he wept. “I got no sense when I’m full. Old
Cap’n Donnelly, and McVey and them got to raggin’ me, and the first
thing I knowed, I’d bet ‘em the thousand, givin’ heavy odds. Now I’m
rooint!”
He throwed back his head and bellered like a walrus with the
belly-ache.
I just give a dismal groan and sunk my head in my hands, too
despondent to say nothing. The crew bust forth in curses against
Whithers, and sallied forth to search further for him, hauling the Old
Man along with them, still voicing his woes in a voice like a
steamboat whistle.
PRESENTLY I RIZ with a sigh and hauled on my duds. They was no
sound outside. Apparently I was alone in the building except for
Spike, my white bulldog. All at once I noticed him smelling of a
closed locker. He whined, scratched at it, and growled. With a sudden
suspicion I strode over and jerked open the door. Inside I seen a
huddled figger. I jerked it rudely forth and set it upright. It was
Jed Whithers. He was pale and shaking, and he had cobwebs in his hair.
He kind a cringed, evidently expecting me to bust into loud cusses.
For once I was too mad for that. I was probably as pale as he was, and
his eyes dilated like he seen murder in mine.
“Jed Whithers,” I said, shoving him up against the wall with one
hand whilst I knotted the other’n into a mallet, “this is one time in
my life when I’m in the mood for killin’.”
“For God’s sake, Dorgan,” he gurgled, “you can’t murder me!”
“Can you think of any reason why I shouldn’t put you in a wheel-chair for the rest of your life?” I demanded. “You’ve rooint my
friends and all the fans which bet on me, lost my skipper his ship—”
“Don’t hit me, Dorgan!” he begged, grabbing my wrist with shaking
fingers. “I had to do it; honest to God, Sailor, I had to do it! I
know you won—won by a mile. But it was the only thing I could do!”
“What you mean?” I demanded suspiciously.
“Lemme sit down!” he gasped.
I reluctantly let go of him, and he slumped down onto a near-by
bench. He sat there and shook, and mopped the sweat offa his face. He
was trembling all over.
“Are the customers all gone?” he asked.
“Ain’t nobody here but me and my man-eatin’ bulldog,” I answered
grimly, standing over him. “Go on—spill what you got to say before I
start varnishin’ the floor with you.”
“I was forced to it, Sailor,” he said. “There’s a man who has a
hold on me.”
“What you mean, a hold?” I asked suspiciously.
“I mean, he’s got me in a spot,” he said. “I have to do like he
says. It ain’t myself I have to think of—Dorgan, I’m goin’ to trust
you. You got the name of bein’ a square shooter. I’m goin’ to tell you
the whole thing.
“Sailor, I got a sister named Constance, a beautiful girl,
innocent as a newborn lamb. She trusted a man, Sailor, a dirty, slimy
snake in human form. He tricked her into signin’ a document—Dorgan,
that paper was a confession of a crime he’d committed himself!”
Whithers here broke down and sobbed with his face in his hands. I
shuffled my feet uncertainly, beginning to realize they was always
more’n one side to any question.
He raised up suddenly and said: “Since then, that man’s been
holdin’ that faked confession over me and her like a club. He’s forced
me to do his filthy biddin’ time and again. I’m a honest man by
nature, Sailor, but to protect my little sister”—he kinda choked for
a instant—“I’ve stooped to low deeds. Like this tonight. This man was
bettin’ heavy on Leary, gettin’ big odds—”
“Somebody sure was,” I muttered. “Lots of Leary money in sight.”
“Sure!” exclaimed Whithers eagerly. “That was it; he made me throw
the fight to Leary, the dirty rat, to protect his bets.”
I begun to feel new wrath rise in my gigantic breast.
“You mean this low-down polecat has been blackmailin’ you on
account of the hold he’s got over your sister?” I demanded.
“Exactly,” he said, dropping his face in his hands. “With that
paper he can send Constance to prison, if he takes the notion.”
“I never heered of such infermy,” I growled. “Whyn’t you bust him
on the jaw and take that confession away from him?”
“I ain’t no fightin’ man,” said Whithers. “He’s too big for me. I
wouldn’t have a chance.”
“Well, I would,” I said. “Listen, Whithers, buck up and quit
cryin’. I’m goin’ to help you.”
His head jerked up and he stared at me kinda wild-eyed.
“You mean you’ll help me get that paper?”
“You bet!” I retorted. “I ain’t the man to stand by and let no
innercent girl be persecuted. Besides, this mess tonight is his
fault.”
Whithers just set there for a second, and I thought I seen a slow
smile start to spread over his lips, but I mighta been mistook,
because he wasn’t grinning when he held out his hand and said
tremulously: “Dorgan, you’re all they say you are!”
A remark like that ain’t necessarily a compliment; some of the
things said about me ain’t flattering; but I took it in the spirit in
which it seemed to be give, and I said: “Now tell me, who is this
rat?”
He glanced nervously around, then whispered: “Ace Bissett!”
I grunted in surprize. “The devil you say! I’d never of thought
it.”
“He’s a fiend in human form,” said Whithers bitterly. “What’s your
plan?”
“Why,” I said, “I’ll go to his Diamond Palace and demand the
confession. If he don’t give it to me, I’ll maul him and take it away
from him.”
“You’ll get shot up,” said Whithers. “Bissett is a bad man to fool
with. Listen, I got a plan. If we can get him to a certain house I
know about, we can search him for the paper. He carries it around with
him, though I don’t know just where. Here’s my plan—”
I listened attentively, and as a result, perhaps a hour later I
was heading through the narrer streets with Spike, driving a closed
car which Whithers had produced kinda mysteriously. Whithers wasn’t
with me; he was gone to prepare the place where I was to bring Bissett
to.
I driv up the alley behind Ace’s big new saloon and gambling-hall,
the Diamond Palace, and stopped the car near a back door. It was a
very high-class joint. Bissett was friends with wealthy sportsmen,
officials, and other swells. He was what they call a soldier of
fortune, and he’d been everything, everywhere—aviator, explorer, big
game hunter, officer in
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