The Indian Drum, William MacHarg [e reader pdf best .TXT] 📗

I want drink right away. Tell Ben Corvet I want my thousan' dollar...!"

Constance turned swiftly to her maid. "Go out to the car and wait for me," she commanded.

Luke's muffled, heavy voice went on; moments while he fought for breath interrupted it.

"You hear me, you damn Injin! ... You go tell Ben Corvet I want my thousan' dollars, or I make it two nex' time! You hear me; you go tell Ben Corvet.... You let me go, you damn Injin!"...

Through the doorway to the library they could see the doctor force Luke back upon the couch; Luke fought him furiously; then, suddenly as he had stirred to strength and fury, Luke collapsed again. His voice went on a moment more, rapidly growing weaker:

"You tell Ben Corvet I want my money, or I'll tell. He knows what I'll tell.... You don't know, you Injin devil.... Ben Corvet knows, and I know.... Tell him I'll tell ... I'll tell ... I'll tell!" The threatening voice stopped suddenly.

Constance, very pale, again faced Alan. "Of course, I understand," she said. "Uncle Benny has been paying blackmail to this man. For years, perhaps...." She repeated the word after an instant, in a frightened voice, "Blackmail!"

"Won't you please go, Miss Sherrill?" Alan urged her. "It was good of you to come; but you mustn't stay now. He's—he's dying, of course."

She seated herself upon a chair. "I'm going to stay with you," she said simply. It was not, she knew, to share the waiting for the man in the next room to die; in that, of itself, there could be nothing for him to feel. It was to be with him while realization which had come to her was settling upon him too—realization of what this meant to him. He was realizing that, she thought; he had realized it; it made him, at moments, forget her while, listening for sounds from the other room, he paced back and forth beside the table or stood staring away, clinging to the portières. He left her presently, and went across the hall to the doctor. The man on the couch had stirred as though to start up again; the voice began once more, but now its words were wholly indistinguishable, meaningless, incoherent. They stopped, and Luke lay still; the doctor—Alan was helping him now—arranged a quite inert form upon the couch. The doctor bent over him.

"Is he dead?" Constance heard Alan ask.

"Not yet," the doctor answered; "but it won't be long, now."

"There's nothing you can do for him?"

The doctor shook his head.

"There's nothing you can do to make him talk—bring him to himself enough so that he will tell what he keeps threatening to tell?"

The doctor shrugged. "How many times, do you suppose, he's been drunk and still not told? Concealment is his established habit now. It's an inhibition; even in wandering, he stops short of actually telling anything."

"He came here—" Alan told briefly to the doctor the circumstances of the man's coming. The doctor moved back from the couch to a chair and sat down.

"I'll wait, of course," he said, "until it's over." He seemed to want to say something else, and after a moment he came out with it. "You needn't be afraid of my talking outside ... professional secrecy, of course."

Alan came back to Constance. Outside, the gray of dusk was spreading, and within the house it had grown dark; Constance heard the doctor turn on a light, and the shadowy glow of a desk lamp came from the library. Alan walked to and fro with uneven steps; he did not speak to her, nor she to him. It was very quiet in the library; she could not even hear Luke's breathing now. Then she heard the doctor moving; Alan went to the light and switched it on, as the doctor came out to them.

"It's over," he said to Alan. "There's a law covers these cases; you may not be familiar with it. I'll make out the death certificate—pneumonia and a weak heart with alcoholism. But the police have to be notified at once; you have no choice as to that. I'll look after those things for you, if you want."

"Thank you; if you will." Alan went with the doctor to the door and saw him drive away. Returning, he drew the library portières; then, coming back to Constance, he picked up her muff and collar from the chair where she had thrown them, and held them out to her.

"You'll go now, Miss Sherrill," he said. "Indeed, you mustn't stay here—your car's still waiting, and—you mustn't stay here ... in this house!"

He was standing, waiting to open the door for her, almost where he had halted on that morning, a few weeks ago, when he had first come to the house in answer to Benjamin Corvet's summons; and she was where she had stood to receive him. Memory of how he had looked then—eager, trembling a little with excitement, expecting only to find his father and happiness—came to her; and as it contrasted with the way she saw him now, she choked queerly as she tried to speak. He was very white, but quite controlled; lines not upon his face before had come there.

"Won't you come over home with me," she said, "and wait for father there till we can think this thing out together?"

Her sweetness almost broke him down. "This ... together! Think this out! Oh, it's plain enough, isn't it? For years—for as long as Wassaquam has been here, my father has been seeing that man and paying blackmail to him twice a year, at least! He lived in that man's power. He kept money in the house for him always! It wasn't anything imaginary that hung over my father—or anything created in his own mind. It was something real—real; it was disgrace—disgrace and worse—something he deserved; and that he fought with blackmail money, like a coward! Dishonor—cowardice—blackmail!"

She drew a little nearer to him. "You didn't want me to know," she said. "You tried to put me off when I called you on the telephone; and—when I came here, you wanted me to go away before I heard. Why didn't you want me to know? If he was your father, wasn't he our—friend? Mine and my father's? You must let us help you."

As she approached, he had drawn back from her. "No; this is mine!" he denied her. "Not yours or your father's. You have nothing to do with this. Didn't he try in little cowardly ways to keep you out of it? But he couldn't do that; your friendship meant too much to him; he couldn't keep away from you. But I can—I can do that! You must go out of this house; you must never come in here again!"

Her eyes filled, as she watched him; never had she liked him so much as now, as he moved to open the door for her.

"I thought," he said almost wistfully, "it seemed to me that, whatever he had done, it must have been mostly against me. His leaving everything to me seemed to mean that I was the one that he had wronged, and that he was trying to make it up to me. But it isn't that; it can't be that! It is something much worse than that! ... Oh, I'm glad I haven't used much of his money! Hardly any—not more than I can give back! It wasn't the money and the house he left me that mattered; what he really left me was just this ... dishonor, shame..."

The doorbell rang, and Alan turned to the door and threw it open. In the dusk the figure of the man outside was not at all recognizable; but as he entered with heavy and deliberate steps, passing Alan without greeting and going straight to Constance, Alan saw by the light in the hall that it was Spearman.

"What's up?" Spearman asked. "They tried to get your father at the office and then me, but neither of us was there. They got me afterwards at the club. They said you'd come over here; but that must have been more than two hours ago."

His gaze went on past her to the drawn hangings of the room to the right; and he seemed to appreciate their significance; for his face whitened under its tan, and an odd hush came suddenly upon him.

"Is it Ben, Connie?" he whispered. "Ben ... come back?"

He drew the curtains partly open. The light in the library had been extinguished, and the light that came from the hall swayed about the room with the movement of the curtains and gave a momentary semblance of life to the face of the man upon the couch. Spearman drew the curtains quickly together again, still holding to them and seeming for an instant to cling to them; then he shook himself together, threw the curtains wide apart, and strode into the room. He switched on the light and went directly to the couch; Alan followed him.

"He's—dead?"

"Who is he?" Alan demanded.

Spearman seemed to satisfy himself first as to the answer to his question. "How should I know who he is?" he asked. "There used to be a wheelsman on the Martha Corvet years ago who looked like him; or looked like what this fellow may have looked like once. I can't be sure."

He turned to Constance. "You're going home, Connie? I'll see you over there. I'll come back about this afterward, Conrad."

Alan followed them to the door and closed it after them. He spread the blankets over Luke. Luke's coats, which Alan had removed, lay upon a chair, and he looked them over for marks of identification; the mackinaw bore the label of a dealer in Manitowoc—wherever that might be; Alan did not know. A side pocket produced an old briar: there was nothing else. Then Alan walked restlessly about, awaiting Spearman. Spearman, he believed, knew this man; Spearman had not even ventured upon modified denial until he was certain that the man was dead; and then he had answered so as not to commit himself, pending learning from Constance what Luke had told.

But Luke had said nothing about Spearman. It had been Corvet, and Corvet alone, of whom Luke had spoken; it was Corvet whom he had accused; it was Corvet who had given him money. Was it conceivable, then, that there had been two such events in Corvet's life? That one of these events concerned the Miwaka and Spearman and some one—some one "with a bullet hole above his eye"—who had "got" Corvet; and that the other event had concerned Luke and something else? It was not conceivable, Alan was sure; it was all one thing. If Corvet had had to do with the Miwaka, then Luke had had to do with it too. And Spearman? But if Spearman had been involved in that guilty thing, had not Luke known it? Then why had not Luke mentioned Spearman? Or had Spearman not been really involved? Had it been, perhaps, only evidence of knowledge of what Corvet had done that Spearman had tried to discover and destroy?

Alan went to the door and opened it, as he heard Spearman upon the steps again. Spearman waited only until the door had been reclosed behind him.

"Well, Conrad, what was the idea of bringing Miss Sherrill into this?"

"I didn't bring her in; I tried the best I could to keep her out."

"Out of what—exactly?"

"You know better than I do. You know exactly what it is. You know that man, Spearman; you know what he came here for. I don't mean money; I mean you know why he came here for money, and why he got it. I tried, as well as I could, to make him tell me; but he wouldn't do it. There's disgrace of some sort here, of course—disgrace that involves my father and, I think, you too. If you're not guilty with my father, you'll help me now; if you are guilty, then, at least, your refusal to help