Beyond the Wall

The first of a remarkable series of underworld stories by the author of “Thirst” and “The Harvest of the Deep.” Few other writers have Mr. Leverage’s keen sense of drama and ability to describe swift action clearly.

Chester Fay, a slender, keen-eyed, gray-haired young man,—clad in prison shoddy, serving life and fifteen years at Rockglen,—glanced through the rain and over the wall to where a green-cloaked hill loomed. “Charley,” he whispered, “we might as well try it this afternoon. Are you game?” Charley O’Mara, sixty-five years old, bent, broken, and bitter at the law, coughed a warning. He raised his pick and started digging around a flower-bed.

A guard in a heavy raincoat, carrying a dripping rifle, came toward the two prisoners. He stopped a few feet away from Fay.

“Quit that talkin’!” he snarled. “I’ll chalk you in if I see any more of it!”

Fay did not answer the guard. He spaded the earth, dug deep, tossed the shovelfuls to one side and waited until the guard had strolled within the shelter of a low shed.

“Charley!” he continued without moving his lips. “Listen, old pal. See that motortruck near the shed?”

“I see it, Chester.”

“See where the screw is standing?”

“He’s watching us.”

“And I’m watching him, Charley. We can beat this stir in an hour. Do you want to try it?”

“How you going to do it?”

“Will you follow me?”

“Yes, pal.”

“Wait till it gets a little darker. Then we’ll take the chance.”

The prison guard stood with his rifle lowered to the moist earth beneath the shed. His eyes ranged from the two convicts to the wall upon which were other guards sheltered in tiny guardhouses. He yawned and drowsed, standing.

Fay worked in a slow circle. He had seen the auto-truck come into the prison yard at noon. It was part of the road-gang’s outfit. There was no road-work that day, on account of the rain. The inmate driver had gone into the cellhouse.

Old Charley O’Mara let his pick dig into the earth with feeble strokes. He paused at times. There was that to Fay’s actions which presaged much. The gray-haired young man was gradually closing in on the drowsing guard. He was like a lean panther getting ready for a spring.

The attack came with lightninglike suddenness. Fay dropped his shovel, crossed the earth, struck the guard a short-arm uppercut and bore him down to earth, where he smothered his cries with a flap of the raincoat.

Charley O’Mara came limping toward the shed.

“Get a rope!” snapped Fay. “I don’t want to croak him.”

“Croakin’s too good for the likes of him, Chester.”

“Get a rope. We’ve got about fifteen minutes to work in. We ought to be beyond the wall by then.”

Fay worked quickly. He took the rope the old convict found, and trussed the guard, after taking off the raincoat. He made sure that the man would make no outcry. He fastened a stick in his mouth and tied it behind his head. He rose and glanced through the down-pouring rain.

“I knocked him out,” he said. “Now, Charley, put on that raincoat, take the cap and rifle and walk slowly toward the auto-truck. Get in the front. Stand up like a guard.”

“But they might know me!”

“They wont know you. It’s raining. The screws on the wall will think you are taking the truck out, by order of the warden. I’ll drive. An inmate always drives.”

The guard who sat huddled in the little house which loomed over the great gate at Rockglen rose, opened a small window and glanced out as he heard the motortruck mounting the grade from the prison yard. He saw what he thought was the figure of a guard standing by a convict. The convict crouched with partly hidden face over the steering-wheel.

“All right!” shouted Charley O’Mara, motioning with his rifle toward the closed gate.

The guard squinted for a second time. He caught, through the rain, the gleam of brass on the cap Charley wore. He saw the rifle. He reached and pulled at a lever. The gate slowly opened, first to a crack, then wide. Fay pressed forward the clutch pedal, shifted from neutral to first speed, stepped on the accelerator and let the clutch pedal up gently.

The truck mounted the top of the grade, churned through the gate, turned in front of the warden’s house and took the incline which led over the hill from Rockglen.

All might have gone well for the convicts had it not been for the rain. Water had formed in deep pools along the road. Into these pools Fay guided the clumsy truck. He heard the engine miss an explosion. A sputter followed. The truck slowed. An explosion sounded in the muffler. The insulation wires grounded and short-circuited. The truck stopped.

Fay sprang from the driver’s seat and opened the hood. He attempted to find the trouble. A dangling wire, touching the engine’s frame, was sodden with water.

“No go!” he said to Charley. “Come on! We’ll leave the truck and take to the woods. That means a chase as soon as the big whistle blows.”

The two convicts were crossing an open field when they heard the first menacing blasts from the prison siren. They ran for shelter. A dog barked. A farmhand came through the underbrush. He stood watching.

“Keep your nerve!” said Fay. “You’ve got the rifle. Night is coming on. Follow me.”

The trail led away from Rockglen. Fay sensed the general direction. He attempted to gain a railroad junction where a freight could be taken for Chicago. He was headed off by a motorcar load of prison guards. He saw the danger in time.

“To the right,” he whispered to O’Mara. “Follow me. Don’t cave, pal.”

“I’m all in,” sobbed the old convict.

Fay braced his arm beneath Charlie’s elbow. He took the rifle. They crossed a swollen brook, broke through the hedge of a vast estate and came suddenly upon a trio of watchmen who had been alarmed by the blowing of the prison’s siren.

The fight that followed was entirely onesided. Fay pumped lead in the general direction of the watchmen. He was answered by a salvo. Crimson cones splashed the night. Bullets whined. A shout sounded far away. Other watchmen and constables were surrounding the estate.

Old Charley O’Mara, crouching in the shelter of a hawthorn clump, coughed, rose, spun and fell face downward. A great spot of scarlet ran over the raincoat. His aged face twisted in agony. Fay knelt by his side.

“I’m croaked, pal,” said the convict. “They winged me through the lungs. Good-by, pal.”

“Anything I can do, Charley?”

“Do you think you’ll get away?”

“I know I will.”

“To Chi?”

“Yes!”

“Will you go see my little girl?”

“Where is she?”

“At the Dropper’s, on Harrison Street. She’s in bad, Chester. Take her away from them low-brows.”

“How old is she?”

“Sixteen.”

“What is her name?”

“Emily—little Emily.”

“I’ll take care of her, Charley. I promise you that!”

Fay let the convict’s head drop to the ground. He heard the death-rattle. He kicked aside the empty and useless rifle.

The way of escape was not an easy one. Forms moved in the mist. He darted for a row of bushes. He crawled beneath them. He gained the high fence around the estate, where, freed of the necessity of setting his pace to that of the old convict, he broke through the far-flung cordon of guards and watchmen and gained a woods which extended north and west for over a score of miles.

He discovered, toward morning, a small house in course of erection. Its scaffolding stood gaunt against the velvet of the sky. A carpenter’s chest rested on the back porch.

Fay pried this open with a hatchet, removed a suit of overalls and a saw, and dropped the lid. He emerged from the woods, looking for all the world like a carpenter going to work.

To the man who had wolfed the world—to the third cracksman then living—the remainder of his get-away to Chicago was a journey wherein each detail fitted in with the others.

He arrived—after riding in gondola-cars, hugging the tops of Pullmans and helping stoke an Atlantic type locomotive—at the first fringe of the city of many millions.

With sharp eyes before him, and dodging police-haunted streets, he mingled with the workers—seemingly a carpenter.

No one of all the throng seemed to notice him. He walked slowly at times. He thought of old Charley O’Mara, and of the dying convict’s request.

A speck in the yeast, a chip on the foam, he quickened his steps and entered a small pawnshop where money could be borrowed for enterprises of a shady nature.

Mother Madlebaum peered over the counter at the gray-haired young man who held out an empty palm and asked for a loan on a mythical watch. She removed her spectacles, polished them with her black alpaca apron, and glanced shrewdly toward the door.

“What a start you gave me, Chester. And me thinking all along you were lagged.”

“Five C’s on the block,” laughed Fay pleasantly. “Remember the blue-white gems I brought you last time? Remember the swag, loot and plunder from the Hanover job? You made big on them.”

“I always do with your stuff, Chester.”

“Can you lend me five hundred? I’ve just beaten stir.”

The old fence opened her safe and brought forth a money-drawer. Fay took the bills she handed to him, without counting them. He touched his hat and started toward the door.

“Wait, Chester.”

“What is it?”

“Want to plant upstairs till the blow is over?”

“No. I promised old Charley O’Mara I’d see his girl for him. Poor Charley is dead.”

“He wasn’t in your class, Chester. Nobody is.”

“Where’s the Dropper’s scatter?”

“Five doors from the corner, on Harrison Street. Is the girl there?”

“Yes.”

“Then may God help her. You can’t!”

Fay passed from the fence and lost himself in the clothing-department of a dry-goods store. He entered the place a carpenter—down in the heels and somewhat grimy from his train-ride. He emerged with a bamboo cane hooked over the sleeve of a shepherd-plaid suit. His hat was a flat-brimmed Panama, his shoes correct.

A bath, shave, shampoo and haircut completed his metamorphosis. He left a barber-shop—the proper figure of a young man. He walked briskly, seeing everything.

There were detectives in that city—discerning ones. He avoided the main streets and crossings. Wolf-keen and alert for the police, he turned toward the dive where little Emily O’Mara lived. He distrusted the place and cursed himself for the venture.

The Dropper’s reputation among the powers that preyed was—unsavory. There had been rumors in the old days that he was a pigeon. The den and joint he managed sheltered cheap dips, pennyweighters and store-histers who bragged of their miserable exploits.

Fay entered the hallway that led up to the Dropper’s, like a duke paying a visit to a tenement.

A gas-light flared the second landing. An ash-can, half filled with empty bottles, marked the third. Fay paused by this can, studied a fist-banged door, then knocked with light knuckles.

As he waited for a chain to be unhooked and a slide to open, he sniffed the air of the hallway. Somewhere, some one was smoking opium.

A brutish, shelving-browed, scar-crossed face appeared at the opening. Steely eyes drilled toward the cracksman.

“What d’ye want here?”

“Gee sip en quessen, hop en yen?”

“Who to hell are yuh?”

“A friend,” said Fay. “A man to see Charley O’Mara’s daughter.”

Fay carried no revolver. He scorned such things. The police rated him too clever to commit murder. Only amateurs and coke-fiends did things like that.

He wished, however, that he could thrust the blued-steel muzzle of a gat through the panel and order the Dropper to unlatch the door. The thug was so long in making up his none-too-alert mind.

It swung finally. Fay stepped into the room. He narrowed his eyes and mentally photographed a mean den, made translucent by the greenish-hued smoke that swirled over a peanut-oil lamp and floated before the drawn faces of many poppy-dreamers who were peering from bunks.

The Dropper stood waiting. His elbows were slightly bent. His huge, broken-boned hands came slowly in front. He measured Fay from the tip of the shoes to the prematurely gray hair that showed beneath the cracksman’s straw hat.

“Well, when did you get out of stir?” he snarled with sudden recognition. “I thought they threw the key away on yuh.”

“Easy, Dropper! Who are all these people?”

“Aw, they’re all right! There’s Canada Mac and Glycerine Jimmy an’ three broads over there. Then there’s Mike the Bike and Micky Gleason with us to-night. Know them?”

Fay unhooked his cane from his arm. He swung it back and forth as he studied the faces in the bunks. His stare dropped to the peanut-oil lamp and the lay-out tray around which reclined two smokers. He saw a piglike dog crouching by a screen. Behind this was the entrance to another room.

“Suppose we go in there,” he said. “There’s something I want to speak to you about, Dropper.”

“Spit it out, here!”

“No!” Fay’s voice took on a metallic incisiveness. He flashed a warning at the Dropper. The big man shifted his eyes uneasily, and followed Fay around the screen and into a room where two chintz-covered windows looked out into Harrison Street. There were a poker-table, a couch and many chairs in the room. The floor was covered with a cheap matting.

“Listen,” said Fay, still swinging his cane: “I came here to see Charley O’Mara’s daughter. I want to see her quick! I can’t stay around here. It’s no place—”

“Aw, cut that kid-glove stuff. What d’ye think we are—stools?”

“I want to see Charley’s daughter—Emily!”

“You can’t!”

“What have you done with her?”

“I aint done nothin’. She lives right here.”

Fay hung his cane on a chair, removed his hat, turned, backed against the poker-table and fastened upon the Dropper a glance of white fire.

“Tell that girl to come to me.”

“Well, who the hell are you orderin’ around?”

“Go! Get—that—girl!”

The Dropper was in his own castle. The bunks in the den were filled with the reclining forms of a number of men who would commit murder at his bidding. He had, safely planted, the only hundred toys of choice Victoria hop in all of Chicago. One could buy most anything, from virtue to a man’s soul, with opium at the current prices.

He considered the matter of Fay with a slow brain. Back in the heart of him there lurked a fear for a five-figure man. They did big things. They were supercrooks. Their weight might be felt through political influence.

“I’m hep!” he said sullenly. “You want to cop the skirt from me. You want to tell her about diamonds and rubies and strings of pearls—of swag and kale and the easy life swillin’ wine.”

“I don’t want to do anything of the kind. I’ve got a message for her from her old man. He’s not well,” Fay added cautiously, remembering that under the law the Dropper might be considered Emily’s guardian.

“So he aint goin’ to get sprung? I heard he had a swell mouthpiece who was workin’ with the pollies.”

“The appeal was denied last week. The governor turned it down—cold. Charley may have to serve his full term.”

“Oh, well, if that’s the straight of it— I’ll get the moll an’ let you chin with her a bit. Remember, no fancy stuff.”

Fay stared at the dive-keeper disgustedly. The Dropper weighed over two hundred and fifty pounds. He moved his gross form across the matting, paused at the screen where the piglike dog lay, and lumbered out of sight. His voice rasped in a shout: “Emily!”

Her entrance came a minute after Fay had seated himself at the poker-table. His hand rested on his hat. He heard the Dropper’s nagging oaths.

Emily entered, propelled by a strong arm.

Fay rose. He flashed an assuring glance. He reached and offered her a chair.

The picture she left with him, as he turned for the chair, was one he could never forget.

Golden-glossed hair, fine-spun as flax, an oval face, big sherry-colored eyes, long lashes, a round breast and straight figure—was his summing up of little Emily O’Mara.

The Dropper lunged for the girl. He lifted her chin. He leered as she cringed from him.

“This guy wants to see you, kid!”

Fay pressed the sides of his trousers with the sensitive tips of his fingers. He waited, with his teeth grinding. He wanted to leap the distance, reach, clutch and throttle the purple neck of the brute.

The Dropper swung a terrible jaw and eyed Fay.

“Go to it!” he rumbled. “Get done with the kid, damn quick. Tell her she’ll never see her old man again. That’s wot I’ve been tellin’ her—all the time.”

Fay waited until the Dropper disappeared. He moved the chair he had offered to the girl, so that she could see it.

“Wont you sit down, Emily? I left your dad last night. He wasn’t well.”

A flash of interest and gratitude crossed her features. She clutched her skirt, stared at the door, bent one knee and sank into the chair timidly.

Fay leaned and whispered:

“Your father sent me to you. He wants you to leave this bunch. He’s afraid you are not being well treated. He thinks you ought to go to some good home,” he added as he realized the girl’s underworld upbringing.

“Is Father coming back to me?”

“No, never.”

“Why not?”

The naivete of the question struck Fay as an indictment against society.

“Because the laws are unjust!” he declared. “They keep a man in prison after he is reformed. They don’t keep a man in a hospital after he is cured.”

“Did you escape from Rockglen?”

“Would it make any difference to you if I had broken out of prison?”

“No, it wouldn’t make any difference to me—but I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean I want you to go away with me. I want to get you out of this den of petty-larceny addicts and low-brows. That’s what your father wanted, Emily.”

“But I don’t even know your name. Why should I run away with you?”

“Because the Dropper is a brute. Because he will beat you—if he hasn’t already. Because the life here leads to the gutter—and mighty fast you’ll drift down to it, little Emily.”

The girl arranged a black velvet bandeau on her hair. Fay noticed that the rings on her fingers were brassy and childish. They grated on a man who had never handled any but first-water jewels.

He leaned forward and suggested:

“Come with me—say, to-morrow night. We’ll go East together. I know a motherly woman who has an old mansion on the Hudson.”

Little Emily fluttered her lashes in an anxious glance at the open door, beyond which was the sound of dreamy voices.

“I’m afraid I can’t.”

“Why?”

“He wont let me.”

“What is he to you?”

“Nothing, but I’m afraid of him. He’s so strong.”

“He’s a big mush, little Emily—a woman-beater, a peddler of opium—a Fink, if you know what that means.”

The girl pulled her dress down to the tops of her broken shoes. She twisted, glanced up, smiled faintly, and blanched as the Dropper thrust his head into the room.

“What are you tryin’ to pull off?” he asked.

Fay stared over the girl’s cringing shoulder. His steel-blue eyes locked with the brute’s. They burned and blazed into a sodden brain. The Dropper leered, said, “Oh, all right, cul,” and went back to the smokers around the lay-out tray.

“Quick, Emily! Make up your mind. Can I come for you to-morrow night? I owe it to your old man. We’ll go East, and this woman I know will take care of you. I hate the coppers, and I’m out to collect from the world. They sent me away to Rockglen—dead, bang wrong! They gave me life and fifteen years. I didn’t serve fifteen weeks!”

Fay ceased pleading. He watched the girl. There was a mark behind her left ear which could only have come from a blow. She fingered a black velvet bandeau. She clenched her hands. She started to rise. Suddenly she dropped to the chair.

“I can’t go—even if Dad wants me to. I can’t leave the Dropper. I am afraid he’ll kill me if I go away with you.”