It was a small bare room, at the other end of which, beside the bed, an enormous red-haired Irishman stood like a herculean statue. He was bent forward in a half-crouching attitude and held menacingly at shoulder height, grasped in both hands, a chair, with the obvious intention of hurling it at the intruder. Stacey involuntarily started. Then a gleam of appreciation came into his eye. The man’s attitude was magnificent. Rodin might have posed him.
“Well, upon my word, Monahan,” he said easily, “you give a fellow a cordial reception!” And he dropped into a chair—the only other one in the room.
The man lowered his chair slowly, a look of blank amazement, changing gradually to gloom, coming over his face.
“Christ Almighty! Captain!” he muttered finally. “So it’s you that’s come to arrest me!”
“It is not!” cried Stacey angrily, “and you ought to know it isn’t!”
The man shook his red hair back from his forehead and stood there, gazing at Stacey.
“Sit down, can’t you?” said Stacey sharply. “You take up too damned much room that way.”
A faint smile curved the giant’s mouth and wrinkled the corners of his eyes. He sat down carefully, the chair creaking beneath him.
Stacey reflected, staring at him thoughtfully. “Monahan,” he began at last, “I found your name on a list of men I was to go out and get for that Sunday night row. What’s the meaning of that?”
The Irishman’s face flamed. “I didn’t have a thing to do with it!” he burst out.
“Oh, hell! I know you didn’t!” said Stacey impatiently. “You were,” he continued slowly, “the most unmanageable man in my battalion (and the one I cared most for,” he added to himself). “You were quarrelsome, you had fits of sullenness, you made me trouble on an average about seven days a week, and you broke every rule it was possible to break, but you wouldn’t any more have been part of a mob to pick on a man than you’d have turned tail and run in an attack. Now what is this charge about?”
A slow smile had spread over Monahan’s vast face. “That’s a hell of a fine character you’ve given me, Captain dear!” he observed.
“It might be worse. Go on. Clear this thing up.”
“Well, I’ll tell you the whole story, Captain,” he began. “I don’t hold much with niggers, but I don’t hold neither with getting five thousand men together—real bold-like—and going out and lynching one nigger. And Sunday night when I seen what was doing I was pretty mad. But not half as mad as I was when right in front of my nose a bunch of white-livered sons of bitches got hold of the mayor, who was acting like a man, and strung him up—by God! strung him up to a pole! I was there, Captain, and I pitched in and I fought the dirtiest I knew how—’n’ you know whether we was trained to fight dirty or not. And by ’n’ by I kicked one man in the guts and another in the knee—me getting madder ’n’ madder because all th’ time there was the mayor swinging and twitching up there—but some one else got up the pole ’n’ cut him down before I could get there, ’n’ then some damn cold-blooded skunk of a photographer took a flash-light picture, ’n’ then all of a sudden there’s Sergeant McCarthy of the police beside me, ’n’ he says: ‘By God! Monahan! I didn’t think it of you!’ So there I am in the photograph at headquarters ’s clear as life, and there’s McCarthy to testify I was one of them that lynched th’ mayor.” He paused, an expression of resentment and resignation on his face.
Stacey considered him thoughtfully. “Why don’t you go around to police headquarters, give yourself up, and tell the truth?”
Monahan shook his head. “There wouldn’t anybody believe me, Captain,” he said sullenly. “?‘Fat story, me lad, with your record!’ they’d say. They’d laugh at me.”
“What do you mean—‘your record’?”
“I’ve been twice in the jug, Captain, since I got back,” the Irishman growled, “and I’ll tell you about that, too, if you’ll listen.
“When I got back from across—and I wish to God I’d never come back!—I got me a job at the packing-house. Well, who should I find for my foreman but a white-livered skunk called Barton? ’N’ I’ll tell you about Barton, too. Barton, he got exempted from the draft as being the sole support of one poor aged mother ’n’ two poor little sisters. Now the truth about that skunk was, so help me God! that he never done one thing for them—not a red cent had he given them for years, Captain! All the little they had come to them from a brother’s son of the old lady.
“But that ain’t all—not half, Captain!”
Monahan paused and thrust his shaggy red head forward. His eyes gleamed dangerously.
“I had a girl, Captain, when I went away,” he went on, in a deep rumbling voice, “and a good girl she was. But this Barton, he comes shining around and shining around, ’n’ she falls for him like a little fool, ’n’ after a while he goes ’n’ marries her,—which he wouldn’t have done, Barton wouldn’t, if it hadn’t been that she had two brothers, big strong up-standing men who sort of urged him on.
“Well, when I see this skunk there for my foreman things just busted up inside me, ’n’ the very first day at th’ noon hour I laid for him in a quiet place in the yard and I says: ‘Now fight, you God-damned, white-livered son of a bastard German skunk!’ ’N’ Barton hollered for help and a lot of men come running, but not before I’d handled him a little rough—though not half what I could have done with more time. Well, would you believe it, Captain? for that little bit of righteous trifling th’ judge give me six days!”
The aggrieved innocence in the Irishman’s face was too much. Stacey struggled, then gave up and burst out laughing. “Go on! Go on, Jim!” he cried at last.
Monahan, too, had laughed, finally, but at Stacey’s words his face grew dark again. “When I come out,” he continued angrily, “I went back for my job, ’n’ they wouldn’t give it to me, the rotten skunks! ’N’ they’d blacklisted me, too. Not another job in any packing-house could I get.” He paused, with a growl.
Stacey considered him, at once sympathetically and curiously. He noted that in recounting the damning evidence of the flash-light picture and McCarthy’s misinterpretation of his presence at the lynching, Monahan had displayed only a melancholy resentment against fate; it was his later discovery that an organization was against him which shook him with anger. Now McCarthy’s remark had been grossly unjust, and the attitude of Monahan’s employers was not altogether so; yet Stacey understood the distinction—understood it emotionally. His heart went out to Monahan. They were kin.
But the Irishman continued his tale. “?’N’ then I said I’d do them dirt, ’n’ I done it, Captain. There was a strike among the boys before long, ’n’ ’twas me more than any other that brought it about. ’N’ they knew ’twas me, the dirty packers! but never a thing could they get on me. ’N’ th’ strike cost them money—the only thing that hurts a packer, Captain. Then there were scabs ’n’ fighting, ’n’ I couldn’t keep out of it, ’n’ that time they caught me, ’n’ the judge—a decent sort of man and not knowing the rights of the story neither—give me a month, ’n’ they was sore because they couldn’t fix it so I’d get five years.
“?’N’ that’s all, Captain. But you can see how I can’t go to the police, quiet-like, ’n’ tell them th’ truth about Sunday night.”
Stacey saw. He meditated.
“Well, look here!” he said at last. “I didn’t say anything about you or why I didn’t bring you in, but Traile” (when he spoke to Monahan Stacey did not say “Lieutenant Traile”) “Traile, though he didn’t know your name was on my list, happened to say something that would lead the authorities to believe you’d left town, along with a good many others. Why don’t you?”
“I dunno,” replied the Irishman sullenly. “I didn’t like to beat it as if I’d really been one of them skunks that lynched th’ mayor.”
“Did you have money? Because I can—”
“Lord bless you, yes, Captain!” the man interrupted. “The boys come ’n’ offered me all I’d’ve needed.”
Stacey gazed at him. “D’you mean that our boys did that?” he demanded. “Peters and Swanson and Petitvalle and the rest of them?”
“Sure they did!”
“Then, damn it all! they’ve known about this charge against you ever since I got them together, and not one of them’s come to me and told me!”
Monahan grinned. “Sure not, Captain!” he replied. “They done what you told them to, because you’re you, ’n’, as far as I can see, they’re enjoying themselves doing it, it not being what you might call strictly according to rule. But they didn&r............