# The Man Who Would Be Crooked

The Man Who Would Be Crooked
A Complete Story
By Arthur Train
—Owen Meredith, "Clymenestra."
"SURE!" affirmed "Squinty" Phelan, stoutly. "Absolutely, Boss! I prmise—on me affidavy. You should worry. I'll be back on the six-ten tonight."
The big warden, whose faith in his fellow man had never yet wavered, clapped the little, twisted fellow beside him upon the shoulder and pushed him almost affectionately out of the prison office.
"Well, Squinty, go to it! Remember! 'Word of honor,' now!"
Then the Boss closed the door and left the convict a free man outside—free for six hours on his own parole. Squinty fitted on the derby hat he had borrowed from one of the keepers and took a tentative step along the macadam. In the warden's enormous black cutaway he looked curiously like a crow. A half minute later Squinty, a grotesque figure, was hurrying along the road to the railroad station.
Back In the office in the bare brick building on the hill over the track Tim Anders, the trusty, watched him through the window. Tim, as vice president of the Mutual Welfare League, had his doubts. What was the use? The Boss was all right—had a big heart and all that—but he was taking a big chance in letting a convicted professional safe-cracker go off by himself to New York to his grandmother's funeral. If Squinty shouldn't turn up, then they would all be in bad, their privileges would be cut off, and, to use his own mental expression, the whole damn league be put on the bum. He grunted disapprovingly as he contemplated the brass cuspidor he was polishing upon his knees.
"What's the matter, Tim?" inquired the warden from his desk. "Jealous?"
"Me—huh!" The trusty placed the cuspidor on the floor and sat back on his haunches. "Suppose the little runt don't come back?"
"He will come back!" asserted the Boss with conviction.
"Anybody else, mebbe!" muttered Tim. "But Squinty's a weak character. You can't count on him. Does whatever happens to come along. Ain't got no will of his own. Fact! He'll do anything you tell him. He ain't a real gun at all—belongs to the class of mental deficients, a 'high-grade neuro'—ain't that what the bug doctors call 'em?"
"You mean, if he sees a safe he cracks it!" smiled the warden.
"You've said it!" assented the other.
"He's a good sort, whatever else he is," returned the warden. "Had less trouble with him than with most of you. And he's only got six months more to serve. He'd be crazy to beat it and forfeit all his time off for good behavior. He's earned a year and two months, besides making himself liable for another ten-year term on that suspended sentence of his."
SQUINTY, the warden's cutaway flapping about his legs, seemed to himself, as he entered the train, to fill the entire car. The blazing light from the river blinded him; the rattle and roar deafened him. Squinty, always retiring, sank in confusion to a secluded seat by the fire extinguisher. Those who in fact noticed him, saw only a meager, narrow-shouldered, middle-aged man with a plaintive, half-surprised look upon his twisted face.
If he had not had a real purpose in going to the city, he might very well have got out at Yonkers and taken the next train back to Ossining.
The heat and dust gave him an awful thirst and a light headache. He had a curious, helpless feeling. He congratulated himself on having no duties except to go to the funeral and then come right back—"home." He had his return ticket—the warden had handed it to him. And he had a two-dollar bill.
The funeral services for Grandmother Phelan were held at the house of his Uncle Richard in Long Island City, but he had no sooner arrived there than it became quite evident that his appearance was both unexpected and inopportune. No place had been arranged for him in any one of the funeral hacks, so that ultimately he was thrust, ignominiously and much to his disgust, into the landau used to transport the floral decorations from the house.
Even at the cemetery he was clearly de trop and he lingered in the background, the last to leave when the ceremonies were concluded. The others all piled into their hacks, but Squinty found himself standing disconsolately alone at the gate while they rolled off merrily toward the Queensboro Bridge. A fine lot they were! Curse them! Give him the boys at Sing Sing, the big boss, the Welfare League and a fixed and unambiguous place in the social order!
Squinty (as there were no street cars) started to walk back to New York. The day was warm, and the Saturday afternoon stream of motors filled the air with a hanging pall of white powder that got in his nose and eyes. Tired out, utterly miserable, his throat fiery, the warden's dust-covered cutaway weighing him down like a coat of mail, Squinty staggered footsore into Long Island City—with an hour in which to catch his train at the Grand Central station.
Just before him, across the way, clean, cool, refreshing, a row of lights was alluringly reflected in plate-glass mirrors and shining mahogany. Through the windows he could see a white-jacketed barkeeper busily filling beer glasses from the wood and sliding them across the counter to thirsty souls like himself. To Squinty it was the most beautiful vision he had ever seen.
We make no excuses for Squinty. He had promised not to touch alcohol while in the city and he had intended to keep his word. The promise played no part in the matter. At that instant there was for him no such thing as Sing Sing, a warden, or a Welfare League: promises and paroles did not exist. He was thirsty and he drank—again and again.
He drank alone and he drank with others—he drank up his $2, and then, mysteriously absenting himself for a few moments in the company of a new and sympathetic friend, he returned without the warden's cutaway and drank some more. But when he woke up it was the next day and he was in a fifteen-cent lodging house on East Houston street. In place of the cutaway he was wearing a blue jumper.
Tim Anders had proved right and the warden wrong. Squinty had broken his parole. The curse was upon him.
DCAN Squinty THORNTON by ten years, was younger than Squinty by ten years and everything had been in his favor from the start, including the fact that he did not have any money. He had a whimsical, cadaverous face, out of which a pair of soft gray eyes shot straight at you, a lanky muscular body; had been welterweight champion and stroked the crew at college; and, because he had been a regular fellow, although he came from an unknown region infested by coyotes and timber wolves, had effectually demonstrated the error of supposing that Harvard University is snobbish in insisting upon the right to select her own heroes by being one of those heroes—perhaps the biggest one of them, himself.
This loose-jointed Lochinvar had come out of the west and made a clean sweep of Boston's Metropolitan district, including the Back Bay, Milton and the Norfolk Hunt. Yet he had never seen a dinner suit or a red coat until 1905. He had been brought up to regard women as semi-spiritual creatures to be worshiped afar off; and the aggressive love-making of Cambridge so bored him that he escaped marrying into one of the old families and remained heart-whole until he had become president and principal stockholder of the Weed-Jackson Tool & Hardware Company at thirty-five and saved a hundred thousand dollars, which is doing pretty well for a sagebrush New Yorker even in these days. Then, having transplanted his old mother from Nebraska and set her up quite well enough in a comfortable house on a lesser avenue, Thornton allowed his thoughts to turn to the next duty of good citizenship.
When Thornton proceeded to fall in love with Jessica Winthrop, one of the very Boston banker's daughters he might have married fifteen years before but hadn't, he did not pause to reason why, but took the midnight train and, after a hearty breakfast at the Parker House, bearded her father in his financial den on State street.
"Mr. Winthrop," he began without further elaboration. "I want to marry your daughter. You don't know me but——"
"Well, who the hell are you?" demanded his prospective father-in-law laconically.
"Thornton, '05."
"H'm!"
Even the famous banker had heard of the even more famous oar.
Winthrop '80 gazed searchingly at Thornton '05, and saw that he was good. Both had stroked an eight and punched the puissant pugs of the 'Port in the eye.
"Can you support her?" concluded Mr. Winthrop. "When my girls marry they go 'as is'—without a cent."
"You can look me up in Bradstreet," answered Thornton confidently, "and I've got a hundred thousand dollars."
"With you?"
Thornton removed from his inside pocket an envelope containing an assortment of stock certificates. Winthrop glanced through them and nodded.
"I see you've got quite a lot of our stuff there. I guess you're all right. Go to it!—Hello, what's this? Pujo Limited! What on earth put you into that? It's absolutely rotten!"
"I know it," admitted Thornton readily. "It was just a flyer. I haven't counted that in the hundred thousand."
"But how on earth did you get it?"
Thornton laughed reminiscently.
"You know Scanlon the promoter? Well, I didn't. But I used to be a deputy police commissioner, and one day I was watching a parade from the grand stand—and he happened to be alongside me. Some one in the crowd who didn't like him threw a brick and I—well, I managed to catch it before it hit him. He was naturally grateful and gave me an inside tip to buy Pujo at sixteen. So I did."
"He's nothing but a crook!" snorted Mr. Winthrop.
"So I found out afterward. But at that time Pujo was supposed to be a big thing."
"O Lord!" groaned the banker. "And you want to marry my daughter!"
"Excuse me!" apologized Thornton. "But may I ask whether or not you ever bought any Pujo yourself!"
The banker's eyes twinkled in spite of himself.
"Yes, I did," he admitted sheepishly. "And I bought mine at thirty-one.
THE course of true love cannot be permitted to run smooth. The wallop Fate had in store for Dean Thornton was delivered within a month. The wedding day had been fixed, the bridesmaids' costumes chosen, and Jessica was in New York visiting Dean's mother and buying her trousseau when the bomb exploded. The two women were sitting in the cozy drawing room waiting for Thornton to come home. A key rattled and the girl flew to the door. Thornton, apparently in the gayest of spirits, carried her back laughing in his arms.
"Well, this has been a day!" he cried.
"What's up?" she demanded suspiciously.
"Hold fast!" he returned, "I've one grand little joke for you. Are you ready? We're busted—wiped out!"
Jessica drew back her head and looked intently up into his face while old Mrs. Thornton laid down her knitting resignedly.
"I knew there was something!" she sighed.
"Well, we're just busted. Hard luck! That's all! Have to start over and all that. Call it a misfortune, perhaps, but no real calamity. I've still my good right arm!"
"O, Dean!" murmured the girl, covering her eyes. "What has happened!"
"Durham, our treasurer, has disappeared with every cent of our money. The accountants say he's been jockeying with the books for at least two years. Collecting the accounts and pocketing the receipts, you know. He's got away first and last, with about two hundred thousand. Heaven knows what he's done with it. Salted it away very likely in Chili or Peru. He's left a wife and five children stranded without a dime. The company owes nearly a hundred thousand over its assets."
"Oh, Dean!" cried Jessica, putting his hand to her cheek. "Poor Dean!"
"But he hasn't taken any of your money!" remarked Mrs. Thornton sagaciously. "Even if the company is bankrupt you can start in again on your own capital, can't you?"
"I won't have any capital after I've paid off the corporation's creditors," he retorted rather grimly. "The best I can do is to keep the ship afloat and begin a new cruise."
A proud look came into his mother's wrinkled face.
"Silly!" she murmured protestingly. "But your father would have done the same thing!"
Jessica lifted Dean's hand, turned it upward and kissed his palm.
"I don't mind! If we have to we can wait!" she said heroically. Then she suddenly threw her arms about his neck and burst into tears.
The Weed-Jackson failure turned out to be worse than the accountants had prophesied. But a sympathetic creditor's committee and a capable temporary receiver saved the corporation from actual shipwreck. Nevertheless, the statement presented at the meeting, held as it happened upon the Saturday afternoon of Squinty Phelan's visit to New York to attend his grandmother's funeral, showed past due indebtedness of $97,000. Thornton, dogged but cheerful, asked for a week's delay before they should apply for a trustee in bankruptcy. His accumulated savings would have enabled him to go ahead and marry Jessica, and there was no reason but a perhaps Quixotic sense of honor why he should not let the corporation be dissolved or settle with its creditors on the usual percentage basis. But that was not Thornton's way. He had it out with Jessica before she boarded the train for Boston to see her father, who, she protested, would not think of letting them postpone the ceremony. Her father was foolishly rich, she said, and she and Dean could live with her family until he could get a fresh start. But he was obdurate. Her father had insisted on his taking her "as is"—well, she must take him the same way. He would never live with or on anybody—even bis wife's parents. The wedding would have to be put off until he was able to offer her at least a makeshift for a home of her own. In ten days or so he would join her in Boston and tell her how much could be saved out of the wreck.
During the next week Dean finished his investigation of the corporation's financial condition, liquidated his private holdings and on the second Monday after the collapse invited the creditors to dinner at his club, where each guest found under his plate a certified check for the full amount of his claim. Dean made a little speech, in which he explained that a friend of the company who had perhaps unwarranted faith in its future and his own had opportunely come forward to relieve the situation.
THERE is nothing like an unexpected dividend to stimulate geniality, and the dinner resolved itself into a financial love feast. It was half after eleven before the final creditor had departed rejoicing and Thornton, having slipped his last five-dollar bill to the club waiter, put on his overcoat and started toward home—the home that had already been sold to meet the Weed-Jackson Company's debts. He was cleaned out, all except his hundred shares of Pujo Limited, which, after five years of dejection, had within the last month worked up from the digits to around fifteen. It would keep his mother and himself going for a few. months if he sold it, and it had seemed a good time to sell. So he had taken the certificate out of the vault and put it in his pocket, intending to deliver it to his broker the next morning.
The club was only a short distance from his house, and ordinarily, since it was raining, he would have jumped into a taxi; but taxis, he told himself, were no longer for him, and so he turned up his collar and started forth on foot. As he neared Park avenue a man zigzagged across the sidewalk and intercepted him. In the dim light of the arc lamps he presented a grotesque, almost laughable, appearance, for the old jumper which enwrapped the upper part of his figure hung heavily about his knees and his flat-topped derby was pulled down close over his ears.
Squinty raised his face timidly.
"Boss." he wavered in a larynxless voice, "could you slip me enough for a cup of coffee? I've not had a bite to eat for two days. Honest, boss, I'm near starved." Thornton took the scarecrow by the arm and looked him over.
"Why don't you go to a police station?"
Squinty trembled in his grasp.
"I'm afraid of the bulls."
"What are you afraid of them for?"
Suddenly the scarecrow tottered. Had Thornton not grabbed him, Squinty would have departed in an ambulance. The poor devil was all in. That was enough for Dean.
"Come along with me, old man," said Thornton. "I can fix you up somehow. There's still something left in the icebox, I guess."
Twenty minutes later a steaming Squinty was slowly rotating before the fire in the Thornton parlor. His boots were off, his jumper hung on a chair turned to the blaze, and on the mantelpiece beside him stood what remained of a tumbler of hot toddy. He had devoured, standing, two cold chops, a dissociated chicken wing, a saucer of olives, a can of salmon and half a loaf of bread. As the warm toddy percolated through his body his heart expanded and he whimpered with happiness blent with pity for his unfortunate self.
"Feel better?" inquired his host.
Squinty nodded solemnly.
"Guv'ner," he said huskily, "you've saved my life. Too bad; it ain't worth savin'."
"Nonsense," retored Thornton. "Any life is worth saving."
"Mine ain't!" muttered Squinty. "I'm done. It ain't no use for me to try to pull anything on you. I'm a gun. Doin' time up the river. The warden he let me come down to bury my grandmother, but I fell for the booze and broke my parole. I'm scared to go back, 'cause beside the six months I owe yet I'm under a ten-year suspended sentence for another job, and I'll forfeit my good behavior. That makes eleven and eight. Life—for me—boss! Yes—life! I'll not live through it!"
Thornton looked at him curiously.
"Why did you tell me that?"
"Cause you treated me right. I want to be on the level with you. You'll have to surrender me."
"I'll not surrender you!"
"Not?"
"No. But I won't help you to make a getaway, either."
"Getaway!" Squinty shrugged his thin shoulders disdainfully. "A fine getaway I'd make. I dassent show my face outdoors. I ain't had but three bites in six days and n%thing to drink 'cept out of the sparrow fountain in Madison Square. Some life, what? Getaway! O, rapture!"
Thornton tossed him a cigarette.
"You say the warden let you come to New York alone?"
Squinty nodded.
"Then he must have had considerable confidence in you!"
"Confidence? I should say he did! Ain't I—I mean wasn't I—on the honor roll?"
"Oh!" Thornton regarded him severely. "Won't this performance of yours seriously affect prison discipline? Won't the warden lose faith in the bows?"
Squinty bit his lips, his twisted face became distorted, and tears—real ones—came into his eyes.
"Look here, my friend!" exclaimed Thornton. "You're sure to go back! No question about that! If you don't, every privilege they've got up there will be cut off. You'll make the other fellows pay for your good time for the next two years!"
"Good time!" snorted Squinty. "I've had a hell of a time!"
"But you preferred the hootch to keeping your word."
"No, I didn't. I didn't want no hootch."
"Well, why on earth didn't you go back?"
"Because," averred Squinty, facing Thornton again, "those damn Phelan cousins of mine at the funeral give me such a pain it just took all the pleasure out of it. I had to get drunk."
IT was 2 o'clock before it occurred to Thornton to go to bed, and had it not been for Squinty's inability to keep awake they would doubtless have conversed all night. Leaving the fugitive snoozing in his chair, Thornton foraged for a blanket and arranged a shake-down on the divan. There was a small safe in the corner, and before going back he unlocked it and placed the sheaf of papers which he had been carrying in his pocket in one of its pigeonholes. Then he conducted Squinty thither, bade him good-night and locked him in.
He felt quite sure he could square Squinty with the warden. He was still dreaming when he heard a knock on his bedroom door and awoke to find, to his surprise, that it was already daylight.
"Mr. Hawksley wants to speak to you on the telephone," said the maid. Thornton lifted the instrument from the bed-table beside him.
"Excuse me for disturbing you," came his broker's voice, "but—you've got a hundred 'Pujo,' haven't you? I thought so. Well, did you see where Pujo closed at forty-nine last night?"
"No." In an instant Thornton was bolt upright. "Why," he gasped, "it's been selling for years around seven and eight."
"Sure! But they say old Scanlon is trying to corner it. If you want to get out, now is the time."
"Hurrah!" exclaimed his delighted client. "Sell, by all means."
"All right," replied Hawksley. "I'll enter your order to sell at the market at the opening. Be sure and send me down your certificate some time today. So long!"
Thornton dressed slowly. His luck had turned. Forty-nine hundred dollars! A neat little profit. Almost enough to take a chance and marry Jessica on. A reward for doing the good Samaritan act the night before. With his heart aglow, he whistled himself downstairs and turned to the door of the den. It was ajar. The room was vacant. Squinty had vanished. And the safe in which he had so carefully placed his stock certificate for one hundred shares of Pujo was open and empty; also empty was a bottle, his last bottle of King William, standing solitary upon the mantel. He could no longer sell his stock, for he could not deliver it.
He looked at his watch—nine forty-five. In fifteen minutes the gong on the stock exchange would sound and Hawksley would sell a hundred Pujo for his account at the market. Why not let the sale go through on the chance that Squinty would turn up or be arrested during the course of a day or so, or that Pujo would sell off after the opening so that he could cover at nearer what the stock was worth. He probably could cover in the twenties, or at least in the thirties.
Five minutes to ten! But suppose Scanlon had cornered the stock and it should go up? He would have to buy in at a higher price in order to deliver—and he had no money. It was too risky! It wouldn't be honorable, for Hawksley would have sold relying on his assurance that he had the stock.
Without more ado he got Hawksley's office on the telephone, asked for the broker and, finding that he had already gone upon the floor, sent word through his partner to cancel the order to sell. The partner protested politely. There had been private dealings in Pujo and already before the opening there were outside bids of 60 for the stock. Sixty! Thornton turned faint at the risk he had run: then sick at the thought of the profit he was losing.
Six thousand dollars! If he could only locate Squinty and get back that wretched certificate wholly useless to the thief! How did one find lost people, anyway?
Nothing had boon heard of the truant either at Sing Sing or at police headquarters. The use of the warden's name, to be sure, secured for his inquiry instant attention at the detective bureau. But it at one developed that the fact that Thornton himself had seen and talked with the fugitive the night before was the first and only clue the police had of him.
Thornton slammed down the receiver. Instantly he received a fresh incoming call, Hawksley speaking from the floor of the exchange.
"Look here, old man," he panted. "Pujo has climbed up to eighty-nine. There's terrific dealings in it. Looks like a real corner. Market may break at any moment. For God's sake, let me sell your stock. Why, man, it's near nine thousand dollars!"
"Dammit!" roared back Thornton. "I can't sell. I haven't got any stock!"
"Haven't got it? Where is it? Did you sell it through some other house?"
"A burglar took it!" yelled Thornton.
There was an amazed silence at the other end of the telephone. "A burglar!"
"Yes—a burglar!"
"I'll be damned!"
"Well, you can be for all of me!" retorted Thornton. "Isn't there anything I can do? Sell for future delivery?"
"Not in a market like this," answered his friend. "They want immediate delivery. What you better do is to apply to the transfer company for a new certificate, file an affidavit setting forth the circumstances surrounding the loss and offer to give a bond in double the amount." . "And how long will all that take?"
"Oh, about a week. Sorry, old top, I've got to get back to the post." And Hawksley rang off.
Thornton racked his brains for some method of tracing the elusive Squinty.
How about an advertisement in the evening papers, which might catch the convict's eye?
"Pujo Ltd. Lost! Certificate in my name for 100 shares of Pujo Limited. Agree to pay one thousand dollars ($1,000) for its immediate return. No questions. DEAN THORNTON."
Ah! Something like. He'd print this among the regular "ads" in an eight-inch box—cost what may.
It was after 11 o'clock, and he decided to go to his lawyer's and start proceedings for the issuance of a fresh certificate. As he left the subway at Rector street a boy shoved an extra under his chin. In a two-inch headline across the top ran the words.
"Corner in Pujo Limited. Stock soars up to 186."
Thornton brushed him roughly aside. At the lawyer's office the corner in Pujo was causing something like a Roman holiday. By lunch time Pujo had jumped to 190, at 2 o'clock to 240, and when the gong rang was quoted 385 bid without takers.
T'HORNTON caused his advertisement to be inserted in four evening papers, with the result that his telephone kept ringing all the evening. But Squinty did not call up.
Thornton lay awake all night trying to devise ways or means to extricate himself from his tantalizing predicament. The only possible chance lay in the forlorn hope that Pujo might not decline too much before his new certificate could be issued—which they told him would take ten days. He arose with his nerves twitching like a dope fiend's.
Pujo opened at an advance overnight of fifty points—a ten-share lot at 435. A few more shares came out at 470, and by noon the stock was quoted 505 bid.
Thornton spent his morning in a frenzy of telephoning, to the detective bureau, to Sing Sing, to the newspapers, to the Pujo Company's offices in case the certificate had been picked up and turned in. Pujo closed at 577! Fifty-seven thousand dollars thrown away. By the irony of fate!
Dean strode through the streets peering into saloons and down alleys, scanning the crowds, searching vainly for the vanished safe-cracker. From time to time he would pause long enough to telephone Sing Sing, or police headquarters.
Thornton, waiting beside the telephone, did not take off his clothes that night, but smoked cigar after cigar and consumed large quantities of black coffee. Some time after midnight he threw himself upon the divan and fell into fitful slumber. It was after 9 next morning when he awoke with stiff and aching muscles, his eyes smarting and his head full of tightly strung wires. When he arrived at his office there were no communications for him and no answer to his advertisements.
Pujo opened with a bang at 555. Ten minutes more and it had crossed 600, pirouetting gayly upward until it suddenly shot like a rocket to 725. The sight made Thornton sick. Seventy-two thousand dollars.
After luncheon, as he was about to ascend the stairs to his rooms, his attention was attracted by a faint, subtle but familiar odor, suggestive of whisky and stale tobacco-the Squinty odor! Then he observed that the door of the den—usually left open—was shut.
Puzzled, he turned the knob and quietly opened the door. The room reeked with the smell of Squinty. Squinty or his ghost was kneeling before the safe, the door of which was swung wide. He turned a coal-dust covered face to Dean's and gave him a pathetic, twisted, anxious smile. With a bound Thornton was upon him, his hands about his neck. "My certificate!" he gasped. "Where is my certificate?"
"Easy, guv'ner! Easy there!" protested the half-choked Squinty, squirming. "I put all the papers back——"
Thornton's hands flew to the pigeonhole, snatched forth the envelope and tore it open. The certificate was there! One hundred shares of priceless Pujo!
Unnerved and shaking, he could hardly voice the question that trembled on his lips. "You—why—where've you been?"
"In the cellar!" returned Squinty, blithely. "It was the hootch! You gave it to me first—an' you lef' the bottle on the mantel. When I woke up I was in the cellar."
"Why did you rob my safe?"
"I didn't, guv'ner!" protested Squinty. indignantly. "I jest opened it—matter of habit, I guess. Honest. I didn't know I was doin' it! An' as soon as I come to I put back the stuff. 'Twarn't nuthin'. A few papers. You get 'em in yer hand. Gee! but coal is hard!"
Thornton dropped him and leaped for the telephone, ringing wildly for Hawksley. It seemed hours before he heard the banker's voice.
"Hello, old man!" it said, mockingly. "Pity you haven't got that certificate of yours. Pujo sold a moment ago at 995."
"But I have got it!" bellowed Thornton. "Sell me a hundred at the market! I'll hold the wire until you report the sale."
"All right!" Hawksley reported, presently. "You caught nearly the high mark. I sold your hundred for 975. Just in time. Market's turned weak all of a sudden. Ninety-seven thousand dollars for what cost you sixteen hundred! Pretty good, old horse! Now mind you get that certificate down here right away. Bye-bye!"
"Cellar!" he choked. "You've been in the cellar! All the time—two days and a half—sixty hours! Oh, Lord!"
"Wots that, guv'ner?" inquired Squinty. "Wot's that yezz say? I been in that there cellar two days and a half?"
THORNTON steadied himself on the divan. "That's exactly it! You came in here out of the rain into the heat, ate your first solid meal in a week, drank a quart of King William, cracked my safe, and then just naturally went to sleep in my cellar for nearly three whole days. Oh, I don't mind! Come as often as you like! You're all right, Squinty, old boy—you little crooked fairy!"
The return of Squinty to Sing Sing savored somewhat of a royal progress, although there was no delegation of prominent citizens to greet him, no band, no public demonstraton. He reached the person just before supper time that same afternoon by motor, arrayed in a suit of the latest cut, a fashionable overcoat with a genuine mink collar and a new derby hat. The "twin-six" that brought him carried also Mr. Dean Thornton and a new moving-picture machine, the gift of the latter to the Mutual Welfare League, the members of which lost no privileges by reason of Squinty's absence. In fact, the word sped quickly through the corridors that his aunt had left him a million and that the warden had extended his parole.
(Copyright, 1921.)
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1945, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 78 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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