The Incendiary: A Story of Mystery Read online

  CHAPTER II.

  MIDNIGHT--ALL'S WELL.

  "Accident is out of the question, John Davidson." The hands of the clockwere moving toward midnight in Klein's restaurant, but mugs were stillclinking, dishes rattling and waiters hurriedly cleansing soiled tableswith their towels. The freedom of the saloon had been extended to thevictorious fire-fighters, who, after supping with Duke Humphrey, werenot at all reluctant to lunch with Commoner Klein.

  "A health to Carl Klein," shouted one, tossing a tumblerful high in air.

  "Your health!" the place echoed, as the whole group stood up and shouteda rousing toast. They were tough, middle-sized fellows, all of them, ofthe true fireman's build, which is just a shade taller and broader thana sailor's. The smiling old German hovered near and bowed and rubbed hishands in appreciation. To judge from the girth under his apron, he washimself a worshiper of the worthy trinity, breakfast, dinner and supper,which he served. The two men chattering in low tones at a side table hadnot stood up or noticed the interruption.

  "I can't believe it, McCausland," answered John Davidson, the firemarshal. "There is no motive. It's devilish. It's beneath flesh andblood. Four lives already and heaven knows how many more. It isn't inhuman kind to do that without a reason."

  "Mankind is my kind, too," answered McCausland, pleasantly, but in sucha manner as to convey the idea that he was a diver of some experienceinto the deep-sea depths of human turpitude. "But suppose we look at thestatus quo. Everybody--Wotherspoon, Chandler and all the others--agreedthat the fire must have been going some time when the servant-girl ranout of the house. If her story is to be believed, and she never turned ahair under cross-questioning, you'll allow?"

  "The girl's fair spoken, I admit that," answered the marshal.

  "Then the blaze started in a room two flights above the only fire whichwas going in the house, and that one a low coal fire in the cook stove.The cook stove and the study-hearth get their drafts from differentchimneys. No possible connection there?"

  "No," answered the marshal, for McCausland's last inflection had beenslightly interrogative.

  "The cast-away cigar doesn't fit," continued his companion, telling offthe thumb on his chubby left hand. "There was no tobacco allowed in thehouse. Mungovan, their last coachman, was discharged for smoking on thesly. The professor was eccentric, you know, and this was the stanchestof his dogmas."

  "Well?"

  "No boys with firecrackers playing around. It's the lull between the17th of June and the Fourth."

  "No."

  "No phosphorescent rat-bane on the premises," went on McCausland,telling off finger after finger. "You heard what the domestic said?"

  "Yes; she was positive about that."

  "Because they were not troubled with mice. Another accidental causeremoved. But if rodents were swarming like flies in a meat shop, I don'tsee what substance more combustible than the pasted bindings of oldbooks they could have found in that library to nibble. The lucifers wereall kept in a safe downstairs, excepting a few for the sleeping-rooms."

  "That's true, but----"

  "Number six," interrupted McCausland. "What shall it be? Cotton wastetaking fire spontaneously? Benzine? Naphtha varnish? Celluloid? None ofthem about, according to Bertha. I'm at my rope's end. Where are you?"

  "Do you suppose they have been as careful since the professor died?"asked the marshal.

  "That was only four days ago and the study has been locked ever since.Only opened fifteen minutes before the fire."

  "Aren't you done guzzling yet?" broke in a strident tone of command fromthe open door. Chief Federhen's face was haggard and sooty, and hisvoice, naturally harsh, had a ragged edge from shouting that grated onthe ear like the squawking of a peacock. But the firemen leapedimmediately to attention. They did not resent their gray chief'sreprimand, for they knew that he himself had gone without any supper atall and that he stood ready at that moment to lead wherever he orderedthem to follow. In personal courage, as well as generalship, he wasbelieved to be the foremost chief in the country, and, though notexactly popular personally, he was professionally adored. Only theinsurance companies had ever ventured to criticise his bold methods, andthey, as everybody knows, are simple-minded idealists, who expect animmunity from fire such as even the arctic regions can hardly enjoy.

  "Take your machine alongside of fourteen, Tyrrell, and keep two lines onthe Harmon building all night."

  "All right, chief," answered Capt. Tyrrell, and his men followed him outthrough the curious crowd that stood peeking in on their collation.

  "Impossible!" exclaimed the marshal, raising his voice, now that theywere nearly alone.

  "Impossible, that's what I say," smiled McCausland; "we're not living infairyland. This is earth, where effects have causes."

  "But who would have the heart to set it?"

  McCausland shrugged his shoulders.

  "If that's your impossible," he replied, "in the case of my own son, I'drather his defense were a concrete alibi."

  Inspector McCausland was a detective of the good old school, renowned inmany states and not unknown to Scotland Yard and the keen Parisians.Nature had favored him with an exterior of deceptive smoothness. Novulpine contraction of the muzzle, such as would have suggested thesleuth and invited suspicion. Round, florid, pleasant-faced, a littlesloping in the shoulders, decidedly suave of voice and genial in manner,he did not look the figure to be feared. Yet some, not easilyfrightened, would depart in haste from the neighborhood of RichardMcCausland.

  "The only living occupants of the room," he continued, unfolding hischain of reasoning to the still skeptical marshal, "at the time whenBertha went in, were the St. Bernard, Sire, whose barking had attractedher attention upstairs, and the canary bird, whose life she tried tosave."

  "Probably the delicate creature was dead when she opened the door," saidthe marshal.

  "At any rate, it is impossible that an old dog, sleeping on the mat, ora golden-feathered songster, whistling in his cage, could be the authorof this fire----"

  "And loss of life."

  "If the housemaid is telling the truth there was some other cause; andif she is lying," he concluded, arising to go, "it must be to cover upcarelessness or guilt, either on her own part or on the part of some onein whom she takes an interest."

  Intimate associates found McCausland a rollicking companion; but, in thepursuit of crime, he was a practical believer in the doctrine of totaldepravity, or, rather, to be just, he knew the potential evil which isharbored in every human heart until some life-or-death temptationeffects, perhaps, the wreck of honor and humanity.

  "Well, this is another feather in Federhen's cap," said the marshal,cheerily, at the door.

  "He must share it with Jupiter Pluvius," answered McCausland.

  As dark came on there had been a heavy fall of rain, which dampened theroofs and stifled many a darting tongue and incipient blaze in thevicinity, though it appeared to have no more effect on the body of thefire than so much fuel thrown into its maw. But it had enabled Federhento concentrate his streams, which before this had necessarily beenscattered about, protecting exposed points of danger. In fact, one ortwo serious subsidiary fires had only been checked with the utmostdifficulty. If either of them had extended, and the Bay quarter oncefairly caught, 500 poor families might have been ruined and two hotelsand one depot would have been included in the loss.

  At 6:45 Federhen had issued an order to blow up the Columbia shoe storebuilding. Against the frantic protest of the owners his oracular answerwas "Necessity!" and a high-handed jostle of the remonstrants to oneside. The magazines were promptly laid and a wide space cleared.Precision and dispatch followed, like two leashed hounds, in thefootsteps of the chief. At 7 o'clock, with a mammoth concussion, themiddle of the building seemed lifted bodily into midair. Its walls cavedin, and at once twenty lines of hose were wetting down the debris, whilepickax men began widening still further the breach on the side towardthe van of the approaching fire. This corner building
laid low, theflames were sixty yards away from the depot, and all their surging andleaping failed to clear the gap. Confined at last, assaulted from everyside, drenched, smothered and confounded, they spent their rage in ablind, internal fuming.

  Those who returned to visit the fire in the evening, attracted, perhaps,by the noise of the last concussion, witnessed a miraculoustransformation. The black night made a spacious and harmoniousbackground for the flames, now a spectacle of sinister beauty, chargingheavenward solidly to great heights only to flutter back and writhe attheir manifest impotence. The streets below, flushed with rain, wereglistening in the lamplight and the awestruck wonder of the crowd hadsubsided to a mere vulgar curiosity about details. Already the event wasold to many, its solemn lesson and the revelation of underlying forcesmaking only a shallow impress on shallow minds. Gangs of rowdies swungto and fro, elbowing respectable sight-seers into the puddles andrendering night hideous with their ill-timed pranks and depredations,like prowlers stripping the slain after battle.

  The police were occupied guarding the ropes and ejecting withoutceremony all intruders whose credentials were imperfect. Lines of hoselay about in inextricable confusion, half-buried in an amalgam of lakewater, litter and mud, while at every corner the engines still sent upshowers of sparks, the rhythm of their dull pumping resounding throughthe city like the labored beatings of some giant heart. Comments on thelosses, the injuries, the probable hour when the flames would beconquered, beguiled the ranks of spectators who lined the ropes, thosebehind crushing forward as the front file yielded place, and drinking inall they could (not much at that distance), until the exhaustion oftheir interest in turn became evident by their repeated yawns. It wasSaturday night, the late night in America, but by 11 o'clock there weregaps in the solid phalanxes and the homeward-bound stream faroutnumbered that flowing toward the still vigorous but dull-red andsmoke-colored sheet of fire.

  Eleven was just ringing when a young man rushed up to the linesstretched across Cazenove street at its junction with Meridian, and halfby force, half by entreaty, breasted his way to the rope.

  "I wish to pass, officer; my property is among those burned," he said.

  "Your property?" echoed the policeman, a phlegmatic-looking fellow. Theyouth was not over 21 and Higgins had heard this story at least a dozentimes within an hour. His orders were to throw the burden of proof inevery case upon the petitioner.

  "Yes; that is to say, not mine, but my uncle's. I am a nephew of Prof.Arnold and lived with him."

  The slight correction which the young man made in his explanationevidently prejudiced his cause in the policeman's eyes--as if confusionwere a mark peculiar to the glib kinsmen of Ananias. The youth hadslipped under the rope and the crowd craned near, expecting analtercation.

  "Get back there!" came the sharp rebuke, and a heavy hand was laid onthe young man's breast, gathering up the lapels of his coat and half hisvest bosom.

  "But my uncle's house is burned, I tell you," he protested.

  "Outside!"

  "I am also a member of the press."

  "Outside the ropes!"

  "You're a bully," cried the young citizen, pushing sturdily on his ownside and fairly holding his own. "Sergeant!"

  The sergeant in charge had come over when he saw trouble brewing andstepped closer at this personal appeal.

  "I think you must know me. My name is Floyd. I am a nephew of Prof.Arnold, in whose house the fire is said to have started. Am I refusedpermission to pass the ropes?"

  "I'm afraid there's little to be seen of your uncle's house, Mr. Floyd,"quietly answered the sergeant, who knew him. "This gentleman is allright, Higgins."

  Higgins nonchalantly moved a few steps off, doubtless reflecting that hehad only erred on the side of vigilance.

  "But the servants--do you know where they may be found?"

  "Try opposite. They're still at home. The wind was the other way, yousee."

  The young man sped up to the site of his former home. One look at theblack ruin sickened though it fascinated him. In that old-fashionedhouse on the hill he had lived since infancy. Indeed, he had known noother home, no other parent save the eccentric old professor, his uncle.On Thursday, the body of Prof. Arnold had been carried away and laid inanother resting-place. Tonight the old home smoldered before him, a heapof blackening embers, wearing no vestige of resemblance to its belovedfamiliar contours. But little time was given him for meditation now.

  "Oh, Mr. Robert!"

  He felt his hands seized in a warm, strong grasp, which did not quicklyloosen.

  "Oh, Mr. Robert!" repeated Bertha, drawing him into the doorway of thebake-shop and beginning to cry. "I thought you were burned in the fire.Where have you been all the time?"

  "Only at Miss Barlow's. How did it happen?"

  "It was soon after you left. The library took fire. I heard Sire barkingand ran down to find out what was the matter, when what should I see butthe room full of smoke."

  "Ellen is safe, I hope?"

  "Ellen went out. We haven't seen her yet. But if it hadn't been forSire----"

  They had gone inside the shop and the great St. Bernard jumped up andfondled his young master joyfully, but again with that strangeundertone in his barking, as of one who had a tale to tell, if onlystupid men folk could understand it.

  "What ails you, Sire? Poor fellow! Old master gone; house burned down;getting old yourself. Yes, it's too bad. Good dog."

  Sire whined at the sympathy in Robert Floyd's voice.

  "Nothing was saved?" asked the youth.

  "Not a stitch. But I don't mind if I was only sure Ellen----"

  "Are you really anxious about Ellen? I thought she went out?"

  "Oh, yes. It was her day out. But when she came back to supper she oughtto have looked for me."

  "Perhaps she did hunt for you and missed you, or went to her sister's inthe confusion. You haven't found a lodging yet yourself for the night?"

  "I suppose I'll have to go to my aunt's."

  "Mrs. Christenson's. That's the place for you; and take good care ofSire until I call for him."

  "Go with Bertha, Sire," he commanded, but the dog had to be draggedaway, the tall Swedish maiden laying her hand on his collar.

  "Well, your house, as the little girl said in the story, presents aremarkable disappearance."

  Robert turned toward the stranger who was so facetious out of season.Inspector McCausland had just parted company with the fire marshal andwas sauntering carelessly about.

  "How did it happen? Do they know yet?" asked Robert, anxiously.

  "I don't," answered McCausland. "Possibly so"--he filliped off thelighted end of his cigar, but it fell into a black moat alongside of thecurbstone and went out with a gentle hiss.

  "But none of us smoked."

  "Perhaps it was of incendiary origin," said the detective. "There havebeen some strange fires lately."

  "It is a mystery," answered Robert Floyd.