Fred tossed about, oppressed by the close air. But, in the end, even he fell into a series of fitful dozes. He dreamed the room in which he was sleeping was suddenly transformed into a huge spider web from which there was no escape. And he caught glimpses of Storch himself hanging spider-wise from a gossamer thread, spinning dizzily in midair... He awoke repeatedly, returning as often to the same dream.

Toward morning he heard a faint stirring about. But he lay huddled in a pretense of sleep... Finally the door banged and he knew that Storch had left... He let out a profound sigh and turned his face from the light...

CHAPTER XVII

When Fred Starratt awoke a noonday sun was flooding in at the single window. Consciousness brought no confusion ... he was beginning to grow accustomed to sudden shifts in fortune and strange environments had long since ceased to be a waking novelty. Outside he could hear the genial noises of a thickly populated lane--shrilly cried bits of neighborhood gossip bandied from doorstep to doorstep ... the laughter of children ... the call of a junkman ... even a smothered cackling from some captive hen fulfilling its joyful function in spite of restraint. He did not rise at once, but he lay there thinking, trying to force the realization that he was again in San Francisco... He wondered dimly at the power of the homing instinct that had driven him back. It was plain to him now that almost any other environment would have been materially better. He had had the whole state of California to choose from, indeed he might have flown even farther afield. But from the very beginning his feet had turned homeward with uncanny precision. On those first days and nights when he had lain huddled in any uncertain shelter that came to hand the one thought that had goaded him on was the promise of this return.

And those first hours of freedom had been at once the sweetest and the bitterest. Wet to the skin, starved, furtive, like a lean, dog-harried coyote he had achieved the mountains and safety more dead than alive.

Looking back, he could see that only the sheerest madness had tempted him to flight in the first place. Without an ounce of provisions, without blankets, at the start lacking even a hat, he had defied the elements and won. G.o.d was indeed tender with all fools and madmen!

He knew now that under ordinary circ.u.mstances he must have perished in the mountain pa.s.ses. But the weather had been warm there all during December and more rain than snow had fallen, keeping the beaten paths reasonably open... He had thought always of these snow-pent places as quite devoid of any life at the winter season, and he was amazed to find how many human beings burrowed in and hibernated during the storm-bound months. Elsewhere, the skulking traveler received a chary welcome, but in the silent fastness of the hills latchstring and hearthstone and tobacco store were for genial sharing. In almost any one of these log shelters that he chanced upon he might have settled himself in content and found an indefinite welcome, but the urge to be up and on sent him forward to the next rude threshold. Thus mountain cabin succeeded mountain cabin until, presently, one day Fred Starratt found himself swinging down to the plains again--to the broad-bosomed valleys lying parched and expectant under the cruel spell of drought.

Now people regarded him suspiciously, dogs snapped at his heels, and farmers' women thrust him doles of food through half-opened kitchen doors. Here and there he picked up a stray job or two. But he was plainly inefficient for most tasks a.s.signed him... In the small towns there were not enough jobs to go round ... young men were returning from overseas and dislodging the incompetents who had achieved prosperity because of the labor shortage. The inland cities were in the grip of strikes ... there were plenty of jobs, but few with the temerity to attempt to fill them. And, besides, what had Fred Starratt to offer in the way either of skill or brawn?... He grew to know the meaning of impotence. No, he was a creature of the paved streets, and to the paved streets he returned as swiftly as his feet and his indifferent fortune could carry him. Besides, he had grown hungry for familiar sights and faces, and perhaps, down deep, curiosity had been the mainspring of his return. Even bitter ties have a pull that cannot always be denied. At Fairview the presence of Monet had held him almost a willing captive. There was something about the flame burning in that almost frail body that had lighted even the ugliness of Fairview with a strange beauty. He could not think of him as dead.

That last moment had been too tinged with the haunting poetry of life.

How often he had reconstructed that scene--the gray, sullen rain pattering on the spent leaves, the quick-rushing sound of a body in flight, the sudden leap of a soul toward greater freedom! And then the vision of the churning pool below closing in triumphantly as it might have done upon some reclaimed pagan creature that had tasted the bitter wine of exile and returned in leaping joy to its chosen element! It was not the shock and sadness of death that had sent Fred Starratt for a moment stark mad into the storm and freedom, but rather an ecstasy of loneliness ... a yearning to match daring with daring.

And now he was home again, in his own gray-green city, lying beneath tattered quilts in a hovel, with the selfsame February sun that had once p.r.i.c.ked him to a spiritual adventure flooding in upon him! He rose and threw open the door. The soft noontide air floated in, displacing the fetid atmosphere. He looked about the room searchingly.

In the daylight it seemed even more unkempt, but less forbidding. A two-burner kerosene stove stood upon an empty box just under the window. On another upturned box at its side lay a few odds and ends of cooking utensils, shriveling bits of food, a plate or two. He found a loaf of dry bread and cut a slice from it. This, together with a gla.s.s of water, completed his breakfast.

He tried to brush his weather-beaten clothes into decency with a stump of a whisk broom and to wipe the dust of the highroad from his almost spent shoes. But, somehow, these feeble attempts at gentility seemed to increase his forlorn appearance.

He went over and straightened out the bedcoverings. At least he would leave the couch in some semblance of order. What did Storch expect him to do? Come back again for shelter? He had no plans, but as he went out, banging the door, he felt no wish to return.

His first thought now was to see Ginger. He went to the Turk Street address. He found a huge frame mansion of the 'eighties converted into cheap lodgings. The landlady, wearing large jet and gold ornaments, eyed him suspiciously. Miss Molineaux no longer lived there. Her present address? She had left none. Thus dismissed, he turned his steps toward the Hilmers'.

He had expected to come upon the vision of his wife wheeling Mrs.

Hilmer up and down the sidewalk, and yet, when these expectations were realized, he experienced a shock. There she was, Helen Starratt, in a black dress and a black hat, pacing with drab patience the full length of the block and back again. He could not get a good view of her face because her hat shaded her eyes. Mrs. Hilmer's figure, equally indistinct, was a shapeless ma.s.s of humanity. A child, coming out of a nearby house with a pair of roller skates in her hand, stood off and answered his questions, at first reluctantly, but finally with the importance of encouraged childhood... Who was the lady in the wheeled chair? Mrs. Hilmer. And the other one in black? Her name was Starratt.

No, she didn't know her very well. But people said she was very sad.

She dressed in black and looked unhappy. Why? Because her husband was dead. No, there was no mistake--she had heard her mother say so many times--Mrs. Starratt's husband was dead, quite dead!...

He turned back toward town. _Dead, quite dead_! Well, the child had reckoned better than she knew!

He retraced his steps slowly, resting upon many hospitable doorsteps that afternoon. The noise of the city confused him, the stone pavements hurt his ankles, he was hungry and faint. He did not know what to do or where to go. Only one shelter lay open to him. Should he go back to Storch?

Finally, toward five o'clock, he found himself standing upon the corner of California and Montgomery streets, watching the tide of office workers flooding homeward. A truant animation was flaming them briefly. Familiar face after familiar face pa.s.sed, lighted with the joy of sudden release from servitude. Fred Starratt was curiously unmoved. He had fancied that he would feel a great yearning toward all this well-ordered sanity. He had fancied that he would be overwhelmed with memories, with regrets, with futile tears. But he knew now that even if it were possible to re-enter the world in which he had once moved he would refuse scornfully. Was it always so with those who achieved death? Ah yes, death was the great progression, one never re-entered the circle of life one quitted. Dead, quite dead! Or, as Storch put it, "A field freshly broken to the plow!" A field awaiting the eternal upspringing and the inevitable harvest... And so on, again and again, to the end of time!

He came out of his musings with a renewed sense of faintness and the realization that the street was rapidly being emptied of its throng. A few stragglers hurried toward the ferry. He roused himself. A green-gold light was enlivening the west and giving a ghostly unreality to the street lamps twinkling in a premature blossoming.

He was turning to go when he saw a familiar figure coming up the street. He looked twice to a.s.sure himself that he was not mistaken. It was Brauer!

He stood a moment longer, roused to indifferent curiosity, but, as Brauer brushed close, a sudden malevolent hatred shook him. He squared himself and said in a hoa.r.s.e tone:

"I'm starving... I want money ... to eat!" Brauer turned a face of amazed and insolent incredulity toward Fred.

"Well, you won't get it from me!" he flung back.

Fred Starratt grasped Brauer's puny wrist in a ferocious grip.

"Oh yes, I will... Do you know who I am?"

"You? ... No... Let me go; you're hurting me!"

"Look at me closely!"

"I tell you I don't know you. Are you crazy?"

"Perhaps... I've been in an insane asylum... Now do you know who I am?"

Brauer fell back. "No," he breathed: "it can't be possible! Fred Starratt is dead."

Fred began to laugh. "You're right. But I want something to eat just the same. You're going to take me into Hjul's ... and buy me a meal.

... And after I've eaten perhaps you'll hear how I died and who killed me."

He could feel Brauer trembling in his grasp. A rising cruelty overwhelmed him. He flung Brauer from him with a gesture of contempt.

"Are we going to eat?" he asked, coldly.

"Yes ... whatever you say."

Fred nodded and together the two drifted down Montgomery Street.

Sitting over a generous platter of pot roast and spaghetti at Hjul's, with Brauer's pallid face staring up at him, Fred Starratt had the realization that there was at least one mouselike human to whom he could play the role of cat.

Brauer did not need to be prodded to speech. He told everything with the eagerness of a child caught in a fault and seeking to curry the favor of his questioner. He and Kendricks were placing all the Hilmer insurance. Yes, they were rebating--that went without saying. And what else lay at the bottom of Hilmer's generosity? Fred Starratt put the question insinuatingly. Ah yes, the little matter of standing by when Starratt had been sent to Fairview. No, Hilmer had made no demand, but he had advised Brauer to be firm--through his lawyer, of course ... a hint, nothing more--that some sort of example should be made of men who...

Yes, that was just as it had happened.

"And you knew where they were sending me?" Fred was moved to demand, harshly.

"Well ... yes... But Hilmer's lawyer put it so convincingly...

Everything was to be for the best."

"Including your share in the Hilmer business?"

Brauer had the grace to wince. "Well, there was nothing said absolutely."

"And what did you figure was Hilmer's reason for ... well, wanting me to summer at Fairview?"

Brauer toyed with a spoon. "There could only be one reason."

"Don't be afraid. You mean that my wife..."

"Yes ... just that!"

Fred Starratt had a sense that he should have been stirred to anger, but instead a great pity swept him, pity for a human being who could sell another so shamelessly and not have the grace to deny it. Yes, he realized now that there were times when a lie was the most self-respecting and admirable thing in the world.

"It appears that I am dead also. I saw my wife to-day mourning for me in the most respectable of weeds."