For this man the frugal, hard working newsboy had conceived a regard amounting to a passion. As he listened to McCarthy he got continuous delightful little thrills. “There is nothing he would not dare,” thought the boy. “He is the freest, the boldest, the bravest man in town.” When the young Irishman, seeing the admiration in his eyes, flung him a silver dollar saying, “That is for your fine brown eyes, my boy; it I had them I would have half the women in town after me,” Sam kept the dollar in his pocket and counted it a kind of treasure like the rose given a lover by his sweetheart.
It was past eleven o’clock when Hop Higgins returned to town with McCarthy, driving quietly along the street and through an alley at the back of the town hall. The crowd upon the street had broken up. Sam had gone from one to another of the muttering groups, his heart quaking with fear. Now he stood at the back of the mass of men gathered at the jail door. An oil lamp, burning at the top of the post above the door, threw dancing, flickering lights on the faces of the men before him. The thunder storm that had threatened had not come, but the unnatural warm wind continued and the sky overhead was inky black.
Through the alley, to the jail door, drove the town marshal, the young McCarthy sitting in the buggy beside him. A man rushed forward to hold the horse. McCarthy’s face was chalky white. He laughed and shouted, raising his hand toward the sky.
“I am Michael, son of God. I have cut a man with a knife so that his red blood ran upon the ground. I am the son of God and this filthy jail shall be my sanctuary. In there I shall talk aloud with my Father,” he roared hoarsely, shaking his fist at the crowd. “Sons of this cesspool of respectability, stay and hear! Send for your females and let them stand in the presence of a man!”
Taking the white, wild-eyed man by the arm Marshal Higgins led him into the jail, the clank of locks, the low murmur of the voice of Higgins and the wild laughter of McCarthy floating out to the group of silent men standing in the mud of the alley.
Sam McPherson ran past the group of men to the side of the jail and finding John Telfer and Valmore leaning silently against the wall of Tom Folger’s wagon shop slipped between them. Telfer put out his arm and laid it upon the boy’s shoulder. Hop Higgins, coming out of the jail, addressed the crowd. “Don’t answer if he talks,” he said; “he is as crazy as a loon.”
Sam moved closer to Telfer. The voice of the imprisoned man, loud, and filled with a startling boldness, rolled out of the jail. He began praying.
“Hear me, Father Almighty, who has permitted this town of Caxton to exist and has let me, Thy son, grow to manhood. I am Michael, Thy son. They have put me in this jail where rats run across the floor and they stand in the mud outside as I talk with Thee. Are you there, old Truepenny?”
A breath of cold air blew up the alley followed by a flaw of rain. The group under the flickering lamp by the jail entrance drew back against the walls of the building. Sam could see them dimly, pressing closely against the wall. The man in the jail laughed loudly.
“I have had a philosophy of life, O Father,” he shouted. “I have seen men and women here living year after year without children. I have seen them hoarding pennies and denying Thee new life on which to work Thy will. To these women I have gone secretly talking of carnal love. With them I have been gentle and kind; them I have flattered.”
A roaring laugh broke from the lips of the imprisoned man. “Are you there, oh dwellers in the cesspool of respectability?” he shouted. “Do you stand in the mud with cold feet listening? I have been with your wives. Eleven Caxton wives without babes have I been with and it has been fruitless. The twelfth woman I have just left, leaving her man in the road a bleeding sacrifice to thee. I shall call out the names of the eleven. I shall have revenge also upon the husbands of the women, some of whom wait with the others in the mud outside.”
He began calling off the names of Caxton wives. A shudder ran through the body of the boy, sensitised by the new chill in the air and by the excitement of the night. Among the men standing along the wall of the jail a murmur arose. Again they grouped themselves under the flickering light by the jail door, disregarding the rain. Valmore, stumbling out of the darkness beside Sam, stood before Telfer. “The boy should be going home,” he said; “this isn’t fit for him to hear.”
Telfer laughed and drew Sam closer to him. “He has heard enough lies in this town,” he said. “Truth won’t hurt him. I would not go myself, nor would you, and the boy shall not go. This McCarthy has a brain. Although he is half insane now he is trying to work something out. The boy and I will stay to hear.”
The voice from the jail continued calling out the names of Caxton wives. Voices in the group before the jail door began shouting: “This should be stopped. Let us tear down the jail.”
McCarthy laughed aloud. “They squirm, oh Father, they squirm; I have them in the pit and I torture them,” he cried.
An ugly feeling of satisfaction came over Sam. He had a sense of the fact that the names shouted from the jail would be repeated over and over through the town. One of the women whose names had been called out had stood with the evangelist at the back of the church trying to induce the wife of the baker to rise and be counted in the fold with the lambs.
The rain, falling on the shoulders of the men by the jail door, changed to hail, the air grew colder and the hailstones rattled on the roofs of buildings. Some of the men joined Telfer and Valmore, talking in low, excited voices. “And Mary McKane, too, the hypocrite,” Sam heard one of them say.
The voice inside the jail changed. Still praying, Mike McCarthy seemed also to be talking to the group in the darkness outside.
“I am sick of my life. I have sought leadership and have not found it. Oh Father! Send down to men a new Christ, one to get hold of us, a modern Christ with a pipe in his mouth who will swear and knock us about so that we vermin who pretend to be made in Thy image will understand. Let him go into churches and into courthouses, into cities, and into towns like this, shouting, ‘Be ashamed! Be ashamed of your cowardly concern over your snivelling souls!’ Let him tell us that never will our lives, so miserably lived, be repeated after our bodies lie rotting in the grave.”
A sob broke from his lips and a lump came into Sam’s throat.
“Oh Father! help us men of Caxton to understand that we have only this, our lives, this life so warm and hopeful and laughing in the sun, this life with its awkward boys full of strange possibilities, and its girls with their long legs and freckles on their noses, that are meant to carry life within themselves, new life, kicking and stirring, and waking them at night.”
The voice of the prayer broke. Wild sobs took the place of speech. “Father!” shouted the broken voice, “I have taken a life, a man that moved and talked and whistled in the sunshine on winter mornings; I have killed.”
The voice inside the jail became inaudible. Silence, broken by low sobs from the jail, fell on the little dark alley and the listening men began going silently away. The lump in Sam’s throat grew larger. Tears stood in his eyes. He went with Telfer and Valmore out of the alley and into the street, the two men walking in silence. The rain had ceased and a cold wind blew.
The boy felt that he had been shriven. His mind, his heart, even his tired body seemed strangely cleansed. He felt a new affection for Telfer and Valmore. When Telfer began talking he listened eagerly, thinking that at last he understood him and knew why men like Valmore, Wildman, Freedom Smith, and Telfer loved each other and went on being friends year after year in the face of difficulties and misunderstandings. He thought that he had got hold of the idea of brotherhood that John Telfer talked of so often and so eloquently. “Mike McCarthy is only a brother who has gone the dark road,” he thought and felt a glow of pride in the thought and in the apt expression of it in his mind.
John Telfer, forgetting the boy, talked soberly to Valmore, the two men stumbling along in the darkness intent upon their own thoughts.
“It is an odd thought,” said Telfer and his voice seemed far away and unnatural like the voice from the jail; “it is an odd thought that but