His eyes lighted, smiled. “Hi, Cara,” he said. “I know — I’m late, but I won’t let it happen again today! Stopped to talk to Pierson. I see there was a—”
“Phineas,” she cut in, “what’s wrong?”
“Wrong?” he inquired. “Why?”
“I heard you snap at Pete when you came in, and saw your face. You looked—”
“Oh! That. Just the usual, Cara. This Southard thing. Pierson and I were talking about it. He advised caution and the long pull to fame and fortune. And it got me— Wait a minute! What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing,” she said hurriedly. “Only — Phineas, I wish you’d take that advice! Pierson’s right. You’ve only been here three months — you’ve had the Blade only six weeks. And — and you simply don’t know Liberty! How smug it is, how cruel and vindictive and set in its ways!”
Phineas Spear heaved his lean body out of its slouch with effortless ease. He came around his desk and stood smiling faintly into the dark eyes, the perfect, upturned oval of her face.
“Cara,” he said irrelevantly, “you’re a pretty little thing — but to get back. I don’t know the town — you say! Now I’ll tell you a secret. I do know the town, and it’s just like any other town of twenty thousand — or two million! I spent my first month here in the local barber shops and gin-mills, the street corners and back alleys and hotel lobbies — where you meet people in the raw. I read the News-Herald and the Blade every day, from cover to cover, and maybe I could tell you some things about Liberty that you don’t know! But anyway, I wanted to buy a newspaper — one that was down at the heel, preferably — that I could have some fun in building up. And the Blade was the answer to all that.”
“Yes, Phineas, I know, but...”
“Then,” he went on as though he hadn’t heard her, “old Senator Southard was murdered, and that poor wretch, Parkes, was caught without an alibi. Oh, I know they’ve got a motive against him, but forget that, Cara. I’ll tell you why Southard was killed! Because he had the courage to stand up and tell this smug and cruel and vindictive town just what was happening to it! Tell it what to expect if it kept on letting the News-Herald gang do its thinking, run its affairs. And Southard’s death proves he was right! By Heaven, Cara, there’s something afoot in this town that won’t stop at one killing to get what it wants. There’s something—”
“I know, Phineas,” she said. “They... they won’t stop at just one killing! But I don’t want the next one to be — you! I found — this — pinned on the door of your office when I came in this morning.”
In silence Phineas Spear’s gaze dropped to the sheet of paper she held out to him tensely. For an instant he stood motionless, taut as drawn wire, before he snatched at the sheet, read aloud the crudely printed message:
As he finished he crumpled the thing in a fist that quivered with the fierce pressure of his grip.
“Guardsmen of America!” he grated, then: “Cara! Get Pete in here, get Hanley, Johnson! Kill whatever we’ve got on today’s front page. I want an extra on the streets as soon as you can get it there. Headline — take this — ‘War Declared!’ Eight column spread, Cara. Under it print a facsimile of this note, and an explanation at the bottom as to how and where you found it. You write it. I’m going to do a sizzling editorial and print that—”
“Hello!” He scooped up the jangling phone. “Yeah... What? Oke, I’ll be there.” And to Cara again, “Court just convened. The Southard jury’s coming in. You write the editorial too. Make it — you know — hot! S’long.”
The door banged. A gleam of excitement blotted out bewilderment, anxiety in Cara Collin’s face. She threw open the door again. “Pete!” she called. “Here — Hurry! Extra edition.”
In the court-room a silence that was heavy with a surcharge of electric tension brought jammed spectators to their toes. Phineas Spear made no attempt to reach the Press table. The trial judge — Blake — was already on the bench, the jury had just filed back into the box. He heard the voice of the clerk intone that fateful question: “Gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?” And the solemn answer, “We have.”
Using elbows and shoulders, Spear ignored muttered objections, reached a window sill and climbed on it. Clinging precariously, he looked over massed heads to the railed enclosure below the bench. His eyes focused upon the defense’s table, upon Max Horstmann, counsel appointed by the court to defend Abel Parkes. And Parkes himself, his thin, emaciated face turned upward to the jury with terrible, hopeless intensity.
“And what is that verdict?” the clerk droned on.
To Phineas Spear, it was grotesque, unreal. The man spoke his lines in this set and unvarying drama apathetically, with no feeling for the depths of human emotions that were being plumbed. The foreman looked once at Abel Parkes and the old man’s head dropped, his thin shoulders trembled. He knew before the words were said.
“We find the defendant guilty as charged.”
An indrawn, multi-throated breath sighed like a gust of wind through a broken window. No one heard the rest of it. Very few of them heard Judge Blake postpone the pronouncement of sentence until the following day. But Phineas Spear heard. He slid down from his window sill, his eyes bleak, his mouth thinly determined.
Chapter II
Suspicion
The bar was crowded, heavy with smoke, loud with talking. Everyone talked at once. Only in the immediate vicinity of Phineas Spear was there any silence, and that was soon overwhelmed in the contagion of words. But Phineas Spear didn’t talk. His hat low over his eyes, nose buried in a half empty beer glass, he listened.
“Naw! There won’t be no appeal. Horstmann won’t appeal.”
“Why should he? Parkes is the guy!”
“Parkes did it — the rat! Bit the hand that’s fed him.”
“After the Senator kep’ him all these years.”
“Guilty as hell. Oughta be lynched.”
“I ain’t so sure!”
In the split second of startled silence that followed that last statement, Spear marked the man who had made it. Big, level-eyed, slow-spoken, the doubter was garbed in overalls. His hand on a beer glass was grimy-nailed. He looked like a mechanic. The fierce storm of protest that burst about him did not alter his somberly reflective face, nor his posture.
Behind him, Phineas Spear heard, “Somebody oughta — sorta talk to Charley Vargas, shouldn’t they?”
“Yeah,” was the reply, “somebody will!”
Spear’s glass thudded on the bar. He pushed back his hat, turned and caught the smouldering stare of the man who had spoken last. Spear smiled narrowly, and shouldered his way out. A muffled yodel from the street filtered through the chaos inside. At the curb he bought one of his own extras, regarded it with grim pleasure and watched the faces of others who bought. He wondered how Charley Vargas — the man who wasn’t so sure — would look when he read the Guardsmen’s note. What would he think when somebody came around to “sorta talk” to him? Spear crossed the street, strode half a block to the tall, elaborately facaded News-Herald building. He left the elevator at the tenth floor, entered the door marked Max Horstmann. And the attorney for the defense — Horstmann himself — turned away from a window to eye him.