Phineas Spear stood in Pierson’s dingy office and looked down at the inert body of Randall Pierson. The letter that Abel Parkes had signed slid slowly back into his own pocket, and he bent over the lawyer, lifted him and heaved him with a grunt across his shoulder. He kicked an empty gin bottle under the desk. Pierson’s breathing was labored, heavy.
The village drunk!
Out like a light!
Expressionless, his eyes smouldering, Spear went out with his burden. He crossed to the Blade building, went in and emerged again shortly, alone. As he relocked the door, he muttered, “But you’re going to be sober, fella, for tomorrow’s court appearance!” And Phineas Spear went home, and wearily to bed.
His body ached. Every bone and muscle in him cried out for rest, sleep. And every atom of his brain refused feverishly. The luminous hands of the alarm clock on the table beside him crawled from midnight to one o’clock. At a quarter of two he turned the clock around, and he didn’t know how much later it was when his phone rang. He took it before he was fully out of the doze into which he had fallen, said:
“Yeah?” Then, “What!”
“Phineas!” The very timbre of Cara’s voice sent a shock through him, prepared him for anything. In a half second he thought of everything but what she told him, frantically, “Phineas — the office! It’s burning!”
His feet hit the floor. Light flared. “How bad, Cara? Is it—”
His heart pounded.
“Oh, it’s the whole building. They say it’s hopeless — gone!”
“Cara...” His voice was hoarse. “Where are you? Are you near there?”
“Yes. I’m in Randall Pierson’s office.”
“Then tell ’em — tell ’em quick! Pierson’s in that fire! I left him, dead-drunk, in my office. Locked in! Hurry, Cara — I’m coming!”
Chapter IV
Sentence of Death
A gain the court-room was jammed. People stood on one another’s toes, or sat two in a seat intended for one. People waited, panting in air grown unfit to breathe, crowded intolerably while still more tried to enter. And no one would have left willingly as long as he could retain consciousness. The mob that had assembled to hear a verdict of guilty pronounced upon Abel Parkes was apathetic compared to that which had gathered to hear him sentenced to die. But it was not only the morbidly curious who had come, not alone the sensation seekers!
Men who had not attended a single session of the trial of Abel Parkes — who had been satisfied to read about it — were there now. Business men: bankers; doctors. And their wives. And some of them seemed a little ill at ease, a little dazed. More than one glanced again, furtively perhaps, at the printed single sheets — like cheap hand-bills — that were scattered through the room, through the streets, throughout the town for anyone to see and read, free of charge.
Those handbills bore the masthead of the Blade. They were marked “Extra.” They said simply:
Pending completion of alterations to Plant and Equipment, The Blade will appear in its present form. However limited in scope, The Blade will continue to report the news.
There was no reference to fire, no mention of presses smashed into twisted junk before fire ever touched them. There was no statement of the fact that the pungent reek of burned kerosene still permeated the smouldering ruins of the Blade building. But those things were not necessary to be printed. Rumor had them! Rumor flung them, amplified by the clamoring tongues of repetition, to all the town.
Rumor said that Randall Pierson had died. That Spear had killed him. That Pierson had started the fire. That Major Bardin had been found, beaten and robbed. Rumor said that a guard had been half killed under Abel Parkes cell window. That Phineas Spear had bought an antiquated hand-press in a neighboring town and had set it up in an empty loft.
That seemed to be a fact — a bald rock of reality in the surrounding sea of rumor. And the sentence of death about to be pronounced upon Abel Parkes faded into the background, became suddenly but the opening move on a chessboard of grim conflict. Instead of the yellow cur, snapping at the fringes of respectability, beyond the pale of recognition, the Blade loomed as a tiger challenging those lions of civic virtue: public opinion and the News-Herald!
But they sat passively while the preliminaries were done. They rose when Judge Blake entered, and sat down when he did. They tolerated the bustling activity of court attendants, whispered conferences among attorneys. They had eyes only for Abel Parkes and the subtle change that had taken place in him. Instead of the hopeless futility that had marked him throughout his trial, he had now a breathless quality of dog-like eagerness.
His eyes wandered from crammed doorways to press table, with its full quota of News-Herald men, and its two vacant chairs where the Blade’s representatives might sit. Major Bardin was there with his contingent. Spear was not — nor Randall Pierson. But rumor had not penetrated to Abel Parkes’ cell. He hadn’t heard that a besotted lawyer had been trapped in the Blade inferno.
Then the drama had been acted out. The letter of the Law had been appeased and the clerk broke the waiting silence.
“The defendant will rise.”
Slowly, his face like a frightened child, uncomprehending, Abel Parkes wavered to his feet. Judge Blake’s voice was resonant, sternly uninflected.
“Abel Parkes,” he said, “you have been found guilty by a jury of your peers of the wilful and felonious murder of Justin Southard. Under the Criminal Code of this State, the penalty for such murder is death by electrocution. Have you any reason to give why that sentence should not be pronounced upon you?”
There was the quiet of death. The old man’s eyes went slowly from judge to jury, rested briefly on press table and prosecution, reached Max Horstmann’s darkly handsome face. Then, “Your Honor,” he panted, “please, Your Honor, I... I didn’t do it! I...” and Abel Parkes’ throat closed in a racking sob.
“Is that all?” the Judge asked. “Is there — nothing else?”
Max Horstmann spoke. “Your Honor, that is all.”
It was getting dark. They stood together at a dusty window with a broken pane and looked out over the street. Behind them the dim emptiness of the warehouse loft was broken only by the bulk of a dilapidated hand-press, a limited stock of printers’ supplies. But such as it was, the Blade! Phineas Spear turned slowly and looked at it.
His face was soot-grimed, gaunt, ink-streaked. A livid gash over one eye had been stitched, bandaged earlier in the day, but the dressing had long since been lost. His hair was singed and ragged; remnants of tweed hung on him in charred shreds — mute evidence that if Randall Pierson had died, at least he had not gone without an effort to save him! His gaze dropped to Cara Collins, almost as dirty as he.
She breathed, “Why— Oh, why doesn’t somebody phone!”
“It’s a good sign, Cara!” he said. “If he’d been thrown out, we’d have known it long ago! But now” — his teeth gleamed white in the dimness — “we’ll beat ’em! We’ll smoke ’em out with the very fire they thought was burning us into oblivion!”
“But Phineas,” her voice was almost a sob, “how can we go on? The insurance won’t buy a third of the equipment we need. We can’t last — like this—” Her hand, in a hopeless gesture, swept the bare loft. “No advertising — not a cent coming in. And — nobody’ll even work for the Blade! I saw old Pete this morning, Phineas — and even he’s turned against us!”