Adventure stories; Brothers -- Fiction; Chicago (Ill.) -- Fiction; Detective and mystery stories
I knew the trouble before they shouted it to us; Jerry had got away.
Instantly, without a jerk of warning, he had sprung from their hands as
they dragged him, all limp the second before; he was out of a door and
gone; and their loud bullets bagged them nothing.
They were all about the streets and alleys searching for him when I
came out to the ambulance beside the stretcher on which was Dorothy
Crewe.
“I’ll not go with you to the hospital,” I told the surgeon. “I’ll go
to her people; don’t ’phone them.” And so, while the police looked for
Jerry, I went to Dorothy’s people and tried to tell them--Keeban.
Keeban? Of course they did not believe. Stunned themselves, they
thought me mildly maddened by what had happened. Keeban! What did I
truthfully know of him? I got back home at last and stopped at Jerry’s
room, which had always been next to mine; I opened the door and in the
dark looked in. “Keeban!” I said to myself. “By God, there’s a Keeban;
there has to be!”
And, careful not to wake my own people, I went into my room.
III
I HAVE ENCOUNTER BY THE RIVER.
As long as I stayed by myself, I had some luck at believing; but there
was morning and the newspapers and telephone calls. I had to tell my
father then, and mother; and they talked with the police. They talked
with Mrs. Sparling and Gibson and fifty others who were at the dance.
And also they talked with Dorothy.
She was conscious now but in complete collapse, and her prostration,
added to what she said, gave the final proof against Jerry. She’d loved
him, too, it seemed; and he’d attacked and robbed her.
There’s no sense in stringing here the sensations the papers spread;
they were perfectly plain and obvious. “Foster Son of Millionaire
Attacks and Robs Society Girl”; and “Foundling of Fanneals Turns
Brute”; and “Waif Reared to Riches Reverts to Original Savagery” and
all that tosh. They dogged my people and me, the servants and even our
office force. They ran articles by “professors,” cheap alienists,
psychoanalysts and the rest of the ruck running after sensation.
Jerry had “reverted”; that was the seed of their stuff. He carried
in his blood a “complex” which suddenly caused him to cast off all
the restraints and habits of thought and conduct which our family had
drilled into him and to plan and effect the robbery of the jewels about
Dorothy Crewe’s neck. The dance and drink that night had inflamed him,
they said; then something flared up inside him and he forgot all that
we had grafted into him, forgot even his own obvious advantage in
remaining the son of Austin Fanneal, for the “primordial, overpowering
instinct for violence.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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