Hearts of Three

by Jack London

  With the coming of daylight his growing terror added wings to his thought, and he achieved a new and profoundly simple theory of escape. Since he could not climb up, and since he could not get out through the sides themselves, then the only possible remaining way was down. Fool that he was! He might have been working through the cool night hours, and now he must labour in the quickly increasing heat. He applied himself in an ecstasy of energy to digging down through the mass of crumbling bones. Of course, there was a way out. Else how did the funnel drain? Otherwise it would have been full or part full of water from the rains. Fool! And thrice times thrice a fool!

  He dug down one side of the wall, flinging the rubbish into a mound against the opposite side. So desperately did he apply himself that he broke his finger-nails to the quick and deeper, while every finger-tip was lacerated to bleeding. But love of life was strong in him, and he knew it was a life-and-death race with the sun. As he went deeper, the rubbish became more compact, so that he used the muzzle of his rifle like a crowbar to loosen it, ere tossing it up in single and double handfuls.

  By mid-forenoon, his senses beginning to reel in the heat, he made a discovery. Upon the wall which he had uncovered, he came upon the beginning of an inscription, evidently rudely scratched in the rock by the point of a knife. With renewed hope, his head and shoulders down in the hole, he dug and scratched for all the world like a dog, throwing the rubbish out and between his legs in true dog-fashion. Some of it fell clear, but most of it fell back and down upon him. Yet had he become too frantic to note the inefficiency of his effort.

  At last the inscription was cleared, so that he was able to read:

  Peter McGill, of Glasgow. On March 12, 1820,

  I escaped from the Pit of Hell by this passage by digging down and finding it.

  A passage! The passage must be beneath the inscription! Torres now toiled in a fury. So dirt-soiled was he that he was like some huge, four-legged, earth-burrowing animal. The dirt got into his eyes, and, on occasion, into his nostrils and air passages so as to suffocate him and compel him to back up out of the hole and sneeze and cough his breathing apparatus clear. Twice he fainted. But the sun, by then almost directly overhead, drove him on.

  He found the upper rim of the passage. He did not dig down to the lower rim; for the moment the aperture was large enough to accommodate his lean shape, he writhed and squirmed into it and away from the destroying sun-rays. The cool and the dark soothed him, but his joy and the reaction from what he had undergone sent his pulse giddily up, so that for the third time he fainted.

  Eecovered, mouthing with black and swollen lips a half-insane chant of gratefulness and thanksgiving, he crawled on along the passage. Perforce he crawled, because it was so low that a dwarf could not have stood erect in it. The place was a charnel house. Bones crunched and crumbled under his hands and knees, and he knew that his knees were being worn to the bone. At the end of a hundred feet he caught his first glimmering of light. But the nearer he approached freedom, the slower he progressed, for the final stages of exhaustion were coming upon him. He knew that it was not physical exhaustion, nor food exhaustion, but thirst exhaustion. Water, a few ounces of water, was all he needed to make him strong again. And there was no water.

  But the light was growing stronger and nearer. He noted, toward the last, that the floor of the passage pitched down at an angle of fully thirty degrees. This made the way easier. Gravity drew him on, and helped every failing effort of him, toward the source of light. Very close to it, he encountered an increase in the deposit of bones. Yet they bothered him little, for they had become an old story, while he was too exhausted to mind them.

  He did observe, with swimming eyes and increasing numbness of touch, that the passage was contracting both vertically and horizontally. Slanting downward at thirty degrees, it gave him an impression of a rat-trap, himself the rat, descending head foremost toward he knew not what. Even before he reached it, he apprehended that the slit of bright day that advertised the open world beyond was too narrow for the egress of his body. And his apprehension was verified. Crawling unconcernedly over a skeleton that the blaze of day showed him to be a man’s, he managed, by severely and painfully squeezing his ears flat back, to thrust his head through the slitted aperture. The sun beat down upon his head, while his eyes drank in the openness of the freedom of the world that the unyielding rock denied to the rest of his body.

  Most maddening of all was a running stream not a hundred yards away, tree-fringed beyond, with lush meadowgrass leading down to it from his side. And in the treeshadowed water, knee-deep and drowsing, stood several cows of the dwarf breed peculiar to the Valley of Lost Souls. Occasionally they flicked their tails lazily at flies, or changed the distribution of their weight on their legs. He glared at them to see them drink, but they were evidently too sated with water. Fools! Why should they not drink, with all that wealth of water flowing idly by! They betrayed alertness, turning their heads toward the far bank and pricking tneir ears forward. Then, as a big antlered buck came out from among the trees to the water’s edge, they flattened their ears back and shook their heads and pawed the water till he could hear the splashing. But the stag disdained their threats, lowered his head, and drank. This was too much for Torres, who emitted a maniacal scream which, had he been in his senses, he would not have recognised as proceeding from his own throat and larynx.

  The stag sprang away. The cattle turned their heads in Torres’ direction, drowsed, their eyes shut, and resumed the nicking of flies. With a violent effort, scarcely knowing that he had half-torn off his ears, he drew his head back through the slitted aperture and fainted on top of the skeleton.

  Two hours later, though he did not know the passage of time, he regained consciousness, and found his own head cheek by jowl with the skull of the skeleton on which he lay. The descending sun was already shining into the narrow opening, and his gaze chanced upon a rusty knife. The point of it was worn and broken, and he established the connection. This was the knife that had scratched the inscription on the rock at the base of the funnel at the other end of the passage, and this skeleton was the bony framework of the man who had done the scratching. And Alvarez Torrez went immediately mad.

  “Ah, Peter McGill, my enemy,” he muttered. “Peter McGill of Glasgow who betrayed me to this end. This for you! And this! And this!”

  So speaking, he drove the heavy knife into the fragile front of the skull. The dust of the bone which had once been the tabernacle of Peter McGill’s brain arose in his nostrils and increased his frenzy. He attacked the skeleton with his hands, tearing at it, disrupting it, filling the pent space about him with flying bones. It was like a battle, in which he destroyed what was left of the mortal remains of the one time resident of Glasgow.

  Once again Torres squeezed his head through the slit to gaze at the fading glory of the world. Like a rat in the trap caught by the neck in the trap of ancient Maya devising, he saw the bright world and day dim to darkness as his final consciousness drowned in the darkness of death.

  But still the cattle stood in the water and drowsed and flicked at flies, and, later, the stag returned, disdainful of the cattle, to complete its interrupted drink.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  NOT for nothing had Regan been named by his associates, The Wolf of Wall Street! While usually no more than a conservative, large-scale player, ever SO’ often, like a periodical drinker, he had to go on a rampage of wild and daring stock-gambling. At least five times in his long career had he knocked the bottom out of the market or lifted the roof off, and each time to the tune of a personal gain of millions. He never went on a small rampage, and he never went too often.

  He would let years of quiescence slip by, until suspicion of him was lulled asleep and his world deemed that the Wolf was at last grown old and peaceable. And then, like a thunderbolt, he would strike at the men and interests he wished to destroy. But, though the blow always fell like a thunderbolt, not like a thunderbolt was it in its inception
. Long months, and even years, were spent in deviously preparing for the day and painstakingly maturing the plans and conditions for the battle.

  Thus had it been in the outlining and working up of the impending Waterloo for Francis Morgan. Revenge lay back of it, but it was revenge against a dead man. Not Francis, but Francis’ father, was the one he struck against, although he struck through the living into the heart of the grave to accomplish it. Eight years he had waited and sought his chance ere old R.H.M. ��� Richard Henry Morgan ��� had died. But no chance had he found. He was, truly, the Wolf of Wall Street, but never by any luck had he found an opportunity against the Lion for to his death R.H.M. had been known as the Lion of Wall Street.

  So, from father to son, always under a show of fair appearance, Regan had carried the feud over. Yet Regan’s very foundation on which he built for revenge was meretricious and wrongly conceived. True, eight years before R.H.M.‘s death, he had tried to doublecross him and failed; but he never dreamed that E.H.M. had guessed. Yet E.H.M. had not only guessed but had ascertained beyond any shadow of doubt, and had promptly and cleverly doublecrossed his treacherous associate. Thus, had Regan known that E.H.M. knew of his perfidy, Regan would have taken his medicine without thought of revenge. As it was, believing that E.H.M. was as bad as himself, believing that E.H.M., out of meanness as mean as his own, without provocation or suspicion, had done this foul thing to him, he saw no way to balance the account save by ruining him, or, in lieu of him, by ruining his son.

  And Regan had taken his time. At first Francis had left the financial game alone, content with letting his money remain safely in the safe investments into which it had been put by his father. Not until Francis had become for the first time active in undertaking Tampico Petroleum to the tune of millions of investment, with an assured many millions of ultimate returns, had Regan had the ghost of a chance to destroy him. But, the chance given, Regan had not wasted time, though his slow and thorough campaign had required many months to develop. Ere he was done, he came very close to knowing every share of whatever stock Francis carried on margin or owned outright.

  It had really taken two years and more for Regan to prepare. In some of the corporations in which Francis owned heavily, Regan was himself a director and no inconsiderable arbiter of destiny. In Frisco Consolidated he was president. In New York, Vermont and Connecticut he was vicepresident. From controlling one director in Northwestern Electric, he had played kitchen politics until he controlled the two-thirds majority. And so with all the rest, either directly, or indirectly through corporation and banking ramilications, he had his hand in the secret springs and levers of the financial and business mechanism which gave strength to Francis’ fortune.

  Yet no one of these was more tl: an a bagatelle compared with the biggest thing of all Tampico Petroleum. In this, beyond a paltry twenty thousand shares bought on the open market, ‘Regan owned nothing, controlled nothing, though the time was growing ripe for him to sell and deal and juggle in inordinate quantities. Tampico Petroleum was practically Francis’ private preserve. A number of his friends were, for them, deeply involved, Mrs. Carruthers even gravely so. She worried him, and was not even above pestering him over the telephone. There were others, like Johnny Pathmore, who never bothered him at all, and who, when they met, talked carelessly and optimistically about the condition of the market and financial things in general. All of which was harder to bear than Mrs. Carruthers’ perpetual nervousness.

  Northwestern Electric, thanks to Regan’s machinations, had actually dropped thirty points and remained there. Those on the outside who thought they knew, regarded it as positively shaky. Then there was Ihe little, old, solidas-the-rock-of-Gibraltar Frisco Consolidated. The nastiest of rumors were afloat, and the talk of a receivership was growing emphatic. Montana Lode was still sickly under Mulhaney’s unflattering and unmodified report, and Weston, the great expert sent out by the English investors, had failed to report anything reassuring. For six months, Imperial Tungsten, earning nothing, had been put to disastrous expense in the great strike which seemed only just begun. Nor did anybody, save the several labor leaders who knew, dream that it was Regan’s gold that was at the bottom of the affair.

  The secrecy and the deadliness of the attack was what unnerved Bascom. All properties in which Francis was interested were being pressed down as if by a slow-moving glacier. There was nothing spectacular about the movement, merely a steady persistent decline that made Francis’ large fortune shrink horribly. And, along with what he owned outright, what he bsld on margin suffered even greater shrinkage.

  Then had come rumors of war. Ambassadors were receiving their passports right and left, and half the world seemed mobilizing. This was the moment, with the market shaken and panicky, and with the world powers delaying in declaring moratoriums, that Regan selected to strike. The time was ripe for a bear raid, and with him were associated half a dozen other big bears who tacitly accepted his leadership. But even they did not know the full extent of his plans, nor guess at the specific direction of them. They were in the raid for what they could make, and thought he was in it for the same reason, in their simple directness of pecuniary vision catching no glimpse of Francis Morgan nor of his ghostly father at whom the big blow was being struck.

  Regan’s rumor factory began working overtime, and the first to drop and the fastest to drop in the dropping market were the stocks of Francis, which had already done consider able dropping ere the bear market began. Yet Regan was careful to bring no pressure on Tampico Petroleum. Proudly it held up its head in the midst of the general slump, and eagerly Kegan waited for the moment of desperation when Francis would be forced to dump it on the market to cover his shrunken margins in other lines.

  “Lord! Lord!”

  Bascom held the side of his face in the palm of one hand and grimaced as if he had a jumping toothache.

  “Lord! Lord!” he reiterated. “The market’s gone to smash and Tampico Pet along with it. How she slumped! Who’d have dreamed it!”

  Francis, puffing steadily away at a cigarette and quite oblivious that it was unlighted, sat with Bascom in the latter’s private office.

  “It looks like a fire-sale,” he vouchsafed.

  “That won’t last longer than this time tomorrow morning then you’ll be sold out, and me with you,” his broker simplified, with a swift glance at the clock.

  It marked twelve, as Francis’ swiftly automatic glance verified.

  “Dump in the rest of Tampico Pet,” he said wearily. “That ought to hold back until tomorrow.”

  “Then what tomorrow?” bis broker demanded, “with the bottom out and everybody including the office boys selling short.”

  Francis shrugged his shoulders. “You know I’ve mortgaged��� the house, Dreamwold, and the Adirondack Camp to the limit.”

  “Have you any friends?”

  “At such a time!” Francis countered bitterly.

  “Well, it’s the very time,” Bascom retorted. “Look here, Morgan. I know the set you ran with at college. There’s Johnny Pathmore-”

  “And he’s up to his eyes already. When I smash he smashes. And Dave Donaldson will have to readjust his life to about one hundred and sixty a month. And as for Chris Westhouse, he’ll have to take to the movies for a livelihood. He always was good at theatricals, and I happen to know he’s got the ideal “film “face.”

  “There’s Charley Tippery,” Bascom suggested, though it was patent that he was hopeless about it.

  Yes,” Francis agreed with equal hopelessness. “There’s only one thing the matter with him his father still lives.”

  “The old cuss never took a flyer in his life,” Bascom supplemented. “There’s never a time he can’t put his hand on millions. And he still lives, worse luck.”

  “Charley could get him to do it, and would, except the one thing that’s the matter with me.”

  “No securities left?” his broker queried.

  Francis nodded.

&
nbsp; Catch the old man parting with a dollar without due security.”

  Nevertheless, a few minutes later, hoping to find Charley Tippery in his office during the noon hour, Francis was sending in his card. Of all jewelers and gem merchants in New York, the Tippery establishment was the greatest. Not only that. It was esteemed the greatest in the world. More of the elder Tippery’s money was invested in the great Diamond Corner, than even those in the know of most things knew of this particular thing.

  The interview was as Francis had forecast. The old man still held tight reins on practically everything, and the son had little hope of winning his assistance.

  “I know him,” he told Francis. “And though I’m going to wrestle with him, don’t pin an iota of faith on the outcome. I’ll go to the mat with him, but that will be about all. The worst of it is that he has the ready cash, to say nothing of oodles and oodles of safe securities and United States bonds. But you see, Grandfather Tippery, when he was young and struggling and founding the business, once loaned a friend a thousand. He never got it back, and he never got over it. Nor did Father Tippery ever get over it either. The experience seared both of them. Why, father wouldn’t lend a penny on the North Pole unless he got the Pole for security after having had it expertly appraised. And you haven’t any security, you see. But I’ll tell you what. I’ll wrestle with the old man to-night after dinner. That’s his most amiable mood of the day, And I’ll hustle around on my own and see what I can do. Oh, I know a few hundred thousand won’t mean anything, and I’ll do my darnedest for some��� thing big. Whatever happens, I’ll be at your house at nine tomorrow-”