At Reno, Nevada, a dispatch was delivered to Hall. It was from the sentimental Denver assassin.
“Man ground to pieces at Winnemucca. Must be Chief. Return at once. Members all arriving Denver. We must reorganize.”
But Hall grinned and remained on his westbound train. The reply he wired was:
“Better identify. Did you deliver letter to lady?”
Three days later, at the St. Francis Hotel, Hall heard again from the manager of the Denver Bureau. This wire was from Winnemucca, Nevada.
“My mistake. It was Harding. Chief surely heading for San Francisco. Inform local branch. Am following. Delivered letter. Lady remained on train.”
But no trace of Grunya could Hall find in San Francisco. Nor could Breen and Alsworthy, the two local members, help him. Hall even went over to Oakland and ferreted out the sleeping car she had arrived in and the Negro porter of the car. She had come to San Francisco and promptly disappeared.
The assassins began to string in—Hanover of Boston, Haas, the hungry one with the misplaced heart, Starkington of Chicago, Lucoville of New Orleans, John Gray of New Orleans, and Harkins of Denver. With the two San Francisco members there was a total of eight. They were all that survived in the United States. As was well known to them, Hall did not count. While Temporary Secretary of the organization, disbursing its funds and transmitting its telegrams, he was not one of them and his life was not threatened by the mad leader.
What convinced Hall that they were all madmen was the uniform kindness with which they treated him and the confidence they reposed in him. They knew him to be the original cause of their troubles; they knew he was bent upon the destruction of the Assassination Bureau and that he had furnished the fifty thousand dollars for the death of their Chief; and yet they gave Hall credit for what he considered the rightness of his conduct and for the particular streak of ethical madness that simmered somewhere in his make-up and compelled him to play fairly with them. He did not betray them. He handled their funds honestly; and he performed satisfactorily all the duties of Temporary Secretary.
With the exception of Haas, who, despite his achievements in Greek and Hebrew, was too kin to the tiger in lust to kill, Hall could not help but like these learned lunatics who had made a fetish of ethics and who took the lives of fellow humans with the same coolness and directness of purpose with which they solved problems in mathematics, made translations of hieroglyphics, or carried through chemical analyses in the test-tubes of their laboratories. John Gray he liked most of all. A quiet Englishman, in appearance and carriage a country squire, John Gray entertained radical ideas concerning the function of the drama. During the weeks of waiting, when there was no sign of Dragomiloff or Grunya, Gray and Hall frequented the theatres together, and to Hall their friendship proved a liberal education. During this period, Lucoville became immersed in basketry, devoting himself in particular to the recurrent triple-fish design so common in the baskets of the Ukiah Indians. Harkins painted water colors, after the Japanese school, of leaves, mosses, grasses, and ferns. Breen, a bacteriologist, continued his search of years for the parasite of the corn-worm. Alsworthy’s hobby was wireless telephony, and he and Breen divided an attic laboratory between them. And Hanover, an immediate patron of the city’s libraries, surrounded himself with scientific books and worked at the fourteenth chapter of a ponderous tome which he had entitled Physical Compulsions of the Aesthetics of Color. He put Hall to sleep one warm afternoon by reading to him the first and thirteenth chapters.
The two months of inaction would not have occurred, and the assassins would have gone back to their home cities, had it not been for the fact that they were baited to remain by a weekly message from Dragomiloff. Regularly, each Saturday night, Alsworthy was called up by telephone, and over the wire heard the unmistakable toneless and colorless voice of the Chief. He always reiterated the one suggestion that the surviving members of the Assassination Bureau disband the organization. Hall, present at one of their councils, seconded the proposition. The hearing they accorded him was out of courtesy only, for he was not one of them; and he stood alone in the opinion he expressed.
As they saw it, there was no possible way by which they could break their oaths. The rules of the Bureau had never been broken. Even Dragomiloff had not broken them. In strict accord with the rules he had accepted Hall’s fee of fifty thousand dollars, judged himself and his acts as socially hurtful, passed sentence on himself, and selected Haas to execute the sentence. Who were they, they demanded, that they should behave less rightly than their Chief? To disband an organization which they believed socially justifiable would be a monstrous wrong. As Lucoville said, “It would stultify all morality and place us on the level of the beasts. Are we beasts?”
And “No! No! No!” had been the passionate cries of the members.
“Madmen yourselves,” Hall called them. “As mad as your Chief is mad.”
“All moralists have been considered mad,” Breen retorted. “Or, to be precise, have been considered mad by the common ruck of their times. No moralist, unworthy of contempt, can act contrary to his belief. All crucifixions and martyrdoms have been gladly accepted by the true moralists. It was the only way to give power to their teaching. Faith! That’s it! And, as the slang of the day goes, they delivered the goods. They had faith in the right they envisioned. What is the life of man compared with the living truth of the thought of man? A vain thing is precept without example. Are we preceptors who dare not be exemplars?”
“No! No! No!” had been the chorus of approbation.
“We dare not, as true thinkers and right-livers, by thought, much less by deed, negate the high principles we expound,” said Harkins.
“Nor can we otherwise climb upwards towards the light,” Hanover added.
“We are not madmen,” Alsworthy cried. “We are men who see clearly. We are high priests at the altar of right conduct. As well call our good friend, Winter Hall, a madman. If truth be mad, and we are touched by it, is not Winter Hall likewise touched? He has called us ethical lunatics. What else, then, has his conduct been but ethical lunacy? Why has he not denounced us to the police? Why does he, holding our views abhorrent, continue to act as our Secretary? He is not even bound by solemn contracts as we are. He merely bowed his head and consented to do the several things requested of him by our recreant Chief. He belongs to both sides in the present controversy; the Chief trusts him; we trust him; and he betrays neither one side nor the other. We know and like him. I, for one, find but two things distasteful in him: first, his sociology, and, second, his desire to destroy our organization. But when it comes to ethics he is as like us as a pea in a pod is to its fellows.”
“I, too, am touched,” Hall murmured sadly. “I admit it. I confess it. You are such likable lunatics, and I am so weak, or strong, or foolish, or wise—I don’t know what—that I cannot break my given word. All the same, I wish I could bring you fellows to my way of thinking, as I brought the Chief to my way of thinking.”
“Oh, but did you?” Lucoville cried. “Why then did the Chief not retire from the organization?”
“Because he had accepted the fee I paid for his life,” Hall answered.
“And for the same reasons precisely are we plighted to take his life,” Lucoville drove the point home. “Are we less moral than our Chief? By our compacts, when the Chief accepted the fee we were bound to carry into execution his agreement with you. It mattered not what that agreement might be. It chanced to be the Chief’s own death.” He shrugged his shoulders. “What would you? The Chief must die, else we are not exemplars of what we believe to be right.”
“There you go, always harking back to morality,” Hall complained.
“And why not?” Lucoville concluded grandly. “The world is founded on morality. Without morality the world would perish. There is a righteousness in the elements themselves. Destroy morality and you would destroy gravitation. The very rocks would fly apart. The whole sidereal system would fume into the unthinkableness of chaos.”