Gladiator by Philip Wylie (ebook reader below 3000 TXT) 📕

Hugo did not move until they had all gone. Then he locked the door behind them. He walked to the safe and rapped on it tentatively with his knuckles. He removed his coat and vest. He planted his feet against the steel sill under the door. He caught hold of the two handles, fidgeted with his elbows, drew a deep breath, and pulled. There was a resonant, metallic sound. Something gave. The edge of the seven-foot door moved outward and a miasma steamed through the aperture. Hugo changed his stance and took the door itself in his hands. His back bent. He pulled again. With a reverberating clang and a falling of broken steel it swung out. Hugo dragged the man who lay on the floor to a window that gave on a grated pit. He broke the glass with his fist. The clerk’s chest heaved violently; he panted, opened his eyes, and closed them tremblingly.

Hugo put on his coat and vest and unlocked the door. The people outside all moved toward him.

“It’s all right,” Hugo said. “He’s out.”

Mrs. Robinson glanced at the clerk and walked to the safe. “He’s ruined it!” she said in a shrill voice.

The president was behind her. He looked at the handles of the vault, which had been bent like hairpins, and he stooped to examine the shattered bolts. Then his eyes traveled to Hugo. There was a profoundly startled expression in them.

The clerk was sobbing. Presently he stopped. “Who got me out?”

They indicated Hugo and he crossed the floor on tottering feet.

“Thanks, mister,” he said piteously. “Oh, my God, what a wonderful thing to do! I—I just passed out when I saw your fingers reaching around—”

“Never mind,” Hugo interrupted. “It’s all right, buddy.” The president touched his shoulder. “Come up to my office.”

A doctor arrived. Several people left. Others stood around the demolished door.

The president was alone when Hugo entered and sat down.

He was cold and he eyed Hugo coldly. “How did you do that?”

Hugo shrugged. “That’s my secret, Mr. Mills.”

“Pretty clever, I’d say.”

“Not when you know how.” Hugo was puzzled. His ancient reticence about himself was acting together with a natural modesty.

“Some new explosive?”

“Not exactly.”

“Electricity? Magnetism? Thought-waves?”

Hugo chuckled. “No. All wrong.”

“Could you do it on a modern safe?”

“I don’t know.”

President Mills rubbed his fingers on the mahogany desk. “I presume you were planning that for other purposes?”

“What!” Hugo said.

“Very well done. Very well acted. I will play up to you, Mr.—”

“Danner.”

“Danner. I’ll play up to this assumption of innocence. You have saved a man’s life. You are, of course, blushingly modest. But you have shown your hand rather clearly. Hmmm.” He smiled sardonically. “I read a book about a safe-cracker who opened a safe to get a child out—at the expense of his liberty and position—or at the hazard of them, anyhow. Maybe you have read the same book.”

“Maybe,” Hugo answered icily.

“Safe-crackers-blasters, light fingers educated to the dials, and ears attuned to the tumblers-we can cope with those things, Mr.—”

“Danner.”

“But this new stunt of yours. Well, until we find out what it is, we can’t let you go. This is business, Mr. Danner. It involves money, millions, the security of American finance, of the very nation. You will understand. Society cannot afford to permit a man like you to go at large until it has a thoroughly effective defense against you. Society must disregard your momentary sacrifice, momentary nobleness. Your process, unknown by us, constitutes a great social danger. I do not dare overlook it. I cannot disregard it even after the service you have done-even if I thought you never intended to put it to malicious use.”

Hugo’s thoughts were far away-to the fort he had built when he was a child in Colorado, to the wagon he had lifted up, to the long, discouraging gauntlet of hard hearts and frightened eyes that his miracles had met with. His voice was wistful when, at last, he addressed the banker. “What do you propose to do?”

“I shan’t bandy words, Danner. I propose to hang on to you until I get that secret. And I shall be absolutely without mercy. That is frank, is it not?”

“Quite.”

“You comprehend the significance of the third degree?”

“Not clearly.”

“You will learn about it—unless you are reasonable.” Hugo bowed sadly. The president pressed a button. Two policemen came into the room. “McClaren has my instructions,” he said.

“Come on.” Hugo rose and stood between them. He realized that the whole pantomime of his arrest was in earnest. For one brief instant the president was given a glimpse of a smile, a smile that worried him for a long time. He was so worried that he called McClaren on the telephone and added to his already abundant instructions.

A handful of bystanders collected to watch Hugo cross from the bank to the steel patrol wagon. It moved forward and its bell sounded. The policemen had searched Hugo and now they sat dumbly beside him. He was handcuffed to both of them. Once he looked down at the nickel bonds and up at the dull faces. His eyebrows lifted a fraction of an inch.

Captain McClaren received Hugo in a bare room shadowed by bars. He was a thick-shouldered, red-haired man with a flabby mouth from which protruded a moist and chewed toothpick. His eyes were blue and bland. He made Hugo strip nude and gave him a suit of soiled clothes. Hugo remained alone in that room for thirty hours without food or water. The strain of that ordeal was greater than his jailers could have conceived, but he bore it with absolute stoicism.

Early in the evening of the second day the lights in the room were put out, a glaring automobile lamp was set up on a table, he was seated in front of it, and men behind the table began to question him in voices that strove to be terrible. They asked several questions and ultimately boiled them down to one: “How did you get that safe open?” which was bawled at him and whispered hoarsely at him from the darkness behind the light until his mind rang with the words, until he was waiting frantically for each new issue of the words, until sweat glistened on his brow and he grew weak and nauseated. His head ached splittingly and his heart pounded. They desisted at dawn, gave him a glass of water, which he gulped, and a dose of castor oil, which he allowed them to force into his mouth. A few hours later they began again. It was night before they gave up.

The remnant of Hugo’s clenched sanity was dumbfounded at what followed after that. They beat his face with fists that shot from the blackness. They threw him to the floor and kicked him. When his skin did not burst and he did not bleed, they beat and kicked more viciously. They lashed him with rubber hoses. They twisted his arms as far as they could—until the bones of an ordinary man would have become dislocated.

Except for thirst and hunger and the discomfort caused by the castor oil, Hugo did not suffer. They refined their torture slowly. They tried to drive a splinter under his nails; they turned on the lights and drank water copiously in his presence; they finally brought a blowtorch and prepared to brand him. Hugo perceived that his invulnerability was to stand him in stead no longer. His tongue was swollen, but he could still talk. Sitting placidly in his bonds, he watched the soldering iron grow white in the softly roaring flame. When, in the full light that shone on the bare and hideous room, they took up the iron and approached him, Hugo spoke. “Wait. I’ll tell you.”

McClaren put the iron back. “You will, eh?”

“No.”

“Oh, you won’t.”

“I shan’t tell you, McClaren; I’ll show you. And may God have mercy on your filthy soul.”

There were six men in the room. Hugo looked from one to another. He could tolerate nothing more; he had followed the course of President Mills’s social theory far enough to be surfeited with it. There was decision in his attitude, and not one of the six men who had worked his torment in relays could have failed to feel the chill of that decision. They stood still. McClaren’s voice rang out: “Cover him, boys.”

Hugo stretched. His bonds burst; the chair on which he sat splintered to kindling. Six revolvers spat simultaneously. Hugo felt the sting of the bullets. Six chambers were emptied. The room eddied smoke. There was a harsh silence.

“Now,” Hugo said gently. “I will demonstrate how I opened that safe.’

“Christ save us,” one of the men whispered, crossing himself.

McClaren was frozen still. Hugo walked to the wall of the jail and stabbed his fist through it. Brick and mortar burst out on the other side and fell into the cinder yard. Hugo kicked and lashed with his fists. A large hole opened. Then he turned to the men. They broke toward the door, but he caught them one by one—and one by one he knocked them unconscious. That much was for his own soul. Only McClaren was left. He carried McClaren to the hole and dropped him into the yard. He wrenched open the iron gate and walked out on the street, holding the policeman by the arm. McClaren fainted twice and Hugo had to keep him upright by clinging to his collar. It was dark. He hailed a cab and lifted the man in.

“Just drive out of town,” Hugo said.

McClaren came to. They bumped along for miles and he did not dare to speak. The apartment buildings thinned. Street lights disappeared. They traversed a stretch of woodland and then rumbled through a small town.

“Who are you?” McClaren said.

“I’m just a man, McClaren—a man who is going to teach you a lesson.”

The taxi was on a smooth turnpike. It made swift time. Twice Hugo satisfied the driver that the direction was all right. At last, on a deserted stretch, Hugo called to the driver to stop. McClaren thought that he was going to die. He did not plead. Hugo still held him by the arm and helped him from the cab.

“Got any money on you?” Hugo asked. “About twenty dollars.”

“Give me five.”

With trembling fingers McClaren produced the bill. He put the remainder of his money back in his pocket automatically. The taxi-driver was watching but Hugo ignored him.

“McClaren,” he said soberly, “here’s your lesson. I just happen to be the strongest man in the world. Never tell anybody that. And don’t tell any one where I took you to-night—wherever it is. I shan’t be here anyway. If you tell either of those two things, I’ll eat you. Actually. There was a poor devil smothering in that safe and I yanked it open and dragged him out. As a reward you and your dirty scavengers were put to work on me. If I weren’t as merciful as God Himself, you’d all be dead. Now, that’s your lesson. Keep your mouth shut. Here is the final parable.”

Still holding the policeman’s arm, he walked to the taxi and, to the astonishment of the driver, gripped the axle in one hand, lifted up the front end like a derrick, and turned the entire car around. He put McClaren in the back seat.

“Don’t forget, McClaren.” To the driver: “Back to where you picked us up. The bird in the back seat will be glad to pay.”

The red lamp of the cab vanished. Hugo turned in the other direction and began to run in great leaps. He slowed when he came to a town. A light was burning in an