← catalogue

Branded

by Francis Lynde · English · Gutenberg #19472 · 442,410 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Branded
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Branded

Author: Francis Lynde


        
Release date: October 5, 2006 [eBook #19472]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19472

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BRANDED ***




Produced by Al Haines










[Frontispiece: The resemblance . . . transformed itself slowly into the
breath-cutting reality, and I was staring up . . . into the face of
Cummings.]






BRANDED


BY

FRANCIS LYNDE



AUTHOR OF

THE TAMING OF RED BUTTE WESTERN, THE CITY OF NUMBERED DAYS, ETC.




FRONTISPIECE BY

ARTHUR E. BECHER




GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS ---------- NEW YORK




COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS


Published April, 1918

Reprinted April, 1918




  To the one who, more clearly than
  any other, can best understand and
  appreciate the motive for its writing,
  this book is affectionately inscribed by

  THE AUTHOR




CONTENTS


CHAPTER

     I.  THE HEATING OF THE IRON
    II.  THE SEARING TOUCH
   III.  IN THE NAME OF THE LAW
    IV.  SCARS
     V.  THE DOWNWARD PATH
    VI.  A GOOD SAMARITAN
   VII.  THE PLUNGE
  VIII.  WESTWARD
    IX.  THE CUP OF TREMBLING
     X.  THE PLAIN-CLOTHES MAN
    XI.  NUMBER 3126
   XII.  A CAST FOR FORTUNE
  XIII.  FOR THE SINEWS OF WAR
   XIV.  PAPER WALLS
    XV.  THE BROKEN WAGON
   XVI.  IN THE OPEN
  XVII.  ALADDIN'S LAMP
 XVIII.  "THE WOMAN . . . WHOSE HANDS ARE AS BANDS"
   XIX.  A RECKONING AND A HOLD-UP
    XX.  BROKEN FAITH
   XXI.  THE END OF A HONEYMOON
  XXII.  A WOMAN'S LOVE
 XXIII.  SKIES OF BRASS
  XXIV.  RESTORATION
   XXV.  THE MOUNTAIN'S TOP




BRANDED


I

The Heating of the Iron

It was not until the evening when old John Runnels, who had been the
town marshal in my school days, and was now chief of police under the
new city charter, came into the dingy little private banking room to
arrest me that I began to realize, though only in a sort of dumb and
dazed fashion, how much my promise to Agatha Geddis might be going to
cost me.

But even if the full meaning of the promise had been grasped at the
time when my word was given, it is an open question if the earlier
recognition of the possible consequences would have made any
difference.  Before we go any farther, let it be clearly understood
that there was no sentiment involved; at least, no sentimental
sentiment.  Years before, I, like most of the other town boys of my
age, had taken my turn as Agatha's fetcher and carrier; but that was
only a passing spasm--a gust of the calf-love which stirs up momentary
whirlwinds in youthful hearts.  The real reason for the promise-making
lay deeper.  Abel Geddis had been crabbedly kind to me, helping me
through my final year in the High School after my father died, and
taking me into his private bank the week after I was graduated.  And
Agatha was Abel Geddis's daughter.

Over and above the daughterhood, she was by far the prettiest girl in
Glendale, with a beauty of the luscious type; eyes that could toll a
man over the edge of a bluff and lips that had a trick of quivering
like a hurt baby's when she was begging for something she was afraid
she wasn't going to get.  All through the school years she had been one
of my classmates, and a majority of the town boys were foolish about
her, partly because she had a way of twisting them around her fingers;
partly, perhaps, because her father was the rich man of the community
and the president of the Farmers' Bank.

She had sent for me to come up to the big house on the hill the night
before this other night of old John Runnels's call.  I went, taking it
as a matter of course that she wished to talk to me about the trouble
at the bank, and saying to myself that I was going to be iron and steel
and adamant; this when I might have known that I should be only putty
in her hands.  She met me on the porch, and made me sit with my back to
the window, which was open, while she faced me, sitting in the hammock
where the house lights fell fairly upon her and I could get the full
benefit of the honeying eyes and baby lips as she talked.

She had begun by saying in catchy little murmurings that I knew better
than any one else what it was going to mean to her--to all of them--if
her father's crookedness (she called it his "mistake") in using the
depositors' money for his own speculations should be published abroad;
and I did.  She was engaged to young Wheeland, son of the copper
magnate Wheeland, of New York, and the wedding date was set.  Black
ruin was staring them all in the face, she said, and I could save them,
if I only would.  What would be shouted from the housetops as a
penitentiary offense in the president of the bank would be condoned as
a mere error in judgment on the part of a hired bookkeeper.

If I would only consent to let the directors think that I was the one
who had passed upon and accepted the mining-stock collateral--which had
taken the place in the bank's vault of the good, hard money of the
depositors--well, I could see how easily the dreadful crisis would be
tided over; and besides earning the undying gratitude of the family,
her father would stand by me and I would lose nothing in the end.

For one little minute she almost made me believe what she didn't
believe herself--that the crime wasn't a crime.  Her father, "our
eminent and public-spirited fellow-citizen, the Hon. Abel Geddis," to
quote the editor of the Glendale _Daily Courier_, was desperately
involved.  For months he had been throwing good money after bad in a
Western gold mine; not only his own money, but the bank's as well.  At
the long last the half-dozen sleepy directors, three of them retired
farmers and the other three local merchants, had awakened to the fact
that there was something wrong.  They didn't know fully, as yet, just
what they were in for; Geddis's part of the bookkeeping was in a
horrible muddle owing to his efforts to hide the defalcation.  But they
knew enough to be certain that somebody had been skating upon thin ice
and had broken through.

"You can't help seeing just how it is, Herbert," Agatha had pleaded,
with the soulful look in her pretty eyes and the baby lips all in a
tremble.  "If the faintest breath of this gets out, VanBruce Wheeland
will have to know, and then everything will come to an end and I shall
want to go and drown myself in the river.  You are young and strong and
brave, and you can live down a--an error of judgment"--she kept on
calling it that, as if the words had been put into her mouth; as they
probably had.  "Promise me, Herbert, won't you?--for--for the sake of
the old times when you used to carry my books to school, and I--I----"

What was the use?  Every man is privileged to be a fool once in a
while, and a young man sometimes twice in a while.  I promised her that
I would shoulder the load, or at least find some way out for her
father; and when she asked me how it could be done, I was besotted
enough to explain how the mining-stock business had really passed
through my hands--as it had in a purely routine way--and telling her in
so many words that everything would be all right for her father when
the investigating committee should come to overhaul the books and the
securities.

When I got up to go, she went to the front steps with me, and at the
last yearning minute a warm tear had splashed on the back of my hand.
At that I kissed her and told her not to worry another minute.  And
this brings me back to that other evening just twenty-four hours later;
I in the bank, with the accusing account books spread out under the
electric light on the high desk, and old John Runnels, looking never a
whit less the good-natured, easy-going town marshal in his
brass-buttoned uniform and gilt-banded cap, stumbling over the
threshold as he let himself in at the side door which had been left on
the latch.

I had started, half-guiltily, I suppose, when the door opened; and
Runnels, who had known me and my people ever since my father had moved
in from the farm to give us children the advantage of the town school,
shook his grizzled head sorrowfully.

"I'd ruther take a lickin' than to say it, but I reckon you'll have to
come along with me, Bertie," he began soberly, laying a big-knuckled
hand on my shoulder.  "It all came out in the meetin' to-day, and the
d'rectors 're sayin' that you hadn't ort to be allowed to run loose any
longer."

The high desk stool was where I could grab at it, and it saved me from
tumbling over backward.

"Go with you?" I gasped.  "You mean to--to _jail_?"

Runnels nodded.  "Jest for to-night.  I reckon you'll be bailed, come
mornin'--if that blamed security comp'ny that's on your bond don't kick
up too big a fight about it."

"Hold on--wait a minute," I begged.  "There is nothing criminal against
me, Uncle John.  Mr. Geddis will tell you that.  I----"

The big hand slipped from my shoulder and became a cautionary signal to
flag me down.

"You mustn't tell me nothin' about it, Bertie; I don't want to have to
take the stand and testify against your father's boy.  Besides, it
ain't no kind o' use.  You done it yourself when you was up at Abel
Geddis's house las' night.  Two of the d'rectors, Tom Fitch and old man
Withers, was settin' behind the window curtains in the front room
whilst you was talkin' to Miss Agathy on the porch.  You know, better'n
I do, what they heard you say."

For a second the familiar interior of the bank went black for me.  I
was young in those days; much too young to know that human nature in
the lump is neither all saint nor all devil; that a man may be a second
father to you for years, and then turn and hold your head under water
until you drown when he is fighting for himself.  It had been a trap,
deliberately set and baited with Agatha.  I remembered now that she had
not spoken loud enough to be overheard; while I, with my back to the
open window, had talked in ordinary tones.  Fitch and Withers had heard
me say that the investigating committee would find nothing against Abel
Geddis, and they had naturally taken it as a confession of my own guilt.

I remember that I went quite methodically about putting things away
while Runnels waited, though every move was dumbly mechanical.
Something seemed to have died inside of me, and I suppose the
psychologists would say that it was the subconscious Bert Weyburn who
put the books in the vault, locked the iron door, set the high desk in
order, and turned off all the lights save the one we always left turned
on in front of the vault.

Afterward, when we were in the street together, and Runnels was walking
me around the square to the police station, the dead thing inside of me
came alive.  It had gone to sleep a pretty decent young fellow, with a
soft spot in his heart for his fellow men, and a boy's belief in the
ultimate goodness of all women.  It awoke a raging devil.  It was all I
could do to keep from throttling unsuspecting John Runnels as we
tramped along side by side.  I could have done it.  I had inherited my
father's well-knit frame and serviceable muscles, and all through my
office experience I had kept myself fit with long walks and a few bits
of home-made gymnastic apparatus in my room at Mrs. Thompson's.  And
the new-born devil was ready with the suggestion.

I have been glad many times since that old John never knew; glad that
the frenzied curses that came boiling up out of that inner hell were
wordless.  I contrived to hold in while Runnels was hurrying me through
the station office and past the sleepy sergeant at the desk.  But when
the cell door had opened and closed for me, and old John's heavy
footsteps were no longer echoing in the iron-floored corridor, the
newly hatched devil broke loose and I made a pretty bad night of it.




II

The Searing Touch

Out of the first twenty-four hours, when my little raft of
respectability and good report was going to pieces under me, I have
brought one heart-mellowing recollection.  In the morning it was old
John Runnels himself who brought me my cell breakfast, and he did it to
spare me the shame of being served by the police-station turnkey.  Past
that, he sat on the edge of the iron cot and talked to me while I tried
to eat.

"They was aimin' to telegraph the sheriff and have you railroaded slap
up to the county seat las' night, but I told 'em nary," he confided.
"I wasn't allowin' to have 'em jerk you out of your home town before
you'd had a chance to pick a lawyer and talk to your friends; no
sir-ee, I wasn't."

"I guess I haven't any friends any more," I was still bitter enough to
say.  And then: "Tell me, if you can, Uncle John, just what the charge
against me is."

"I reckon you know a heap better'n I do, Bertie," was his sober
rejoinder, "but I can tell you what I heard.  They say you've been
takin' the bank's money to put into a gold mine somewheres out yonder
in the Rocky Mountains."

"Who swore out the warrant for my arrest?"

"Ab Withers."

Abner Withers, town miser, note-shaver and skinflint, was the one man
on the board of directors of the bank whom I had always most cordially
detested.  Back in my childhood, before my father had got upon his
feet, Withers had planned to foreclose a mortgage on the home farm,
making the hampering of my father so that he could not pay the debt a
part of the plan.  More than once I had half suspected that he was in
with Geddis on the mining deal, but I had no proof of this.

"You say they were getting ready to railroad me out of town last night:
I suppose they will do it to-day, won't they?"

"Not if I can help it, Bertie.  I'm goin' to try to hold you here till
you've had time to kind of straighten yourself around and ketch up with
the procession.  I don't know what in Sam Hill you wanted to go and
bu'st yourself up for, this way, but I'm owin' it to Amos Weyburn dead
to help his boy get some sort of a fair show for his white alley.  You
ask me anything in reason, and I'll do it."

I considered the most necessary requirements hastily.  My mother and
sister were absent on a visit to a distant relative in the far-away
Saskatchewan wheat country, and I thanked God for that.  It was
altogether unlikely that they would see any of the home newspapers, for
some time, at least, and any anxiety on that score might be dismissed,
or at all events postponed.  The most pressing need was for a lawyer,
and since lawyers do not serve without fees, I was glad to remember
that my savings, which were still reposing in Abel Geddis's bank vault,
would enable me to pay as I went.

By this time, in bitter revulsion from gratitude to fierce enmity, I
was determined to defend myself tooth and nail.  At one stroke Abel
Geddis had cancelled all my obligations to him.  At the very moment
when I was promising his daughter to help cover up his criminality, he
had been deliberately plotting to make me his scapegoat.

"I need a lawyer, of course," I told Runnels; and then I made the first
and worst of a long series of wretched mistakes.  "Send word to Cy
Whitredge and tell him I'd like to see him."

If anybody had asked me five minutes after Runnels went away why I had
chosen Cyrus Whitredge to be my counsel I doubt if I could have offered
any justifiable reason.  Whitredge was known throughout our end of the
State as a criminal lawyer, shrewd, unscrupulous, and with a reputation
built up entirely upon his singular success in defeating the ends of
justice.  Before a jury of farmers and small merchants, such as I was
likely to have, I had prejudiced my case at the very outset.

I was completely and thoroughly convinced of this a little later when
Whitredge came to see me.  He was a lean man, leather-faced, and with
an eye like that of a fish.  To my consternation and keen
disheartenment he assumed my guilt from the moment the cell door was
locked upon him and he had seated himself upon the iron-framed cot to
nurse a knee in the locked fingers of his bony hands.

"You've got the wrong idea of things, altogether, Weyburn," he
criticised, after I had tried to tell him that I was being made to hold
the bag for some one else; and his use of the bare surname, when he had
known me from boyhood, cut me like a knife.  "You can't expect me to do
anything for you unless you are entirely frank with me.  As your
counsel, I've got to know the facts; and you gain absolutely nothing by
insisting to me that you are not guilty."

There was more of it; a good bit more in which I stubbornly asserted my
innocence while Whitredge used every trick and wile known to his craft
to entrap me into admitting that I was guilty, in the act if not in the
intention.

"You can't deny--you don't deny--that you knew these mining sharps,
Hempstead and Lesherton, pretty intimately, that you saw them
frequently and talked with them in the way of business, and that you
knew all about the capitalization scheme they were trying to put over,"
was Whitredge's summing up of the situation.  "You'll have to loosen
up, Weyburn, if you expect to get any help.  I'll come around again
this afternoon, and maybe by that time you will have taken a tumble to
yourself."

He got up, rattled the door for the turnkey, and then wheeled upon me
with a sharp question.

"I take it you've got a little ready money hid away somewhere, haven't
you?" he demanded.

I told him I had; but when I added that my savings were all in the bank
he swore impatiently.

"That will mean an order from the court before you can even pay your
counsel's retainer--always providing your account hasn't already been
attached to apply on the shortage," he snapped; and at that the
corridor officer came to let him out and he went away.

Having lived in Glendale practically all my life, I had a good right to
expect that at least a few of my friends would rally to my support in
the time of trouble.  They came, possibly a half-dozen of them in all,
between Whitredge's visit and old John Runnels's bringing of my dinner
at one o'clock.

Who they were, and what they said to me, are matters which shall be
burled in the deepest pit of oblivion I can find or dig.  For the best
of them, in the turning of a single leaf in the lifebook, I had
apparently become an outcast, a pariah.  One and all, they had already
tried and condemned me unheard, and though there were clammy-handed
offers of assistance they were purely perfunctory, as I could see, and
there was never a man of them all to say heartily, "Bert Weyburn, I
don't believe it of you."  It wasn't the fault of any of these cold
comfort bringers that the milk of human kindness didn't turn to vinegar
in me that day, or that I did not drink the cup of bitterness and
isolation to the very dregs.

I know now, of course, that I was boyishly hot-hearted and unfair; that
I was too young and inexperienced to make allowances for that deathless
trait in human nature--in all animate nature--which prompts the well to
recoil instinctively from the pest-stricken.  Later on--but I needn't
anticipate.

It was along in the latter part of the afternoon, and before
Whitredge's return, that Agatha came.  Her appearance in my cell was a
total surprise.  I was standing at the little grated window when I
heard footsteps in the corridor.  I thought it was Whitredge coming
back, and was morose enough not to turn or look around until after the
door had opened and clanged shut again.  Then I wheeled to find myself
looking straight into the man-melting eyes.

"Oh, Herbert!" she gasped; and with that she dropped upon the cot and
put her face in her hands.

If only the women wouldn't weep at us how vastly different this world
would be!  All day long I had been praying that I might some time have
the chance to hold a mirror up to Agatha Geddis; a mirror that would
reflect her soul and show her what a mean and shriveled thing it was.
But what I did was to sit beside her and put my arm around her and try
to comfort her as I might have comforted my sister.

When her sobbing fit had subsided and she began to talk I found out
what she had come for--or I thought I did.  It was all a miserable
mistake--so she protested--and Abner Withers was the responsible one.
It was he who had insisted that I should be arrested and prosecuted;
and, thus far, her father had not been able to make him listen to
reason.  But it would come out all right in the end, if I would only be
patient and wait.  Mr. Whitredge had been up to the house to see her
father, and they had had a long talk.  Among other things, she had
heard her father say that he would bear all the expenses, meaning--I
supposed--that he would see to it that Whitredge did not lose his fee.

I have more than once had professional mesmerists try to hypnotize me,
without success.  But there is little doubt that Agatha Geddis turned
the trick for me that afternoon in the steel cell of the Glendale
police station.  As she talked, my heart grew putty-soft again.  As
before, she dwelt upon the terrible consequences, the awful disgrace,
the wreck of her happiness, and all that; and once more I promised her
that I would stand by her.  Even after she had gone I told myself that
since the worst had already happened, it would be cowardly and unmanly
to turn back.

Later, when the reaction came, it is more than likely that I swung back
to the other extreme, writing Agatha Geddis down in the book of bitter
remembrances as a cold-blooded, plotting fiend in woman's form.  She
was not that.  It may be said that, at this earlier period, she was
merely a loosely bound fagot of evil potentialities.  Doubtless the
threatened cataclysm appeared sufficiently terrifying to her, and she
was willing to use any means that might offer to avert it.  But it may
be conceded, in bare justice, that in this stage of her development she
was nothing worse than a self-centered young egoist, immature, and
struggling, quite without malice, to make things come her way.

It was quite late in the afternoon when Whitredge made his second visit
to my cell, and this time his attitude was entirely different.  Also,
he dropped the curt use of my surname.

"We're going to ignore the question of your culpability for the
present, Bert, and wrestle with the plain facts of the case," was the
way he began on me.  "From what you said this morning, I was led to
infer that you had some notion of trying to shift the responsibility to
Mr. Geddis.  I won't say that something couldn't be done along that
line; not to do you any good, you understand, but to do other folks a
lot of harm.  You could probably roil the water and stir up the mud
pretty badly for all concerned.  But in the outcome, and before a jury,
you'd be likely to get the hot end of it.  I'll be frank with you.  If
I were in your shoes, I'd rather have Geddis for me than against me.
He has money and influence, and you are a young man without either."

"You are trying to advise me to plead guilty?" I asked.

"Oh, of course, the formal plea in court would be 'Not guilty.'  I'm
merely advising you not to make the fight vindictive.  If you don't,
I'm inclined to believe that Geddis will stand by you and you'll get
off easy."

It was on the tip of my tongue to say that I would fight to the last
gasp before I would suffer myself to be tried and condemned for a crime
of which I was innocent.  Then the distorted sense of honor got in its
work again.  Agatha Geddis's visit was still recent enough to make me
believe that I owed her something.

"You'll have to get me out of it in some way," I returned.  "I can't
afford to be convicted."

"Abel Geddis has been a pretty good friend of yours in the past, Bert,"
the lawyer suggested.  "You don't want to forget that."

"I'm not forgetting it, and I'm giving him all the credit that is due
him.  But you can't blame me for thinking a little of my mother and
sister, and myself.  You know what a prison sentence means to a man,
better than I do.  I couldn't stand for that."

Whitredge stroked his long chin and looked past me out of the little
grated window.

"We'd hope for the best, of course," he returned.  "If we can make it
appear as an error in judgment"--there was that cursed phrase
again--"without any real criminal intention, and if we can prove that
you didn't reap any monetary benefit from the transfer of the mining
stock, there is good reason to hope that the court may be lenient.  Do
I understand that you are giving me a free hand in the case, Bert?"

"I don't see that there is anything else for me to do," I said,
half-doubtfully; and as he was going I asked him about the question of
bail.

"I have waived the preliminary examination for you--merely to save you
the humiliation of appearing in a justice's court in Glendale," was the
evasive reply.

"But without the examination I shan't have a chance to offer bail,
shall I?"

Whitredge shook his head.  "The guaranty company that is on your bond
beat us to it, I'm sorry to say.  They sent their attorney over from
Cincinnati last night, and he is here now, prepared to refuse the
company's consent in the matter of ball.  That is another reason why,
acting for you, I have waived the preliminary.  Without the guaranty
company's assent to the arrangement it would be useless for us to offer
sureties, though Geddis and two or three others have expressed their
willingness to sign for you."

"Then what am I to expect?"

"Nothing worse than a little delay.  Court is in session, and you will
be taken to Jefferson.  If the grand jury finds a true bill against
you, the cause will probably be tried at the present term of court.
There need be nothing humiliating or embarrassing for you here in
Glendale.  Sam Jorkins will take you over to Jefferson on the midnight
train, and you needn't see any of the home-town folks unless you want
to."

Remembering the clammy handshakings of the forenoon, I thought I should
never again want to see anybody that I knew.  And thus I made the
second of the miserable blunders which led to all that followed.

"Let it be that way," I said.  "If Jorkins will go with me up to Mrs.
Thompson's so that I can get a few things and pack a grip----"

"Oh, of course," said Whitredge, readily enough.  "I'll have a carriage
to take you to the train, and it can drive around by your
boarding-house.  But you mustn't try to run away.  I suppose you
wouldn't do anything like that, would you?--even if you had a good
chance?"

I turned upon him as quick as a flash.

"Do you mean that you're trying to give me a hint that I'd better run
away?" I demanded.

He took a step toward the cell door and I had a fleeting impression
that he was listening to determine whether or not there was any one in
the corridor.  When he faced me again he was frowning reprovingly.

"I am a member of the bar in good standing," he reminded me stiffly.
"If you knew the first letter of the legal alphabet you'd know that I
couldn't advise a client to run away."

"Damn the legal alphabet!" I broke out hotly.  "You're a man, Cy
Whitredge; and I'm another man and in trouble.  Can't you drop the
professional cant for half a minute and talk straight?"

At this he shook his head again.

"It would prejudice your case mighty badly--that is, if you should try
it and not succeed.  On the other hand--but no; I won't say another
word.  Your best friend wouldn't advise you to make such a break.
Besides, you have no money, and you couldn't get very far without it.
I shouldn't even think of it, if I were you.  Dwelling on a thing like
that sometimes gives it a chance to get hold of you.  But this is all
foolishness, of course.  You are going to Jefferson, and you'll take
your medicine like a man if you have to.  That's all, I believe, for
the present.  Keep a stiff upper lip, and if anybody comes to see you,
don't talk too much.  I'll be over at the county seat in a day or two,
and we'll thresh it out some more."

After Runnels had brought me my supper, and I had nothing to do but to
wait for the constable and train-time, I did the very thing that
Whitredge had advised me not to do; I couldn't get it out of my mind
that freedom at any price was now the most desirable thing on earth--in
the universe, for that matter.  It was facilely easy to picture a
future in some far distant corner of the country where I might begin
all over again and make good.  Other men had done it.  Every once in a
while I had read in the newspapers the story of some fellow who had
eluded his fate, deserved or otherwise, years before and had lived and
builded anew and in a fashion to win the applause of all men.

Because I had lived in a small town the better part of my life, I had
the mistaken notion that the world is very wide and that there must be
no end of safe hiding-places for the man who needs to seek one.  From
that to imagining the possible details was only a series of steps, each
one carrying me a little nearer to the brink of decision.  As I have
said, I had money of my own in the bank vault; much more than enough to
bribe easy-going Sam Jorkins, the constable who, as Whitredge had said,
was to take me to Jefferson.  I weighed and measured all the chances
and hazards, and there were only two for which I could not provide in
advance.  There was a possibility that Geddis might be staying late in
the bank; and if he were not, there was the other possibility that he
might have changed the combination on the vault lock since my arrest.

The more I thought about it, the more fiercely the escape notion
gripped me.  Whitredge's talk had made it perfectly plain that the best
I could hope for in a court trial would be a light sentence.  As
train-time drew near, the obsession pushed reason and all the scruples
aside.  If I could only persuade Jorkins to let me go to the bank on
the drive to the station----

The town clock in the tower of the new city hall was striking eleven
when good old John Runnels and the constable came for me.  At the final
moment I was telling myself feverishly that it would be of no use for
me to try to bribe honest Sam Jorkins; that this was the fatal weakness
in my plan of escape.  Hence, I could have shouted for joy when Runnels
unlocked the cell door and turned me over, not to Jorkins, but to a
stranger; a hard-faced man roughly dressed, and with the scar of a
knife slash across his right cheek.

"This is Bill Simmons, a deputy from Jefferson, Bertie; come to take
you over to the county ja--to the sheriff's office," said Runnels.
"I've told him he ain't goin' to have no use for them handcuffs he's
brought along."

"That may be," growled the sheriff's messenger.  "All the same, I ain't
takin' no chances--not me!" and with that he whipped the manacles from
his pocket.  But Runnels intervened quickly.

"Nary!--not here in my shop, you don't, Simmons," he said.  "For two
cents I'd go along with Bertie, myself, if only to see to it that he
gets a fair show.  You treat him right and white, or I'll fire you out,
warrant or no warrant!"

When we reached the street I said I wanted to go around by way of my
boarding-house for a change of clothing.

"That's all been 'tended to," said the surly deputy, with a jerk of his
thumb toward a suitcase in the seat beside the driver of the hack
carriage.  "You get in and keep quiet; that's all you've got to do."

After this he said nothing and made no further move until we were
jouncing along on our way to the railroad station.  Then, without
warning, he turned upon me suddenly and tried to snap the hand-cuffs on
my wrists.

It was all I was waiting for; something to pull the trigger.  In a
flash the savage, which, in the best of us, lies but skin-deep under
the veneer of habit and the civilized conventions, leaped alive.  There
was a fierce grapple in the interior of the darkened carriage--fierce
but silent--and the blood sang in my veins when I found that I was more
than a match for the scar-faced deputy.  With fingers to throat I
choked him into submission, and when I had taken his pistol and
hand-cuffed him with his own manacles, the step that made me a criminal
in fact had been overpassed.

"One yip out of you, and you get a bullet out of your own gun!" I
warned him; and then I got speech with the driver, a squat, thickset
Irishman, whose face and brogue were both strange to me.

"Drive to the Farmers' Bank--side door--and be quick about it!" I
called to him over the lowered window-sash.

"I'm hired to go to the train.  Who's payin' me for the side-trip?" he
queried impatiently.

"I am," I snapped; adding: "There's money in it for you if you put the
whip on."

He obeyed the order with what might have seemed suspicious readiness,
if I had been cool enough to consider it, and a minute or two later the
hack ground its wheels against the curb at the side door of the bank
building.  With the pistol at his ribs I pushed the deputy out ahead of
me.  My keys were still in my pocket--Runnels hadn't searched me for
anything--and I opened the door and entered, driving Simmons a step in
advance.

The bank was untenanted, as I knew it would be if Geddis should not be
there, since we had never employed a night watchman.  At that time of
night there was nothing stirring in the town, and in the midnight
silence the ticking of the clock on the wall over Abel Geddis's desk
crashed into the stillness like the blows of a hammer.  I made the
deputy sit down under the vault light while I worked the combination.
The lock had not been changed, and the door opened at the first trial.

Again pushing Simmons ahead of me, I entered the vault.  It was a
fairly modern structure; Geddis had had it rebuilt within the year; and
it was electric-lighted and large enough to serve the double purpose of
a bank strong-room and a safety deposit.  Shoving the deputy into a
corner I opened the cash-box and took out the exact amount of my
savings, neither more nor less.  Simmons stretched his neck and leered
at me with an evil grin.

"You're the fine little crook, all right enough," he remarked.  "They
was sayin' over at Jefferson that you was a Sunday-school
sup'rintendent, or somethin' o' that sort.  Them kind is always the
flyest."

It struck me suddenly that he was taking his defeat pretty easily, but
there was no time for a nice weighing of other men's motives.

"I'm fly enough to give you what's coming to you," I said; and with
that I snapped off the electric light, darted out, slammed the vault
door and shot the bolts.  For a few hours at least, during the latter
part of which he might have to breathe rather bad air, the deputy was
an obstruction removed.

My hurriedly formed plan of escape would probably have made a
professional criminal weep; but it was the only one I could think of on
the spur of the moment.  In the next county, at a distance of
thirty-odd miles, there was another railroad.  If I could succeed in
bribing the Irish hack-driver, I might be far on my way before the bank
vault would be opened and the alarm given.

The Irishman took my money readily enough and offered no objections
when I told him what I wished to do.  Also, he claimed to be familiar
with the cross-country road to Vilasville, saying that he could set me
down in the village before daylight.  Oddly enough, he made no comment
on the absence of the deputy, and seemed quite as willing to haul one
passenger as two.  With my liberal bribe for a stimulant he whipped up
his horses, and in a few minutes we were out of town and rolling
smoothly along the intercounty pike.

For a time the sudden break with all the well-behaved traditions kept
me awake and in a fever heat of excitement.  But along in the small
hours the monotonous _clack-clack_ of the horses' hoofs on the
limestone pike and the steady rumbling of the wheels quieted me.
Reflecting that I had had little sleep the night before, and that the
way ahead would be perilous enough to ask for sharpened faculties and a
well-rested body, I braced myself in a corner of the carriage and
closed my eyes.

When I awakened, after what seemed like only the shortest hand-space of
dreamless oblivion, a misty dawn was breaking and the carriage was
stopped in a town street and in front of a brick building with barred
windows.  While I was blinking and rubbing my eyes in astoundment, a
big, bearded man whose face was strangely familiar opened the door and
whipped the captured pistol from the seat.

"This was one time when the longest way 'round was the shortest way
home," chuckled the big pistol-snatcher quizzically.  And then: "Old Ab
Withers seems to know you better than most of us do, Bert.  He told me
I'd better not risk you on the train with just one Glendale constable;
that I'd better send a rig and two deputies after you, if I wanted to
make sure o' seein' you.  What have you done with Simmons?"

I told him briefly.

"All right," he said.  "Climb down out o' that and come on in.  The
jig's up."

It was not until I was standing on the sidewalk beside the gigantic
sheriff, with the Irishman grinning at me from his seat in the hack,
that I realized fully what had happened.  Instead of taking me to
Vilasville, the driver, who was Simmons's partner and fellow deputy,
had changed his route while I was asleep and brought me to the county
seat.




III

In the Name of the Law

Of course, I didn't have to wait until Whitredge came over to the
county seat to learn that I had hopelessly cooked my goose by the
clumsy attempt at an escape.  What I did not suspect then, nor, indeed,
for a long time afterward, was the possibility that Withers or Geddis,
or both of them, had forestalled me in the matter of bribing the two
deputies; that my foolish attempt had been anticipated, and that
Whitredge, himself, was not wholly above suspicion as an accessory
before the fact.  For it was his thinly veiled suggestion that put the
thing into my head.

However, that is neither here nor there.  With the charge before it,
the grand jury quickly brought in a true bill against me; and on the
plea of the county prosecuting attorney my case was advanced on the
docket and set for trial within the week, the argument for haste being
the critical state of affairs in the business of the Farmers' Bank of
Glendale; a state of affairs which demanded that the responsibility for
certain shortages in the bank's assets be fixed immediately as between
the accused bookkeeper and cashier and his superiors.  Whitredge
brought me word of this hurry-up proposal, and either was, or pretended
to be, properly indignant over the unseemly haste.

"You just say the word, Bert, and I'll have the case postponed until
the next term of court, or else I'll know the reason why!" he blustered
stoutly.

"Why should I wish to have it postponed, when the delay would merely
mean six months more of jail for me?" I objected.

"It might give us some chance to frame up some sort of a defense; and,
besides, it would give public opinion a little time to die down," he
suggested.  "I say it isn't fair to try you while everybody's hot and
excited and wrathy about the money loss.  Still, if you think you're
all ready, and want to take the chance----"

He knew I did, and was only egging me on.  What he and all the rest of
them were working for was to get me out of the way as swiftly as
possible.  I knew this afterward, after I had time to think it out and
piece it together; and God knows, they gave me all the time I needed to
do the thinking.

So, with the prisoner's counsel making no motion to the contrary, the
trial date stood, and shortly I found myself in the dock, with good old
Judge Haskins peering down at me over the top of his spectacles.  Like
many of the older people in the county, the judge had known my father
well, and I am willing to believe that it was not easy for him to sit
in judgment upon that father's son.

The trial was fair enough, as such things go.  In the selection of the
jury, Whitredge made free use of his challenging privilege; but it
seemed to me that he always objected to the intelligent man and chose
the other kind.  When our Anglo-Saxon ancestors fought for the right of
trial by jury, and got it, they passed down to us a sword with two
edges.  Their idea, which was embodied in the common law, was that a
man should be tried by a jury of his peers.  But the way things have
worked out, the man of average intelligence is apt to have to face a
dozen jurors who are chosen partly for their lack of intelligence, and
partly because their earning ability is so low that they are willing to
serve for the paltry wage of a juror, whatever it may be.

So far as the presentation of the case went, the county attorney had it
all his own way.  Certain of the bank's moneys were missing, and they
had been replaced by worthless mining stock.  Specifically, the charge
was that I had been borrowing the bank's money and investing it in the
mining stock--all without authority from anybody higher up--and that at
the last I had grown panic-stricken, or something, and had turned the
stock in as part of the bank's assets.

Chandler, the prosecuting attorney, called only two witnesses, Withers
and Fitch.  They both testified that they had heard me admit that I was
guilty.  There were no details given which could involve Agatha Geddis.
It was merely stated that my admission of guilt was made at Abel
Geddis's house, and both witnesses asserted that Geddis himself was not
present.

Whitredge leaned over and whispered to me while this evidence was being
taken.

"Chandler knows, and we all know, that this acknowledgment of yours was
made in a talk with Miss Geddis.  We are all willing to spare her the
humiliation of being brought into court.  But it is your perfect right
to have her called if you wish it."

Knowing well enough by this time what I was in for, I was still foolish
enough, or besotted enough, to shake my head.  "I don't wish it," I
said; and since this was practically telling Whitredge not to do so, he
did not cross-examine the two witnesses.

When the prosecution rested, Whitredge took up his line of defense.  He
tried to show, rather lamely, I thought, that I had always lived within
my means, hadn't been dissipated, and had never been known to bet,
either on horse races or on the stock market; that whatever I had done
had been done without criminal intent.  In this part of the trial I had
a heart-warming surprise.  The afternoon train from Glendale brought a
big bunch of young people, and a good sprinkling of older ones, all
eager to testify to my former good character.  I saw then how unfair I
had been in the bitterness of that first day.  The shock of my arrest
had simply dammed up the sympathy stream like a sudden frost; but now
the reaction had come and I was not without friends.  That little
demonstration went with me though many a long and weary day afterward.

Naturally, the greater part of this "character evidence" was thrown out
as irrelevant.  The trial wasn't held for the purpose of ascertaining
what sort of a young man I had been in the past.  It was supposed to be
an attempt to get at the facts in a particular case; and according to
the testimony of two uncontradicted witnesses, I had admitted these
facts.

Chandler said nothing about my attempt to escape until he came to
address the jury.  But then he drove the nail in good and hard.  The
deputy sheriff, Simmons, bruised and beaten, was shown to the jurors,
and the prosecuting attorney made much of the fact that I had not
stopped at a possible murder in shutting Simmons up in the bank vault.
There was nothing said about the bribe to the other deputy who had
figured as the hack driver; from which I inferred that the Irishman had
pocketed my money and held his peace.

Whitredge's summing-up was as lame in effect as it was rantingly
emotional.  He liked to hear himself talk, and his stock in trade as a
criminal lawyer consisted mainly of perfervid appeals to the sympathies
of his juries.  Here, he pleaded, with the tremolo stop pulled all the
way out, was a young man whose entire future would be blasted--and all
that sort of thing.  It hadn't the slightest effect upon the group of
stolid hill farmers and laborers in the box who sat and yawned through
it, and I fancy it wasn't intended to have any.

Good old Judge Haskins's charge to the jury was all that a fair and
upright judge could make it.  He was no party to the agreement between
the attorneys to keep Agatha Geddis out of it, or even to any knowledge
of it, as he proved by pointing out to the jury the lack of detail in
Fitch's and Withers's testimony.  Also, he cautioned the twelve not to
make too much of the attempted escape.  He said--what most judges
wouldn't have said--that the attempt was entirely extraneous to the
charge upon which I had been arraigned; that it was not to be taken as
a presumption of guilt; that it proved nothing either way.  He added
that an innocent man badly involved might be as easily terrified into
taking flight as a guilty one.  If the jury, upon due deliberation,
should be convinced that I had misappropriated the bank's funds, the
verdict should be "Guilty"; but not otherwise.

It was merely in conformity with time-honored custom that the jurymen
rose and left the box and filed out of the court-room, I am sure, for
they were back again in almost no time.  Though I had every reason to
expect it, the low-voiced verdict of "Guilty as charged" struck me like
the blow of a fist.

"Brace up and be a man!" Whitredge leaned over to whisper in my ear;
and then the good old judge, with his voice shaking a little,
pronounced my sentence.  Five years was the minimum for the offense
with which I stood charged.  But a law recently passed gave the judges
a new power.  Within the nominal period of five years my sentence was
made indeterminate.  The law was vindicated and I became a convict.




IV

Scars

I was twenty-five years old, almost to a day, when Judge Haskins
pronounced the words which were to make me for the next five years or
less--the period to be determined upon my good behavior--an inmate of the
State penitentiary.  Lacking the needful good behavior, five long years
would be taken out of the best part of life for me, and what was worse (I
realized this even in the tumultuous storm of first-moment impressions
and emotions), my entire point of view was certain to be hopelessly
twisted and distorted for all the years that I might live beyond my
release.

Surely little blame can attach to the confession that out of the tumult
came a hot-hearted and vindictive determination to live for a single
purpose; to work and strive and endure so that I might be the sooner free
to square my account with Abel Geddis and Abner Withers.  I need make no
secret now of the depth of this hatred.  At times, when the obsession was
strongest upon me, the fear that one or both of them might die before my
chance should come was almost maddening.  They were both old men, and in
the nature of things there was always a possibility that death might
forestall me.

So it was this motive at first that made me jealous of my good-conduct
marks; made me study the prison regulations and live up to them with a
rigidity that knew no lapses.  I am not defending the motive; I
cheerfully admit that it was unworthy.  None the less, I owe it
something: it sustained me and kept me sane and cool-headed at a time
when, without some such stimulus, I might have lost my reason.

Of the three succeeding years and what they brought or failed to bring
the least said will be, perhaps, the soonest mended.  I am glad to be
able to write it down that my native State had, and still has, a fairly
enlightened prison system; or at least it is less brutalizing than many
others.  During my period of incarceration the warden-in-office was an
upright and impartial man, just to his charges and even kindly and
fatherly when the circumstances would warrant.  After my steady
determination to earn an early release became apparent, I was made a
"trusty," and for two of the three years I was the prison bookkeeper.

Study as I might, I could never determine how the prison life affected my
associates; but for me it held few real hardships beyond the confinement,
the disgrace, and the fear that before I could outlive it I should become
a criminal in fact.  Fight the idea as we may, environment, association,
and suggestion have a great deal to say to the human atom.  I was treated
as a criminal, was believed to be a criminal, and mingled daily with
criminals.  Put yourself in my place and try to imagine what it would
make of you in three changes of the calendar.

During the three years I received but one letter from home, and wrote but
one.  Almost as soon as my sentence period began I had a heart-broken
letter from my sister.  She and my mother had returned from Canada, only
to find me dead and buried to the world.  I answered the letter, begging
her not to write again, or to expect me to write.  It seemed a refinement
of humiliation to have the home letters come addressed to me in a prison;
and besides, I was like the sick man who turns his face to the wall,
wishing neither to see nor to hear until the paroxysm has passed.  I may
say here that both of these good women respected my wishes and my foolish
scruples.  They wrote no more; and, what was still harder for my mother,
I think, they made no journeys half across the State on the prison
visiting days.

It will be seen that I have cut the time down from the five-year limit
imposed by my sentence; and so it was cut down in reality.  After I had
been promoted to the work in the prison offices my life settled into a
monotonous routine, with nothing eventful or disturbing to mark the
passing weeks and months; and by living strictly within the prison
requirements, working faithfully, and never once earning even a reprimand
from the kindly warden or his deputy, I was given the full benefit of my
"good time," and at the end of the third year, with a prison-provided
suit on my back and five dollars of the State's money in my pocket, I was
paroled.

Though I have been its beneficiary and victim, and have been made to
suffer cruelly under its restrictions, I make here no arraignment of the
law which provides in some States--my own among the number--for the
indeterminate prison sentence.  The reform was doubtless conceived in
mercy and a true spirit of sociological lenity toward the offender.  But
in practice it may be so surrounded with safeguards and limitations, so
wrapped up in provisos and conditions, as to completely defeat its own
end and reverse its intent.

Under the law as it stood--and still stands, I believe--in my own
commonwealth, I was required to remain in the State; to report, at least
once a month, by letter to the prison authorities, and in person to the
chief of police in any city in which I might be living; to retain my own
name; and to bind myself to tell a straightforward story of my conviction
and imprisonment at any time and to any one who should require it.  The
omission to comply with any of these restrictions and requirements would
automatically cancel my parole and subject me to arrest and
re-imprisonment for the unexpired period of the original sentence.

Again I ask you to put yourself in the place of a man paroled under such
conditions.  With such handicaps, what possible chance can a released man
have to secure honest employment?  Fortunately for me, I was still only
twenty-eight--young and hopeful; and I started out to do my best, saying
only that nothing should tempt me to go back to Glendale where, I was
told, my mother and sister were still living in retirement and under the
shadow of the family disgrace.

Knowing that the released convict usually heads for the largest city he
can reach, thus obeying the common-sense instinct which prompts him to
lose himself quickly in a crowd, I planned to do the opposite thing.  I
told myself that I was not a criminal, and therefore would not follow the
criminal's example.  I would board an interurban trolley and expend a
portion of my five dollars in reaching some obscure town in a distant
part of the State, where I would begin the new life honestly and openly
in any employment that might offer.

There was nobody to meet me as I forthfared from the prison gates, but I
was not expecting any one and so was not disappointed.  None the less, on
my way to the central trolley station I had a half-confirmed conviction
that I was followed; that the follower had been behind me all the way
from the prison street.

After making several fruitless attempts I finally succeeded in fixing
upon the particular person in the scattering sidewalk procession who made
all the turns that I made, keeping always a few paces in the rear.  He
was a man of about my own age, round-faced and rather fleshy.  In my
Glendale days I should have set him down at once as a traveling salesman.
He looked the part and dressed it.

Farther along, upon reaching the interurban station, I was able to
breathe freer and to smile at the qualms of my new-liberty nervousness.
Just as I was parting with two of my five dollars for a ticket to the
chosen destination my man came up to the ticket window, followed by a
hotel porter carrying a grip and a sample case.  I saw then how facilely
easy it was going to be to take fright at shadows.  Evidently the young
man was a salesman, and his apparent pursuit of me had been merely a
coincidence in corner turnings.  And in the recoil from the apprehensive
extreme I refused to attach any significance to the fact that he was
purchasing a ticket to the same distant town to which I had but now paid
my own passage.

During the leisurely five-hour run across the State the object of my
suspicions--my foolish suspicions, I was now calling them--paid no
attention to me, so far as I could determine.  Save for the few minutes
at noon when the interurban car stopped to permit its passengers to
snatch a hasty luncheon at a farm-town restaurant, he did not once leave
his place, which was two seats behind mine and on the opposite side of
the car.  On the contrary, like a seasoned traveler, he made himself
comfortable behind the barricade of hand-baggage and wore out the entire
time with sundry newspapers and magazines.  Moreover, at our common
destination he did not follow me to the one old-fashioned hotel; instead,
he led the way to it, and was buying a cigar at the little counter
show-case when I came up to bargain, with another of my precious dollars,
for the supper, lodging and breakfast which were to launch me upon the
new career.

After this, I saw the fat-faced traveling man but twice, and both times
casually.  At supper he had a small table to himself in one corner of the
room; and the following morning, when I went out to lay siege to my new
world, he was smoking in the hotel office and again buried in a
newspaper.  Two hours later I had found employment driving a grocer's
delivery wagon, and in the triumph of having so soon found even this
humblest of footholds in a workaday world, I had completely forgotten him.

Having thus made my cast for fortune and secured the foothold, it took me
less than a week to learn that I had made a capital mistake in choosing a
small town.  Under that condition of my parole which required me to
report in my true character to the town marshal I assured myself that I
might as well have published my story in the county newspaper.  Before
the end of the week half of my customers on the delivery route were
beginning to look askance at me, and when the Saturday night came I was
discharged.  I knew perfectly well what was coming when the boss, a
big-bodied, good-natured man who had made his money as a farmer and was
now losing it as the town grocer, called me into his little box of an
office at the back of the shop.

"Say, Weyburn; when I asked you where you had been working before you
came here, you didn't tell me the truth," was the way he began on me.

"I told you I had worked in a bank in Glendale," I protested; "which was
and is the truth."

"I know; but you didn't tell me that you'd put in the last three years in
the pen, and were out on parole."

"No, I didn't tell you that.  But I would have told you if you had asked
me."

"I can't stand for it," he grumbled, chewing at the unlighted cigar which
was his Saturday night indulgence.  "And if I could, the customers
wouldn't.  I suppose as many as a dozen women have been to me in the last
few days.  They say they can't afford to be watchin' the back door every
time you come 'round with the groceries.  You see how it is."

I saw; but I was still foolish enough to try to stem the pitiless tide.

"Would it make any difference if I were to say that I was as innocent of
the crime for which I was convicted as any of these frightened women?" I
suggested.

"They all say that," was the colorless retort.  "The point is, Weyburn,
that you was convicted.  There ain't no gettin' 'round that.  You've worn
the stripes, and you'll just have to make up your mind to live it down
before you can expect people to forget it."

If I hadn't been the wretched victim of this paradox it might have
provoked a smile.

"How am I ever going to live it down, Mr. Bucks, if nobody will give me a
chance?" I asked.

"I know," he agreed readily enough.  "But I'm losin' money here, every
day, as it is, and I can't afford to make experiments.  I'm sorry for
you, honestly, Weyburn; but you see how it is."

"Yes, I see," I returned.  "You think I ought to be given a chance, but
you prefer to have somebody else give it to me.  I don't blame you.
Perhaps under similar conditions I'd do the same thing myself.  Pay me
and I'll disappear."

He did pay me, and tried to give me two dollars more than the agreed
weekly wage, generously putting it upon the ground of the lack of notice.
I shall always be glad that I still had pride enough left to refuse the
charity.  Even at this early twisting of the thumb-screws I was beginning
to realize that self-respect would be the first thing to go by the board,
and the fight to save it was almost instinctive.

Before leaving Bucks I tried to find out how he had learned my story;
this though I was definitely charging the exposure to the town marshal as
being the only person who could have spread it abroad.  To my surprise,
the grocer defended the marshal promptly and warmly.

"That shows how little you know Cal Giddings," he retorted.  "He's the
last man on top of earth to go 'round givin' you a black eye of that
sort."

"May I ask what reason you have for thinking so?" I inquired.

"Sure you may.  I've known Cal ever since we was little kids together.
I've seen him every day this week, and he knew you was workin' for me.
If he'd 'a' told anybody, it would 'a' been me; you can bet your hat on
that."

"Then where did you hear the story?" I persisted.

"Why, I dunno just where I did hear it first.  Everybody in town seems to
know it," he asserted; and with this unsatisfying answer I was obliged to
be contented.

The next attempt was made in a small industrial city on the opposite side
of the State.  This time I went to the chief of police as soon as I
arrived, and after making the required report, I had it out with him in
plain speech.

"I am going to try to get work here in your city," I said, "and I'd like
to know beforehand how much leeway you are going to give me."

The portly thief-taker leaned back in his chair and regarded me with a
coldly appraisive eye.  He was a coarse-featured man with a face that
would have fitted admirably in any rogues' gallery in the land.

"You're in bad, young fellow," he growled.  "We've got plenty and more
than enough of your kind in this town, without takin' on any more."

"But I am keeping my parole," I pleaded.  "I have come to you like a man
the first thing, and have made my report according to the conditions.
Somebody has got to give me a chance."

"You'll earn it, damn' good and plenty, if you stay here to get it," was
the gruff response.  "What kind of a job are you lookin' for?"

It was hard to confide in such a man, even casually, but I had no choice.

"I am willing to take anything I can get, but my experience has been
mostly in office work," I told him; adding: "I suppose I might call
myself a fairly expert bookkeeper."

"Umph!" he grunted, shifting his cigar from one corner of the hard-bitted
mouth to the other.  "That means that you want to try for a job where you
can work the till-tapping game again."

Not having as yet learned my lesson line by line, I was incautious enough
to say: "I have yet to work it the first time."

"Like hell you have!  See here, young fellow--you needn't spring that
kind of talk on me.  I know you and your kind up one side and down the
other.  You say you've put three years in 'stir' and that settles it."
At this point he broke off short, righted his chair with a snap and
reached for a bill-spindle on his desk.  After a glance at one of the
impaled memoranda he sat back again, chewing his cigar and staring into
vacancy.  A full minute elapsed before he deigned to become once more
aware of my presence.  Then he whirled upon me to rap out an explosive
question.

"What did you say your name was?" and when I told him: "Aw right; you
come back here this afternoon and we'll see whether you stay or move on.
That's all.  Now get out.  I'm busy."

I went away and killed time as I could until the middle of the afternoon.
Upon returning to police headquarters I found the hard-faced chief tilted
in his chair with his feet on his desk, looking as if he hadn't moved
since my visit of the forenoon.  When he saw who it was cutting off the
afternoon sunlight he straightened up with a growl, rummaged in a file of
papers and jerked out a typewritten sheet which he glanced over as one
who reads only the headings.

"James Bertrand Weyburn, eh?" he rasped.  "I know all about you now, and
you may as well can all that didn't-do-it stuff.  Forget it and come down
to business.  You say you want to hit the straight-and-narrow: how would
a job in a coal yard fit you?--keepin' books and weighin'-in the coal
cars?"

I told him, humbly enough, that I was too nearly a beggar to be a
chooser; that I'd be only too glad to get a chance at anything at which I
might earn a living.

"Aw right," was the curt rejoinder.  "You hike over to the Consolidated
Coal Company's yard on the West Side, and tell Mullins, the head
book-keeper, that I sent you, see?  Tell him to call me on the 'phone if
he wants to know anything more about you.  That's all.  Pull your freight
out of here and get busy--if you don't want to get the 'move on' out of
this burg."

Notwithstanding this crabbed speech, matching all the other things this
man had said to me, I left police headquarters with a warm spot in my
heart, thinking that I had lighted upon a diamond in the rough and hadn't
had discernment enough to recognize it.

Yet there was a small mystery thrusting itself into this second interview
with the chief.  What was the content of the typewritten sheet he had
consulted, and who had written it?  If it had been a telegram I might
have concluded that he had wired the warden of the penitentiary for a
corroboration of my story.  But it was not a telegram.

I was still puzzling over the mystery half an hour later when I found the
coal yard and the bookkeeper, Mullins, a red-faced Irishman who winked
solemnly when I told him that Chief Callahan had sent me.

"Know anything at all about the railroad end of the coal business?" was
the first inquiry shot at me; but it was not made until after the
book-keeper had shut himself into the telephone booth, presumably for a
wire talk with Callahan.

I shook my head.  "None of the details.  But I can learn."

"Maybe you can, and maybe you can't.  We'll try you out on the railroad
desk, and Peters 'll show you what you don't know.  Peel your coat and
jump in.  Hours eight to six; pay, sixty dollars a month: more bimeby if
you're worth it."

Robert Louis Stevenson's cheerful little opening verse:

  "Light foot and tight foot,
  And green grass spread;
  Early in the morning,
  And hope is on ahead,"

was ringing in my ears when I squared myself at the railroad desk and
attacked the first big bunch of "flimsies," as the tissue copies of the
waybills are called.  It was almost unbelievable that my luck had turned
so soon, and yet the fact seemed undeniable.  I had a job to which I had
been recommended by the one man in the city who knew my record.  No
questions had been asked, and the inference seemed to be that none were
going to be asked.

I was all of a busy week getting a firm working hold upon the routine of
my desk, and during that time I didn't exchange a dozen words with
Mullins, who appeared to be the head and front of Consolidated Coal,
locally, at least, and whose word, in the office and about the yards, was
law.  None the less, the little mystery connected with this easy finding
of a job in a strange city persisted, and it kept me from dwelling too
pointedly upon the object for which I meant to live and work; namely, the
squaring of accounts with Abel Geddis and Abner Withers.

Singularly enough, it took me, trained accountant as I was, a full month
to find out what I had been let in for, and why the job I was holding
down had been given to an ex-convict.  It was my duty to check the
railroad waybills on consignments of coal, to correct the weights, and to
make claims for overcharges and shortages.  I made these claims as I had
been told to make them, taking the figures of the weights from Peters,
who, in turn, took them from the scale men in the yard.  It was Peters
who gave the snap away one night when we two were working overtime in the
otherwise deserted offices.

"Say, Weyburn; you've got about the coldest nerve of any fellow I've ever
run up against," he said, looking up from his place across the
flat-topped desk.

"What makes you say that, Tommy?" I asked.

"Because it's so.  I've been watching you.  You've been sitting on the
lid for an even month, now, and never batting an eye when these railroad
fellows come at you and make their little roar about the overcharges.
Believe me, it takes nerve to do that--and carry it off as if you were
reading 'em a verse out o' the Bible.  Blaisdell, the lad who was here
before you, went batty and talked in his sleep.  Told me once he couldn't
see anything but stripes, any way he looked."

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said, with a sudden sinking
of the heart.  "Why should it take nerve to tell a railroad agent he's
been overcharging us?"

Peters's laugh was a cackle.  "You're the traffic man of this outfit: do
you know the rates on coal from the mines to Western Central common
points?"

"Of course I do."

"Got 'em all down in the printed tariff, so you can't help knowing 'em,
eh?  Consolidated Coal pays these rates, doesn't it?--all according to
Hoyle and the Interstate Commerce laws?"

"I suppose we pay them.  I check the bills as they are presented."

"Exactly.  But every little so-while you have to make a whaling big claim
on the railroad company for overcharges, and maybe you've noticed that
these claims are always paid--or maybe you haven't?"

I was beginning to see the hole in the millstone.

"I make the claims on the weights as you give them to me, Peters.  Do you
mean to tell me that you've been giving me false figures?"

The yard clerk stuck his tongue in his cheek.  "I'm not telling you
anything.  You know as well as I do that it's against the law to give or
receive rebates.  But if you're not a heap greener than you look, you
know that we're getting our cut rates, just the same.  All we need is a
man right here at your desk who has the nerve to make out the claims, and
is fly enough to do a little bluffing and ask no questions.  You're all
right, Bertie."

"But the figures of the weights," I insisted.  "You are the man who gives
them to me, and you are responsible if they are wrong."

"Not in a thousand years!" was the prompt retort.  "I never put anything
on paper--you're the man that does that--and if the Interstate Commerce
people should break in, I'd have the best little forgettery of any
clock-watcher in the works.  Nix for me, Weyburn; you are the chap with
the figures, and the only man in the shop who has them down in black on
white.  When the roar comes, it'll be up to you, and Mullins will throw
up his hands and accuse you of having a private graft of some sort with
the railroad clerks in the claim office.  That's about what he'll do."

My overtime companion had finished his job and was putting on his coat.
I let him go without further talk, but after he had gone, I stayed long
enough to check over the files of the yard-master's blotter.  When the
checking was completed I knew perfectly well why I had been hired so
promptly, and why Mullins had been willing to take on an ex-convict.  My
basing figures, which Peters had been giving me verbally, were all wrong.
The majority of the claims I had been making from day to day were
fraudulent, and in paying them the railroad company was merely rebating
the coal rates for Consolidated Coal.

It was easy to see where I stood.  A scapegoat was necessary, and with a
prison record behind me I had about as much show as a rat in a trap.  If
there should be an investigation, Mullins would swear that I had entire
charge of the claim department.  And having no written data to fall back
upon, I should be helpless.

The date of this disheartening discovery chanced to be the 25th of the
month--our regular pay-day, and I had my month's salary in my pocket when
I left the office about eleven o'clock to go to my boarding-house.  At
the nearest street corner I met the patrolman on the beat.

"Hello, cully!" he growled as I was passing him; and then with a hand on
my arm he stopped me.  "You're forgettin' somethin', ain't you?"

"I guess not," I answered.

"I guess yes," he retorted.  "It's pay-day at the works, and you gotta
come across."

Here was the remainder of the conspiracy made plain as day.  The crooked
chief of police had turned me over to the crooked coal company to do
crooked work, and I was to be held up for a graft on my salary.  With a
swift return of the blood-boiling which had once helped me to manhandle
the deputy, Simmons, I faced the patrolman.

"And if I don't come across--what then?"

The policeman grinned good-naturedly.  "You're goin' to 'produce' all
right.  You're a paroled man, and you can't afford to have the chief get
it in for you."

It was just here that the three nerve-breaking years got in their work.
I couldn't face the grafter down, and--I confess it with shame--I was
horribly afraid.

"How much?" I asked, and my tongue was dry in my mouth.

"This is the first mont', and we'll let you down easy.  You fork over a
ten-spot for the campaign fund and we'll call it square.  Next mont'
it'll be more."

I paid the blackmail with trembling hands, and when the patrolman was out
of sight around the corner I ran to reach my boarding place, intent only
upon flight, instant and secret, from this moral cesspool of a city.  I
remembered that there was a westbound train passing through at midnight,
and by hurrying I hoped to be able to catch it.




V

The Downward Path

I had left the board money and a note for my landlady on the mantel in
the darkened dining-room, had reached the railroad station, and was
about to buy a ticket to the farthest corner of the State, when I
suddenly remembered that I was running away with an additional handicap
to be added to all the others.  Leaving the coal company and the city
without notice or explanation, I was making it impossible to keep my
record clear in the monthly report to the prison authorities.

With a sinking heart I realized that I must wait and fight it out with
Mullins to some sort of a conclusion which would give me a clean slate.
There must be nothing that I could not explain clearly to any one who
might ask.  I had a job, and I must be able to give my reason for
quitting it.  With this new entanglement to put leaden shoes on my
feet, I retraced my steps through the eight weary blocks to the
boarding-house, dodging through back streets and walking because I
hadn't the nerve to face the cheerful throng of theater-goers at that
hour crowding the street-cars.

I think Mullins knew or suspected what was coming when I went to him
the next morning and told him I wished to have a talk with him.
Without a word he grabbed me by the arm and dragged me into the little
private office which was used at odd times by the district manager.

"I'm quitting this morning, Mr. Mullins," I began, when the door was
shut.  "If my work has been satisfactory, I should like to have a
letter of recommendation."

The bookkeeper smoked a corn-cob pipe, and he stopped to refill and
light it before he opened on me.

"What's wrong?" he demanded.  For an Irishman he was always exceedingly
sparing of his words.

"Suppose we say that the climate doesn't agree with me here."

"You're no sick man!" he shot back; and then: "Want more pay?"

"No; I want a letter of recommendation."

"We never give 'em."

"So I have heard.  But this time, Mr. Mullins, you are going to make an
exception and break your rule."

"Not for you, we won't."

"Why not for me?"

"Because we're knowing your record.  You're fixing to go back to the
pen, where you came from."

"You knew my record when you hired me.  Chief Callahan gave it to you,
and I knew that he did.  But that is neither here nor there; I want my
letter, and I want you to say in it that I am leaving to look for a
more favorable climate."

"And if I don't give it to you?--if I tell you to go straight plumb to
hell?"

"In that case I shall take all the chances--_all_ of them, mind
you---and write a letter to the Interstate Commerce Commission."

If the man had had a gun in his hands I believe he would have killed
me.  There was manslaughter in his little gray, pig-like eyes.  But he
recovered himself quickly.

"If you're that kind of a gink, I'm damned glad to get rid of you at
any price," he rasped; and then went to the district manager's desk and
wrote me the letter, "To Whom it may Concern," practically as I
dictated it.

That ended it, and when the letter was signed and flung across the desk
at me I lost no time in getting out of the noxious atmosphere of the
place.  But before I was well out of the yard it occurred to me that I
had still left a loaded weapon in Mullins's hands.  Though the threat
of exposure might tie him and his grafting coal company up, he could
still appeal to Callahan, who would doubtless find an excuse for
arresting me before I could leave town.  And once in the hands of the
chief crook I should be lost.

Under the spur of this new menace I returned quickly to the coal
office, with some inchoate idea of trying to bully the scoundrelly
chief of police through the hold I had acquired upon the coal company.
The office was empty when I reached it, and at first I thought Mullins
had gone out.  But at a second glance I saw that he was in the
telephone closet, the door of which he had left ajar.  Overhearing my
own name barked into the transmitter, I listened without scruple.

"----Yes, Weyburn; that's what I'm telling you.  He's flew the
coop. . . .  Yes, he knows something--too damned much. . . .  No, I
wouldn't snag him here; he might talk too loud and get somebody to
believe him--some fool in a Federal grand jury, for instance.  Let him
go--with a plain-clothes man to find out where he heads for--and then
wire that outfit that piped him off when he came here.  That'll settle
him."

There may have been more of it, but I did not wait to hear.  Speed was
my best chance now, and I slipped out noiselessly and ran for the
railroad station.  If I should be lucky enough to find a train ready to
leave, I might yet hope to escape whatever trap it might be that the
bookkeeper and his official accomplice were going to set for me.

Reaching the station I found that the first train through would be a
westbound, and that it was not due for half an hour.  The wait was
painfully trying.  I did not dare to buy a ticket for fear Callahan
might have telephoned the ticket office.  As the passengers for the
expected train straggled in I sought vainly to identify the spy who was
undoubtedly among them; and when the train thundered up to the platform
I made haste to board it and to lose myself quickly in the crowded
smoking-car.  Later, when the conductor made his round, I paid a cash
fare to the end of the division, forbearing to draw a full breath of
relief until the cesspool city had faded to a smoky blur on the horizon.

With time to think, I began to puzzle anxiously over the new
development of mystery opened up by the overheard telephone talk.  Who
or what was the "outfit" that had been meddling in my sorry
affair?--that was to be wired when my new destination should be
ascertained?  One by one the suspicious circumstances remarshaled
themselves; the feeling that I had been spied upon, the speedy
publicity which my story had attained in the town where I had made my
earliest attempt at wage-earning, the memorandum which Chief Callahan
had consulted before sending me to the crooked coal company.  It seemed
singular to me afterward that the one answer to all of these small
mysteries should not have suggested itself at once.  But it did not.

The end of the conductor's run--the point which I had paid fare--came
at midday at the capital of the State, where there was a stop long
enough to enable the train's people--or those who chose to evade the
dining-car--to seek a lunch counter.  I went with the others and had a
frugal sandwich and a cup of coffee, hastening afterward to the station
ticket office to buy a ticket to a town well over toward the western
boundary of my prison State, and chosen haphazard from its location on
the wall-map beside the ticket window.  A little later, upon resuming
my seat in the train, I had a small shock.  Sitting just across the
aisle, and once more barricaded behind his hand-baggage and buried in a
newspaper, was the round-faced salesman who had been my traveling
companion on the day of my release from prison.

Naturally, all the suspicions I had been harboring for the past few
hours leaped alive again at the sight of this man.  But at the second
train stop in the westward flight they were promptly disconnected from
my _vis-a-vis_ across the aisle when the salesman gathered his
belongings and disappeared; left the train--as I made sure by looking
out of the window and seeing him cross the station platform.  In the
short run from the capital he had not so much as looked in my
direction, emerging from his newspaper only once for a word with the
conductor at the moment of ticket-collecting.

After he was gone I was able to smile grimly and call it a coincidence,
wondering meanwhile, if one of the consequences of my hideously
disarranged life was to be a lapse into chittering cowardice; an
endless starting aside at shadows.

The new field of endeavor, chosen blindly at the ticket window in the
capital, proved to be a small manufacturing city.  Here the chief of
police, to whom I reported on the evening of my arrival, was of a type
exactly opposite to the grafting brute from whose jurisdiction I had
fled; a promoted town-marshal, like John Runnels of Glendale; a
shrewd-eyed, kindly old man who heard my story patiently and gave me a
word of encouragement that was like a draft of cold water in the desert.

"You're goin' to get a square deal in this town, my boy," he said,
after I had enlarged upon my story sufficiently to make it include my
late experience with Callahan and Mullins.  "It ain't any part of my
job to bruise the broken reed n'r quench the smokin' flax.  You don't
look like a thief, and, anyways, if you're tryin' to make an honest
livin', that settles all the old scores--or it ort to.  Go find you a
job, if you can.  What you've told me stays right in here"--tapping his
broad chest--"leastwise, it won't be used against you as long as you
walk straight."

Under such kindly auspices it did seem as if I ought to be able to dig
a quiet little rifle-pit in the field of respectability and good repute
and to hold it against all comers.  But, oddly enough, I couldn't do
it--not to save my life.  My experience had all been in office work,
and since business was good in the small city, I had little difficulty
in finding employment.  Yet in each case--and there were five of them,
one after another--I secured work only to lose it almost immediately.
By some means my story had got out, and it spread through the town like
an epidemic.  After the fifth failure I went back to the fatherly old
chief of police to confess defeat and to notify him that I was leaving
town.

In this interview he made me tell him more about my trial and
conviction, and when I finished he was shaking his head.  "There's
something sort o' queer about this pull-down of yours, Weyburn," he
commented.  "I gave you my word not to talk unless you went back on me,
and I've kept it.  You hain't told anybody else?"

"Not a soul."

"Still, it's been told--not once, but a heap o' times.  Have you tried
chasin' it back to its startin' point?"

"Yes; but it is no good.  It seems to be in the air."

"Well, it's a dum shame.  It looks as if you had somebody houndin' you
out o' sheer spite.  Is there anybody back behind that would do that?"

I suppose I was bat-blind; but the suggestion, even when it was added
to the mysterious entanglements that were tripping me at every step,
failed to open my eyes.  Truly, Abel Geddis and Abner Withers had used
me ruthlessly as their criminal stop-gap, but since I had paid the
penalty and still bore the criminal odium, I could postulate no
possible reason why they should reach out across the three-year
interval to add cruel persecution to injury.

"No," I said, after a reflective pause.  "There are only the two old
men I have named.  And now that it is all over, I can see that they
were only shoving me into the breach to save themselves."

He nodded, half-doubtfully, I thought; and then: "You're goin' to try
again somewheres else?"

I replied that there was nothing else to do; whereupon this
white-haired old angel, who seemed so vastly out of place as the head
of even a small city's police department, made an astounding proposal.

"Get your bit of dunnage--I s'pose you hain't got very much, have
you?--and come around here about dark this evenin'.  I'll have my buggy
ready and we'll drive over to Altamont, so you can take the train there
instead of here.  If there's anybody follerin' you up and blacklistin'
you, maybe that'll throw 'em off the track."

It was a splendid bit of kindness; and when I could swallow the lump it
brought into my throat I accepted joyfully.  And as the disappearance
was planned, so it was carried out.  In the dusk of the evening the
good old man drove me the ten miles across to the neighboring village,
and after thanking him out of a full heart I boarded a train and began
my wanderings afresh.




VI

A Good Samaritan

After such a disheartening experience in a community where I had had
the help and countenance of a just and charitable head of the police
department, I went back to the smaller places.  Merely because it
seemed foolish to take the time to learn a new trade when I already had
one, I still sought office work.  There was little difficulty in
finding such employment--at humble wages; the unattainable thing was
the keeping of it.  Though I could never succeed in running it down and
bringing it to bay, a pitiless Nemesis seemed to dog me from town to
town.  Gossiping marshals there may have been, now and then, to spread
my story; but I had twice been given proof that another agency must be
at work--a mysterious persecution that I could neither fight nor
outwit, nor account for upon any reasonable hypothesis.

So the hopeless and one-sided battle went on as I fled from post to
pillar up and down and back and forth in the "permitted" area, doing a
bit of extra bookkeeping here and another there.  The result was always
the same.  Work of that kind necessarily carried more or less
responsibility, and in consequence I was never retained more than a few
days at a time.

It was borne in upon me more and more that I must sink lower, into some
walk in life in which no questions were asked.  This conviction
impressed itself upon me with greater emphasis at each succeeding
failure, and the decision to drop into the ranks of the unidentified
was finally reached in a small city in the agricultural section of the
State where I had been employed for a few days in a hardware and
implement store as shipping clerk.  Once more I was discharged,
peremptorily, and with a reproachful reprimand for having thrust
myself, unplacarded, upon well-behaved people.

"I don't admit your right to say such things to me, Mr. Haddon," I
protested, after the reproach had been well rubbed in.  "I have given
you good service for small pay, and there was no reason why I should
have furnished you with an autobiography when you didn't ask it.  In
the circumstances it seems that I am the one to be aggrieved, but I'll
waive the right to defend myself if you'll tell me where you got your
information."

The implement dealer was a thin, ascetic person, with cold gray eyes
and two distinct sets of manners; one for his customers and another for
his employees; and the look he gave me was meant to be withering.

"I don't recognize your right to question me, at all," he objected,
with the air of one who brushes an annoying insect from his
coat-sleeve.  "It is enough to say that my source of information is
entirely reliable.  By your own act you have placed yourself outside of
the pale.  If you break a natural law, Nature exacts the just penalty.
It is the same in the moral field."

"But if any penalty were due from me I have paid it," I retorted.

"No; you have paid only a part of it--the law's part.  Society still
has its claims and they must be met; recognized and satisfied to the
final jot and tittle."

Though this man was a church member, and a rather prominent one in
Springville--we may call the small city Springville because that isn't
its real name--I did not accuse him, even mentally, of conscious
hypocrisy.  What I said, upon leaving him, was that I hoped he'd never
have to pay any of the penalties himself.  I did not know then--what I
learned later--that he was a very whited sepulchre; a man who was
growing rich by a systematic process of robbing his farmer customers on
time sales.

Turned out once again upon an unsympathetic world, I was minded to do
what I had done so many times before--take the first train and vanish.
But a small incident delayed the vanishing--for the moment, at least.
On the way to the railroad station I saw a sight, commoner at that time
in my native State than it is now, I am glad to be able to say; a
young, farmer-looking fellow overcome by liquor, reeling and stumbling
and finding the sidewalk far too narrow.  He was coming toward me, and
I yielded to the impulse which prompts most of us at such times; the
disposition to give the inebriate all the room he wants--to pass by,
like the priest and the Levite, on the other side.

Just as I was stepping into the roadway, the drunken man collided
heavily with a telephone pole, caught clumsily at it to save himself,
and fell, striking his head on the curbstone and rolling into the
gutter.  It was a case for the Good Samaritan, and, as it happened,
that time-honored personage was at hand.  Before I could edge away, as
I confess I was trying to do, a clean-cut young man in the fatigue
uniform of the Church militant came striding across the street.

"Here, you!" he snapped briskly to me.  "Don't turn your back that way
on a man needing help!  That fellow's hurt!"

We got the pole-bombarder up, between us, and truly he was hurt.  There
was a cut over one eye where he had butted into one of the
climbing-steps on the pole, and either that, or the knock on the
curbstone, had made him take the count.  Since Springville wasn't
citified enough to have a hospital or an ambulance, I supposed we would
carry the wounded man to the nearest drug store.  But my Good Samaritan
wasn't built that way.  Hastily commandeering a passing dray, he made
me help him load the unconscious man into it, and the three of us were
trundled swiftly through a couple of cross streets to a--to a church, I
was going to say, but it was to a small house beside the church.

Here, with the help of the driver, we got the John Barleycorn victim
into the house and spread him out on a clean white bed, muddy boots,
sodden clothes, bloody head and all.  I asked if I should go for a
doctor, but the Samaritan shook his head.  "No," he said; "you and I
can do all that is necessary."  Then he paid the dray driver and we
fell to work.

It was worth something to see that handsome, well-built young
theologue--it didn't seem as if he could have been more than a boy
freshly out of the seminary--strip off his coat and roll up his sleeves
and go to it like a veteran surgeon.  In a few minutes, with such help
as I could render, he had the cut cleaned and bandaged, the red face
sponged off, and the worst of the street dirt brushed from the man's
clothing.

"That is about all we can do--until he gets over the double effects of
the hurt and the whiskey," he said, when the job was finished; and
then, with a sort of search-warrant look at me: "Are you very busy?"

I told him I was not.

"All right; you stay here with him and keep an eye on him while I go
and find out who he is and where he belongs."  And with that he put on
his coat and left the house.

He was gone for over an hour, and during that time I sat by the bed,
keeping watch over the patient and letting my thoughts wander as they
would.  Here was a little exhibition of a spirit which had been
conspicuously absent in my later experiences of the world and its
peopling.  Apparently the milk of human kindness had not become
entirely a figure of speech.  One man, at least, was trying to live up
to the requirements of a nominally Christian civilization, and if this
bit of rescue work were a fair sample, he was making a success of it.

I took it for granted that he was the minister of the next-door church,
and that the house was its parsonage or rectory.  It was a simple
story-and-a-half cottage, plainly furnished but exquisitely neat and
home-like.  There were books everywhere, and an atmosphere about as
much of the place as I could see to make me decide that it was a man's
house--I mean that the young minister wasn't as yet sharing it with a
woman.  You can tell pretty well.  A woman's touch about a house
interior is as easily distinguishable as the stars on a clear night.

From my place at the bedside I could look through an open door into the
sitting-room.  There were easy-chairs and a writing-table and a general
air of man-comfort.  Among the pictures on the walls was one of a
stately group of college buildings; another was a class picture taken
with a church, or perhaps it was the college chapel, for a background.

When the hour was about up, the man on the bed began to stir and show
signs that he was coming out of the unconscious fit.  Pretty soon he
opened his eyes and asked, in a liquor-thickened voice, where he was.
I told him he had had an accident and was in the hands of his friends;
and at that he dropped off to sleep, and was still sleeping when a farm
wagon stopped at the cottage gate and the Good Samaritan came in.  His
search had been successful.  Our broken-winged bird was a young farmer
living a few miles out of town.  The young minister had found his team,
and a friend to drive it, and both friend and team were at the gate
ready to take the battered one home.

With the help of the volunteer driver we got the young farmer up and
out and into the wagon; and there the Samaritan outreaching ended--or I
supposed it was ended.  But as a matter of fact, it was merely
transferring itself to me.  As I was moving off to resume my
interrupted dash for the railroad station, Whitley--I read his name on
the notice board of the near-by church--stopped me.

"What's your hurry?" he asked; adding: "I haven't had time to get
acquainted with you yet."

I answered briefly that I was leaving town, and this brought the
questioner's watch out of his pocket.

"There is no train in either direction before nine o'clock this
evening," he demurred.  And then: "It is nearly six now: if you haven't
anything better to do, why not stay and take dinner with me?  I'm a
lone bachelor-man, and I'd be mighty glad of your company."

The wagon had driven off and the street was empty.  I looked my
potential host squarely in the eyes and said the first thing that came
uppermost.

"I have just been discharged from Mr. Haddon's store--for what Mr.
Haddon considers to be good and sufficient cause.  I don't believe you
want me at your dinner-table."

His smile was as refreshing as a cool breeze on a hot summer day.

"I don't care what Mr. Haddon has said or done to you.  If you can't
give any better reason than that----"

"But I can," I interposed.  "I am a paroled convict."

Without another word he opened the gate and drew me inside with an arm
linked in mine.  And he didn't speak again until he had planted me in
the easiest of the big chairs before the grate fire in the cozy
sitting-room, and had found a couple of pipes, filling one for me and
the other for himself.

"Now, then, tell me all about it," he commanded, "You are having plenty
of trouble; your face says that much.  Begin back a bit and let it lead
up to Mr. Zadoc Haddon as a climax, if you wish."

It had been so long since I had had a chance really to confide in
anybody that I unloaded it all; the whole bitter burden of it.  Whitley
heard me through patiently, and when I was done, put his finger on the
single omission in the story.

"You haven't told me whether you did or did not use the bank's money
for your own account in the mining speculation," he said.

I shook my head.  "I have learned by hard experience not to say much
about that part of it."

"Why?" he asked.

"If you knew convicts you wouldn't ask.  They will all tell you that
they were innocent of the crimes for which they were sentenced."

He smoked in silence for a minute or two and then said: "You are not a
criminal, Weyburn."

"I am not far from it at the present time--whatever I was in the
beginning."

Another silence, and then: "It seems incredible to me that you, or any
man in your situation, should find the world so hard-hearted.  It isn't
hard-hearted as a whole, you know; on the contrary, it is kind and
helpful and charitable to a degree that you'd never suspect until you
appeal to it.  I know, because I am appealing to it every day."

Again I shook my head.

"It draws a line in its charity; and the ex-convict is on the wrong
side of that line."  I was going on to say more, but at that moment a
white-haired old negro in a spotless serving jacket came to the door to
say that dinner was ready, and we went together to the tiny dining-room
in the rear.

At dinner, which was the most appetizing meal I had sat down to in many
a long day, Whitley told me more about himself, sparing me, as I made
sure, the necessity of further talk about my own wretched experiences.
He was Southern born and bred--which accounted for the old negro
serving man--and Springville was his first parish north of the Ohio
River.  He was enthusiastic over his work, and he seemed to forget
completely who and what I was as he talked of it.

Later, when we had come again to the sitting-room with its cheerful
fire, we talked of books, finding common ground in the field of
autobiography and travel.  Whitley's reading in this field had been
much wider than mine, and his knowledge of far countries and the men
who wrote about them was a revelation to such a dabbler as I had been.
Book after book was taken from the shelves and dipped into, and before
I realized it the evening--so different from any I had enjoyed for
months and years--had slipped away and the little clock on the mantel
was chiming the half-hour after eight.  It was time for me to efface
myself, and I said so--a bit unsteadily, perhaps, for the pleasant
evening had been as the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land.

"No," said Whitley, quite definitely.  "You are not going to-night.  I
have a spare bed upstairs and I want you to stay--as my guest.  Beyond
that, you are not going to leave Springville merely because Mr. Haddon
has seen fit to deny you your little meed of justice and a fair show."

"It's no use," I said.  "The story is out, and it will follow me
wherever I go--doubtless with Mr. Haddon's help.  You'd best let me go
while the going is easy."

"No," he Insisted.  "You are a part of my work--one of my reasons for
existence.  Christianity means something, Weyburn, and I am here to
define its meaning in specific cases.  There is a little legacy of
common justice due you, and I shall take it upon myself to see that you
get it.  As for Zadoc Haddon, you needn't worry about him.  I am
ashamed to say that he is a member of my own church, but that doesn't
prevent him from being a wolf in sheep's clothing.  I have told him so
to his face, and he has tried to get me ousted--without success, so
far."

I saw difficulties and more difficulties for this generous young fellow
who was so ready to champion my cause, and it seemed only decent to
spare him if I could.  But at the end of my protest he summed the
situation up in a single sentence:

"What you say about me is all beside the mark; somebody has got to give
you the chance you are needing, and the fight may just as well be made
here in Springville as anywhere.  Sit down again and let's dig a little
deeper into that Mexican book of Enock's.  I do like his blunt English
way of describing things; don't you?"

Though the next three days were full of hopes and despairings for me I
shall pass over them lightly.  Each day, though he did not tell me in
detail what he was doing, I knew that Whitley was trying his best to
find a place for me; and I knew, too, that he was meeting with no
success.  He was such a fine, upstanding fellow, and so full of holy
zeal and enthusiasm, that it was hard for him to acknowledge defeat.
But on the third evening, after a dinner at which he had tried vainly
to bridge the gaps that were continually opening out in the talk, he
threw up his hands.

"Weyburn," he began, when the pipes were lighted and he had poked the
grate fire into a roaring blaze, "don't you know, these last three days
have come mighty near to making me lose faith in my kind.  It's simply
wretched--miserable!"

"I would have saved you if you had been willing to let me," I reminded
him.

"The question is much bigger than Bert Weyburn or John Whitley, or both
of them put together," he asserted soberly.  "It involves the entire
fabric of Christianity, and our so-called Christian civilization.  The
Church is here to shadow forth the spirit and teachings of Christ, or
it isn't--one of the two.  If it falls in its mission it is a hollow
mockery; a thing beneath contempt.  I go to my fellow Christians with a
simple plea for justice for a man who needs it, and what do I get?  I
am told, with all the sickening variations, that it won't do; that the
thing I am proposing is one of the things that 'isn't done'; that
society must be protected, and all that!"

"The mills of the gods," I suggested.

"Nothing of the sort!  It's a radical defect in the existing scheme of
things.  Heavens and earth, Weyburn, you are not a pariah!  Assuming
that you really did the thing for which you were punished--and I don't
believe you did--is that any reason why we should stultify ourselves
absolutely and deny the very first principles of the religion we
profess?  But I mustn't be unfair.  Perhaps the fault is partly mine,
after all.  Perhaps I haven't done my duty by these people."

"No; the fault is not yours," I hastened to say.

"I'm hoping it is; some of it, at least.  Just the same, the wretched
fact remains.  You might be the biggest villain unhung--if only you
hadn't passed through the courts and the penitentiary.  As you thought
probably was the case, your story is known all over town; though how it
has got such a wide publication in so short a time is more than I can
fathom.  Men whom I would bank on; men to whom I have felt that I could
go in any conceivable extremity, have turned me down as soon as I
mentioned your name.  The prison story is like a big, brutal, inanimate
mountain standing squarely in the way; and I--I haven't the faith
needful for its removal!"

Being under the deepest obligation to this dear young fellow who was
bruising himself for me, I said what I could to lighten his burden.
But in the midst of it he got up and reached for his hat and overcoat.

"I have just thought of something," he explained hastily; "something
that may throw a good bit of light on this thing.  You sit right here
and toast your shins.  I'm going out for a little while."

He was gone for the better part of an hour, during which interval I
obeyed his injunction literally, sitting before the fire and basking in
its home-like warmth; making the most of the comfort of it all before I
should again go forth to face an inclement world.  When Whitley came in
and flung himself into a chair on the opposite side of the hearth his
dark eyes were blazing.

"Weyburn," he began abruptly, "what I have to tell you will stir every
evil passion you've ever harbored; and yet, in decent justice to you,
it must be told.  Have you ever suspected that your fight for
reinstatement has been deliberately handicapped, right from the
beginning?"

"I have suspected it at times; yes," I returned.  "But there is no
proof."

"There _is_ proof," he shot back.  "By the merest chance I stumbled
upon it a few minutes ago.  I went out with the intention of going to
Zadoc Haddon and making him tell me where he got the information that
you are the desperate criminal he professes to believe you to be.
While we were sitting here it struck me all at once that this thing was
being helped along by some one who had an object in view.  At Haddon's
house the doorman told me that Haddon had an appointment with an
out-of-town customer and had gone to the hotel to keep it; and rather
than wait, I went over to the Hamilton House to try to find my man.  I
didn't find him; but in the lobby of the hotel somebody found me.  As I
was turning away from the desk after asking for Haddon, a heavy-set
young man, neatly dressed, stepped up and asked if my name was Whitley.
I admitted it.  Then he asked if I would give him a few minutes, and we
went aside to sit facing each other in a couple of the lobby chairs.
Weyburn, that young man is in the employ of a private detective agency,
and what he wished to do, and did do, was to warn me that I was
sheltering a dangerous criminal in my house!"

In a flash all the small mysteries that had been befogging me for
months made themselves transparently clear: the man I had called a
traveling salesman who had followed me from the prison gates to the
scene of my first humble effort; the memorandum Chief Callahan had
consulted; the "outfit" that was to be notified when my next
destination was known; the second appearance of the "salesman" on the
train at the capital, and his disappearance when he had learned from
the conductor the name of my next stopping-place; and after this the
long series of hitherto unaccountable blacklistings.  My mouth was dry,
but I contrived to tell Whitley to go on.

"I will," he conceded; "but you must promise me to control yourself.
Naturally, my first impulse, when this scamp began on me, was to cut
him off short and tell him what I thought of the despicable business to
which he was lending himself.  But the second thought was craftier, and
I hope I may be forgiven for yielding to it.  By leading him on I got
the entire brutal story.  It seems that the two old men upon whose
complaint you were indicted knew when you were to be paroled.  They
profess to believe that you are a menace to society; that the prison
authorities were at fault in releasing you short of the limit of your
sentence.  Hence, through his employers, they have set this man upon
your track to see to it--I use his own words--that you do not have an
opportunity to rob some one else."

I suppose I should have been driven mad with vindictive fury at this
plain revelation of the true cause of most of my misfortunes, but there
is a point beyond which the beaten man cannot rise to renew the fight,
and I had reached and passed it.  Wherefore I found myself saying,
quite calmly:

"Neither Abel Geddis nor Abner Withers would spend one copper penny for
any such altruistic reason as this man has given you, Whitley.  Their
motive is strictly selfish and personal.  They are either afraid that I
may go back to Glendale and try to expose them; or that I may take the
shorter and surer way of balancing the account by killing them--as, at
one time, I meant to."

"Oh, but my dear fellow!" Whitley protested.  "In that case they would
hardly take a course which was calculated to drive you to desperation!"

"You don't understand it all," I rejoined.  "Everything has been done
secretly, and it is only by the merest chance that I have now learned
the truth.  This man you have been talking to has been following me, or
keeping track of me, ever since I left the penitentiary.  I have seen
him twice, and I took him to be a traveling salesman--as he doubtless
intended I should.  You can see how it was designed to work out.  With
a sufficient amount of discouragement it was reasonable to assume that
the prison bird would finally yield to the inevitable; become a
criminal in fact and get himself locked up again out of harm's way."

"You think that was the motive?"

"I am as certain of it as I should be if I could read the minds of
those two old plotters in my home town.  You see, I've summered and
wintered them.  The only thing I can't understand is why I have been so
blind; why I didn't assume all this long ago and act accordingly."

"But why, _why_ should they be so utterly lost to every sense of right
and justice; to all the promptings of common humanity?  It's hideously
incredible!"

"I have given you two reasons, and you may take your choice.  It is
either the fear of death--the fear of the vengeance of a man whose life
they have ruined, or else the transaction in which they involved me,
and in which they made me their scapegoat, was more far-reaching than
I, or anybody in Glendale, supposed it was."

Whitley sat for a full minute staring absently into the fire.  Then he
said, very gently: "Now that you know the truth, what will you do?"

"I know well enough what I ought to do.  We may pass over the fellow at
the Hamilton House; he is only a poor tool in the hands of the master
workmen.  I bear him no malice of the blood-letting sort.  But really,
Whitley, I ought to go back to Glendale and rid the earth of those two
old villains who have earned their blotting-out."

Again there was a pause, and then: "Well, why don't you do it?"

I laughed rather bitterly.

"Because all the fight has been taken out of me, Whitley.  That is the
reason and the only reason."

His smile was beatific.  "No, it isn't," he denied.  "You know you
couldn't do it; you couldn't bring yourself to do it.  Maybe, in the
heat of passion . . . but to go deliberately: no, Weyburn; if you think
you could do such a thing as that, I can tell you that I know you
better than you know yourself."

"I merely said that that was what I ought to do.  I know well enough
that I shan't do it, but the reason is far beneath that which you are
good enough to hint at.  I'm a broken man, Whitley; what I have gone
through in the past few months has smashed my nerve.  You can't
understand that--I don't expect you to.  But if I should meet those two
old men when I leave this house, I should probably run away from them
and try to hide."

"But what _will_ you do?" he queried.

"What can I do, more than I've been doing?"

Again a silence intervened.

"I wish I knew how to advise you," Whitley said at length.  "If there
were only some way in which you might shake off this wretched hired
spy!"

"I can't.  If I dodge him, he has only to wait until I report myself
again to the prison authorities.  The one thing I can do is to relieve
you of my threatening presence, and I'll do that now--to-night, while
the going is good."

He was at the end of his resources, as I knew he must be, and he made
no objections.  But at train-time he got up and put on his overcoat to
accompany me as far as the station.  It was a rough night outside, and
I tried to dissuade him, but he wouldn't have it that way.  "No," he
said; "it's my privilege to speed the parting guest, if I can do no
more than that," and so we breasted the spitting snow-storm which was
sweeping the empty streets, tramping in silence until we reached the
shelter of the train-shed.

It was after the train had whistled for the crossing below the town
that Whitley asked me again what I intended doing.  I answered him
frankly because it was his due.

"It has come down to one of two things: day-labor, in a field where a
man is merely a number on the pay-roll--or that other road which is
always open to the prison-bird."

He put his hand on my shoulder.  "You are not going to take the other
road, Weyburn," he said gravely.

"I hope not--I hope I shan't be driven to."

"You mustn't make it conditional.  I know you are not a criminal; you
were not a criminal when you were convicted.  You can't afford to begin
to be one now."

"Neither can I afford to starve," I interposed.  "Other men live by
their wits, and so can I, if I'm driven to it.  But I'll play fair with
you, Whitley.  So long as I can keep body and soul together, with a
pick and shovel, or any other implement that comes to hand, I'll stick.
I owe you that much, if only for the reason that you are--with the
single exception of an old police chief who lives at the other edge of
the State--the one really human being I've met since I shook hands with
the warden."

The train was in and the conductor was waving his lantern.  Whitley
grasped my hand and wrung it.  "Be a man, and God bless you!" he said
in low tones.  "And when the pinch comes again and you are tempted to
the limit, just remember that there is a fellow back here in
Springville who believes in you, and who will limp a little all the
rest of his days if you stumble and fall and refuse to get up.
Good-night and good-by!"




VII

The Plunge

By the train which bore me away from Springville I went only far enough
to put me safely beyond the possibility of stumbling upon any of the
places where I had hitherto sought work; though as to that, I had
little hope of escaping the relentless blacklister who had been set
upon me.

About midnight I had a talk with the flagman in the smoking-car,
calling myself a laborer looking for a job and asking about the
prospects in the region through which we were passing.  I was told that
there were swamp lands in the next county, and that the contractors who
were installing systems of under-draining had been advertising for men.

Accordingly, the next morning found me in the new field, with one set
of difficulties outpaced for the moment only to make room for another.
The first man I tackled was the foreman of a ditching crew, and he
looked me over with a cold and contemptuous eye.

"Show yer hands!" he rasped, and when I held them out, palms upward:
"On yer way, Misther Counter-hopper; 'tis wor-rkin'min we're hirin'
here this day--not anny lily-fingered dudes!"

So it was, in a disheartening number of instances; on a railroad
grading force in an adjoining county, on city buildings where I asked
to be taken as an unskilled helper, with a sewer contractor in another
city, as a shoveler in a village brick-yard.  Finally I landed a job as
a stacker in a lumberyard; and now I found another of the day-laborer
difficulties lying in wait for me.  At the time of my commitment for
trial I was in good physical condition.  But the three years in prison
had made me soft and flabby, a handicap which liberty--with a string
tied to it--had done little to remove; and four hard days of the
stacking, in which two of us were handling two-by-ten eighteen-foot
joists to the top of a pile twelve feet high, finished me.

The boss grinned understandingly when he gave me my time-check for the
four days.

"I thought you wouldn't last very long at the stacking," he commented;
"that's a man's job."  Then: "Got any head for figures?"

I faced him fairly.  "I can't take a job of that kind."

"Why can't you?"

He got the reason in a single sentence.

"Paroled man, hey?  What was you in for?"

I named the charge, and did not add that it was an unjust one.  I had
pleaded the miscarriage of justice so many times, only to be called a
liar, that it seemed useless to try to explain.

"Robbed a bank, did you?  Well, I don't know as I think any worse of
you for spittin' it right out.  Tryin' to brace up?"

"I'm trying to earn an honest living."

"And havin' a mighty hard time of it, I reckon--'r you wouldn't be
makin' a push at stackin' lumber with them blistered hands.  Say, boy;
I sort o' like your looks, and I'm goin' to give you a boost.  They're
needin' a log-scaler in the sawmill.  If you know figures, you can
catch on in half a day.  Chase your feet down to the mill foreman and
tell him I sent you."

I went gladly enough, secured the new job, learned how to do it
acceptably, and was temerariously happy and light-hearted for two whole
weeks.  Then my Nemesis found me again.  In the third week I chanced to
get a glimpse of a short, heavy-set man talking to a bunch of my fellow
laborers.  Before I could cross the mill yard to identify the stranger
he turned and walked quickly away; but the sixth sense of apprehension
which develops so surely and quickly in the ex-convict told me that the
heavy-set man was Abel Geddis's hired blacklister, and that I was once
more on the toboggan slide.

Pay-day came at the end of the week, and when the envelopes had been
given out the mill foreman took me aside.

"I'm sorry, Weyburn," he began curtly, "but I'm afraid you'll have to
be moving on.  Personally, I don't care, one way or the other, what
you've been or where you hall from.  You do your work well, and that's
all I ask of any man.  But your story has got out among the hands, and
that settles it.  They won't work with a convict."

When I took the long road again after this latest rebuff I knew that
the fine resolution with which I had left the prison five months
earlier was breaking down.  The relentless pressure was doing its work,
and I began to ask myself how long I could hold out as a law-abiding
citizen and a victim of injustice against the belief of the world that
I was neither.

The five months' wanderings had carried me the length and breadth of
the State, and I had avoided only the large cities and my home
neighborhood.  But with the lumber company's money in my pocket I
boarded a train for the State metropolis.  At the end of the experiment
I was doing what the released criminal usually does at the
outset--seeking an opportunity to lose myself in the crowd.

Jobs were notably harder to find in the great city, though police
headquarters, where I reported myself, placed no obstacles in my way so
far as I know; took no note of me in any fashion, as I was afterward
led to believe.  That the hired traducer would follow and find me I
made no doubt; but by this time I was becoming so inured to this
peculiar hardship that I refused to cross bridges until I came to them,
and was at times even able to forget, in the discouragements of other
hardships, that I was a marked man.

In the search for means to keep body and soul together it was easy to
forget.  Day labor offered only now and then, and in my increasing
physical unfitness I could not hold my own against the trained muscles
of seasoned roustabouts, porters and freight-handlers.  Worse still,
the physical deterrent grew by what it fed upon--or by the lack of
feeding.  Part of the time I couldn't get enough to eat; and there were
cold and blustering nights when I had not the few cents which would
have given me a bed in a cheap lodging-house.

It was in this deepest abyss in the valley of disheartenment that I met
a former prison-mate named Kellow; a forger whose time of release from
the penitentiary coincided nearly with my own.  The meeting was wholly
by chance.  I was crossing one of the city bridges at night, pointing
for one of the river warehouses where I hoped to find a tramp's lodging
and shelter from the bitter wind, when I walked blindly into a man
coming in the opposite direction.  The recognition was instant and
mutual.

Like myself, Kellow had been a "trusty," and under certain relaxations
of the rule of silence in the prison we had talked and an acquaintance
of a sort had slowly grown and ripened.  In this intimacy, which I had
striven to hold at arm's length, I had come to know the forger as a
criminal of the most dangerous breed; a man of parts and of some
education, but wholly lacking in the moral sense; a rule-keeper in
prison only because he was shrewd enough to appreciate the fact that he
was bringing the day of release nearer by piling up "good-conduct" time.

"Well, pinch me!  Look who's here!" was his greeting when we met on the
bridge.

For a silent moment it was I who did the looking.  Kellow had grown a
pair of curling black mustaches since his release; he was well-dressed,
erect and alert, and was smoking a cigar the fragrance of which made me
sick and faint with an attack of the long-denied tobacco hunger.

"You're out, too, are you?" I managed to say at last, shivering in the
cold blast which came sweeping up the river.

"Three months, and then some," he returned jauntily.  "I'm collecting a
little on the old debt now, and doing fairly well at it, thank you."

"The old debt?" I queried.

"Yep; the one that the little old round world owes every man: three
squares, a tailor, a bed and a pocket-roll."

"You look as if you had acquired all four," I agreed, setting my jaw to
keep my teeth from chattering.

"Sure I have; and you look as if you hadn't," he countered.  And then:
"What's the matter?  Just plain hard luck?  Or is it the parole scare?"

"Both," I admitted.

He shot me a quick look.

"I can put you onto a dead sure thing, if you're game for it.  Let's
hunt us a warm place and chew it over."

The place was the back room of an all-night saloon in the slum quarter
beyond the bridge.  It was warm, stiflingly warm and close, after the
outdoor blast and chill, and it reeked like a sty.  Kellow kicked out a
chair for me and drew up one for himself on the opposite side of the
small round card-table over which a single gas-jet hissed and sizzled,
lighting the tiny box of a place with a sickly yellow glare.

"What'll it be?" he asked, when the waiter came in.

"A piece of bread and meat from the lunch counter, if you don't mind,"
I said; and then, in an apology for which I instantly despised myself:
"Liquor doesn't agree with me lately; it--it would gag me."

Kellow ordered whiskey for himself, and after the waiter was gone he
stared at me contemptuously.

"So it's come to that, has it?" he derided.  "You're so damned hungry
you're afraid to put a drop of bug-juice under your belt.  You're a
fool, Weyburn.  I know what you've been doing, just as well as if you'd
told me the whole story.  Also, I'll believe now what I didn't believe
while we were in 'stir'; you were pinched for something you didn't do."

"Well?" I said, neither affirming nor denying.  The free lunch had come
and I was falling upon it like a famished wolf.  I hadn't a penny in my
pockets, and the bread and meat stood for breakfast, dinner and supper
combined.

Kellow swallowed his whiskey at a gulp and stood the empty glass bottom
upward on the table.

"Been trying the honest lay, I suppose--handing in your name and number
wherever you went?" he suggested.

I nodded, adding that there was nothing else to be done, as I saw it.

He laughed scornfully.  "A minute ago I said you were a fool, but
you're worse than that--you're an infant!  Why, good hell, Weyburn,
there are a dozen ways to beat the parole game!  Look at me: I'm here,
ain't I?  And the warden knows all about it, does he?  Not on your
life!  Every four weeks he gets a letter from me telling him what a
fine time I'm having on Dad's farm down in Wayne, and how I'm all to
the good and thanking him every day for all he did for me.  What?"

"Somebody mails those letters for you in Wayne?" I asked.

"Sure!  And a little split for the marshal in the nearest town does the
rest.  Bimeby, when I've collected enough of the debt I spoke of, I'll
shake the dust and disappear."

"They'll find you and bring you back."

"Not without a fine-tooth comb, they won't.  This old world is plenty
good and wide when you learn how to use it."

"I suppose I haven't learned yet; and I don't want to learn--in your
way, Kellow."

Again he gave me the sneering laugh.

"You may as well begin, and have it over with.  It's all the same to
you, now, whether you cracked the bank or didn't.  You may think you
can live square and live the prison-smell down, but you can't.  It'll
stick to you like your skin.  Wherever you go, you'll be a marked man."

Though I had devoured the bar hand-out to the final crumb, I was still
half-famished; and hunger is but a poor ally in any battle.  What he
was saying was truth of the truth, so far as the blunt facts were
concerned.  Every failure I had made in the six weary months confirmed
it.  There was little room in the world of the well-behaved for the man
who was honest enough--or foolish enough--to confess himself an
ex-convict; less still for a man who had been made the object of a
persecuting conspiracy.  None the less, I had resolution, or obstinacy,
enough to say:

"I don't believe it."

"That's what makes me say you're a fool!" he snapped back.  "You've got
the name, and you may as well have the game.  The world is dead easy,
if you take it on its blind side; easy living, easy money.  Listen,
Weyburn, and I'll show you how you can climb into the bandwagon."

I listened because I could not well help it, being the man's wretched
beneficiary, in a sense.  As he talked I felt the ground of good
resolutions slipping from beneath my feet.  He was staging the old and
time-honored swindle--the gold-brick game--and he needed a confederate.
The fish was almost as good as landed, and with a little coaching I
could step in and clinch the robbery.  Kellow proposed to stake me for
the clothes and the needful stage properties; and my knowledge of
banking and finance, limited as it was, would do the rest.  It was a
cinch, he averred, and when it was pulled off we could divide the
spoils and vanish.

It was hardly a temptation.  That word calls up a mental picture of
stern virtues assailed on every side and standing like a rock in a
storm.  But, stripped of their poetic glamor, the virtues--and the
vices, for that matter,--are purely human; they can rise no higher or
sink no lower than the flesh-and-blood medium through which they find
their expression.  The six months of hardship and humiliation which had
brought me to a pass at which I could eat a saloon luncheon at the
expense of a thief were pushing me over the brink.  Kellow sat back in
his chair, smoking quietly, but I could feel his black eyes boring into
my brain.  When he judged that the time was fully ripe, he drew a fat
roll of bank-notes from his pocket, stripped ten ten-dollar bills from
it and tossed them across the table to me.

"There's the stake, and here's the lay," said he, tersely.  "Your
name's Smollett; you've struck it rich, and you're on your way home to
New York, we'll say, from your mine in Colorado.  You're stopping at
the Marlborough, and we'll run across you accidentally--I and the
come-on--to-morrow forenoon in the hotel lobby.  Get that?"

"I hear what you are saying."

"All right.  Now for the preliminaries.  Any all-night pawnbroker can
fit you out with a couple of grips and some clothes that will let you
dress the part--or at least let you into the hotel.  Then, to-morrow
morning bright and early you can hit the ready-made tailors and blossom
out right as the honest miner spending some of his money for the glad
rags.  I'm at the Marlborough myself--J. T. Jewett, Room 706--but, of
course, I won't know you; you'll just butt in as a stranger to both of
us.  When we get together I'll give you the cues as we go along."

During all this talk the hundred dollars had lain on the table between
us.  It didn't look like money to me; it stood for food and decent
clothing and a bath--but chiefly for food.  Slowly I took it up and
fingered it, almost reverently, straightening out the crumpled corners
of the bills and smoothing them down. . . .

I scarcely know how I got away from Kellow, nor do I know why he chose
to stay on there in the back room of that miserable doggery, drinking
whiskey sours alone and smoking his high-priced cigars.  But I do know
that I was up against the fight of my life when I went out to face the
bitter night wind in the streets.

It was a singular thing that helped me to win the fight, temporarily,
at least.  By all accounts it ought to have been those three
heart-warming days spent with Whitley a month earlier, and his farewell
words of helpfulness and cheer spoken as I was boarding the outgoing
train at the Springville station.  But though Whitley's sturdy faith in
me came to do its part, it was another and much longer leap of memory
that made me hesitate and draw back; a flash carrying me back to my
school-days in Glendale . . . to a certain afternoon when a plain-faced
little girl, the daughter of our physics and chemistry teacher, had
told me, with her brown eyes ablaze, what she thought of dishonesty in
general, and in particular of the dishonesty of a boy in her class who
was lying and stealing his way past his examinations.

I don't know to this day why I should have recalled Polly Everton and
her flaming little diatribe against thievery and hypocrisy at that
desperate moment.  She, and her quiet college-professor father who had
seemed so out of place teaching in a Glendale school, had dropped out
of my life years before.  But the fact remained, and at the memory,
Kellow's bribe, gripped pocket-deep in my hand, burnt me like a coal of
fire.  With a gasp I realized that I was over the brink at last,
stumbling and falling into the pit which has no bottom.  With a single
dollar of the thief's money spent and gone beyond recall, I should be
lost.

With that memory of little Polly Everton to drive me, I went doggedly
back to the riverside slum and sought for Kellow where I had left him.
He was gone, but the newly aroused resolution, the outworn swimmer's
stubborn steeling of the nerves and muscles to make one more stroke
before he drowns, persisted.  Footsore and half-frozen, I tramped the
dozen squares to the great hotel in the business district.  The night
clerk sized me up for precisely what I was, listening with only half an
ear to my stammering question.  But he deigned to answer it,
nevertheless.  Yes; Mr. Jewett was the gentleman who had Number 706,
but he was not in.  His key was still in the box.

There were writing-desks in the lobby, a number of them, and I went to
the first that offered.  Some guest had left a few sheets of the hotel
paper and an envelope.  Without a written word to go with it, I slipped
the unbroken bribe into the envelope, sealed the flap hurriedly and
went back to the clerk.

"Put this in Mr. Jewett's key-box, if you please," I requested; and
when I had seen the thing done, and had verified the number of the box
with my own eyes, I headed once more for the inhospitable streets.

It was on the icy sidewalk, directly in front of the revolving doors of
the big hotel, that my miracle was wrought.  While I hesitated, not
knowing which way to turn for shelter for the remainder of the night, a
cab drove up and a man, muffled to the ears in a fur-lined overcoat,
got out.  He was apparently an arrival from one of the night trains;
while he was slamming the cab door a bell-hop from the Marlborough
skated across the sidewalk, snatched a couple of grips from the front
seat of the cab and disappeared with them.

Humped and shivering, I was almost at the traveler's elbow when he
turned and felt in his pockets for the money to pay the cab driver.  I
was so busy envying him the possession of that warm, fur-lined coat
that I didn't pay much attention to what he was doing, but it was
evident that he had forgotten in which pocket he carried his change,
since he was feeling first in one and then in another.

Suddenly my heart skipped a beat and then fell to hammering a fierce
tattoo as a gust of the highwayman's madness swept over me.  The man
had taken out a huge pocket roll of bank-notes and was running the
bills over to see if there were one small enough to serve the
cab-paying purpose.  Obviously there was not, and with a grunt of
impatience he searched again, this time unearthing a handful of silver.
Dropping the proper coin into the cabman's outstretched hand, he turned
and disappeared through the revolving doors, and at the same instant
the cabby whipped up his horse and drove away.  Then I saw it lying
almost at my feet; a small black pocketbook which the traveler had let
fall in his fumbling search for change.

Judged by any code of ethics--my own, for that matter--what followed
was entirely indefensible.  The grab for the treasure, its swift
hiding, the breathless dash into the shadows of the nearest cross
street; all these named me for what I was at the moment--a
half-starved, half-frozen, despair-hounded thief.  When I had made sure
that there was no policeman in sight I examined my prize by the light
of a crossing electric.  The black pocketbook contained sixty-three
dollars in bills and a single half-dollar in silver.  And a hasty
search revealed nothing by which the loser could be identified; there
were no papers, no cards, nothing but the money.

Though a desperate disregard for anything like property rights had
prompted the sudden snatch and the thief-like dash for cover, I am glad
to be able to say that common honesty, or some shadowy simulacrum of
it, revived presently and sent me back to the hotel, though not without
terrible foot-draggings, you may be sure.  And as I went, many-tongued
temptation clamored riotously for a hearing: the man had so much--he
would never miss this carelessly spilt driblet; I had no means of
identifying him, and with the fur-lined coat removed I should probably
fail to recognize him; if I should try to describe him, the hotel
clerk, he of the detached and superior manner, would doubtless take the
pocketbook in charge and that would be the last I should ever hear of
it.

Giving these arguments their just weight, I hope I may take some small
credit for the perseverance which finally drove me through the swinging
doors and up to the clerk's counter.  For the second time that night I
sought speech with the bediamonded chief lackey, and got it grudgingly.
No; no one had registered within the past few minutes, and no man
answering my exceedingly incomplete description had presented himself
at the counter.  Conscious that I must do, there and then, all that
ever could be done, I persisted.

"The gentleman I speak of came in a cab and he had two hand-bags; they
were brought in by one of the bell-boys," I said, thinking that this
might afford the clue.

The clerk looked afar over my head.  "Some guest who already has his
room and had gone to fetch his grips."  Then, with the contemptuous
lip-curl that I had encountered too often not to recognize it at sight:
"Who are you, anyway?--a plain-clothes man looking for crooks?  You'll
not find them in the Marlborough.  We don't keep that kind of a house."

I turned away, gripping the precious treasure-trove in my pocket.  For
a full half-year I had kept faith with the prison authorities and the
law, living the life of a hunted animal and coming at last to the
choice between starvation and a deliberate plunge into the underworld.
Through it all I had obeyed the requirements of my parole in letter and
in spirit.  But now----

The black pocketbook was warm in my hand.  It was mine, if not by the
finder's right, at least by the right of possession, and it contained
the price of freedom.  Before I had reached the corner, of the first
street my determination was taken, and there had been but one instant
of hesitation.  This had come in a frenzied burst of red rage when I
remembered that, when all was said, I owed this last downward step, as
well as all that had gone before, to two old men who . . .  I stopped
short in my shuffling race to the railroad station.  I had money;
enough to take me to Glendale--and far beyond when the deed should be
done.  Years before I had sworn to kill them, and since that time they
had doubly earned their blotting-out.

I don't know to this day whether it was some remaining shreds of the
conventional conscience, or a broken man's inability to screw
retaliatory determination to the murder point, that sent me onward to
the westbound station and framed my reply to the ticket agent's curt
question, "Where to?" when I thrust my money through his wicket.  Be
that as it may, a short half-hour later I had boarded a through
westbound train and was crouching in the corner of a seat in the
overheated smoking-car with a ticket to Denver in my pocket.  Though I
was not on my way to commit a double murder, I was none the less an
outlaw.  I had broken my parole.




VIII

Westward

A sleety rain was retarding the March dawn and obscuring the Middle
Western farmstead landscape when the lights were turned off in the
through-train smoking-car.  A glance at the railroad time-table which
had been given me with my ticket proved that the train was well past
the boundaries of my home State, and suddenly the vile atmosphere of
the crowded, night-fouled car seemed shot through with the life-giving
ozone of freedom.

Before long, however, the reaction set in.  True, I was free at last,
but it was the freedom only of the escaped convict--of the fugitive.
To be recaptured now would mean a return to prison and the serving out
of the remainder of the full five-year term, with an added penalty for
the broken parole.  I knew well the critical watchfulness with which
the workings of the new law were regarded.  The indeterminate sentence
itself was on trial, and the prison authorities and others interested
were resolved that the trial should be fair and impartial.  Therefore I
might count confidently upon pursuit.

At first there seemed little likelihood that my midnight flight could
be traced.  In the great city I had left behind I had been only an
uncounted unit in a submerged minority.  It was doubtful if any one
besides Kellow and the keeper of the police records would know or
remember my name.  There had been many travelers to board the through
train with me, and surely one might consider himself safely lost in
such a throng, if only by reason of the unit inconsequence.

But now I was to be brought face to face with a peril which constantly
besets the fugitive of any sort in an age of rapid and easy travel.
Under such conditions the smallness of the modern world has passed into
a hackneyed proverb.  I had scarcely rubbed the sleep out of my eyes
and straightened up in the car seat which had served for a bed when
some one came down the aisle, a hand was clapped on my shoulder, and a
cheery voice said:

"Well, I'll be dog-daddled!  Bert Weyburn--of all the people in the
world!"

There was murder in my heart when I looked up and recognized a Glendale
man whom I had known practically all my life; a rattle-brained young
fellow named Barton, who had tried a dozen different occupations after
leaving school, and had, at my last account of him, become a traveling
salesman for our single large factory--a wagon-making company.

Under the existing conditions Barton was easily the last man on earth
whom I should have chosen out of a worldful of men for a traveling
companion; but before I could do more than nod a surly response to his
greeting he had slipped into the empty half of the seat and was
offering me a cigar.

At first our talk was awkwardly constrained, as it was bound to be with
one party to it wishing fervently that the other were at the bottom of
the sea.  But Horace Barton was much too good-natured, and too
loquacious, to let the constraint remain as a barrier.  Working around
by degrees to the _status quo_--my _status quo_--he finally broke the
ice in the pond of the intimate personalities--as I knew he would.

"I'm mighty glad to see you out, and alive and well, Bert," was the way
in which he brushed aside the awkwardnesses.  "You've had pretty tough
lines, I know; but that's no reason why you should be grouchy with me.
I'm not letting it make any difference, am I?"

"Not here on the train," I conceded, sourly.

"No; and, by George, I wouldn't let it at home, either!  I'll bet
you've got a few friends left in Glendale, right now, and you've had
'em all along.  Been back there since you--since--er----"

I shook my head, and he went on as if he were afraid that a stop might
prove fatal to another start.

"It sure isn't any of my butt-in, but I don't believe you ought to
dodge the home town, Bert.  There are a lot of good people there, and
if I were in your fix, I believe I'd want to go and bully it out right
where it happened.  You've bought your little chunk of experience and
paid for it, and now you're a free man just like the rest of us.  You
want to buck up, and tell them that don't like it to go straight plumb
to the dickens."

There was ample reason why he should take this tone with me if he felt
like it.  I looked like a derelict and was acting like one.  Moreover,
I was tormented to the verge of madness by the fear that the conductor
might come along on a ticket-punching tour, and that by this means
Barton would learn my ultimate destination--which would be equivalent,
I fancied, to publishing it in the Glendale _Daily Courier_.

"Cut it out!" I said gruffly.  "If Glendale were the last place in the
universe, I wouldn't go back there."

He dropped the argument with perfect good-humor, and even made apology.
"I take it all back; it's none of my business.  Of course, you know
best what you want to do.  You're a free man, as I say, and can go
where you please."

His repetition of this "free man" phrase suddenly opened my eyes.  He
had forgotten, as doubtless a good many others had, all about the
indeterminate sentence and its terms, if, indeed, he--and the
others--had ever known anything about its conditions.  It was not to be
wondered at.  Three years and a half will ordinarily blot the best of
us out of remembrance--at least as to details.

It was at this point that I twisted the talk by thrusting in a question
of my own.

"No; I haven't been in Glendale right lately--been out on the road for
a couple of weeks," was Barton's answer to the question.  "We've
widened the old wagon-shop out some few lines since you knew us, and
I've been making a round of the agencies.  I was in the big city last
night and got a wire to go to St. Louis.  The wire got balled up
somewhere, and I didn't get it until late at night.  Made me hustle,
too.  I'd been out of the city for the day and didn't get back to the
Marlborough until nearly midnight."

This bit of detail made no impression upon me at the moment because I
was too busy with the thoughts suggested by the fact that I might have
Barton with me all day.  Returning to Glendale at the end of his round,
he would be sure to talk, and in due time the prison authorities would
learn that I had been last seen in St. Louis.  This accidental meeting
with Barton figured as a crude misfortune, but I saw no way to mitigate
it.

About this time came the first call for breakfast in the dining-car,
and I hoped this would relieve me of Barton's presence, for a while, at
any rate.  But I was reckoning altogether without my host.

"Breakfast, eh?--that fits me all the way down to the ground," was his
welcoming of the waiter's sing-song call.  "Come along, old man, and
we'll go eat a few things.  This is on me."

I tried to refuse.  Apart from a frantic desire to be quit of him, I
was in no condition to present myself in the dining-car.  I showed him
my grimy hands, and at that he made me forgive him in advance for all
the harm he might eventually do me.

"That's perfectly all right," he laughed.  "Fellow can't help getting
that way on the road.  My sleeper is the first one back, and the
dining-car's coupled on behind.  You come along into the Pullman with
me and wash up.  I've got a bunch of clean collars and a shirt, if you
want them; and if the Pullman man makes a roar I'll tell him you're my
long-lost brother and give him the best ten-cent cigar he ever
smoked--I get 'em at a discount from a fellow who makes a little on the
side by selling his samples."  And when I still hung back--"Don't be an
ass, Bertie.  This old world isn't half as mean as you'd like to think
it is."

I yielded, weakly, I was going to say; yet perhaps it wasn't altogether
weakness.  For the first time since leaving the penitentiary I was
meeting a man from home; a man who knew, and apparently didn't care.  I
went to the Pullman with Barton and was lucky enough to meet the
ticket-punching train conductor on the way.  Barton was a step or two
ahead of me and he did not see my ticket.  In consequence, the Colorado
destination was still my own secret.

In the Pullman wash-room Barton stood by me like a man, fetching his
own clean linen and tipping the porter to make him turn his back while
I had a wash and a shave and a change.  One who has always marched in
the ranks of the well-groomed may never realize the importance of soap
and water in a civilized world.  As a moral stimulus, the combination
yields nothing to all the Uplift Foundations the multi-millionaires
have ever laid.  When I took my place at the table for two opposite
Barton in the diner, I was able to look the world in the eye, and to
forget, momentarily at least, in the luxury of clean hands and clean
linen, that I was practically an outlaw with a price upon my head.

Yearning like a shipwrecked mariner for home news, I led Barton on to
talk of Glendale and the various happenings in the little town during
my long absence.  Though I had quartered the home State in all
directions for half a year he was, as I have said, the first Glendale
man I had met.

He told me many things that I was eager to know; how my mother and
sister were living quietly at the town place, which the income from the
farm enabled them to retain.  For several years after her majority my
sister, older than I, had taught in the public school; she was now, so
Barton said, conducting a small private school for backward little ones
at home.

There were other news items, many of them.  Old John Runnels was still
chief of police; Tom Fitch, the hardware man, was the new mayor; Buck
Severance, my one-time chum in the High School, was now chief of the
fire department, having won his spurs--or rather, I should say, his red
helmet and silver trumpet--at the fire which had destroyed the
Blickerman Department Store.

"And the bank?" I asked.

"Which one?  We've got three of them now, if you please, and one's a
National."

"I meant the Farmers'," I said.

"Something right funny about that, Bert," Barton commented.  "The old
bank is rocking along and doing a little business in farm mortgages and
note-shaving at the old stand, same as usual, but it's got a hoodoo.
The other banks do most of the commercial business--all of it, you
might say; still, they say Geddis and old Abner Withers are getting
richer and richer every day."

"Agatha is married?" I asked.

"No; and that's another of the funny things.  Her engagement with young
Copper-Money was broken off--nobody knew just how or why--shortly after
your--er--shortly after the trouble at the bank three years and a half
ago.  Agatha's out West somewhere now--in a sanitorium, I believe.  Her
health has been rather poor for the last year or so."

This was news indeed.  As I had known her as girl and woman, Agatha
Geddis had always been the picture of health.  I put up a fervent
little prayer that her particular sanitorium might not prove to be in
the vicinity of Denver.  If it should be it meant another move for me.

"I didn't see the finish of the bank trouble before they buried me, did
I, Barton?" I queried.

"You bet your life you didn't!  There was the dickens to pay all
around.  Under the State law, as you probably know, the depositors'
losses had to be made up, to the extent of twice the amount of the
stockholdings, by the stockholders in the bank.  When they came to
count noses they found that Geddis and Withers hadn't done a thing but
to quietly unload their bank stock here and there and everywhere, until
they held only enough to give them their votes.  There was a yell to
raise the roof, but the stockholders of record had to come across.  It
teetotally smashed a round dozen of the best farmers in the county; and
I heard, on the quiet, that it caught a good many outsiders who had
been buying Farmers' stock at a bargain, among them this young Mr.
Copper-Money who was going to marry Agatha--and didn't.  Geddis and
Withers played it mighty fine--and mighty low-down."

All this was a revelation to me.  In my time Geddis and Withers
together had held a majority of the stock in the close little
corporation known as the Farmers' Bank.  The despicable trick by means
of which Geddis, or both of them, had shifted the defalcation loss to
other shoulders proved two things conclusively: that the scheme had
been well planned for in advance, and that the two old men had worked
in collusion.  I remembered my suspicion--the one I couldn't
prove--that Withers had been as deep in the mud as Geddis was in the
mire.

"What became of the mining stock?" I inquired.

"Geddis put it into the assets, 'to help out against the loss,' as he
said.  Nobody wanted it, of course; and then, to be right large-hearted
and generous, Geddis bought it in, personally--at ten cents on the
dollar."

"And you say Geddis is still running the bank?"

"Oh, yes; he and Withers run it and own it.  As you'd imagine, Farmers'
Bank stock was mighty nearly a drug in the market, after all the bills
had been paid, and, just to help their neighbors out of a hole, as they
put it, the two old skinflints went around buying it back.  I don't
know what they paid; different prices, I suppose.  But Hawkins, our
manager, told me that he sold his for twenty-five cents on the dollar,
flat, and was blamed good and glad to get that much out of it."

It was just here that my breakfast threatened to choke me.  If I had
been as guilty as everybody believed I was, I should still have been a
white-robed angel with wings compared with these two old Pharisees who
had deliberately robbed their friends and neighbors, catching them both
coming and going.  And yet I was a hunted outlaw, and they were honored
and respected--or at least they were out of jail and able to live and
flourish among their deluded victims.

The choking was only momentary.  Barton was in a reminiscent mood, and
he went rambling on about people in whom I was most deeply interested.
It was like a breath of the good old home air in my nostrils just to
sit and listen to him.

But it seems as though there has to be a fly in everybody's pot of
sweetened jam.  In the midst of things, at a moment when I was
gratefully rejoicing in the ability to push my wretched
life-catastrophe a little way into the background, I had a glimpse of a
new face at the farther end of the dining-car.  A large-framed man with
drooping mustaches had just come in from the Pullman, and the
dining-car steward was looking his car over to find a place for the
newcomer at the well-filled tables.

I did not have to look twice to identify the man with the drooping
mustaches.  For three long and weary years I had seen him dally in the
office of the State penitentiary.  His name was William Cummings, and
he was the deputy warden.




IX

The Cup of Trembling

Why I should have chosen, haphazard, and solely because it chanced to
be the first that offered, a train which numbered among its passengers
not only a man from my home town of Glendale, but also the deputy
warden of the penitentiary, is one of those mysteries of coincidence
which we discredit impatiently when we run across them in fiction, but
which, nevertheless, are constantly recurring in every-day life.

For the moment I was desperately panic-stricken.  It seemed blankly
impossible that Cummings should not see and recognize me at once.  I
could have sworn that he was looking straight at me while the steward
kept him waiting.  My terror must have shown itself in my face, since
Barton spoke up quickly.

"Why, say--what's struck you, Bert?--are you sick?" he demanded; and
then he supplied an answer to his own query: "I ought to be kicked
around the block for loading you up with a big dining-car breakfast
when you had just told me that you were off your feed.  Cut it short
and we'll trot up ahead and smoke a cigar.  That'll help you get away
with it."

The steward had found Cummings a seat at the forward end of the car,
and how to pass him without detection was a problem that made me dizzy
with the nausea of fear.  Barton, with the lordly manner of the
American salesman away from home, made it possible.  Snapping his
fingers for a waiter he paid for the breakfasts before we left our
seats, and then quickly led the way forward.  At the pause in the
vestibule, while Barton was answering the steward's query as to how we
had been served, I could have reached out and touched Cummings's
shoulder.  But the deputy warden was running an investigative finger
down the menu card and he did not see me.

It may say itself that I was in no condition to enjoy the
after-breakfast cigar burned in the smoking-room of Barton's Pullman,
where the wagon salesman's tips, or his good-natured insistence, again
made me welcome.  Every moment I expected to see the door curtain flung
aside to admit the burly figure of William Cummings.  True, there were
a number of Pullmans in the train, and it was possible that I might not
be in the smoking-room of his car.  But it was enough, and more than
enough, to know that we were fellow-travelers on the same train.

There is little use piling on the agony by trying to tell what I
suffered during this forenoon of nerve-racking torture and suspense.
Let it be sufficient to say that the torments ended for me at Decatur,
Illinois, when, at the train stop, I saw Cummings cross the platform to
a street-car followed by a station porter carrying his grip.  Barton
marked the change in me at once.

"By George, Bert, what did you see in that platform jumble to make you
look as if you had suddenly taken on a new lease of life?" he inquired
jestingly.  Then he passed the ever-ready cigarcase.  "Smoke up, and
after a bit we'll go and try it on the dog--see if a second meal in the
diner will come as near to upsetting you as the first one did.  Say,
don't you know, I'm bully glad we met up in the smoker this morning?  I
was rawhiding myself to beat the everlasting band at the prospect of
having to make this long, tiresome day jump alone, and it's done me a
heap of good to talk you to frazzles.  And that reminds me: you haven't
told me yet where you are heading for."

I had not; and what was more, I did not mean to.  There were distant
relatives on my mother's side of the family living somewhere in central
Missouri, and I spoke of them.

"Sedalla, you say?" he commented.  "Well, if that's the how of it, I
may see you again in a day or so, and here's hoping.  I have a horrible
suspicion that our St. Louis general agent wants me to chase out with
him and dig up some of his dead-alive country dealers.  We sell a raft
of wagons in Missouri."

It was just here that it occurred to me that Barton was carrying it off
pretty toppingly for a mere traveling salesman; also that he dressed
better, smoked better cigars, and seemed a good bit freer with his
money than such a job warranted.

"You were selling Whiteley Wagons by yourself, when I dropped out," I
said.  "Have I been doing you an injustice by not allowing for a
promotion in the three years and a half?"

"You sure have!" he laughed.  "In the reorganization a year ago they
made me sales manager.  Oh, yes, Bert; I've blossomed out some since
you knew me.  I've actually got a little chunk of stock in the concern.
You never would have thought it of old Hod Barton, would you?  Look at
this."

He reached into a pocket and pulled out a money roll, riffling the ends
of the bills between thumb and forefinger to let me see that the
denominations were all comfortably large.  There was something
instantly suggestive in the bit of braggadocio; a feeling that I had
seen somebody do that same thing in exactly that same way once before.
But before I could follow up the impression he was making me an offer
which put everything but his free-hearted generosity out of my mind.

"You haven't said a word, Bert, and if it's none of my business, you
can tell me so--but if a couple of these yellow-backs would come in
handy to you just now, they're yours and you can toss 'em back to me
any old time when you're good and ready."

I shook my head and thanked him out of a full heart.  The purchase of
the Denver ticket hadn't left me much of a balance out of the black
pocketbook's holdings, but I couldn't borrow of Barton; that was out of
the question.

Shortly after this we had another meal together in the dining-car, and
this time there were no sudden alarms to make me turn sick and panicky.
Afterward, I made another attempt to return to my place in the forward
end of the train, but since Barton would not hear of it, we spent the
remainder of the short afternoon in the Pullman smoker.

During this interval, Barton did most of the talking, growing
confidential along toward the last and telling me a lot about the girl
he was going to marry--the youngest daughter of good old Judge Haskins,
of Jefferson--the man who had sentenced me.  If all the world loves a
lover, certainly no considerable part of it cares to pay strict
attention while he descants at length upon the singular and altogether
transcendent charms of the loved one; and when Barton got fairly
started I had time to consider another matter which was of far greater
importance to me.

Earlier in the day Barton had assured me that he would not fail to go
and see my mother and sister when he returned to Glendale.  I could
scarcely urge him not to do so, though I knew very well that he would
not stop with telling the home-folks; that he would doubtless tell
every Tom, Dick and Harry in town how he had met me, and where.  What I
was asking myself as he burbled on about Peggy Haskins was whether I
might dare give him the one cautionary word which would reveal the true
state of affairs.  In the end I decided that it would be most
imprudent, not to say disastrous.  He would have sympathized with me
instantly and heartily, but the knowledge would have been as fire to
tow when he got back where he could talk.  I could foresee just how it
would bubble out of him as he button-holed each fresh listener: "Say!
you must keep it midnight dark, old man, but I met Bert Weyburn on the
train: he's jumped his parole and, skipped--lit out--vanished!  Not a
word to any living soul, mind you; this is a dead secret.  We mustn't
give him away, you know,"--and a lot more of the same sort.

The arrival of the through train in the great echoing Terminal at St.
Louis was timed accurately with the coming of a gloomy twilight fitly
climaxing the bleak and stormy day.  Having no hand-baggage I was the
first to leave the Pullman, and on the platform I waited for Barton who
had gone back into the body of the car to get his coat and hat and
bags.  As he ran down the steps and gave his two suit cases to the
nearest red-cap, the links in a vague chain of recognition snapped
themselves suddenly into a complete whole, and I knew instantly why the
thumbing of the pocket-roll in my friend's generous offer to lend me
money had struck the chord of familiarity.  The two hand-bags turned
over to the platform porter were the same two that I had seen snatched
out of a cab in front of the Marlborough entrance while their owner was
digging in his pockets for the cab fare, and the coat and hat Barton
had donned for the debarking were the fur-lined luxury and the soft
felt worn by the man who had dropped the black pocket-book.

"Well, old boy," he said, gripping my hand in leave-taking, "the best
of friends must part.  I suppose you'll wait here to take your Sedalla
train.  Maybe we'll get together again in a day or so.  If we
shouldn't, here's hoping that the world uses you well from this on--to
sort of make up for what has gone, you know."

"Wait a minute," I gasped, as he was turning to follow the red-cap.
"You said you were at the Marlborough last night.  I was there--on
an--on an errand.  Did you come in late?--in a cab?"

"I did; and I had a funny experience--or have I told you about it?"

"No, you didn't tell me," I contrived to say.

"I didn't know but I had; I've talked so much about everything to-day.
It was this way: when I got out of the cab I saw a sort of hobo-ish
looking fellow standing at the curb with his hands in his pockets and
all doubled over as if he were cold.  It never occurred to me for a
minute that he was anything but what he looked to be."

The porter, with Barton's suit-cases, was disappearing in the direction
of the cab stand, and I suggested that we walk along.  I had learned
all I needed to know.  But Horace Barton never left a story unfinished
if he could help it.

"Yes, sir; that fellow fooled me good and proper," he went on, as we
hurried to overtake the suit-cases.  "He wasn't any hobo at all; he was
a pickpocket, and one of the finest.  I was hunting for a half-dollar
to pay the cabby, and I could have sworn that that 'dip' never got
within six feet of me.  And yet he 'frisked' me before I could get
across the sidewalk and into the hotel.  Luckily, all he got was a
little pocketbook with some sixty or so dollars in it."

"You reported your loss to the police?" I asked.

"Not for one little minute!" was the laughing rejoinder.  "I didn't
discover the loss until after I got up to my room and found the St.
Louis wire waiting for me; and then there wasn't time.  But I shouldn't
have done it anyway.  Any fellow fly enough to do me that way when I'm
wide awake and 'at' myself is welcome to all he gets. . . .  Well,
here's our jumping-off place, I guess.  My man 'll be waiting for me at
the Southern, and I must go.  Take care of yourself, and so long!"

I let him go; saw him climb into a cab and disappear.  There was
nothing to be done about the money, of course: I had spent more than
half of it for my Denver ticket.  But, since honesty, like all other
human attributes, dies hard in any soil where it has once taken root, I
turned away with a great thankfulness in my heart.  The owner of the
black pocketbook was found, and some day he should have his own
again--with interest.

Nothing of any consequence happened after Barton left me.  Finding upon
inquiry that the westbound connecting train would not leave until eight
o'clock, I ventured out in search of a slop-shop where I could purchase
a cheap suit to go with the clean shirt and collar given me by the
free-handed sales manager.  The purchase left me with less than ten
dollars in my pocket, but it made a new man of me otherwise.  In the
old life at home I had never dreamed that a few rags and wisps of
cloth, properly sewed together, make all the difference in a moralizing
world between the man and the vagrant.

There was a wreck on the Missouri road some time during the night, and
our train was caught behind it and delayed.  For this reason another
rainy afternoon was drawing to its close when I had my first glimpse of
Kansas City, high-perched on its hills from my glimpsing view-point on
the opposite bank of the Missouri River, but low-lying and crowded to
suffocation with railroad yards in that part of it where the train came
to a stand.

As a matter of course, I had missed my proper Denver connection, owing
to the wreck delay.  But, a passenger agent directing me, I found the
evening Union Pacific train waiting at another platform.  A short
half-hour later the tangle of railroad yards in the river "bottoms" was
left behind and the overland train was boring westward into a cloudy
night through Kansas.

With the welcoming West lying fair and free before me, the memory of
the prison years and of the parole purgatory to which they had led was
already beginning to fade into a limbo of things past and irrevocable,
and therefore to be quickly and decently forgotten.  There should be a
new life in the new world, and the humiliation and disgrace of the past
should be so deeply burled that it could never be resurrected.  I was
still under twenty-nine, it must be remembered, and at that age Hope,
the one human quality which seems to have in it the precious germ of
immortality, will flap its wings over the most wretched ash-heap that
was ever blown together by the bleak winds of misfortune.




X

The Plain-Clothes Man

Upon landing in Denver in the middle of a day that seemed too bright
and exhilaratingly bracing to be true, I had an adventure which, while
it had no immediate bearing upon my escape, is worthy of record because
it led to a second hasty flight, and so became in a manner responsible
for much that happened afterward.

As I left the train a squarely built man, sharp-eyed under the brim of
his modish soft hat, was standing aside on the track platform and
evidently scrutinizing each of the debarking passengers in turn.  Some
acute inner sense instantly warned me, telling me that this silent
watcher was a plain-clothes man from police headquarters; and his first
word when he stepped out to confront and stop me confirmed the
foreboding.

"You're wanted," he announced curtly, twitching his coat lapel aside to
show his badge.

This was another of the crises in which I was made to feel the murder
madness leaping alive in blood and brain; but the publicity of the
place and the blank hopelessness of escape in a strange city made any
thought of resistance the sheerest folly.

"What am I wanted for?" I asked.

"You'll find that out later.  Will you go quietly, or do you want the
nippers?"

The cooler second thought reassured me.  It seemed entirely incredible
that the news of the broken parole had already been put on the wires.
In the natural order of things I should hardly be missed until after my
failure to report to the prison authorities at the month end should
raise the hue and cry.

"I'll go quietly, of course," I conceded; and then I added the lie of
sham bravado: "I don't know of any reason why I shouldn't.  You are the
man who is taking all the chances."

With no further talk I was marched through the station building, out
the long approach walkway to the foot of Seventeenth Street, and so on
up-town, the plain-clothes man keeping even step with me and indicating
the course at the corner-turnings by a push or a wordless jerk of his
head.

As we went I was striving anxiously to invent a plausible story to be
told at headquarters.  It was an entirely new experience.  Hitherto I
had always told the plain truth, as the law required, and now I found
the inventive machinery singularly rusty.  But the wheels were made to
turn in some fashion.  By the time we were mounting the steps of the
antiquated City Hall at the crossing of Cherry Creek, I knew pretty
well what I was going to say, and how it must be said.

At first they gave me little chance to say anything.  In the
inspector's office my captor and two others got busy over a book of
newspaper clippings, pictures and descriptions of "wanted" criminals.
With wits sharpened now to a razor-edge, I came quickly to the
conclusion that I had been mistaken for some one else.  The conclusion
was confirmed when they took an ink-pad impression of the ball of my
right thumb and fell to comparing it with one of the record prints.

After a time the inspector put me on the rack, beginning by demanding
my name.

Meaning to lie only when there should be no alternative, I told him a
half-truth.  Though every one at home called me "Herbert" and "Bert,"
and it was as "James Herbert Weyburn" that I had been arraigned and
convicted, that was not, strictly speaking, my right name.  I had been
christened "James Bertrand," after my father.  My mother had always
called me "Jimmie," but for others the "Bertrand" was soon shortened
into "Bert" and from that a few home-town formalists had soon evolved
the "Herbert," a change which my own boyish and unreasoning dislike for
"Bertrand" was ready enough to confirm.  So, when the inspector asked
me my name I answered promptly, "James Bertrand."

"Write it," was the curt command, and a pad and a pencil were shoved at
me across the desk.

Since the name was two-thirds of my own, I was able to write it without
any of the hesitation which might otherwise have betrayed me if I had
chosen a combination that was unfamiliar.

"Where are you from?" was the next question.

Here, as I saw it, was one of the holes in which a lie might be
profitably planted--profitably and safely.  So I said, glibly enough:
"Cincinnati."

"Street and number?"

I had given Cincinnati merely because I chanced to be somewhat familiar
with that city, and now I gave the location of a boarding-house near
the river front where I had once stayed over-night.

"Where were you born?"

"In the country, about forty miles from Cincinnati."

"Traveling for your health, I suppose?  Where's your baggage?"

I saw that I should have to call a halt somewhere, and this seemed as
good a point as any.

"See here," I broke out; "you've got the wrong man, and you know it,
and I know it!  You have no shadow of right to arrest me without a
warrant.  Neither have you any right to try to tangle me in my
statements so that I shall fall down and give you an excuse for locking
me up!"

"Say, young fellow--you cut all that out and quiet down!" advised the
plain-clothes man who had nipped me at the railroad terminal.

"That's the one thing I shan't do!" I retorted boldly.  "You have
arrested me without authority, and now you are trying to give me the
third degree.  You've got me here, and you may make the most of
it--until I can find a lawyer.  Lock me up if you feel like it; and are
willing to stand for the consequences."

At this the three of them put their heads together and once more
compared the thumb-prints.  Suddenly the inspector whirled upon me with
his lips drawn back and his hand balled into a fist as if he were going
to strike me.

"How about that little job you pulled off with a forged check in
Chicago last week?" he rapped out.

He was evidently counting upon the effect of a shock and a surprise,
but, naturally, the ruse fell flat.

"I don't know anything about a forged check; and I was never in Chicago
in my life," I replied; and since both statements were strictly true I
could make them calmly and without hesitation.

For the third time they put their heads together.  I think the
inspector was for letting me go without further ado.  But the man who
had arrested me was apparently still suspicious and unsatisfied.  As a
compromise they did the thing which determined my second flight.  They
took me into a room at the rear of the building; a barn-like place bare
of everything save a screen and a tripoded photographer's camera; and
within the next five minutes I had been posed and "mugged."

"Now you may go," said the harsh-voiced inspector; and I left the
building knowing that the Colorado capital had been effectually crossed
off in the list of possible refuges for me.  With my photograph in the
police blotter, discovery and recapture would be only a question of
time, if I should stay where I could be identified by the local
authorities.  Once during my prison term I had seen an escaped man
brought back from far-away Alaska.

Since there was no immediate danger, however, there was time to plan
thoughtfully and prudently for a second disappearance.  After a
lunch-counter meal, eaten in a cheap restaurant within a block or so of
the City Hall, I made a round of the employment offices.  In front of
one of them there was a bulletin-board demand for railroad grade
laborers on the Cripple Creek branch of the Colorado Midland.

At that time I knew next to nothing about the geography of the Rocky
Mountain States, and the great mining-camp at the back of Pike's Peak
was merely a name to me; though the name was familiar, in a way,
because the mine in which Abel Geddis had sunk his depositors' money
was said to be in the Cripple Creek district.  What chiefly attracted
me in the bulletin-board notice was the announcement that free
transportation would be given to the work.  With only a few dollars in
my pocket, the free ride became an object, and I entered the office.

The arrangement was easily made.  I gave the agent his fee of two
dollars, and let him put a name--not my own or any part of my own, you
may be sure--on his list for the evening shipment.  It appeared to cut
no figure with this employment shark that I bore none of the marks of a
successful pick-and-shovel man.  All he wanted or cared for was his two
dollars and something on two legs and in the shape of a man to put into
his gang against the collected fee.  I was told to show up at the Union
Station at six o'clock, sharp; and after spending the remainder of the
afternoon wandering about the city, I reported as instructed, was
passed through the gates with some twenty-five or thirty other
"pick-ups," and so turned my back upon the Queen City of the
Plains--for a time.




XI

Number 3126

In due deference to the "mugging" at police headquarters, I had
registered in the Denver employment office as "William Smith."  But on
the work, which proved to be the construction of a branch feeder for
the Midland in the heart of the gold district, I took my own name--or
rather that part of it which had been given to the Denver police
inspector--arguing that the only way in which I could be traced would
be by means of the photograph.  Against the photographic possibility,
my beard, which had been scraped off by the station barber during the
waiting interval between trains in St. Louis, was suffered to grow
again.

The railroad labor was strenuous, as it was bound to be; and for the
first few days the thin, crisp air of the altitudes cut my already
indifferent physical efficiency almost to the vanishing point.
Nevertheless, there were two pieces of good fortune.  My
fellow-laborers in the grading gang were principally Italians from the
southern provinces and their efficiency was also low.  This helped, but
a better bit of luck lay in the fact that the contractors on the job
were humane and liberal employers; both of them with a shrewd and
watchful eye for latent capabilities in the rank and file.  Within a
week I was made a gang time-keeper, and a fortnight later I became
commissary clerk.

Before I forget it, let me say that my first month's pay, or the
greater part of it, went to replace the sixty-three dollars and a half
in the little black pocketbook which I had stolen--I guess that is the
honest word---from Horace Barton.  I debated for some time over the
safest method of returning the pocketbook and its restored contents to
the wagon salesman.  I realized that it wouldn't do to let him know
where I was; and it seemed a needless humiliation to confess to him
that I was the "hobo" who had posed, in his imagination, as the skilful
sidewalk pickpocket.

In casting about for a means of communication I thought of Whitley, the
Springville minister.  So I wrote him a letter, enclosing the
pocketbook, with a truthful explanation of the circumstances in which
it had come into my possession, and telling him what to do with it.  I
laid no commands upon his conscience, but begged him, if he could
consistently do so, to suppress my name and whereabouts.  And since I
could not be quite sure as to what the ministerial conscience might
demand, I added, rather disingenuously, I fear, that he needn't reply
to my letter, as I had no permanent address.

It was some little time after my promotion to the commissary that
Dorgan came on the job as a track-laying foreman.  He was a heavy-set,
black-browed fellow with a sinister face and deeply caverned, brooding
eyes looking out furtively under their bushy coverts, and his chief
characteristic was a crabbed reticence which not even the exigencies of
handling a crew of steel-layers seemed able to break.  His face was one
not to be easily forgotten; from the first sight I had of it, it was
vaguely familiar, and a thoughtful ransacking of the cubby-holes of
memory very shortly recalled it for me.  Dorgan was an escaped convict.

His jail-break dated back to my second year in the penitentiary, to a
period just after I had been slated for the prison office work.
Dorgan--his name on the prison books was Michael Murphey, but we knew
him only as "Number 3126"--had "brought" ten years for safe-blowing,
and he was known in the prison yard and shops as a dangerous man.
Twice within my recollection of him he had been put in solitary
confinement for fighting; and he was one of the few to whom the warden
denied the small privileges accorded the "good conducts."

One day a hue and cry was raised and word was quickly passed that
Number 3126 was missing.  He had planned his escape craftily.  A new
shop building was at that time in process of erection, and each day a
gang of "trusties" went outside to haul stone.  Of course, the
safe-blower was not included in this outside gang, but one dark and
rainy morning he included himself by the simple process of hog-tying
and gagging one of the trusties detailed for the job, exchanging
numbered jackets with him, and taking the man's place in the ranks of
the stone-loaders, where he contrived to pass unnoticed by the guards.

The escape was entirely successful.  At the critical moment Dorgan had
overpowered the single wagon guard, leaving the man a candidate for
admission to the hospital, and had made his break for liberty.  We, of
the inside, never knew, of course, the various steps taken in the
attempt to recapture him.  But they all appeared to be fruitless since
Number 3126 was never brought back.

I failed utterly in an endeavor to analyze my own feelings when I
recognized Dorgan and realized that an escaped man from my own prison
was at work for my employers; an escaped criminal and a desperate one,
at that.  What was my duty in the premises?  Should I bind myself, once
for all, to the brotherhood of law-breakers--the submerged minority--by
shielding this man and conniving at his escape?  Or should I turn
informer, telling the contractor-partners of the risk they ran by
keeping Dorgan in the force--the risk that some night, after the money
for the monthly pay-roll had been brought out from town, they would
find the camp safe smashed and its contents gone?

While I was debating this question, inclined first in one direction by
some new generosity on the part of one or the other of my employers,
and again leaning the other way when I remembered that, in the eye of
the law, I, myself, was in precisely the same category with Number
3126, I had another promotion.  One evening, just after I had closed
the commissary, one of the water-boys came to tell me that I was wanted
in the contractors' office, a little shack at the far side of the
end-of-track cantonments.  Hadley, the senior member of the firm, was
alone when I showed myself at the door.

"Come in, Bertrand," he invited, gruffly genial; "come in and wait a
minute until I go over this estimate again.  You'll find cigars in that
box on the bunk."

Having nothing to do while I waited, I sat on a stool in a corner of
the shack, smoking the gift cigar and silently regarding the man who
had sent for me.  He was a good example of the better type of Western
contractor and out-door man; big-bodied, burly, whiskered like a miner,
a keen driver on the work, but withal as kindly as a father when
kindness was called for.

In due time he pushed the figuring pad aside and turned to me.  "Drag
up your stool, Jim; I want to talk to you," he began.  And then: "How
much experience have you had in keeping accounts?"

I told him briefly.

"In a bank, eh?" he queried, and I knew precisely what he was thinking.
He was wondering what I had done to break myself.  In spite of all that
had happened or might happen, I believe I was ready to tell him; but to
my astonishment the curt questioning which all my previous experience
had taught me to expect at this stage of the game did not come.

"This is a free country, Bertrand," he said, looking me squarely in the
eye.  "I'm not going to ask you why you quit bank bookkeeping to come
out here and swing a pick in a construction camp.  Here in the tall
hills we don't think much of digging up graves--the graves of any man's
past.  You've done well in every job we've tried you at, and that's all
to the good for you."

I said I had tried to fill the bill as well as I knew how, and he took
me up promptly.

"We know you have; and that brings on more talk.  Kenniston is leaving
us to go prospecting.  We've talked it over--Shelton and I--and you're
to have the paymaster's job.  Think you can hold it down?"

"I am sure I can--so far as the routine duties are concerned.  But----"

Never, in all the soul-killing experiences of the parole period, had I
been confronted with a test so gripping.  Would this large-hearted man
turn the keys of his money chest over to me if he knew I were an
ex-convict, liable at any moment to be re-arrested for having broken my
parole?  I was silent so long that he began again.

"Looking around for a spade to begin the grave-digging?" he asked, with
a sober smile.  Then, with a note of unwonted gentleness in his voice:
"I shouldn't do that if I were you, Jimmie.  The man doesn't live who
hasn't, at one time or another, had to dig a hole and bury something
decently out of sight.  Whatever you may have done in the past, you're
not going to play marbles with the Hadley-and-Shelton pay-money.
That's about all there is to it.  You may take hold to-morrow morning.
Kenniston will stay long enough to show you the ropes."

It was not until after I had left the office shack and was crossing to
the bunk house set apart for the office squad that I remembered Dorgan.
Now, if never before, my duty in his case was plain.  It was tempting
Providence to allow the presence in camp of a burglar who was probably
only waiting for his chance to "clean up"; doubly perilous now, indeed,
since in any case of loss my record would be shown up, and Dorgan, if
he had already recognized me as I had him, would not be slow to take
advantage of my vulnerability.

My first impulse was to go straight back to Hadley and tell him,
without the loss of another moment.  But there were difficulties in the
way; obstacles which I had not before stopped to consider.  If I should
accuse Dorgan, he might retaliate by telling what he knew of me.  This
difficulty was brushed aside at once: I judged there was little to fear
from this, in view of what Hadley had just said to me.  But there was
another obstacle; the one which had kept me silent from the day I had
first seen Dorgan driving his track-layers.  With a crushing sense of
degradation I realized the full force of the motive for silence, as I
had not up to this time.  With every fiber of me protesting that I must
be loyal to my employers at any and all costs, that other loyalty, the
tie that binds the branded, proved the stronger.  I could not bring
myself to the point of sending Dorgan, guilty as he doubtless was, back
to the living death of the "long-termer."  I make no excuses.  One
cannot touch pitch and escape defilement in some sort.  For three years
I had lived among criminals; and the bond . . . but I have said all
this before.

It may be imagined with what inward tremblings I took on the duties of
the new job the next day.  Kenniston, eager to be gone on his
prospecting tour, gave me only a short forenoon over the pay-rolls; but
as to this, the routine was simple enough.  It was what he said at
parting that gave me the greatest concern.

"You have to go to the bank at the Creek and get the money, you know,"
he said.  "I usually go on the afternoon train.  That will make you
late for banking hours, but if you wire ahead they'll have the money
counted out and ready for you.  Then you can catch the evening train to
the junction and come up on one of the construction engines.  Better
take one of the commissary .45's along, just for safety's sake--though
in all the trips I've made I've never needed a gun."

The week following Kenniston's drop-out was a busy one, with time-books
to check and enter, commissary deductions to be made, and the payrolls
to be gotten out.  My office was a small room or space partitioned off
from the commissary, the partition being of matched boards,
breast-high, and above that a rough slat grille like those in country
railroad stations.  As I worked at the bracketed shelf which served as
a high desk, I could see the interior of the commissary, and those who
came and went.  It may have been only a fancy, but it seemed to me that
Dorgan came in oftener than usual; and more than once I caught him
peering at me through the slatted grille, with the convict's trick of
looking aside without turning his head.  It was for this reason, more
than for any other, that I recalled Kenniston's advice and armed myself
when I went to Cripple Creek on the day before pay-day to get the money
from the bank.

The short journey to town was uneventful.  A construction locomotive
took me down to the main line junction, where I caught the regular
train from Denver.  But on the way from the railroad station to the
bank in Cripple Creek I had a shock, followed instantly by the
conviction that I was in for trouble.  On the opposite side of the
street, and keeping even pace with me, I saw Dorgan.

Barrett (for obvious reasons I cannot use real names) was the man I had
been told to ask for at the bank, and it was he who admitted me at the
side door, the hour being well past the close of business.  He was a
clean-cut, alert young fellow; a Westerner, I judged, only by recent
adoption.

"You are Bertrand, from the Hadley and Shelton camps?" he asked; and
then, as I produced my check and letter of authority; "You don't need
the letter.  Kenniston told me what you'd look like.  Your money is
ready."

In one of the private rooms of the bank the currency was counted out,
the count verified, the money receipted for, and I was ready to start
back.  Barrett walked to the railroad station with me, helping with the
valise money bag, which was heavy with a good bit of coin for making
change.  We got better acquainted on the walk, and I warmed immediately
to the frank, open-mannered young bank teller, little dreaming what
this acquaintance, begun in pure business routine, was destined to lead
to in the near future.

Barrett saw me safely aboard of my return train, and stood on the
platform at the open window of the car talking to me until the train
started.  On my part this leave-taking talk was more or less
perfunctory; I was scanning the platform throng anxiously in search of
a certain heavy-shouldered man with a sinister face; and when, just as
the train began to move, I saw Dorgan swing himself up to the step of
the car ahead, I knew what was before me--or thought I did--and
surreptitiously drew the .45 from the inside coat-pocket where I had
carried it, twirling the cylinder to make sure that it was loaded and
in serviceable condition.

There was an excellent chance for a hold-up at the junction.  It was
coming on to dusk as the through train made the stop, and there was no
town, not even a station; nothing but a water tank and the littered
jumble of a construction yard.  My engine was making up a train of
material cars to be taken to our end-of-track camp, and I had to wait
for it to come within hailing distance.

Dorgan got off the through train at the same time that I did.  I stood
with the money valise between my feet and folded my arms with a hand
inside of my coat and grasping the butt of the big revolver, shaking a
bit because all this was so foreign to anything I had ever experienced,
but determined to do what seemed needful at the pinch.  Oddly enough,
as I thought, the track foreman made no move to approach me.  Instead,
he kept his distance, busying himself with the filling and lighting of
a stubby black pipe.  After a little time, and before it was quite
dark, my engine backed down to where I was standing and I climbed
aboard with my money bag, still with an eye on Dorgan.  The last I saw
of him he was sitting on the end of a cross-tie, pulling away at his
pipe and apparently oblivious to me and to everything else.  But I made
sure that when the material train should pull out he would be aboard of
it; and the event proved that he was.

Obsessed with the idea that Dorgan had chosen the time to make his
"clean-up," I took no chances after the end-of-track camp was reached.
The money valise went with me to the mess tent, and I ate supper with
my feet on it, and with the big revolver lying across my knees.  After
supper I lugged my responsibility over to the commissary pay-office,
and by the flickering light of a miner's candle stowed the money in the
ramshackle old safe which was the only security the camp afforded.

Past this I lighted the lamps and busied myself with the account books.
There was little doing in the commissary--it was too near pay-day for
the men to be buying much--and the clerk who had taken over my former
job shut up shop quite early.  At nine o'clock I was alone in the
store-room building; and at a little before ten I put out the lights
and lay down on the office cot with a sawed-off Winchester--a part of
the pay-office armament--lying on the mattress beside me.

A foolish thing to do, you say?--when at a word I might have had all
the help I needed in guarding the pay-money?  No; it wasn't altogether
foolhardiness; it was partly weakness.  For, twist and turn it as I
might, there was always the unforgivable thing at the end: the fact
that by calling in help and betraying Dorgan to others, I, once his
prison-mate, and even now, like him--though in a lesser degree--a
law-breaker, would become a "snitch," an informer, a traitor to my
kind.  A wretchedly distorted point of view?  Doubtless it was.  But
the three years of unmerited punishment and criminal associations must
account for it as they may.

I don't know how long the silent watch was maintained.  One by one the
night noises of the camp died down and the stillness of the solitudes
enveloped the commissary.  The responsibility I was carrying should
have kept me awake, but it didn't.  If the coming of sleep had been
gradual I might have fought it off, but the healthy life of the camp
had given me leave to eat like a workingman and to fall asleep like one
when the day was ended.  So after the stillness had fairly laid hold of
me I was gone before I knew it.

When I opened my eyes it was with a startled conviction that I was no
longer alone in the little boxed-in office.  In the murky indoor
darkness of a moonless night I could barely distinguish the
surroundings, the shelf-desk, the black bulk of the old safe, the
three-legged stool, and at the end of the room the gray patch which
placed the single window.  Then, with a cold sweat starting from every
pore, I saw the humped figure of a man beside the safe.  As nearly as I
could make out, he was sitting with his back to the wall and his knees
drawn up, and by listening intently I could hear his measured breathing.

It required a greater amount of brute courage than I had thought it
would to spring to a sitting posture on the cot and cover the squatting
figure with the rifle slewed into position across my knees.  The man
made no move to obey when I ordered him to hold up his hands.  Then I
spoke again.

"I've got the drop on you, Dorgan--or Murphey; whichever your name is,"
I said.  "If you move I shall kill you.  You see, I know who you are
and what you are here for."

A voice, harsh but neither threatening nor pleading, came out of the
shadows beside the safe.

"You ain't tellin' me nothin' new, pally.  I spotted you a good while
back, and I knowed you'd lamped me.  You was lookin' f'r me to bust in
here to-night?"

"I was.  After you followed me to Cripple Creek and back I knew about
what to expect."

"And you was layin' f'r me alone?--when you could 'a' had Collins and
Nixon and half a dozen more if yous 'd squealed f'r 'em?"

"I didn't need any better help than this," I answered, patting the
stock of the Winchester.  "The jig's up, Dorgan.  You can't crack this
safe while I'm here and alive.  I suppose you got in by the window: you
can go out the same way."

"You're aimin' to turn me loose?" said the voice, and now I fancied
there was a curious trembly hoarseness in it.

"You heard what I said."

"Listen a minute, pally: if you'll hold that gun right stiddy where it
is and let out a yell 'r two, you can earn five hundred doughboys.  Ye
didn't know that, did you?"

"I know you broke jail and skipped for it, but I didn't know how much
the warden was willing to pay to get you back."

"It's five hundred bones, all right.  Study a minute: don't you want
the five hundred?"

"No; not bad enough to send you back to 'stir' for it."

There was a dead silence for the space of a long minute, and while it
endured the man sat motionless, with his back against the wall and his
hands locked over his knees.  Then: "They'd all pat you on the back if
yous was to let out that yell.  I brought ten years with me when the
warden give me my number, and I'm thinkin' they was comin' to me--all
o' them."

"But you don't want to go back?"

"Not me; if it was to come to that, I'd a damned sight rather you'd
squeeze a little harder on that trigger you've got under your finger;
see?"

"Then why did you take this long chance?" I demanded.  "You say you
knew I had spotted you; you might have known that I'd be ready for you."

"I kind o' hoped you would," he said, drawling the words.  "Yes; I sure
did hope ye would--not but what I'm thinkin' I could 'a' done it alone."

"Done what alone?  What are you driv----"

The interruption was imperative; a fierce "Hist!" from the corner
beside the safe, and at the same instant a blurring of the gray patch
of the window, a sash rising almost noiselessly, and two men, following
each other like substance and shadow, legging themselves into the
office over the window-sill.  At first I thought Dorgan had set a trap
for me; but before that unworthy suspicion could draw its second
breath, the track foreman had hurled himself upon the two intruders,
calling to me to come on and help him.

The battle, such as it was, was short, sharp and decisive, as the
darkness and the contracted fighting space constrained it to be.
Though I dared not shoot, I contrived to use the rifle as a club on the
man who was trying to choke Dorgan from behind, and after a
hard-breathing minute or two we had them both down, one of them half
stunned by the blow on his head from the gun-barrel, and the other with
an arm twisted and temporarily useless.  Under Dorgan's directions I
cut a couple of lengths from a rope coil in the commissary with which
we tied the pair hand and foot, dragging them afterward to the freer
floor space beyond the pay-office partition.

"They'll be stayin' put till mornin', I'm thinkin'," was Dorgan's
comment as we retreated to the scene of the battle.  Then, as he edged
toward the open window: "Ye won't be needin' me any more to-night . . .
I'll duck whilst the duckin's good."

"Not just yet," I interposed, and pulled him to a seat on the cot
beside me.  "I want to know a few things first.  You knew about the
raid these fellows were planning?"

"Sure, I did."

"Tell me about it."

"I piped 'em off about a week ago--when Kenniston 'd gone.  They talked
too much, and too loud, d'ye see?  The lay was f'r to chase in to the
Creek wit' you--an' they did--an' get you on the road, if they could;
if that didn't work, they was to crack the safe"--this with the
contempt of the real craftsman for a pair of amateurs.  "D'ye see, the
boss 'd been dippy enough to write the combination on a piece o' paper
when Kenniston ducked out--f'r fear he'd be forgettin' it, maybe, and
these dubs o' the world nipped the paper."

"See here, Dorgan; was that why you followed me to town this
afternoon?" I shot at him.

"Ye've guessed it."

"And it was for the same reason that you sneaked in here while I was
asleep?"

"Ye've guessed it ag'in."

"You didn't want the bosses to be robbed?"

The escaped convict had his face propped between his hands with his
elbows resting on his knees.

"I'm thinkin' maybe it's six o' one and a half-dozen o' tother," he
said soberly.  "I wasn't carin' so damned much about the bosses, square
as they've been to me.  But I puts it up like this: here's you, and
you'd spotted me, and you hadn't snitched; you'd been in 'stir'
yourself, and knowed what it was: d'ye see?"

I smiled in the darkness.  It was the brotherhood of the underworld.

"And you lined up square at the finish, too, as I knowed yous would,"
he went on.  "You sees me pipin' yous off in town, and you was thinkin'
maybe I'd drop in here to-night and crack this old box f'r the swag
there'd be in it.  You laid f'r me alone, because yit you wouldn't be
willin' to give me up.  Ain't that the size of it, pally?"

"You've guessed it," I said, handing his own words back to him.  "And
now one more question, Dorgan: have you quit the crooked business for
keeps?"

He was up and moving toward the open window when he replied.

"Who the hell would know that?  I was a railroad man, pally, before I
took to the road.  These days I'm eatin' my t'ree squares and sleepin'
good.  But some fine mornin' a little man that I could break in halves
wit' my two hands 'll come dancin' along wit' a paper in his pocket and
a gun in his fist; and then it'll be all over but the shoutin'--or the
fun'ral.  There's on'y the one sure thing about it, pally: I'll not be
goin' back to 'stir'--not alive; d'ye see?  So long . . . don't let
them ducks get loose on yous and come at yous fr'm behind, whilst maybe
you'd be dozin' off."

And with this parting injunction he was gone.




XII

A Cast for Fortune

The incident of the frustrated safe robbery was an incident closed, so
far as any difference in Dorgan's attitude toward me was concerned, at
the moment when he disappeared through the open window of the
pay-office.  For the next two or three weeks I saw him only as he
chanced to drop into the commissary of an evening; and upon such
occasions he ignored me absolutely.

Only once more while the work of branch-line building continued did we
have speech together.  It was in the evening of a day when the new
line, then nearly completed, had been honored with visitors; a car-load
of them up from Denver in some railway official's private
hotel-on-wheels.  It so happened that my duties had taken me up to the
actual end-of-track--by this time some miles beyond our headquarters
camp at Flume Gulch--and I was there when the special, with its
observation platform crowded with sightseers, came surging and
staggering up over the uneven track of the new line.

I paid little attention to the one-car train as it passed me, save to
note that there were women among the railroad official's guests.  The
sightseers were quite outside of my purview--or within it only as
temporary hindrances to a job we were all pushing at top speed.  A
short distance beyond me the train came to a stand in the midst of
Dorgan's crew and I saw some of the people getting off the car.  Just
then a construction engine came along on the siding, and, my errand to
the front being accomplished, I flagged it and went back to
headquarters.

As I have said, Dorgan dropped into the commissary that evening.  His
ostensible errand was to buy some tobacco, but after he had filled his
pipe he lingered until the sleepy commissary clerk began to turn the
loiterers out preparatory to closing the place for the night.  It was
then that Dorgan gave me a sign which I rightly interpreted; when I
released the catch of the pay-office door he slipped in and sat down on
the cot where he would be out of sight of those in front.  Here he
smoked in sober silence until Crawford, the commissary man, had gone
out and locked the door on the empty storeroom.

"I was wantin' to tip yez off," was the way he began, after we had the
needful privacy.  "You'd be after seein' that kid-glove gang up at the
front this mornin'?"

I nodded.

"Know anybody in that bunch?"

"I didn't notice them particularly," I replied.  "I understood they
were Denver people--friends of somebody in the railroad management."

"There was women," he said significantly.

"I know; I saw some of them."

"Yes; and be the same token, there was one of them lamped yous off.  I
listened at her askin' one o' the men who you was; d'ye see?"

Instantly I began to ransack my brain for the possibilities, and almost
at once the talk on the train with Horace Barton, the wagon sales
manager, flashed into the field of recollection.

"Could you describe the woman for me?" I asked.

Dorgan made hard work of this, though it was evident that he was trying
his best.  His description would have fitted any one of a round million
of American women, I suppose; yet out of it I thought I could draw some
faint touches of familiarity.  The stumbling description, coupled with
Barton's assertion that Agatha Geddis was living in Colorado, fitted
together only too well.

"Did you hear what she said to the man?" I inquired, and my mouth was
dry.

"On'y a bit of it.  She says, says she: 'Who is that man wit' a French
beard--the young man in his shirt-sleeves?'  The felly she t'rowed this
into was one o' the kid-gloves, and he didn't know.  So he went to
Shelton, who was showin' the crowd around on the job.  When he comes
back, he tells her your name is Jim Bertrand, and that you makes a
noise like the camp paymaster."

"Well?" I prompted.  "Go on."

"She laughs when he says that.  'Jim Bertrand, is it?' says she.  'Will
you do me a favor, Mister Jullybird'--'r some such name.  'Go and ask
that young man how did he leave all the folks in Glendale.  I want to
see him jump,' says she.  He didn't do it because at that same minute
yous was walkin' down the track to

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/19472