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 thestatus quo—mystatus 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 GlendaleDaily 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.
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.
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.
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.