"Sweet are the uses of adversity," sang the great bard who is supposed to have known human nature in all its mutations; and humanity has echoed the aphorism until it has come to believe in some sort that bufferings are benedictions, and hard knocks merely the compacting blows that harden virtues, as the blacksmith's hammer beats a finer temper into the steel upon the anvil.
With all due respect for the shades of the mighty, and for the tacit approval of the many, I beg leave to offer theargumentum ad hominemin rebuttal. Fight the conclusion as I may, I cannot resist the convincement that ill winds have never blown me any good; that, on the contrary, the steady pressure of hardship and misfortune, during a period when my life was still in a great measure in the formative state, exerted an influence which was altogether evil, weakening the impulses which should have been growing stronger, and giving free rein to those which, under more favoring conditions, might never have been quickened.
When I forsook the breakfast-table and the hotel, after having read the newspaper story telling how effectively Agatha Geddis had removed herself from my path, it was to make a joyous dash for the first train leaving the capital for Cripple Creek. With shame I record it, I had already forgotten my own culpable weakness in permitting a dastardly fear of consequences to make me Agatha's puppet and a sharer in her more than questionable dissipations; had forgotten that by every step I had taken with Agatha Geddis I had increased the distance separating me from Mary Everton.
Perhaps it is only a characteristic of human nature to minimize evils past, and evils to come, at the miraculous removal of a great and pressing evil present; even so, one may suffer loss. I was hastening back to take up the dropped thread of my relations with Phineas Everton and his daughter, and I should have gone softly, as one who, knowing himself the chief of sinners yet ventures to tread upon holy ground. But by the time the train was slowing into the great gold camp at the back of Pike's Peak, these, and all other chastening thoughts, were crowded aside to make room for the one jubilant fact: I was free and I was going back to Polly.
Barrett was the first man I met upon reaching our offices. If he were surprised at seeing me in Cripple Creek when I should have been well on my way to the Pacific Coast, he was quite as evidently disappointed.
"I thought you had started for California," he said in his evenest tones.
"I thought so, too; but it was only a false start." Then I had it out with him. "You and I both know, Barrett, why you thought I ought to go, and the reason wasn't even remotely connected with the shipping of the car-load of test-ore. If you have seen the morning papers, you probably know why it is no longer necessary for me to leave Colorado."
He turned to stare absently out of the office window. When he faced about again there was a frown of friendly concern wrinkling between his straight-browed level eyes.
"How the devil did you ever come to get mixed up with the Geddis woman, Jimmie?" he demanded.
I evaded the direct question. "It is a long story, and some day I may be able to tell you all of it. But I can't do it now. You must take my word for it, Bob, that I haven't done a single thing that I didn't believe, at the time, I was compelled to do. That sounds idiotic, I know; but it is the simple truth."
Again he turned to the window and was silent for a full minute. I knew that I had in no uncertain measure forfeited his good opinion—that, I had earned the forfeiture: also, I knew perfectly well what he was doing; he was leaving me entirely out of the question and was weighing the hazards for Polly. When he turned it was to put a hand upon my shoulder.
"I'm taking you 'sight unseen,' old man," he said, with the brotherly affection which came so easily to the front in all his dealings with me. "If you tell me it's done and over with, and won't be resurrected, that's the end of it, so far as I am concerned. What comes next?"
"A little heart-to-heart talk with Polly's father," I said, and began to move toward the door. But he stopped me before I could get away.
"Just one other word, Jimmie: wouldn't it be better to let things rock along for awhile until the dust has time to settle and the smoke to blow away? You've come back red-handed from this thing—whatever it is—and——"
"No," I returned obstinately. "It is now or never for me, Bob. I'm sinking deeper into the mire every day, and Polly has the only rope that will pull me out. You'll say that I am much more likely to drag her in; maybe that is true, but just now I'm like a drowning man. Possibly it would be better for all concerned if I should drown, but you can't expect me to take that view of it." And with that I crossed the corridor to the laboratory.
I can say for Phineas Everton that he was at all times and in all things a fair man, generous to a fault, and always ready to give the other fellow the benefit of the doubt. I sought him that afternoon with an explanation which was very far from explaining, but he listened patiently and with an evident desire to draw favorable inferences where he could from my somewhat vague story of my entanglement with Agatha Geddis.
It was perfectly apparent to me that I was not making the story very clear to him; I couldn't, because any complete explanation would have reached back too far into my past. The half-confidence was inexcusable, and I was aware of this. I owed this man, whose daughter I wished to marry, the fullest and frankest statement of all the facts. But I didn't give it to him.
"You are trying to tell me that the affair with this woman had its origin in a former foolish infatuation?" he said at length.
"It might be called that; but it dates back to my—to a time long before I came to Cripple Creek."
"You gave me to understand yesterday that she had a hold of some sort upon you. Were you under promise to marry her?"
"No, indeed; never in this world!"
He was sitting back in his chair and regarding me gravely.
"I am an old-fashioned man, Bertrand, as I told you yesterday. I have always entertained an idea—which may seem archaic to the present generation—that a young man intending to marry ought to be able to give as much as he asks. You haven't made a very good beginning."
I admitted it; admitted everything save the imputation that my relations with Agatha Geddis had been in any sense wilfully immoral.
He gave a wry smile at this, as if the distinction were finely drawn and the credit small.
"Because it fell to my lot to be a schoolmaster in her native town, I had an opportunity of observing Miss Geddis while she was yet only a young girl, Bertrand," he remarked. "She gave promise, even then, of becoming a disturbing element in the affairs of men. As a school-girl she had a following of silly boys who were ready to take her at her own valuation of herself. There are times when you remind me very strongly of one of them, though the resemblance is only a suggestion: the boy I speak of was a bright young fellow named Weyburn, who afterward became a clerk in Mr. Geddis's bank."
There are moments when the promptings of the panic-stricken ostrich lay hold upon the best of us. Since I could not thrust my head into the sand, I wheeled quickly to stare at a framed photograph of Bull Mountain and the buildings of the Little Clean-Up hanging on the laboratory wall.
"He was one of the fools, too, was he?" I said, without taking my eyes from the photograph.
"He turned out badly, I am sorry to say, and I have often wondered if the young woman was not in some way responsible. There was a defalcation in Geddis's bank, and Weyburn was found guilty and sent to the penitentiary."
Here was another of the paper life-walls. One little touch would have punctured it and vague recollection would instantly become complete recognition. I held my breath for fear I might unconsciously give the rending touch. But Everton's return to the question at issue turned the danger of recognition aside.
"To get back to the present time, and your plea for a rehearing," he went on. "I wish to be entirely fair to you, Bertrand; as fair as I can be without being unfair to Polly. Barrett told me yesterday afternoon that you had gone, or were going, to the Pacific Coast. I am taking it for granted that you had no intention of accompanying this woman?"
"I certainly had not. Nothing was further from my intentions. On the other hand, her flight last night with another woman's husband is the one thing that makes it possible for me to be here to-day."
"You can assure me that your connection with her is an incident closed; and for all time?"
"It is, unquestionably. I hope I shall never see her or hear of her again."
For a moment he sat nibbling the end of the pencil with which he had been figuring, trying, as I well understood, to be fairly equitable as between even-handed justice and his prejudices. There was a sharp little struggle, but at the end of it he said: "As I remarked yesterday, I labor under all the disadvantages of the average American father. I can occupy the position only of a deeply interested onlooker. But I'll meet you half-way and lift the embargo. You may resume your visits to the house if you wish to."
"I want more than that," I broke in hastily. "I am going to ask Polly to be my wife. If she says Yes, I don't want to wait a minute longer than I'm obliged to."
He demurred at that, intimating that I ought to be willing to wait until a reasonable lapse of time could prove the sincerity of my protestations. He was entirely justified in asking for delay, but I begged like a dog and he finally gave a reluctant consent—contingent, of course, upon his daughter's wishes in the matter. Half an hour later I was sitting with Polly Everton before a cheerful grate fire in the living-room of the cottage on the hill, trying, as best I might, to tell her how much I loved her.
One of the things a man doesn't find out until after he has been married quite some little time is that the best of women may not always wear her heart on her sleeve, nor always open the door of the inner confidences even to the man whose life has become a part and parcel of her own. Mary Everton's eyes were deep wells of truth and sincerity as I talked, but I read in them nothing save the love which matched my own when she gave me her answer. If I had known all that lay behind, I think I should have fallen down and worshiped her.
I did not know then how much or how little she had heard of the Agatha Geddis affair. None the less, I broke faith, if not with her, at least with myself. I did not tell her that she was about to become the wife of an escaped convict; that her life must henceforth be lived under a threatening shadow; that her children, if she should have any, might be made to share the disgrace of their father.
Once more I make no excuses. A little later, if I had waited, the just and honorable impulse might have reasserted itself; I might have realized that the removal of one unscrupulous woman out of my path merely took the lightning out of the edge of the nearest cloud. But in the supreme exaltation of the moment I considered none of these things. In this climaxing of happiness the disaster which had hung over my head for weeks and months seemed as far removed and remote as it had been imminent only a few hours before.
We were together through what remained of the afternoon; until it was nearly time for Phineas Everton to come home. When we parted I had gained my point and our plans were all made. We were to be married very quietly the following day. I had no wish to make the wedding the social function which my position as one of the three partners in the Little Clean-Up might have justified; and Polly agreed with me in this.
It was not until after I had left the house that I remembered that the forced financing of Agatha Geddis's elopement had practically drained my bank account. There had been no mention of money in our talk before the fire; we were both far and away beyond the reach of any such sordid topic. But Phineas Everton would have a right to ask questions, and I must be prepared to answer them. After dinner at the hotel I captured Barrett, drove him into a quiet corner of the lobby, and made my wail.
"Heavens and earth!" he gasped when I had told him the shameful truth. "Are you telling me that you let that woman hold you up for all the ready money you had in the world?"
"It listens that way," I confessed; adding, out of the heart of sincerity: "It was cheap at the price; I was glad enough to be quit of her at any price."
"This is pretty serious, Jimmie," he asserted, after he had re-lighted his cigar. "It isn't the mere fact that you have recklessly chucked a small fortune at the Geddis person—that is a mere matter of dollars and cents, and the Little Clean-Up will square you up on that. But there is another side to it. The dreadful thing is the fact that she had enough of a grip on you to make you do it. I'll like it better if you will say that you were blind drunk when you did it."
"I wasn't—more's the pity, Bob; on the contrary, I was never soberer in my life."
"Of course, you haven't told Polly."
"No—not yet."
"Nor Everton?"
I shook my head. "I didn't want to commit suicide."
Barrett chuckled softly.
"I happen to know this fellow the Geddis woman is running away with," he said. "He has gone through his wife's fortune, in addition to squandering a good little chunk that his father left him. And you've grub-staked 'em both to this! Well, never mind; it's a back number, now, and you have given me your word for it. Don't worry about the money you are going to need for the honeymoon. There is plenty in the bank—in my account, if there isn't any in yours."
I thanked him with tears in my eyes. Was there ever another such generous soul in this world, or in any other? He stopped me in mid career, wishing to know more about the wedding.
"Let the money part of it go hang and tell me more about this hurry business you've planned for to-morrow. It's scandalous and unheard of, but I don't blame you a little bit. Dope my part out for me while you're here—so I'll know where I am to come on and go off."
For a little while longer—as long a while as I could spare from Polly—we talked of the impromptu wedding and arranged for it. Barrett was a brother to me in all that the word implies. He took on all of the "best man's" responsibilities—and more. When I was leaving to walk up the hill he walked to the corner of the side street with me, and at the last moment business intruded.
"I forgot to tell you," he cut in abruptly. "After you left yesterday afternoon a court notice was served upon us. Blackwell's lawyers have taken the Lawrenceburg suit to the Federal court—on the ground of alien ownership—and we've got to show cause all over again why we shouldn't be enjoined for trespass. Benedict seems to be more or less stirred up about it."
"If that is the case, I oughtn't to be going away," I said.
"Yes, you ought; Gifford and I can handle it."
Notwithstanding Barrett's assurance I was vaguely disturbed as I climbed the hill to the Everton cottage. Blackwell had proved to be a veritable bull-dog in the long-drawn-out fight, and the tenacity with which he was holding on was ominous. Why the Lawrenceburg people should make such a determined struggle to wipe us out was beyond my comprehension. It had been proved in the State courts, past a question of doubt, that our title to the Little Clean-Up was unassailable, and still Blackwell hung on. What was the animus?
If I could have had the answer to that question it is conceivable that my one evening as Polly Everton's affianced lover—an evening spent in the seventh heaven of ecstasy before the cheerful coal blaze in the cottage sitting-room—would have been sadly marred.
Our high-noon wedding was in all respects as quiet and unostentatious as we had planned it. The little brown box of a church, bare of decorations because there was neither time nor the group of vicariously interested young people to trim it, was only a few doors from the Everton cottage, and we walked to it; Phineas Everton and I on each side of the plank walk, and Polly between us with an arm for each.
Barrett had told a few of his friends, so there were enough people in the pews to make it look a little less than clandestine. Barrett acted as usher in one aisle and Gifford, very much out of his element but doggedly faithful, did his part in the other. There was even a bit of music; the Wagner as we went in, and a few bars of the Mendelssohn to speed us as we went out. The good-byes were said at the church-door, and the only abnormal thing about the leave-taking was Barrett's gift to the bride, pressed into her hand as we were getting into the carriage to go to the railroad station—a silver filigree hand-bag stuffed heavy with five- and ten-dollar gold pieces, "to be blown in on the wedding journey," as he phrased it.
We had agreed not to tell anybody where we were going; for that matter, I didn't even tell Polly until after we had started. Turning southward from Colorado Springs and stopping overnight in Trinidad, we took a morning train on the Santa Fe and vanished into the westward void. A day and a night beyond this we were debarking at Williams, Arizona, and in due time reached our real hiding-place; a comfortable ranch house within easy riding distance of that most majestic of immensities, the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. It was Polly's idea; the choice of a quiet retreat as against the social attractions of the great hotel on the canyon's brink. We had each other, and that was sufficient.
Of that heavenly month, spent in a world far removed from all the turmoil and distractions of modern civilization, there is nothing to be here written down. For those who have drained a similar cup of blissful happiness for themselves there is no need; and those who have not would not understand. What I recall most vividly now is a single unnerving incident; unnerving, I say, though at the time it was quickly drowned in the flowing tide of joy.
It chanced upon a day toward the month's end when we had broken the heavenly sequence of quiet days by riding a pair of our host's well-broken cow ponies over to El Tovar for dinner. Since it was not the tourist season there were not many guests in the great inn; but one, a man who sat by himself in a far corner of the dining-room, gave me a turn that made me sick and faint at my first sight of him. The man was big and swarthy of face, and he wore a pair of drooping mustaches. For one heart-stopping instant I made sure it was William Cummings, the deputy prison warden who had so miraculously missed seeing me in the dining-car of my train of escape. But since nothing happened and he paid no manner of attention to us, I decided gratefully that it was only a resemblance. There was no such name as Cummings on the hotel register, which I examined after we left the dining-room, and I saw no more of the man with the drooping mustaches.
Momentary as the shock had been, I found that Polly had remarked it. She spoke of it on the ride back to our retreat at Carter's.
"Are you feeling entirely well, Jimmie, dear?" she asked; and before I could reply: "You had a bad turn of some sort while we were at table. I saw it in your face and eyes."
I hastened to assure her that there was nothing the matter with me; that there couldn't be anything the matter with a man who had died and gone to heaven nearly a month previous to the dinner at El Tovar.
"But the man has got to go back to earth again pretty soon, and take the woman with him," she retorted, laughing. "Just think, Jimmie; it has been nearly a month, as you say, and we haven't had a letter or a telegram in all that time! Not that I'm regretting anything; I'm happy, dearest—as happy as an angel with wings; but I want to see my daddy."
The heavenly path was leading back into the old world again, the fighting world, and I knew it, and presently we were taking all the steps of the delightful vanishing in reverse; boarding the through train at Williams, catching glimpses of the stupendous majesty of mountain and plain as the powerful locomotives towed us up the grades of the Raton, doing a brisk walk on the platform at Albuquerque while the train paused, and all the rest of it.
From Trinidad I wired Barrett, telling him that we were on our way home; that we should go in by way of Colorado Springs instead of Florence, with a stop-over between trains for dinner at the Antlers. I half-expected he would run down to the Springs to meet us, and so he did, bringing Father Phineas with him. Polly's love for her father was always very sweet and touching, and Barrett and I left them to themselves at the meeting.
"I'm mighty glad to see you back, Jimmie, old man," Barrett declared, when we had found a quiet corner in the rotunda. "You are looking like a new man, and I guess you are one. And you are on your feet again financially, too. We declared a dividend yesterday, and you've got a bank account that will warm the cockles of your silly old heart."
"How is Gifford? and how are things at the mine?" I asked.
"Gifford is all right; only he's got too much money—doesn't know what to do with it now that he has built all the new houses the camp will stand for. And the Little Clean-Up is all right, too; though we are digging into a small mystery just now."
"A mystery?" I queried.
"Yes. You remember how the branch vein in the two-hundred-foot level was bearing off to the east?"
"I do."
"Well, three weeks ago the sloping carried us over into the Mary Mattock ground, and I tell you what, Jimmie, I was more than glad we had bought that claim outright while we could. The ore is richer than anything we have found since we made the big strike at grass-roots, and we'd be up against it good and hard if we hadn't paid those Nebraska farmers what they asked and taken a clear title to the ground."
"But the mystery," I reminded him.
"It is a little trick of acoustics, I guess; it has happened in other mines, so Hicks tells me. Some peculiar geological structure of the porphyry in particular localities makes it carry sound like a telephone wire. In that eastern adit of ours you can hear them working in the Lawrenceburg as plainly as if they were only a few feet away."
"That is odd," I mused; "especially as the Lawrenceburg workings are all in exactly the opposite direction—down the hill on their side of the spur."
Barrett thrust his hands deep into his pockets.
"I have often wondered, Jimmie, if they reallyaredownhill. Nobody, outside of the men on their own pay-roll, knows anything about it definitely; and Blackwell wouldn't let an outside engineer go down his shaft for a king's ransom. I know it, because I have tried to send one. If the downhill story that we've been hearing should happen to be a fake; if he should be under-cutting us, instead; it would explain a heap of things."
"The stubborn lawsuit among others," I offered.
"Yes; the lawsuit. By the way, we've been up to our necks in that while you've been hiding out. Blackwell's lawyers succeeded in persuading the Federal court to grant a temporary injunction, in spite of everything we could do, and we are operating now under an indemnity bond big enough to make your head swim. The hearing to determine whether the injunction shall be dissolved or made permanent is timed for next Monday."
"Heavens!" I ejaculated. "We can't let them tie us up!"
"I don't think they are going to be able to. Benedict is feeling a little better now and he thinks he has them sewed up in a blanket, only he won't tell me how, and you never can tell what's going to happen when the lawyers get at you. There are lots of holes in the legal skimmer: for example, at the preliminary hearing Blackwell had three surveyors who went on the stand and swore flat-footed that the lines on our side of the spur were all wrong; that the Lawrenceburg group of claims covered not only our original triangle, but the Mary Mattock as well. Paid-for perjury, of course, but we couldn't prove it; so there you are."
At my urging Barrett would have gone into this phase of the trouble more deeply, but just then Polly and her father came across the rotunda and we all went to the dining-room together. I shall never forget, the longest day I live, just where our table for four stood, and how a group of gabbling tourists had the three or four tables nearest to us, and how the lights, due to some trouble with the electric current, winked now and then, like the stage lights in a theater ticking off the cues.
We had got as far as the black coffees, and Barrett was joking Polly and telling her that she shouldn't take sugar, when I saw, through a vista of the tourists, a square-shouldered, dark-faced man rising from his place at a distant table. There was no mistaking him. He was the man I had seen in the dining-room of the hotel at the Grand Canyon.
As he came toward us between the tables the resemblance, which I had so confidently assured myself was only a resemblance, transformed itself slowly into the breath-cutting reality, and I was staring up, wild-eyed and speechless, into the face of the deputy warden, Cummings, when he tapped me on the shoulder and said, loud enough for the others to hear:
"You've led us a pretty long chase, Weyburn, but we don't often miss, and it's ended at last. I guess you'll have to come with me, now."
It is useless for me to try to picture the consternation which fell upon the four of us when the deputy warden touched me on the shoulder and spoke to me. I can't describe it. I only know that Barrett sprang up, gritting out the first oath I had ever heard him utter; that a look of shocked and complete recognition leaped into the mild brown eyes of the old metallurgist; that Polly was standing up with her arms outstretched across the table as if she were trying to reach me and drag me out of the crushing wreck of all our hopes.
When he found that I was not going to offer any resistance, Cummings was very decent—not to say kindly. He let me walk with the others out of the dining-room; made no show of his authority in the rotunda or at the elevators to point me out as a prisoner; and in the up-stairs room to which he took me, pending the departure-time of the earliest eastbound train, he let me see and talk, first with Barrett, and afterward with my wife.
In this most trying exigency Barrett proved to be all that my fancy had ever pictured the truest of friends. His first word assured me that he meant to stand by me to the last ditch, and I knew it was the word of a man who never knew when he was beaten. While Cummings smoked a cigar in the window-seat I told Barrett the whole pitiful story, beginning with the night when I had promised Agatha Geddis that I would pull her father out of the hole he had digged for himself and ending with my appearance in the Cripple Creek construction camp.
Barrett believed the story, and I didn't have to wait for him to tell me so. I could see it in his eyes.
"Jimmie!" he said, wringing my hand as if he would crush it, "you've got the two of us behind you—I'm speaking for Gifford because I know exactly what he will say. We'll spend every dollar that ever comes out of the Little Clean-Up, if needful, to buy you justice! But I wish you had told me all this before; and, more than that, I wish you had told Polly."
"My God, Bob!" I groaned; "don't rub it in!" And then I told him brokenly how I had known Polly as a little girl in Glendale, and how I was certain that her father had more than once been on the verge of recognizing me. Then, in such fashion as I could, I made my will, or tried to, telling him that Polly must have her freedom, and that he must help her get it, and that my share in the mine must go to her.
"It is the only return I can make her for the deception I have put upon her," I said; "and I want you to promise me that——"
In the midst of all this Barrett had turned aside, swearing under his breath, which was his only way, I took it, of letting me know how it was rasping him. But now he whirled upon me and broke in savagely:
"Stop it, you damned maniac! If you have lived with Polly Everton a whole month and don't know her any better than that, you ought to be shot! She is waiting now to have her chance at you, and I'm not going to take any more of her time." Then he went soft again: "You keep a stiff upper lip, and we'll get you out of this if we have to retain every lawyer this side of New York!"
Polly came so soon after Barrett left that I knew she must have been waiting in the corridor. Cummings was considerate enough to shift his smoking-seat to the other window and to turn his back upon us. All the cynics in the world to the contrary notwithstanding, there is a tender spot in the heart of every man that was ever born, if one can only be fortunate enough to touch it.
"My darling!" That is what she said when I took her in my arms; and for a long minute nothing else was said. Then she drew away and held me at arm's length, and there was that in her dear eyes to make me feel like the soldier who faces the guns with a shout in his heart and a song on his lips, knowing that death itself cannot rob him of the Great Recompense.
"You needn't say one word—Jimmie—my husband! I have known it all, every bit of it, from the first—from that Sunday morning when Daddy took me over to your mine," she whispered. "I—I loved you, dearest, when I was only a foolish little school-girl, and your sister and I have exchanged letters ever since Daddy and I left Glendale. So I knew; knew when they sent you to prison for another man's crime, and knew, even better than your mother and sister did, why you let them do it. Oh, Jimmie!"—with a queer little twist of the sweet lips that was half tears and half smile—"if you could only know how wretchedly jealous I used to be of Agatha Geddis!"
"You needn't have been!" I burst out. "But you don't know it all. Last winter—in Denver——"
She nodded sorrowfully.
"Yes, dear; I knew that, too. I knew that Agatha Geddis was using you again—against your will; and that this time she had a cruel whip in her hand. We had all heard of the broken parole; it was in the home newspapers, and, besides, your sister wrote me about it."
"And in the face of all this, you——"
She nodded again, brightly this time, though her eyes were swimming.
"Yes, my lover—a thousand times, yes! And I knew this would come, too,—some time; this dreadful thing that has fallen upon us to-day. I am heart-broken only for you, dear. What will they do to you?"
I told her briefly. They would make me serve the remaining two years of the original sentence, doubtless with an added penalty for the broken regulations.
"Dear God—two years!" she gasped, with a quick little sob; and then she became my brave little girl again. "They will pass, Jimmie, dear, and they won't seem so terribly long when we remember what we are waiting for. I'm going with you, you know—as far as they'll let me; and when things look their blackest you must remember that I'm only just a little way off; just a little way—and waiting—and waiting——"
She broke down at the last and cried in my arms, and when she could find her voice again:
"It mustn't be two years, Jimmie; it would kill you, and me, too. Theymustpardon you—you who have done no wrong! I'll go down on my knees to the Governor, and——"
There was something in this to send the blood tingling to my finger-tips; to rouse the final reserves of manhood.
"Never!" I forbade. "You must never do that, Polly; and you mustn't let Barrett stir hand or foot in that direction. I shall come out an ex-convict, if I have to, but never as a pardoned man with the presumption of guilt fastened upon me for the remainder of my life. Promise me that you won't do anything like that!"
I don't know whether she promised or not. Cummings was stirring uneasily in his window and looking at his watch. I led Polly to the door, kissed her, and put her out into the corridor. The agony, the keenest agony of all, was over, and I turned to the deputy warden. "Whenever you are ready," I said.
Barrett was at the train when we went down, as I was sure he would be, and he seemed strangely excited.
"Give me just a minute with your prisoner, Mr. Cummings," he begged; and after the deputy warden had amiably turned his back: "I've just had a telegram from Gifford. The Lawrenceburg lawyers are offering to compromise. They say that their owners are tired of dragging the quarrel through the courts, and they offer to buy us out, lock, stock and barrel, for five million dollars."
"After they've committed every crime in the calendar to smash us? Not for a single minute!" I exploded.
"Right you are, Jimmie!—I knew you'd be with me!" he agreed defiantly. "We'll fight 'em till the last dog's too dead to bury. There's a hole in the bottom of the sea, somewhere, and we'll find it before we're through with that piratical outfit. Here's your conductor: you'll have to go. Polly will follow you in a day or two. I had a handful of it keeping her from going on this train; but, of course, that wouldn't do. Put a good, stiff bone in your back, and remember that we shan't let up, day or night—any of us—until you're free again. Good-by, old man, and God help you!"
The depressive journey from Colorado to the Middle West records itself in memory as a dismal dream out of which there were awakenings only for train-changings or a word of talk now and then with Cummings. The deputy warden was a reticent man; somber almost to sadness, as befitted his calling; but he was neither morose nor churlish. Underneath the official crust he was a man like other men; was, I say, because he is dead now.
On the final day of the journey I persuaded him to tell me how I had been traced, and I was still human enough to find a grain of comfort in the assurance that Agatha Geddis had not taken my money at the last only to turn and betray me.
Barton, the Glendale wagon sales manager, was the one who was innocently responsible. He had talked too much, as I had feared he would. The clue thus furnished had been lost in St. Louis, but was picked up again, some months later, by Cummings himself through the police-record photograph in Denver.
Cummings admitted that he had followed Polly and me on our wedding journey; that he had known where we were stopping, and had seen us in the canyon-brink hotel.
"Why didn't you take me then?" I asked.
He explained gruffly that the requisition papers with which he was provided were good only in Colorado, and that it was simpler to wait than to go through all the red tape of having them reissued for Arizona. Knowing that the wires were completely at his service, the answer did not satisfy me.
"Was that the only reason?" I queried.
He turned his sober eyes on me and shook his head sorrowfully, I thought.
"I was young once, myself, Weyburn—and I had a wife: she died when the baby came. Maybe you deserve what's coming to you, and maybe you don't; but that little woman o' yours will never have another honeymoon."
Disquieting visions of harsh prison punishments were oppressing me when we reached the penitentiary and I was taken before the eagle-eyed old Civil War veteran who had given me my parole. But the warden merely put me through a shrewd questioning, inquiring closely into my experiences as a paroled man, and making me tell him circumstantially the story of my indictment, trial and conviction, and also the later story of the mining experience in Colorado.
"I don't recall that you ever protested your innocence while you were here serving your time, Weyburn," he commented, at the dose of the inquisition.
"I didn't," I replied, wondering why he should go behind the returns to remark the omission. Then I added: "They all do that, and it doesn't change anything. You set it down as a lie—as it usually is."
"Can you look me in the eye and tell me that you are not lying to me now?" he demanded.
I met the test soberly. "I can. I was convicted of a crime that I didn't commit, and I broke my parole solely because that appeared to be the one remaining alternative to becoming a criminal in fact."
The interview over, I expected to be put into stripes, cropped, and sent to the workshops. But instead I was taken to one of the detention cells, and for an interval which slowly lengthened itself into a week was left a prey to all the devils of solitude. It seemed as if I had been buried out of sight and forgotten. Three times a day a kitchen "trusty" brought my meals and put them through the door wicket, but apart from this I saw no one save the corridor guard, who never so much as looked my way in his comings and goings.
That week of palsying, unnerving isolation got me. Consider it for a moment. For a year I had been living at the very heart of life, working, fighting, scheming, mixing and mingling, and succeeding—not only in the money-winning, but also—until the Agatha Geddis incident came along—in the field of good repute. At the last Agatha had set me free, and Polly's love had opened the ultimate door of supreme happiness; a joy so ecstatic that at the end of the honeymoon I was only beginning to realize what it meant to me.
And then, on the very summit of the mountain of joy, had come the touch of the deputy warden's hand on my shoulder in the Antlers dining-room. That touch had swept the new-born world ruthlessly aside—all save Polly's love and loyalty. Success had been blotted out with the loss of liberty wherewith to profit by it; and for those who had known me in the great gold camp and elsewhere in the West—my new friends—I was branded as an escaped convict. For two shameful years I should be shut away from Polly, from freedom, from participation in the fight my partners were making to save the mine, and most probably from any knowledge of how the fight was going, either for or against us.
Is it any matter for wonder that by the end of the solitary week I was little better than a mad-man? If I might have had speech with the warden, I should have prayed for work; for any employment, however hard or menial, that would serve to stop the sapping of the very foundations of reason. One hope I clung to, as the drowning catch at straws. I could not doubt that Polly was near at hand. If the regular "visiting day" should intervene they would surely admit her. But in this, too, I was unlucky. The date of my reincarceration fell between two of the regular visiting days. So I waited and looked and longed in vain.
I don't know how many more circlings of the clock-hands were measured off before the break came. I lost count of the time by days and was no longer able to think clearly. In perfect physical condition when I was arrested, I began to go to pieces, both mentally and physically, under the strain of suspense. Then insomnia came to add its terrors; I could neither eat nor sleep. I had an ominous foreboding of what the total loss of appetite meant, and kept telling myself over and over that for Polly's sake I must fight to save my sanity.
Under such conditions I was beginning to see things where there was nothing to be seen on the day when I had my first visitor, and the shock of surprise when the cell door was opened to admit Cyrus Whitredge, the lawyer whose bungling defense had done so little to stave off my conviction, was almost like a premonition of further disaster. Before I could rise from my seat on the cot he was shaking hands with me and twisting his dry, leathery face into its nearest approach to a smile.
"Don't bother to get up, Bert," he began effusively. "Just stay right where you are and take it easy. I've been trying for three solid days to get up here, but court is in session and I couldn't break away. You're not looking very well, and they tell me down below that you're off your feed. That won't do, you know—won't do at all. We are going to get you right out of this, one way or another, mighty quick. You've taken your medicine like a man, and we don't propose to let 'em give you a second dose of it—not by a jugful."
All this was so totally unlike the Whitredge I had known that I fairly gasped. Then I reflected—while he was drawing up the single three-legged stool and sitting down—that in all probability the Little Clean-Up was responsible for the change in him. I was no longer a poor bank clerk without money or friends.
"'We,' you say?" I put in, meaning to make him define himself.
"Why, yes, of course I'm including myself; I'm your attorney, and as soon as the news of your arrest came I made preparations to drop everything else, right away, and get into the fight. You got your sentence and served it, and we'll scrap 'em awhile on the proposition of bringing you back for more of it simply because you happened to forget, one day, and step over the State boundaries. I don't know but what we could show that the law is unconstitutional, if we had to. But it won't come to anything like that, I guess."
I looked him straight in the eyes.
"Whitredge, who has retained you this time?" I asked.
"I don't know what you mean by that, Bert."
"I mean that four years and a half ago there were pretty strong reasons for suspecting that you were Abel Geddis's attorney, rather than mine."
"Oh, pshaw!" he returned with large lenience. "Geddis wanted to be fair with you—he thought a good bit of you in those days, Bert, little as you may believe it—and he did offer to pay my fee, if you couldn't. But that has nothing to do with the present aspect of the case. I was your attorney then, and I'm your attorney now. It's a point of professional honor, and I couldn't think of holding aloof when you're needing me. Besides, your Colorado lawyers have been in communication with me—naturally, since I was attorney for the defense four years and a half ago."
"They sent you to me here?" I inquired.
"They knew I would come, of course; I was on the ground and had all the facts. They couldn't come themselves, either of them. They have had their hands full with the injunction business."
"The injunction business?"
"Yes; haven't you heard?"
I shook my head.
"It was in the newspapers, but I suppose they haven't let you see them here. Your mine is shut down. You were operating as bonded lessees under a temporary injunction, or something of that sort, weren't you? Well, the Federal court has made the injunction permanent and tied you up. As soon as I got this I smelled trouble for you, and as your attorney in fact I got busy with the wires. The situation isn't half as bad as it might be. I understand that the plaintiff company, a corporation called the Lawrenceburg Mining & Reduction Company, has offered you people five million dollars for a transfer of all rights and titles under your holdings, and that, notwithstanding the injunction, this offer still holds good."
Since it is a proverb that an empty stomach is a mighty poor team-mate for a befogged brain, I was unable to see what Whitredge was driving at, and I told him so.
"Nothing in particular," he countered, "except to remind you that you still have a good chance to play safe. We are going to 'wrastle' you out of here, just as I say, Bert, my boy, at any cost, and it's a piece of great good luck that you won't have to count the pennies in whatever it may cost."
"But I shall have to count them if our mine is shut down."
"Not if you and your partners make this sale to the Lawrenceburg people. Five millions will give each of you a million and two-thirds apiece. It's up to you right now to persuade your two partners to close with the offer while it still holds good. It's liable to be withdrawn any minute, you know. The other two may be able to hang on and put up a further fight, but you can't afford to."
"Why can't I?"
"For one mighty good reason, if there isn't any other. I met your wife this morning, Bert. She's stopping across town at the Buckingham—just to be as near you as she can get. You can't afford to do, or to leave undone, anything that'll keep that little woman dangling on the ragged edge. She thinks too much of you."
He had me on the run, and I think he knew it. What he did not know was that the smash, the solitary cell, and a weakened body were pushing me harder than any of his specious arguments.
"I've got to get out!" I groaned, with the cold sweat starting out all over me. "Whitredge, I've had enough in these few days to break an iron man!"
"Naturally; married only a month, and all that. I'm a dried-up old bachelor, Bert, my boy, but I know exactly how you feel. As you say, you've got to get out of here, and the quickest way is the right way—when you stop to think of that poor lonesome little woman waiting over yonder in the hotel. I've come fixed for you"—he was on his feet, now, fumbling in his pockets for some papers and a fountain pen—"I've drawn up a letter to your two partners,—let me see; where is it? Oh, yes, here you are—a letter from you advising them to close with that Lawrenceburg offer. If you'll just authorize me to send a wire in your name, and then read this letter that I've blocked out and sign it——"
I glanced hastily over the type-written sheet he handed me. It was a business-like letter addressed to Barrett and Gifford, going fully into the situation from the point of view of a man needing ready money, and urging the acceptance of the Lawrenceburg offer, not wholly for the personal reason upon which Whitredge had been enlarging, but emphatically as a prudent business measure—an alternative to the possible loss of everything.
"You see just how the matter stands," he went on while I was reading the letter. "They've got you stopped, and that is pretty good evidence that the court is holding you as trespassers on Lawrenceburg property. The next thing in order, if you fellows hold out, will be a suit for damages which will gobble up all your former returns from the mine and leave you without anything—you and both of your partners."
"What do you get out of it if this sale goes through, Whitredge?" I asked him suddenly.
He laughed as if I had perpetrated a new joke.
"What doIget out of it? Why, bless your innocent soul, Bert, ain't I working for my fee? And I tell you I'm going to charge you a rattling big one, too, when I can shake hands with you as a millionaire and better on the sidewalk in front of this State eleemosynary Institution!"
"You talk as if you had the sidewalk means in your hand," I said, yielding a little to his enthusiasm in spite of my suspicions of him and my feeble efforts to stand alone.
"I have!" he announced oracularly. "I have here"—slapping a second folded paper which he had drawn from his pocket—"I have here a petition for your free and unconditional pardon, addressed to the Governor and signed by the trial judge, the prosecuting attorney, and by ten of the twelve members of the jury. Oh, I tell you, young man, I've been busy these last three days. You may have been setting me down as a hard-hearted old lawyer, toughened to all these things, Bert, but when I read that newspaper story, of how you were kidnapped, as you may say—torn from the arms of a loving wife and dragged aboard of a train and railroaded back to prison—every drop of blood in me rose up in protest, and I swore then and there that if there was any such thing as executive clemency in this broad land of ours, you should have it!"
If I had been wholly well and out of prison perhaps the cheap bombast in all this would have been apparent at once. But I was neither well nor free. And Polly's heart was breaking; I didn't need Whitredge's word for this—I knew it by all the torments of inward conviction.
I understood well enough what he was asking me to do: to tip the scale against what might be Barrett's and Gifford's better judgment, and to sign a paper which would stamp me for all time as a criminal pleading, not for justice, but for pardon. In spite of this knowledge the pressure Whitredge had brought to bear was well-nigh irresistible. Barrett and the Colorado lawyers evidently had their hands too full to think of me; and, in any event, I could not see what possible chance they might have of reopening my case and proving my innocence. At the end of it I was reaching for the pen in Whitredge's hand, but at the touch of the thing with which I was to sign away my fighting rights for all time a little flicker of strength came.
"You must give me time, Whitredge; a little time to think this over," I pleaded. "Four years and a half ago I told you I was innocent—I tell you so again. You are asking me to confess that I was guilty; if I sign that petition it will be a confession in fact. I have sworn a thousand times that I'd rot right here inside of these walls before I'd ask for a pardon for a crime that wasn't mine. Leave these papers and let me think about it. Give me a chance to convince myself that there is no other way!"
He looked at his watch, and if he were disappointed he was too well schooled in his trade to show it.
"All right; just as you say," he agreed. "Shall we make it this afternoon—say, some time after three o'clock?"
"Make it to-morrow morning," I begged.
This time he hesitated, again pulling out his watch and consulting its face as if it were an oracle. I had no means of knowing—what I learned later—that he was making a swift calculation upon the arriving and departing hours of certain railroad trains. None the less, he agreed somewhat reluctantly to the further postponement; but when the turnkey was unlocking the door he gave me a final shot.
"I don't want to influence you one way or the other, Bert—that is, not against your best interests; but while you're making up your mind don't leave the little woman out. I shall see her at dinner to-night, and she'll want to know what's what. I'm going to give her your love and tell her you're trying mighty hard to be reasonable. Is that right?"