In the Warden's office at the Penitentiary next morning—the same room Harry Sevier had entered when he had first stepped under the gloomy prison archway—Craig stood staring out of the open window across the yellow courtyard. The last move in the game was at hand—the game he had made up his mind now to play out alone, to the last card.
He had not taken the Warden into his confidence, though he had sat talking with him for a half hour. From him he had heard the tale of the escape of prisoner No. 239—a tender subject with the official, but one in which his influential visitor had exhibited a particular interest. To the Warden the latter's concern for a scoundrel who had come within an ace of murdering him seemed natural enough. It would be in keeping with Craig's determined and vindictive character to exhaust every effort to apprehend the fugitive. To some intention of this sort the Warden had laid his caller's further inquiries concerning the pickpocket who had been the missing man's cell-mate.
Craig, however, had had reason of another sort. It had chagrined him to learn that with the prisoner had disappeared the record-card on which he had counted as a piece of tangible evidence. But this was not an essential, since, once denounced, Harry Sevier would be put upon the defensive, and the one conclusive and natural defence—an alibi—he could not furnish. In the meantime, however, the sensational accusation should be supported, and what more to this purpose than the convict who had shared No. 239's very cell? Promise of a pardon—he could arrange that with the Board—would make the fellow tractable, and he could take him with him on parole.
The plan in his mind had leaped into action. He had expressed a wish to talk with Paddy the Brick and the Warden had sent for him. Craig was waiting the man's coming now, as he stood looking across the yard toward the vast round dormitory that tossed back the rumble of the toiling shops. There was an evil gloating in the fixed, speculative eyes—in imagination Craig was seeing Harry Sevier once more a denizen of that dismal place, a felon, and irrevocably shamed now in name and fame.
The door opened and a turnkey entered, a figure in striped clothes with him.
"Here's your man, Mr. Craig," said the Warden.
Craig turned from the window and set his eyes on Paddy the Brick. He gave a sudden start which the Warden, who had crossed to his desk and was searching in its pigeon-holes, did not see. Paddy the Brick shrank back, and a quick gleam of fear ran across his pallid features. For each—the would-be murderer and the man he had shot—in the self-same instant recognised the other.
At the fierce anger that blazed in Craig's face Paddy the Brick drew further back, his eyes darting from the man by the window to the Warden and back again, and his hand went instinctively out to the table to clutch a heavy, brass-edged ruler the only weapon at hand. It seemed at the instant that the other was about to leap upon him, to kill him with his working hands. But Craig recovered himself in time. He looked at the Warden.
"I should like to talk with him alone," he said, "if that is permissible."
"Certainly," the Warden answered. "As long as you like," and left the room with the paper he had been looking for.
As the door closed, Craig bent a long look upon the man who stood there. "Don't be a fool," he said. "Put that thing down. I'm not going to hurt you. I want to ask you some questions."
Paddy the Brick laid the ruler down, but he kept the table between them.
"Did you know who the man was who broke into my house with you—the one who was caught?"
The other looked at him cunningly. "The one you swore shot you?"
Craig's fingers twitched. "Yes," he said, after a pause.
"No. I never saw him before that night."
"What did he pay you for that job?"
Paddy the Brick stared. "Good Lord!Hewasn't one of us. He just happened in for a social call!" He leaned across the table. "Say," he whispered, "what did you want to hang him for?"
There was in the posture, the whisper, an inexpressible assumption of identity of interest which stung and galled the man who faced him. The blood welled into Craig's face, then very slowly ebbed.
"Would you know him again, if he had changed his appearance? If, for instance, he wore a beard?"
"Know him!" Paddy the Brick jerked his thumb toward the window. "Why, we was mates over there."
Craig looked at him steadily for a moment without speaking. Then he pointed to a chair.
"Sit down," he said.
At midnight that night the home city of Harry Sevier was ablaze with lights and throbbing with the last feverish activity of a strenuous campaign. The candidate of the new party had returned that afternoon from a tour of the southern portion of the state, and plenteous bunting, everywhere displayed, testified to an enthusiasm that, carefully fostered by his lieutenants, had permeated every section and class. That evening, to ring down the curtain with a brilliantfinale, a torchlight procession had been organised. Ten thousand strong, the blazing flambeaux had marched and countermarched along the city's main thoroughfares, and Harry had reviewed them from the balcony of the hotel which was the party'srendezvous.
He had flung himself into the fight with every ounce of his splendid vitality which had been deepened and strengthened by the months of mountain solitude. There was infinitely more at issue now than he had dreamed when he canvassed chances at the bungalow. The cause of the new party had then seemed inevitably a losing one. But during that long campaign—particularly in the last few weeks—it had been borne in upon him that the time had been ripe for the venture. Long arrogance and effrontery had borne their legitimate fruit in a profound resentment that had been fanned to vivid life by the quickening breath. There had been an erasure of old lines, and at length the party in power, aroused and desperate, had found itself fighting for its life. There were no odds offered that day on its victory! Once committed, however, there had been no turning back possible. Harry's bridges had been burned behind him. He could only go forward, and, fighting on, he had striven to thrust his problem, with its increasing implications, into the background of his mind. And in spite of himself the zest of victory had absorbed him. To-night's parade had been an inspiring spectacle and it had called from him the last speech of the campaign.
As he closed, amid the shouting and applause, a motor drew up at the curb and stopped just before the hotel entrance. On its fear seat, shielded from the gaze of the pavement by the leather hood, was Cameron Craig, and beside the chauffeur sat Paddy the Brick.
The crowds thinned, began to melt away; here and there the golden square of a window went black on the quieting street. Still the car made no move. At length a little knot of men issued from the hotel lobby, pausing in the lighted doorway to say good night to one another. Craig leaned forward.
"The one in the centre," he said, in a low voice. "The one with the beard."
As he spoke, Harry Sevier's look crossed the pavement and met squarely Craig's envenomed gaze. He saw the heavy head thrust forward from the hood, with the white bandage across the temple and under it the smouldering, implacable eyes. For a space that seemed interminable the eyes held each other. A ghastly expression crossed his face. Very slowly he turned and re-entered the lobby.
Brent, who was the last to leave him, looked at him anxiously.
"You're about all in," he said. "You look positively ill."
Harry tried to smile.
"It's nothing. I think I'll rest now." His voice had all at once lost itstimbre, had become flat and expressionless. All the electric force, the fire and enthusiasm, had faded from it.
Brent held out his hand. "Thank heaven it's over—all but the voting!" he said fervently. "It's the reaction, I suppose."
"Yes," replied Harry, dully. "No doubt it's the reaction."
He turned and went slowly to the elevator.
In the automobile at the curb Craig touched Paddy the Brick on the shoulder. "Well?" he asked. "Is he number 239?"
Paddy the Brick looked at him with a white fury distorting his features.
"I don't know whether he's 239 or not," he said, "but I'd swear to anything that would 'fix' him! That's the lawyer that let them send me up two years ago!"
The elevator deposited Harry at the third floor, where was the suite of rooms that he had occupied while in town during the campaign, as being more accessible than his own apartment. The outer chamber of the suite was set with all the paraphernalia of a committee-room, with a huge writing-table and several small desks holding telegraph instruments installed to receive the returns. To-morrow would find it humming with excitement, but it was deserted now. He had given Suzuki, his valet, the evening off.
He shut the door and stood a moment leaning against it. His eyes were blank, his face set. He had not known of Cameron Craig's journey abroad, nor in the rush of the campaign had he seen the newspaper paragraph which told of the success of the operation in Buda-Pesth. But in the single look across the pavement he had leaped to the truth. Craig had recovered his faculties—there had been full knowledge and vengeful purpose in the haggard eyes. What he had dreaded, the possibility which he had of late locked in an inner chamber of his mind, had come to pass. All was finished! The Sword of Damocles was about to fall!
What remained? To creep away, like a dastard, he, the leader in the fight? To fly, like the discovered thief, as he had once thought of doing? Even that was impossible now. He knew his enemy too well to suppose that he would have left that way open! The other was but playing with him, like a cat with a mouse, till the moment came to publicly denounce him. For with a kind of prescience he guessed Craig's real purpose, to seize the climactic moment and abstract from his humiliation the last ounce of sensationalism.
All night, in the silent, empty apartment, under the brilliant lights, Harry strode up and down—up and down tirelessly, his face white, his hands clenched, confronting the blank wall that reared before him. Temptation, in its most insidious form, fell upon him. Why should he not brazen it out? After all, the burden of proof was upon his accuser. He had destroyed the record-card which had held his physical measurements. Jubilee Jim could be depended upon to swear to his presence at the bungalow through the winter: wild horses would drag no other story from his faithful lips. Simple and God-fearing as the old negro was, love for his master was one of the prime articles of his emotional and uncomplex religion. For that love he would unquestioningly risk even the fires of the material hell of which his Bible told him! Such an alibi would hold. What other proof could Craig bring forward, further than a fortuitous resemblance, materially weakened now by hair and beard, to a one-time convict in a penitentiary in another state?
Was he not doubly justified in this deception? He was really innocent. If he foreswore himself a thousand times, it would be in the way both of justice and expediency. It would solve the problem. The new Cause needed him. Had he any right to fling himself away, merely in the interest of fictitious truth, on the mawkish principle of "Thou shalt not do evil that good may come"?
Yet, to perjure himself! To know himself liar and hypocrite, even in the hour when he should kiss the holy volume in the vows of a high office? He who even in that past that had been clouded by egoistic eccentricity and marred by dissipation, had always counted an oath sacred! To bind that faithful servant on the mountain to a black perjury—which would shadow his imagination with the smoke of the eternal burning!
There came to him suddenly the memory of words that had woven with the fevered imaginings of his illness on the mountain—words of Jubilee Jim's prayer:
"Dey tek yo' darlin' son ... en put er crown o' tho'ns on he beautiful haid, en he ain' done nuthin' 'cep'n good. Ah don' keer what Marse Harry have on; Ah reck'n when he come lak dis, yo' gwine he'p me he'p him—kase dat what he done fo' me!"
The stumbling, broken accents seemed to strike across the void. What if, instead of the great machine of recompense that he had distinguished in that prison experience, there were indeed a personal God, as Jubilee Jim believed, throned in his vast white heaven of glory—a God pitiful for the agony of his human creatures. Would he look down now and hear his cry for help? Harry flung himself suddenly on his knees, and leaned his forehead against the dark wainscoting. He knew that he uttered no word, but all his being seemed to resolve itself into an inarticulate cry for aidance. It was the first appeal of his life to something outside of himself, the first cry of human weakness, groping in its utter hopelessness for the Infinite. It was the last step of the long way Harry had travelled—from self-abasement to remorse and awakening conscience, through struggle with appetite to victory over himself, self-abnegation, acquiescence in the great law of retribution, and finally, in his despair, to prayer.
And out of the deep to which he had called, calmness at length came to him, and with it a clear and steady purpose. As dawn took down the red draw-bars of the sky to let in the day, he threw open a shutter and stood looking down with aching eyes upon the drowsily-waking street. There should be no lying denial, no cowardly evasion—nothing less than the naked truth. If fate, if God, demanded this last thing of him—if only so could he balance the account—he would not repine. He had fought the fight, and at the last, so far as he could, he would keep the faith!
Before the hotel had awakened, Harry was in his own apartment. He had left a note for Brent, who was to be in charge at the hotel suite, saying briefly that he should not appear that day, but would be with the Committee at eight o'clock. He had sent the same message also to Judge Allen. He told Suzuki to admit no one, disconnected his telephone, and thereafter remained at his desk writing, a plate of sandwiches at his elbow, bending himself to the final arrangement of the details of his personal affairs, as he might have done, he thought once, if by some clairvoyancy he foresaw that to-morrow he would die. Death, indeed, would have been a welcome solution if by it he could have bought extrication. Was he not going, living, to a worse death than he should ever die?
As the mantel-clock struck seven, he laid the last written paper in the desk-drawer and rising, went into his dressing-room. He bathed and dressed, the last time in his life, he told himself, that he should don the evening habilaments of a gentleman—grave-clothes! For the blow would not be delayed. To-morrow, no doubt, the state would ring with his downfall. To-night—in the hour of his victory, if victory should be his—he would writefinisto the final chapter and surrender himself to the law.
It was just at the half-hour when Harry opened the outer door of his apartment. But he did not pass through. Three men had been waiting silently just across the threshold. One of them was Craig. They entered without a word, Craig shut the door and one of the others took his stand before it.
Sevier had stepped back as they entered. He had not been startled at the ambush; he had gone past surprises. He was conscious only of a cold preparedness and a kind of dull wonder as to the form of their errand. The purpose in Craig's face left no cause for any speculation as to their intent. He looked at the other's two companions, perfect types of the "heeler," burly and with brutally-cunning features, that wore now a gloze of satisfaction in the work that was forward. They were not in uniform—it was not an arrest, then. What did Craig intend to do? He turned, set his hat on the hall table and passed into the sitting-room. Craig followed him. Harry now saw that he carried a compact bundle under his arm. He snapped the cord and disclosed a costume—jacket and trousers of black and yellow-grey stripes and a flat, peaked cap of dingy canvas. Around one arm of the jacket was a leathern band which bore a metal number—239!
"Put them on," commanded Craig shortly. "Over what you are wearing. They'll be large enough."
A painful mist was before Harry's eyes. He understood. Craig meant to give him up stamped with the old felon character, clothed in the unmistakable livery of the convict! Well, if not to-night, to-morrow. What did it matter?
As he drew on the loathsome garments, buttoning the jacket close up to his chin, their very touch seemed to cling insupportably to his flesh. The smell of the coarse fulled cloth in his nostrils gave him a qualm as of actual physical sickness, and the feel of the canvas cap across his forehead burned it like a brand.
Craig had taken from his pocket a black cloth mask. "Now this," he said. "I believe you wore one in your last burglary," he added with cold malevolence. "I am disposed to miss no realistic touch, believe me."
Harry put on the mask, whose lower hem fell below his beard. Through its eye-holes he looked evenly at the sneering, implacable face opposite. A peculiar apathy had come to him. The wide humiliation—even the cheap and ghastly sensationalism of the mask did not touch him. Like the hapless voyageur caught in the rapids above the great falls, he was watching the nearing brink with a kind of fascination and with the roar of the cataract in his ears.
One of the men had opened a window to peer down into the street. "All clear," he announced briefly, and Craig went to the hall and opened the door.
A monster limousine with curtains drawn waited at the curb, and on the front seat sat a figure at whose pallid face and red-rimmed eyes Harry gazed without a start but with a strange sensation of fitness. Here indeed was the real thief who had shot Craig, but leagued now with his enemy to his undoing!
Sitting in the dark interior, as the car sped along with its silent company, Harry remembered another ride of two years before, when he had flung through the night flying from his own conscience, incarnate in the figure that now rode beside the chauffeur. Was he never to lay that old ghost? He noted dully that the streets were jostling with eager throngs which made compact eddies here and there before some newspaper bulletin-board or flaring club-window which displayed the reports of the voting, as, township by township, county by county, the tally came in. On one the legend was being posted, "Sevier Leads," and a muffled cheer was wafted after. He shut his eyes. Almost he could have thought himself in the grip of someoutré, high-coloured dream—but he knew that it was no dream.
The limousine slowed and stopped. Harry turned his head as the door opened; they were at the gate of Midfields.
As they neared the upper end of the drive, a man rose from the steps and came toward them. It was Lawrence Treadwell. He started as if he had been stung at sight of the masked and striped figure between its stolid escort. He turned on Craig, his eyes blazing with amazement and anger.
"My God!" he cried. "You haven't dared—but this is infamous. It's an outrage! You—"
"Keep your place!" ground Craig. "I tell you I know what I'm doing!"
"It's my private opinion you're as crazy as a March hare," retorted the other, "but if youareright, I'll have nothing to do with it, do you understand? Nothing! I don't carewhatyour damned evidence is!"
Craig turned his back on him and led the way up the steps, and after an instant's hesitation Treadwell followed. Through an open window Harry glimpsed the interior of the east room, dismantled now for the evening's strenuous occupation, where several masculine figures were grouped about a table, excitedly working over charts, and he could hear the irritant buzz of the telephone as it signalled the bulletins that were beginning now to pour into the busy hotel suite at the other end of the wire. Craig did not ring at the big door but led the way along the porch to a French-window, of the library, which stood ajar. He peered into it, then with an exclamation of satisfaction motioned the two attendants back, said a low word to Paddy the Brick at his heels, and flung the window open.
Sevier entered, Craig and his stool-pigeon next. Treadwell followed and drew the window to behind him.
In the wide, lamp-lighted room into which this weird quartette had so startlingly entered, before the capacious fireplace two men had been sitting smoking—Judge Allen and his friend Governor Eveland. At the sudden apparition both had turned sharply toward the window—two strangely dissimilar figures: the Judge slight and spare and scholarly, his pale, finely-chiselled features tinged in the glow; the other deep-chested and powerful, of herculean mould, with a rugged face made almost patriarchal by the long grey beard which swept his chest: both countenances for the instant curiously alike in their expression of shocked surprise.
The Judge arose abruptly from his chair, his gaze shifting from the masked figure in striped clothes to Craig's face, eagerly alight and triumphant. He had no welcome for this summary entrance.
"Who is responsible for this intrusion?" he asked coldly.
Craig laughed. "I am responsible," he said. "I have business with you both. For some time, as you are aware, I have been debarred from such pursuits. However, I am now myself again, and free to pick up lost threads. Hence my call to-night."
"It can wait a more opportune time." The Judge spoke with asperity. "Moreover, I must ask you to remember that I have servants to announce my guests."
"Apologies may be in order later," Craig returned, "if my errand does not justify itself. My business with you is to inform you that you and your friends have been giving countenance to a man whom the law is tracking down—a convict who escaped from prison in the next state some months ago. You see him before you." He looked at the Governor, who had neither moved nor spoken—he had small liking for Cameron Craig. "My business with you, Governor Eveland, is to demand that you call upon the local authorities to arrest this jailbird, pending his extradition to your own jurisdiction. I have brought with me, under my personal surety, an inmate of the penitentiary"—he pointed to Paddy the Brick—"who was this criminal's cellmate and who has identified him."
There was a slight pause before the Governor replied. He had shared his host's irritation at the unceremonious entrance and this was allayed by no regard for Craig, whom he had always reckoned an evil influence in the activities of the state of which he himself was Chief Executive. Now the pallid face with its bandage across one temple, the distempered eyes and strange excitement, smote him with distaste.
"I like neither your method nor your manner, Mr. Craig. This would seem to be a matter for the police, not for me, nor, I take it, for Judge Allen. Why you choose to drag this man here, at such a moment, with this skulduddery of mask and stripes, I cannot imagine."
Craig laughed again, sneeringly. "A little fancy of my own, and regard for the dramatic proprieties..."
Treadwell strode forward with an exclamation.
"Judge—Governor Eveland!" he said explosively. "Let me say something. I came here to-night purely in my capacity of Cameron Craig's attorney, intent only on saving him from what seemed to me a piece of brazen lunacy. But I begin to see that there is something behind this, and if it isn't lunacy it is something I like still less. I withdraw here and now from any connection with him or this action—"
"Withdraw and be damned!" Craig flung him, savagely. "I know what I am about!" His voice rose. "That man, Governor Eveland, is an escaped prisoner from the penitentiary of your state! Tear off his mask and see for yourselves who our 'John Doe' really is—this fine thief and would-be murderer—the man who shot me down a year ago!"
"Stop!" The Governor's voice rang through the room. He was on his feet now, stern authority in every line of his posture. "Mr. Craig, listen to me! You have thrust yourself here without warrant of right or of invitation, in a matter which you—not I—have elected to make my business. Very well: I take the affair and this prisoner into my own hands. Do you understand?"
He paused, his lips clipped to like shears. Craig's outburst, vicious with suppressed fury, had given him a lightning-like glimpse into something unguessed in the situation. The man before him, then, in this convict dress, was the burglar convicted of that old shooting—the prisoner whom he had seen at the court-house, and whose personality had so attracted and puzzled him. Yet there was more beneath Craig's attitude than an understandable desire to punish the man who had shot him: more than that in those infuriate eyes, shaking hands and malicious triumph. The Governor had a hatred of persecution. His mind worked according to a law of stern and inflexible justice, yet to him justice opened itself to no assault of man's passions.
Under that holding look Craig sat down heavily, angry arrogance in his face. Treadwell took a chair near him, and Paddy the Brick remained standing in the background, his small eyes glancing furtively from one to the other.
The Governor resumed his seat and bent his deliberate gaze on the figure that had been standing movelessly before him. A quick memory had come to him of the other's face, now hidden, as he remembered to have once seen it—clear-eyed, vivid and forceful, strangely lacking in the ear-marks of the criminal, a face that had often recalled itself to his mind since that day. He had no vulgar curiosity, but the patent mystery in the background called to him strangely.
"Are you, as this man alleges, a prisoner who some months ago broke jail in the adjoining state?"
"I am." The voice, muffled by the mask, was low but distinct.
"The man who shot him in his library?"
"No."
The questioning, deep grey eyes looked steadily at the mask—it seemed as if the gaze would bore through the cloth. "But you were found guilty of that offence!"
"I was convicted, yes."
The Governor was silent a moment; then his hand reached for the pen on the table. "On the admission, then," he said slowly, "it is my duty to request the authorities to take you into custody. You are aware of your rights under the law?"
The striped figure bowed. "I am. I shall waive extradition. With your permission, however, I should like to make a statement."
"He can make that in the jail," interposed Craig contemptuously. "Take off his mask and send for the police."
The Governor frowned. "He can make it here and now, if he so chooses. This is not your house, Mr. Craig. If you do not care to listen, there will be no objection to your withdrawal—with your witness."
There was a fleeting pause, in which a livid red mounted to Craig's brow, dark against the bandage. Then the Governor turned.
"Do you take your solemn oath that what you are about to say is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?"
"I do."
The Governor leaned back in his chair. "You may make your statement," he said quietly.
Harry bowed. He was feeling a chill sense of estrangement, as though the bars that were so soon to shut him from the life of which he had been a part had already fallen between him and his friends. But he was oddly self-controlled. In the few moments he had been thinking swiftly—not of himself, but of the cause he represented, the men who had pinned their faith upon him and whom he had betrayed, whose leader, Judge Allen, sat there now ignorant of the ruin that overwhelmed them. To say to him, "I, Harry Sevier, whom you honoured, whom you made the bearer of your party banner, reached forth for this trust knowing myself a hunted man, outlawed of honest folk!" They were his friends, his loyal comrades in the fight, men whose friendship had been tried out by long years! In this last hour he shrank from a judgment biased with sympathy, and a fierce craving was rising in him for a justification based on no personal appeal.
He took a step backward to the mantel and stood thus, a little removed from them, looking from one to the other. He spoke in a low voice—not the alert, vibrant voice of the old Harry Sevier, but one alien, metallic, and strangely devoid of feeling.
"What I have to say may soon be said. It was not of my own will that I came here with covered face, and since this masquerade is not of my choosing, it may serve its purpose a moment longer. You, Judge Allen, know me well. Governor Eveland, you also are not unacquainted with me. With every one in this room I have come in contact—not as a convict, but as a citizen and an honest man. My association with you, Judge Allen, has involved certain responsibilities, and these I have accepted while I have lain under the law. For this I owe you a greater reparation than I can ever make. I know that justification in the eyes of the world is impossible, but in your own mind—in the minds of others who stand with you—it perhaps may be given me. But a justification is empty to me that springs from personal sympathy. I want it as man to man. For this reason I keep on the mask a little longer."
He paused. The Governor had not spoken; he had settled back in his great chair, one hand in his beard. The Judge was leaning intently forward, his hands clasped; he had never taken his eyes from the speaker, save once to glance at Craig, who sat with narrowed eyes and heavy lips curved in a malicious sneer. Treadwell's elbow was on his knee, his chin in his palm, his brows drawn into a frown that told nothing, and behind all stood Paddy the Brick, furtively watching.
When the striped figure spoke again, it was in a voice which held a first thin thrill of feeling:
"I have said that I lay under the law, but it was through that law's error. I was unjustly accused and wrongfully convicted. I was innocent."
The Governor spoke, coldly and deliberately. "You were taken at midnight in the Craig house."
"I had entered it for no dishonest purpose. I broke no bolt nor bar—that had been done before my arrival."
"You allege, then, that you were not in company with the robbers?"
"I was not. They were there when I entered."
"Why did you not give the alarm?"
"They made me their prisoner. A pistol was at my head."
"You did not so testify at your trial."
"I declined to testify at all."
The Governor nodded. "That is true," he said. "I remember."
There was a moment's pause, then the voice continued:
"It is sometimes inevitable that the law, whose purpose it is to be just, is terribly unjust. Sometimes the sole clue to a situation which seems to spell inevitable guilt lies in a fact, small in itself, whose significance is such that it cannot be brought forward. This was my case. The fact which would have cleared me could not be told. I became a convict. For six months I was an inmate of the Penitentiary. Then—the way opened to freedom, and I took it. What man would not have done so? I acknowledged no right of the law over my body. I went back to my former life, and took up my old profession here in this city."
"Here!" The Judge muttered, under his breath.
"And in that life I found opening responsibilities. New work called to me. My help was needed. I could not shirk it. I knew the risk always, but I counted it small. And the need was great! With such a work waiting my hand, a labour that no one else, it seemed, could do—one upon which much depended—was I to stand aside, to withhold my effort on the slender chance that discovery might sometime overtake me?"
The speaker seemed to have forgotten the Governor, to have swept all else to one side and to be addressing now only the Judge, in an appeal that touched the older man profoundly. It was, he thought, as though the man's whole soul was crying out in some sense for forgiveness and absolution for an injury unwittingly inflicted.
"The one thing has happened now which must lay the past bare. I must meet this—the scandal, the shame. My life, all that makes life worth living, ends to-night, and I stand before you with the bare soul of a truthful man. You have known me and trusted me. You—and others—have put faith in me...." The voice, for the first time, faltered and fell.
The Judge's head had been bowed, but he lifted it now.
"God alone knows the secrets of our hearts," he said, heavily. "If you were innocent—but of that how can I say? My view of your actions since your escape—those which may affect me—must necessarily hang upon that point. I could believe that you are not a burglar. It may be that knowledge of your true identity will presently convince me of this. And I might be persuaded that your presence in the Craig house that night was no more than an unfortunate coincidence. But the evidence of the shooting appeared at the time irrefutable. I cannot conceive that the mere knowledge of what you are would be likely to affect my belief in that respect. Your statement as to that is not only wholly unsupported, but was—and is—bluntly contradicted by the man who was shot."
He ceased speaking. No word came from the striped figure, only a slight movement of one hand, expressing at once resignation and futility. Then the hand lifted to the mask.
The Governor, however, stayed the action of revealment with a sudden gesture.
"One moment," he said quickly. "We have gone so far, I should like to go a step further—and still forensically, if you please. The question of identity may wait. Do I understand that you deny that you fired that shot?"
"I do."
Craig lurched forward in his chair. "This is no trial court!" he exclaimed savagely. "He has had his hearing once."
"Be silent!" commanded the Governor. "This man is in my hands, not in yours!" The warning was heavy and vengeful, and it held now all the electric energy of the man that had made him famous through a long career of criminal practice before his Governorship days, and that now, unleashed, dominated the room. Before it Craig whitened with a surge of anger that sent a keen probe of pain through his temple. He sat back, breathing hard, his great fingers working on the arms of his chair.
The Governor was leaning forward now, his hand on the table.
"If I recollect—and I think I do, as certain aspects of the case interested me at the time—there was a witness to the shooting beside the men who were assumed to be your comrades. There was a woman there."
"She did not see my face."
"But she might have seen the face of the shooter. Why did she not see yours?"
"I wore a mask."
"Is not a mask, in itself, a badge of criminal intent?"
"It was not mine. One of the men dropped it when they ran."
"If, being innocent," the Governor went on, "you put on the mask, the only presumption is that you did not wish the woman to recognise you. Therefore, she knew. Did you speak to her?"
There was no reply.
"If you spoke to her, it was when the man who had fired the shot was in flight. Your words to her, verified by herself—if she were reputable—would be evidence that you did not do the shooting. Why then, did you not call her as a witness?"
The long French-window had swung again ajar and the cooling evening breeze rustled the paper that lay upon the table. From the far road there came a muffled, long-drawn cheer, that trailed across the tense silence of the room.
"If the significant fact which could be brought forward at your trial was the identity of this missing witness; if her testimony would show that the law had erred—if it might operate to establish your innocence—would not she herself justify you in revealing it?"
The silence, a longer one this time, remained unbroken.
"Do you still refuse to tell the name of the woman?"
"I do."
The Governor leaned to the table and picked up the pen. But in the instant there was a quick step behind them.
All turned. Echo stood framed in the window—a figure in filmy white, against which a single rose glowed like a hot ruby.
"I was that woman, Governor Eveland," she said clearly.
For an instant there was a blank silence. The Judge sat as if stunned, one hand across his lips, the other clenched on his knee. Harry's breath had caught in his throat; he stood taken aback and confounded, his thought shocked apart and dispersed as a street explosion dissipates a crowd of pedestrians. He forgot all else, was conscious only of the deep fire of her eyes and the white surge of her breast, only that he loved her and that she stood on the brink of ruin—she whose name was unspotted from the world! An irrepressible exclamation burst from his lips.
The Governor put up his hand. "We will have the truth!" he said sternly.
He sat erect in his chair, his bushy brows drawn together, his compelling eyes holding Echo's. Slowly he turned his grey head toward Craig.
"It was Miss Allen," said Craig. His smouldering gaze had fastened on her with a savage joy. The drama was rushing now to its inevitabledénouement.
The crisis had come to Echo with fateful suddenness. From the porch—whither she had stolen, full of excitement, to listen to the bulletins from the east room that spelled victory for the cause of Harry Sevier—she had glimpsed through the French window that gathering in the library—the striped masked figure standing as before his judges, Craig with his bandaged temple, the silent listeners. The mask and the convict garb recalled that terrible midnight at Craig's house and the later episode at the jail, blent in a shuddering composite, even as the significance of the scene came home to her with a sudden horrifying clarity. It was true then; Craig had returned recovered! The escaped convict had been retaken, and he had come forward to repeat his mistaken testimony! In her confusion of mind she did not reason: it did not occur to her that here was no tribunal of justice. The suggestion was overpowering: she only knew that within that room men sat again in judgment upon him with whose fate her own peace of mind was so entangled. And she knew the truth! In the swift surprise the shame and horror of the publicity which had wrestled with her pain of conscience during the weeks succeeding her visit to the jail and the baleful certitude it had brought, rolled over her anew with the anguished dread of Harry Sevier's contempt. But there was no wavering: the fight had been fought out once for all, and she had waited for Craig's revelation with outer calmness, though with her blood stilling to an icy current in her veins. Two things had come to her at the same instant: Craig did not intend to involve her, and the convict knew who she was. As she leaned against the sill listening, the meaning of that obstinate refusal to answer had thrilled her. He, like Craig, had known her, then, all along. Yet he had not betrayed her, nor would he betray her even now! The thought had spurred her resolve and sent her forward into the room with that confession on her lips.
She came forward slowly, with what seemed a pathetic weariness. Her face was without colour and there were bruised shadows beneath her eyes, but above them her amber hair was like sunbeams in a mesh of gold.
"Governor Eveland," she said, "you have known me all my life. I do not think you have ever had cause to doubt my word."
"There is no need to remind me of that, my child," he answered, gravely. "Neither I nor any one who knows you, would believe you spoke anything but the truth."
A wan smile, in which was yet a glint of pride, crossed her face. "Then," she said, "I have faith that you will believe me now. I went to that house to gain a thing dearer than my own happiness. No one at home knew it. I did so secretly—my parents believed that I had gone to visit my aunt."
She paused an instant, and turned upon Craig a look of mingled scorn and aversion. "This man had once done me the honour to ask me to marry him, and I had done myself the honour to refuse. He had in his hands—how it had come to him I have never known—a letter which he threatened to publish. It was a personal letter that had no bearing on the present—one written before I was born—but it had the power to bring pain and humiliation upon some one I loved."
The Judge lifted his head; his eyes were moist and shining. "That is true," he said, in a smothered voice. "I knew of the letter, and—of the threat."
She did not proceed at once; her gaze was still upon Craig, and she waited.
"It is true enough," he said, and burst into jarring laughter. "Yes, gentlemen. It is the fact. I had that letter and I would have made my price on it!" He looked from one to the other challengingly, the arrogance and unscrupulousness of the man leaping in his eyes. But no one spoke. Only Treadwell, his eyes averted, moved his chair a little further from him.
"Yes," she repeated, deliberately. "You made your price. I went there that night, to your house, to beg you for that letter. I waited for you till you came, and when you would not give it to me otherwise, I agreed to marry you."
She faced the Governor again. "I was to marry him within the hour. Then—then came the shot from the alcove. I was mad with fright and with fear. There had been three men behind the curtains. Two ran—the man who had done the shooting and another. The third—"
She broke off and turned to the motionless figure in the striped clothes. "I know now that you were the third!" she said. "I thank you—with all my heart I thank you, for what you did!"
There was no answer from behind the mask, and she again addressed the Governor:
"This man must have heard my pleading and pitied me. He thought of me before he thought of his own escape. He took the letter I had come for from the safe and gave it to me, then dragged me to the door and told me to run. So I—I got away."
The room was so still that one heard now, through the closed doors, the muffled click of the telegraph keys in the east-room, and the voices of the clerks calling the tally of figures. Wistfulness and pain had crept into her voice now.
"Next day the newspapers said that the man who had fired the shot had been arrested. I believed this to be true, for though I went one day to the trial, I was in the court-room only a few moments and I could not see the face of the man who was being tried."
The striped figure made a sudden involuntary movement. She had not seen him, then? Could it be that he had been mistaken, that she had not known? Harry's heart began to beat violently.
"I believed it till months afterward, when I came back from Europe. Then I saw a ring which this man had given to his lawyer. It was like the one the man who had given me the letters had worn that night, and this made me afraid that a mistake had been made. I visited the Penitentiary to find out. It was the day of the attack on the warden—when this man was stabbed in his defence."
Again she paused and her eyes shifted to the masked figure. "You must have known me," she said gently. "You must have known my name. Yet you never told. Do you think, whatever it might mean to me—after what you did—that I could keep silent, if the truth may help you now?"
Sevier had no answer. Through and through the maze of his conflicting feeling was stabbing an assurance sharpened with unbelievable joy. He had been thinking her cowardly and calloused with worldly selfishness; here she was risking all—and not for him, Harry Sevier, whom she loved, but for an unknown convict!
The Governor was looking at her with intentness. "You mean that he isnotthe one who did the shooting?"
"He is not."
Craig sneered. "She says what she has been told to say," he said with dry lips. "You will understand why, presently."
"Perhaps," returned the Governor, coldly, "I shall." Then, turning to Echo—
"How do you know this is not the man?"
"This man is tall; the man who did the shooting was short."
"But—his face. You saw it that night distinctly? Would you know it if you saw it again?"
"As well as I know yours."
He said no more, and after an instant's pause, she went on:
"Mr. Mason, his lawyer, had told me he believed that if the shooting could have been disproved, his client might have been cleared, and knowing what I did, it seemed to me that I must tell the whole. It—was not easy, for while that night I had thought only of keeping the secret of the letter, I came to see later what the world would say of my presence there. And a woman's name is all she has. So ... I made up my mind. But that same day I read that the man had escaped from prison. There seemed no longer any need then of my telling. There had been no need till now."
She stopped, and stood looking steadily at the Governor, her hands twisted together, her face white. She was far less vividly conscious of him, however, and of all the others—Craig, her father, Treadwell—than of one whom she thought far away, but who now, sometime or other, must know!
The Governor spoke, quietly and evenly:
"Let us go back to a matter of detail. I should like to picture the scene that night a little more distinctly. Where were you standing when the shot was fired?"
She changed her position slightly. "Here, nearly in the centre of the room."
"And the man who shot from the alcove?"
"There." She pointed one side, to the bay-window, before which now stood Paddy the Brick.
The latter would have drawn away, but the Governor stayed him with a gesture. "No, stand where you are, if you please," he said. And Paddy the Brick stood still, shifting his feet and ill-at-ease, his narrow eyes turning stealthily toward Craig.
To Echo the illusion was considerable, for the room was not unlike that other library in which had occurred the scene she was so painfully redrawing. There was the same effect of rich bookcases, of desk and picture-hung walls, and in lieu of the alcove was the big double window with its heavy drawn curtains. The Governor stretched his hand and tilted the shade of the lamp, so that its light fell full upon the latter, lighting the cringing face of the stool-pigeon before it.
"What was the man who shot like?" he asked.
"He was middle-sized and thick-set, with light hair that sprang in a cowlick from his forehead. He..."
She had stopped abruptly. She was staring with wide, horrified eyes at the man who stood blinking in the radiance—at the up-thrust, sand-coloured hair, the rounded shoulders, the red-rimmed eyes, which now held a trapped look of animal fear.
She stiffened. She pointed at him.
"You!" she cried. "You are the man who fired that shot!"