The chill touch of autumn was in the air when the big steamer that brought Mrs. Spottiswoode and Echo home, crept up the bay to her wharf in the teeming North River. They arrived at daylight and the early morning found them safe aboard a Pullman rolling southward.
Looking out across the filmy glory of the October fields and the woods in their golden regalia epauletted in red, Echo thought of the day she had sailed away. She had been wretched then, and with all the tonic of fresh scenes and the savour of change, was she not as wretched now? For no letter from home had chronicled Harry Sevier's return, and moreover the knowledge that Craig had been taken half around the world to test the greatest surgical skill the planet afforded, had made his recovery, with all it might imply for her, an imminent possibility.
As she followed Mrs. Spottiswoode into the dining-car for luncheon, a lank, familiar form sprang up from a table.
"Mr. Malcolm!" she cried, and found both her hands instantly swallowed in a pair of big palms.
He was an extraordinary man, this Thomas Malcolm, whom his intimates dubbed, affectionately, "Tom." His father had begun life brilliantly, had begun to make a name and place for himself in professional life, when he had yielded to the vice of drinking, had speedily sunk himself in poverty, and had died in some slum corner wretched and unredeemed, leaving behind him a widow and a boy of ten who, with grim determination, had set himself to earn a living for both. He had but just begun to succeed in this when disease, its seeds sown in privation, took his mother from him. By dint of night-work he had gained a common-school education and had tutored himself through a southern university. At twenty-five he had founded an obscure Mission in the city which had known his father's disgrace, where for thirty years he had devoted himself to work among the rum-sodden and depraved. There was none so besotted as to be turned from his door; he was a familiar figure in the night-court and a welcome weekly visitor at the Penitentiary, few of whose inmates he did not know personally. At fifty-five no man was more beloved in the community in which he laboured, and most of all was he valued and respected by those who knew his history, and understood how the hatred of liquor had become to the boy a consuming fire that had driven him to this life of undeviating self-denial and strenuous conflict with the most sordid of vices.
Looking down at Echo from his great height, gaunt, raw-boned and with a saturnine twinkle in his cavernous eyes, his homely sallow face softened to a wonderful smile. "Why!" he said. "It's a monstrous time since we've met, my dear!" and to Mrs. Spottiswoode—"I saw your names on the passenger-list in the paper this morning, but I thought New York would have kept you at least a week."
"Not me!" she returned. "We took in all the new plays in London and spent all our money in Paris. I've no ambition now above my winter roses!" She extended her hand to Malcolm's companion.
"How do you do, Mr. Mason? I'm beginning to think you two men are desperate conspirators. Last year in New York I saw you both together."
Malcolm laughed. "A misguided philanthropist once left a part of his estate to my Mission, and Mason, here, is the legal executor.Ferbum sat."
"I hope that is Latin for 'Do sit at our table.' The car is so full, and I never could ride backward! Thank you, so much!" She sat down and bent her smart lorgnette upon the menu-card. "What shall we order, Echo?"
"Anything but the 'fried Chicken, Virginia style,'" said Mason gloomily. "It's supposed to be what that waiter has on his tray there. It's a crime and a swindle."
"Don't mind Mason," interposed Malcolm. "He's a dyspeptic. When I get to be his age—"
"You did," said the other viciously, "five years ago."
"—I'll be a vegetarian," finished the other. "Cheer up, Mason, and have a potato." He turned to Echo: "I know a girl in my town who's mighty keen to see you."
"Nancy Langham!"
He nodded. "She counts on having you down for Thanksgiving week. I hope she'll succeed. I'm giving a great 'spread' down at the Mission, and I want you girls to show me how to decorate the place. You will, then, eh? I haven't forgotten how you and Nancy helped me out last Christmas!" He reached over and patted her hand. "I do like to let it soak into Poverty Terrace that I really keep company with 'dee quality,' as the darkies say!"
Mrs. Spottiswoode looked at him curiously. "How frivolous and selfish we must all seem to you, who give up your life to such people!" she said. "I've heard so much about your work, Mr. Malcolm, especially in the prisons. I think you are wonderful. I should know how to talk to a Martian better than to a criminal. Don't you find it hard to get into sympathy with them?"
His smiling face turned serious. "'A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind,'" he quoted. "You remember your Bunyan? I always say to myself, 'There, but for the lack of a sufficient temptation, goes Thomas Malcolm!' Dear Lady, there is many a man in the Penitentiary who would be a churchwarden to-day but for bad environment and good whisky."
"And the law's mistakes," added Mason, sardonically. He had been turning over on his finger a ring with a square green stone, and Echo had been wondering vaguely where she had seen such a ring before. "I know a man who's in for ten years, and I'd stake my life he's no more guilty than I am."
"How extraordinary!" exclaimed Mrs. Spottiswoode, and Malcolm observed with wicked innocence: "I wonder who could have defended him!"
The other smiled grimly at the thrust. "Oh, he was guilty enough according to the evidence. But he was innocent, for all of that. He is the man who was accused of shooting Cameron Craig."
The blood flew to Echo's face and she bent her head over her salad. She felt as though she had strayed unwittingly into an ambush where all the old dread and terror from which she had fled had sprung again upon her.
"But," said Mrs. Spottiswoode, "I thought Craig himself identified him."
Mason sniffed. "Craig was in no condition to identify anybody. I saw the man and talked with him, day after day, for weeks. He was no criminal—why, his very look gave the theory the lie!"
A keen, thriving wonder crossed Echo's thought at the blunt assertion. That livid face back of the spitting revolver hung before her mental sight with strange vividness—the surly, wicked lips, the low brow and narrow eyes. How was it possible that such a countenance could assume at wont a look of innocency that would deceive a lawyer, even against damning evidence, into a belief that he was a victim of circumstances?
"What is your theory of the shooting, then?" asked Mrs. Spottiswoode, interestedly.
The lawyer was silent a moment, drawing little circles on the cloth with his fork. "I haven't a wholly satisfactory one," he said at length, slowly. "But I don't believe he did it. Craig, it is certain, had arendezvouswith a woman, and the woman saw the shooting. I believe her testimony would have proven that the man who was tried and convicted was not the man who did it. That fact disposed of, I believe he could have shown, if he had chosen to, that he had no connection with the burglars, and would have been acquitted."
"Cherchez la femme!" murmured the lady.
"Yes. She would not come forward."
Mrs. Spottiswoode looked at Malcolm. "Have you seen him?" she asked.
"No, I've been in New Orleans for three months. But I hope to begin my visits at the Penitentiary very soon, and I'm looking forward to meeting him."
"You'll agree with me, I'll bet a hat!" said Mason. "By the way"—he held up his hand—"he gave me this ring, the day he was sentenced."
Echo felt every nerve suddenly tighten. For it had come to her in a flash where she had seen that ring's counterpart: it had been on the finger of the masked burglar on that horrible midnight in Craig's library—when he had held out to her the letters from the safe! Her heart began to beat suffocatingly. "Take them and go—go instantly!"—she seemed to hear the tense command strike across the car. A thrill ran over her. Was the ring a kind of badge, a sign of their guilty calling? Or could it be that the man who was being tried wasnotthe man who had shot Craig—but the other, the one who had saved her?
She began to tremble, for another thought stabbed her. If this was so, how could she honourably keep silence? The instant question touched her conscience, her quick sense of justice and duty, with sudden insistence. But for the spoilers themselves, she was the only witness of that deed in the library. Craig—so narrow had been for him that instant of observation—might have been mistaken. But not she! The very fright and horror of the moment had indelibly fixed the shooter's face upon her mind. Suppose Mason's hypothesis were correct—suppose he had been no burglar, but an honourable man, caught, as she had been, in a web of circumstance. In the crisis he had acted as a gentleman, had thought of her before himself. Instead of flying with the others, he had lingered to do that generous deed for her. What if it were because of that he had been taken! If so, what a debt she owed him!
It came to her suddenly that she must becertain. Never again could she know peace of soul till she knew the truth. If the man in the Penitentiary was indeed the man who had shot Craig, well and good. If not...
She turned her head, for Malcolm was speaking to her. "When you come to Nancy's you must let me take you both out to see theseprotégésof mine that have to be shut up for the good of their souls. Wouldn't you like to, eh?"
She thought he must hear the beating of her pulse. "Would—don't they resent being stared at?" she faltered.
"Bless your heart!" he said, with one of his bear-like laughs. "It's good for them. They don't get a squint at roses and sunshine every day! A sight like you two girls will make them want to get out, and keep them on their best behaviour, so as to earn all the commutation good marks bring! I'll get the Warden to take us through the shops. That's the most interesting part."
"I must be quite certain!" The words seemed singing themselves over in a banal refrain that sounded through the stir and rumble of the station, mingling with 'Lige's hearty voice of welcome, and her father's loving greeting as he lifted her carefully from the car step.
"You're a lot better?Sure?" he queried anxiously, as he held both her hands tight in his.
"Sure!" she smiled. "We've had awonderfultime. I couldn't begin to tell you about it in my letters. But I'm glad to be home just the same! How are mother and Chilly? Mr. Malcolm was on the train—there he is now, waving his hand from the window. Did the wireless tell you we lost a propeller-blade two days out?"
The dusk flowed over them in violet waves as they drove homeward and she laughed and talked gaily, with her hand clasped in his under the carriage-robe, the horses prancing and curvetting in the keen October air. Once, at a crossing, she put out her hand and touched the coachman's arm.
"Take Main Street, 'Lige," she directed. "I'd like to see how it looks."
As he swung into the broader thoroughfare, her father said, "You're looking at the new bank building. You see it's nearly done."
But she was really looking beyond, at a four-storied office-front, on whose second floor the windows of a suite showed in chaste, golden letters the legend, "Henry Sevier, Attorney-at-Law." The windows were blank and dusty, and their blinds were drawn.
"Why, you're shivering!" said her father suddenly, and drew the robe more closely about her.
She smiled at him.
"No," she said, "but I think I'm just a little tired. Drive faster, 'Lige. I—I want to get home."
Lying in his bunk Harry awoke to the consciousness of another bleak dawn. The morning waking was always a pain to him, for in sleep the barriers fell away and the mind fared forth along the free, sweet highways of memory. He did not open his eyes at once, but he felt the rasp of the coarse blanket at his throat, smelled the cold clamminess of the granite floor, and realised by a thousand reminders of the sharpened senses that another round of the treadmill awaited him. He remembered drearily that to-morrow would be Thanksgiving Day. In the world outside it was the time of yellow maples and the red of the frost-kissed sumac, of wild grapes purpling in the thickets and clumps of alder blooms in the fence-corners—of blazing hearths and good fellowship!
Mingling with the stir of reawakening life in the corridors there sounded a lighttap-tap—the tattoo of a tin spoon against the stone.
Without moving he opened his eyes. Paddy the Brick was up and dressed—if donning the cheap flannel shirt, the striped jacket and trousers, might be called dressing—and, stooped in the corner of the cell, was industriously at work with the 'prison-wireless.' For a while Harry watched him curiously; then suddenly his ear made out a word. For in time he had taken his cell-mate's sneering advice, and because the busy mind, turned too long upon itself, must perforce occupy itself with something extraneous, had mastered the code that was scratched in the white-washed wall. He had a retentive memory, sharpened now by disuse, and the tinytap-tapthat he had learned to distinguish through the muffling masonry, though he never used it as a means of communication, had soon become an open book to him. Strange things he had heard in this manner—furtive, uncouth gossip of that under-world, which, although much was couched in an unknownargotand was meaningless to him, had yet served in a way to lighten the unendurable emptiness. The word he had caught now was "visitors."
In another moment Harry was listening intently, for the sounds were spelling something which instinct told him was wickedly suggestive though he could not guess its purport. "Warden ... to-day," tapped the signalled code, "—take ... number nine ... machine ... your ... chance—"
Whatever else might have been said was blotted by the whirring clang of the electric gong in the central corridor. Through the great lamelliform bee-hive it sent its waking clamour, the signal for rising to the new day's tasks. With the sound Paddy the Brick thrust the stolen utensil out of sight and shot a stealthy glance at the upper bunk, but its occupant had apparently just awakened.
All the ensuing morning, as he rubbed himself down in the plenteous cold water which the spigot provided, and did his share in the cleaning of the bare cell—while he sopped his brown bread in the weak breakfast coffee, and presently tramped in the long file to the shop to feed the voracious machines with the clean-smelling leather—all the while Harry's brain was busy with the message he had heard. "Visitors?" Occasionally visitors had passed through the shops—panging reminders to him of the world outside. Perhaps in some devious way the other had heard that some would come to-day. But turn and twist the rest of the words how he might, they meant nothing. Dinner time came, with its lifting break in the unvarying monotony, then the long lock-step back to the shop and its labour.
The work had come to be far more welcome to him than the cell, with the partner to whose society he was chained. The hum and click and throb stole his thought, and the automatic movements, in which he had become an adept, soothed his aching mind. For several hours this afternoon the mechanical occupation absorbed him and he worked on, noting little about him. Then, all at once, as he turned to pick up the bit of cotton waste with which he kept the steel clutches of the machine before him free from dust, he became conscious of something unaccustomed. His own machine was number eight. At the one adjoining, number nine, which was next to the broad middle way bisecting the shop, Paddy the Brick was wont to stand. Now, however, another man was in his stead. At near view Harry recognised him as one whose place was further along, next the wall, and glancing in that direction he saw that Paddy the Brick was running the other's machine.
The meaning of the "wireless" message leaped instantly to his mind. When, after dinner, the long line had broken and distributed its units, the man had taken number nine, and the exchange had been effected so quickly and naturally that it had been thus far unnoted by the watchful Superintendent sitting moveless on the raised platform at the end of the aisle, his revolvers on the desk before him. What did the transfer mean? Harry wondered. The men nearby worked on, but they seemed to be restive, waiting for something, with a subdued excitement and anxiety. As he glanced sideways toward the newcomer, at the haggard parchment visage, lean and ashen with the pallor of long confinement, he noted that the other kept his back to the platform and his head studiously bent over his machine, and there darted to Harry's recollection what Paddy the Brick had said one day to him—of the "lifer" and his hatred of the warden. The tapped message of the morning had spoken of the latter, too. "Your ... chance!" Could that have meant the chance to "get" the man he hated?
As if in answer to the startled thought, there sounded voices behind him. He looked over his shoulder. The Warden himself was entering the door at the end of the shop, and there were visitors with him.
Then instantly every conscious thought save one fled from him and he clapped a hand to his mouth to stifle a cry. With the Warden were three figures, a man and two women, and the women were Echo Allen and Nancy Langham.
A sickness like that of death rushed upon him. That she could come there—careless of the chance that she might see him in these loathsome surroundings—a common convict, with cropped hair and striped clothing, marked with all the badges of the jailbird—smote him with an unendurable pain. She, who knew that he had loved her—to see him in this guise! All the agony he had suffered rolled over him anew, intensified a thousand-fold. He pulled his cap-visor low over his eyes and snatching up the bit of oily waste, drew it across his cheek, smudging his face from chin to brow.
The little group of four had paused near the desk of the Superintendent, the Warden smilingly pointing out to the two girls the details of the work. Harry's fingers performed their task by sheer instinct; for his very life he had not been able to help stealing a swift sidelong look at Echo's face, pale beneath its russet cloud of hair, and he distinguished with a fierce bitterness the jaded shadows that had crept beneath her eyes, tokens that belied her conventionally polite show of interest. So, though she condemned him to this torture, she too suffered!
Could he have looked beneath that controlled exterior he would have discerned a pain and dread to match his own. With that luncheon in the dining-car a sense of fate had fallen upon her, heavy and irrevocable, as though some huge weight was closing down. The whip of conscience had driven her to this day's quest. If the law had erred—if, in truth an innocent man, as Mason believed, lay under condemnation—it was for lack of her testimony: the thought had laid upon her sensitive mind a new sense of guilty responsibility. She must be certain, beyond peradventure. The visit to the Evelands for the Thanksgiving season had furnished the opportunity and the round of the Penitentiary with Malcolm had arranged itself. It had been easy to advert to Mason's belief in the innocence of the prisoner he had defended, and it had seemed natural enough for her to ask the Warden to point out the man as they went through the shops. They had now entered the room in which he had told her the man worked—she was standing on the threshold of the knowledge she feared.
She started at the Warden's voice, close to her ear, above the rasping clamour of the machines: "The last row, at the end. The middle machine—that's the one."
With a quick intake of her breath she looked where he pointed. The colour faded from her cheeks. Doubt—if she had clung to doubt—was ended now! The man who had started with levelled pistol from behind the curtain of Craig's library had been short and stocky and round-shouldered. The side-face of the distant prisoner at whom she was now looking with such painful intensity, under the shadow of his cap-brim showed smudged with oil and dust; but his shoulders were broad and straight and his frame tall and lithe. Whatever the law said, this man was not the man who had shot Craig! She alone could swear it!
She felt suddenly a kind of terror of the place. She touched Malcolm's arm. "I've seen enough—please! Could we turn back now?"
The Warden overheard and nodded. "Just wait here a moment," he said, "and we'll go. I want to take a look forward." He strode from them down the broad way between the lines of workers.
Harry heard the step behind him on the steel floor. He thought the others were with him. Under the rattle of the cogs his sick imagination caught the swish of a dress—almost he thought he caught a faint breath of a familiar perfume—and he averted his face till they should pass. It was by reason of this that his lowered eyes caught a stealthy movement in the man at the next machine—a movement of one hand which crept under his jacket, and jerked forth, clutching something shining and murderous.
Harry acted without conscious thought, by swift and certain instinct. As the lean arm, tense with hate, went up behind the Warden's back, he leaped forward with a cry of warning, caught the wrist whose hand held the sharpened file, and both went down clinched and struggling together.
The cry, sharp and strained, pierced across the din. It brought the Superintendent to his feet on his platform, like the release of a coiled spring, a revolver in either hand.
"Back to the door!" he roared, and Malcolm's sinewy arm swept the two girls behind him. The fierce clamour of a bell sounded outside. There was sudden pandemonium. Doors opened, men in uniform dashed by her, and on the platform the Superintendent stood, crouching forward like a panther about to spring, still as a statue, both hands outstretched with their gleaming muzzles, his eyes flashing over the room.
In that desperate struggle, as he clung to the maddened convict, Harry was conscious only of the strenuous confusion—of commands that snapped like whip-lashes—of the burly form of the Warden above him and that of a "trusty" who snatched at the vicious weapon—of a sudden anguished pang in his shoulder.
Then, swiftly and sweetly, the whole world slipped away into blankness and silence.
A half hour later, as Echo and Nancy sat with Malcolm in the office, on the ground floor of the frame building just inside the great double gates of the prison, the Warden entered. His grave face lightened with a smile of reassurance.
"All well," he said cheerfully. "It came close to being a nasty wound, but the doctor says no harm will come of it, though he will be in the hospital ward for a week. I wouldn't have had this fracas happen while you ladies were here for a year's salary," he added, "and that's a fact!"
Nancy's face was still pale, and she shivered as he spoke, but she gave a little laugh, as she said, "We didn't bring you luck to-day, did we? You'll be wary of Friday visitors hereafter."
"On the contrary," he asserted, "I'm inclined to think I'm a mighty lucky man. It was cunningly planned, with collusion, too, and if it had succeeded there might have been a very bad hour or two—for everybody."
Malcolm turned to him. "The man saved the situation, Warden, and it was a very close call, indeed. If there was collusion I imagine it'll be dangerous in the ranks for him hereafter."
The Warden nodded. "I've thought of that. The trusty who has been clerking in the Record-Room, upstairs, is sick, as it happens. He shall have the place. He sha'n't come to any harm as long as I'm in charge, rest assured of that."
He went with them to the great double-gate. "It's a curious thing," he said thoughtfully, as they said good-bye, "that the man who did that should have been the very one we had been talking about, isn't it?"
The same thought was in all their minds. There had flashed across Echo's, too, a memory of her childhood, a revolting incident of another prison, where a hundred convicts had risen, had killed their keepers and for two days had run desperate riot within the enclosure—till troops had been rushed to the scene. What if that flaming human lava had burst beyond control to-day? She shuddered.
A single hand, maybe, had prevented this—the hand of the man who once before had saved her—who was now shut in this horrible place, perhaps for want of the testimony which she alone could give!
Harry rose from his seat at the desk in the Record-Room and went over to the window. The frost had painted silver ferns and sea weed on its pane, and the prison yard, under the high, saffron-tinted sun, was white with a light powdering of snow which hid its harsh outlines and dingy yellow hue with a mantle of purity and beauty. It was a stinging cold though sunshiny afternoon. Along the wall the sentries, as they paced, swung benumbed arms to start the sluggish blood coursing to warmth. Here and there on the hard ground a pigeon traced its feathery footprints, startling the quarrelsome sparrows, and above in the clear sky a buzzard drew widening circles, an ink-blot on the blue. Across the open space came the muffled roar of the shops and down under the inner gateway the gate-keeper was stamping his Arctic-shod feet and whistling "Weep no more my lad-ee," in syncopated time.
Two weeks Harry had been in the hospital ward, for after those months of confinement the depleted blood had made recuperation slow; but he had steadily mended, and now, though still at times his healing shoulder pained him somewhat, he was practically as strong as before. He had been acutely grateful for the change to the pleasant Record-Room, with its broad window to the sunshine and the drier upper air, for the fact that he no longer tramped in the lock-step or took his meals in the common mess-room—most of all for release from his unsavoury cell-mate. For since the affair in the shop, he had been given a cell to himself.
His momentary glimpse on that day of Echo had stung his every sense to quivering protest. It had pierced, as with a fiery sword, the torpor which had unwrapped his love with its protecting armour and that love had awaked to agonised consciousness, vivified and intensified. Then, in his loneliness, the knowledge that the woman he would have died for had left him to drag out his penalty, would sweep over him till a fierce hatred of her would rise up in him—to be swept away as swiftly by something sweeter and stronger that would not be denied. So, in the end, mingled with this confusion of feeling, there came to him the knowledge that the bitter conviction that she could never again be anything to him, with the contempt for life which had grown from it, had been nevertheless inexpressibly softened by the living warmth of her presence, sad and fleeting as that had been.
Presently Harry turned back to the desk, and picked up the annotated card, a portion of whose record he had been about to transcribe in permanent form in a leathern tome that lay there. It was the filing-card on whose reverse side was pasted his own photograph, full-face and profile, and containing his physical measurements—taken upon the precise and delicate instruments that lined the room—which had been filled out on the day of his arrival. It was the sight of this, with the bitter memories it evoked, which had given him pause. There it was, an enduring monument, stamping forever the man to whom it corresponded, a convict, thrust, so long as he should live, from the society of clean and upright men and women, debarred even from the exercise of the functions of citizenship!
As he dipped his pen in the ink, a quick step sounded on the stairway, and the door opened to admit a man wearing a frogged overcoat with huge fur collar and lapels, and a fur cap whose flaps were turned down over his ears. He was about Harry's age though of slightly heavier build, with somewhat similar firm chin and grey eyes, but with cheeks in which the blood darkled redly, and across one was a slanting scar, slight but sufficiently perceptible. He carried a small valise which he set down, blowing on his nattily-gloved fingers.
"Oh! I beg pardon," he said. "The Warden told me I might change my togs up here. I didn't know the room was occupied."
"You'll not disturb me," answered Harry. "As it happens, I am occupied too."
The stranger laughed—a rather eager, boyish laugh which caught Harry with a subtle tang of old acquaintance. With the pen in his hand, he was staring curiously at that ruddy cheek and its slanting scar, his mind following something elusive and far away. He was feeling the edge of a half-recollection, vague and shadowy and dream-like, of a saw-dust bar-room floor lighted with flaring lamps, of ribald conversation, of a deal table across which a face like that had looked at him. But the memory at which he grasped had belonged to that phase of intoxication in which sense-impression had left no enduring record, and he could not capture it.
John Stark was unconscious of the fixed gaze. He had opened the valise upon a chair and now was laying its contents upon another. Harry saw with surprise that these included a striped jacket and trousers, flat peaked cap and heavy hob-nailed shoes such as each inmate of the prison wore. Last he took out a flat tin box which opened out in two sections, and set it on the end of the desk. It was a "make-up" box of the stage dressing-room, and the sight of its tiny compartments, holding rouge, lamp-black, powder and grease-paint, the pencils and hare's foot, brought back to Harry with a rush old days of amateur theatricals and society stagery. These articles laid out, the other began rapidly to undress. He chuckled as, turning, he caught the look of puzzle on Harry's face.
"I'm not really crazy," he said laughingly. "The fact is, I'm trying an experiment—with the Warden's permission. For half an hour I'm going to take my place with those fellows down there;"—he nodded towards the window—"going in to supper with them. I have a bet on with the Deputy Warden that I can do it so that none of the Superintendents will spot me!"
He had discarded shirt, collar and shoes, and was now arraying himself in the coarse striped garments and clumsy foot-wear. He looked himself over half-humorously. "Ugh!" he exclaimed. "I swear, it gives me the creeps. This is the real stuff, you see! I don't get the true spirit of the thing when I play it."
"When you play it?" repeated Harry, inquiringly.
"Oh," said the other. "I ought to explain. I'm starring in 'The Jail Bird'—the play that's on here this week. I have the title-role. It's a fad with me to get up my 'business' first-hand, and this institution is too good a chance to miss. It's mighty good press-agent stuff for the local papers, incidentally!" The lid of the tin box was a mirror, and propping this upright, he now busied himself with the facial make-up, applying a greyish grease-paint which obliterated the scar on the cheek and lent the requisite pallor, and deepening this with darker pencilled shades. In the midst of his labour he asked:
"Have you seen the piece?"
"No," said Harry, grimly. "Our business here interferes somewhat with our evening pleasures."
Something in the tone made the other look up quickly. Harry's cap had been pushed back when the visitor had entered. He had on, also, a spotless duck over-jacket which buttoned close up to the throat. Now the cap was pulled low on his forehead, and the jacket was open, revealing the tell-tale stripes beneath. The actor started.
"By Jove!" he ejaculated, in embarrassment. "I thought—I didn't know—"
"So I perceived," said Harry calmly. "Pray do not apologise, however. The atmosphere does not tend to develop over-sensitiveness. I must congratulate you on your appearance. The effect is really wonderful."
There was no sarcasm in his words: the illusion was marvellously carried. When the peaked cap was pulled over the other's forehead, a little to one side, Harry thought him highly likely to carry off his wager with the Deputy Warden.
At the moment the bell sounded—the signal to knock off work for the early supper—and John Stark rose hastily. "I'm off now for the lock-step," he said, with his hand on the door. "By the way, if these duds of mine are in the way, chuck 'em in some other room. I can dress anywhere."
The brogans clattered down the stair.
Harry went to the window and watched him cross the yard, a turnkey, wearing a suppressed grin, by his side. Then he returned to the desk, but his pen lay idle by his hand. The curious visit, with its whiff of the outside world, had been packed with clutching reminders of things that had had pleasant part in his past—reminders of society nights when, for sweet charity's sake, he had played those old mimic roles. Some one entered, bringing his supper in a tin pail, and went out again, but he did not look up. He was thinking with bitterness that the flippant masquerader, sitting now with that striped company in the mess-room, would presently emerge, free to pass out into the glad world. It would be only a lark to laugh over, an essay in effrontery performed for a wager and the delectation of a press-agent!
Harry suddenly felt the longing to be free take him by the throat, so that he trembled in every limb with the force of it. He smelled the wind racing across frosty meadows; he could almost fancy that he heard the flow of river-water under its icy coverlet; he could almost see the gnarled catalpas along the Allen driveway lifting their wintry twisted arms toward him. What would it not mean to him if he, like that cheerful stroller, might but slough off this hateful, unnatural character and step forth, himself again!
He started. A thought mad as a nightmare had flashed through his brain. He felt his blood beat to his temples; then instantly he became icily cool and tense in every nerve.
In another moment he had thrown off his over-jacket, and was seated before the make-up box.
With the certainty of ancient practice he applied rouge and pencil deftly to his face, rubbing in a deeper tinge on the cheeks, shadowing the temples, accentuating by ever so little the corners of eyes and mouth. Lastly he drew a slanting scar on the right cheek, emphasising it a trifle, as the keynote of the counterfeit.
He looked at himself, swiftly, critically. There was but the one double gate and the single watchman to pass—and the sunlight was not bright under the archway! And luckily the fur cap, with its ear-flaps, effectually hid the cropped scalp. He wasted no time in changing clothes, but turned up the striped trousers and the sleeves of the jacket and donned the smart habilaments over his prison rig, the extra lining compensating for his slighter form. In five minutes he was completely dressed, even to spats and flaunting tie. All the while he was thinking rapidly and coolly, weighing contingencies, estimating chances, taking into lightning account each detail which might mean the slenderest advantage in the desperate game. Lastly he thrust his prison cap under his coat and put the make-up box and the tin dinner-pail into the empty valise.
Overcoated and with the valise in his hand, he strode to the door—to come back to his desk with a quick afterthought, to pick up the record-card that bore his own number, and slip it into an inner pocket. Then he opened the door and went quickly down the stair.
Fate was kind. The Warden was not in his office. As a matter of fact, at that very moment, with outward gravity yet with inner amusement, he was witnessing John Stark's nonchalant experiment and finding the bit of clever impersonation, under the very eyes of his unsuspecting assistants, vastly diverting.
Harry went out to the gate.
The watchman looked up, surprised. "Hello!" he said. "The half-hour isn't up already, is it? Or did you weaken?"
Harry laughed. "Not I!" he answered, airily. "I've had no end of a lark. I'd have stayed longer only I've got a rehearsal on. I could have pulled the wool over their eyes for a week!" As he spoke he drew out a silver cigarette-and-match box which his hand had encountered in the overcoat pocket, and lighted a cigarette behind his cupped hands. In that crucial instant he dared not look at the face so near him and his heart seemed to flutter and then stop beating—till there came the ponderous grind of the great lock as the inner gate swung open.
The watchman was chuckling as he unlocked the outer barrier. "Well, that's one on the Deputy Warden!" he said appreciatively. "You're a clever one to have pulled it off!"
Harry stepped jauntily through. "Come and see me do it on the stage," he said, nodding a brisk good-bye. "It's up to the Warden to stand tickets all round, I should think!"
The gate clanged shut behind him.
The sound sent to his soul the first agonised stab of futility. He had won through those pitiless encircling walls, yet what chance had he of ultimate escape, after all, there on the highway, in that recognisable costume, with scant grace at best from pursuit? Then, even as the cold wave of hopelessness swept over him, he saw something which sent his blood running like quicksilver; it was the actor's empty motor standing at the side of the road.
In another minute he was in its seat, his grip on the wheel, his hand touching the lever of the self-starter. It was not of a make which he knew, but he had always been an ardent motorist, had known every cog and bearing of his own car's intricate mechanism, and before the machine was well under way he had mastered its essentials.
As the snow-dusted road spun out behind him, he drew deep, gasping breaths of the cold air and felt the dimming sunshine on his face like the touch of some magical elixir, yet he was free from agitation, his mind was working clearly and coolly. The alarm would come soon. When the genial young tragedian returned to the office building, he would be likely to assume that his suggestion had been acted upon, and his clothing bestowed in another room. Subsequent inquiry might be worth a few minutes. The absence of Harry's cap and the tin pail would suggest that he had gone to his cell to eat his supper, a privilege that was his when he cared to avail himself of it—this would be good for a few minutes more. A general search of the buildings would be next in order. How soon the inquiry would embrace the watchman at the outer gate could not be guessed. Altogether he might count, perhaps, on a half-hour. He could cover few miles in that time, and telephone and the clicking wire would soon be busy. It would be the automobile that would be first traced, and the sentries on the wall would report the direction he had taken. He must rid himself of the car, and somehow double on his trail!
Far to the right, across wastes of snowy fields and numb, glittering trees, a line of telegraph poles thrust up darkly against the skyline. A quick plan flashed to his mind. The road was topping a gentle rise now, where the wind had swept the hard ground clear of the light snow. He stopped, and cast a glance before and behind him; no vehicle was in sight. He sprang out and pulled out the rails of the fence that lined the road, then ran the motor into the field and into a hollow of dead, rustling stalks, where stood a group of hayricks which would effectually hide it from the highway. He left the fur-overcoat and the valise in the car, replaced the fence-rails and ran across the field to the railroad track. A quarter of a mile further along stood a small country station and he turned his steps thither, making shift as he went to wipe the grease-paint from his face with John Stark's perfumed handkerchief.
The ticket-seller, who combined with his duties those of freight and express agent and general factotum, was sweeping out his tiny box of an office. "What is the next train west?" inquired Harry.
"None till nine to-night," was the reply. "There's one due in twenty minutes, but she only stops for through passengers."
Before entering Harry had gone through John Stark's pockets; now he pushed a bill under the little wicket. "I happen to be going through," he said easily.
The other made out the ticket with deliberation, laboriously counted the change and leisurely went out to the platform to affix the red flag. The minutes that passed thereafter the lone passenger was all his life to remember as a ghastly interval measured by dragging epochs that drew themselves snail-like across some incalculable duration of time. When the express came to its grinding stop cold drops of perspiration were on Harry's face. He swung himself aboard and went forward to the day-coach.
Five minutes later the train stopped at a water-tank, to refresh the thirsty engine. A half mile away, outlined sombrely against the dusky evening blue, rose a huddle of dingy yellow walls. The occupant of the seat in front of him leaned to look through the window.
"What are those buildings?" he asked interestedly of the conductor, who was passing down the aisle.
"That's the State Penitentiary," was the answer.
As he spoke through the silence there came a deep, dullboom, repeated again and again—the sound of a monster bell, tolling.
"What's that?" the other asked. Windows went up along the car. Harry lifted his also, with outward coolness but with a curious spasm of the heart. The conductor stooped to peer beside him.
"It's the alarm," he said. "A prisoner must have escaped."
Amid excited exclamations the train started again, and the conductor withdrew his head. "They'll soon get him," he predicted, as he punched Harry's ticket. "The poor devil won't get far in those striped clothes they make them wear!"
"No," said Harry. "I fancy he won't."