Branded Part 10

I'm not letting it make any difference, am I?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

He dropped the argument with perfect good-humor, and even made apology.

"I take it all back; it's none of my business. Of course, you know best what you want to do. You're a free man, as I say, and can go where you please."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And the bank?" I asked.

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

"I meant the Farmers'," I said.

"Something right funny about that, Bert," Barton commented. "The old bank is rocking along and doing a little business in farm mortgages and note-shaving at the old stand, same as usual, but it's got a hoodoo.

The other banks do most of the commercial business--all of it, you might say; still, they say Geddis and old Abner Withers are getting richer and richer every day."

"Agatha is married?" I asked.

"No; and that's another of the funny things. Her engagement with young Copper-Money was broken off--n.o.body knew just how or why--shortly after your--er--shortly after the trouble at the bank three years and a half ago. Agatha's out West somewhere now--in a sanitorium, I believe. Her health has been rather poor for the last year or so."

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

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

"You bet your life you didn't! There was the d.i.c.kens to pay all around. Under the State law, as you probably know, the depositors'

losses had to be made up, to the extent of twice the amount of the stockholdings, by the stockholders in the bank. When they came to count noses they found that Geddis and Withers hadn't done a thing but to quietly unload their bank stock here and there and everywhere, until they held only enough to give them their votes. There was a yell to raise the roof, but the stockholders of record had to come across. It teetotally smashed a round dozen of the best farmers in the county; and I heard, on the quiet, that it caught a good many outsiders who had been buying Farmers' stock at a bargain, among them this young Mr.

Copper-Money who was going to marry Agatha--and didn't. Geddis and Withers played it mighty fine--and mighty low-down."

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

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

"Geddis put it into the a.s.sets, 'to help out against the loss,' as he said. n.o.body wanted it, of course; and then, to be right large-hearted and generous, Geddis bought it in, personally--at ten cents on the dollar."

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

"Oh, yes; he and Withers run it and own it. As you'd imagine, Farmers'

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

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

The choking was only momentary. Barton was in a reminiscent mood, and he went rambling on about people in whom I was most deeply interested.

It was like a breath of the good old home air in my nostrils just to sit and listen to him.

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

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

IX

The Cup of Trembling

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

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

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

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

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