Branded Part 12

and it was as "James Herbert Weyburn" that I had been arraigned and convicted, that was not, strictly speaking, my right name. I had been christened "James Bertrand," after my father. My mother had always called me "Jimmie," but for others the "Bertrand" was soon shortened into "Bert" and from that a few home-town formalists had soon evolved the "Herbert," a change which my own boyish and unreasoning dislike for "Bertrand" was ready enough to confirm. So, when the inspector asked me my name I answered promptly, "James Bertrand."

"Write it," was the curt command, and a pad and a pencil were shoved at me across the desk.

Since the name was two-thirds of my own, I was able to write it without any of the hesitation which might otherwise have betrayed me if I had chosen a combination that was unfamiliar.

"Where are you from?" was the next question.

Here, as I saw it, was one of the holes in which a lie might be profitably planted--profitably and safely. So I said, glibly enough: "Cincinnati."

"Street and number?"

I had given Cincinnati merely because I chanced to be somewhat familiar with that city, and now I gave the location of a boarding-house near the river front where I had once stayed over-night.

"Where were you born?"

"In the country, about forty miles from Cincinnati."

"Traveling for your health, I suppose? Where's your baggage?"

I saw that I should have to call a halt somewhere, and this seemed as good a point as any.

"See here," I broke out; "you've got the wrong man, and you know it, and I know it! You have no shadow of right to arrest me without a warrant. Neither have you any right to try to tangle me in my statements so that I shall fall down and give you an excuse for locking me up!"

"Say, young fellow--you cut all that out and quiet down!" advised the plain-clothes man who had nipped me at the railroad terminal.

"That's the one thing I shan't do!" I retorted boldly. "You have arrested me without authority, and now you are trying to give me the third degree. You've got me here, and you may make the most of it--until I can find a lawyer. Lock me up if you feel like it; and are willing to stand for the consequences."

At this the three of them put their heads together and once more compared the thumb-prints. Suddenly the inspector whirled upon me with his lips drawn back and his hand balled into a fist as if he were going to strike me.

"How about that little job you pulled off with a forged check in Chicago last week?" he rapped out.

He was evidently counting upon the effect of a shock and a surprise, but, naturally, the ruse fell flat.

"I don't know anything about a forged check; and I was never in Chicago in my life," I replied; and since both statements were strictly true I could make them calmly and without hesitation.

For the third time they put their heads together. I think the inspector was for letting me go without further ado. But the man who had arrested me was apparently still suspicious and unsatisfied. As a compromise they did the thing which determined my second flight. They took me into a room at the rear of the building; a barn-like place bare of everything save a screen and a tripoded photographer's camera; and within the next five minutes I had been posed and "mugged."

"Now you may go," said the harsh-voiced inspector; and I left the building knowing that the Colorado capital had been effectually crossed off in the list of possible refuges for me. With my photograph in the police blotter, discovery and recapture would be only a question of time, if I should stay where I could be identified by the local authorities. Once during my prison term I had seen an escaped man brought back from far-away Alaska.

Since there was no immediate danger, however, there was time to plan thoughtfully and prudently for a second disappearance. After a lunch-counter meal, eaten in a cheap restaurant within a block or so of the City Hall, I made a round of the employment offices. In front of one of them there was a bulletin-board demand for railroad grade laborers on the Cripple Creek branch of the Colorado Midland.

At that time I knew next to nothing about the geography of the Rocky Mountain States, and the great mining-camp at the back of Pike's Peak was merely a name to me; though the name was familiar, in a way, because the mine in which Abel Geddis had sunk his depositors' money was said to be in the Cripple Creek district. What chiefly attracted me in the bulletin-board notice was the announcement that free transportation would be given to the work. With only a few dollars in my pocket, the free ride became an object, and I entered the office.

The arrangement was easily made. I gave the agent his fee of two dollars, and let him put a name--not my own or any part of my own, you may be sure--on his list for the evening shipment. It appeared to cut no figure with this employment shark that I bore none of the marks of a successful pick-and-shovel man. All he wanted or cared for was his two dollars and something on two legs and in the shape of a man to put into his gang against the collected fee. I was told to show up at the Union Station at six o'clock, sharp; and after spending the remainder of the afternoon wandering about the city, I reported as instructed, was pa.s.sed through the gates with some twenty-five or thirty other "pick-ups," and so turned my back upon the Queen City of the Plains--for a time.

XI

Number 3126

In due deference to the "mugging" at police headquarters, I had registered in the Denver employment office as "William Smith." But on the work, which proved to be the construction of a branch feeder for the Midland in the heart of the gold district, I took my own name--or rather that part of it which had been given to the Denver police inspector--arguing that the only way in which I could be traced would be by means of the photograph. Against the photographic possibility, my beard, which had been sc.r.a.ped off by the station barber during the waiting interval between trains in St. Louis, was suffered to grow again.

The railroad labor was strenuous, as it was bound to be; and for the first few days the thin, crisp air of the alt.i.tudes cut my already indifferent physical efficiency almost to the vanishing point.

Nevertheless, there were two pieces of good fortune. My fellow-laborers in the grading gang were princ.i.p.ally Italians from the southern provinces and their efficiency was also low. This helped, but a better bit of luck lay in the fact that the contractors on the job were humane and liberal employers; both of them with a shrewd and watchful eye for latent capabilities in the rank and file. Within a week I was made a gang time-keeper, and a fortnight later I became commissary clerk.

Before I forget it, let me say that my first month's pay, or the greater part of it, went to replace the sixty-three dollars and a half in the little black pocketbook which I had stolen--I guess that is the honest word---from Horace Barton. I debated for some time over the safest method of returning the pocketbook and its restored contents to the wagon salesman. I realized that it wouldn't do to let him know where I was; and it seemed a needless humiliation to confess to him that I was the "hobo" who had posed, in his imagination, as the skilful sidewalk pickpocket.

In casting about for a means of communication I thought of Whitley, the Springville minister. So I wrote him a letter, enclosing the pocketbook, with a truthful explanation of the circ.u.mstances in which it had come into my possession, and telling him what to do with it. I laid no commands upon his conscience, but begged him, if he could consistently do so, to suppress my name and whereabouts. And since I could not be quite sure as to what the ministerial conscience might demand, I added, rather disingenuously, I fear, that he needn't reply to my letter, as I had no permanent address.

It was some little time after my promotion to the commissary that Dorgan came on the job as a track-laying foreman. He was a heavy-set, black-browed fellow with a sinister face and deeply caverned, brooding eyes looking out furtively under their bushy coverts, and his chief characteristic was a crabbed reticence which not even the exigencies of handling a crew of steel-layers seemed able to break. His face was one not to be easily forgotten; from the first sight I had of it, it was vaguely familiar, and a thoughtful ransacking of the cubby-holes of memory very shortly recalled it for me. Dorgan was an escaped convict.

His jail-break dated back to my second year in the penitentiary, to a period just after I had been slated for the prison office work.

Dorgan--his name on the prison books was Michael Murphey, but we knew him only as "Number 3126"--had "brought" ten years for safe-blowing, and he was known in the prison yard and shops as a dangerous man.

Twice within my recollection of him he had been put in solitary confinement for fighting; and he was one of the few to whom the warden denied the small privileges accorded the "good conducts."

One day a hue and cry was raised and word was quickly pa.s.sed that Number 3126 was missing. He had planned his escape craftily. A new shop building was at that time in process of erection, and each day a gang of "trusties" went outside to haul stone. Of course, the safe-blower was not included in this outside gang, but one dark and rainy morning he included himself by the simple process of hog-tying and gagging one of the trusties detailed for the job, exchanging numbered jackets with him, and taking the man's place in the ranks of the stone-loaders, where he contrived to pa.s.s unnoticed by the guards.

The escape was entirely successful. At the critical moment Dorgan had overpowered the single wagon guard, leaving the man a candidate for admission to the hospital, and had made his break for liberty. We, of the inside, never knew, of course, the various steps taken in the attempt to recapture him. But they all appeared to be fruitless since Number 3126 was never brought back.

I failed utterly in an endeavor to a.n.a.lyze my own feelings when I recognized Dorgan and realized that an escaped man from my own prison was at work for my employers; an escaped criminal and a desperate one, at that. What was my duty in the premises? Should I bind myself, once for all, to the brotherhood of law-breakers--the submerged minority--by shielding this man and conniving at his escape? Or should I turn informer, telling the contractor-partners of the risk they ran by keeping Dorgan in the force--the risk that some night, after the money for the monthly pay-roll had been brought out from town, they would find the camp safe smashed and its contents gone?

While I was debating this question, inclined first in one direction by some new generosity on the part of one or the other of my employers, and again leaning the other way when I remembered that, in the eye of the law, I, myself, was in precisely the same category with Number 3126, I had another promotion. One evening, just after I had closed the commissary, one of the water-boys came to tell me that I was wanted in the contractors' office, a little shack at the far side of the end-of-track cantonments. Hadley, the senior member of the firm, was alone when I showed myself at the door.

"Come in, Bertrand," he invited, gruffly genial; "come in and wait a minute until I go over this estimate again. You'll find cigars in that box on the bunk."

Having nothing to do while I waited, I sat on a stool in a corner of the shack, smoking the gift cigar and silently regarding the man who had sent for me. He was a good example of the better type of Western contractor and out-door man; big-bodied, burly, whiskered like a miner, a keen driver on the work, but withal as kindly as a father when kindness was called for.

In due time he pushed the figuring pad aside and turned to me. "Drag up your stool, Jim; I want to talk to you," he began. And then: "How much experience have you had in keeping accounts?"

I told him briefly.

"In a bank, eh?" he queried, and I knew precisely what he was thinking.

He was wondering what I had done to break myself. In spite of all that had happened or might happen, I believe I was ready to tell him; but to my astonishment the curt questioning which all my previous experience had taught me to expect at this stage of the game did not come.

"This is a free country, Bertrand," he said, looking me squarely in the eye. "I'm not going to ask you why you quit bank bookkeeping to come out here and swing a pick in a construction camp. Here in the tall hills we don't think much of digging up graves--the graves of any man's past. You've done well in every job we've tried you at, and that's all to the good for you."

I said I had tried to fill the bill as well as I knew how, and he took me up promptly.

"We know you have; and that brings on more talk. Kenniston is leaving us to go prospecting. We've talked it over--Shelton and I--and you're to have the paymaster's job. Think you can hold it down?"

"I am sure I can--so far as the routine duties are concerned. But----"

Never, in all the soul-killing experiences of the parole period, had I been confronted with a test so gripping. Would this large-hearted man turn the keys of his money chest over to me if he knew I were an ex-convict, liable at any moment to be re-arrested for having broken my parole? I was silent so long that he began again.

"Looking around for a spade to begin the grave-digging?" he asked, with a sober smile. Then, with a note of unwonted gentleness in his voice: "I shouldn't do that if I were you, Jimmie. The man doesn't live who hasn't, at one time or another, had to dig a hole and bury something decently out of sight. Whatever you may have done in the past, you're not going to play marbles with the Hadley-and-Shelton pay-money.

That's about all there is to it. You may take hold to-morrow morning.

Kenniston will stay long enough to show you the ropes."