Branded Part 30

"The injunction business?"

"Yes; haven't you heard?"

I shook my head.

"It was in the newspapers, but I suppose they haven't let you see them here. Your mine is shut down. You were operating as bonded lessees under a temporary injunction, or something of that sort, weren't you?

Well, the Federal court has made the injunction permanent and tied you up. As soon as I got this I smelled trouble for you, and as your attorney in fact I got busy with the wires. The situation isn't half as bad as it might be. I understand that the plaintiff company, a corporation called the Lawrenceburg Mining & Reduction Company, has offered you people five million dollars for a transfer of all rights and t.i.tles under your holdings, and that, notwithstanding the injunction, this offer still holds good."

Since it is a proverb that an empty stomach is a mighty poor team-mate for a befogged brain, I was unable to see what Whitredge was driving at, and I told him so.

"Nothing in particular," he countered, "except to remind you that you still have a good chance to play safe. We are going to 'wrastle' you out of here, just as I say, Bert, my boy, at any cost, and it's a piece of great good luck that you won't have to count the pennies in whatever it may cost."

"But I shall have to count them if our mine is shut down."

"Not if you and your partners make this sale to the Lawrenceburg people. Five millions will give each of you a million and two-thirds apiece. It's up to you right now to persuade your two partners to close with the offer while it still holds good. It's liable to be withdrawn any minute, you know. The other two may be able to hang on and put up a further fight, but you can't afford to."

"Why can't I?"

"For one mighty good reason, if there isn't any other. I met your wife this morning, Bert. She's stopping across town at the Buckingham--just to be as near you as she can get. You can't afford to do, or to leave undone, anything that'll keep that little woman dangling on the ragged edge. She thinks too much of you."

He had me on the run, and I think he knew it. What he did not know was that the smash, the solitary cell, and a weakened body were pushing me harder than any of his specious arguments.

"I've got to get out!" I groaned, with the cold sweat starting out all over me. "Whitredge, I've had enough in these few days to break an iron man!"

"Naturally; married only a month, and all that. I'm a dried-up old bachelor, Bert, my boy, but I know exactly how you feel. As you say, you've got to get out of here, and the quickest way is the right way--when you stop to think of that poor lonesome little woman waiting over yonder in the hotel. I've come fixed for you"--he was on his feet, now, fumbling in his pockets for some papers and a fountain pen--"I've drawn up a letter to your two partners,--let me see; where is it? Oh, yes, here you are--a letter from you advising them to close with that Lawrenceburg offer. If you'll just authorize me to send a wire in your name, and then read this letter that I've blocked out and sign it----"

I glanced hastily over the type-written sheet he handed me. It was a business-like letter addressed to Barrett and Gifford, going fully into the situation from the point of view of a man needing ready money, and urging the acceptance of the Lawrenceburg offer, not wholly for the personal reason upon which Whitredge had been enlarging, but emphatically as a prudent business measure--an alternative to the possible loss of everything.

"You see just how the matter stands," he went on while I was reading the letter. "They've got you stopped, and that is pretty good evidence that the court is holding you as trespa.s.sers on Lawrenceburg property.

The next thing in order, if you fellows hold out, will be a suit for damages which will gobble up all your former returns from the mine and leave you without anything--you and both of your partners."

"What do you get out of it if this sale goes through, Whitredge?" I asked him suddenly.

He laughed as if I had perpetrated a new joke.

"What do _I_ get out of it? Why, bless your innocent soul, Bert, ain't I working for my fee? And I tell you I'm going to charge you a rattling big one, too, when I can shake hands with you as a millionaire and better on the sidewalk in front of this State eleemosynary Inst.i.tution!"

"You talk as if you had the sidewalk means in your hand," I said, yielding a little to his enthusiasm in spite of my suspicions of him and my feeble efforts to stand alone.

"I have!" he announced oracularly. "I have here"--slapping a second folded paper which he had drawn from his pocket--"I have here a pet.i.tion for your free and unconditional pardon, addressed to the Governor and signed by the trial judge, the prosecuting attorney, and by ten of the twelve members of the jury. Oh, I tell you, young man, I've been busy these last three days. You may have been setting me down as a hard-hearted old lawyer, toughened to all these things, Bert, but when I read that newspaper story, of how you were kidnapped, as you may say--torn from the arms of a loving wife and dragged aboard of a train and railroaded back to prison--every drop of blood in me rose up in protest, and I swore then and there that if there was any such thing as executive clemency in this broad land of ours, you should have it!"

If I had been wholly well and out of prison perhaps the cheap bombast in all this would have been apparent at once. But I was neither well nor free. And Polly's heart was breaking; I didn't need Whitredge's word for this--I knew it by all the torments of inward conviction.

I understood well enough what he was asking me to do: to tip the scale against what might be Barrett's and Gifford's better judgment, and to sign a paper which would stamp me for all time as a criminal pleading, not for justice, but for pardon. In spite of this knowledge the pressure Whitredge had brought to bear was well-nigh irresistible.

Barrett and the Colorado lawyers evidently had their hands too full to think of me; and, in any event, I could not see what possible chance they might have of reopening my case and proving my innocence. At the end of it I was reaching for the pen in Whitredge's hand, but at the touch of the thing with which I was to sign away my fighting rights for all time a little flicker of strength came.

"You must give me time, Whitredge; a little time to think this over," I pleaded. "Four years and a half ago I told you I was innocent--I tell you so again. You are asking me to confess that I was guilty; if I sign that pet.i.tion it will be a confession in fact. I have sworn a thousand times that I'd rot right here inside of these walls before I'd ask for a pardon for a crime that wasn't mine. Leave these papers and let me think about it. Give me a chance to convince myself that there is no other way!"

He looked at his watch, and if he were disappointed he was too well schooled in his trade to show it.

"All right; just as you say," he agreed. "Shall we make it this afternoon--say, some time after three o'clock?"

"Make it to-morrow morning," I begged.

This time he hesitated, again pulling out his watch and consulting its face as if it were an oracle. I had no means of knowing--what I learned later--that he was making a swift calculation upon the arriving and departing hours of certain railroad trains. None the less, he agreed somewhat reluctantly to the further postponement; but when the turnkey was unlocking the door he gave me a final shot.

"I don't want to influence you one way or the other, Bert--that is, not against your best interests; but while you're making up your mind don't leave the little woman out. I shall see her at dinner to-night, and she'll want to know what's what. I'm going to give her your love and tell her you're trying mighty hard to be reasonable. Is that right?"

XXIV

Restoration

At the clanging of the cell door behind the departing lawyer I was to all intents and purposes a broken reed. The theorists may say what they please about the fine and courageous quality of resolution which rises only the higher the harder it is beaten down; but man is human, and there are limits beyond which the finest resiliency becomes dead and brittle and there is no rebound.

The temptation to yield was both subtle and compelling. Reason, the kind of reason which scoffs at ideals, told me that I was foolish to fight for a principle. On the one hand there were sharp misery, the loss of freedom, poverty and suffering for Polly: on the other, liberty and a generous degree of affluence. We could hide ourselves, Polly and I, in some remote corner of the world where no one knew; and our share of the five millions, wealth even as wealth is reckoned in the day of wealth, would put us far enough beyond the reach of want; nay, it would do more--it would silence the gossiping tongues if there were any to wag.

Up and down the narrow limits of my cell I paced, praying at one moment for strength to hold out to the end, and at the next cursing myself for an idiotic splitter of hairs helpless to break away from the manaclings of an idea. Love, reason, common sense were all ranged on the side of the compromise with principle; and opposed to them there was only the stubborn protest against injustice pleading feebly and despairingly for its final hearing.

In the midst of the struggle the kitchen "trusty" brought the mid-day meal, and for the first time in forty-eight hours I forced myself to eat.

A sound body, weakened only by anxiety and abstinence, is quick to respond to a resumption of the normal. Under the food stimulus I felt better, stronger. But now the strength was all on the side of yielding.

With the quickening pulses came the keen l.u.s.t of life. To live, to be free, to enjoy, in the years, few or many, of the little earthly span: after all, these were the only realities.

Whitredge had left his fountain pen, and the papers--the letter to Barrett and Gifford and the pet.i.tion--were lying on the cot where I had thrown them. For the last time I put the pleading protest under foot.

Freedom, a fortune, and Polly's happiness: the triple bribe was too great and I uncapped the pen.

It was at this precise moment that footsteps in the corridor warned me that someone was coming. A bit of the old convict secretiveness made me hastily thrust the papers out of sight under the cot blankets, and at the rattling of the key in the lock I stood up to confront--Whitredge.

"You?" I said. "I thought you were going to give me until to-morrow morning."

He looked strangely perturbed, and the nervousness was also in his voice when he said: "I meant to, Bert, but I've had a wire, and I've got to go back to Glendale on this next train"--dragging his watch out of its pocket and glancing at it hurriedly. "Those papers: you've had time enough to think things over, and I'm sure you've made up your mind to do the sensible thing. Let me have them so I can set things in motion before I leave town."

I wondered why he kept jerking his head around to look over his shoulder as he talked, and why the turnkey jingled his keys and waited. But the time for indecision on my part was past and I reached under the blanket for the two papers. With the three-legged stool for a writing-table I was kneeling to put my name at the bottom of the letter to my partners when there were more footsteps in the corridor, hurried ones, this time, and I looked up to see the squarely built, competent figure of our Western lawyer, Benedict, standing in the cell doorway, with the deputy warden, c.u.mmings, backgrounding him.

"h.e.l.lo, Whitredge; at your old tricks, are you?" snapped the new-comer brusquely. And then to me: "What are you signing there, Bertrand?"

"Nothing, now--without your advice," I said, getting up and handing him the letter.

Whitredge couldn't get out, with Benedict filling the doorway, so he had to stand a cringing second prisoner, looking this way and that, like a rat searching for a hole, while the big Westerner read calmly through the letter which had been written out for me. That moment amply repaid me for much that I had suffered at the hands of Cyrus Whitredge.

"Humph!" said Benedict, folding the letter and thrusting it into his pocket. "Now what's that other doc.u.ment?"

I gave him the pet.i.tion for pardon, and again he took his time with the reading.

"Nice little scheme you were trying to pull off!" he said to Whitredge, after the pet.i.tion, accurately refolded, had gone to join the pocketed letter. "You are certainly an ornament to an honorable profession."

Then, stepping into the cell and standing aside: "You may go. We'll know where to find you when you're needed."