Branded Part 31

Whitredge's vanishing was like a trick of legerdemain; one moment he stood before us, and at the next he was gone. At his going, c.u.mmings and the turnkey also disappeared and I was left alone with Benedict. There was a hearty handgrasp to a.s.sure me that I was not dreaming, and then I said:

"I had given you up, Benedict. I thought they had you tied hand and foot back yonder in the big hills."

"Myers is handling that end of it," he returned. "I had other irons in the fire, and they've been getting hot in such rapid succession that I couldn't leave them. But I did what I could by wire--got the warden's promise that he would hold your case 'in suspension' until I could show up in person. Have they been treating you well? I'm afraid they haven't. You're not looking quite up to the mark."

I was beginning to understand--a little.

"When did you telegraph the warden?" I asked.

"Immediately; from Cripple Creek, and as soon as Barrett had told me your story. We had our reply at once, and I took the first train for Glendale, your old home town. What I have been able to dig up in that little dead-alive burg is a great plenty, Bertrand. Your arrest has turned out to be just about the most unfortunate thing that could possibly have happened for certain persons who were most anxious to bring it to pa.s.s--namely, two old rascals who made use of the traveling-man Barton's story and started the pursuit in the right direction."

"Call me Weyburn," I broke in. "That is my name--James Bertrand Weyburn--and I'm going to wear it, all of it, from this time on."

"I know," laughed the big attorney, drawing up the stool and seating himself beside the cot much as Whitredge had done at an earlier hour of the same day. "They call you 'Bert' and 'Herbert' down yonder in your home village, and they don't seem to know that your middle name is Bertrand."

"You say you have been digging: what did you find out?" I questioned eagerly.

"Some things that I was looking for and some that I wasn't. I had the advantage of being a total stranger to everybody, and all I had to do was to stroll around and ask questions. Let me ask you one, right now; do you know who the owners of the Lawrenceburg are?"

"A New York syndicate, I've always understood."

"Not in a thousand years!" retorted the lawyer, laughing again. "It is owned, pretty nearly in fee simple, by two old friends of yours--Abel Geddis and Abner Withers. More than that, it is a reorganized and renamed corporation founded upon a certain gold-brick proposition, called 'The Great Oro Mining and Reduction Company,' promoted and floated down in your section of the State something like five years ago by two men named Hempstead and Lesherton. Does that stir up any old memories for you?"

It did, indeed. "The Great Oro" was the mine for the capitalization of which Abel Geddis had used the money belonging to his depositors; the basis of the theft which had cost me three good years of my life.

"But I had understood that the 'Oro' was a fake, pure and simple!" I protested.

"It was. A claim had been located and a shaft sunk to ninety feet, but there was no mineral. That shaft is the present main shaft of the Lawrenceburg. After Geddis and Withers found they had been 'gold-bricked' they went to Colorado and looked the ground over for themselves. The result of that visit was a determination on their part to send a little good money after the bad, so they put a force in the mine and began to drift from the shaft-bottom, and shortly after that the workings began to pay."

"Which direction did that drift take?" I asked.

Benedict did not answer the question directly. "Things began to fit themselves together pretty rapidly after I got the facts in the history of 'The Great Oro'," he went on. "By that time the news of your arrest and return to the penitentiary had reached Glendale and the gossip bees were buzzing. Whitredge was rattling around like a pea in a dried bladder, holding midnight conferences in the bank with the two h.o.a.ry old villains who had sworn your liberty away, starting a pet.i.tion for your pardon, and I don't know what all. I didn't pay much attention to him because I was at that time more deeply interested in a number of other things."

"Go on," I begged breathlessly.

"First, I investigated carefully the records of your trial and it didn't take very long to discover that Whitredge had doubled-crossed you. He bribed the two deputies sent to transfer you from the police station in Glendale to the county seat. They were to bully and browbeat you into making an attempt to escape--thus affording proof presumptive of your guilt--and this they proceeded to do. They've admitted it under oath--after I had shown them what we could do to them if they didn't."

"Whitredge began to plan for that very thing almost at the first," I put in. "It was he who put the idea of running way into my head."

"Sure he did. But speaking of affidavits, I have another; from a fellow named Griggs; you remember him, of course,--your understudy in Geddis's bank at the time when you were bookkeeper and cashier? He swears that the original stock certificates in 'The Great Oro' were made out in the name of Abel Geddis--as you know they were--and that on a certain night just previous to your arrest, when he had been working late and had gone to the back room for his hat and coat, Geddis and Whitredge came in and Geddis opened the vault. Are you paying attention?"

I was choking with impatience, as he well knew, but he refused to be hurried.

"All in good time," he chuckled. "I'm coming to it by littles. Griggs was curious to know what was going on and he played the spy. He saw Geddis's name taken out of the stock certificates with an acid and your name written in its place. You see, they were confidently counting upon 'getting' you through Geddis's daughter and were framing things up to fit. How much or how little they took the young woman into their confidence I don't know."

"That doesn't matter now," I hastened to say.

"No; Griggs was the man I wanted, and I got him. He will testify in court, if he is obliged to. He would have done it at the time if Geddis and Whitredge hadn't discovered him and scared him stiff with a threat to put him in the prisoner's dock with you, as an accomplice. After I had secured Griggs's affidavit I wanted one more thing, and I got it--bought it. That was a map of the Lawrenceburg underground workings, corrected up to date. I knew Geddis and Withers must have one, and by a piece of great good luck I found a young surveyor's clerk who had made a tracing for Geddis from one of Blackwell's blue-prints. He had spoiled his first attempt by spilling a bottle of ink on it, so he made another. He didn't see any reason why he shouldn't sell me the spoiled copy."

"I know what you are going to say!" I shouted.

"I imagine you do," he laughed. "The Lawrenceburg workings have never gone downhill at all. They've been burrowing in the opposite direction all the time, and according to their own map they never touched pay-ore until they cut the Little Clean-Up vein below your hundred-and-fifty-foot level. Now you know why they have been fighting us so desperately, and why, as a final resort, they are willing to pay us five million dollars for a quit-claim to the Little Clean-Up. We've got them by the neck, Jimmie. We can make them pay for every dollar's worth of ore they have stolen from us."

It was too big to be surrounded at the first attempt. I completely lost sight of my own involvement in the upflash of joy at the thought that at the long last the two old scoundrels who had robbed others right and left were going to get what was coming to them. Benedict went on with his story quietly and circ.u.mstantially.

"I guessed at once what Whitredge was up to when I found that he was circulating that pardon pet.i.tion. He was aiming to make you a self-confessed criminal before we could have time to turn a wheel. At that, I wired a Cincinnati detective agency, and a young man who knew his business was put on the job. The detective's reports showed the whole thing up. Geddis, Withers and Whitredge were hustling like mad to make capital out of your recapture by the prison authorities. Whitredge was to advise you to urge the sale of the Little Clean-Up upon Barrett and Gifford, and your reward was to be a pardon, by the asking for which you would be virtually confessing your guilt. Thus the past would be buried beyond any possibility of a resurrection. Nice little scheme, wasn't it?"

"You have those two papers--the letter and the pet.i.tion," I said, with an uncontrollable shudder. "You'll never know how near Whitredge came to winning out. I was just about to sign when you came."

"Whitredge is a dangerous man," was Benedict's comment. "He took the train from Glendale last night, and the detective went with him, wiring me from a station up the line. I caught the next train and got here two hours ago. I might have headed him off of you, I suppose, but I had a bit of legal business to attend to first. If you are ready, we'll go.

Your wife is waiting for you in the warden's office, and she'll be wondering why we are so long about getting the doors unlocked."

"Go?" I stammered. "You--you mean that I'm free?"

"Sure you are! My legal business was to press the _habeas corpus_ proceedings which were begun as soon as I had obtained evidence of the miscarriage of justice in your trial before Judge Haskins. You are a free man. I left the order of the court with the warden as I came in."

There is a limit to human endurance, either of sorrow or of joy. I got up and tried to walk with Benedict to the cell door, which had been left standing open. I remember catching at the big lawyer's arm, and then the world went black before my eyes. And that is all I do remember.

We held our council of war--the final one in the long series--late in the evening of the day of climaxes in the sitting-room of a Hotel Buckingham suite, Benedict, Barrett and I. Barrett had arrived just as we were sitting down to dinner, having hurried east as soon as he could be spared at Cripple Creek.

"They are all in, down and out," was Barrett's summing-up of the situation, after he had heard Benedict's story. And then: "It's up to you, Jimmy"--looking away from me. "You owe those two old men and their scamp of a lawyer a pretty long score, and I guess you'll be wanting to pay it."

"I do!" I gritted. In a flash all the injustice I had suffered at the hands of Abel Geddis and Abner Withers and Cyrus Whitredge piled in upon me and there was no room in my heart for anything but retaliation.

Benedict clipped and lighted a cigar, and Barrett sat back in his chair and stared at the gas-fixture in the center of the ceiling.

"I can't blame you much, Jimmie," he offered. "I guess maybe, if the shoe were on my foot, I'd want to give them the limit. And yet----"

"There isn't any 'and yet'," I cried out.

"Perhaps not; but I don't know, Jimmie. If I were going to be the father of Polly's children, as you are, I--well, I don't believe I'd care to hand down that sort of a legacy to the children; a legacy of hatred--even a just hatred--gorged and surfeited on the thumb-s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g of two old men.

Whitredge will get what is coming to him; the Bar a.s.sociation will see to that. But these two old misers who are already tottering on the edge of the grave----"

"They have robbed me of my good name, and they have robbed us all of our good money!" I cut in rancorously.

At this, Benedict, who had been saying little, put in his word.

"I saw Whitredge an hour ago. He has been wiring Geddis and Withers--to tell them that the game is up. He says he supposes he will have to take his own medicine, but he asked me to intercede for the two old men. They have wired their Colorado attorneys to withdraw the Lawrenceburg suit and to lift the injunction, and they offer to turn in all their property if they are permitted to leave the country. That's as bad as a prison sentence for two men as old as they are. Will you let them do it, and call the account square, Weyburn?"

"No, by G.o.d!" If I set down the very words that I uttered, it is only in the interest of truth. At that moment I was like the soldiers who have seen their dead; I had seen the look in Polly's eyes, put there by that horrible week of waiting and suspense.

The room, as I have said, was the sitting-room of our suite--Polly's and mine--and I had neither seen nor heard the door of communication with the bed-room open. When I glanced up she was standing in the doorway, and I knew that she had heard. In the turning of a leaf she had flown across the room to drop on her knees beside me and bury her face in my lap.

"Oh, Jimmie--Jimmie, dear!" she sobbed; "you _must_ forgive--forgive and forget! For my sake--for your own sake--you must!"

That settled it. Benedict flung his freshly lighted cigar into the grate and turned away, and Barrett got up and crossed to the window. I stood up and lifted my dear girl to her feet, and with her tear-stained face between my palms I turned my back upon the past and told her what we were going to do.