Branded Part 32

"It shall be as you say, Polly; we'll go back to the tall hills and forget it--and make other people forget it. And we'll let Mr. Benedict, here, do just what he pleases, no more and no less, with a pair of old plotters who haven't so very many years to wait before they will have to turn in their score to the Great Evener."

At this Barrett jerked out his watch and broke in brusquely; and as at other times, the brusquerie was only a mask for the things that a man doesn't wear on his sleeve.

"Cut it short, you two turtle-doves; you've got about forty-five minutes before the Westbound Limited is due, and you'd better be packing your grips. Come on downstairs, Benedict, and I'll buy you a drink to go with that red necktie of yours. Let's go."

XXV

The Mountain's Top

There is little to add; nothing, perhaps, if the literary unities only were to be considered. The trials and tribulations have all been lived through; the man and the woman have found each other; the villains have been given--if not altogether a full measure of their just dues, at least a sufficient approach to it; and virtue--but no, here the figure breaks down; virtue hasn't been rewarded. There wasn't any especial virtue, since there is little credit in merely enduring what cannot be cured.

Of what happened after our return to Colorado only a few things stand out as being at all worthy of note. For one, Barrett and I, with Benedict's help, took up the case of one Dorgan, _alias_ Michael Murphey, _alias_ No. 3126, whom we found still preserving his incognito in a dam-building camp in Idaho. Appealing to the Governor and Board of Pardons of my home State, we made it appear that Dorgan was a reformed man and no longer a menace to society, and in due time had the satisfaction of seeing him set legally free.

As another act of pure justice, tempered with a good bit of filial and fraternal affection--Polly was the prime mover in this--my mother and sister were brought to Colorado, and a home was built for them in Colorado Springs, where my sister, ignoring a bank account which would have enabled her to sit with folded hands for the remainder of her days, promptly gathered a group of little girls about her and began teaching them the mysteries of the three "R's."

A third outreaching--and this, also, was Polly's idea--was in the altruistic field. A fund was set apart out of the lavish yieldings of the Little Clean-Up, the income from which provides in perpetuity that at the doors of at least one prison of the many in our land the outcoming convict shall be met and helped to stand upon his own feet, if so be he has any feet to stand upon.

Gray granite peaks and valleys fallow-dun under the westering autumn sun; vistas of inspiring horizons leading the eye to vanishing levels remote and vaguely deliminating earth and sky, or soaring with it to shimmering heights dark-green or bald; these infinities were spread before us in celestial array one afternoon in the first year of peace and joy when we--my good angel and I--clambered together to the summit of the mountain behind the Little Clean-Up.

After the little interval of reverent adoration which is claimed by all true lovers of the mountain infinities at the opening of the illimitable doors, we fell to talking of the past--my past--as we sat on a projecting shelf of the summit rock.

"No," I said. "I can't admit that there is anything regenerative in punishment. If I had been the thief that everybody believed I was, I should have come out of prison still a thief--with an added grudge against society. While I was treated well, as a whole, nothing was done to arouse the better man in me, or even to ascertain if there might possibly be a better man in me."

There was what I have learned to call the light of all-wisdom in Polly's eyes when she answered.

"Oh, if one must lean altogether upon sheer logic and the pure materialism of this divided by that and multiplied by something else,"

she returned. "But there are two kinds of regeneration, Jimmie, dear; the kind which involves a radical change in the life-motive, and the other which is merely a stripping of the husks from a strong soul that never needed changing."

"Your love would put me where I don't belong," I protested humbly.

"No; not my love: what you are, and what you have done."

"What I am, you have made me; and what I have done you have suggested.

No; the injustice, the prison, the brand of the convict, the dodging and evading, the knowledge that, if the truth were to be blazoned abroad, I could never hope to recross the chasm which Judge Haskins's sentence had opened between me and the world at large; these things made a shuddering coward of me--which I was not in the beginning. It was this prison-bred cowardice that made me potentially Kellow's murderer, willing in heart and mind, and waiting only for the firing spark of provocation. It was the same cowardice that made me Agatha Geddis's slave, and very nearly her murderer. Worse still, it sent me to you with sealed lips when I should have told you all that you had a right to know."

"Well? If you will have it so, what then?"

"Only this: that the brand which the law put upon the man wasn't any sign of the cross to make a new creature of him, as you have been trying to make me believe. That's all."

Polly's smile is a thing to make any man tingle to the roots of his hair. "As if the past, or anything in it, could make any difference to us now!" she chided. "Haven't we learned to say:

'Not heaven itself upon the past has power, But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour'?

Beloved man, I'm hungry; and it's miles and miles to dinner. Shall we go?"