Branded Part 9

He laughed scornfully. "A minute ago I said you were a fool, but you're worse than that--you're an infant! Why, good h.e.l.l, Weyburn, there are a dozen ways to beat the parole game! Look at me: I'm here, ain't I? And the warden knows all about it, does he? Not on your life! Every four weeks he gets a letter from me telling him what a fine time I'm having on Dad's farm down in Wayne, and how I'm all to the good and thanking him every day for all he did for me. What?"

"Somebody mails those letters for you in Wayne?" I asked.

"Sure! And a little split for the marshal in the nearest town does the rest. Bimeby, when I've collected enough of the debt I spoke of, I'll shake the dust and disappear."

"They'll find you and bring you back."

"Not without a fine-tooth comb, they won't. This old world is plenty good and wide when you learn how to use it."

"I suppose I haven't learned yet; and I don't want to learn--in your way, Kellow."

Again he gave me the sneering laugh.

"You may as well begin, and have it over with. It's all the same to you, now, whether you cracked the bank or didn't. You may think you can live square and live the prison-smell down, but you can't. It'll stick to you like your skin. Wherever you go, you'll be a marked man."

Though I had devoured the bar hand-out to the final crumb, I was still half-famished; and hunger is but a poor ally in any battle. What he was saying was truth of the truth, so far as the blunt facts were concerned. Every failure I had made in the six weary months confirmed it. There was little room in the world of the well-behaved for the man who was honest enough--or foolish enough--to confess himself an ex-convict; less still for a man who had been made the object of a persecuting conspiracy. None the less, I had resolution, or obstinacy, enough to say:

"I don't believe it."

"That's what makes me say you're a fool!" he snapped back. "You've got the name, and you may as well have the game. The world is dead easy, if you take it on its blind side; easy living, easy money. Listen, Weyburn, and I'll show you how you can climb into the bandwagon."

I listened because I could not well help it, being the man's wretched beneficiary, in a sense. As he talked I felt the ground of good resolutions slipping from beneath my feet. He was staging the old and time-honored swindle--the gold-brick game--and he needed a confederate.

The fish was almost as good as landed, and with a little coaching I could step in and clinch the robbery. Kellow proposed to stake me for the clothes and the needful stage properties; and my knowledge of banking and finance, limited as it was, would do the rest. It was a cinch, he averred, and when it was pulled off we could divide the spoils and vanish.

It was hardly a temptation. That word calls up a mental picture of stern virtues a.s.sailed on every side and standing like a rock in a storm. But, stripped of their poetic glamor, the virtues--and the vices, for that matter,--are purely human; they can rise no higher or sink no lower than the flesh-and-blood medium through which they find their expression. The six months of hardship and humiliation which had brought me to a pa.s.s at which I could eat a saloon luncheon at the expense of a thief were pushing me over the brink. Kellow sat back in his chair, smoking quietly, but I could feel his black eyes boring into my brain. When he judged that the time was fully ripe, he drew a fat roll of bank-notes from his pocket, stripped ten ten-dollar bills from it and tossed them across the table to me.

"There's the stake, and here's the lay," said he, tersely. "Your name's Smollett; you've struck it rich, and you're on your way home to New York, we'll say, from your mine in Colorado. You're stopping at the Marlborough, and we'll run across you accidentally--I and the come-on--to-morrow forenoon in the hotel lobby. Get that?"

"I hear what you are saying."

"All right. Now for the preliminaries. Any all-night p.a.w.nbroker can fit you out with a couple of grips and some clothes that will let you dress the part--or at least let you into the hotel. Then, to-morrow morning bright and early you can hit the ready-made tailors and blossom out right as the honest miner spending some of his money for the glad rags. I'm at the Marlborough myself--J. T. Jewett, Room 706--but, of course, I won't know you; you'll just b.u.t.t in as a stranger to both of us. When we get together I'll give you the cues as we go along."

During all this talk the hundred dollars had lain on the table between us. It didn't look like money to me; it stood for food and decent clothing and a bath--but chiefly for food. Slowly I took it up and fingered it, almost reverently, straightening out the crumpled corners of the bills and smoothing them down. . . .

I scarcely know how I got away from Kellow, nor do I know why he chose to stay on there in the back room of that miserable doggery, drinking whiskey sours alone and smoking his high-priced cigars. But I do know that I was up against the fight of my life when I went out to face the bitter night wind in the streets.

It was a singular thing that helped me to win the fight, temporarily, at least. By all accounts it ought to have been those three heart-warming days spent with Whitley a month earlier, and his farewell words of helpfulness and cheer spoken as I was boarding the outgoing train at the Springville station. But though Whitley's st.u.r.dy faith in me came to do its part, it was another and much longer leap of memory that made me hesitate and draw back; a flash carrying me back to my school-days in Glendale . . . to a certain afternoon when a plain-faced little girl, the daughter of our physics and chemistry teacher, had told me, with her brown eyes ablaze, what she thought of dishonesty in general, and in particular of the dishonesty of a boy in her cla.s.s who was lying and stealing his way past his examinations.

I don't know to this day why I should have recalled Polly Everton and her flaming little diatribe against thievery and hypocrisy at that desperate moment. She, and her quiet college-professor father who had seemed so out of place teaching in a Glendale school, had dropped out of my life years before. But the fact remained, and at the memory, Kellow's bribe, gripped pocket-deep in my hand, burnt me like a coal of fire. With a gasp I realized that I was over the brink at last, stumbling and falling into the pit which has no bottom. With a single dollar of the thief's money spent and gone beyond recall, I should be lost.

With that memory of little Polly Everton to drive me, I went doggedly back to the riverside slum and sought for Kellow where I had left him.

He was gone, but the newly aroused resolution, the outworn swimmer's stubborn steeling of the nerves and muscles to make one more stroke before he drowns, persisted. Footsore and half-frozen, I tramped the dozen squares to the great hotel in the business district. The night clerk sized me up for precisely what I was, listening with only half an ear to my stammering question. But he deigned to answer it, nevertheless. Yes; Mr. Jewett was the gentleman who had Number 706, but he was not in. His key was still in the box.

There were writing-desks in the lobby, a number of them, and I went to the first that offered. Some guest had left a few sheets of the hotel paper and an envelope. Without a written word to go with it, I slipped the unbroken bribe into the envelope, sealed the flap hurriedly and went back to the clerk.

"Put this in Mr. Jewett's key-box, if you please," I requested; and when I had seen the thing done, and had verified the number of the box with my own eyes, I headed once more for the inhospitable streets.

It was on the icy sidewalk, directly in front of the revolving doors of the big hotel, that my miracle was wrought. While I hesitated, not knowing which way to turn for shelter for the remainder of the night, a cab drove up and a man, m.u.f.fled to the ears in a fur-lined overcoat, got out. He was apparently an arrival from one of the night trains; while he was slamming the cab door a bell-hop from the Marlborough skated across the sidewalk, s.n.a.t.c.hed a couple of grips from the front seat of the cab and disappeared with them.

Humped and shivering, I was almost at the traveler's elbow when he turned and felt in his pockets for the money to pay the cab driver. I was so busy envying him the possession of that warm, fur-lined coat that I didn't pay much attention to what he was doing, but it was evident that he had forgotten in which pocket he carried his change, since he was feeling first in one and then in another.

Suddenly my heart skipped a beat and then fell to hammering a fierce tattoo as a gust of the highwayman's madness swept over me. The man had taken out a huge pocket roll of bank-notes and was running the bills over to see if there were one small enough to serve the cab-paying purpose. Obviously there was not, and with a grunt of impatience he searched again, this time unearthing a handful of silver.

Dropping the proper coin into the cabman's outstretched hand, he turned and disappeared through the revolving doors, and at the same instant the cabby whipped up his horse and drove away. Then I saw it lying almost at my feet; a small black pocketbook which the traveler had let fall in his fumbling search for change.

Judged by any code of ethics--my own, for that matter--what followed was entirely indefensible. The grab for the treasure, its swift hiding, the breathless dash into the shadows of the nearest cross street; all these named me for what I was at the moment--a half-starved, half-frozen, despair-hounded thief. When I had made sure that there was no policeman in sight I examined my prize by the light of a crossing electric. The black pocketbook contained sixty-three dollars in bills and a single half-dollar in silver. And a hasty search revealed nothing by which the loser could be identified; there were no papers, no cards, nothing but the money.

Though a desperate disregard for anything like property rights had prompted the sudden s.n.a.t.c.h and the thief-like dash for cover, I am glad to be able to say that common honesty, or some shadowy simulacrum of it, revived presently and sent me back to the hotel, though not without terrible foot-draggings, you may be sure. And as I went, many-tongued temptation clamored riotously for a hearing: the man had so much--he would never miss this carelessly spilt driblet; I had no means of identifying him, and with the fur-lined coat removed I should probably fail to recognize him; if I should try to describe him, the hotel clerk, he of the detached and superior manner, would doubtless take the pocketbook in charge and that would be the last I should ever hear of it.

Giving these arguments their just weight, I hope I may take some small credit for the perseverance which finally drove me through the swinging doors and up to the clerk's counter. For the second time that night I sought speech with the bediamonded chief lackey, and got it grudgingly.

No; no one had registered within the past few minutes, and no man answering my exceedingly incomplete description had presented himself at the counter. Conscious that I must do, there and then, all that ever could be done, I persisted.

"The gentleman I speak of came in a cab and he had two hand-bags; they were brought in by one of the bell-boys," I said, thinking that this might afford the clue.

The clerk looked afar over my head. "Some guest who already has his room and had gone to fetch his grips." Then, with the contemptuous lip-curl that I had encountered too often not to recognize it at sight: "Who are you, anyway?--a plain-clothes man looking for crooks? You'll not find them in the Marlborough. We don't keep that kind of a house."

I turned away, gripping the precious treasure-trove in my pocket. For a full half-year I had kept faith with the prison authorities and the law, living the life of a hunted animal and coming at last to the choice between starvation and a deliberate plunge into the underworld.

Through it all I had obeyed the requirements of my parole in letter and in spirit. But now----

The black pocketbook was warm in my hand. It was mine, if not by the finder's right, at least by the right of possession, and it contained the price of freedom. Before I had reached the corner, of the first street my determination was taken, and there had been but one instant of hesitation. This had come in a frenzied burst of red rage when I remembered that, when all was said, I owed this last downward step, as well as all that had gone before, to two old men who . . . I stopped short in my shuffling race to the railroad station. I had money; enough to take me to Glendale--and far beyond when the deed should be done. Years before I had sworn to kill them, and since that time they had doubly earned their blotting-out.

I don't know to this day whether it was some remaining shreds of the conventional conscience, or a broken man's inability to screw retaliatory determination to the murder point, that sent me onward to the westbound station and framed my reply to the ticket agent's curt question, "Where to?" when I thrust my money through his wicket. Be that as it may, a short half-hour later I had boarded a through westbound train and was crouching in the corner of a seat in the overheated smoking-car with a ticket to Denver in my pocket. Though I was not on my way to commit a double murder, I was none the less an outlaw. I had broken my parole.

VIII

Westward

A sleety rain was r.e.t.a.r.ding the March dawn and obscuring the Middle Western farmstead landscape when the lights were turned off in the through-train smoking-car. A glance at the railroad time-table which had been given me with my ticket proved that the train was well past the boundaries of my home State, and suddenly the vile atmosphere of the crowded, night-fouled car seemed shot through with the life-giving ozone of freedom.

Before long, however, the reaction set in. True, I was free at last, but it was the freedom only of the escaped convict--of the fugitive.

To be recaptured now would mean a return to prison and the serving out of the remainder of the full five-year term, with an added penalty for the broken parole. I knew well the critical watchfulness with which the workings of the new law were regarded. The indeterminate sentence itself was on trial, and the prison authorities and others interested were resolved that the trial should be fair and impartial. Therefore I might count confidently upon pursuit.

At first there seemed little likelihood that my midnight flight could be traced. In the great city I had left behind I had been only an uncounted unit in a submerged minority. It was doubtful if any one besides Kellow and the keeper of the police records would know or remember my name. There had been many travelers to board the through train with me, and surely one might consider himself safely lost in such a throng, if only by reason of the unit inconsequence.

But now I was to be brought face to face with a peril which constantly besets the fugitive of any sort in an age of rapid and easy travel.

Under such conditions the smallness of the modern world has pa.s.sed into a hackneyed proverb. I had scarcely rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and straightened up in the car seat which had served for a bed when some one came down the aisle, a hand was clapped on my shoulder, and a cheery voice said:

"Well, I'll be dog-daddled! Bert Weyburn--of all the people in the world!"

There was murder in my heart when I looked up and recognized a Glendale man whom I had known practically all my life; a rattle-brained young fellow named Barton, who had tried a dozen different occupations after leaving school, and had, at my last account of him, become a traveling salesman for our single large factory--a wagon-making company.

Under the existing conditions Barton was easily the last man on earth whom I should have chosen out of a worldful of men for a traveling companion; but before I could do more than nod a surly response to his greeting he had slipped into the empty half of the seat and was offering me a cigar.

At first our talk was awkwardly constrained, as it was bound to be with one party to it wishing fervently that the other were at the bottom of the sea. But Horace Barton was much too good-natured, and too loquacious, to let the constraint remain as a barrier. Working around by degrees to the _status quo_--my _status quo_--he finally broke the ice in the pond of the intimate personalities--as I knew he would.

"I'm mighty glad to see you out, and alive and well, Bert," was the way in which he brushed aside the awkwardnesses. "You've had pretty tough lines, I know; but that's no reason why you should be grouchy with me.