The Long Lane's Turning Part 25

She turned her head, for Malcolm was speaking to her. "When you come to Nancy's you must let me take you both out to see these _proteges_ of mine that have to be shut up for the good of their souls. Wouldn't you like to, eh?"

She thought he must hear the beating of her pulse. "Would--don't they resent being stared at?" she faltered.

"Bless your heart!" he said, with one of his bear-like laughs. "It's good for them. They don't get a squint at roses and sunshine every day! A sight like you two girls will make them want to get out, and keep them on their best behaviour, so as to earn all the commutation good marks bring! I'll get the Warden to take us through the shops.

That's the most interesting part."

"I must be quite certain!" The words seemed singing themselves over in a ba.n.a.l refrain that sounded through the stir and rumble of the station, mingling with 'Lige's hearty voice of welcome, and her father's loving greeting as he lifted her carefully from the car step.

"You're a lot better? _Sure?_" he queried anxiously, as he held both her hands tight in his.

"Sure!" she smiled. "We've had a _wonderful_ time. I couldn't begin to tell you about it in my letters. But I'm glad to be home just the same! How are mother and Chilly? Mr. Malcolm was on the train--there he is now, waving his hand from the window. Did the wireless tell you we lost a propeller-blade two days out?"

The dusk flowed over them in violet waves as they drove homeward and she laughed and talked gaily, with her hand clasped in his under the carriage-robe, the horses prancing and curvetting in the keen October air. Once, at a crossing, she put out her hand and touched the coachman's arm.

"Take Main Street, 'Lige," she directed. "I'd like to see how it looks."

As he swung into the broader thoroughfare, her father said, "You're looking at the new bank building. You see it's nearly done."

But she was really looking beyond, at a four-storied office-front, on whose second floor the windows of a suite showed in chaste, golden letters the legend, "Henry Sevier, Attorney-at-Law." The windows were blank and dusty, and their blinds were drawn.

"Why, you're shivering!" said her father suddenly, and drew the robe more closely about her.

She smiled at him.

"No," she said, "but I think I'm just a little tired. Drive faster, 'Lige. I--I want to get home."

CHAPTER x.x.xI

AMBUSH

Lying in his bunk Harry awoke to the consciousness of another bleak dawn. The morning waking was always a pain to him, for in sleep the barriers fell away and the mind fared forth along the free, sweet highways of memory. He did not open his eyes at once, but he felt the rasp of the coa.r.s.e blanket at his throat, smelled the cold clamminess of the granite floor, and realised by a thousand reminders of the sharpened senses that another round of the treadmill awaited him. He remembered drearily that to-morrow would be Thanksgiving Day. In the world outside it was the time of yellow maples and the red of the frost-kissed sumac, of wild grapes purpling in the thickets and clumps of alder blooms in the fence-corners--of blazing hearths and good fellowship!

Mingling with the stir of reawakening life in the corridors there sounded a light _tap-tap_--the tattoo of a tin spoon against the stone.

Without moving he opened his eyes. Paddy the Brick was up and dressed--if donning the cheap flannel shirt, the striped jacket and trousers, might be called dressing--and, stooped in the corner of the cell, was industriously at work with the 'prison-wireless.' For a while Harry watched him curiously; then suddenly his ear made out a word. For in time he had taken his cell-mate's sneering advice, and because the busy mind, turned too long upon itself, must perforce occupy itself with something extraneous, had mastered the code that was scratched in the white-washed wall. He had a retentive memory, sharpened now by disuse, and the tiny _tap-tap_ that he had learned to distinguish through the m.u.f.fling masonry, though he never used it as a means of communication, had soon become an open book to him. Strange things he had heard in this manner--furtive, uncouth gossip of that under-world, which, although much was couched in an unknown _argot_ and was meaningless to him, had yet served in a way to lighten the unendurable emptiness. The word he had caught now was "visitors."

In another moment Harry was listening intently, for the sounds were spelling something which instinct told him was wickedly suggestive though he could not guess its purport. "Warden ... to-day," tapped the signalled code, "--take ... number nine ... machine ... your ...

chance--"

Whatever else might have been said was blotted by the whirring clang of the electric gong in the central corridor. Through the great lamelliform bee-hive it sent its waking clamour, the signal for rising to the new day's tasks. With the sound Paddy the Brick thrust the stolen utensil out of sight and shot a stealthy glance at the upper bunk, but its occupant had apparently just awakened.

All the ensuing morning, as he rubbed himself down in the plenteous cold water which the spigot provided, and did his share in the cleaning of the bare cell--while he sopped his brown bread in the weak breakfast coffee, and presently tramped in the long file to the shop to feed the voracious machines with the clean-smelling leather--all the while Harry's brain was busy with the message he had heard. "Visitors?"

Occasionally visitors had pa.s.sed through the shops--panging reminders to him of the world outside. Perhaps in some devious way the other had heard that some would come to-day. But turn and twist the rest of the words how he might, they meant nothing. Dinner time came, with its lifting break in the unvarying monotony, then the long lock-step back to the shop and its labour.

The work had come to be far more welcome to him than the cell, with the partner to whose society he was chained. The hum and click and throb stole his thought, and the automatic movements, in which he had become an adept, soothed his aching mind. For several hours this afternoon the mechanical occupation absorbed him and he worked on, noting little about him. Then, all at once, as he turned to pick up the bit of cotton waste with which he kept the steel clutches of the machine before him free from dust, he became conscious of something unaccustomed. His own machine was number eight. At the one adjoining, number nine, which was next to the broad middle way bisecting the shop, Paddy the Brick was wont to stand. Now, however, another man was in his stead. At near view Harry recognised him as one whose place was further along, next the wall, and glancing in that direction he saw that Paddy the Brick was running the other's machine.

The meaning of the "wireless" message leaped instantly to his mind.

When, after dinner, the long line had broken and distributed its units, the man had taken number nine, and the exchange had been effected so quickly and naturally that it had been thus far unnoted by the watchful Superintendent sitting moveless on the raised platform at the end of the aisle, his revolvers on the desk before him. What did the transfer mean? Harry wondered. The men nearby worked on, but they seemed to be restive, waiting for something, with a subdued excitement and anxiety.

As he glanced sideways toward the newcomer, at the haggard parchment visage, lean and ashen with the pallor of long confinement, he noted that the other kept his back to the platform and his head studiously bent over his machine, and there darted to Harry's recollection what Paddy the Brick had said one day to him--of the "lifer" and his hatred of the warden. The tapped message of the morning had spoken of the latter, too. "Your ... chance!" Could that have meant the chance to "get" the man he hated?

As if in answer to the startled thought, there sounded voices behind him. He looked over his shoulder. The Warden himself was entering the door at the end of the shop, and there were visitors with him.

Then instantly every conscious thought save one fled from him and he clapped a hand to his mouth to stifle a cry. With the Warden were three figures, a man and two women, and the women were Echo Allen and Nancy Langham.

A sickness like that of death rushed upon him. That she could come there--careless of the chance that she might see him in these loathsome surroundings--a common convict, with cropped hair and striped clothing, marked with all the badges of the jailbird--smote him with an unendurable pain. She, who knew that he had loved her--to see him in this guise! All the agony he had suffered rolled over him anew, intensified a thousand-fold. He pulled his cap-visor low over his eyes and s.n.a.t.c.hing up the bit of oily waste, drew it across his cheek, smudging his face from chin to brow.

The little group of four had paused near the desk of the Superintendent, the Warden smilingly pointing out to the two girls the details of the work. Harry's fingers performed their task by sheer instinct; for his very life he had not been able to help stealing a swift sidelong look at Echo's face, pale beneath its russet cloud of hair, and he distinguished with a fierce bitterness the jaded shadows that had crept beneath her eyes, tokens that belied her conventionally polite show of interest. So, though she condemned him to this torture, she too suffered!

Could he have looked beneath that controlled exterior he would have discerned a pain and dread to match his own. With that luncheon in the dining-car a sense of fate had fallen upon her, heavy and irrevocable, as though some huge weight was closing down. The whip of conscience had driven her to this day's quest. If the law had erred--if, in truth an innocent man, as Mason believed, lay under condemnation--it was for lack of her testimony: the thought had laid upon her sensitive mind a new sense of guilty responsibility. She must be certain, beyond peradventure. The visit to the Evelands for the Thanksgiving season had furnished the opportunity and the round of the Penitentiary with Malcolm had arranged itself. It had been easy to advert to Mason's belief in the innocence of the prisoner he had defended, and it had seemed natural enough for her to ask the Warden to point out the man as they went through the shops. They had now entered the room in which he had told her the man worked--she was standing on the threshold of the knowledge she feared.

She started at the Warden's voice, close to her ear, above the rasping clamour of the machines: "The last row, at the end. The middle machine--that's the one."

With a quick intake of her breath she looked where he pointed. The colour faded from her cheeks. Doubt--if she had clung to doubt--was ended now! The man who had started with levelled pistol from behind the curtain of Craig's library had been short and stocky and round-shouldered. The side-face of the distant prisoner at whom she was now looking with such painful intensity, under the shadow of his cap-brim showed smudged with oil and dust; but his shoulders were broad and straight and his frame tall and lithe. Whatever the law said, this man was not the man who had shot Craig! She alone could swear it!

She felt suddenly a kind of terror of the place. She touched Malcolm's arm. "I've seen enough--please! Could we turn back now?"

The Warden overheard and nodded. "Just wait here a moment," he said, "and we'll go. I want to take a look forward." He strode from them down the broad way between the lines of workers.

Harry heard the step behind him on the steel floor. He thought the others were with him. Under the rattle of the cogs his sick imagination caught the swish of a dress--almost he thought he caught a faint breath of a familiar perfume--and he averted his face till they should pa.s.s. It was by reason of this that his lowered eyes caught a stealthy movement in the man at the next machine--a movement of one hand which crept under his jacket, and jerked forth, clutching something shining and murderous.

Harry acted without conscious thought, by swift and certain instinct.

As the lean arm, tense with hate, went up behind the Warden's back, he leaped forward with a cry of warning, caught the wrist whose hand held the sharpened file, and both went down clinched and struggling together.

The cry, sharp and strained, pierced across the din. It brought the Superintendent to his feet on his platform, like the release of a coiled spring, a revolver in either hand.

"Back to the door!" he roared, and Malcolm's sinewy arm swept the two girls behind him. The fierce clamour of a bell sounded outside. There was sudden pandemonium. Doors opened, men in uniform dashed by her, and on the platform the Superintendent stood, crouching forward like a panther about to spring, still as a statue, both hands outstretched with their gleaming muzzles, his eyes flashing over the room.

In that desperate struggle, as he clung to the maddened convict, Harry was conscious only of the strenuous confusion--of commands that snapped like whip-lashes--of the burly form of the Warden above him and that of a "trusty" who s.n.a.t.c.hed at the vicious weapon--of a sudden anguished pang in his shoulder.

Then, swiftly and sweetly, the whole world slipped away into blankness and silence.

A half hour later, as Echo and Nancy sat with Malcolm in the office, on the ground floor of the frame building just inside the great double gates of the prison, the Warden entered. His grave face lightened with a smile of rea.s.surance.

"All well," he said cheerfully. "It came close to being a nasty wound, but the doctor says no harm will come of it, though he will be in the hospital ward for a week. I wouldn't have had this fracas happen while you ladies were here for a year's salary," he added, "and that's a fact!"

Nancy's face was still pale, and she shivered as he spoke, but she gave a little laugh, as she said, "We didn't bring you luck to-day, did we?

You'll be wary of Friday visitors hereafter."

"On the contrary," he a.s.serted, "I'm inclined to think I'm a mighty lucky man. It was cunningly planned, with collusion, too, and if it had succeeded there might have been a very bad hour or two--for everybody."

Malcolm turned to him. "The man saved the situation, Warden, and it was a very close call, indeed. If there was collusion I imagine it'll be dangerous in the ranks for him hereafter."

The Warden nodded. "I've thought of that. The trusty who has been clerking in the Record-Room, upstairs, is sick, as it happens. He shall have the place. He sha'n't come to any harm as long as I'm in charge, rest a.s.sured of that."