The Way of the Strong Part 55

At Alston he made his way to a store where he could procure some letter paper and envelopes. Just for one moment he hesitated at the door of the building. He was about to meet a free citizen. One who had never known prison bars. With a thrust he drew his hat well down to his ears, squared his shoulders and went in. His precautions proved needless. The man who served him was used to such visitors, and quite indifferent. He scarcely even looked at him as he fulfilled his order, and took the prison money.

Frank hurried away. His self-consciousness was quite painful. But he meant to beat it.

His next effort was a restaurant. He was a long time making his selection. Nor did it occur to him to wonder at the number of cheap eating houses this small village supported. Finally, however, he accepted the doubtful hospitality of a Chinese establishment where they dispensed a cheap chop-suey. Again his appearance caused no surprise as he gave his order and then sat down at a corner table.

Here he drew out his letter paper and laid it on the much-stained table before him, and, in a moment, had forgotten the almond-eyed attendant who was preparing his food.

He felt it necessary to answer Monica's letter at once. His purpose was definite and quite clear in his mind. The past, his past, their past was done with. He would face the world alone, and on his own resources.

The letter was quite short and was finished before the Chinaman brought him his food.

His meal finished and bill settled, he waited until the lynx-eyed Mongolian was engaged elsewhere. Then he placed the letter and the five thousand dollars into an envelope and addressed it to Monica at Winnipeg. It was his intention to mail the packet from Toronto.

CHAPTER IV

ON THE RAILROAD

No man may serve a term of imprisonment in a modern prison and return to freedom on the same moral plane as he left it. A man may fall, but he may rise again, provided he is saved from that lifelong branding which a penal prison leaves upon its victim. Innocent or guilty the modern prison system is an invention which must rob its victim for ever of his confidence, his self-respect, almost of his hope. It is an inst.i.tution set up to protect the free citizen, and terrorize the wrong-doer into better ways. And it does neither of these things.

Instead, it pours upon society, daily, a stream of hopeless, hardened, bitter creatures, who, through its merciless process, have abandoned what little grip they ever had upon their moral natures, and drives them along the broad, ill-lit road of crime. Instead of being the deterrent it is supposed to be, it is the worst creator of crime known to civilization.

These were some of the reflections forced upon young Frank Burton after twelve months' bitter experience in Alston Penitentiary. And now, with each pa.s.sing moment of his new freedom, the truth of these painful observations was more and more surely brought home to him. An innocent man, he had come out into the light of freedom, dreading and shrinking before every eye that was turned in his direction. His self-confidence was shaken. All his old trust and belief in the goodness of the life about him seemed to have melted into dark and painful suspicion, and, for the time at least, he was forced into those darkened purlieus which belong to the world of crime. The light was unendurable.

He had changed terribly from the buoyant lad he had been. He had seen so much, thought so much during those twelve long months, that now he was weighted down by a maturity that belonged to twice his years.

He knew he could never go back to the old life. That he had long since made up his mind up to. More than that, he could not accept benefits from those who belonged to it, whom he had known and loved. Even Phyllis, for all her ardent affection, she, too, belonged to a life that was wholly dead.

The future, his future, lay in his own two empty hands. Those whom he loved, and those whom he hated and despised could have no part in it.

Were it otherwise he felt that to see Monica would be to bring him into contact with Hendrie, and such contact could only stir in him all the evil influences of the prison, influences from which it was his determination to escape.

Phyllis? Little Phyllis?

No. She must go, too. The band of the criminal had sunk too deeply into his soul. She must be left free. No such contamination must be brought into her life. His love for her was far too great for him to submit her to such a dreadful disaster as marriage with an ex-convict.

He had thought of all these things before, he thought again of them now. They were rarely absent from his mind.

The moment he read Monica's letter he knew what he intended to do. And it was the same when he hungrily devoured the words of devotion he received from Phyllis. Dealing with Monica's letter had been simple enough. With Phyllis's it was a far different matter. He wanted her to understand. He knew he must hurt her, but he felt that by presenting all his feelings to her, she, with her wide understanding, would appreciate and accept his decisions.

The whole journey from Alston to Fieldcoats, in the old-fashioned rumbling "stage," was given up to these hopeless meditations of an outcast. And he was glad of it. He was glad that he had the time to think of the letter he must send this girl at once.

It was dark when the twinkling lights of Fieldcoats, the nearest town where he would take train for Toronto, came into view, and he was glad of that friendly obscurity. His shrinking from the light was no morbid feeling. With his close-cropped head the story of his recent past was open for every one to read.

He did not complete the journey to the final halting place of the stage, but dropped off it in the lower and more obscure part of the town. It was here that he meant to begin his new life. A cheap, clean bed was all he desired, just a place where he could rest between sheets, and write his long letter to Phyllis. He wanted something solid on four legs. Something which would not remind him of the hammock he had learned to hate.

He found the place he required without difficulty. It vaunted the t.i.tle, "The Alexandra Hotel," and its beds, in cubicles, were let out at twenty-five cents and ten cents a night. It was a mere "dossing house," but that was quite a matter of indifference. He felt he had no right to squeamishness.

He booked one of the higher priced cubicles and ascertained that it was clean. Then, with a sigh of resignation, and some squaring of the shoulders, he prepared to face the curious eyes of the derelicts who haunted the "office" of the establishment.

To face even these, with his close-cropped head, Frank found no light task, but he knew that for weeks yet he must keep himself hardened to the consciousness of his prison brand. The only thing possible was a desperately bold front, a front that would intimidate the curious, and, if necessary, he must follow it up with all it threatened.

So he entered the room and calmly looked about him. He was big, spare, and enormously powerful. His hard blue eyes deliberately sought for any eye that might be turned in his direction. His trouble was wasted. He forgot that these poor creatures, lounging upon the hard Windsor chairs, reading papers, or staring hopelessly before them while they smoked, were derelicts like himself. n.o.body gave him the slightest heed, and he was left to seek out his obscure corner where he could write in peace.

Once a.s.sured of his immunity, Frank began his letter, and promptly became completely lost to his surroundings. The long-pent thoughts of the past year flowed pa.s.sionately as he attempted to show the girl he loved all that which lay deep down in his simple heart.

It was not, perhaps, the convincing letter of a deep thinker. It was not a letter full of the refinement of logical argument. He wrote just as he thought, and felt, and saw, with a mind tinged by the dark hues of his own sufferings and the sufferings of others.

He told her, simple creature that he was, of all his love for her. He told her of the aching heart which this definite parting left him with, and, in the same breath almost, he told her that he regarded it as his sacred duty to shield her from contamination with a disgrace such as his. He forgot that where a real woman's love is concerned, duty, and perhaps any other scruple is willingly flung aside.

His simplicity carried him into deeper water, for he wrote long and ardently of his own future, a future conceived, and to be founded upon all he had seen and experienced in prison. Again he forgot the wide mind of the girl he was writing to, and blindly believed that the sincerity and honesty of his motives must appeal to her.

It was altogether a headlong sort of letter. He wrote as he thought and felt, and scarcely paused for a word or phrase. The gist of it was a yearning for a sort of sublime socialism. He could not longer bear the thought of self-seeking. He had seen so much of the disastrous results of it that he felt and knew that the whole process of it was utterly wrong. The prisons were filled with its results.

Those things, he said, had started his train of thought, and, with each pa.s.sing day, his eyes had become more fully opened.

All the old ambitions, he told her, had been rooted out of him for ever. They were the natural impulses of a heart and mind all untutored, and far too immature for the real understanding of life. He had desired wealth and place in the world, and it had seemed good to him to so desire. Nor was it to be wondered at. Such desires had been inspired by honest motives, if, perhaps, selfish. They were just the first teachings of life until--it presented the reverse side of the picture.

He had been shown the reverse of the picture, and it had come in time.

For twelve months he had gazed upon it and learned its lessons. For twelve months he had groped amid the cobwebs of life and sought among the darkened corners. That which he had discovered there had plainly shown him that, for him, past and future ambitions were divided by a gulf that could never be bridged again. In future his life would be cast on the side of the helpless and struggling, on the side of the oppressed, and those who were less endowed for the battle of life.

The battle of life? There should be no battle. There never was a battle intended. Why should there be? Was there not more than enough to go round? It was only because the laws of man permitted acc.u.mulations to the individual and so reduced more than half the world to a position bordering on starvation, a condition which lay at the very root of all crime. The old belief in the survival of the fittest was a dead one. It applied to simple physical conditions, not to the right to enjoy a fair share of those blessings a beneficent Creator had provided for the benefit of all. Think of it, he appealed, think of the king of beasts cornering all the food upon which his species depended to support life.

Picture one proud brute standing over a h.o.a.rd of rotting flesh, flourishing his tail and snarling defiance at a crowd of starving creatures of his own kind. Would they permit it? Would they leave him in possession? No, they would set upon him in their numbers, and, in desperation, they would tear him limb from limb.

Brotherhood and Equality! That was to be the keynote of his future.

Henceforth all his power, all his heart should be flung into the only cause that could make the world endurable.

So he wrote to this girl of more than common wisdom, and he told himself she would understand. He told himself that though their lives could never come together again, at least he would possess her sympathy.

It was long past midnight when Frank's letter was folded in its cheap envelope and addressed. But its writing had done him good. It had been inspired by a big heart, if little wisdom, and he felt that he had taken his first step upon the new road opening out before him.

There were still stragglers in the office when he finally retired to his cubicle. Some were sleepily drunk, after an evening spent in "cadging" drinks among the low-cla.s.s saloons in the neighborhood. Some were merely utterly weary with a long day of vain searching for some means of livelihood. All were unkempt and tattered, and most of them dirty.

These were some of the poor creatures belonging to the ranks of those, who, in his lofty ideals of the work that lay before him, Frank hoped to range himself on the side of. In his youthful blindness he failed utterly to recognize the workings of the definite laws of compensation.

He missed entirely the most glaring fact of life. It pa.s.sed him by that the majority of these were _able-bodied_ men who had wilfully thrown away the chances which life never fails to offer, for the indulgence of those selfish pa.s.sions which in his heart he abhorred.

That night he slept the fitful sleep of a man unused to his surroundings, but he was sufficiently refreshed when the hour appointed for arising in such places arrived. He turned out quite ready to face all that the day might bring forth. He knew that he must endure many trials of patience and feelings. But he intended to face them with a brave heart.

Ten cents was all he allowed himself for his breakfast. He required only sufficient to sustain life, nor did he obtain more for the money.

Then he made his way to the railroad depot, forcing himself to a blindness for the attention his appearance attracted. Here he made inquiries as to the train, and booked his pa.s.sage. The train for Toronto left just before noon, so he purchased a newspaper and sat down in the waiting-hall. He intended to pa.s.s the time scanning the advertis.e.m.e.nts, that he might learn the best means of obtaining employment when he arrived at his destination.

The train was "on time," and, in due course, Frank boarded it. The car he selected was fairly empty. At the far end of it a party of people, evidently a family party, occupied several seats. For the rest five or six men and two women were scattered about its length.

He took his place in the rear seat of the coach, feeling that it was preferable to have no inquisitive eyes behind him. Those who displayed marked attention from in front he felt confident of being able to deal with. But he reckoned without his host.

The first part of his journey was quite uneventful. But at the first important town at which the train stopped several pa.s.sengers boarded the car. Among them was a man with closely trimmed iron gray hair, and quick, searching eyes that closely scanned the faces of each person in the car.

His stare was not wholly rude. It was the searching glance of a man who is accustomed to studying his fellows, who never fails to do so at any opportunity. He took a corner seat just across the aisle of the car, and on the level immediately in front of Frank. He sat turned so that the whole view of the car came within his focus. Nor was it a matter of more than moments before Frank's cropped head came under his observation.