"But if any penalty were due from me I have paid it," I retorted.

"No; you have paid only a part of it—the law's part. Society still has its claims and they must be met; recognized and satisfied to the final jot and tittle."

Though this man was a church member, and a rather prominent one in Springville—we may call the small city Springville because that isn't its real name—I did not accuse him, even mentally, of conscious hypocrisy. What I said, upon leaving him, was that I hoped he'd never have to pay any of the penalties himself. I did not know then—what I learned later—that he was a very whited sepulchre; a man who was growing rich by a systematic process of robbing his farmer customers on time sales.

Turned out once again upon an unsympathetic world, I was minded to do what I had done so many times before—take the first train and vanish. But a small incident delayed the vanishing—for the moment, at least. On the way to the railroad station I saw a sight, commoner at that time in my native State than it is now, I am glad to be able to say; a young, farmer-looking fellow overcome by liquor, reeling and stumbling and finding the sidewalk far too narrow. He was coming toward me, and I yielded to the impulse which prompts most of us at such times; the disposition to give the inebriate all the room he wants—to pass by, like the priest and the Levite, on the other side.

Just as I was stepping into the roadway, the drunken man collided heavily with a telephone pole, caught clumsily at it to save himself, and fell, striking his head on the curbstone and rolling into the gutter. It was a case for the Good Samaritan, and, as it happened, that time-honored personage was at hand. Before I could edge away, as I confess I was trying to do, a clean-cut young man in the fatigue uniform of the Church militant came striding across the street.

"Here, you!" he snapped briskly to me. "Don't turn your back that way on a man needing help! That fellow's hurt!"

We got the pole-bombarder up, between us, and truly he was hurt. There was a cut over one eye where he had butted into one of the climbing-steps on the pole, and either that, or the knock on the curbstone, had made him take the count. Since Springville wasn't citified enough to have a hospital or an ambulance, I supposed we would carry the wounded man to the nearest drug store. But my Good Samaritan wasn't built that way. Hastily commandeering a passing dray, he made me help him load the unconscious man into it, and the three of us were trundled swiftly through a couple of cross streets to a—to a church, I was going to say, but it was to a small house beside the church.

Here, with the help of the driver, we got the John Barleycorn victim into the house and spread him out on a clean white bed, muddy boots, sodden clothes, bloody head and all. I asked if I should go for a doctor, but the Samaritan shook his head. "No," he said; "you and I can do all that is necessary." Then he paid the dray driver and we fell to work.

It was worth something to see that handsome, well-built young theologue—it didn't seem as if he could have been more than a boy freshly out of the seminary—strip off his coat and roll up his sleeves and go to it like a veteran surgeon. In a few minutes, with such help as I could render, he had the cut cleaned and bandaged, the red face sponged off, and the worst of the street dirt brushed from the man's clothing.

"That is about all we can do—until he gets over the double effects of the hurt and the whiskey," he said, when the job was finished; and then, with a sort of search-warrant look at me: "Are you very busy?"

I told him I was not.

"All right; you stay here with him and keep an eye on him while I go and find out who he is and where he belongs." And with that he put on his coat and left the house.

He was gone for over an hour, and during that time I sat by the bed, keeping watch over the patient and letting my thoughts wander as they would. Here was a little exhibition of a spirit which had been conspicuously absent in my later experiences of the world and its peopling. Apparently the milk of human kindness had not become entirely a figure of speech. One man, at least, was trying to live up to the requirements of a nominally Christian civilization, and if this bit of rescue work were a fair sample, he was making a success of it.

I took it for granted that he was the minister of the next-door church, and that the house was its parsonage or rectory. It was a simple story-and-a-half cottage, plainly furnished but exquisitely neat and home-like. There were books everywhere, and an atmosphere about as much of the place as I could see to make me decide that it was a man's house—I mean that the young minister wasn't as yet sharing it with a woman. You can tell pretty well. A woman's touch about a house interior is as easily distinguishable as the stars on a clear night.

From my place at the bedside I could look through an open door into the sitting-room. There were easy-chairs and a writing-table and a general air of man-comfort. Among the pictures on the walls was one of a stately group of college buildings; another was a class picture taken with a church, or perhaps it was the college chapel, for a background.

When the hour was about up, the man on the bed began to stir and show signs that he was coming out of the unconscious fit. Pretty soon he opened his eyes and asked, in a liquor-thickened voice, where he was. I told him he had had an accident and was in the hands of his friends; and at that he dropped off to sleep, and was still sleeping when a farm wagon stopped at the cottage gate and the Good Samaritan came in. His search had been successful. Our broken-winged bird was a young farmer living a few miles out of town. The young minister had found his team, and a friend to drive it, and both friend and team were at the gate ready to take the battered one home.

With the help of the volunteer driver we got the young farmer up and out and into the wagon; and there the Samaritan outreaching ended—or I supposed it was ended. But as a matter of fact, it was merely transferring itself to me. As I was moving off to resume my interrupted dash for the railroad station, Whitley—I read his name on the notice board of the near-by church—stopped me.

"What's your hurry?" he asked; adding: "I haven't had time to get acquainted with you yet."

I answered briefly that I was leaving town, and this brought the questioner's watch out of his pocket.

"There is no train in either direction before nine o'clock this evening," he demurred. And then: "It is nearly six now: if you haven't anything better to do, why not stay and take dinner with me? I'm a lone bachelor-man, and I'd be mighty glad of your company."

The wagon had driven off and the street was empty. I looked my potential host squarely in the eyes and said the first thing that came uppermost.

"I have just been discharged from Mr. Haddon's store—for what Mr. Haddon considers to be good and sufficient cause. I don't believe you want me at your dinner-table."

His smile was as refreshing as a cool breeze on a hot summer day.

"I don't care what Mr. Haddon has said or done to you. If you can't give any better reason than that——"

"But I can," I interposed. "I am a paroled convict."

Without another word he opened the gate and drew me inside with an arm linked in mine. And he didn't speak again until he had planted me in the easiest of the big chairs before the grate fire in the cozy sitting-room, and had found a couple of pipes, filling one for me and the other for himself.

"Now, then, tell me all about it," he commanded, "You are having plenty of trouble; your face says that much. Begin back a bit and let it lead up to Mr. Zadoc Haddon as a climax, if you wish."

It had been so long since I had had a chance really to confide in anybody that I unloaded it all; the whole bitter burden of it. Whitley heard me through patiently, and when I was done, put his finger on the single omission in the story.

"You haven't told me whether you did or did not use the bank's money for your own account in the mining speculation," he said.

I shook my head. "I have learned by hard experience not to say much about that part of it."

"Why?" he asked.

"If you knew convicts you wouldn't ask. They will all tell you that they were innocent of the crimes for which they were sentenced."

He smoked in silence for a minute or two and then said: "You are not a criminal, Weyburn."

"I am not far from it at the present time—whatever I was in the beginning."

Another silence, and then: "It seems incredible to me that you, or any man in your situation, should find the world so hard-hearted. It isn't hard-hearted as a whole, you know; on the contrary, it is kind and helpful and charitable to a degree that you'd never suspect until you appeal to it. I know, because I am appealing to it every day."

Again I shook my head.

"It draws a line in its charity; and the ex-convict is on the wrong side of that line." I was going on to say more, but at that moment a white-haired old negro in a spotless serving jacket came to the door to say that dinner was ready, and we went together to the tiny dining-room in the rear.

At dinner, which was the most appetizing meal I had sat down to in many a long day, Whitley told me more about himself, sparing me, as I made sure, the necessity of further talk about my own wretched experiences. He was Southern born and bred—which accounted for the old negro serving man—and Springville was his first parish north of the Ohio River. He was enthusiastic over his work, and he seemed to forget completely who and what I was as he talked of it.

Later, when we had come again to the sitting-room with its cheerful fire, we talked of books, finding common ground in the field of autobiography and travel. Whitley's reading in this field had been much wider than mine, and his knowledge of far countries and the men who wrote about them was a revelation to such a dabbler as I had been. Book after book was taken from the shelves and dipped into, and before I realized it the evening—so different from any I had enjoyed for months and years—had slipped away and the little clock on the mantel was chiming the half-hour after eight. It was time for me to efface myself, and I said so—a bit unsteadily, perhaps, for the pleasant evening had been as the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land.

"No," said Whitley, quite definitely. "You are not going to-night. I have a spare bed upstairs and I want you to stay—as my guest. Beyond that, you are not going to leave Springville merely because Mr. Haddon has seen fit to deny you your little meed of justice and a fair show."

"It's no use," I said. "The story is out, and it will follow me wherever I go—doubtless with Mr. Haddon's help. You'd best let me go while the going is easy."

"No," he Insisted. "You are a part of my work—one of my reasons for existence. Christianity means something, Weyburn, and I am here to define its meaning in specific cases. There is a little legacy of common justice due you, and I shall take it upon myself to see that you get it. As for Zadoc Haddon, you needn't worry about him. I am ashamed to say that he is a member of my own church, but that doesn't prevent him from being a wolf in sheep's clothing. I have told him so to his face, and he has tried to get me ousted—without success, so far."

I saw difficulties and more difficulties for this generous young fellow who was so ready to champion my cause, and it seemed only decent to spare him if I could. But at the end of my protest he summed the situation up in a single sentence:

"What you say about me is all beside the mark; somebody has got to give you the chance you are needing, and the fight may just as well be made here in Springville as anywhere. Sit down again and let's dig a little deeper into that Mexican book of Enock's. I do like his blunt English way of describing things; don't you?"

Though the next three days were full of hopes and despairings for me I shall pass over them lightly. Each day, though he did not tell me in detail what he was doing, I knew that Whitley was trying his best to find a place for me; and I knew, too, that he was meeting with no success. He was such a fine, upstanding fellow, and so full of holy zeal and enthusiasm, that it was hard for him to acknowledge defeat. But on the third evening, after a dinner at which he had tried vainly to bridge the gaps that were continually opening out in the talk, he threw up his hands.

"Weyburn," he began, when the pipes were lighted and he had poked the grate fire into a roaring blaze, "don't you know, these last three days have come mighty near to making me lose faith in my kind. It's simply wretched—miserable!"

"I would have saved you if you had been willing to let me," I reminded him.

"The question is much bigger than Bert Weyburn or John Whitley, or both of them put together," he asserted soberly. "It involves the entire fabric of Christianity, and our so-called Christian civilization. The Church is here to shadow forth the spirit and teachings of Christ, or it isn't—one of the two. If it falls in its mission it is a hollow mockery; a thing beneath contempt. I go to my fellow Christians with a simple plea for justice for a man who needs it, and what do I get? I am told, with all the sickening variations, that it won't do; that the thing I am proposing is one of the things that 'isn't done'; that society must be protected, and all that!"

"The mills of the gods," I suggested.

"Nothing of the sort! It's a radical defect in the existing scheme of things. Heavens and earth, Weyburn, you are not a pariah! Assuming that you really did the thing for which you were punished—and I don't believe you did—is that any reason why we should stultify ourselves absolutely and deny the very first principles of the religion we profess? But I mustn't be unfair. Perhaps the fault is partly mine, after all. Perhaps I haven't done my duty by these people."

"No; the fault is not yours," I hastened to say.

"I'm hoping it is; some of it, at least. Just the same, the wretched fact remains. You might be the biggest villain unhung—if only you hadn't passed through the courts and the penitentiary. As you thought probably was the case, your story is known all over town; though how it has got such a wide publication in so short a time is more than I can fathom. Men whom I would bank on; men to whom I have felt that I could go in any conceivable extremity, have turned me down as soon as I mentioned your name. The prison story is like a big, brutal, inanimate mountain standing squarely in the way; and I—I haven't the faith needful for its removal!"

Being under the deepest obligation to this dear young fellow who was bruising himself for me, I said what I could to lighten his burden. But in the midst of it he got up and reached for his hat and overcoat.

"I have just thought of something," he explained hastily; "something that may throw a good bit of light on this thing. You sit right here and toast your shins. I'm going out for a little while."

He was gone for the better part of an hour, during which interval I obeyed his injunction literally, sitting before the fire and basking in its home-like warmth; making the most of the comfort of it all before I should again go forth to face an inclement world. When Whitley came in and flung himself into a chair on the opposite side of the hearth his dark eyes were blazing.

"Weyburn," he began abruptly, "what I have to tell you will stir every evil passion you've ever harbored; and yet, in decent justice to you, it must be told. Have you ever suspected that your fight for reinstatement has been deliberately handicapped, right from the beginning?"

"I have suspected it at times; yes," I returned. "But there is no proof."

"There is proof," he shot back. "By the merest chance I stumbled upon it a few minutes ago. I went out with the intention of going to Zadoc Haddon and making him tell me where he got the information that you are the desperate criminal he professes to believe you to be. While we were sitting here it struck me all at once that this thing was being helped along by some one who had an object in view. At Haddon's house the doorman told me that Haddon had an appointment with an out-of-town customer and had gone to the hotel to keep it; and rather than wait, I went over to the Hamilton House to try to find my man. I didn't find him; but in the lobby of the hotel somebody found me. As I was turning away from the desk after asking for Haddon, a heavy-set young man, neatly dressed, stepped up and asked if my name was Whitley. I admitted it. Then he asked if I would give him a few minutes, and we went aside to sit facing each other in a couple of the lobby chairs. Weyburn, that young man is in the employ of a private detective agency, and what he wished to do, and did do, was to warn me that I was sheltering a dangerous criminal in my house!"

In a flash all the small mysteries that had been befogging me for months made themselves transparently clear: the man I had called a traveling salesman who had followed me from the prison gates to the scene of my first humble effort; the memorandum Chief Callahan had consulted; the "outfit" that was to be notified when my next destination was known; the second appearance of the "salesman" on the train at the capital, and his disappearance when he had learned from the conductor the name of my next stopping-place; and after this the long series of hitherto unaccountable blacklistings. My mouth was dry, but I contrived to tell Whitley to go on.

"I will," he conceded; "but you must promise me to control yourself. Naturally, my first impulse, when this scamp began on me, was to cut him off short and tell him what I thought of the despicable business to which he was lending himself. But the second thought was craftier, and I hope I may be forgiven for yielding to it. By leading him on I got the entire brutal story. It seems that the two old men upon whose complaint you were indicted knew when you were to be paroled. They profess to believe that you are a menace to society; that the prison authorities were at fault in releasing you short of the limit of your sentence. Hence, through his employers, they have set this man upon your track to see to it—I use his own words—that you do not have an opportunity to rob some one else."

I suppose I should have been driven mad with vindictive fury at this plain revelation of the true cause of most of my misfortunes, but there is a point beyond which the beaten man cannot rise to renew the fight, and I had reached and passed it. Wherefore I found myself saying, quite calmly:

"Neither Abel Geddis nor Abner Withers would spend one copper penny for any such altruistic reason as this man has given you, Whitley. Their motive is strictly selfish and personal. They are either afraid that I may go back to Glendale and try to expose them; or that I may take the shorter and surer way of balancing the account by killing them—as, at one time, I meant to."

"Oh, but my dear fellow!" Whitley protested. "In that case they would hardly take a course which was calculated to drive you to desperation!"

"You don't understand it all," I rejoined. "Everything has been done secretly, and it is only by the merest chance that I have now learned the truth. This man you have been talking to has been following me, or keeping track of me, ever since I left the penitentiary. I have seen him twice, and I took him to be a traveling salesman—as he doubtless intended I should. You can see how it was designed to work out. With a sufficient amount of discouragement it was reasonable to assume that the prison bird would finally yield to the inevitable; become a criminal in fact and get himself locked up again out of harm's way."

"You think that was the motive?"

"I am as certain of it as I should be if I could read the minds of those two old plotters in my home town. You see, I've summered and wintered them. The only thing I can't understand is why I have been so blind; why I didn't assume all this long ago and act accordingly."

"But why, why should they be so utterly lost to every sense of right and justice; to all the promptings of common humanity? It's hideously incredible!"

"I have given you two reasons, and you may take your choice. It is either the fear of death—the fear of the vengeance of a man whose life they have ruined, or else the transaction in which they involved me, and in which they made me their scapegoat, was more far-reaching than I, or anybody in Glendale, supposed it was."

Whitley sat for a full minute staring absently into the fire. Then he said, very gently: "Now that you know the truth, what will you do?"

"I know well enough what I ought to do. We may pass over the fellow at the Hamilton House; he is only a poor tool in the hands of the master workmen. I bear him no malice of the blood-letting sort. But really, Whitley, I ought to go back to Glendale and rid the earth of those two old villains who have earned their blotting-out."

Again there was a pause, and then: "Well, why don't you do it?"

I laughed rather bitterly.

"Because all the fight has been taken out of me, Whitley. That is the reason and the only reason."

His smile was beatific. "No, it isn't," he denied. "You know you couldn't do it; you couldn't bring yourself to do it. Maybe, in the heat of passion . . . but to go deliberately: no, Weyburn; if you think you could do such a thing as that, I can tell you that I know you better than you know yourself."

"I merely said that that was what I ought to do. I know well enough that I shan't do it, but the reason is far beneath that which you are good enough to hint at. I'm a broken man, Whitley; what I have gone through in the past few months has smashed my nerve. You can't understand that—I don't expect you to. But if I should meet those two old men when I leave this house, I should probably run away from them and try to hide."

"But what will you do?" he queried.

"What can I do, more than I've been doing?"

Again a silence intervened.

"I wish I knew how to advise you," Whitley said at length. "If there were only some way in which you might shake off this wretched hired spy!"

"I can't. If I dodge him, he has only to wait until I report myself again to the prison authorities. The one thing I can do is to relieve you of my threatening presence, and I'll do that now—to-night, while the going is good."

He was at the end of his resources, as I knew he must be, and he made no objections. But at train-time he got up and put on his overcoat to accompany me as far as the station. It was a rough night outside, and I tried to dissuade him, but he wouldn't have it that way. "No," he said; "it's my privilege to speed the parting guest, if I can do no more than that," and so we breasted the spitting snow-storm which was sweeping the empty streets, tramping in silence until we reached the shelter of the train-shed.

It was after the train had whistled for the crossing below the town that Whitley asked me again what I intended doing. I answered him frankly because it was his due.

"It has come down to one of two things: day-labor, in a field where a man is merely a number on the pay-roll—or that other road which is always open to the prison-bird."

He put his hand on my shoulder. "You are not going to take the other road, Weyburn," he said gravely.

"I hope not—I hope I shan't be driven to."

"You mustn't make it conditional. I know you are not a criminal; you were not a criminal when you were convicted. You can't afford to begin to be one now."

"Neither can I afford to starve," I interposed. "Other men live by their wits, and so can I, if I'm driven to it. But I'll play fair with you, Whitley. So long as I can keep body and soul together, with a pick and shovel, or any other implement that comes to hand, I'll stick. I owe you that much, if only for the reason that you are—with the single exception of an old police chief who lives at the other edge of the State—the one really human being I've met since I shook hands with the warden."

The train was in and the conductor was waving his lantern. Whitley grasped my hand and wrung it. "Be a man, and God bless you!" he said in low tones. "And when the pinch comes again and you are tempted to the limit, just remember that there is a fellow back here in Springville who believes in you, and who will limp a little all the rest of his days if you stumble and fall and refuse to get up. Good-night and good-by!"



VII

The Plunge

By the train which bore me away from Springville I went only far enough to put me safely beyond the possibility of stumbling upon any of the places where I had hitherto sought work; though as to that, I had little hope of escaping the relentless blacklister who had been set upon me.

About midnight I had a talk with the flagman in the smoking-car, calling myself a laborer looking for a job and asking about the prospects in the region through which we were passing. I was told that there were swamp lands in the next county, and that the contractors who were installing systems of under-draining had been advertising for men.

Accordingly, the next morning found me in the new field, with one set of difficulties outpaced for the moment only to make room for another. The first man I tackled was the foreman of a ditching crew, and he looked me over with a cold and contemptuous eye.

"Show yer hands!" he rasped, and when I held them out, palms upward: "On yer way, Misther Counter-hopper; 'tis wor-rkin'min we're hirin' here this day—not anny lily-fingered dudes!"

So it was, in a disheartening number of instances; on a railroad grading force in an adjoining county, on city buildings where I asked to be taken as an unskilled helper, with a sewer contractor in another city, as a shoveler in a village brick-yard. Finally I landed a job as a stacker in a lumberyard; and now I found another of the day-laborer difficulties lying in wait for me. At the time of my commitment for trial I was in good physical condition. But the three years in prison had made me soft and flabby, a handicap which liberty—with a string tied to it—had done little to remove; and four hard days of the stacking, in which two of us were handling two-by-ten eighteen-foot joists to the top of a pile twelve feet high, finished me.

The boss grinned understandingly when he gave me my time-check for the four days.

"I thought you wouldn't last very long at the stacking," he commented; "that's a man's job." Then: "Got any head for figures?"

I faced him fairly. "I can't take a job of that kind."

"Why can't you?"

He got the reason in a single sentence.

"Paroled man, hey? What was you in for?"

I named the charge, and did not add that it was an unjust one. I had pleaded the miscarriage of justice so many times, only to be called a liar, that it seemed useless to try to explain.

"Robbed a bank, did you? Well, I don't know as I think any worse of you for spittin' it right out. Tryin' to brace up?"

"I'm trying to earn an honest living."

"And havin' a mighty hard time of it, I reckon—'r you wouldn't be makin' a push at stackin' lumber with them blistered hands. Say, boy; I sort o' like your looks, and I'm goin' to give you a boost. They're needin' a log-scaler in the sawmill. If you know figures, you can catch on in half a day. Chase your feet down to the mill foreman and tell him I sent you."

I went gladly enough, secured the new job, learned how to do it acceptably, and was temerariously happy and light-hearted for two whole weeks. Then my Nemesis found me again. In the third week I chanced to get a glimpse of a short, heavy-set man talking to a bunch of my fellow laborers. Before I could cross the mill yard to identify the stranger he turned and walked quickly away; but the sixth sense of apprehension which develops so surely and quickly in the ex-convict told me that the heavy-set man was Abel Geddis's hired blacklister, and that I was once more on the toboggan slide.

Pay-day came at the end of the week, and when the envelopes had been given out the mill foreman took me aside.

"I'm sorry, Weyburn," he began curtly, "but I'm afraid you'll have to be moving on. Personally, I don't care, one way or the other, what you've been or where you hall from. You do your work well, and that's all I ask of any man. But your story has got out among the hands, and that settles it. They won't work with a convict."

When I took the long road again after this latest rebuff I knew that the fine resolution with which I had left the prison five months earlier was breaking down. The relentless pressure was doing its work, and I began to ask myself how long I could hold out as a law-abiding citizen and a victim of injustice against the belief of the world that I was neither.

The five months' wanderings had carried me the length and breadth of the State, and I had avoided only the large cities and my home neighborhood. But with the lumber company's money in my pocket I boarded a train for the State metropolis. At the end of the experiment I was doing what the released criminal usually does at the outset—seeking an opportunity to lose myself in the crowd.

Jobs were notably harder to find in the great city, though police headquarters, where I reported myself, placed no obstacles in my way so far as I know; took no note of me in any fashion, as I was afterward led to believe. That the hired traducer would follow and find me I made no doubt; but by this time I was becoming so inured to this peculiar hardship that I refused to cross bridges until I came to them, and was at times even able to forget, in the discouragements of other hardships, that I was a marked man.

In the search for means to keep body and soul together it was easy to forget. Day labor offered only now and then, and in my increasing physical unfitness I could not hold my own against the trained muscles of seasoned roustabouts, porters and freight-handlers. Worse still, the physical deterrent grew by what it fed upon—or by the lack of feeding. Part of the time I couldn't get enough to eat; and there were cold and blustering nights when I had not the few cents which would have given me a bed in a cheap lodging-house.

It was in this deepest abyss in the valley of disheartenment that I met a former prison-mate named Kellow; a forger whose time of release from the penitentiary coincided nearly with my own. The meeting was wholly by chance. I was crossing one of the city bridges at night, pointing for one of the river warehouses where I hoped to find a tramp's lodging and shelter from the bitter wind, when I walked blindly into a man coming in the opposite direction. The recognition was instant and mutual.

Like myself, Kellow had been a "trusty," and under certain relaxations of the rule of silence in the prison we had talked and an acquaintance of a sort had slowly grown and ripened. In this intimacy, which I had striven to hold at arm's length, I had come to know the forger as a criminal of the most dangerous breed; a man of parts and of some education, but wholly lacking in the moral sense; a rule-keeper in prison only because he was shrewd enough to appreciate the fact that he was bringing the day of release nearer by piling up "good-conduct" time.

"Well, pinch me! Look who's here!" was his greeting when we met on the bridge.

For a silent moment it was I who did the looking. Kellow had grown a pair of curling black mustaches since his release; he was well-dressed, erect and alert, and was smoking a cigar the fragrance of which made me sick and faint with an attack of the long-denied tobacco hunger.

"You're out, too, are you?" I managed to say at last, shivering in the cold blast which came sweeping up the river.

"Three months, and then some," he returned jauntily. "I'm collecting a little on the old debt now, and doing fairly well at it, thank you."

"The old debt?" I queried.

"Yep; the one that the little old round world owes every man: three squares, a tailor, a bed and a pocket-roll."

"You look as if you had acquired all four," I agreed, setting my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering.

"Sure I have; and you look as if you hadn't," he countered. And then: "What's the matter? Just plain hard luck? Or is it the parole scare?"

"Both," I admitted.

He shot me a quick look.

"I can put you onto a dead sure thing, if you're game for it. Let's hunt us a warm place and chew it over."

The place was the back room of an all-night saloon in the slum quarter beyond the bridge. It was warm, stiflingly warm and close, after the outdoor blast and chill, and it reeked like a sty. Kellow kicked out a chair for me and drew up one for himself on the opposite side of the small round card-table over which a single gas-jet hissed and sizzled, lighting the tiny box of a place with a sickly yellow glare.

"What'll it be?" he asked, when the waiter came in.

"A piece of bread and meat from the lunch counter, if you don't mind," I said; and then, in an apology for which I instantly despised myself: "Liquor doesn't agree with me lately; it—it would gag me."

Kellow ordered whiskey for himself, and after the waiter was gone he stared at me contemptuously.

"So it's come to that, has it?" he derided. "You're so damned hungry you're afraid to put a drop of bug-juice under your belt. You're a fool, Weyburn. I know what you've been doing, just as well as if you'd told me the whole story. Also, I'll believe now what I didn't believe while we were in 'stir'; you were pinched for something you didn't do."

"Well?" I said, neither affirming nor denying. The free lunch had come and I was falling upon it like a famished wolf. I hadn't a penny in my pockets, and the bread and meat stood for breakfast, dinner and supper combined.

Kellow swallowed his whiskey at a gulp and stood the empty glass bottom upward on the table.

"Been trying the honest lay, I suppose—handing in your name and number wherever you went?" he suggested.

I nodded, adding that there was nothing else to be done, as I saw it.

He laughed scornfully. "A minute ago I said you were a fool, but you're worse than that—you're an infant! Why, good hell, 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 assailed 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 pass 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 pawnbroker 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 butt 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 sturdy 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 class 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, muffled 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, snatched 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 snatch 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 retarding 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 passed 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. I'm not letting it make any difference, am I?"

"Not here on the train," I conceded, sourly.

"No; and, by George, I wouldn't let it at home, either! I'll bet you've got a few friends left in Glendale, right now, and you've had 'em all along. Been back there since you—since—er——"

I shook my head, and he went on as if he were afraid that a stop might prove fatal to another start.

"It sure isn't any of my butt-in, but I don't believe you ought to dodge the home town, Bert. There are a lot of good people there, and if I were in your fix, I believe I'd want to go and bully it out right where it happened. You've bought your little chunk of experience and paid for it, and now you're a free man just like the rest of us. You want to buck up, and tell them that don't like it to go straight plumb to the dickens."

There was ample reason why he should take this tone with me if he felt like it. I looked like a derelict and was acting like one. Moreover, I was tormented to the verge of madness by the fear that the conductor might come along on a ticket-punching tour, and that by this means Barton would learn my ultimate destination—which would be equivalent, I fancied, to publishing it in the Glendale Daily Courier.

"Cut it out!" I said gruffly. "If Glendale were the last place in the universe, I wouldn't go back there."

He dropped the argument with perfect good-humor, and even made apology. "I take it all back; it's none of my business. Of course, you know best what you want to do. You're a free man, as I say, and can go where you please."

His repetition of this "free man" phrase suddenly opened my eyes. He had forgotten, as doubtless a good many others had, all about the indeterminate sentence and its terms, if, indeed, he—and the others—had ever known anything about its conditions. It was not to be wondered at. Three years and a half will ordinarily blot the best of us out of remembrance—at least as to details.

It was at this point that I twisted the talk by thrusting in a question of my own.

"No; I haven't been in Glendale right lately—been out on the road for a couple of weeks," was Barton's answer to the question. "We've widened the old wagon-shop out some few lines since you knew us, and I've been making a round of the agencies. I was in the big city last night and got a wire to go to St. Louis. The wire got balled up somewhere, and I didn't get it until late at night. Made me hustle, too. I'd been out of the city for the day and didn't get back to the Marlborough until nearly midnight."

This bit of detail made no impression upon me at the moment because I was too busy with the thoughts suggested by the fact that I might have Barton with me all day. Returning to Glendale at the end of his round, he would be sure to talk, and in due time the prison authorities would learn that I had been last seen in St. Louis. This accidental meeting with Barton figured as a crude misfortune, but I saw no way to mitigate it.

About this time came the first call for breakfast in the dining-car, and I hoped this would relieve me of Barton's presence, for a while, at any rate. But I was reckoning altogether without my host.

"Breakfast, eh?—that fits me all the way down to the ground," was his welcoming of the waiter's sing-song call. "Come along, old man, and we'll go eat a few things. This is on me."

I tried to refuse. Apart from a frantic desire to be quit of him, I was in no condition to present myself in the dining-car. I showed him my grimy hands, and at that he made me forgive him in advance for all the harm he might eventually do me.

"That's perfectly all right," he laughed. "Fellow can't help getting that way on the road. My sleeper is the first one back, and the dining-car's coupled on behind. You come along into the Pullman with me and wash up. I've got a bunch of clean collars and a shirt, if you want them; and if the Pullman man makes a roar I'll tell him you're my long-lost brother and give him the best ten-cent cigar he ever smoked—I get 'em at a discount from a fellow who makes a little on the side by selling his samples." And when I still hung back—"Don't be an ass, Bertie. This old world isn't half as mean as you'd like to think it is."

I yielded, weakly, I was going to say; yet perhaps it wasn't altogether weakness. For the first time since leaving the penitentiary I was meeting a man from home; a man who knew, and apparently didn't care. I went to the Pullman with Barton and was lucky enough to meet the ticket-punching train conductor on the way. Barton was a step or two ahead of me and he did not see my ticket. In consequence, the Colorado destination was still my own secret.

In the Pullman wash-room Barton stood by me like a man, fetching his own clean linen and tipping the porter to make him turn his back while I had a wash and a shave and a change. One who has always marched in the ranks of the well-groomed may never realize the importance of soap and water in a civilized world. As a moral stimulus, the combination yields nothing to all the Uplift Foundations the multi-millionaires have ever laid. When I took my place at the table for two opposite Barton in the diner, I was able to look the world in the eye, and to forget, momentarily at least, in the luxury of clean hands and clean linen, that I was practically an outlaw with a price upon my head.

Yearning like a shipwrecked mariner for home news, I led Barton on to talk of Glendale and the various happenings in the little town during my long absence. Though I had quartered the home State in all directions for half a year he was, as I have said, the first Glendale man I had met.

He told me many things that I was eager to know; how my mother and sister were living quietly at the town place, which the income from the farm enabled them to retain. For several years after her majority my sister, older than I, had taught in the public school; she was now, so Barton said, conducting a small private school for backward little ones at home.

There were other news items, many of them. Old John Runnels was still chief of police; Tom Fitch, the hardware man, was the new mayor; Buck Severance, my one-time chum in the High School, was now chief of the fire department, having won his spurs—or rather, I should say, his red helmet and silver trumpet—at the fire which had destroyed the Blickerman Department Store.

"And the bank?" I asked.

"Which one? We've got three of them now, if you please, and one's a National."

"I meant the Farmers'," I said.

"Something right funny about that, Bert," Barton commented. "The old bank is rocking along and doing a little business in farm mortgages and note-shaving at the old stand, same as usual, but it's got a hoodoo. The other banks do most of the commercial business—all of it, you might say; still, they say Geddis and old Abner Withers are getting richer and richer every day."

"Agatha is married?" I asked.

"No; and that's another of the funny things. Her engagement with young Copper-Money was broken off—nobody knew just how or why—shortly after your—er—shortly after the trouble at the bank three years and a half ago. Agatha's out West somewhere now—in a sanitorium, I believe. Her health has been rather poor for the last year or so."

This was news indeed. As I had known her as girl and woman, Agatha Geddis had always been the picture of health. I put up a fervent little prayer that her particular sanitorium might not prove to be in the vicinity of Denver. If it should be it meant another move for me.

"I didn't see the finish of the bank trouble before they buried me, did I, Barton?" I queried.

"You bet your life you didn't! There was the dickens to pay all around. Under the State law, as you probably know, the depositors' losses had to be made up, to the extent of twice the amount of the stockholdings, by the stockholders in the bank. When they came to count noses they found that Geddis and Withers hadn't done a thing but to quietly unload their bank stock here and there and everywhere, until they held only enough to give them their votes. There was a yell to raise the roof, but the stockholders of record had to come across. It teetotally smashed a round dozen of the best farmers in the county; and I heard, on the quiet, that it caught a good many outsiders who had been buying Farmers' stock at a bargain, among them this young Mr. Copper-Money who was going to marry Agatha—and didn't. Geddis and Withers played it mighty fine—and mighty low-down."

All this was a revelation to me. In my time Geddis and Withers together had held a majority of the stock in the close little corporation known as the Farmers' Bank. The despicable trick by means of which Geddis, or both of them, had shifted the defalcation loss to other shoulders proved two things conclusively: that the scheme had been well planned for in advance, and that the two old men had worked in collusion. I remembered my suspicion—the one I couldn't prove—that Withers had been as deep in the mud as Geddis was in the mire.

"What became of the mining stock?" I inquired.

"Geddis put it into the assets, 'to help out against the loss,' as he said. Nobody wanted it, of course; and then, to be right large-hearted and generous, Geddis bought it in, personally—at ten cents on the dollar."

"And you say Geddis is still running the bank?"

"Oh, yes; he and Withers run it and own it. As you'd imagine, Farmers' Bank stock was mighty nearly a drug in the market, after all the bills had been paid, and, just to help their neighbors out of a hole, as they put it, the two old skinflints went around buying it back. I don't know what they paid; different prices, I suppose. But Hawkins, our manager, told me that he sold his for twenty-five cents on the dollar, flat, and was blamed good and glad to get that much out of it."

It was just here that my breakfast threatened to choke me. If I had been as guilty as everybody believed I was, I should still have been a white-robed angel with wings compared with these two old Pharisees who had deliberately robbed their friends and neighbors, catching them both coming and going. And yet I was a hunted outlaw, and they were honored and respected—or at least they were out of jail and able to live and flourish among their deluded victims.

The choking was only momentary. Barton was in a reminiscent mood, and he went rambling on about people in whom I was most deeply interested. It was like a breath of the good old home air in my nostrils just to sit and listen to him.

But it seems as though there has to be a fly in everybody's pot of sweetened jam. In the midst of things, at a moment when I was gratefully rejoicing in the ability to push my wretched life-catastrophe a little way into the background, I had a glimpse of a new face at the farther end of the dining-car. A large-framed man with drooping mustaches had just come in from the Pullman, and the dining-car steward was looking his car over to find a place for the newcomer at the well-filled tables.

I did not have to look twice to identify the man with the drooping mustaches. For three long and weary years I had seen him dally in the office of the State penitentiary. His name was William Cummings, and he was the deputy warden.



IX

The Cup of Trembling

Why I should have chosen, haphazard, and solely because it chanced to be the first that offered, a train which numbered among its passengers not only a man from my home town of Glendale, but also the deputy warden of the penitentiary, is one of those mysteries of coincidence which we discredit impatiently when we run across them in fiction, but which, nevertheless, are constantly recurring in every-day life.

For the moment I was desperately panic-stricken. It seemed blankly impossible that Cummings should not see and recognize me at once. I could have sworn that he was looking straight at me while the steward kept him waiting. My terror must have shown itself in my face, since Barton spoke up quickly.

"Why, say—what's struck you, Bert?—are you sick?" he demanded; and then he supplied an answer to his own query: "I ought to be kicked around the block for loading you up with a big dining-car breakfast when you had just told me that you were off your feed. Cut it short and we'll trot up ahead and smoke a cigar. That'll help you get away with it."

The steward had found Cummings a seat at the forward end of the car, and how to pass him without detection was a problem that made me dizzy with the nausea of fear. Barton, with the lordly manner of the American salesman away from home, made it possible. Snapping his fingers for a waiter he paid for the breakfasts before we left our seats, and then quickly led the way forward. At the pause in the vestibule, while Barton was answering the steward's query as to how we had been served, I could have reached out and touched Cummings's shoulder. But the deputy warden was running an investigative finger down the menu card and he did not see me.

It may say itself that I was in no condition to enjoy the after-breakfast cigar burned in the smoking-room of Barton's Pullman, where the wagon salesman's tips, or his good-natured insistence, again made me welcome. Every moment I expected to see the door curtain flung aside to admit the burly figure of William Cummings. True, there were a number of Pullmans in the train, and it was possible that I might not be in the smoking-room of his car. But it was enough, and more than enough, to know that we were fellow-travelers on the same train.

There is little use piling on the agony by trying to tell what I suffered during this forenoon of nerve-racking torture and suspense. Let it be sufficient to say that the torments ended for me at Decatur, Illinois, when, at the train stop, I saw Cummings cross the platform to a street-car followed by a station porter carrying his grip. Barton marked the change in me at once.

"By George, Bert, what did you see in that platform jumble to make you look as if you had suddenly taken on a new lease of life?" he inquired jestingly. Then he passed the ever-ready cigarcase. "Smoke up, and after a bit we'll go and try it on the dog—see if a second meal in the diner will come as near to upsetting you as the first one did. Say, don't you know, I'm bully glad we met up in the smoker this morning? I was rawhiding myself to beat the everlasting band at the prospect of having to make this long, tiresome day jump alone, and it's done me a heap of good to talk you to frazzles. And that reminds me: you haven't told me yet where you are heading for."

I had not; and what was more, I did not mean to. There were distant relatives on my mother's side of the family living somewhere in central Missouri, and I spoke of them.

"Sedalla, you say?" he commented. "Well, if that's the how of it, I may see you again in a day or so, and here's hoping. I have a horrible suspicion that our St. Louis general agent wants me to chase out with him and dig up some of his dead-alive country dealers. We sell a raft of wagons in Missouri."

It was just here that it occurred to me that Barton was carrying it off pretty toppingly for a mere traveling salesman; also that he dressed better, smoked better cigars, and seemed a good bit freer with his money than such a job warranted.

"You were selling Whiteley Wagons by yourself, when I dropped out," I said. "Have I been doing you an injustice by not allowing for a promotion in the three years and a half?"

"You sure have!" he laughed. "In the reorganization a year ago they made me sales manager. Oh, yes, Bert; I've blossomed out some since you knew me. I've actually got a little chunk of stock in the concern. You never would have thought it of old Hod Barton, would you? Look at this."

He reached into a pocket and pulled out a money roll, riffling the ends of the bills between thumb and forefinger to let me see that the denominations were all comfortably large. There was something instantly suggestive in the bit of braggadocio; a feeling that I had seen somebody do that same thing in exactly that same way once before. But before I could follow up the impression he was making me an offer which put everything but his free-hearted generosity out of my mind.

"You haven't said a word, Bert, and if it's none of my business, you can tell me so—but if a couple of these yellow-backs would come in handy to you just now, they're yours and you can toss 'em back to me any old time when you're good and ready."

I shook my head and thanked him out of a full heart. The purchase of the Denver ticket hadn't left me much of a balance out of the black pocketbook's holdings, but I couldn't borrow of Barton; that was out of the question.

Shortly after this we had another meal together in the dining-car, and this time there were no sudden alarms to make me turn sick and panicky. Afterward, I made another attempt to return to my place in the forward end of the train, but since Barton would not hear of it, we spent the remainder of the short afternoon in the Pullman smoker.

During this interval, Barton did most of the talking, growing confidential along toward the last and telling me a lot about the girl he was going to marry—the youngest daughter of good old Judge Haskins, of Jefferson—the man who had sentenced me. If all the world loves a lover, certainly no considerable part of it cares to pay strict attention while he descants at length upon the singular and altogether transcendent charms of the loved one; and when Barton got fairly started I had time to consider another matter which was of far greater importance to me.

Earlier in the day Barton had assured me that he would not fail to go and see my mother and sister when he returned to Glendale. I could scarcely urge him not to do so, though I knew very well that he would not stop with telling the home-folks; that he would doubtless tell every Tom, Dick and Harry in town how he had met me, and where. What I was asking myself as he burbled on about Peggy Haskins was whether I might dare give him the one cautionary word which would reveal the true state of affairs. In the end I decided that it would be most imprudent, not to say disastrous. He would have sympathized with me instantly and heartily, but the knowledge would have been as fire to tow when he got back where he could talk. I could foresee just how it would bubble out of him as he button-holed each fresh listener: "Say! you must keep it midnight dark, old man, but I met Bert Weyburn on the train: he's jumped his parole and, skipped—lit out—vanished! Not a word to any living soul, mind you; this is a dead secret. We mustn't give him away, you know,"—and a lot more of the same sort.

The arrival of the through train in the great echoing Terminal at St. Louis was timed accurately with the coming of a gloomy twilight fitly climaxing the bleak and stormy day. Having no hand-baggage I was the first to leave the Pullman, and on the platform I waited for Barton who had gone back into the body of the car to get his coat and hat and bags. As he ran down the steps and gave his two suit cases to the nearest red-cap, the links in a vague chain of recognition snapped themselves suddenly into a complete whole, and I knew instantly why the thumbing of the pocket-roll in my friend's generous offer to lend me money had struck the chord of familiarity. The two hand-bags turned over to the platform porter were the same two that I had seen snatched out of a cab in front of the Marlborough entrance while their owner was digging in his pockets for the cab fare, and the coat and hat Barton had donned for the debarking were the fur-lined luxury and the soft felt worn by the man who had dropped the black pocket-book.

"Well, old boy," he said, gripping my hand in leave-taking, "the best of friends must part. I suppose you'll wait here to take your Sedalla train. Maybe we'll get together again in a day or so. If we shouldn't, here's hoping that the world uses you well from this on—to sort of make up for what has gone, you know."

"Wait a minute," I gasped, as he was turning to follow the red-cap. "You said you were at the Marlborough last night. I was there—on an—on an errand. Did you come in late?—in a cab?"

"I did; and I had a funny experience—or have I told you about it?"

"No, you didn't tell me," I contrived to say.

"I didn't know but I had; I've talked so much about everything to-day. It was this way: when I got out of the cab I saw a sort of hobo-ish looking fellow standing at the curb with his hands in his pockets and all doubled over as if he were cold. It never occurred to me for a minute that he was anything but what he looked to be."

The porter, with Barton's suit-cases, was disappearing in the direction of the cab stand, and I suggested that we walk along. I had learned all I needed to know. But Horace Barton never left a story unfinished if he could help it.

"Yes, sir; that fellow fooled me good and proper," he went on, as we hurried to overtake the suit-cases. "He wasn't any hobo at all; he was a pickpocket, and one of the finest. I was hunting for a half-dollar to pay the cabby, and I could have sworn that that 'dip' never got within six feet of me. And yet he 'frisked' me before I could get across the sidewalk and into the hotel. Luckily, all he got was a little pocketbook with some sixty or so dollars in it."

"You reported your loss to the police?" I asked.

"Not for one little minute!" was the laughing rejoinder. "I didn't discover the loss until after I got up to my room and found the St. Louis wire waiting for me; and then there wasn't time. But I shouldn't have done it anyway. Any fellow fly enough to do me that way when I'm wide awake and 'at' myself is welcome to all he gets. . . . Well, here's our jumping-off place, I guess. My man 'll be waiting for me at the Southern, and I must go. Take care of yourself, and so long!"

I let him go; saw him climb into a cab and disappear. There was nothing to be done about the money, of course: I had spent more than half of it for my Denver ticket. But, since honesty, like all other human attributes, dies hard in any soil where it has once taken root, I turned away with a great thankfulness in my heart. The owner of the black pocketbook was found, and some day he should have his own again—with interest.

Nothing of any consequence happened after Barton left me. Finding upon inquiry that the westbound connecting train would not leave until eight o'clock, I ventured out in search of a slop-shop where I could purchase a cheap suit to go with the clean shirt and collar given me by the free-handed sales manager. The purchase left me with less than ten dollars in my pocket, but it made a new man of me otherwise. In the old life at home I had never dreamed that a few rags and wisps of cloth, properly sewed together, make all the difference in a moralizing world between the man and the vagrant.

There was a wreck on the Missouri road some time during the night, and our train was caught behind it and delayed. For this reason another rainy afternoon was drawing to its close when I had my first glimpse of Kansas City, high-perched on its hills from my glimpsing view-point on the opposite bank of the Missouri River, but low-lying and crowded to suffocation with railroad yards in that part of it where the train came to a stand.

As a matter of course, I had missed my proper Denver connection, owing to the wreck delay. But, a passenger agent directing me, I found the evening Union Pacific train waiting at another platform. A short half-hour later the tangle of railroad yards in the river "bottoms" was left behind and the overland train was boring westward into a cloudy night through Kansas.

With the welcoming West lying fair and free before me, the memory of the prison years and of the parole purgatory to which they had led was already beginning to fade into a limbo of things past and irrevocable, and therefore to be quickly and decently forgotten. There should be a new life in the new world, and the humiliation and disgrace of the past should be so deeply burled that it could never be resurrected. I was still under twenty-nine, it must be remembered, and at that age Hope, the one human quality which seems to have in it the precious germ of immortality, will flap its wings over the most wretched ash-heap that was ever blown together by the bleak winds of misfortune.



X

The Plain-Clothes Man

Upon landing in Denver in the middle of a day that seemed too bright and exhilaratingly bracing to be true, I had an adventure which, while it had no immediate bearing upon my escape, is worthy of record because it led to a second hasty flight, and so became in a manner responsible for much that happened afterward.

As I left the train a squarely built man, sharp-eyed under the brim of his modish soft hat, was standing aside on the track platform and evidently scrutinizing each of the debarking passengers in turn. Some acute inner sense instantly warned me, telling me that this silent watcher was a plain-clothes man from police headquarters; and his first word when he stepped out to confront and stop me confirmed the foreboding.

"You're wanted," he announced curtly, twitching his coat lapel aside to show his badge.

This was another of the crises in which I was made to feel the murder madness leaping alive in blood and brain; but the publicity of the place and the blank hopelessness of escape in a strange city made any thought of resistance the sheerest folly.

"What am I wanted for?" I asked.

"You'll find that out later. Will you go quietly, or do you want the nippers?"

The cooler second thought reassured me. It seemed entirely incredible that the news of the broken parole had already been put on the wires. In the natural order of things I should hardly be missed until after my failure to report to the prison authorities at the month end should raise the hue and cry.

"I'll go quietly, of course," I conceded; and then I added the lie of sham bravado: "I don't know of any reason why I shouldn't. You are the man who is taking all the chances."

With no further talk I was marched through the station building, out the long approach walkway to the foot of Seventeenth Street, and so on up-town, the plain-clothes man keeping even step with me and indicating the course at the corner-turnings by a push or a wordless jerk of his head.

As we went I was striving anxiously to invent a plausible story to be told at headquarters. It was an entirely new experience. Hitherto I had always told the plain truth, as the law required, and now I found the inventive machinery singularly rusty. But the wheels were made to turn in some fashion. By the time we were mounting the steps of the antiquated City Hall at the crossing of Cherry Creek, I knew pretty well what I was going to say, and how it must be said.

At first they gave me little chance to say anything. In the inspector's office my captor and two others got busy over a book of newspaper clippings, pictures and descriptions of "wanted" criminals. With wits sharpened now to a razor-edge, I came quickly to the conclusion that I had been mistaken for some one else. The conclusion was confirmed when they took an ink-pad impression of the ball of my right thumb and fell to comparing it with one of the record prints.

After a time the inspector put me on the rack, beginning by demanding my name.

Meaning to lie only when there should be no alternative, I told him a half-truth. Though every one at home called me "Herbert" and "Bert," and it was as "James Herbert Weyburn" that I had been arraigned and convicted, that was not, strictly speaking, my right name. I had been christened "James Bertrand," after my father. My mother had always called me "Jimmie," but for others the "Bertrand" was soon shortened into "Bert" and from that a few home-town formalists had soon evolved the "Herbert," a change which my own boyish and unreasoning dislike for "Bertrand" was ready enough to confirm. So, when the inspector asked me my name I answered promptly, "James Bertrand."

"Write it," was the curt command, and a pad and a pencil were shoved at me across the desk.

Since the name was two-thirds of my own, I was able to write it without any of the hesitation which might otherwise have betrayed me if I had chosen a combination that was unfamiliar.

"Where are you from?" was the next question.

Here, as I saw it, was one of the holes in which a lie might be profitably planted—profitably and safely. So I said, glibly enough: "Cincinnati."

"Street and number?"

I had given Cincinnati merely because I chanced to be somewhat familiar with that city, and now I gave the location of a boarding-house near the river front where I had once stayed over-night.

"Where were you born?"

"In the country, about forty miles from Cincinnati."

"Traveling for your health, I suppose? Where's your baggage?"

I saw that I should have to call a halt somewhere, and this seemed as good a point as any.

"See here," I broke out; "you've got the wrong man, and you know it, and I know it! You have no shadow of right to arrest me without a warrant. Neither have you any right to try to tangle me in my statements so that I shall fall down and give you an excuse for locking me up!"

"Say, young fellow—you cut all that out and quiet down!" advised the plain-clothes man who had nipped me at the railroad terminal.

"That's the one thing I shan't do!" I retorted boldly. "You have arrested me without authority, and now you are trying to give me the third degree. You've got me here, and you may make the most of it—until I can find a lawyer. Lock me up if you feel like it; and are willing to stand for the consequences."

At this the three of them put their heads together and once more compared the thumb-prints. Suddenly the inspector whirled upon me with his lips drawn back and his hand balled into a fist as if he were going to strike me.

"How about that little job you pulled off with a forged check in Chicago last week?" he rapped out.

He was evidently counting upon the effect of a shock and a surprise, but, naturally, the ruse fell flat.

"I don't know anything about a forged check; and I was never in Chicago in my life," I replied; and since both statements were strictly true I could make them calmly and without hesitation.

For the third time they put their heads together. I think the inspector was for letting me go without further ado. But the man who had arrested me was apparently still suspicious and unsatisfied. As a compromise they did the thing which determined my second flight. They took me into a room at the rear of the building; a barn-like place bare of everything save a screen and a tripoded photographer's camera; and within the next five minutes I had been posed and "mugged."

"Now you may go," said the harsh-voiced inspector; and I left the building knowing that the Colorado capital had been effectually crossed off in the list of possible refuges for me. With my photograph in the police blotter, discovery and recapture would be only a question of time, if I should stay where I could be identified by the local authorities. Once during my prison term I had seen an escaped man brought back from far-away Alaska.

Since there was no immediate danger, however, there was time to plan thoughtfully and prudently for a second disappearance. After a lunch-counter meal, eaten in a cheap restaurant within a block or so of the City Hall, I made a round of the employment offices. In front of one of them there was a bulletin-board demand for railroad grade laborers on the Cripple Creek branch of the Colorado Midland.

At that time I knew next to nothing about the geography of the Rocky Mountain States, and the great mining-camp at the back of Pike's Peak was merely a name to me; though the name was familiar, in a way, because the mine in which Abel Geddis had sunk his depositors' money was said to be in the Cripple Creek district. What chiefly attracted me in the bulletin-board notice was the announcement that free transportation would be given to the work. With only a few dollars in my pocket, the free ride became an object, and I entered the office.

The arrangement was easily made. I gave the agent his fee of two dollars, and let him put a name—not my own or any part of my own, you may be sure—on his list for the evening shipment. It appeared to cut no figure with this employment shark that I bore none of the marks of a successful pick-and-shovel man. All he wanted or cared for was his two dollars and something on two legs and in the shape of a man to put into his gang against the collected fee. I was told to show up at the Union Station at six o'clock, sharp; and after spending the remainder of the afternoon wandering about the city, I reported as instructed, was passed through the gates with some twenty-five or thirty other "pick-ups," and so turned my back upon the Queen City of the Plains—for a time.



XI

Number 3126

In due deference to the "mugging" at police headquarters, I had registered in the Denver employment office as "William Smith." But on the work, which proved to be the construction of a branch feeder for the Midland in the heart of the gold district, I took my own name—or rather that part of it which had been given to the Denver police inspector—arguing that the only way in which I could be traced would be by means of the photograph. Against the photographic possibility, my beard, which had been scraped off by the station barber during the waiting interval between trains in St. Louis, was suffered to grow again.

The railroad labor was strenuous, as it was bound to be; and for the first few days the thin, crisp air of the altitudes cut my already indifferent physical efficiency almost to the vanishing point. Nevertheless, there were two pieces of good fortune. My fellow-laborers in the grading gang were principally Italians from the southern provinces and their efficiency was also low. This helped, but a better bit of luck lay in the fact that the contractors on the job were humane and liberal employers; both of them with a shrewd and watchful eye for latent capabilities in the rank and file. Within a week I was made a gang time-keeper, and a fortnight later I became commissary clerk.

Before I forget it, let me say that my first month's pay, or the greater part of it, went to replace the sixty-three dollars and a half in the little black pocketbook which I had stolen—I guess that is the honest word—-from Horace Barton. I debated for some time over the safest method of returning the pocketbook and its restored contents to the wagon salesman. I realized that it wouldn't do to let him know where I was; and it seemed a needless humiliation to confess to him that I was the "hobo" who had posed, in his imagination, as the skilful sidewalk pickpocket.

In casting about for a means of communication I thought of Whitley, the Springville minister. So I wrote him a letter, enclosing the pocketbook, with a truthful explanation of the circumstances in which it had come into my possession, and telling him what to do with it. I laid no commands upon his conscience, but begged him, if he could consistently do so, to suppress my name and whereabouts. And since I could not be quite sure as to what the ministerial conscience might demand, I added, rather disingenuously, I fear, that he needn't reply to my letter, as I had no permanent address.

It was some little time after my promotion to the commissary that Dorgan came on the job as a track-laying foreman. He was a heavy-set, black-browed fellow with a sinister face and deeply caverned, brooding eyes looking out furtively under their bushy coverts, and his chief characteristic was a crabbed reticence which not even the exigencies of handling a crew of steel-layers seemed able to break. His face was one not to be easily forgotten; from the first sight I had of it, it was vaguely familiar, and a thoughtful ransacking of the cubby-holes of memory very shortly recalled it for me. Dorgan was an escaped convict.

His jail-break dated back to my second year in the penitentiary, to a period just after I had been slated for the prison office work. Dorgan—his name on the prison books was Michael Murphey, but we knew him only as "Number 3126"—had "brought" ten years for safe-blowing, and he was known in the prison yard and shops as a dangerous man. Twice within my recollection of him he had been put in solitary confinement for fighting; and he was one of the few to whom the warden denied the small privileges accorded the "good conducts."

One day a hue and cry was raised and word was quickly passed that Number 3126 was missing. He had planned his escape craftily. A new shop building was at that time in process of erection, and each day a gang of "trusties" went outside to haul stone. Of course, the safe-blower was not included in this outside gang, but one dark and rainy morning he included himself by the simple process of hog-tying and gagging one of the trusties detailed for the job, exchanging numbered jackets with him, and taking the man's place in the ranks of the stone-loaders, where he contrived to pass unnoticed by the guards.

The escape was entirely successful. At the critical moment Dorgan had overpowered the single wagon guard, leaving the man a candidate for admission to the hospital, and had made his break for liberty. We, of the inside, never knew, of course, the various steps taken in the attempt to recapture him. But they all appeared to be fruitless since Number 3126 was never brought back.

I failed utterly in an endeavor to analyze my own feelings when I recognized Dorgan and realized that an escaped man from my own prison was at work for my employers; an escaped criminal and a desperate one, at that. What was my duty in the premises? Should I bind myself, once for all, to the brotherhood of law-breakers—the submerged minority—by shielding this man and conniving at his escape? Or should I turn informer, telling the contractor-partners of the risk they ran by keeping Dorgan in the force—the risk that some night, after the money for the monthly pay-roll had been brought out from town, they would find the camp safe smashed and its contents gone?

While I was debating this question, inclined first in one direction by some new generosity on the part of one or the other of my employers, and again leaning the other way when I remembered that, in the eye of the law, I, myself, was in precisely the same category with Number 3126, I had another promotion. One evening, just after I had closed the commissary, one of the water-boys came to tell me that I was wanted in the contractors' office, a little shack at the far side of the end-of-track cantonments. Hadley, the senior member of the firm, was alone when I showed myself at the door.

"Come in, Bertrand," he invited, gruffly genial; "come in and wait a minute until I go over this estimate again. You'll find cigars in that box on the bunk."

Having nothing to do while I waited, I sat on a stool in a corner of the shack, smoking the gift cigar and silently regarding the man who had sent for me. He was a good example of the better type of Western contractor and out-door man; big-bodied, burly, whiskered like a miner, a keen driver on the work, but withal as kindly as a father when kindness was called for.

In due time he pushed the figuring pad aside and turned to me. "Drag up your stool, Jim; I want to talk to you," he began. And then: "How much experience have you had in keeping accounts?"

I told him briefly.

"In a bank, eh?" he queried, and I knew precisely what he was thinking. He was wondering what I had done to break myself. In spite of all that had happened or might happen, I believe I was ready to tell him; but to my astonishment the curt questioning which all my previous experience had taught me to expect at this stage of the game did not come.

"This is a free country, Bertrand," he said, looking me squarely in the eye. "I'm not going to ask you why you quit bank bookkeeping to come out here and swing a pick in a construction camp. Here in the tall hills we don't think much of digging up graves—the graves of any man's past. You've done well in every job we've tried you at, and that's all to the good for you."

I said I had tried to fill the bill as well as I knew how, and he took me up promptly.

"We know you have; and that brings on more talk. Kenniston is leaving us to go prospecting. We've talked it over—Shelton and I—and you're to have the paymaster's job. Think you can hold it down?"

"I am sure I can—so far as the routine duties are concerned. But——"

Never, in all the soul-killing experiences of the parole period, had I been confronted with a test so gripping. Would this large-hearted man turn the keys of his money chest over to me if he knew I were an ex-convict, liable at any moment to be re-arrested for having broken my parole? I was silent so long that he began again.

"Looking around for a spade to begin the grave-digging?" he asked, with a sober smile. Then, with a note of unwonted gentleness in his voice: "I shouldn't do that if I were you, Jimmie. The man doesn't live who hasn't, at one time or another, had to dig a hole and bury something decently out of sight. Whatever you may have done in the past, you're not going to play marbles with the Hadley-and-Shelton pay-money. That's about all there is to it. You may take hold to-morrow morning. Kenniston will stay long enough to show you the ropes."

It was not until after I had left the office shack and was crossing to the bunk house set apart for the office squad that I remembered Dorgan. Now, if never before, my duty in his case was plain. It was tempting Providence to allow the presence in camp of a burglar who was probably only waiting for his chance to "clean up"; doubly perilous now, indeed, since in any case of loss my record would be shown up, and Dorgan, if he had already recognized me as I had him, would not be slow to take advantage of my vulnerability.

My first impulse was to go straight back to Hadley and tell him, without the loss of another moment. But there were difficulties in the way; obstacles which I had not before stopped to consider. If I should accuse Dorgan, he might retaliate by telling what he knew of me. This difficulty was brushed aside at once: I judged there was little to fear from this, in view of what Hadley had just said to me. But there was another obstacle; the one which had kept me silent from the day I had first seen Dorgan driving his track-layers. With a crushing sense of degradation I realized the full force of the motive for silence, as I had not up to this time. With every fiber of me protesting that I must be loyal to my employers at any and all costs, that other loyalty, the tie that binds the branded, proved the stronger. I could not bring myself to the point of sending Dorgan, guilty as he doubtless was, back to the living death of the "long-termer." I make no excuses. One cannot touch pitch and escape defilement in some sort. For three years I had lived among criminals; and the bond . . . but I have said all this before.