Momentary as the shock had been, I found that Polly had remarked it. She spoke of it on the ride back to our retreat at Carter's.

"Are you feeling entirely well, Jimmie, dear?" she asked; and before I could reply: "You had a bad turn of some sort while we were at table. I saw it in your face and eyes."

I hastened to assure her that there was nothing the matter with me; that there couldn't be anything the matter with a man who had died and gone to heaven nearly a month previous to the dinner at El Tovar.

"But the man has got to go back to earth again pretty soon, and take the woman with him," she retorted, laughing. "Just think, Jimmie; it has been nearly a month, as you say, and we haven't had a letter or a telegram in all that time! Not that I'm regretting anything; I'm happy, dearest—as happy as an angel with wings; but I want to see my daddy."

The heavenly path was leading back into the old world again, the fighting world, and I knew it, and presently we were taking all the steps of the delightful vanishing in reverse; boarding the through train at Williams, catching glimpses of the stupendous majesty of mountain and plain as the powerful locomotives towed us up the grades of the Raton, doing a brisk walk on the platform at Albuquerque while the train paused, and all the rest of it.

From Trinidad I wired Barrett, telling him that we were on our way home; that we should go in by way of Colorado Springs instead of Florence, with a stop-over between trains for dinner at the Antlers. I half-expected he would run down to the Springs to meet us, and so he did, bringing Father Phineas with him. Polly's love for her father was always very sweet and touching, and Barrett and I left them to themselves at the meeting.

"I'm mighty glad to see you back, Jimmie, old man," Barrett declared, when we had found a quiet corner in the rotunda. "You are looking like a new man, and I guess you are one. And you are on your feet again financially, too. We declared a dividend yesterday, and you've got a bank account that will warm the cockles of your silly old heart."

"How is Gifford? and how are things at the mine?" I asked.

"Gifford is all right; only he's got too much money—doesn't know what to do with it now that he has built all the new houses the camp will stand for. And the Little Clean-Up is all right, too; though we are digging into a small mystery just now."

"A mystery?" I queried.

"Yes. You remember how the branch vein in the two-hundred-foot level was bearing off to the east?"

"I do."

"Well, three weeks ago the sloping carried us over into the Mary Mattock ground, and I tell you what, Jimmie, I was more than glad we had bought that claim outright while we could. The ore is richer than anything we have found since we made the big strike at grass-roots, and we'd be up against it good and hard if we hadn't paid those Nebraska farmers what they asked and taken a clear title to the ground."

"But the mystery," I reminded him.

"It is a little trick of acoustics, I guess; it has happened in other mines, so Hicks tells me. Some peculiar geological structure of the porphyry in particular localities makes it carry sound like a telephone wire. In that eastern adit of ours you can hear them working in the Lawrenceburg as plainly as if they were only a few feet away."

"That is odd," I mused; "especially as the Lawrenceburg workings are all in exactly the opposite direction—down the hill on their side of the spur."

Barrett thrust his hands deep into his pockets.

"I have often wondered, Jimmie, if they really are downhill. Nobody, outside of the men on their own pay-roll, knows anything about it definitely; and Blackwell wouldn't let an outside engineer go down his shaft for a king's ransom. I know it, because I have tried to send one. If the downhill story that we've been hearing should happen to be a fake; if he should be under-cutting us, instead; it would explain a heap of things."

"The stubborn lawsuit among others," I offered.

"Yes; the lawsuit. By the way, we've been up to our necks in that while you've been hiding out. Blackwell's lawyers succeeded in persuading the Federal court to grant a temporary injunction, in spite of everything we could do, and we are operating now under an indemnity bond big enough to make your head swim. The hearing to determine whether the injunction shall be dissolved or made permanent is timed for next Monday."

"Heavens!" I ejaculated. "We can't let them tie us up!"

"I don't think they are going to be able to. Benedict is feeling a little better now and he thinks he has them sewed up in a blanket, only he won't tell me how, and you never can tell what's going to happen when the lawyers get at you. There are lots of holes in the legal skimmer: for example, at the preliminary hearing Blackwell had three surveyors who went on the stand and swore flat-footed that the lines on our side of the spur were all wrong; that the Lawrenceburg group of claims covered not only our original triangle, but the Mary Mattock as well. Paid-for perjury, of course, but we couldn't prove it; so there you are."

At my urging Barrett would have gone into this phase of the trouble more deeply, but just then Polly and her father came across the rotunda and we all went to the dining-room together. I shall never forget, the longest day I live, just where our table for four stood, and how a group of gabbling tourists had the three or four tables nearest to us, and how the lights, due to some trouble with the electric current, winked now and then, like the stage lights in a theater ticking off the cues.

We had got as far as the black coffees, and Barrett was joking Polly and telling her that she shouldn't take sugar, when I saw, through a vista of the tourists, a square-shouldered, dark-faced man rising from his place at a distant table. There was no mistaking him. He was the man I had seen in the dining-room of the hotel at the Grand Canyon.

As he came toward us between the tables the resemblance, which I had so confidently assured myself was only a resemblance, transformed itself slowly into the breath-cutting reality, and I was staring up, wild-eyed and speechless, into the face of the deputy warden, Cummings, when he tapped me on the shoulder and said, loud enough for the others to hear:

"You've led us a pretty long chase, Weyburn, but we don't often miss, and it's ended at last. I guess you'll have to come with me, now."



XXII

A Woman's Love

It is useless for me to try to picture the consternation which fell upon the four of us when the deputy warden touched me on the shoulder and spoke to me. I can't describe it. I only know that Barrett sprang up, gritting out the first oath I had ever heard him utter; that a look of shocked and complete recognition leaped into the mild brown eyes of the old metallurgist; that Polly was standing up with her arms outstretched across the table as if she were trying to reach me and drag me out of the crushing wreck of all our hopes.

When he found that I was not going to offer any resistance, Cummings was very decent—not to say kindly. He let me walk with the others out of the dining-room; made no show of his authority in the rotunda or at the elevators to point me out as a prisoner; and in the up-stairs room to which he took me, pending the departure-time of the earliest eastbound train, he let me see and talk, first with Barrett, and afterward with my wife.

In this most trying exigency Barrett proved to be all that my fancy had ever pictured the truest of friends. His first word assured me that he meant to stand by me to the last ditch, and I knew it was the word of a man who never knew when he was beaten. While Cummings smoked a cigar in the window-seat I told Barrett the whole pitiful story, beginning with the night when I had promised Agatha Geddis that I would pull her father out of the hole he had digged for himself and ending with my appearance in the Cripple Creek construction camp.

Barrett believed the story, and I didn't have to wait for him to tell me so. I could see it in his eyes.

"Jimmie!" he said, wringing my hand as if he would crush it, "you've got the two of us behind you—I'm speaking for Gifford because I know exactly what he will say. We'll spend every dollar that ever comes out of the Little Clean-Up, if needful, to buy you justice! But I wish you had told me all this before; and, more than that, I wish you had told Polly."

"My God, Bob!" I groaned; "don't rub it in!" And then I told him brokenly how I had known Polly as a little girl in Glendale, and how I was certain that her father had more than once been on the verge of recognizing me. Then, in such fashion as I could, I made my will, or tried to, telling him that Polly must have her freedom, and that he must help her get it, and that my share in the mine must go to her.

"It is the only return I can make her for the deception I have put upon her," I said; "and I want you to promise me that——"

In the midst of all this Barrett had turned aside, swearing under his breath, which was his only way, I took it, of letting me know how it was rasping him. But now he whirled upon me and broke in savagely:

"Stop it, you damned maniac! If you have lived with Polly Everton a whole month and don't know her any better than that, you ought to be shot! She is waiting now to have her chance at you, and I'm not going to take any more of her time." Then he went soft again: "You keep a stiff upper lip, and we'll get you out of this if we have to retain every lawyer this side of New York!"

Polly came so soon after Barrett left that I knew she must have been waiting in the corridor. Cummings was considerate enough to shift his smoking-seat to the other window and to turn his back upon us. All the cynics in the world to the contrary notwithstanding, there is a tender spot in the heart of every man that was ever born, if one can only be fortunate enough to touch it.

"My darling!" That is what she said when I took her in my arms; and for a long minute nothing else was said. Then she drew away and held me at arm's length, and there was that in her dear eyes to make me feel like the soldier who faces the guns with a shout in his heart and a song on his lips, knowing that death itself cannot rob him of the Great Recompense.

"You needn't say one word—Jimmie—my husband! I have known it all, every bit of it, from the first—from that Sunday morning when Daddy took me over to your mine," she whispered. "I—I loved you, dearest, when I was only a foolish little school-girl, and your sister and I have exchanged letters ever since Daddy and I left Glendale. So I knew; knew when they sent you to prison for another man's crime, and knew, even better than your mother and sister did, why you let them do it. Oh, Jimmie!"—with a queer little twist of the sweet lips that was half tears and half smile—"if you could only know how wretchedly jealous I used to be of Agatha Geddis!"

"You needn't have been!" I burst out. "But you don't know it all. Last winter—in Denver——"

She nodded sorrowfully.

"Yes, dear; I knew that, too. I knew that Agatha Geddis was using you again—against your will; and that this time she had a cruel whip in her hand. We had all heard of the broken parole; it was in the home newspapers, and, besides, your sister wrote me about it."

"And in the face of all this, you——"

She nodded again, brightly this time, though her eyes were swimming.

"Yes, my lover—a thousand times, yes! And I knew this would come, too,—some time; this dreadful thing that has fallen upon us to-day. I am heart-broken only for you, dear. What will they do to you?"

I told her briefly. They would make me serve the remaining two years of the original sentence, doubtless with an added penalty for the broken regulations.

"Dear God—two years!" she gasped, with a quick little sob; and then she became my brave little girl again. "They will pass, Jimmie, dear, and they won't seem so terribly long when we remember what we are waiting for. I'm going with you, you know—as far as they'll let me; and when things look their blackest you must remember that I'm only just a little way off; just a little way—and waiting—and waiting——"

She broke down at the last and cried in my arms, and when she could find her voice again:

"It mustn't be two years, Jimmie; it would kill you, and me, too. They must pardon you—you who have done no wrong! I'll go down on my knees to the Governor, and——"

There was something in this to send the blood tingling to my finger-tips; to rouse the final reserves of manhood.

"Never!" I forbade. "You must never do that, Polly; and you mustn't let Barrett stir hand or foot in that direction. I shall come out an ex-convict, if I have to, but never as a pardoned man with the presumption of guilt fastened upon me for the remainder of my life. Promise me that you won't do anything like that!"

I don't know whether she promised or not. Cummings was stirring uneasily in his window and looking at his watch. I led Polly to the door, kissed her, and put her out into the corridor. The agony, the keenest agony of all, was over, and I turned to the deputy warden. "Whenever you are ready," I said.

Barrett was at the train when we went down, as I was sure he would be, and he seemed strangely excited.

"Give me just a minute with your prisoner, Mr. Cummings," he begged; and after the deputy warden had amiably turned his back: "I've just had a telegram from Gifford. The Lawrenceburg lawyers are offering to compromise. They say that their owners are tired of dragging the quarrel through the courts, and they offer to buy us out, lock, stock and barrel, for five million dollars."

"After they've committed every crime in the calendar to smash us? Not for a single minute!" I exploded.

"Right you are, Jimmie!—I knew you'd be with me!" he agreed defiantly. "We'll fight 'em till the last dog's too dead to bury. There's a hole in the bottom of the sea, somewhere, and we'll find it before we're through with that piratical outfit. Here's your conductor: you'll have to go. Polly will follow you in a day or two. I had a handful of it keeping her from going on this train; but, of course, that wouldn't do. Put a good, stiff bone in your back, and remember that we shan't let up, day or night—any of us—until you're free again. Good-by, old man, and God help you!"



XXIII

Skies of Brass

The depressive journey from Colorado to the Middle West records itself in memory as a dismal dream out of which there were awakenings only for train-changings or a word of talk now and then with Cummings. The deputy warden was a reticent man; somber almost to sadness, as befitted his calling; but he was neither morose nor churlish. Underneath the official crust he was a man like other men; was, I say, because he is dead now.

On the final day of the journey I persuaded him to tell me how I had been traced, and I was still human enough to find a grain of comfort in the assurance that Agatha Geddis had not taken my money at the last only to turn and betray me.

Barton, the Glendale wagon sales manager, was the one who was innocently responsible. He had talked too much, as I had feared he would. The clue thus furnished had been lost in St. Louis, but was picked up again, some months later, by Cummings himself through the police-record photograph in Denver.

Cummings admitted that he had followed Polly and me on our wedding journey; that he had known where we were stopping, and had seen us in the canyon-brink hotel.

"Why didn't you take me then?" I asked.

He explained gruffly that the requisition papers with which he was provided were good only in Colorado, and that it was simpler to wait than to go through all the red tape of having them reissued for Arizona. Knowing that the wires were completely at his service, the answer did not satisfy me.

"Was that the only reason?" I queried.

He turned his sober eyes on me and shook his head sorrowfully, I thought.

"I was young once, myself, Weyburn—and I had a wife: she died when the baby came. Maybe you deserve what's coming to you, and maybe you don't; but that little woman o' yours will never have another honeymoon."

Disquieting visions of harsh prison punishments were oppressing me when we reached the penitentiary and I was taken before the eagle-eyed old Civil War veteran who had given me my parole. But the warden merely put me through a shrewd questioning, inquiring closely into my experiences as a paroled man, and making me tell him circumstantially the story of my indictment, trial and conviction, and also the later story of the mining experience in Colorado.

"I don't recall that you ever protested your innocence while you were here serving your time, Weyburn," he commented, at the dose of the inquisition.

"I didn't," I replied, wondering why he should go behind the returns to remark the omission. Then I added: "They all do that, and it doesn't change anything. You set it down as a lie—as it usually is."

"Can you look me in the eye and tell me that you are not lying to me now?" he demanded.

I met the test soberly. "I can. I was convicted of a crime that I didn't commit, and I broke my parole solely because that appeared to be the one remaining alternative to becoming a criminal in fact."

The interview over, I expected to be put into stripes, cropped, and sent to the workshops. But instead I was taken to one of the detention cells, and for an interval which slowly lengthened itself into a week was left a prey to all the devils of solitude. It seemed as if I had been buried out of sight and forgotten. Three times a day a kitchen "trusty" brought my meals and put them through the door wicket, but apart from this I saw no one save the corridor guard, who never so much as looked my way in his comings and goings.

That week of palsying, unnerving isolation got me. Consider it for a moment. For a year I had been living at the very heart of life, working, fighting, scheming, mixing and mingling, and succeeding—not only in the money-winning, but also—until the Agatha Geddis incident came along—in the field of good repute. At the last Agatha had set me free, and Polly's love had opened the ultimate door of supreme happiness; a joy so ecstatic that at the end of the honeymoon I was only beginning to realize what it meant to me.

And then, on the very summit of the mountain of joy, had come the touch of the deputy warden's hand on my shoulder in the Antlers dining-room. That touch had swept the new-born world ruthlessly aside—all save Polly's love and loyalty. Success had been blotted out with the loss of liberty wherewith to profit by it; and for those who had known me in the great gold camp and elsewhere in the West—my new friends—I was branded as an escaped convict. For two shameful years I should be shut away from Polly, from freedom, from participation in the fight my partners were making to save the mine, and most probably from any knowledge of how the fight was going, either for or against us.

Is it any matter for wonder that by the end of the solitary week I was little better than a mad-man? If I might have had speech with the warden, I should have prayed for work; for any employment, however hard or menial, that would serve to stop the sapping of the very foundations of reason. One hope I clung to, as the drowning catch at straws. I could not doubt that Polly was near at hand. If the regular "visiting day" should intervene they would surely admit her. But in this, too, I was unlucky. The date of my reincarceration fell between two of the regular visiting days. So I waited and looked and longed in vain.

I don't know how many more circlings of the clock-hands were measured off before the break came. I lost count of the time by days and was no longer able to think clearly. In perfect physical condition when I was arrested, I began to go to pieces, both mentally and physically, under the strain of suspense. Then insomnia came to add its terrors; I could neither eat nor sleep. I had an ominous foreboding of what the total loss of appetite meant, and kept telling myself over and over that for Polly's sake I must fight to save my sanity.

Under such conditions I was beginning to see things where there was nothing to be seen on the day when I had my first visitor, and the shock of surprise when the cell door was opened to admit Cyrus Whitredge, the lawyer whose bungling defense had done so little to stave off my conviction, was almost like a premonition of further disaster. Before I could rise from my seat on the cot he was shaking hands with me and twisting his dry, leathery face into its nearest approach to a smile.

"Don't bother to get up, Bert," he began effusively. "Just stay right where you are and take it easy. I've been trying for three solid days to get up here, but court is in session and I couldn't break away. You're not looking very well, and they tell me down below that you're off your feed. That won't do, you know—won't do at all. We are going to get you right out of this, one way or another, mighty quick. You've taken your medicine like a man, and we don't propose to let 'em give you a second dose of it—not by a jugful."

All this was so totally unlike the Whitredge I had known that I fairly gasped. Then I reflected—while he was drawing up the single three-legged stool and sitting down—that in all probability the Little Clean-Up was responsible for the change in him. I was no longer a poor bank clerk without money or friends.

"'We,' you say?" I put in, meaning to make him define himself.

"Why, yes, of course I'm including myself; I'm your attorney, and as soon as the news of your arrest came I made preparations to drop everything else, right away, and get into the fight. You got your sentence and served it, and we'll scrap 'em awhile on the proposition of bringing you back for more of it simply because you happened to forget, one day, and step over the State boundaries. I don't know but what we could show that the law is unconstitutional, if we had to. But it won't come to anything like that, I guess."

I looked him straight in the eyes.

"Whitredge, who has retained you this time?" I asked.

"I don't know what you mean by that, Bert."

"I mean that four years and a half ago there were pretty strong reasons for suspecting that you were Abel Geddis's attorney, rather than mine."

"Oh, pshaw!" he returned with large lenience. "Geddis wanted to be fair with you—he thought a good bit of you in those days, Bert, little as you may believe it—and he did offer to pay my fee, if you couldn't. But that has nothing to do with the present aspect of the case. I was your attorney then, and I'm your attorney now. It's a point of professional honor, and I couldn't think of holding aloof when you're needing me. Besides, your Colorado lawyers have been in communication with me—naturally, since I was attorney for the defense four years and a half ago."

"They sent you to me here?" I inquired.

"They knew I would come, of course; I was on the ground and had all the facts. They couldn't come themselves, either of them. They have had their hands full with the injunction business."

"The injunction business?"

"Yes; haven't you heard?"

I shook my head.

"It was in the newspapers, but I suppose they haven't let you see them here. Your mine is shut down. You were operating as bonded lessees under a temporary injunction, or something of that sort, weren't you? Well, the Federal court has made the injunction permanent and tied you up. As soon as I got this I smelled trouble for you, and as your attorney in fact I got busy with the wires. The situation isn't half as bad as it might be. I understand that the plaintiff company, a corporation called the Lawrenceburg Mining & Reduction Company, has offered you people five million dollars for a transfer of all rights and titles under your holdings, and that, notwithstanding the injunction, this offer still holds good."

Since it is a proverb that an empty stomach is a mighty poor team-mate for a befogged brain, I was unable to see what Whitredge was driving at, and I told him so.

"Nothing in particular," he countered, "except to remind you that you still have a good chance to play safe. We are going to 'wrastle' you out of here, just as I say, Bert, my boy, at any cost, and it's a piece of great good luck that you won't have to count the pennies in whatever it may cost."

"But I shall have to count them if our mine is shut down."

"Not if you and your partners make this sale to the Lawrenceburg people. Five millions will give each of you a million and two-thirds apiece. It's up to you right now to persuade your two partners to close with the offer while it still holds good. It's liable to be withdrawn any minute, you know. The other two may be able to hang on and put up a further fight, but you can't afford to."

"Why can't I?"

"For one mighty good reason, if there isn't any other. I met your wife this morning, Bert. She's stopping across town at the Buckingham—just to be as near you as she can get. You can't afford to do, or to leave undone, anything that'll keep that little woman dangling on the ragged edge. She thinks too much of you."

He had me on the run, and I think he knew it. What he did not know was that the smash, the solitary cell, and a weakened body were pushing me harder than any of his specious arguments.

"I've got to get out!" I groaned, with the cold sweat starting out all over me. "Whitredge, I've had enough in these few days to break an iron man!"

"Naturally; married only a month, and all that. I'm a dried-up old bachelor, Bert, my boy, but I know exactly how you feel. As you say, you've got to get out of here, and the quickest way is the right way—when you stop to think of that poor lonesome little woman waiting over yonder in the hotel. I've come fixed for you"—he was on his feet, now, fumbling in his pockets for some papers and a fountain pen—"I've drawn up a letter to your two partners,—let me see; where is it? Oh, yes, here you are—a letter from you advising them to close with that Lawrenceburg offer. If you'll just authorize me to send a wire in your name, and then read this letter that I've blocked out and sign it——"

I glanced hastily over the type-written sheet he handed me. It was a business-like letter addressed to Barrett and Gifford, going fully into the situation from the point of view of a man needing ready money, and urging the acceptance of the Lawrenceburg offer, not wholly for the personal reason upon which Whitredge had been enlarging, but emphatically as a prudent business measure—an alternative to the possible loss of everything.

"You see just how the matter stands," he went on while I was reading the letter. "They've got you stopped, and that is pretty good evidence that the court is holding you as trespassers on Lawrenceburg property. The next thing in order, if you fellows hold out, will be a suit for damages which will gobble up all your former returns from the mine and leave you without anything—you and both of your partners."

"What do you get out of it if this sale goes through, Whitredge?" I asked him suddenly.

He laughed as if I had perpetrated a new joke.

"What do I get out of it? Why, bless your innocent soul, Bert, ain't I working for my fee? And I tell you I'm going to charge you a rattling big one, too, when I can shake hands with you as a millionaire and better on the sidewalk in front of this State eleemosynary Institution!"

"You talk as if you had the sidewalk means in your hand," I said, yielding a little to his enthusiasm in spite of my suspicions of him and my feeble efforts to stand alone.

"I have!" he announced oracularly. "I have here"—slapping a second folded paper which he had drawn from his pocket—"I have here a petition for your free and unconditional pardon, addressed to the Governor and signed by the trial judge, the prosecuting attorney, and by ten of the twelve members of the jury. Oh, I tell you, young man, I've been busy these last three days. You may have been setting me down as a hard-hearted old lawyer, toughened to all these things, Bert, but when I read that newspaper story, of how you were kidnapped, as you may say—torn from the arms of a loving wife and dragged aboard of a train and railroaded back to prison—every drop of blood in me rose up in protest, and I swore then and there that if there was any such thing as executive clemency in this broad land of ours, you should have it!"

If I had been wholly well and out of prison perhaps the cheap bombast in all this would have been apparent at once. But I was neither well nor free. And Polly's heart was breaking; I didn't need Whitredge's word for this—I knew it by all the torments of inward conviction.

I understood well enough what he was asking me to do: to tip the scale against what might be Barrett's and Gifford's better judgment, and to sign a paper which would stamp me for all time as a criminal pleading, not for justice, but for pardon. In spite of this knowledge the pressure Whitredge had brought to bear was well-nigh irresistible. Barrett and the Colorado lawyers evidently had their hands too full to think of me; and, in any event, I could not see what possible chance they might have of reopening my case and proving my innocence. At the end of it I was reaching for the pen in Whitredge's hand, but at the touch of the thing with which I was to sign away my fighting rights for all time a little flicker of strength came.

"You must give me time, Whitredge; a little time to think this over," I pleaded. "Four years and a half ago I told you I was innocent—I tell you so again. You are asking me to confess that I was guilty; if I sign that petition it will be a confession in fact. I have sworn a thousand times that I'd rot right here inside of these walls before I'd ask for a pardon for a crime that wasn't mine. Leave these papers and let me think about it. Give me a chance to convince myself that there is no other way!"

He looked at his watch, and if he were disappointed he was too well schooled in his trade to show it.

"All right; just as you say," he agreed. "Shall we make it this afternoon—say, some time after three o'clock?"

"Make it to-morrow morning," I begged.

This time he hesitated, again pulling out his watch and consulting its face as if it were an oracle. I had no means of knowing—what I learned later—that he was making a swift calculation upon the arriving and departing hours of certain railroad trains. None the less, he agreed somewhat reluctantly to the further postponement; but when the turnkey was unlocking the door he gave me a final shot.

"I don't want to influence you one way or the other, Bert—that is, not against your best interests; but while you're making up your mind don't leave the little woman out. I shall see her at dinner to-night, and she'll want to know what's what. I'm going to give her your love and tell her you're trying mighty hard to be reasonable. Is that right?"



XXIV

Restoration

At the clanging of the cell door behind the departing lawyer I was to all intents and purposes a broken reed. The theorists may say what they please about the fine and courageous quality of resolution which rises only the higher the harder it is beaten down; but man is human, and there are limits beyond which the finest resiliency becomes dead and brittle and there is no rebound.

The temptation to yield was both subtle and compelling. Reason, the kind of reason which scoffs at ideals, told me that I was foolish to fight for a principle. On the one hand there were sharp misery, the loss of freedom, poverty and suffering for Polly: on the other, liberty and a generous degree of affluence. We could hide ourselves, Polly and I, in some remote corner of the world where no one knew; and our share of the five millions, wealth even as wealth is reckoned in the day of wealth, would put us far enough beyond the reach of want; nay, it would do more—it would silence the gossiping tongues if there were any to wag.

Up and down the narrow limits of my cell I paced, praying at one moment for strength to hold out to the end, and at the next cursing myself for an idiotic splitter of hairs helpless to break away from the manaclings of an idea. Love, reason, common sense were all ranged on the side of the compromise with principle; and opposed to them there was only the stubborn protest against injustice pleading feebly and despairingly for its final hearing.

In the midst of the struggle the kitchen "trusty" brought the mid-day meal, and for the first time in forty-eight hours I forced myself to eat. A sound body, weakened only by anxiety and abstinence, is quick to respond to a resumption of the normal. Under the food stimulus I felt better, stronger. But now the strength was all on the side of yielding. With the quickening pulses came the keen lust of life. To live, to be free, to enjoy, in the years, few or many, of the little earthly span: after all, these were the only realities.

Whitredge had left his fountain pen, and the papers—the letter to Barrett and Gifford and the petition—were lying on the cot where I had thrown them. For the last time I put the pleading protest under foot. Freedom, a fortune, and Polly's happiness: the triple bribe was too great and I uncapped the pen.

It was at this precise moment that footsteps in the corridor warned me that someone was coming. A bit of the old convict secretiveness made me hastily thrust the papers out of sight under the cot blankets, and at the rattling of the key in the lock I stood up to confront—Whitredge.

"You?" I said. "I thought you were going to give me until to-morrow morning."

He looked strangely perturbed, and the nervousness was also in his voice when he said: "I meant to, Bert, but I've had a wire, and I've got to go back to Glendale on this next train"—dragging his watch out of its pocket and glancing at it hurriedly. "Those papers: you've had time enough to think things over, and I'm sure you've made up your mind to do the sensible thing. Let me have them so I can set things in motion before I leave town."

I wondered why he kept jerking his head around to look over his shoulder as he talked, and why the turnkey jingled his keys and waited. But the time for indecision on my part was past and I reached under the blanket for the two papers. With the three-legged stool for a writing-table I was kneeling to put my name at the bottom of the letter to my partners when there were more footsteps in the corridor, hurried ones, this time, and I looked up to see the squarely built, competent figure of our Western lawyer, Benedict, standing in the cell doorway, with the deputy warden, Cummings, backgrounding him.

"Hello, Whitredge; at your old tricks, are you?" snapped the new-comer brusquely. And then to me: "What are you signing there, Bertrand?"

"Nothing, now—without your advice," I said, getting up and handing him the letter.

Whitredge couldn't get out, with Benedict filling the doorway, so he had to stand a cringing second prisoner, looking this way and that, like a rat searching for a hole, while the big Westerner read calmly through the letter which had been written out for me. That moment amply repaid me for much that I had suffered at the hands of Cyrus Whitredge.

"Humph!" said Benedict, folding the letter and thrusting it into his pocket. "Now what's that other document?"

I gave him the petition for pardon, and again he took his time with the reading.

"Nice little scheme you were trying to pull off!" he said to Whitredge, after the petition, accurately refolded, had gone to join the pocketed letter. "You are certainly an ornament to an honorable profession." Then, stepping into the cell and standing aside: "You may go. We'll know where to find you when you're needed."

Whitredge's vanishing was like a trick of legerdemain; one moment he stood before us, and at the next he was gone. At his going, Cummings and the turnkey also disappeared and I was left alone with Benedict. There was a hearty handgrasp to assure me that I was not dreaming, and then I said:

"I had given you up, Benedict. I thought they had you tied hand and foot back yonder in the big hills."

"Myers is handling that end of it," he returned. "I had other irons in the fire, and they've been getting hot in such rapid succession that I couldn't leave them. But I did what I could by wire—got the warden's promise that he would hold your case 'in suspension' until I could show up in person. Have they been treating you well? I'm afraid they haven't. You're not looking quite up to the mark."

I was beginning to understand—a little.

"When did you telegraph the warden?" I asked.

"Immediately; from Cripple Creek, and as soon as Barrett had told me your story. We had our reply at once, and I took the first train for Glendale, your old home town. What I have been able to dig up in that little dead-alive burg is a great plenty, Bertrand. Your arrest has turned out to be just about the most unfortunate thing that could possibly have happened for certain persons who were most anxious to bring it to pass—namely, two old rascals who made use of the traveling-man Barton's story and started the pursuit in the right direction."

"Call me Weyburn," I broke in. "That is my name—James Bertrand Weyburn—and I'm going to wear it, all of it, from this time on."

"I know," laughed the big attorney, drawing up the stool and seating himself beside the cot much as Whitredge had done at an earlier hour of the same day. "They call you 'Bert' and 'Herbert' down yonder in your home village, and they don't seem to know that your middle name is Bertrand."

"You say you have been digging: what did you find out?" I questioned eagerly.

"Some things that I was looking for and some that I wasn't. I had the advantage of being a total stranger to everybody, and all I had to do was to stroll around and ask questions. Let me ask you one, right now; do you know who the owners of the Lawrenceburg are?"

"A New York syndicate, I've always understood."

"Not in a thousand years!" retorted the lawyer, laughing again. "It is owned, pretty nearly in fee simple, by two old friends of yours—Abel Geddis and Abner Withers. More than that, it is a reorganized and renamed corporation founded upon a certain gold-brick proposition, called 'The Great Oro Mining and Reduction Company,' promoted and floated down in your section of the State something like five years ago by two men named Hempstead and Lesherton. Does that stir up any old memories for you?"

It did, indeed. "The Great Oro" was the mine for the capitalization of which Abel Geddis had used the money belonging to his depositors; the basis of the theft which had cost me three good years of my life.

"But I had understood that the 'Oro' was a fake, pure and simple!" I protested.

"It was. A claim had been located and a shaft sunk to ninety feet, but there was no mineral. That shaft is the present main shaft of the Lawrenceburg. After Geddis and Withers found they had been 'gold-bricked' they went to Colorado and looked the ground over for themselves. The result of that visit was a determination on their part to send a little good money after the bad, so they put a force in the mine and began to drift from the shaft-bottom, and shortly after that the workings began to pay."

"Which direction did that drift take?" I asked.

Benedict did not answer the question directly. "Things began to fit themselves together pretty rapidly after I got the facts in the history of 'The Great Oro'," he went on. "By that time the news of your arrest and return to the penitentiary had reached Glendale and the gossip bees were buzzing. Whitredge was rattling around like a pea in a dried bladder, holding midnight conferences in the bank with the two hoary old villains who had sworn your liberty away, starting a petition for your pardon, and I don't know what all. I didn't pay much attention to him because I was at that time more deeply interested in a number of other things."

"Go on," I begged breathlessly.

"First, I investigated carefully the records of your trial and it didn't take very long to discover that Whitredge had doubled-crossed you. He bribed the two deputies sent to transfer you from the police station in Glendale to the county seat. They were to bully and browbeat you into making an attempt to escape—thus affording proof presumptive of your guilt—and this they proceeded to do. They've admitted it under oath—after I had shown them what we could do to them if they didn't."

"Whitredge began to plan for that very thing almost at the first," I put in. "It was he who put the idea of running way into my head."

"Sure he did. But speaking of affidavits, I have another; from a fellow named Griggs; you remember him, of course,—your understudy in Geddis's bank at the time when you were bookkeeper and cashier? He swears that the original stock certificates in 'The Great Oro' were made out in the name of Abel Geddis—as you know they were—and that on a certain night just previous to your arrest, when he had been working late and had gone to the back room for his hat and coat, Geddis and Whitredge came in and Geddis opened the vault. Are you paying attention?"

I was choking with impatience, as he well knew, but he refused to be hurried.

"All in good time," he chuckled. "I'm coming to it by littles. Griggs was curious to know what was going on and he played the spy. He saw Geddis's name taken out of the stock certificates with an acid and your name written in its place. You see, they were confidently counting upon 'getting' you through Geddis's daughter and were framing things up to fit. How much or how little they took the young woman into their confidence I don't know."

"That doesn't matter now," I hastened to say.

"No; Griggs was the man I wanted, and I got him. He will testify in court, if he is obliged to. He would have done it at the time if Geddis and Whitredge hadn't discovered him and scared him stiff with a threat to put him in the prisoner's dock with you, as an accomplice. After I had secured Griggs's affidavit I wanted one more thing, and I got it—bought it. That was a map of the Lawrenceburg underground workings, corrected up to date. I knew Geddis and Withers must have one, and by a piece of great good luck I found a young surveyor's clerk who had made a tracing for Geddis from one of Blackwell's blue-prints. He had spoiled his first attempt by spilling a bottle of ink on it, so he made another. He didn't see any reason why he shouldn't sell me the spoiled copy."

"I know what you are going to say!" I shouted.

"I imagine you do," he laughed. "The Lawrenceburg workings have never gone downhill at all. They've been burrowing in the opposite direction all the time, and according to their own map they never touched pay-ore until they cut the Little Clean-Up vein below your hundred-and-fifty-foot level. Now you know why they have been fighting us so desperately, and why, as a final resort, they are willing to pay us five million dollars for a quit-claim to the Little Clean-Up. We've got them by the neck, Jimmie. We can make them pay for every dollar's worth of ore they have stolen from us."

It was too big to be surrounded at the first attempt. I completely lost sight of my own involvement in the upflash of joy at the thought that at the long last the two old scoundrels who had robbed others right and left were going to get what was coming to them. Benedict went on with his story quietly and circumstantially.

"I guessed at once what Whitredge was up to when I found that he was circulating that pardon petition. He was aiming to make you a self-confessed criminal before we could have time to turn a wheel. At that, I wired a Cincinnati detective agency, and a young man who knew his business was put on the job. The detective's reports showed the whole thing up. Geddis, Withers and Whitredge were hustling like mad to make capital out of your recapture by the prison authorities. Whitredge was to advise you to urge the sale of the Little Clean-Up upon Barrett and Gifford, and your reward was to be a pardon, by the asking for which you would be virtually confessing your guilt. Thus the past would be buried beyond any possibility of a resurrection. Nice little scheme, wasn't it?"

"You have those two papers—the letter and the petition," I said, with an uncontrollable shudder. "You'll never know how near Whitredge came to winning out. I was just about to sign when you came."

"Whitredge is a dangerous man," was Benedict's comment. "He took the train from Glendale last night, and the detective went with him, wiring me from a station up the line. I caught the next train and got here two hours ago. I might have headed him off of you, I suppose, but I had a bit of legal business to attend to first. If you are ready, we'll go. Your wife is waiting for you in the warden's office, and she'll be wondering why we are so long about getting the doors unlocked."

"Go?" I stammered. "You—you mean that I'm free?"

"Sure you are! My legal business was to press the habeas corpus proceedings which were begun as soon as I had obtained evidence of the miscarriage of justice in your trial before Judge Haskins. You are a free man. I left the order of the court with the warden as I came in."

There is a limit to human endurance, either of sorrow or of joy. I got up and tried to walk with Benedict to the cell door, which had been left standing open. I remember catching at the big lawyer's arm, and then the world went black before my eyes. And that is all I do remember.

* * * * * *

We held our council of war—the final one in the long series—late in the evening of the day of climaxes in the sitting-room of a Hotel Buckingham suite, Benedict, Barrett and I. Barrett had arrived just as we were sitting down to dinner, having hurried east as soon as he could be spared at Cripple Creek.

"They are all in, down and out," was Barrett's summing-up of the situation, after he had heard Benedict's story. And then: "It's up to you, Jimmy"—looking away from me. "You owe those two old men and their scamp of a lawyer a pretty long score, and I guess you'll be wanting to pay it."

"I do!" I gritted. In a flash all the injustice I had suffered at the hands of Abel Geddis and Abner Withers and Cyrus Whitredge piled in upon me and there was no room in my heart for anything but retaliation.

Benedict clipped and lighted a cigar, and Barrett sat back in his chair and stared at the gas-fixture in the center of the ceiling.

"I can't blame you much, Jimmie," he offered. "I guess maybe, if the shoe were on my foot, I'd want to give them the limit. And yet——"

"There isn't any 'and yet'," I cried out.

"Perhaps not; but I don't know, Jimmie. If I were going to be the father of Polly's children, as you are, I—well, I don't believe I'd care to hand down that sort of a legacy to the children; a legacy of hatred—even a just hatred—gorged and surfeited on the thumb-screwing of two old men. Whitredge will get what is coming to him; the Bar Association will see to that. But these two old misers who are already tottering on the edge of the grave——"

"They have robbed me of my good name, and they have robbed us all of our good money!" I cut in rancorously.

At this, Benedict, who had been saying little, put in his word.

"I saw Whitredge an hour ago. He has been wiring Geddis and Withers—to tell them that the game is up. He says he supposes he will have to take his own medicine, but he asked me to intercede for the two old men. They have wired their Colorado attorneys to withdraw the Lawrenceburg suit and to lift the injunction, and they offer to turn in all their property if they are permitted to leave the country. That's as bad as a prison sentence for two men as old as they are. Will you let them do it, and call the account square, Weyburn?"

"No, by God!" If I set down the very words that I uttered, it is only in the interest of truth. At that moment I was like the soldiers who have seen their dead; I had seen the look in Polly's eyes, put there by that horrible week of waiting and suspense.

The room, as I have said, was the sitting-room of our suite—Polly's and mine—and I had neither seen nor heard the door of communication with the bed-room open. When I glanced up she was standing in the doorway, and I knew that she had heard. In the turning of a leaf she had flown across the room to drop on her knees beside me and bury her face in my lap.

"Oh, Jimmie—Jimmie, dear!" she sobbed; "you must forgive—forgive and forget! For my sake—for your own sake—you must!"

That settled it. Benedict flung his freshly lighted cigar into the grate and turned away, and Barrett got up and crossed to the window. I stood up and lifted my dear girl to her feet, and with her tear-stained face between my palms I turned my back upon the past and told her what we were going to do.

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

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

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



XXV

The Mountain's Top

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, if one must lean altogether upon sheer logic and the pure materialism of this divided by that and multiplied by something else," she returned. "But there are two kinds of regeneration, Jimmie, dear; the kind which involves a radical change in the life-motive, and the other which is merely a stripping of the husks from a strong soul that never needed changing."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE END