THE FLIGHT FROM PRISON.
Dean Mercer was older and better educated than Marcus Ellison, and yet
the latter took the lead in the first stage of their hurried flight
from the vicinity of the reform school as he had done in the initial
steps of the plan of escape from its gloomy precincts.
“I’ve thought it all out,” he told Dean as they ran along. “You just
trust in me and we’ll soon be safe from pursuit.”
They met no one in their flight. There was a reason for this. As they
came to the end of the thicket a rocky waste showed, and sterile and
difficult to traverse as it was, Marcus insisted on crossing it.
“You see, Dean,” he explained, “no one will think that we went this
way. Of course the warden and his men will search for us, but they will
think that we went citywards.”
“Or west?”
“Exactly. Once we cross this waste we come to the marshy lowlands along
the river, and beyond that is a still more desolate waste. We must try
to get other clothes and gradually change our appearance so that we
wouldn’t be recognized on description. In a week or two we can dare to
venture back to civilization----”
“A week or two?” repeated the dismayed Dean.
“Yes.”
“Lose all that time?”
“From what?”
“From--from----”
“I know what you are going to say,” interrupted Marcus sagely. “You
think I ought to be on the track of those papers and you after your
enemies. Now I think different. What good is it if we are captured
again?”
“That’s so, but if I could once reach my friends----”
“They wouldn’t dare to recapture you?”
“No.”
“You think so?”
“I do.”
“You are very much mistaken. You don’t think far enough, Dean; you
believe too fully in human nature. Why, your friends all believe you
to be a thief.”
Dean sighed dejectedly.
“If you dared to go back to Millville or Springfield you would at once
be arrested.”
“And convicted?”
“Circumstances are against you.”
“But I could prove----”
“What?”
“That I was carried away.”
“How?”
Aye, how, indeed? Dean Mercer confessed that his companion had thought
further than he had.
He was in a bad dilemma. He did not know of a certainty who his enemies
were. He could prove that he had been kept from appearing at Millville
because he was mysteriously a prisoner in the State reform school.
But suppose that the same deft plotters who had undoubtedly placed him
there had also so cunningly covered their tracks that every statement
Dean might make would be refuted by circumstances?
Who would believe his story? He was adjudged a thief, and----
“Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do?” he moaned in actual distress as
his true situation dawned upon him.
“Work out your own salvation?” cried Marcus heroically.
“How?”
“Just abide by my plans for a few days. I have a scheme to work light
out of darkness. I am as impatient as you are to aid my father, to see
him, but I know the risk. There is plenty of time. We must first remove
the risk of recapture then we can work.”
“Can we remove that risk?”
“You shall see,” replied Marcus confidently.
It was about two o’clock in the morning when for the first time since
leaving the vicinity of the prison they rested.
In the near distance a whole host of fireflies seemed to line the
landscape near the river, but Marcus soon explained what these were.
“A charcoal camp,” he said.
“Where they burn the wood?” asked Dean.
“Yes. Now, then, you wait here. I want to reconnoiter a little.”
Marcus was gone for over an hour. When he returned he bore quite a
large bundle.
“Come on,” he said.
“Where to?”
“Into the swamp. We mustn’t be seen here.”
“Weren’t you seen?”
“No.”
“But the bundle?”
“Clothes.”
“Clothes?” repeated the mystified Dean.
“Yes.”
“Where did you get them?”
“I’m sorry to say that I took them,” replied Marcus with a grimace.
“They’re old and worn out, black as soot, and no good; but I suppose
they belonged to somebody. I found them near a furnace. We had to have
them, Dean. These prison suits of ours would betray us, even this far
from civilization.”
Marcus seemed untiring in his resolve to make escape certain. It was
daylight when they waded through the last of a score of bogs and landed
on a sort of island, well sheltered by reeds and willows.
“No one likely to follow or find us here,” he laughed. “We’re safe at
last. This is our home for a day or two, Dean.”
“We’ll starve!”
“I guess not. Come! a shelter first, and then sleep. I’m dead to the
world.”
“So am I.”
They soon built a sort of hut out of branches and reeds under a tree,
and then sunk into an exhausted slumber.
“Noon! Wake up!” cried a cheery voice to Dean, and he sprung to his
feet, aroused from a horrible dream of recapture and the solitary cell
at the reform school.
Marcus had matches, and directed Dean how to make a fire without much
smoke.
Then he went off on an exploring expedition, and returned with a
triumphant shout, bearing some kind of fowl in his hand.
“What is it?” queried the amazed Dean.
“A wild duck.”
“You killed it?”
“With a stone. The swamp is full of them. Come, the rest of the bread
and broiled fowl won’t make such a bad meal, eh, Dean?”
They enjoyed the repast immensely.
“Now, to business,” said Marcus after it was over. “We will disrobe,
put on these charcoal burner’s garments, burn the old convict
suits--shoes, cap and all--for they might betray us, and grime our
faces.”
An hour later they had indeed altered their personal appearance
wonderfully.
The old blue canvas suits and begrimed faces gave the boys the look of
regular charcoal burners.
They saw the last vestige of the shameful livery of crime, the prison
suits, consumed to ashes.
Before abandoning his, however, Marcus drew from various pockets
several articles.
He revealed to the amazed Dean evidences of his patient ingenuity in
imprisonment, and his provision for just such a contingency as the
present one.
“I made them out of bits of hair I picked up in the prison barber
shop,” he explained to Dean. “See; here are two mustaches and wigs and
side whiskers, and a patch for the eye.”
The mustaches had been made by pasting individual pieces of hair upon a
piece of buckskin from the prison glove shop.
Marcus insisted that both he and Dean should wear one, and after
cutting and pasting it, the appearance of wig and mustache, with the
blue clothes and grimed faces, actually disguised the boys so that even
the prison officials would not have known them.
“Now, then,” said Marcus, “we had better stay here until to-morrow.”
“And then?”
“Proceed slowly and cautiously west.”
“Toward Springfield?”
“Yes, quite near to it, first.”
“Have you some definite point in view?”
“I have. Wait till we leave here, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
They caught some fish for supper with a thorn fish-hook, and were
undisturbed in their hermit-like occupation of the island that night.
“We’ll start on now,” said Marcus the next morning.
He glanced over a piece of paper in his hand as he spoke.
“What’s that, Marcus?” asked Dean curiously.
“A memoranda from the prison register.”
“Where did you get it?”
“Copied it when I was in the library sorting garden seeds.”
“What is it about?”
“You.”
“Me!” ejaculated Dean surprisedly.
“Yes.”
“Why----”
“It’s the chronicle of your case.”
“Read it.”
Marcus did so.
Dean listened interestedly.
It ran:
“Convict No. 301: Name, Robert Rawley; charge, burglary; term, five
years; complainant, James Rawley, uncle; committing officer, Justice
Mullern; county, Wayne; township, Daleford.”
“Well, well!” gasped Dean. “Robert Rawley! Does that mean me?”
“I reckon it does.”
“Uncle James Rawley?”
“Yes.”
“I’m stunned.”
“I ain’t.”
“You make it out?”
“Plainly, and I’m going to find the man who had you arrested, and the
justice who committed you at once. How lucky that I know somebody at
Daleford. Once there, Dean Mercer, we are fairly on the trail of our
enemies.”