I--CONVICT NO. 550
FROM somewhere far along the iron gallery, a guard's boot-heel rang
with a hollow, muffled, metallic sound;' from everywhere, as from some
strange, inceptive cradle, the source out of which all sounds emanated,
and which, too, was as some strange sounding-board that accentuated each
individual sound as it was given birth, came a confused, indeterminate,
scarcely audible rupture of the silence that never ceased its uneasy,
restless murmur. It was like water simmering in a caldron--only the
water was a drear humanity, and the caldron was this gray-walled,
steel-barred place.
A voice, low, quite inarticulate, falling often to little more than a
whisper, mumbled endlessly on. That was the old bomb-thrower, old Tony
Lomazzi, the lifer, in the next cell. The man was probably clinging to
the bars of his door, his face thrust up against them, talking,
talking, talking--always talking to himself. He did not disturb anybody.
Everybody was used to it; and, besides, the man did not talk loudly. One
even had to listen attentively to catch the sound of his voice at
all. It had become a habit, second nature; the man was incorrigible.
Presently the guard would come along, and perhaps rap the old man on the
knuckles; after that Lomazzi would retire to his cot quite docilely. It
had been that way night after night, week after week, month after month,
year after year.
Dave Henderson laid the prison-library book, that he had been fingering
absently, down on the cot beside him. It was still early evening in
early summer, and there was still light in the cell, though hardly
enough to read by; but he had not been reading even when there had been
better light. His mind was too active to-night. And now there was a
curiously wistful smile on his face. He would miss that stumbling,
whispering voice. A most strange thing to miss! Or was it the old man
himself whom he would miss? Not to-morrow, not even next week, there
still remained sixty-three days--but sixty-three days, with all the
rest of the five years behind them, gone, served, wiped out, were like
to-morrow; and, as against a lifer's toll, it was freedom, full born
and actually present. Yes, he would miss Tony Lomazzi. There was a bond
between the old man and himself. In almost the first flush of his entry
into the penitentiary he had precipitated a fight amongst his fellow
convicts on account of old Tony. Two of them had gone into the hospital,
and he, Dave Henderson, had gone into the black hole.
He sat suddenly bolt upright on his cot. He had not forgotten the horror
of those days of solitary confinement. He was not likely to forget
them--the silence, the blackness. The silence that came at last to
scream and shriek at him in myriad voices out of the blackness until he
was upon the verge of screaming and shrieking back in raving, unhinged
abandon; the blackness that was as the blackness of the pit of hell, and
that came at last to be peopled with hideous phantom shapes that plagued
him until, face down on his cot, he would dig his fists into his eyes
that he might not see--the blackness! His hands clenched hard as the
memory of it surged upon him; but a moment later he laughed a little
under his breath. It had been bad, bad enough; but he wasn't there
_now_, was he? Old Tony hadn't deluged him with any excessive thanks.
The old man had simply called him a fool--but there had been a
difference after that. On the march out from the cells, old Tony
was always the man behind him, and old Tony's shoulder touch in the
lock-step wasn't as perfunctory as it had been before. And there had
been years of that. Yes, he would miss old Tony Lomazzi!
Instinctively he turned his head in the direction of that voice that
whispered through the bars of the adjoining cell, and his face, lean and
hard, softened, and, tinging the dead-white prison pallor, a flush crept
into his cheeks. The man was a lifer. A lifer! God, he knew what that
meant! Five years of a living hell had taught him that. Five years that
were eternities piled upon eternities, and they were only a short
step along the path toward the only goal to which a lifer could look
forward--death!
Yes, he knew! The massed eternities, that were called five years by
those who walked outside in the sunlight, where men laughed, and women
smiled, and children played, had taught him why old Tony Lomazzi clung
to the bars and whispered.
Five years! Was it only five years since he had stood in the dock in
that courtroom, and the judge had sentenced him to--five years? The
scene was vivid and distinct enough! Even the ages that spanned the gulf
between the now and then could not efface that scene, nor dim it,
nor rob it of a single stark and naked detail. Tydeman had been
there--Martin K. Tyde-man, that prince of royal sports. Tydeman was
about the only man in that courtroom whose presence had made him uneasy;
and yet Tydeman, too, was the only man in that courtroom who had been
friendly toward him. It was probably due to the old millionaire's plea
for leniency that the sentence had been five years, and not ten, or
fifteen, or twenty, or whatever it might be that the erect, spare little
figure on the bench, with the thin, straight lips, had had the right to
pronounce. And Tydeman was dead now.
Dave Henderson stirred uneasily on the edge of the cot. He drew his hand
slowly across his eyes. He had wished from the start, hadn't he, that
it might have been some one else rather than Martin K. Tydeman? But it
_had_ been Tydeman's money, and the hundred thousand dollars alone was
all that had counted, and Tydeman was dead now, had been dead two or
three years, and on that score that ended it--didn't it?
The dark eyes, that had wavered abstractedly around the cell, narrowed
suddenly, and from their depths a smoldering fire seemed to leap as
suddenly into flame. But there was another score that was not ended!
Bookie Skarvan! Baldy Vickers, Runty Mott and the rest of Baldy's
gang had lied speciously, smoothly, ingeniously and with convincing
unanimity. They had admitted the obvious--quite frankly--because they
could help themselves. They had admitted that their intention had been
to steal the hundred thousand dollars themselves. But they hadn't stolen
it--and that let them out; and they proved that he, Dave Henderson,
had--and that saved their own hides. Also they had not implicated Bookie
Skarvan.
Their story had been very plausible! Runty Mott “confessed” that, on the
morning of the crime, he had overheard Bookie Skarvan and Dave Henderson
making their arrangements at the race course to get Tydeman to put up
the money to tide Bookie Skarvan over the crisis. He, Runty Mott, had
then left at once for San Francisco, put the deal up to Baldy Vickers
and Baldy's gang, and they had waited for Dave Henderson to arrive.
Naturally they had watched their proposed prey from the moment of his
arrival in the city, intending to rob him when the money was in his
possession and before he got back to the race course that night; but
instead of Tydeman turning the money over to Dave Henderson, as they had
expected, Dave Henderson had completely upset their plans by stealing
the money himself, and this had resulted in the prisoner's attempted
getaway, and the automobile chase which represented their own efforts to
intercept him.
The dark eyes were almost closed now, but the gleam was still
there--only now it was half mocking, half triumphant, and was mirrored
in a grim smile that flickered across his lips. He had not denied their
story. To every effort to obtain from him a clue as to the whereabouts
of the stolen money, he had remained as mute and unresponsive as a
stone; cajolery, threats, the hint of lighter sentence if restitution
were made, he had met with silence. He had not even employed a lawyer.
The court had appointed one. He had refused to confer with the lawyer.
The lawyer had entered a perfunctory plea of “not guilty.”
The grim smile deepened. There had been very good reasons why he had
refused to open his lips at that trial--three of them. In the first
place, he was guilty; in the second place, there was Bookie Skarvan, who
had no suspicion that he, Dave Henderson, knew the truth that lay
behind Runty Mott's story; and in the third place--there was one hundred
thousand dollars. There was to be no hedging. And he had not hedged!
That was his creed. Well, it had paid, hadn't it, that creed? The
hundred thousand dollars was almost his now--there were only sixty-three
days left. He had bought it with his creed, bought it with five years
wrung in blood and sweat from his life, five years that had turned his
soul sick within him. He had paid the price. Five years of sunlight he
had given for that hundred thousand dollars, five years that had sought
to bring the slouch of slavery and subjugation to his shoulders, a
cringe into his soul, a whimper into his voice, and----
He was on his feet, his hands clenched until his knuckles cracked. And
he stood there for a long time staring at the barred door, and then
suddenly he shrugged his shoulders, and relaxed, and laughed in a low,
cool way. But he had won, hadn't he, even on that score? It was not
often that the penitentiary would do for a man what this devil's hole
had done for him! He had entered it a crude, unpolished assistant to a
crooked bookmaker, his education what he had acquired before he had run
away from an orphan school at ten; and he could leave the place
now, given the clothes and the chance, and pass anywhere for a
gentleman--thanks in a very large measure to Charlie Millman.
Dave Henderson began to pace slowly up and down his cell. Millman had
never understood, of course, just why he had had so apt a pupil. He had
never explained to Millman that it had been from the very beginning his
plan to rise to the level of a hundred thousand dollars that was
waiting for him when he got out! Millman knew, of course, what he, Dave
Henderson, was up for; but that was about all. And Millman had perhaps,
and very naturally so, attributed his, Dave Henderson's, thirst for
polish and education to the out-cropping of the inherent good that in
him was, the coming to the surface finally of his better nature. And so
Millman, up for two years, had proved a godsend, for there hadn't been
much progress made along the lines of “higher education” until Millman
had come into the prison.
He liked Millman; and somehow Millman seemed to like him. A gentleman
from the tip of his fingers was Millman--and he took his medicine like
a gentleman. Millman wasn't the name that was entered on the prison
books--there it was Charlie Reith.
It was strange that Millman should have given him his confidence; he
could never quite understand that, except that it had seemed to come
gradually as their friendship grew, until finally it was almost the
basis of that friendship itself. He had come to trust Millman as he had
never trusted any other man, and he had come to believe in Millman as
the soul of courtesy and honor. And yet he had not been quite as open
with Millman as Millman had been with him; he had not spread his cards
upon the table, and Millman had never asked to see them; and somehow he
liked the man all the better for that. It was not that he did not trust
the other; it was because his confidence was not the sort of confidence
to give to an _honest_ man--and Millman was honest. There was a queer
twist to it all!
Dave Henderson smiled grimly again. It wouldn't be _fair_ to make an
honest man a party to the secret of where that money was, for instance,
would it--to make an honest man an accomplice after the fact? And there
was no doubt of Millman's clean-cut, courageous honesty. The prison
stripes could not change that!
He knew Millman's story: A nasty bit of work on the Barbary Coast, and
viciously clever. Millman, a stranger in the city, and en route for
a long trip through the South Seas, had been inveigled by a woman's
specious plea for help into a notorious resort on the night in which
a much-wanted member of the underworld was hard put to it to give the
police the slip--and Millman had unsuspectingly made himself the vehicle
of the other's escape.
The details were sordid; the woman's story pitifully impressive; and
Millman's chivalry had led him, innocent of the truth, to deprive the
plain-clothes squad of the services of one of their best men for the
period of several months--while one of the slickest counterfeiters in
the United States, and the woman with him, had made good their getaway.
It didn't look innocent in the eyes of the police, and Millman had stood
for two years--convicted as Charles Reith--to save the name of Charles
Millman, and those that belonged to him back in New York. He had been
found in a very unsavory place, and no amount of explanation could
purify those surroundings. Millman had never said so in so many words,
but he was buying a little woman's peace of mind back there in New
York with two years' hard labor. And meanwhile he was supposed to be
somewhere on a trading schooner in the out-of-the-way isles of the
Pacific, or something like that--maybe it was Borneo on a hunting
trip--he, Dave Henderson, didn't remember just precisely how the other
had fixed it. It didn't matter! The point was that they had made Millman
one of the convict librarians in the prison, and Millman had become his
tutor and his friend. Well, Millman was another he would miss. The day
after to-morrow Millman's time was up, and Millman would be gone. He was
glad for Millman's sake.
Five steps and a half from the rear wall of the cell to the steel-barred
door, and five and a half steps back again--over and over. He was
unaccountably restless to-night both in body and mind. He had spent his
five years, less the time that had been manumitted for good conduct, and
less the sixty-three days that still remained, not altogether to his own
disadvantage in an educational sense. In that respect he was satisfied
he was now ready to leave the prison and make the most of that hundred
thousand dollars--not as a “raw skate,” blowing it to the winds, but
as one who would make it pay dividends on those five years of servitude
that represented its purchase price. It was enough, that amount, for the
rest of his life, if he took care of it. It meant comfort, independence,
luxury. He didn't want any more. That was the amount he had already
fixed and decided upon even before the opportunity had come to take it.
It was his first job--but it was equally his last. And it was his last
because he had waited until, at the first attempt, he had got all he
wanted. He wasn't coming back to the penitentiary any more. He was going
out for good--in sixty-three days.
Sixty-three days! He wanted no piker, low-brow life at the end of those
sixty-three days when he got out. He had had enough of that! That was
one reason why he had taken the money--to pitch that one seamy room at
Tooler's and the rotten race-track existence into the discard, and he
was ready now, equipped, to play the part he meant to play. He had spent
the years here learning not to eat with his knife, either literally or
metaphorically. But there were only sixty-three days left, and there was
still _one_ thing he hadn't done, one problem still left unsolved, which
of late had been growing into nightmare proportions. In the earlier
years of his sentence he had put it aside--until the time came. That
time was here now--and the problem was still aside.
He had made all other preparations. He had even communicated secretly,
by means of a fellow convict who was going out, discharged, with Square
John Kelly of the Pacific Coral Saloon in San Francisco, with whom he
had invested his savings--that three thousand dollars at six per cent.
And he had had foresight enough to do this months ago in order to give
Kelly time to pull the money out of his business and have it ready
in cash; for he wasn't quite sure where the law stood on this point.
Failing to recover the proceeds of the Tydeman robbery, the law might
confiscate those savings--if the law knew anything about them. But the
law didn't--and wouldn't. Square John had sent back word that everything
was all right.
But there was still one problem left to solve--the way, once he was a
free man again and outside these walls, of getting that hundred thousand
dollars away from under the noses of the police and then giving the
police the slip. And this, grown to monumental proportions in the last
few months, rose before him now like some evil familiar that had taken
possession of both his waking and sleeping hours. And there came upon
him now, as it had come again and again in these last months, that scene
in the hospital when he had first opened his eyes to consciousness and
they had rested on the face of the man who had run him to earth--Barjan,
Lieutenant Joe Barjan, of the 'Frisco plainclothes squad. And Joe
Barjan's words were ringing in his ears now; ringing, somehow, with a
cursed knell in them:
“Don't fool yourself! It's a hell of a long time in the pen! And if you
think you could get away with the wad when you get out again, you've got
another think coming too! Take it from me!”
An acute sense of the realization of the _tangibility_ of his
surroundings seized upon him and brought a chill to his heart. That
hard, unyielding cot; these walls, that caged him within their few
scanty feet of space; his keepers' voices, that lashed out their
commands; the animals, of which he was one, that toiled upon the eternal
treadmill of days whose end but foretold another of like horror and
loathing to come! Barjan had told the truth; more of the truth than
Barjan ever knew, or could know, that he had told. It had been a hell
of a long time. Long! His face, as he still paced the cell, grayed under
the prison pallor. God, it had been long! Years of damnable torment that
had shut him out from the freedom that he loved! It had been a price
beyond all reckoning that he had paid for that hundred thousand dollars.
But he had paid it! He had paid it--paid it! He had gone all the
way--gone the limit. Was Barjan, right in one thing, right in that other
thing as well--that at the end they would beat him?
His hands curled into knotted lumps. There were not enough Barjans for
that though the world were peopled with Barjans! The thought had brought
a chill of dread for a moment, that was all. He had paid the price; he
was not likely to forget what that price had been; and he would never
yield up what that price had bought. True, he had no plan for this last
play of his worked out in detail, but he would find a way--because he
must. He was probably exaggerating what the police would, or could do,
anyhow! At first when he had come into the penitentiary, they had tried
to trap, sometimes to wheedle him into disclosing where the money
was, though they had long since given up those tactics and left him to
himself. But suppose the police did watch him now when he got out. He
could afford to wait--to wait a long while--until the police got tired,
perhaps, or perhaps came to the conclusion that, after all, they had got
the wrong man. They would not forget that, though he had refused to say
anything at the trial, he had not been so mute in his attitude toward
Runty Mott and Baldy Vickers, who had “sent him up;” and Barjan would
not forget, either, that in the hospital that day, with scarcely
strength to speak, he had threatened to get even with the gangster
and the Runt. There was a psychological factor in this. If he, Dave
Henderson, made no effort to get the money, showed no sign that he had
any knowledge of its whereabouts, might not the police in time come
to the far from illogical conclusion that they might better have
watched--five years ago--the men who had so glibly acted as witnesses
for the State, the men who had, admittedly, themselves attempted to
steal the money? It wasn't unreasonable, was it? And he could afford to
wait. The three thousand dollars from Square John Kelly would keep him
going for quite a while! He was a fool to let this thing madden his
brain with its constant torturing doubts. It was their move--not his.
From far along the iron gallery again a boot-heel rang with a dull,
metallic sound. It was the guard, probably, coming to rap old Tony
Lomazzi over the knuckles. Dave Henderson stopped his restless pacing,
and stood still in the center of the cell to listen. No, the old
bomb-thrower wasn't talking any longer; there wasn't any sound at all
except that boot-heel ringing on the iron flooring. The sound came
nearer, and Dave Henderson frowned in a puzzled way. The guard was not
alone, in any case. He could distinguish the footsteps of two men now.
It wasn't usual at this hour for any one to be out there with the guard.
What was in the wind? The warden, perhaps, making an unexpected round,
or----
His hands gripped suddenly hard and tight--but he did not move. There
came flashing over him once more the scene in that hospital ward of five
years ago. The cell door had opened and closed. A man had entered. The
guard's footsteps died away outside. The man spoke:
“Hello, Dave!”
It was Barjan, Lieutenant Joe Barjan, of the 'Frisco plain-clothes
squad. It _was_ the scene of five years ago. That was exactly what
Barjan had said then: “Hello, Dave!” And he had answered: “Hello, Joe!”
But he did not answer now.
“This is a little irregular, Dave,” said Barjan pleasantly; “but I
wanted to have a quiet little chat with you, you know, before”--he
stepped forward and clapped his hand on Dave Henderson's shoulder, and
laughed--“well, before you changed your address.” Dave Henderson made
no reply. He moved back from the other, and sat down on the edge of his
cot.
“There's a couple of things I want to say to you,” said Barjan, still
pleasantly. “And the first of them is that I want to tell you on the
level just where you stand. You're going out of here pretty soon now,
Dave. I guess you've got a better line on that than I have--eh?” He
laughed again good-humoredly. “Got the days counted, haven't you, Dave?”
No answer. Dave Henderson's eyes were fixed on the ungainly lines of the
toe of his prison boot.
“Oh, come on, now, Dave!” Barjan's tones were still hearty and jocular,
but the heartiness and jocularity, as though disconcerted, lacked some
of their original spontaneity. “Loosen up! You've been a clam for five
years. That's long enough. I've come up here to-night to play square
with you. You know that whatever I say goes with both of us. I know you
aren't holding anything against me personally just because I happened to
be the one who put the bracelets on you, and back of that we used to be
pretty good friends. I haven't forgotten the tips you used to give me in
the old days--and don't you think I have, either! Remember when that
old skeleton with the horse-hair cover pranced away with a forty-to-one
shot? Bonnie Lass, her name was--or was it Boney? Remember? She got the
hee-haw--but my missus got the swellest outfit of gewgaws and fixings
the old girl ever had before or since. You wised me up to that, Dave.”
No answer. There seemed to be something curiously significant in the
uncouthness and the coarseness of that boot toe--but the significance
was irritatingly elusive in its application.
There was silence for a moment. Barjan walked the length of the cell,
and back again.
“All right,” he said, halting in front of the cot. “Maybe we'll get
along better on another tack. I'm not beating about the bush, Dave”--his
voice was a little harder, crisper, sterner--“I want to know where that
hundred thousand dollars is. But I told you that I'd put you straight
first on where you stand. Now, listen! We've played both ends to the
middle. We believed that the story Runty Mott and Baldy Vickers told was
true; but both men had a record, and you can't be sure of a crook on his
own say-so. We didn't take any chances, and so we're sure now. Those men
were watched--not for a couple of weeks, or a couple of months, but for
the last four years. They don't know where the money is, and they never
did know what you did with it after you handed them that automobile
smash and beat it for the woods. Get that? It's up to you! And now, get
this: I told you in the hospital that day, you remember, that you could
never get away with it, and that's as true as I'm standing here talking
to you now. You've got some brains, Dave--use 'em now for your own sake.
From the moment you step outside these walls you're a marked man, and
not for just a little while either, but for all your life. They'll never
let up on you, Dave. Let that sink in! And it ain't only just old Joe
Barjan you've got to fool. Talking racey, Dave, your number's up on the
board on every police track in this country from one end to the other.
You can't beat that kind of a game. I'm talking straight, and you know
it. Come on now, Dave, pry them lips of yours apart, and come across!”
Dave Henderson's lips parted--but it was only to touch them with the
tip of his tongue. They were dry. His eyes were still on that coarse,
ungainly toe. Its significance had taken concrete form now. He knew now
what it meant. It typified a living hell of five long years, a ghastly
hell and a ghastly price paid for that hundred thousand dollars--years
that had left a stench in his nostrils that would live as long as
he lived--years that piled the daily, never-ending details of petty
persecutions, of loathsome associations, of miserable discomforts,
of haggard dreariness, of heart sickness, of bitterness that was the
bitterness of gall, into one overwhelming mass of horror from which the
soul recoiled, blanched, seared, shrivelled. And it went back further
than that. It went back to a night of the long, long ago, eternities
ago, a night when, in physical torture and anguish from his wound, his
teeth had sunk into his lips, and he had become blood-fanged like the
hunted animal at bay he was, and he had endured until the blackness
came. That was what it meant, this rough, heavy ungraceful clod of a
prison boot upon his foot! It meant that he had gone the limit, that
he had never hedged, that he had paid the price, all of it--all of
it--except only the sixty-three days that were left.
“Ain't you going to say anything, Dave?”
Tony Lomazzi must have shuffled his way back to the bars of his cell
door. The old Italian was whispering and muttering again. If one
listened very intently, one could hear him. There was no other sound.
Barjan cleared his throat.
“Look here,” he said slowly, “what's the use, Dave? I've showed you that
you're bound to lose, and that on that score it don't pay. And it don't
pay any way you want to look at it. You don't have to go out of here a
marked man, Dave. There ain't any truth in that--that the police never
give a guy a chance to go straight again. There ain't anything in that.
It's all up to the guy himself. You come across, make good on that
money, and I'll guarantee you'll get the squarest deal any man ever
got. Why, it would be proof in itself that you meant to go straight,
Dave, and everybody'd fall over himself to give you the glad hand. You
can see that, can't you, Dave? Don't you want to look the other fellow
in the eye for the rest of your life? Don't you want to be a free man?
You've got a lot of years ahead of you. Ain't you ever thought of a
home, and kiddies, maybe? It don't pay, Dave--the other way don't.
You've got the chance now to make good. What do you say?”
Tony Lomazzi was still muttering. Strange the guard was letting the old
bomb-thrower have so much license to-night! Tony seemed to be chattering
louder than he had ever chattered in all the years he had occupied that
next cell there!
Barjan laughed a little in a low, but not unpleasant way.
“Well, then, listen again, Dave,” he said. “I got one more thing to tell
you. You know what I've said is right. You come across, and I'll see
that you get your chance--and you don't have to wait for it, either,
Dave. I've got it all fixed, I've got the papers in my pocket. You
come across, and you walk out of here a free man with me right
now--to-night!” He leaned forward and slapped Dave Henderson's shoulder
again. “To-night, Dave--get that? Right now--tonight--this minute! What
do you say?”
It was true! The tentative plan he had half formulated was no good! He
realized that now. To lay low and wait was no good--Barjan had made that
clear. The hope that the police might veer around to the belief that
Runty Mott and Baldy Vickers were, after all, the men to watch, was no
good either--Barjan had made that equally clear. There didn't seem to be
any way out--and his number was up on the board on every police track in
the country. Yes, that was true, too. He lifted his eyes from the toe of
his boot for the first time, and met Barjan's eyes, and held the other's
for a long minute in a steady gaze.
And then Dave Henderson spoke--for the first time.
“You go to hell!” he said.
II--WOLVES ON THE SCENT
GUARDS on the raised platforms at either end of the room, guards
circulating amongst the striped figures that toiled over the work
benches, guards watching everywhere. They aroused a new and sullen fury
in Dave Henderson's soul. They seemed to express and exemplify to-day in
a sort of hideous clearness what Barjan had told him last night that he
might expect in all the days to follow.
His number was up on the board!
He had not slept well last night. Barjan did not know it, but Barjan had
struck a blow that had, in a mental way, sent him groggy to the ropes.
He was groggy yet. His mind was in confusion. It reached out in this
direction--and faltered, not quite sure of itself; it groped out in
another direction--and faltered. It seemed to have lost its equilibrium
and its poise. He had never expected that the whole world would turn its
back while he walked from the penitentiary to Mrs. Tooler's pigeon-cote
and tucked that package of a hundred thousand dollars under his arm. In
that sense Barjan had told him nothing new. But nevertheless Barjan had
struck home. He could not tell just where in the conversation, at just
precisely what point, Barjan had done this, nor could he tell in any
concrete way just what new difficulties and obstacles Barjan had reared
up. He had always expected that it was up to him to outwit the police
when he got away from these cursed guards. But his mind was haggard this
afternoon. He had lashed it, driven it too hard through the night and
through the morning. It had lost tenacity; it would not define. The only
thing that held and clung there, and would not be dislodged, was the
unreal, a snatch of nightmare out of the little sleep, fitful and
troubled, that he had had. He was swimming across a dark, wide pool
whose banks were all steep and impassable except at one spot which was
very narrow, and here a figure worked feverishly with a pile of huge
stones, building up a wall against him. He swam frantically, like a
madman; but for every stroke he took, the figure added another stone to
the wall; and when he reached the edge of the bank the wall was massive
and high, and Barjan was perched on the top of the wall grinning at him.
He raised his hand, and drew it across his eyes. The clatter and clamor
in the carpenter shop here around him was unendurable. The thud of a
hammer jarred upon him, jangling his nerves; the screech of the bandsaw,
a little way down the shop, was like the insane raving of some devil,
with a devil's perverted sense of humor, running up and down a devil's
scale. There were sixty-two days left.
His eyes fell upon old Tony Lomazzi a few benches away. Showing under
Tony's cap, the hair, what there was of it, was silver--more nearly
silver than it had somehow ever seemed to be before. Perhaps the prison
barber had been a little late in getting around to the old man this
time, perhaps it was because it was a little longer, perhaps that was
it. It was strange though, rather queer! His eyes, arrested now, held
on the other, and he seemed to be noticing little details that had
never attracted his attention before. His own hands, that mechanically
retained their grip upon the plane he had been using, were idle now.
Certainly those old shoulders over there were more bowed and bent than
he had ever seen them before. And the striped form was very frail; the
clothes hung on it as clothes hang on a scarecrow. There was only the
old fellow's side face in view, for the other's back was partially
turned, but it appeared to possess quite a new and startling
unfamiliarity. It wasn't the gray-white, unhealthy pallor--old Tony
wasn't the only one who had that, for no one had ever claimed that there
was any analogy between a penitentiary and a health resort--but the
jowl was most curiously gaunt, and drawn inward as though the man were
sucking in his cheeks, and yet the skin seemed to be stretched tight and
hard as a drum-head. Very curious! It must be because he couldn't see
the sharp little black eyes, full of fire, that put life and soul into
that scarecrow frame.
Old Tony turned, and their eyes met. The old man lifted his hand as
though to wipe his mouth--and there was a little flirt of the fingers in
Dave Henderson's direction. It was the old, intimate, little signal that
had passed between them unnumbered times in the thousand years that they
had spent together here in the penitentiary's carpenter shop--but he had
been quite wrong about the eyes. Something seemed to have filmed across
them, veiling their luster. And suddenly Dave Henderson swallowed hard.
Sixty-two days! Old Tony hadn't much more than that. Perhaps another
year at the outside, and the old lifer would be free, too.
Dave Henderson's mind reverted to Lieutenant Joe Barjan, of the
plain-clothes squad. It was perfectly true that playing a lone hand
against the police of all America was a desperate game--desperate in
the sense that success was in jeopardy. That was what made his brain
confused and chaotic now. He was afraid--not of Barjan, not of all the
police in the United States in a physical way, he had never hedged a
bet, and the five years that he had now paid would goad him on more than
ever to face any physical risk, take any physical chance--but he was
afraid now, sick with fear, because his mind would not respond and show
him clearly, definitely the way to knock Barjan and his triumphant grin
from off that nightmare wall, and----
A guard's voice snapped sharply at his elbow.
Yes, of course! He had been standing idle for a few seconds--perhaps an
hour. Automatically he bent over the bench, and automatically his plane
drew a neat, clean shaving from the work in front of him.
The guard's voice snapped again.
“You're wanted!” said the guard curtly. “There's a visitor to see you.”
Dave Henderson turned away from the bench, and followed the guard; but
the act was purely mechanical, born out of the years of discipline and
obedience. A visitor--for him! There was no one in the outside world,
not a soul, who cared for him; not many even, to whom his existence was
of enough interest to cause a second thought--except Barjan. And Barjan
had visited him yesterday. Another visitor--to-day! Well, whoever it
was, the visitor had been in no hurry about it! The little attention was
certainly belated! His lips thinned bitterly. Whoever it was had waited
almost five years. He had never had a visitor before--except the police.
It was an event! The bitterness grew deeper, and rankled. He had asked
for no human touch, or thought, or consideration; he had asked for none,
and he had given none; he had made his own bed, and he had not whined
because it had proved to be a rack of torture. He was not whining now,
and he had no desire to change the rules of the game that he himself had
elected to play. This was no visitor--it was an intruder!
But curiosity, as he crossed the prison yard and entered the main
building, tempered the sullen antagonism that had flared up in his soul.
Who was it that was waiting for him there along the corridor in the
wire-netted visitor's room, where, like some beast with its keeper
pacing up and down in front of the cage, he was to be placed on
exhibition? He searched his brain for an answer that would be even
plausible. Not Square John Kelly. Kelly _might_ have come if Kelly had
been left to himself, but Kelly was the one man he had warned off from
the beginning--there was that matter of three thousand dollars, and
caution had prompted him to avoid any sign of intimacy between them.
There was no one else. Even Kelly, perhaps, wasn't a friend any more.
Kelly would, perhaps, simply play square, turn over the three thousand
dollars--and then turn his back. It wouldn't be Tooler. The only thing
that interested Tooler was to see that he collected his room rent
regularly--and there would be some one else paying rent now for that
front room at Tooler's! No, there was no one else. Leaving a very keen
regard for old Tony Lomazzi aside, he had only one friend that he
knew of whom he could really call a friend, only one man that he could
trust--and that man was a convict too! It was ironical, wasn't it?--to
trust a convict! Well, he could trust Millman--only it wouldn't be fair
to Millman.
He lagged a little behind the guard as they approached the visitor's
room, a sudden possibility dawning upon him. Perhaps it _was_ Millman!
Millman's time was up to-morrow, and to-morrow Millman was going away.
He and Millman had arranged to say good-by to one another at the library
hour to-day after work was over; but perhaps, as a sort of special
dispensation, Millman had obtained permission to come here.
Dave Henderson shrugged his shoulders, impatient with himself, as
the guard opened a door and motioned him to enter. It was absurd,
ridiculous! Who had ever heard of one prisoner visiting another in this
fashion! There wouldn't have been any satisfaction in it anyhow, with a
guard pacing up and down between them! Well, then, who was it?
The door closed behind him--he was subconsciously aware that the door
had closed, and that the guard had left him to himself. He was also
subconsciously aware that his hands had reached out in front of him and
that his fingers were fiercely laced in the interstices of the heavy
steel-wire netting of the enclosure in which he stood, and that faced
another row of steel-wire netting, separated from his own only by the
space that was required to permit the guard to pace up and down between
the two--only the guard hadn't come in yet from the corridor to take up
his station there. There was only a face peering at him from behind that
other row of netting--a fat face--the face was supposed to be smiling,
but it was like the hideous grin of a gargoyle. It was the same face,
the same face with its rolls of fat propped up on its short, stumpy
neck. There wasn't any change in it, except that the red-rimmed gray
eyes were more shifty. That was the only change in five years--the eyes
were more shifty. He found that his mouth was dry, curiously dry. The
blood wasn't running through his veins, because his fingers on the wire
felt cold--and yet he was burning, the soul of him suddenly like some
flaming furnace, and a mad, passionate fury had him in its grip, and
a lust was upon him to reach that stumpy neck where the throat was,
and--and---- He had been waiting five years for that--and he was simply
smiling, just as that other face was smiling. Why shouldn't he smile!
That fat face was Bookie Skarvan's face.
“I guess you weren't looking to see me, Dave?” said Skarvan, nodding his
head in a sort of absurd cordiality. “Maybe you thought I was sore on
you, and there's no use saying I wasn't. That was a nasty crack you
handed me. If Tydeman hadn't come across with another bunch of coin on
the jump, those pikers down at the track would have pulled me to pieces.
But I didn't feel sore long, Dave--that ain't in me. And that ain't why
I kept away.”
The man was quite safe, of course, on account of these wire gratings,
and on account of the guard who was somewhere out there in the corridor.
It was very peculiar that the guard was not pacing up and down even
now in this little open space between Bookie Skarvan and himself--very
peculiar! Bookie was magnanimous--not to be sore! He wanted to laugh
out in a sort of maniacal hysteria, only he would be a fool to do that
because there were sixty-two days left before he could get his fingers
around that greasy, fat throat, and he must not _scare_ the man off now.
He had a debt to pay--five years of prison, those days and nights and
hours of torment when he had been a wounded thing hounded almost to
his death. Certainly, he owed all that to this man here! The man had
cunningly planned to have him disappear by the _murder_ route, hadn't
he? And he owed Bookie Skarvan for that too! If it hadn't been for that
he would have got away with the money, and there wouldn't have been five
years of prison, or those hours of physical torment, or----
He lifted his hand and brushed it heavily across his forehead. He was
quite cool now, perfectly in control of himself. The man didn't have
even a suspicion that he, Dave Henderson, knew these things. He mustn't
put the other on his guard--there were still sixty-two days during which
these prison walls held him impotent, and during which another, warned,
could get very far out of reach. Yes, he was quite cool now. He was even
still smiling, wasn't he? He could even play the man like a hooked fish.
It wasn't time to land the other yet. But it was strange that Bookie
Skarvan should have come here at all. Bookie wasn't a fool; he hadn't
come here for nothing. What was it the man wanted?
“Ain't you glad to see me, Dave?” demanded Bookie Skarvan quite
jocularly. “'Cause, if you ain't now, you will be before I go.”
“What do you mean?” inquired Dave Henderson coolly.
“Notice anything queer about what's doing here right at this minute?”
Bookie's left eye closed in a significant wink. “Sure, you do! There
ain't any guard butting in, Dave. Get me? Well, I fixed it like that.”
Dave Henderson relapsed into the old vernacular.
“Spill it!” he invited. “I'm listening.”
“Attaboy!” Bookie grinned. “You bet you're listening! We ain't forgotten
those years you and me spent together, have we, Dave? You know me, and
I know you. I kept away from here until now, 'cause I didn't want 'em
to get the right dope on the betting--didn't want 'em to think there was
any chance of us playing up to each other.”
“You mean you didn't want them to get wise that you were a crook, too,”
suggested Dave Henderson imperturbably.
Bookie Skarvan had no false modesty--his left eyelid drooped for the
second time.
“You got the idea, Dave,” he grinned again. “They've got to figure I'm
straight--that's the play. That's the play I've been making in waiting
five years--so's they'd be sure there wasn't nothing between us. Now you
listen hard, Dave. All you've handed the police is a frozen face, and
that's the right stuff; but I got a dead straight tip they're going to
keep their eyes on you till hell's a skating pond. They're going to get
that money--_or else you ain't!_ See? Well, that's where I stepped in.
I goes to the right source, and I says: 'Look here, you can't do nothing
with Dave. Let me have a try. Maybe I can handle him. He worked for me
a good many years, and I know him better than his mother would if he had
one. He's stubborn, stubborn as hell, and threats ain't any good, nor
promises neither; but he's a good boy, for all that. You let me have a
chance to talk to him privately, and maybe I can make him come across
and cough up that money. Anyway, it won't do any harm to try. I always
liked Dave, and I don't want to see him dodging the police all his
life. Tydeman's dead, and, though it was really Tydeman's money, I was a
partner of Tydeman's, and if anybody on earth can get under Dave's shell
I can.'” Bookie put his face closer to his own particular stretch of
wire netting. He lowered his voice. “That's the reason I'm here, and
that's the reason the guard--ain't!”
There was almost awe and admiration in Dave Henderson's voice.
“You've got your nerve with you!” he said softly.
Bookie Skarvan chuckled in his wheezy way.
“Sure!” he said complacently. “And that's why we win. You get the lay,
don't you?” He was whispering now. “You can't get that cash _alone_,
Dave. I'm telling you straight they won't let you. But they won't watch
_me!_ You know me, Dave. I'll make it a fair split--fifty-fifty. Tell
me where the money is, and I'll get it, and be waiting for you anywhere
you say when you come out; and I'll fix it to hand over your share so's
they'll never know you got it--I got to make sure it's fixed like that
for my own sake, you can see that. Get me, Dave? And I go out of here
now and tell the warden it ain't any good, that I can't get you to talk.
I guess that looks nifty enough, don't it, Dave?” #
There was a fly climbing up the wire netting. It zigzagged its course
over the little squares. It was a good gamble whether, on reaching the
next strand, it would turn to the right or left, or continue straight
ahead. Dave Henderson watched it. The creature did no one of those
things. It paused and frictioned its front legs together in a leisurely
fashion. After that it appeared to be quite satisfied with its
position--and it stayed there.
“Poor Bookie!” murmured Dave Henderson. “Sad, too! I guess it must be
softening of the brain!”
Bookie Skarvan's face blotched suddenly red--but he pressed his face
still more earnestly against the wire barrier.
“You don't get it!” he breathed hoarsely. “I'm giving you a straight
tip. Barjan's waiting for you. The police are waiting for you. You
haven't got a hope. I tell you, you can't get that money alone, no
matter where you put it.”
“I heard you,” said Dave Henderson indifferently.
There was silence for a moment.
A sort of anxious exasperation spread over Skarvan's face, then
perplexity, and then a flare of rage.
“You're a fool!” he snarled. “You won't believe me! You think I'm
trying to work you for half of that money. Well, so I am, in a way--or
I wouldn't have come here. But I'm earning it. Look at the risk I'm
taking--five years, the same as you got. You crazy fool! Do you think
I'm bluffing? I tell you again, I know what I'm talking about. The
police'll never give you a look-in. You got to have help. Who else is
there but me? It's better to split with me than lose the whole of it,
ain't it?”
“You haven't changed a bit in five years, Bookie.” There was studied
insolence in Dave Henderson's voice now. “Not a damned bit! Run along
now--beat it!”
“You mean that?” Bookie Skarvan's eyes were puckered into slits now.
“You mean you're going to turn me down?”
“Yes!” said Dave Henderson.
“I'll give you one more chance,” whispered Skarvan. “_No!_”
Bookie Skarvan's fat fingers squirmed around inside his collar as though
it choked him.
“All right!” His lips were twitching angrily. “All right!” he repeated
ominously. “Then, by God, _you'll_ never get the money--even if you beat
the police! Understand? I'll see to that! I made you a fair, straight
offer. You'll find now that there'll be some one else besides you and
Barjan out for that coin--and when the showdown comes it won't be either
you or Barjan that gets it! And maybe you think that's a bluff, too!”
“I never said I knew where the money was,” said Dave Henderson--and
smiled--and shrugged his shoulders. “Therefore you ought to stand just
as good a chance as Barjan--or I. After I got wounded I kind of lost
track of things, you know.”
“You lie!” said Skarvan fiercely. “I--I------” He checked himself,
biting at his lips. “I'll give you one more chance again. What's your
last word?”
“You've got it, Bookie,” said Dave Henderson evenly.
“Then take mine!” Skarvan rasped. “I'll go now and tell the warden you
wouldn't say anything. If you try to put a crimp in me by reporting my
offer, I'll say you lied. I don't mind taking chances on my word being
believed against the word of a convict and a thief who is known to be
playing tricky! You get that? And after that--God help you!”
The man was gone....
Presently, Dave Henderson found himself back in the carpenter shop.
The band-saw was shrieking, screeching insanely again. He had smiled in
there in the visitor's room at Bookie Skarvan; he had even been debonair
and facetious--he wasn't that way now. He could mask his face from
others; he couldn't mask his soul from himself. It seemed as though his
courage were being drained away from him, and in its place were coming
a sense of final, crushing defeat. Barjan's blow of last night had sent
him groggy to the ropes; but the blow Bookie Skarvan had just dealt had
smashed in under his guard and had landed on an even more vital spot.
Skarvan's veiled threat hadn't veiled anything. The veil was only
too transparent! “God help you!” meant a lot. It meant that, far more
dangerous to face, even more difficult to outwit than the police, there
was now to be aligned against him the criminal element of San Francisco.
It meant Baldy Vickers and Runty Mott, and Baldy Vickers' gang. It meant
the men who had already attempted to murder him, and who would be eager
enough to repeat that attempt for the same stake--one hundred thousand
dollars. With the police it would have been, more than anything else,
the simple thrust and parry of wits; now, added to that, was a physical,
brutish force whose danger only a fool would strive to minimize. There
were dives and dens in the underworld there, as he knew well enough,
where a man would disappear from the light of day forever, and where
tortures that would put the devil's ingenuity to shame could be applied
to make a man open his lips. He was not exaggerating! It was literally
true. And if he were once trapped he could expect no less than that.
They had already tried to murder him once! Naturally, they had entered
into his calculations before while he had been here in prison; but they
had not seemed to be a very vital factor. He had never figured on Bookie
Skarvan setting that machinery in motion again--he had only figured on
getting his own hands on Bookie Skarvan himself. But he saw it now; and
he realized that, once started again, they would stop at nothing to get
that money. Whether Bookie Skarvan would have abided by his offer, on
the basis that he would get more out of it for himself that way, or
whether it was simply a play to discover the whereabouts of the money
and then divide up with his old accomplices, did not matter; it was
certain now that Bookie Skarvan would be content with less rather than
with none, and that the underworld would be unleashed on his, Dave
Henderson's, trail. The police--and now the underworld! It was like a
pack of wolves and a pack of hounds in chase from converging directions
after the same quarry; the wolves and the hounds might clash together,
and fall upon one another--but the quarry would be mangled and crushed
in the mêlée.
The afternoon wore on. At times Dave Henderson's hands clenched over his
tools until it seemed the tendons must snap and break with the strain;
at times the sweat of agony oozed out in drops upon his forehead. Bookie
Skarvan was right. He could not get that money _alone_. No! No, that was
wrong! He could get it alone, and he would get it, and then fight for
it, and go under for it, all hell would not hold him back from that, and
Bookie Skarvan and some of the others would go under too--but he could
not get _away_ with the money alone. And that meant that these five
years of prison, five years of degradation, of memories that nauseated
him, five years that he had wagered out of his life, had gone for
nothing! God, if he could only turn to some one for help! But there was
no one, not a soul on earth, not a friend in the world who could aid
him--except Millman.
And he _couldn't_ ask Millman--because it wouldn't be fair to Millman.
His face must have grown haggard, perhaps he was acting strangely. Old
Tony over there had been casting anxious glances in his direction. He
took a grip upon himself, and smiled at the old bomb-thrower. The old
Italian looked pretty bad himself--that pasty whiteness about the old
fellow's face had a nasty appearance.
His mind went back to Millman, working in queer, disconnected snatches
of thought. He was going to lose Millman, too... Millman was going out
tomorrow.... It had always been a relief to talk to Millman.... He had
never told Millman where the money was, of course, but Millman knew what
he, Dave Henderson, was “in” for.... The library hour wasn't far off,
and it would help to talk to Millman now.... Only Millman was going out
to-morrow--? and he was to bid Millman good-by.
This seemed somehow the crowning jeer of mockery that fate was flinging
at him--that to-morrow even Millman would be gone. It seemed to bring a
snarl into his soul, the snarl as of some gaunt, starving beast at bay,
the snarl of desperation flung out in bitter, reckless defiance.
He put his hands to his face, and beneath them his jaws clamped and
locked. They would never beat him, he would go under first, but--but----
Time passed. The routine of the prison life went on like the turning of
some great, ponderous wheel that moved very slowly, but at the same time
with a sort of smooth, oiled immutability. It seemed that way to Dave
Henderson. He was conscious of no definite details that marked or
occupied the passage of time. The library hour had come. He was on his
way to the library now--with permission to get a book. He did not want
a book. He was going to see Millman, and, God knew, he did not want to
see Millman--to say good-by.
Mind, body and soul were sick--sick with the struggle of the afternoon,
sick with the ceaseless mental torment that made his temples throb and
brought excruciating pain, and with the pain brought almost physical
nausea; sick with the realization that his recompense for the five years
of freedom he had sacrificed was only--wreckage, ruin and disaster.
He entered the little room. A guard lounged negligently against the
wall. One of the two convict librarians was already busy with another
convict--but it wasn't Millman who was busy. He met Millman's cool,
steady, gray eyes, read a sudden, startled something in them, and moved
down to the end of the sort of wooden counter away from the guard--and
handed in his book to be exchanged.
“What's the matter, Dave?” Millman, across the counter, back half turned
to the guard, spoke in a low, hurried voice, as he pretended to examine
the book. “I never saw you look like this before! Are you sick?”
“Yes,” said Dave Henderson between his teeth. “Sick--as hell! I'm up
against it, Charlie! And I guess it's all over except for one last
little fight.”
“What book do you want?” said Millman's voice coolly; but Millman's
clean-cut face with its strong jaw tightening a little, and Millman's
clear gray eyes with a touch of steel creeping into them, said: “Go on!”
“The police!” Dave Henderson spoke through the corner of his mouth
without motion of the lips. “Barjan was here last night. And I got
another tip to-day. The screws are going on--to a finish.”
“You mean they're going to see that you don't get that money?”
Dave Henderson nodded curtly.
“Why not give it up then, Dave, and start a clean sheet?” asked Millman
softly.
“Give it up!” The red had come into Dave Henderson's face, there was a
savage tightening of his lips across his teeth. “I'll never give it up!
D'ye think I've rotted here five years only to _crawl_ at the end?
By God! No! I'll get it--if they get me doing it!” His hoarse whisper
caught and choked suddenly. “But it's hell, Charlie--hell! Hell to go
under like that, just because there isn't a soul on God's wide earth I
can trust to get it for me while they're watching me!” Millman turned
away, and walked to the racks of books at the rear of the room.
Dave Henderson watched the other in a numbed sort of way. It was a
curious kind of good-by he was saying to Millman. He wasn't quite sure,
for that matter, just what he had said. He was soul sick, and body sick.
Millman was taking a long while over the selection of a book--and he
hadn't even asked for a book, let alone for any particular one. What did
it matter! He didn't want anything to read. Reading wasn't any good to
him any more! Barjan and Bookie Skarvan had----
Millman was leaning over the counter again, a book in his hand.
“Would you trust _me_, Dave?” he asked quietly.
“You!” The blood seemed to quicken, and rush in a mad, swirling tide
through Dave Henderson's veins. “Do you mean that, Charlie? Do you mean
you'll help me?”
“Yes,” said Millman. “If you want to trust me, I'll get that money for
you. I'm going out to-morrow. But talk quickly! The guard's watching us
and getting fidgety. Where is it?”
Dave Henderson rubbed his upper lip with the side of his forefinger as
though it itched; the remaining fingers, spread out fanlike, screened
his mouth.
“In the old pigeon-cote--shed back of Tooler's house where I used to
live--you can get into the shed from the lane.”
Millman laid the book on the counter--and pushed it toward Dave
Henderson.
“All right,” he said. “They won't be looking for it in New York. You've
two months more here. Make it the twenty-fourth of June. That'll
give you time enough. I'll be registered at the St. Lucian Hotel--New
York--eight o'clock in the evening--June twenty-fourth. I'll hand the
money over to you there, and----”
“You there, Five-Fifty”--the guard was moving toward them from across
the room--“you got your book, ain't you?”
Dave Henderson picked up the book, and turned toward the door.
“Good-by!” he flung over his shoulder.
“Good-by!” Millman answered.
III--BREAD UPON THE WATERS
IT was dark in the cell, quite dark. There was just the faint glimmer
that crept in from the night lights along the iron galleries, and came
up from the main corridor two tiers below. It must have been hours since
he had left Millman in the prison library--and yet he was not sure.
Perhaps it was even still early, for he hadn't heard old Tony talking
and whispering to himself through the bars to-night yet.
Dave Henderson's head, cupped in hands whose fingers dug with a brutal
grip into the flesh of his cheeks, came upward with a jerk, and he
surged to his feet from the hinged shelf that he called cot and bed.
What difference did it make whether it was dark or light, or late
or early, or whether old Tony had babbled to himself or not! It was
pitifully inconsequential. It was only his brain staggering off into the
byways again, as though, in some sneaking, underhand way, it wanted to
steal rest and respite.
His hands went up above his head, and held there, and his fists
clenched. He was the fool of fools, the prince of fools! He saw it now!
His laugh purled low, in hollow mirth, through the cell--a devil's laugh
in its bitter irony. Yes, he saw it now--when it was too late.
Millman! Damn Millman to the pit! Damn Millman for the smoothest,
craftiest hypocrite into whom God had ever breathed the breath of life!
He had been trapped! That had been Millman's play, two years of cunning
play--to win his confidence; two years of it, that always at the end
the man might get that hundred thousand dollars. And he had fallen into
Millman's trap!
He did not believe Millman's story, or in Millman's innocence now--when
it was too late! He couldn't reach Millman now. There were bars of iron,
and steel doors, and walls of stone between himself and Millman's
cell; and in the morning Millman would be gone, and Millman would have
sixty-two--no, sixty-one days--to get that money and put the width of
the world between them before he, Dave Henderson, was free.
Sixty-one days! And in the space of one short moment, wrecking all that
the toil and agony of years was to have stood for, he had told Millman
what Millman wanted to know! And that was the moment Millman had been
waiting for through two long years with cunning patience--and he, Dave
Henderson, because he was shaken to the soul with desperation, because
he was alone with his back to the wall, in extremity, ready to grasp
at any shred of hope, and because he was sick in body, and because the
sudden, overwhelming uplift at Millman's offer had numbed and dulled his
faculties in a mighty revulsion of relief, had fallen into the traitor's
trap.
And it had been done so quickly! The guard had been there and had
intervened, and there hadn't been time for his mind to win back its
normal poise and reason logically. He hadn't reasoned in that brief
instant; he had only caught and grasped the outflung hand of one whom,
for two years, he had trusted and believed was a friend. He hadn't
reasoned then; he had even stepped out of the prison library more
lighthearted than he had been almost from the moment they had put these
striped clothes upon him five years before; but he had barely stood
locked in his cell here again when, like some ghastly blight falling
upon him, reason had come and left him a draggled weakling, scarcely
able physically to stand upon his feet. And then that had passed, and he
had been possessed of an insensate fury that had bade him fling himself
at the cell door, and, with superhuman strength, wrench and tear the
bars asunder that he might get at Millman again. He had checked that
impulse amidst the jeers and mockeries of impish voices that rang in
his ears and filled the cell with their insane jabberings--voices that
laughed in hellish glee at him for being a fool in the first place, and
for his utter impotence in the second.
They were jeering and chuckling now, those insane demon voices!
He swung from the center of the cell, and flung himself down on the cot
again. They might well mock at him, those voices! For two years, though
he had had faith in Millman, he had kept the secret of the hiding place
of that money to himself because, believing Millman to be an honest
man, it would have been unfair to Millman to have told him, since, as
an honest man, Millman then would either have had to inform the
authorities--or become a dishonest man. It was clear enough, wasn't it?
And logical enough? And yet in one unguarded moment he had repudiated
his own logic! He had based all, his faith and trust and confidence in
Millman, on the belief that Millman was an honest man. Well, an _honest_
man wouldn't voluntarily aid and abet a thief in getting away with
stolen money, nor make himself an accomplice after the fact, nor offer
to help outwit the police, nor agree to participate in what amounted to
stealing the money for a second time, and so make of himself a criminal!
And if the man was then _dishonest_, and for two years had covered that
dishonesty with a mask of hypocrisy, it was obvious enough, since the
hypocrisy had been solely for his, Dave Henderson's, benefit, that
Millman had planned it all patiently from the beginning, and now meant
to do him cold, to get the money and keep it.
He could not remain still. He was up on his feet again from the cot.
Fury had him in its grip once more. Five years! Five years of hell in
this devil's hole! And a branded name! He had thrown everything into
the balance--all he had! And now--_this!_ Tricked! That was it--tricked!
Tricked by a Judas!
All the passion of the man was on the surface now. Lean and gaunt,
his body seemed to crouch forward as though to spring; his hands, with
fingers crooked like claws reaching for their prey, were outstretched
before him. Sixty-one days' start Millman had. But Millman would need
more than that! The only man in the world whom he had ever trusted, and
who had then betrayed him, would need more than sixty-one days to escape
the reckoning that was to come. Millman might hide, Millman might live
for years in lavish ease on that money, and in the end there might be
none of that money left, but sooner or later Millman would pay a bigger
price than--a hundred thousand dollars. He would get Millman. The world
wasn't big enough for the two of them. And when that day came----
His muscles relaxed. The paroxysm of fury left him, and suddenly he
moaned a little as though in bitter hurt. There was another side to it.
He could not help thinking of that other side. There had been two years
of what he had thought was friendship--and the friendship had been
hypocrisy. It was hard to believe. Perhaps Millman meant to play square
after all, perhaps Millman would keep that rendezvous in New York on
June twenty-fourth at eight o'clock in the evening at the St. Lucian
Hotel. Perhaps Millman would. It wasn't only on account of the money
that he hoped Millman would--there were those two years of what he had
thought was friendship.
He leaned suddenly against the wall of the cell, the palms of his hands
pressed against it, his face crushed into his knuckles. No! What was the
use of that! Why try to delude himself again? Why try to make himself
believe what he _wanted_ to believe? He could reason now coolly and
logically enough. If Millman was honest he would not do what he had
offered to do; and being, therefore, dishonest, his apparent honesty had
been only a mask, and the mask had been only for his, Dave Henderson's,
benefit, and that, logically, could evidence but one thing--that Millman
had deliberately set himself to win the confidence that would win for
Millman the stake of one hundred thousand dollars. There was no other
conclusion, was there?
His head came up from his hands, and he stood rigid, tense. Wait! Wait
a minute, until his brain cleared. There was another possibility. He
had not thought of it before! It confused and staggered him now. Suppose
that Millman stood in with the police! Suppose that the police had used
Millman for just the purpose that Millman had accomplished! Or--why
not?--suppose that Millman was even one of the police himself! It was
not so tenable a theory as it was to assume that Millman had acted as
a stool-pigeon; but it was, even at that, well within the realm of
possibility. A man would not count two years ill spent on a case that
involved the recovery of a hundred thousand dollars--nor hesitate to
play a convict's part, either, if necessary. It had been done before.
Until Barjan had come last night, the police had made no sign for
years--unless Millman were indeed one of them, and, believing at the
last that he was facing failure, had called in Barjan. Millman hadn't
had a hard time of it in the penitentiary. His education had been the
excuse, if it were an excuse, for all the soft clerical jobs. Who was to
know if Millman ever spent the nights in his cell?
Dave Henderson crushed his fists against his temples. What did it
matter! In the long run, what did it matter! Crook, or informant, or an
officer, Millman had wrecked him, and he would pay his debt to Millman!
He laughed low again, while his teeth gnawed at his lip. There was
Barjan and Bookie Skarvan--and now Millman! And Baldy Vickers and the
underworld!
There wasn't much chance, was there? Not much to expect now in return
for the eternities in which he had worn these prison stripes, not much
out of the ruin of his life, not much for the all and everything he had
staked and risked! Not much--only to make one last fight, to make as
many of these men pay as dearly as he could. Fight! Yes, he would fight.
He had never hedged. He would never hedge. They had him with his back to
the wall. He knew that. There wasn't much chance now; there wasn't
any, if he looked the situation squarely in the face. He stood alone,
absolutely alone; there was nowhere to turn, no single soul to turn
to. His hand was against every other man's. But he was not beaten.
They would never beat him. A knife thrust or a black-jack from Bookie
Skarvan's skulking pack, though it might end his life, would not beat
him; a further term here behind these walls, though it might wither up
the soul of him, would not beat him!
And Millman! Up above his head his hands twisted and knotted together
again, and the great muscular shoulders locked back, and the clean,
straight limbs grew taut. And he laughed. And the laugh was very low and
sinister. A beast cornered was an ugly thing. And the dominant instinct
in a beast was self-preservation--and a leap at its enemy's throat. A
beast asked no quarter--and gave none. Fie was a beast. They had made
him a beast in here, an animal, a numbered thing, not a man; they had
not even left him with a name--just one of a herd of beasts and animals.
But they had not tamed him. He was alone, facing them all now, and there
wasn't much chance because the odds were overwhelming; but if he was
alone, he would not go _down_ alone, and--
He turned his head suddenly, and his hands dropped to his sides. There
had come a cry from somewhere. It was not very loud, but it rang in a
startling way through the night silence of the prison. It was a cry
as of sudden fear and weakness. It came again; and in a bound Dave
Henderson reached the bars of his door, and beat upon them furiously
with his fists. He would get into trouble for it undoubtedly, but he
had placed that cry now. Old Tony wasn't whispering tonight. There was
something wrong with the old bomb-thrower. Yes, he remembered--old
Tony's strange appearance that afternoon. He rattled again and again on
the bars. Old Tony was moaning now.
Footsteps on the run sounded along the iron gallery. A guard passed by;
another paused at the door.
“Get back out of there!” growled the guard. “Beat it! Get back to your
cot!”
Dave Henderson retreated to the center of the cell. He heard old Tony's
door opened. Then muffled voices. And then a voice that was quite
audible--one of the guard's:
“I guess he's snuffed out. Get the doc--and, yes, tell the warden, if he
hasn't gone to bed yet.”
Snuffed out! There was a queer, choking sensation in Dave Henderson's
throat. A guard ran along the gallery. Dave Henderson edged silently
close up to the door of his cell again. He couldn't see very much--only
a gleam of light from Lomazzi's cell that fell on the iron plates of the
gallery. There was no sound from within the other cell now.
Snuffed out! The thought that old Tony was dead affected him in a
numbed, groping sort of way. It had come with such startling suddenness!
He had not grasped it yet. He wondered whether he should be sorry or
glad for old Tony--death was the lifer's goal. He did not know. It
brought, though, a great aching into his own soul. It seemed to stamp
with the ultimate to-night the immeasurable void in his own life. Old
Tony was the last link between himself and that thing of priceless worth
that men called friendship. Millman had denied it, outraged it, betrayed
it; and now old Tony had swerved in his allegiance, and turned away at
the call of a greater friend. Yes, death could not be anything but a
friend to Tony. There seemed to be no longer any doubt of that in his
mind.
Footsteps, several of them, came again along the iron gallery, racketing
through the night, but they did not pass his cell this time; they came
from the other direction, and went into Lomazzi's cell. It was strange
that this should have happened to-night! There would be no more
shoulder-touch in the lock-step for the few days that were left; no
smile of eyes and lips across the carpenter shop; no surreptitious,
intimate little gestures of open-hearted companionship! It seemed to
crown in an appalling way, to bring home to him now with a new and
appalling force what, five minutes ago, he had thought he had already
appreciated to its fullest and bitterest depths--loneliness. He was
alone--alone--alone.
The murmur of voices came from the other cell. Time passed. He clung
there to the bars. Alone--without help! The presence of death seemed
to have infused itself into, and to have become synonymous with that
thought. It seemed insidiously to eat into his soul and being, to make
his mind sick and weary, whispering to him to capitulate because he was
alone, ringed about with forces that would inevitably overwhelm his puny
single-handed defiance--because he was alone--and it would be hopeless
to go further alone--without help.
He drew back suddenly from the door, conscious for the first time that
he must have been clutching and straining at the bars with all his
strength. His fingers, relaxed now, were stiff, and the circulation
seemed to have left them. A guard was opening the door. Behind the
guard, that white-haired man was the warden. He had always liked the
warden. The man was stern, but he was always just. He did not understand
why the warden had come to his cell.
It was the warden who spoke:
“Lomazzi is dying. He has begged to be allowed to say good-by to you. I
can see no objection. You may come.”
Dave Henderson moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue.
“I--I thought I heard them say he was dead,” he mumbled.
“He was unconscious,” answered the warden briefly. “A heart attack. Step
quickly; he has not many minutes.”
Dave Henderson stepped out on the iron gallery; and paused an instant
before the door of the adjoining cell. A form lay on the cot, a form
with a pasty-colored face, a form whose eyes were closed. The prison
doctor, a hypodermic syringe still in his hand, stood a little to one
side. Dave Henderson swept his hand across his eyes--there was a sudden
mist there that blurred the scene--and, moving forward, dropped down on
his knees beside the cot.
A hand reached out and grasped his feebly; the dark eyes opened and
fixed on him with a flicker of the old fire in their depths; and the
lips quivered in a smile.
Old Tony was whispering--old Tony always talked and whispered to himself
here in his cell every night--but old Tony never disturbed anybody--it
was hard to hear old Tony even when one listened attentively. Dave
Henderson brushed his hand across his eyes again, and bent his head to
the other's lips to catch the words.
“You make-a da fool play when you come in here, Dave--for me. But I
never, never forget. Old Tony no forget. You no make-a da fool play
when you go out. Old Tony knows. You need-a da help. Listen--Nicolo
Capriano--'Frisco. You understand? Tony Lomazzi send-a you. Tony Lomazzi
take-a da life prison for Nicolo. Nicolo will pay back to Tony's friend.
You did not think that”--the voice was growing feebler, harder to
understand, and it was fluttering now--“that, because old Tony call-a
you da fool, he did--did not--remember--and--and----”
Some one disengaged Dave Henderson's hand from the hand that was clasped
around it, and that had suddenly twitched and, with a spasmodic clutch,
had seemed as though striving to maintain its hold.
The prison doctor's voice sounded muffled in the cell:
“He is dead.”
Dave Henderson looked up at the touch of a guard's hand on his shoulder.
The guard jerked his head with curt significance in the direction of the
door.