me--aroused my sympathy, in fact."
"My wife feels the same way about him," said the warden. "But then,
you know how women are. He's young and well-mannered and she's full of
kindness for every human being."
"Then probably she'd be pleased in case--_h'm_--in case I should grant
him a pardon?"
Warden Riddle gave a start.
"She might," he said, "but nobody else would. Governor, take it from
me, that fellow's bad all the way through. And the crime that landed
him here--a cold-blooded, brutal murder--it was an atrocious thing,
utterly unprovoked. No mitigating circumstances whatsoever, just plain
butchery. Governor, as your friend I beg you, don't be swept off your
feet by any rush of misguided sentimentality for such a wretch. To turn
him loose would kill you politically. You're in line to be our next
United States Senator. Already they're saying over the country that
you're Presidential timber. There's no telling how high or how far
you'll go if only you don't make some fatal mistake. And this--this
would be fatal. It would rouse the whole state against you. It would
destroy you, not only with the party but with the people. You know what
ruined your predecessor--he made too free a use of the pardoning power.
Governor, if you let that man loose on society, you're wrecked."
That night, back at the Executive Mansion, the bachelor governor slept
not a wink.
Was ever a man strung between the horns of a worse dilemma? Warden
Riddle had been right. To open the prison doors for so infamous a
creature as Wyeth was, would be damnation for all his ambitions. And
Governor Blankenship was as ambitious as he was godly. And probably no
more godly man ever lived. On the other hand, he had given his pledge
to Wyeth.
There was this about Governor Blankenship: he had been named for
the father of his country--that man who could not tell a lie. And,
wittingly, Governor Blankenship had never in all his blameless life
told a lie either. To keep the faith with himself and the world, to
wear truth like a badge shining upon his breast, had from boyhood been
his dearest ideal. Off that course he never intentionally had departed.
With him it was more than a code of ethics and more than a creed of
personal conduct--it was the holiest of religions. He unreservedly
believed that one guilty falsehood--just one--would consign his soul to
the bottommost pit of perdition forever. Here was a real Sir Galahad, a
perfect knight of perfect honor.
Through days and weeks he walked between two invisible but ever-present
mentors. One of them, whose name was Expediency, constantly tempted him.
"You passed your word under duress and in mortal fear," Expediency
whispered in his ear. "Let that man rot in his cell. 'Tis his just
desert."
But the other counselor, called Conscience, as repeatedly said to him:
"You never told a lie. Can you tell one now?"
In such grievous plight, he received a secret message, sent by
underground from Wyeth.
"I'm getting impatient," was Wyeth's word. "Are you, or are you not,
going to come clean?"
This enhanced his desperation. From sleeplessness, from gnawing worry
he lost flesh. People about him said the noble young governor was not
like himself any more. They predicted a breakdown unless he was cured
of what hidden cause it was which distressed him.
One morning he rose, haggard and red-eyed, from the bed upon which
since midnight he had tossed and rolled. He had made his decision.
Selfishness had won. He would break his promise to Wyeth. But since he
must go to eternal Hell for a lie, he would go there for another and a
sweeter reason.
Until now, his romantic dealings with little Mrs. Riddle had been
mild and harmless, if clandestinely conducted. He had not philandered
with her; he merely had flirted. On his side it had been an innocent
flirtation--an agreeable diversion. But he knew the lady's mind--knew
she was weak and willing, where he had been strong and straightforward.
So be it then. For a crown to his other and lesser iniquity he would
corrupt the wife of his devoted friend.
For the first time in a month he had zest for his breakfast. Conscience
was so thoroughly drugged she seemed as though dead.
From the table he went to the long-distance telephone. He would call
her up and arrange for an assignation. There was considerable delay in
establishing the connection--a buzzing over the wire, a confusion of
vague sounds. Finally his ringing was answered by a strange voice.
"I wish to speak with Mrs. Riddle," he said.
There was a little pause. Then, in a fumbling, evasive fashion the
voice made reply.
"She's not here. She's--she's out."
It occurred to the governor that he might as well tell the warden he
had abandoned the idea of pardoning the barber.
"Then I'd like to talk with Mr. Riddle," he said.
"He's--he's not here either. Who is this, please?"
In his double disappointment the governor forgot the possible need for
caution. "This," he said, "is Governor Blankenship."
"Oh!" The voice became warmer. "Is that you, Governor? I've been trying
for an hour to get you on your private line. This is Warden Riddle's
brother at the 'phone--you know, Henry Riddle? They got me up at
daylight when this--this terrible thing was discovered, and I've been
here ever since, doing what I could."
"What terrible thing do you mean?"
"Haven't you heard the news? Why, sir, the worst man in the penitentiary
got away last night--Wyeth, the desperado. He--he had help. That's why
the warden's away, why I'm in charge. My poor brother's out with the
posse trying to get trace of the scoundrel. I guess he'll shoot him if
he finds him."
"But why is Mrs. Riddle absent at such a time?"
"Governor, that's the worst part of it. She was the one that helped
that devil to escape. And she--she went with him!"
To the end of his days Governor G. W. Blankenship was known as the
man who never told a lie. When he died they carved something to that
general effect upon his tombstone.
GOOD SAM
[Decoration]
From the foot of the lake where most of the camps were, everybody had
been driven out by the forest-fire. Among those who fled up to our end
and took temporary quarters on the hotel reservation was my friend, the
Native Genius.
My friend, the Native Genius, was a cowboy before he became a painter.
He became a great man and was regarded in our Eastern art circles, but
in his feelings and his language he remained a cowboy. He also was an
historian of the folk-lore of the Old West that has ridden over the
ultimate hill of the last free grazing and vanished forever and ever,
alas! With none of the conscious effort which so often marks such an
undertaking, he could twine a fragrant fictional boscage upon the solid
trellis of remembered fact and make you like it. To my way of thinking,
this was not the least of his gifts. Indeed not.
He joined us the evening before, bringing the tools of his trade and
various finished or unfinished canvases. During the night my slumber
was at intervals distracted by the far-off wails of a wind-instrument
in travail. It was as though someone, enraged by its stubborn
defiance, had put the thing to the torture. Distance muffled those
moaning outcries but in them, piercing through the curtains of my
sleepiness, were torment and anguish.
In the morning early, when I walked past the row of log houses at the
farther side of the grounds, I came upon the author of this outrage. A
male of the refugees sat at an open window and contended with a haunted
saxophone for the lost soul of a ghostly tune.
He was young enough to have optimism. On the other hand, he was old
enough to know better. He had the look about him--a wearied and
red-eyed and a wannish look it was--of one who never knows when he
is licked. Except among amateur musicians I would regard this as an
admirable trait.
My friend was squatted on the top step of his cabin, two numbers on
beyond. He greeted me and the new-born day with a wide yawn.
"Would you maybe like to buy a horn?" he asked, and flirted with his
thumb toward the place next-door-but-one.
"I don't think so," I answered.
"I'm making a special inducement," he said. "There's a man's hide goes
with it."
His mien changed then from the murderous to the resigned. "Lead me away
from here," he pleaded. "I don't know which distresses me the most--the
sight of so much suffering or the sound of it."
We went by the scene of the unfinished crime and sat in the lee of the
hotel veranda with the lake below us, blinking like a live turquoise in
its rough matrix of gray mountains. The wind was in our favor there;
to our ears reached only faint broken strains of that groaning and
that bleating. But from other sources other interruptions ensued, all
calculated to disturb the pious reflections of the elderly.
A domestic group, exercising rights of squatter sovereignty on the
slope of the lawn in a tent, emerged therefrom and swarmed about us.
Of parents there was but the customary pair, but of offspring there
were seven or eight and although plainly of the same brood, a family
resemblance marking each as brother or sister to the rest, these
latter seemed miraculously all to be of substantially the same age
or thereabouts. The father told a neighbor fifty yards away of their
narrow escape; the mother joined in and was shrill in her lamentations
for a threatened homestead over the hills across the water; the
overalled little ones got underfoot and scuffled around and by their
loud childish clamor still further interfered with our ruminations.
Then one of the big red busses hooted and drove up and disgorged upon
us a locust plague of arriving tourists. The responsible strangers went
within to claim reservations but the juveniles inundated the porches
and the lawn, giving hearty indorsement to the scenery and taking
snap-shots of it, and inquiring where souvenir postcards might be had
and whether the fishing was any good here; and so on and so forth,
according to their tribal habits. Hillocks of hand-baggage accumulated
about us and trunks descended from a panting auto-truck in a thunderous
cascade. A bobbed-haired camera bandit in search of picturesque local
types came within easy shooting distance and aimed her weapon at us,
asking no leave of her victims but shooting repeatedly at will; and
she wore riding breeches and boots. Presumably she had been wearing
them aboard the train. An oversized youth stumbled with his large
undisciplined feet against an outlying suitcase and struck the wall and
caromed off and almost upset us from our tilted chairs. Here plainly
was an undergraduate--a perfect characteristic specimen. He was in the
immature summer plumage.
"I always feel sorry for one of those college boys this season of the
year in this climate," said my friend as the gigantic fledgling lunged
away toward the boat dock. "It's too late for his coon-skin ulster and
too early yet for him to tie a handkerchief around his scalp and go
bareheaded."
He arose, tagging me on the arm.
"Let's ramble down the line a piece," he suggested, "and maybe find
us a hollow snag to hide in. After what I went through last night my
nerves ain't what they used to be, if they ever were."
Below the creek we quit the paved highway and took the lower trail.
Through the brush we could see where the vast blue eye of the lake had
quit winking and was beginning to scowl. The wind must have changed
quarters; it no longer brought us smells of ashes and char, but a
fresher, sweeter smell as of rain gathering; and puffed clouds were
forming over the range to the westward. The sunshine shut itself off
with the quickness of a stage effect. Along the shore toward us limped
a blackened smudge of a man, like a ranger turned chimney-sweep. For a
fact, that precisely was what he was--Melber, assistant chief of the
park forestry service. From tiredness he was crippled. He could shamble
and that was about all.
"Well, we've got her whipped," he told us, and leaned against a
tree. He left smears like burnt cork on the bark where his shoulders
rubbed. "This breeze hauling around ought to finish the job. She'll
burn herself out before dark, with or without showers. I'm on my
way now to long-distance to notify the chief that we won't need any
reinforcements."
"Much damage?"
"The colony is saved. By backfiring we held the flames on the upper
edge of the road leading in from the station. But Ordman's ranch
is gone up in smoke, and the Colfax & Webster sawmill and eighteen
thousand acres of the handsomest virgin pine on this side of the
Divide. Man, you'd weep to see those raped woodlands--and all because
some dam'-fool hiker didn't have sense enough to put out his cigarette!
Or hers, as the case may be!" He grinned through his mask and we were
reminded of nigger minstrels.
"How close up did the burning get to my shebang?" inquired the Native
Genius.
"Dog-gone close, Charley. But that wasn't the big blaze--that was the
other blaze which broke out soon after midnight. We got her--the second
one, I mean--licked just over the rise behind your studio. My force
fought till they dropped and even that bunch of I.W.W.'s that they
rushed in on the special from Spokane did fairly well. I've revised
some of my opinions about Wobblies. But there's a million dead cinders
in the grass around your cottage right now, Charley. And your back
corral fence is all scorched.
"I leave it to you--wouldn't you think with that first example before
our eyes that everybody in both gangs would have sense enough not to
be careless? But you never can tell, can you? When most of the crew
knocked off late last night, seeing she was under control, one idiot
builds a fire to heat himself up a pot of coffee. Would you believe
it?--with the timber all just so much punk and tinder after this long
dry spell, he kindles up a rousing big blaze right among the down-stuff
and then drops off to sleep? I don't much blame him for wanting to
sleep--I'm dead on my own feet this minute--but to make a fire that
size in such a place! He's the kind that would call out the standing
army to kill a cockroach! Well, when this poor half-wit wakes up, the
fire is running through the tree-tops for a quarter of a mile south of
him and we've got another battle on our hands that lasts until broad
daybreak. It's a God's blessing we had the outfit and the emergency
apparatus handy."
"Who's the guilty party?"
"Not one of my staff, you can gamble on that. And not one of the
Spokane gang either. It was a green hand--fellow named Seymour working
as a brakeman on the railroad and one of the few volunteers who refused
to take any pay. And he was square enough to own up to what he'd done,
too. Oh, I guess he had good intentions. But, thunderation, good
intentions have ruined empires!
"Well, I've got to be getting along. I'm certainly going to put
somebody's nice clean bathroom on the bum as soon as I get through
telephoning."
Melber straightened himself and lurched off into the second-growth. He
moved like a very old man, his blistered hands dangling.
"What he just now said about good intentions puts me in mind of Samson
Goodhue," said Charley. "There was one of the best paving contractors
Hell ever had." I knew what the expression on his face meant. It meant
he was letting down a mental tentacle like a baited hook into the
thronged private fish-pool of his early reminiscence. Scenting copy, I
encouraged him.
"What about this Samson person?"
"I'm fixing to tell you," he promised. "This looks to me like a good
loafing place."
We reposed side by side on a lichened log with our toes gouging the
green moss, and he rolled a cigarette and proceeded:
* * * * *
Like I was just now telling you, his name was Samson Goodhue. So you
can see how easy it was to twist that around into Good Samaritan and
then to render that down for kitchen use into Good Sam. It was a
regular trick name and highly suitable, seeing that he counted that day
lost which, as the poet says, its low descending sun didn't find him
trying to help somebody out of a jam.
In fact, he really made a profession out of it. You might say he was an
expert promoter. He wasn't one of your meek and lowly ones, though.
They say the meek shall inherit the earth but I reckon not until
everybody else is through with it.
Not Good Sam. He was just as pushing and determinated and persisting in
his work as though he was taking orders for enlarging crayon portraits.
And probably it wasn't his fault that about every time he tackled a job
of philanthropping the scheme seemed to go wrong. You had to give him
credit for that. But after a while it got so that when the word spread
that Good Sam was going around doing good, smart people ran for cover.
They didn't know but what it might be their turn next, and they figured
they'd had enough hard luck already without calling in a specialist.
I remember like it was yesterday the first time I ever saw him
operating--down in Triple Falls, this state. I hadn't been there
very long. Winter-time had driven a bunch of us beef-herders in off
the range and we were encouraging the saloon industry--in fact, you
might say we were practically supporting it. That was before I quit.
I haven't taken a drink for fifteen years now but, at that, I figure
I'm even with the game. The day I quit I had enough to last me fifteen
years.
Good Sam hadn't been there much longer than we had. He blew in from
somewhere back East and to look at him you'd have said offhand that
here was just an average pilgrim, size sixteen-and-a-half collar,
three-dollar pants, addicted to five-cent cigars and a drooping
mustache; otherwise no distinguishing marks. He didn't look a thing in
the world like a genius. His gifts were hidden. But it didn't take him
long to begin showing them.
One bright cold morning Whiz Bollinger came in from his place proudly
riding in a brand-new buckboard that had cost him thirty-two dollars,
and right in front of Billy Grimm's filling-station the cayuse he was
driving balked on him. You understand I'm speaking of a filling-station
in the old-fashioned sense. We'd read about automobiles and seen
pictures of them but they hadn't penetrated to our parts as yet. If
a fellow was going somewhere by himself he generally rode a hoss and
if he was moving his womenfolks he packed 'em in a prairie-schooner.
Sometimes he'd let 'em live in one for a few years so they could
have constant change of scene and air. I recall one day a bunch of
old-timers were discussing the merits of different wagons--Old Hickory
and South Bend and even Conestoga--and old Mar'm Whitaker spoke up
and says: "Well, boys, I always have claimed and always will that the
Murphey wagon is the best one they is for raisin' a family in."
So Billy Grimm's sign was a pile of empty beer kegs racked up alongside
the front door. Sometimes in mild weather he'd have another sign--some
wayfarer that had been overtaken just as he got outside and was
sleeping it off on the sidewalk. After the first of November all the
flies in the state that didn't have anywhere else to go went to Billy's
place and wintered there. He was Montana's leading house-fly fancier.
He was getting his share of my patronage and I happened to be on the
spot when this Bollinger colt decided to stop right where he was and
stay there until he froze solid.
You know how it is when a hoss goes balky. In less than no time at all
the entire leisure class of Triple Falls were assembled, giving advice
about how to get that hoss started again. They twisted his ear and they
tried stoving in his ribs by kicking him in the side and they pushed
against his hind quarters and dragged at the bit, and through it all
that wall-eyed, Roman-nosed plug remained just as stationary as an Old
Line Republican. Alongside of him, the Rock of Gibraltar would seem
downright restless.
And then this Samson Goodhue comes bulging into the circle and takes
charge. "Stand back, everybody, please," he says, "while I show you how
to unbalk a horse. Get me a few pieces of kindling wood, somebody,"
he says, "and some paper or some straw or something." Various persons
hurry off in all directions, eager to obey. In every crowd there are
plenty of suckers who'll carry out any kind of orders if somebody who
acts executive will give them. So when they've assembled his supplies
for him he makes a little pile of 'em on the packed snow right under
the cayuse's belly and is preparing to scratch a match and telling
Whiz Bollinger to climb back on his seat and take a strong grip on the
reins, when Mrs. Oliver J. Doheny, who's among the few ladies present,
interferes with the proceedings.
Now this here Mrs. Oliver J. Doheny is at that remote period our
principal reform element. She's 'specially strong on cruelty to dumb
beasts, being heartily against it. It's only been a few weeks before
this that a trapper trails down from across the international boundary
with one of those big Canada bobcats that he's caught in a trap and
he's got it on exhibition in a cage in Hyman Frieder's Climax Clothing
Store, when Mrs. Doheny happens along and sees how the thing sort of
drags one foot where the trap pinched it and she begins tongue-lashing
the Canuck for not having bound up its wounds.
When she's slowed down for breath he says to her very politely: "Ma'am,
in reply to same I would just state this: Ma'am, when my dear old
mother was layin' on her death-bed she called me to her side and she
whispered to me, 'My son, whatever else you do do, don't you never
try to nurse no sick lynxes.' And, ma'am, I aim to keep that farewell
promise to my dear dyin' mother! But I ain't no objections to your
tryin'. Only, ma'am, I feels it my Christian duty to warn you right now
that if you would get too close to this here unfortunate patient of
mine he's liable to turn you every way you can think of except loose."
So on that occasion Mrs. Doheny thought better of her first impulse
but now she is very harsh toward this stranger. "Do you mean to tell
me," she says, "that it is your deliberate intention to ignite a fire
beneath this poor misguided animal's--er--person?" Although a born
reformer she was always very ladylike in her language.
"That, madam," he says, "is the broad general idea."
"How dare you!" she says. Then she says it again: "How dare you! Think
of the poor brute's agony!" she says.
"Madam," he says right back at her, "you do me a grave injustice. Not
for worlds would I inflict suffering upon any living creature. The
point is, madam, that the instant this here chunk of obstinacy feels
the heat singeing of him he will move. Observe, madam!" And before
she can say anything more he has lighted the match and stuck it in
the paper and the flames shoot up and, just as he's predicted, Whiz
Bollinger's balked cayuse responds to the appeal to a dormant better
nature.
You never saw a horse move forward more briskly or more willingly than
that one did. There was just one drawback to the complete success of
the plan and, as everybody agreed afterwards when the excitement had
died down and there was time for sober reason, this Goodhue party as
we called him then, or Good Sam as we took to calling him afterwards,
couldn't really be held responsible for that. The hoss moved forward
but he stopped again when he'd gone just exactly far enough for the
fire to get a good chance at Whiz's shiny beautiful new buckboard,
which it blazed up like a summer hotel, the paint being fresh and
him having only that morning touched up the springs with coal-oil. A
crate of celluloid hair combs burning up couldn't have thrown off any
prettier sparks or more of them. Before the volunteer fire department
could put their uniforms on and get there that ill-fated buckboard was
a total loss with no insurance.
This was Good Sam's first appearance amongst us in, as you might say,
a business capacity. It wasn't long, though, before he was offering us
more and more and still more evidences of his injurious good toward
afflicted humanity. It was no trouble to show samples. With that
misguided zealot it amounted to a positive passion.