"WHEN SHE WAKES UP"
It was mid-afternoon of a bright autumn day when Lambert approached
Glendora with Kerr chained to the seat beside him. As the train rapidly
cut down the last few miles, Lambert noted a change in his prisoner's
demeanor. Up to that time his carriage had been melancholy and morose,
as that of a man who saw no gleam of hope ahead of him. He had spoken
but seldom during the journey, asking no favors except that of being
allowed to send a telegram to Grace from Omaha.
Lambert had granted that request readily, seeing nothing amiss in Kerr's
desire to have his daughter meet him and lighten as much as she could
his load of disgrace. Kerr said he wanted her to go with him to the
county seat and arrange bond.
"I'll never look through the bars of a jail in my home county," he said.
That was his one burst of rebellion, his one boast, his one approach to
a discussion of his serious situation, all the way.
Now as they drew almost within sight of Glendora, Kerr became fidgety
and nervous. His face was strained and anxious, as if he dreaded
stepping off the train into sight of the people who had known him so
long as a man of consequence in that community.
Lambert began to have his own worries about this time. He regretted the
kindness he had shown Kerr in permitting him to send that telegram to
Grace. She might try to deliver him on bail of another kind. Kerr's
nervous anxiety would seem to indicate that he expected something to
happen at Glendora. It hadn't occurred to Lambert before that this might
be possible. It seemed a foolish oversight.
His apprehension, as well as Kerr's evident expectation, seemed
groundless as he stepped off the train almost directly in front of the
waiting-room door, giving Kerr a hand down the steps. There was nobody
in sight but the postmaster with the mail sack, the station agent, and
the few citizens who always stood around the station for the thrill of
seeing the flier stop to take water.
Few, if any, of these recognized Kerr as Lambert hurried him across the
platform and into the station, his hands manacled at his back. Kerr held
back for one quick look up and down the station platform, then stumbled
hastily ahead under the force of Lambert's hand. The door of the
telegraph office stood open; Lambert pushed his prisoner within and
closed it.
The station agent came in as the train pulled away, and Lambert made
inquiry of him concerning the sheriff. The agent had not seen him there
that day. He turned away with sullen countenance, looking with disfavor
on this intrusion upon his sacred precincts. He stood in front of his
chattering instruments in the bow window, looking up and down the
platform with anxious face out of which his natural human color had
gone, leaving even his lips white.
"You don't have to keep him in here, I guess, do you?" he said, still
sweeping the platform up and down with his uneasy eyes.
"No. I just stepped in to ask you to put this satchel in your safe and
keep it for me a while."
Lambert's calm and confident manner seemed to assure the agent, and
mollify him, and repair his injured dignity. He beckoned with a jerk of
his head, not for one moment quitting his leaning, watchful pose, or
taking his eyes from their watch on the platform. Lambert crossed the
little room in two strides and looked out. Not seeing anything more
alarming than a knot of townsmen around the postmaster, who stood with
the lean mail sack across his shoulder, talking excitedly, he inquired
what was up.
"They're layin' for you out there," the agent whispered.
"I kind of expected they would be," Lambert told him.
"They're liable to cut loose any minute," said the agent, "and I tell
you, Duke, I've got a wife and children dependin' on me!"
"I'll take him outside. I didn't intend to stay here only a minute.
Here, lock this up. It belongs to Vesta Philbrook. If I have to go with
the sheriff, or anything, send her word it's here."
As Lambert appeared in the door with his prisoner the little bunch of
excited gossips scattered hurriedly. He stood near the door a little
while, considering the situation. The station agent was not to blame for
his desire to preserve his valuable services for the railroad and his
family; Lambert had no wish to shelter himself and retain his hold on
the prisoner at the trembling fellow's peril.
It was unaccountable that the sheriff was not there to relieve him of
this responsibility; he must have received the telegram two days ago.
Pending his arrival, or, if not his arrival, the coming of the local
train that would carry himself and prisoner to the county seat, Lambert
cast about him for some means of securing his man in such manner that he
could watch him and defend against any attempted rescue without being
hampered.
A telegraph pole stood beside the platform some sixty or seventy feet
from the depot, the wires slanting down from it into the building's
gable end. To this Lambert marched his prisoner, the eyes of the town on
him. He freed one of Kerr's hands, passed his arms round the pole so he
stood embracing it, and locked him there.
It was a pole of only medium thickness, allowing Kerr ample room to
encircle it with his chained arms, even to sit on the edge of the
platform when he should weary of his standing embrace. Lambert stood
back a pace and looked at him, thus ignominiously anchored in public
view.
"Let 'em come and take you," he said.
He laid out a little beat up and down the platform at Kerr's back,
rolled a cigarette, settled down to wait for the sheriff, the train, the
rush of Kerr's friends, or whatever the day might have in store.
Slowly, thoughtfully, he paced that beat of a rod behind his surly
prisoner's back, watching the town, watching the road leading into it.
People stood in the doors, but none approached him to make inquiry, no
voice was lifted in pitch that reached him where he stood. If anybody
else in town besides the agent knew of the contemplated rescue, he kept
it selfishly to himself.
Lambert did not see any of Kerr's men about. Five horses were hitched in
front of the saloon; now and then he could see the top of a hat above
the latticed half-door, but nobody entered, nobody left. The station
agent still stood in his window, working the telegraph key as if
reporting the clearing of the flier, watching anxiously up and down the
platform.
Lambert hoped that Sim Hargus and young Tom, and the old stub-footed
scoundrel who was the meanest of them all who had lashed him into the
fire that night, would swing the doors of the saloon and come out with a
declaration of their intentions. He knew that some of them, if not all,
were there. He had tied Kerr out before their eyes like wolf bait. Let
them come and get him if they were men.
This seemed the opportunity which he had been waiting for time to bring
him. If they flashed a gun on him now he could clean them down to the
ground with all legal justification, no questions asked.
Two appeared far down the road, riding for Glendora in a swinging
gallop. The sheriff, Lambert thought; missed the train, and had ridden
the forty and more miles across. No; one was Grace Kerr. Even at a
quarter of a mile he never could mistake her again. The other was Sim
Hargus. They had miscalculated in their intention of meeting the train,
and were coming in a panic of anxiety.
They dismounted at the hotel, and started across. Lambert stood near his
prisoner, waiting. Kerr had been sitting on the edge of the platform.
Now he got up, moving around the pole to show them that he was not to be
counted on to take a hand in whatever they expected to start.
Lambert moved a little nearer his prisoner, where he stood waiting. He
had not shaved during the two days between Chicago and Glendora; the
dust of the road was on his face. His hat was tipped forward to shelter
his eyes against the afternoon glare, the leather thong at the back
rumpling his close-cut hair. He stood lean and long-limbed, easy and
indifferent in his pose, as it would seem to look at him as one might
glance in passing, the smoke of his cigarette rising straight from its
fresh-lit tip in the calm air of the somnolent day.
As Hargus and Grace advanced, coming in the haste and heat of
indignation that Kerr's humiliating situation inflamed, two men left the
saloon. They stopped at the hitching-rack as if debating whether to
take their horses, and so stood, watching the progress of the two who
were cutting the long diagonal across the road. When Grace, who came a
little ahead of her companion in her eagerness, was within thirty feet
of him, Lambert lifted his hand in forbidding signal.
"Stop there," he said.
She halted, her face flaming with fury. Hargus stopped beside her, his
arm crooked to bring his hand up to his belt, sawing back and forth as
if in indecision between drawing his gun and waiting for the wordy
preliminaries to pass. Kerr stood embracing the pole in a pose of
ridiculous supplication, the bright chain of the new handcuffs
glistening in the sun.
"I want to talk to my father," said Grace, lashing Lambert with a look
of scornful hate.
"Say it from there," Lambert returned, inflexible, cool; watching every
movement of Sim Hargus' sawing arm.
"You've got no right to chain him up like a dog!" she said.
"You ain't got no authority, that anybody ever heard of, to arrest him
in the first place," Hargus added, his swinging, indecisive arm for a
moment still.
Lambert made no reply. He seemed to be looking over their heads, back
along the road they had come, from the lift of his chin and the set of
his close-gathered brows. He seemed carelessly indifferent to Hargus'
legal opinion and presence, a little fresh plume of smoke going up from
his cigarette as if he breathed into it gently.
Grace started forward with impatient exclamation, tossing her head in
disdainful defiance of this fence-rider's authority.
"Go back!" Kerr commanded, his voice hoarse with the fear of something
that she, in her unreasoning anger, had not seen behind the calm front
of the man she faced.
She stopped, turning back again to where Hargus waited. Along the street
men were drawing away from their doors, in cautious curiosity, silent
suspense. Women put their heads out for a moment, plucked curtains aside
for one swift survey, vanished behind the safety of walls. At the
hitching-rack the two men--one of them Tom Hargus, the other
unknown--stood beside their horses, as if in position according to a
previous plan.
"We want that man," said Hargus, his hand hovering over his gun.
"Come and take him," Lambert invited.
Hargus spoke in a low voice to Grace; she turned and ran toward her
horse. The two at the hitching-rack swung into their saddles as Hargus,
watching Grace over his shoulder as she sped away, began to back off,
his hand stealing to his gun as if moved by some slow, precise machinery
which was set to time it according to the fleeing girl's speed.
Lambert stood without shifting a foot, his nostrils dilating in the
slow, deep breath that he drew. Yard by yard Hargus drew away, his
intention not quite clear, as if he watched his chance to break away
like a prisoner. Grace was in front of the hotel door when he snapped
his revolver from its sheath.
Lambert had been waiting this. He fired before Hargus touched the
trigger, his elbow to his side as he had seen Jim Wilder shoot on the
day when tragedy first came into his life. Hargus spun on his heel as if
he had been roped, spread his arms, his gun falling from his hand;
pitched to his face, lay still. The two on horses galloped out and
opened fire.
Lambert shifted to keep them guessing, but kept away from the pole where
Kerr was chained, behind which he might have found shelter. They had
separated to flank him, Tom Hargus over near the corner of the depot,
the other ranging down toward the hotel, not more than fifty yards
between Lambert and either of them.
Intent on drawing Tom Hargus from the shelter of the depot, Lambert ran
along the platform, stopping well beyond Kerr. Until that moment he had
not returned their fire. Now he opened on Tom Hargus, bringing his horse
down at the third shot, swung about and emptied his first gun
ineffectually at the other man.
This fellow charged down on him as Lambert drew his other gun, Tom
Hargus, free of his fallen horse, shooting from the shelter of the rain
barrel at the corner of the depot. Lambert felt something strike his
left arm, with no more apparent force, no more pain, than the flip of a
branch when one rides through the woods. But it swung useless at his
side.
Through the smoke of his own gun, and the dust raised by the man on
horseback, Lambert had a flash of Grace Kerr riding across the middle
background between him and the saloon. He had no thought of her
intention. It was not a moment for speculation with the bullets hitting
his hat.
The man on horseback had come within ten yards of him. Lambert could see
his teeth as he drew back his lips when he fired. Lambert centered his
attention on this stranger, dark, meager-faced, marked by the
unmistakable Mexican taint. His hat flew off at Lambert's first shot as
if it had been jerked by a string; at his second, the fellow threw
himself back in the saddle with a jerk. He fell limply over the high
cantle and lay thus a moment, his frantic horse running wildly away.
Lambert saw him tumble into the road as a man came spurring past the
hotel, slinging his gun as he rode.
Nearer approach identified the belated sheriff. He shouted a warning to
Lambert as he jerked his gun down and fired. Tom Hargus rose from
behind the rain barrel, staggered into the road, going like a drunken
man, his hat in one hand, the other pressed to his side, his head
hanging, his long black hair falling over his bloody face.
In a second Lambert saw this, and the shouting, shooting officer bearing
down toward him. He had the peculiar impression that the sheriff was
submerged in water, enlarging grotesquely as he approached. The slap of
another bullet on his back, and he turned to see Grace Kerr firing at
him with only the width of the platform between them.
It was all smoke, dust, confusion around him, a sickness in his body, a
dimness in his mind, but he was conscious of her horse rearing, lifting
its feet high--one of them a white-stockinged foot, as he marked with
painful precision--and falling backward in a clatter of shod hoofs on
the railroad.
When it cleared a little, Lambert found the sheriff was on the ground
beside him, supporting him with his arm, looking into his face with
concern almost comical, speaking in anxious inquiry.
"Lay down over there on the platform, Duke, you're shot all to pieces,"
he said.
Lambert sat on the edge of the platform, and the world receded. When he
felt himself sweep back to consciousness there were people about him,
and he was stretched on his back, a feeling in his nostrils as if he
breathed fire. Somebody was lying across from him a little way; he
struggled with painful effort to lift himself and see.
It was Grace Kerr. Her face was white in the midst of her dark hair, and
she was dead.
It was not right for her to be lying there, with dead face to the sky,
he thought. They should do something, they should carry her away from
the stare of curious, shocked eyes, they should--He felt in the pocket
of his vest and found the little handkerchief, and crept painfully
across to her, heedless of the sheriff's protest, defiant of his
restraining, kindly hand.
With his numb left arm trailing by his side, a burning pain in his
breast, as if a hot rod had been driven through him, the track of her
treacherous bullet, he knew, he fumbled to unfold the bit of soft white
linen, refusing the help of many sympathetic hands that were
out-stretched.
When he had it right, he spread it over her face, white again as an
evening primrose, as he once had seen it through the dusk of another
night. But out of this night that she had entered she would ride no
more. There was a thought in his heart as tender as his deed as he thus
masked her face from the white stare of day:
"_She can wipe her eyes on it when she wakes up and repents._"