THE MARKED PARAGRAPH
The first half of the night he spent moving the money to the marshes'
edge. Its weight was like the weight of millstones but disposed about
him, in the basket, in the gunny sacks slung from his shoulders, in the
newspaper carried in his hands, he dragged it across. When he reached the
bank he fell like one dead. Outstretched beside his treasure he lay on
his back and looked with half-closed eyes at the black vault and the cold
satiric stars.
Before the dawn came he wrapped part of it in the paper and buried it
among the sedge; the rest he put in his basket and his pockets. Early
morning saw him, an inconspicuous, frowsy figure, slouching up to a way
station on the line to Sacramento.
In the train he found a newspaper left by a departed traveler, and on its
front page, featured with black headlines, the latest news of the Knapp
and Garland holdup. After he had read it he sat very still. He knew what
he had found and was relieved. It cleared the situation if it added to
its danger. But he was intrigued by the difficulty of disposing of the
money. To bank it was out of the question; he must rouse no curiosity and
he could give no references. To leave it on the marshes' edge was
impracticable. He had heard of men who kept their loot buried, but he
feared the perils of a cache, to be dug and redug, ungettable, in a
solitary place, hard to find and dangerous to visit. He must put it
somewhere not too remote, secure against discovery, where he could come
and go unnoticed and free from question. By the time the train reached
Sacramento he had formulated a plan.
He knew the city well, had footed the streets of its slums before he went
South. In a men's lodging house, kept by a Chinese, he engaged a room,
left what gold he had there--he had to take his chance against theft--and
in the afternoon took a down train to the marsh. He was back with the
rest of the money that night, buying a secondhand suitcase on his way
from the depot. In this he packed it, still in the canvas sacks, the
newspaper folded over it. He saw to it that the suitcase had a lock, and
lead-heavy he laid it flat under the bed.
The next morning he rose, nerved to a day of action. He was out early,
his objective the small, mean stores of the poorer quarter. In these he
bought shoes, the coarse brogans of the workman, and a hat, a rusty,
sweat-stained Stetson. A barber's shop in a basement was his next point
of call. Here he was shaved and his hair cut. When he emerged into the
light of day the tramp had disappeared. The ragged growth gone, the proud
almost patrician character of his face was strikingly apparent. It
matched so illy with his wretched clothes that passersby looked at him.
He saw it and slunk along the walls, his hat on his brows, uneasily aware
of the glances of women which usually warmed him like wine. At a
secondhand dealer's, a dark den with coats and trousers hanging in layers
about the entrance, he bought a suit of clothes and an overcoat. Carrying
these in a bundle he went back to his room and put them on.
The transformation was now complete. He studied himself in the blotched
and wavy mirror and nodded in grave approval. He might have been an
artisan, a small clerk, or a traveling salesman routed through the
country towns.
Half an hour later saw him at the desk of the Whatcheer House. This was a
third-rate men's hotel, a decent enough place where the transient male
population from the interior met the restless influx from the coast. Here
floated in, lodged a space, then drifted out a tide of men, seekers of
work, of pleasure, of change, of nothing at all. The majority were of the
world's rovers impelled by an unquenchable wanderlust, but among them
were the industrious and steady, quartered in the city or shifting to a
new center of activity. He registered as Harry Romaine of Vancouver and
described himself as a traveling man who would use Sacramento as a base
of operations. He took a room in the back--No. 19--said he would probably
keep it all winter and paid a month's rent in advance.
By afternoon he had the money there and with it a chisel and hammer. It
was intensely hot, the sun beating on the wall and sloping in through the
one window. Complete silence from the rooms on either side reassured him,
and in the scorching stillness he worked with a noiseless, capable speed.
In one corner under the bed he pulled up the carpet and pried loose the
boards. Some of the money went there, some below the pipes in the
cupboard under the stationary washstand, the rest behind a piece of the
baseboard.
Before he replaced the boards in the corner cache--the largest and least
difficult to disturb--he glanced about for anything overlooked or
forgotten for which the hole would be a convenient hiding-place. On the
floor, outspread and crumpled, lay the newspaper. The outer sheets were
brown and disintegrated from contact with the mud, but the two inner ones
were whole and clean. Probably it would be better to take no chances and
hide it; someone might notice it and wonder how it came to be in such a
state. He picked it up, looked it over, and saw it was the _Sacramento
Courier_ of August 25. That would make it only three days old, the issue
of the day before the holdup. If anything was needed to convince him that
the cache was Knapp and Garland's this was it. He opened it on the table
to fold, brushing out the creases, when suddenly his hand dropped and his
glance became fixed. A marked paragraph had caught his attention.
The light was growing dim and he took the paper to the window. The
paragraph was at the end of a column, was encircled by two curved
pencil strokes, and on the edge of clean paper below it was written,
also in pencil, "Hello, Panchita. Ain't you the wonder. Your best
beau's proud of you."
He pulled a chair to the window, folded back the page and read the
marked item. The column was headed "C. C.'s San Francisco Letter," was
dated August 21, and was mainly concerned with social and business news
of the coast city. That part of it outlined by the pencil strokes ran
as follows:
As to matters theatrical there's nothing new in sight, except that Pancha
Lopez--our Pancha--made a hit this week in "The Zingara," the gypsy
operetta produced on Sunday night at the Albion. I can't tell much about
"The Zingara"--maybe it was good and maybe it wasn't. I couldn't reckon
with anything but Pancha; she was the whole show. She's never done
anything so well, was as dainty as a pink, as brilliant as a humming
bird, danced like a fairy, and sang--well, she sang way beyond what she's
led us to expect of her. Can I say more? The public evidently agrees with
me. The S.R.O. sign has been out at the cozy little home of comic opera
ever since Sunday. C.C., who can't keep away from the place, has seen so
many dress shirt fronts and plush cloaks that he's rubbed his eyes and
wondered if he hasn't made a mistake and it's the grand opera season come
early with a change of dates. But he hasn't. Pacific and Van Ness avenues
are beginning to understand that we've got a little song bird right here
in our midst that they can hear for half a dollar and who gives them more
for that than the Metropolitans do for a V. Saluda, Pancha! Here's
looking at you. Some day the East is going to call you and you're going
to make a little line of footsteps across the continent. But for our
sakes postpone it as long as you can. Remember that you belong to us,
that we discovered you and that we can't get on without you.
He read it twice and then studied the penciled words, "Hello, Panchita!
Ain't you the wonder. Your best beau's proud of you." In the dying light
he murmured them over as if their sound delighted him and as he murmured
a slight, sardonic smile broke out on his face.
His sense of humor, grim and cynical, was tickled. He, the picaroon,
companion of rogues and small marauders, had seen many and diverse love
affairs. On the shady bypaths he had followed, edging along the rim of
the law, he had met all sorts of couples, men and women incomprehensibly
attracted, ill-assorted, mysterious, picturesque. This seemed to him one
of the most piquant combinations he had ever encountered--a bandit and a
comic opera singer. It amused him vastly and he crooned over the paper,
grinning in the dusk. The fellow had evidently marked the item and
written his congratulations, intending to send it to her, then needed it
to wrap round the money, and confident in the security of his cache, left
it there against his return. That thought increased his amusement, and he
laughed, a low, smothered chuckle.
It was dark and he rose and lit the lamp. Then he tore out the piece of
the paper and put it in the pocket of his suitcase. The rest he folded
and placed in the hole under the money. As he knelt, fitting the boards
back, he thought of the singing woman, Pancha Lopez. The beloved of a
highwayman, with a Spanish name, he pictured her as a dark, flashing
creature, coarsely opulent and mature. It was evident that she too
belonged to the world of rogues and social pirates, and he laughed again
as he saw himself, swept back by a turn of fate, into the lives of the
outlawed. He must see Pancha Lopez; she promised to be interesting.