THE VOICE IN THE NIGHT
When Garland passed through the lobby the hall clock showed him it was
after midnight. Cushing, roused from a nap, looked up at the sound of his
step, and asked how Miss Lopez was. "Gettin' on first rate," he called
back cheerily as he opened the door and went out.
His immediate desire was for silence and seclusion--a place where he
could recover from the stunned condition in which Pancha's story had left
him. Before he could act on it he would have to get back to a clearness
where coordinated thought was possible. He walked down the street in the
direction of his old lodgings; he had a latch-key and could get to his
room without being heard. On the way he found himself skirting the open
space of South Park, an oval of darkness, light-touched at intervals and
encircled by a looming wall of houses. Here and there on benches huddled
figures sat, formless and immovable, less like human beings than ghosts
come back in the depths of night to find themselves denied an entrance
into life, and drooping disconsolate. His footsteps sounded abnormally
loud, thrown back from the houses, buffeted between their frowning
fronts, as if they were maliciously determined to reveal his presence,
wanted him to know that they too were leagued against him. He stumbled
over the sidewalk's coping to the grass and stole to a bench under the
shade of a tree.
There he burrowed upward toward the light through the avalanche that had
fallen on him.
At first there was only a gleam of it, a central glow. About this his
thoughts circled like May flies round a lamp, irresistibly attracted and
seemingly as purposeless.
"Hello, Panchita! Ain't you the wonder. Your best beau's proud of
you"--that was the glow. He saw the words traced at the end of the
column, saw a hand tearing the piece out, saw into the mind that directed
the hand, knew its conviction of the paper's value.
It was some time before he could get away from it; divert his mental
energies to this night, the hour and its necessities, and the next day,
the formidable day, now so close at hand.
From a clock tower nearby two strokes chimed out, dropping separate and
rounded on the silence. They dropped on him like tangible things, calling
him to action. He sat up, his brain-clouds dispersed, and thought. Any
information of the lost bandit would gain clemency for Mayer, and Mayer
had a clew. Knapp would remember the paper taken from his partner's coat
and buried with the money. That would lead them to Pancha. Years before
in Siskiyou he had witnessed the cross-examination of a girl, daughter of
an absconding murderer, and the scene in the crowded courtroom of the
wild mountain town rose in his memory, with Pancha as the central figure.
They would badger and break her down as they had the murderer's daughter.
She would know everything. There would be no secrets from her any more.
In an uprush of despair his life unrolled before him, all, it now seemed,
progressing to this climax. Step by step he had advanced on it, builded
up to it as if it were the goal of his desire. Wanting to keep her in
ignorance he had created a situation that had worked out worse for her
than for him. He could fly, leave her to face it alone, enlightenment
come with shame and ignominy. It wasn't fair, it wasn't human. If it had
only been himself that he had ruined he wouldn't have cared, he would
have been glad to end the whole thing. But under the broken law of his
conduct he had held to the greater law of his love. It was that he would
sacrifice; be untrue to what had sustained him as his one ideal. He could
have cried to the heavens that to let her know him for what he was, was a
retribution too great for his sins. Death would have been a release but
he could not die. He must live and make one final fight to preserve the
belief that was his life's sole apology.
That determination toughened him, his despair past, and wrestling with
the problem he came upon its solution and with it his punishment.
He would tell the man, give him warning and let him go. There was plenty
of time; the authorities were not yet informed; no one was on the watch.
Mayer could leave the city that morning and make the Mexican border by
night. It was the only way out and it dragged his penance with it--Pancha
unavenged, the enemy rewarded, the prison doors set wide for the flight
of their mutual despoiler.
Three strokes chimed out and he rose, trying to step lightly with feet
that felt heavy as lead. It was very silent, as if the night and the
brooding city were at one in that conspiracy to impress him with a sense
of their hostility. The houses were still malignly watchful, again took
up and tossed about his footsteps, echoed them from wall to wall till he
wondered doors did not open, people did not come. On the main street he
shrank by shop window and closed doorway, gliding blackly across a gush
of light, slipping, a moving darkness, against the deeper darkness of
shuttered lower stories. He had it almost to himself--a policeman
lounging on a corner, a reveler reeling by with indignant mutterings, one
or two night workers footing it homeward to rest and bed.
At the door of a drugstore he stopped and looked in. A frowsy woman was
talking across the counter to a clerk whose bald head shone, glossy as
ivory, above the gray fatigue of his face. In a corner was a telephone
booth. Garland opened the door, then started as a bell jangled stridently
and the bald-headed man craned his neck and the woman whisked round.
"Telephone," he muttered, tentative on the sill.
The clerk, too listless for words, jerked his head toward the booth and
then handed the woman a package. As Garland entered the booth he heard
her dragging step cross the floor and the bell jangle on her exit.
While he waited he struggled for a closer control on the rage that
possessed him. He had decided what he would say and he cleared his throat
for a free passage of the words that were to carry deliverance to one he
longed to kill. He had expected a wait--the man, confidant in his
security, would be sleeping--but almost on top of his request for Mr.
Mayer came a voice, wide-awake and incisive:
"Hello, who is it?"
His answer was very low, the deep tones hoarse despite his effort.
"Is this Mr. Boye Mayer?"
"Yes. What do you want? Who are you?"
The voice fitted his conception of the man, hard, commanding, with
something sharply imperious in its cultivated accents. He thought he
detected fear in it.
"It don't matter who I am. I got somethin' to say to you that matters.
It's time for you to skip."
There was a momentary pause, then the word was repeated, seemed to be
ejected quickly as if delivered on a rising breath:
"Skip?"
"Yes--get out. You've got time--till tomorrow afternoon. They'll be
lookin' for you then."
Again there was that slight pause. When the voice answered, trepidation
was plain in it.
"Who's looking for me? What are you talking about ?"
It was Garland's turn to pause. For a considering moment he sought his
words, then he gave them in short, telegraphic sentences:
"End of August. The tules--opposite the Ariel Club. Twelve thousand.
Whatcheer House, Sacramento. Harry Romaine."
The pause was longer, then the voice came breathless, shaken:
"What in hell do you mean by this gibberish?"
"I guess that's all right. You don't need to play any baby business. You
know now and _I_ know, and by tomorrow evening the Express company and
the police'll know."
A stammering of oaths came along the wire, a burst of maledictions,
interspersed by threats. Garland cut into it with:
"That don't help any. You ain't got time to waste that way. You want
to make the Mexican border by tomorrow night and to do that you got to
go quick."
The man's anger seemed to rise to a pitch of furious incoherence. His
words, shot out in a storm of passion and fear, were transmitted in a
stuttering jumble of sound, from which phrases broke, here and there
rising into clearness. Garland caught one: "Who's turned you loose on
this? Who's behind it?" and the restraint he had put on himself gave
way. He laid his hand on the shelf before him as something to seize and
wrenched at it.
"If _I_ was there you'd know--I'd make it plain. And maybe you guess. You
thought you'd struck someone who was helpless. But she could pay you back
and she _has_."
He stopped, realizing what he was saying. Through the singing of the
blood in his ears the answering words came as an unintelligible mutter.
With an unsteady hand he hung up the receiver, his breath beating in loud
gasps on the stillness that had so suddenly fallen on the small,
walled-in place. For a space he sat crouched in the chair, trying to
subdue the pounding of his heart, the shaking of his limbs. Then,
stealthily, like a guilty thing, he opened the door and came out. From
above a line of bottles on the prescription desk the clerk's bald head
gleamed, his eyes dodging between them.
"It's all right," Garland muttered; "I'm through," and shambled to the
door with its jangling bell.
In his room at Mrs. Meeker's he threw himself dressed on the bed. The
shade was up and through the window he could see the long flank of
the new building and above it a section of sky. He kept his eyes on
the night-blue strip and as he lay there his spirit, all spring gone,
sank from depths to depths. He saw nothing before him but the life of
the outlaw, and, mind and body taxed beyond their powers, he longed
for death.
Presently he slept, sprawled on the wretched bed, the light of the dawn
revealing the tragedy of his ravaged face.