Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Marcia Brooks and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
book was produced from scanned images of public domain
material from the Google Print project.)
THE ESCAPE OF MR. TRIMM
[Illustration: NOBODY PAID ANY ATTENTION TO MR. TRIMM.--_Frontispiece_
(_Page 18._)]
THE ESCAPE
OF MR. TRIMM
_HIS PLIGHT AND OTHER PLIGHTS_
BY
IRVIN S. COBB
AUTHOR OF
OLD JUDGE PRIEST,
BACK HOME, ETC.
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1910, 1911, 1912 AND 1913
BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1913
BY THE FRANK A. MUNSEY COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1913
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
[Transcriber's Note: A List of Illustrations has been added.]
TO MY WIFE
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE ESCAPE OF MR. TRIMM 3
II. THE BELLED BUZZARD 54
III. AN OCCURRENCE UP A SIDE STREET 79
IV. ANOTHER OF THOSE CUB REPORTER STORIES 96
V. SMOKE OF BATTLE 142
VI. THE EXIT OF ANNE DUGMORE 179
VII. TO THE EDITOR OF THE SUN 202
VIII. FISHHEAD 244
IX. GUILTY AS CHARGED 260
ILLUSTRATIONS
NOBODY PAID ANY ATTENTION TO MR. TRIMM. Frontispiece
"TWO LONG WING FEATHERS DRIFTED SLOWLY DOWN." Facing page 70
"I WAS THE ONE THAT SHOT HIM--WITH THIS THING HERE." Facing Page 164
HE DRAGGED THE RIFLE BY THE BARREL, SO THAT ITS BUTT
MADE A CROOKED FURROW IN THE SNOW. Facing Page 193
THE ESCAPE OF MR. TRIMM
I
THE ESCAPE OF MR. TRIMM
Mr. Trimm, recently president of the late Thirteenth National Bank, was
taking a trip which was different in a number of ways from any he had
ever taken. To begin with, he was used to parlor cars and Pullmans and
even luxurious private cars when he went anywhere; whereas now he rode
with a most mixed company in a dusty, smelly day coach. In the second
place, his traveling companion was not such a one as Mr. Trimm would
have chosen had the choice been left to him, being a stupid-looking
German-American with a drooping, yellow mustache. And in the third
place, Mr. Trimm's plump white hands were folded in his lap, held in a
close and enforced companionship by a new and shiny pair of Bean's
Latest Model Little Giant handcuffs. Mr. Trimm was on his way to the
Federal penitentiary to serve twelve years at hard labor for breaking,
one way or another, about all the laws that are presumed to govern
national banks.
* * * * *
All the time Mr. Trimm was in the Tombs, fighting for a new trial, a
certain question had lain in his mind unasked and unanswered. Through
the seven months of his stay in the jail that question had been always
at the back part of his head, ticking away there like a little watch
that never needed winding. A dozen times a day it would pop into his
thoughts and then go away, only to come back again.
When Copley was taken to the penitentiary--Copley being the cashier who
got off with a lighter sentence because the judge and jury held him to
be no more than a blind accomplice in the wrecking of the Thirteenth
National--Mr. Trimm read closely every line that the papers carried
about Copley's departure. But none of them had seen fit to give the
young cashier more than a short and colorless paragraph. For Copley was
only a small figure in the big intrigue that had startled the country;
Copley didn't have the money to hire big lawyers to carry his appeal to
the higher courts for him; Copley's wife was keeping boarders; and as
for Copley himself, he had been wearing stripes several months now.
With Mr. Trimm it had been vastly different. From the very beginning he
had held the public eye. His bearing in court when the jury came in with
their judgment; his cold defiance when the judge, in pronouncing
sentence, mercilessly arraigned him and the system of finance for which
he stood; the manner of his life in the Tombs; his spectacular fight to
beat the verdict, had all been worth columns of newspaper space. If Mr.
Trimm had been a popular poisoner, or a society woman named as
co-respondent in a sensational divorce suit, the papers could not have
been more generous in their space allotments. And Mr. Trimm in his cell
had read all of it with smiling contempt, even to the semi-hysterical
outpourings of the lady special writers who called him The Iron Man of
Wall Street and undertook to analyze his emotions--and missed the mark
by a thousand miles or two.
Things had been smoothed as much as possible for him in the Tombs, for
money and the power of it will go far toward ironing out even the
corrugated routine of that big jail. He had a large cell to himself in
the airiest, brightest corridor. His meals were served by a caterer from
outside. Although he ate them without knife or fork, he soon learned
that a spoon and the fingers can accomplish a good deal when backed by a
good appetite, and Mr. Trimm's appetite was uniformly good. The warden
and his underlings had been models of official kindliness; the
newspapers had sent their brightest young men to interview him whenever
he felt like talking, which wasn't often; and surely his lawyers had
done all in his behalf that money--a great deal of money--could do.
Perhaps it was because of these things that Mr. Trimm had never been
able to bring himself to realize that he was the Hobart W. Trimm who had
been sentenced to the Federal prison; it seemed to him, somehow, that
he, personally, was merely a spectator standing to one side watching the
fight of another man to dodge the penitentiary.
However, he didn't fail to give the other man the advantage of every
chance that money would buy. This sense of aloofness to the whole thing
had persisted even when his personal lawyer came to him one night in the
early fall and told him that the court of last possible resort had
denied the last possible motion. Mr. Trimm cut the lawyer short with a
shake of his head as the other began saying something about the chances
of a pardon from the President. Mr. Trimm wasn't in the habit of letting
men deceive him with idle words. No President would pardon him, and he
knew it.
"Never mind that, Walling," he said steadily, when the lawyer offered to
come to see him again before he started for prison the next day. "If
you'll see that a drawing-room on the train is reserved for me--for us,
I mean--and all that sort of thing, I'll not detain you any further. I
have a good many things to do tonight. Good night."
"Such a man, such a man," said Walling to himself as he climbed into
his car; "all chilled steel and brains. And they are going to lock that
brain up for twelve years. It's a crime," said Walling, and shook his
head. Walling always said it was a crime when they sent a client of his
to prison. To his credit be it said, though, they sent very few of them
there. Walling made as high as fifty thousand a year at criminal law.
Some of it was very criminal law indeed. His specialty was picking holes
in the statutes faster than the legislature could make them and provide
them and putty them up with amendments. This was the first case he had
lost in a good long time.
* * * * *
When Jerry, the turnkey, came for him in the morning Mr. Trimm had made
as careful a toilet as the limited means at his command permitted, and
he had eaten a hearty breakfast and was ready to go, all but putting on
his hat. Looking the picture of well-groomed, close-buttoned, iron-gray
middle age, Mr. Trimm followed the turnkey through the long corridor and
down the winding iron stairs to the warden's office. He gave no heed to
the curious eyes that followed him through the barred doors of many
cells; his feet rang briskly on the flags.
The warden, Hallam, was there in the private office with another man, a
tall, raw-boned man with a drooping, straw-colored mustache and the
unmistakable look about him of the police officer. Mr. Trimm knew
without being told that this was the man who would take him to prison.
The stranger was standing at a desk, signing some papers.
"Sit down, please, Mr. Trimm," said the warden with a nervous
cordiality. "Be through here in just one minute. This is Deputy Marshal
Meyers," he added.
Mr. Trimm started to tell this Mr. Meyers he was glad to meet him, but
caught himself and merely nodded. The man stared at him with neither
interest nor curiosity in his dull blue eyes. The warden moved over
toward the door.
"Mr. Trimm," he said, clearing his throat, "I took the liberty of
calling a cab to take you gents up to the Grand Central. It's out front
now. But there's a big crowd of reporters and photographers and a lot of
other people waiting, and if I was you I'd slip out the back way--one of
my men will open the yard gate for you--and jump aboard the subway down
at Worth Street. Then you'll miss those fellows."
"Thank you, Warden--very kind of you," said Mr. Trimm in that crisp,
businesslike way of his. He had been crisp and businesslike all his
life. He heard a door opening softly behind him, and when he turned to
look he saw the warden slipping out, furtively, in almost an embarrassed
fashion.
"Well," said Meyers, "all ready?"
"Yes," said Mr. Trimm, and he made as if to rise.
"Wait one minute," said Meyers.
He half turned his back on Mr. Trimm and fumbled at the side pocket of
his ill-hanging coat. Something inside of Mr. Trimm gave the least
little jump, and the question that had ticked away so busily all those
months began to buzz, buzz in his ears; but it was only a handkerchief
the man was getting out. Doubtless he was going to mop his face.
He didn't mop his face, though. He unrolled the handkerchief slowly, as
if it contained something immensely fragile and valuable, and then,
thrusting it back in his pocket, he faced Mr. Trimm. He was carrying in
his hands a pair of handcuffs that hung open-jawed. The jaws had little
notches in them, like teeth that could bite. The question that had
ticked in Mr. Trimm's head was answered at last--in the sight of these
steel things with their notched jaws.
Mr. Trimm stood up and, with a movement as near to hesitation as he had
ever been guilty of in his life, held out his hands, backs upward.
"I guess you're new at this kind of thing," said Meyers, grinning. "This
here way--one at a time."
He took hold of Mr. Trimm's right hand, turned it sideways and settled
one of the steel cuffs over the top of the wrist, flipping the notched
jaw up from beneath and pressing it in so that it locked automatically
with a brisk little click. Slipping the locked cuff back and forth on
Mr. Trimm's lower arm like a man adjusting a part of machinery, and then
bringing the left hand up to meet the right, he treated it the same way.
Then he stepped back.
Mr. Trimm hadn't meant to protest. The word came unbidden.
"This--this isn't necessary, is it?" he asked in a voice that was husky
and didn't seem to belong to him.
"Yep," said Meyers. "Standin' orders is play no favorites and take no
chances. But you won't find them things uncomfortable. Lightest pair
there was in the office, and I fixed 'em plenty loose."
For half a minute Mr. Trimm stood like a rooster hypnotized by a
chalkmark, his arms extended, his eyes set on his bonds. His hands had
fallen perhaps four inches apart, and in the space between his wrists a
little chain was stretched taut. In the mounting tumult that filled his
brain there sprang before Mr. Trimm's consciousness a phrase he had
heard or read somewhere, the title of a story or, perhaps, it was a
headline--The Grips of the Law. The Grips of the Law were upon Mr.
Trimm--he felt them now for the first time in these shiny wristlets and
this bit of chain that bound his wrists and filled his whole body with a
strange, sinking feeling that made him physically sick. A sudden sweat
beaded out on Mr. Trimm's face, turning it slick and wet.
He had a handkerchief, a fine linen handkerchief with a hemstitched
border and a monogram on it, in the upper breast pocket of his buttoned
coat. He tried to reach it. His hands went up, twisting awkwardly like
crab claws. The fingers of both plucked out the handkerchief. Holding it
so, Mr. Trimm mopped the sweat away. The links of the handcuffs fell in
upon one another and lengthened out again at each movement, filling the
room with a smart little sound.
He got the handkerchief stowed away with the same clumsiness. He raised
the manacled hands to his hat brim, gave it a downward pull that brought
it over his face and then, letting his short arms slide down upon his
plump stomach, he faced the man who had put the fetters upon him,
squaring his shoulders back. But it was hard, somehow, for him to square
his shoulders--perhaps because of his hands being drawn so closely
together. And his eyes would waver and fall upon his wrists. Mr. Trimm
had a feeling that the skin must be stretched very tight on his jawbones
and his forehead.
"Isn't there some way to hide these--these things?"
He began by blurting and ended by faltering it. His hands shuffled
together, one over, then under the other.
"Here's a way," said Meyers. "This'll help."
He bestirred himself, folding one of the chained hands upon the other,
tugging at the white linen cuffs and drawing the coat sleeves of his
prisoner down over the bonds as far as the chain would let them come.
"There's the notion," he said. "Just do that-a-way and them bracelets
won't hardly show a-tall. Ready? Let's be movin', then."
But handcuffs were never meant to be hidden. Merely a pair of steel
rings clamped to one's wrists and coupled together with a scrap of
chain, but they'll twist your arms and hamper the movements of your body
in a way to constantly catch the eye of the passer-by. When a man is
coming toward you, you can tell that he is handcuffed before you see the
cuffs.
Mr. Trimm was never able to recall afterward exactly how he got out of
the Tombs. He had a confused memory of a gate that was swung open by
some one whom Mr. Trimm saw only from the feet to the waist; then he and
his companion were out on Lafayette Street, speeding south toward the
subway entrance at Worth Street, two blocks below, with the marshal's
hand cupped under Mr. Trimm's right elbow and Mr. Trimm's plump legs
almost trotting in their haste. For a moment it looked as if the
warden's well-meant artifice would serve them.
But New York reporters are up to the tricks of people who want to evade
them. At the sight of them a sentry reporter on the corner shouted a
warning which was instantly caught up and passed on by another picket
stationed half-way down the block; and around the wall of the Tombs came
pelting a flying mob of newspaper photographers and reporters, with a
choice rabble behind them. Foot passengers took up the chase, not
knowing what it was about, but sensing a free show. Truckmen halted
their teams, jumped down from their wagon seats and joined in. A
man-chase is one of the pleasantest outdoor sports that a big city like
New York can offer its people.
Fairly running now, the manacled banker and the deputy marshal shot down
the winding steps into the subway a good ten yards ahead of the foremost
pursuers. But there was one delay, while Meyers skirmished with his free
hand in his trousers' pocket for a dime for the tickets, and another
before a northbound local rolled into the station. Shouted at, jeered
at, shoved this way and that, panting in gulping breaths, for he was
stout by nature and staled by lack of exercise, Mr. Trimm, with Meyers
clutching him by the arm, was fairly shot aboard one of the cars, at the
apex of a human wedge. The astonished guard sensed the situation as the
scrooging, shoving, noisy wave rolled across the platform toward the
doors which he had opened and, thrusting the officer and his prisoner
into the narrow platform space behind him, he tried to form with his
body a barrier against those who came jamming in.
It didn't do any good. He was brushed away, protesting and blustering.
The excitement spread through the train, and men, and even women, left
their seats, overflowing the aisles.
There is no crueler thing than a city crowd, all eyes and morbid
curiosity. But Mr. Trimm didn't see the staring eyes on that ride to the
Grand Central. What he saw was many shifting feet and a hedge of legs
shutting him in closely--those and the things on his wrists. What the
eyes of the crowd saw was a small, stout man who, for all his bulk,
seemed to have dried up inside his clothes so that they bagged on him
some places and bulged others, with his head tucked on his chest, his
hat over his face and his fingers straining to hold his coat sleeves
down over a pair of steel bracelets.
Mr. Trimm gave mental thanks to a Deity whose existence he thought he
had forgotten when the gate of the train-shed clanged behind him,
shutting out the mob that had come with them all the way. Cameras had
been shoved in his face like gun muzzles, reporters had scuttled
alongside him, dodging under Meyers' fending arm to shout questions in
his ears. He had neither spoken nor looked at them. The sweat still ran
down his face, so that when finally he raised his head in the
comparative quiet of the train-shed his skin was a curious gray under
the jail paleness like the color of wet wood ashes.
"My lawyer promised to arrange for a compartment--for some private place
on the train," he said to Meyers. "The conductor ought to know."
They were the first words he had uttered since he left the Tombs. Meyers
spoke to a jaunty Pullman conductor who stood alongside the car where
they had halted.
"No such reservation," said the conductor, running through his sheaf of
slips, with his eyes shifting from Mr. Trimm's face to Mr. Trimm's hands
and back again, as though he couldn't decide which was the more
interesting part of him; "must be some mistake. Or else it was for some
other train. Too late to change now--we pull out in three minutes."
"I reckon we better git on the smoker," said Meyers, "if there's room
there."
Mr. Trimm was steered back again the length of the train through a
double row of pop-eyed porters and staring trainmen. At the steps where
they stopped the instinct to stretch out one hand and swing himself up
by the rail operated automatically and his wrists got a nasty twist.
Meyers and a brakeman practically lifted him up the steps and Meyers
headed him into a car that was hazy with blue tobacco smoke. He was
confused in his gait, almost as if his lower limbs had been fettered,
too.
The car was full of shirt-sleeved men who stood up, craning their necks
and stumbling over each other in their desire to see him. These men came
out into the aisle, so that Meyers had to shove through them.
"This here'll do as well as any, I guess," said Meyers. He drew Mr.
Trimm past him into the seat nearer the window and sat down alongside
him on the side next the aisle, settling himself on the stuffy plush
seat and breathing deeply, like a man who had got through the hardest
part of a not easy job.
"Smoke?" he asked.
Mr. Trimm shook his head without raising it.
"Them cuffs feel plenty easy?" was the deputy's next question. He lifted
Mr. Trimm's hands as casually as if they had been his hands and not Mr.
Trimm's, and looked at them.
"Seem to be all right," he said as he let them fall back. "Don't pinch
none, I reckon?" There was no answer.
The deputy tugged a minute at his mustache, searching his arid mind. An
idea came to him. He drew a newspaper from his pocket, opened it out
flat and spread it over Mr. Trimm's lap so that it covered the chained
wrists. Almost instantly the train was in motion, moving through the
yards.
* * * * *
"Be there in two hours more," volunteered Meyers. It was late afternoon.
They were sliding through woodlands with occasional openings which
showed meadows melting into wide, flat lands.
"Want a drink?" said the deputy, next. "No? Well, I guess I'll have a
drop myself. Travelin' fills a feller's throat full of dust." He got up,
lurching to the motion of the flying train, and started forward to the
water cooler behind the car door. He had gone perhaps two-thirds of the
way when Mr. Trimm felt a queer, grinding sensation beneath his feet; it
was exactly as though the train were trying to go forward and back at
the same time. Almost slowly, it seemed to him, the forward end of the
car slued out of its straight course, at the same time tilting up. There
was a grinding, roaring, grating sound, and before Mr. Trimm's eyes
Meyers vanished, tumbling forward out of sight as the car floor buckled
under his feet. Then, as everything--the train, the earth, the sky--all
fused together in a great spatter of white and black, Mr. Trimm, plucked
from his seat as though a giant hand had him by the collar, shot forward
through the air over the seatbacks, his chained hands aloft, clutching
wildly. He rolled out of a ragged opening where the smoker had broken in
two, flopped gently on the sloping side of the right-of-way and slid
easily to the bottom, where he lay quiet and still on his back in a bed
of weeds and wild grass, staring straight up.
How many minutes he lay there Mr. Trimm didn't know. It may have been
the shrieks of the victims or the glare from the fire that brought him
out of the daze. He wriggled his body to a sitting posture, got on his
feet, holding his head between his coupled hands, and gazed full-face
into the crowning railroad horror of the year.
There were numbers of the passengers who had escaped serious hurt, but
for the most part these persons seemed to have gone daft from terror and
shock. Some were running aimlessly up and down and some, a few, were
pecking feebly with improvised tools at the wreck, an indescribable
jumble of ruin, from which there issued cries of mortal agony, and from
which, at a point where two locomotives were lying on their sides,
jammed together like fighting bucks that had died with locked horns, a
tall flame already rippled and spread, sending up a pillar of black
smoke that rose straight, poisoning the clear blue of the sky. Nobody
paid any attention to Mr. Trimm as he stood swaying upon his feet. There
wasn't a scratch on him. His clothes were hardly rumpled, his hat was
still on his head. He stood a minute and then, moved by a sudden
impulse, he turned round and went running straight away from the
railroad at the best speed his pudgy legs could accomplish, with his
arms pumping up and down in front of him and his fingers interlaced. It
was a grotesque gait, almost like a rabbit hopping on its hindlegs.
Instantly, almost, the friendly woods growing down to the edge of the
fill swallowed him up. He dodged and doubled back and forth among the
tree trunks, his small, patent-leathered feet skipping nimbly over the
irregular turf, until he stopped for lack of wind in his lungs to carry
him another rod. When he had got his breath back Mr. Trimm leaned
against a tree and bent his head this way and that, listening. No sound
came to his ears except the sleepy calls of birds. As well as Mr. Trimm
might judge he had come far into the depths of a considerable woodland.
Already the shadows under the low limbs were growing thick and confused
as the hurried twilight of early September came on.
Mr. Trimm sat down on a natural cushion of thick green moss between two
roots of an oak. The place was clean and soft and sweet-scented. For
some little time he sat there motionless, in a sort of mental haze. Then
his round body slowly slid down flat upon the moss, his head lolled to
one side and, the reaction having come, Mr. Trimm's limbs all relaxed
and he went to sleep straightway.
After a while, when the woods were black and still, the half-grown moon
came up and, sifting through a chink in the canopy of leaves above,
shone down full on Mr. Trimm as he lay snoring gently with his mouth
open, and his hands rising and falling on his breast. The moonlight
struck upon the Little Giant handcuffs, making them look like
quicksilver.
Toward daylight it turned off sharp and cool. The dogwoods which had
been a solid color at nightfall now showed pink in one light and green
in another, like changeable silk, as the first level rays of the sun
came up over the rim of the earth and made long, golden lanes between
the tree trunks. Mr. Trimm opened his eyes slowly, hardly sensing for
the first moment or two how he came to be lying under a canopy of
leaves, and gaped, seeking to stretch his arms. At that he remembered
everything; he haunched his shoulders against the tree roots and
wriggled himself up to a sitting position where he stayed for a while,
letting his mind run over the sequence of events that had brought him
where he was and taking inventory of the situation.
Of escape he had no thought. The hue and cry must be out for him before
now; doubtless men were already searching for him. It would be better
for him to walk in and surrender than to be taken in the woods like an
animal escaped from a traveling menagerie. But the mere thought of
enduring again what he had already gone through--the thought of being
tagged by crowds and stared at, with his fetters on--filled him with a
nausea. Nothing that the Federal penitentiary might hold in store for
him could equal the black, blind shamefulness of yesterday; he knew
that. The thought of the new ignominy that faced him made Mr. Trimm
desperate. He had a desire to burrow into the thicket yonder and hide
his face and his chained hands.
But perhaps he could get the handcuffs off and so go to meet his captors
in some manner of dignity. Strange that the idea hadn't occurred to him
before! It seemed to Mr. Trimm that he desired to get his two hands
apart more than he had ever desired anything in his whole life before.
The hands had begun naturally to adjust themselves to their enforced
companionship, and it wasn't such a very hard matter, though it cost him
some painful wrenches and much twisting of the fingers, for Mr. Trimm to
get his coat unbuttoned and his eyeglasses in their small leather case
out of his upper waistcoat pocket. With the glasses on his nose he
subjected his bonds to a critical examination. Each rounded steel band
ran unbroken except for the smooth, almost jointless hinge and the small
lock which sat perched on the back of the wrist in a little rounded
excrescence like a steel wart. In the flat center of each lock was a
small keyhole and alongside of it a notched nub, the nub being sunk in a
minute depression. On the inner side, underneath, the cuffs slid into
themselves--two notches on each showing where the jaws might be
tightened to fit a smaller hand than his--and right over the large blue
veins in the middle of the wrists were swivel links, shackle-bolted to
the cuffs and connected by a flat, slightly larger middle link, giving
the hands a palm-to-palm play of not more than four or five inches. The
cuffs did not hurt--even after so many hours there was no actual
discomfort from them and the flesh beneath them was hardly reddened.
But it didn't take Mr. Trimm long to find out that they were not to be
got off. He tugged and pulled, trying with his fingers for a purchase.
All he did was to chafe his skin and make his wrists throb with pain.
The cuffs would go forward just so far, then the little humps of bone
above the hands would catch and hold them.
Mr. Trimm was not a man to waste time in the pursuit of the obviously
hopeless. Presently he stood up, shook himself and started off at a fair
gait through the woods. The sun was up now and the turf was all dappled
with lights and shadows, and about him much small, furtive wild life was
stirring. He stepped along briskly, a strange figure for that green
solitude, with his correct city garb and the glint of the steel at his
sleeve ends.
Presently he heard the long-drawn, quavering, banshee wail of a
locomotive. The sound came from almost behind him, in an opposite
direction from where he supposed the track to be. So he turned around
and went back the other way. He crossed a half-dried-up runlet and
climbed a small hill, neither of which he remembered having met in his
night from the wreck, and in a little while he came out upon the
railroad. To the north a little distance the rails ran round a curve. To
the south, where the diminishing rails running through the unbroken
woodland met in a long, shiny V, he could see a big smoke smudge against
the horizon. This smoke Mr. Trimm knew must come from the wreck--which
was still burning, evidently. As nearly as he could judge he had come
out of cover at least two miles above it. After a moment's consideration
he decided to go south toward the wreck. Soon he could distinguish small
dots like ants moving in and out about the black spot, and he knew these
dots must be men.
A whining, whirring sound came along the rails to him from behind. He
faced about just as a handcar shot out around the curve from the north,
moving with amazing rapidity under the strokes of four men at the pumps.
Other men, laborers to judge by their blue overalls, were sitting on the
edges of the car with their feet dangling. For the second time within
twelve hours impulse ruled Mr. Trimm, who wasn't given to impulses
normally. He made a jump off the right-of-way, and as the handcar
flashed by he watched its flight from the covert of a weed tangle.
But even as the handcar was passing him Mr. Trimm regretted his
hastiness. He must surrender himself sooner or later; why not to these
overalled laborers, since it was a thing that had to be done? He slid
out of hiding and came trotting back to the tracks. Already the handcar
was a hundred yards away, flitting into distance like some big,
wonderfully fast bug, the figures of the men at the pumps rising and
falling with a walking-beam regularity. As he stood watching them fade
away and minded to try hailing them, yet still hesitating against his
judgment, Mr. Trimm saw something white drop from the hands of one of
the blue-clad figures on the handcar, unfold into a newspaper and come
fluttering back along the tracks toward him. Just as he, starting
doggedly ahead, met it, the little ground breeze that had carried it
along died out and the paper dropped and flattened right in front of
him. The front page was uppermost and he knew it must be of that
morning's issue, for across the column tops ran the flaring headline:
"Twenty Dead in Frightful Collision."
Squatting on the cindered track, Mr. Trimm patted the crumpled sheet
flat with his hands. His eyes dropped from the first of the glaring
captions to the second, to the next--and then his heart gave a great
bound inside of him and, clutching up the newspaper to his breast, he
bounded off the tracks back into another thicket and huddled there with
the paper spread on the earth in front of him, reading by gulps while
the chain that linked wrist to wrist tinkled to the tremors running
through him. What he had seen first, in staring black-face type, was his
own name leading the list of known dead, and what he saw now, broken up
into choppy paragraphs and done in the nervous English of a trained
reporter throwing a great news story together to catch an edition, but
telling a clear enough story nevertheless, was a narrative in which his
name recurred again and again. The body of the United States deputy
marshal, Meyers, frightfully crushed, had been taken from the wreckage
of the smoker--so the double-leaded story ran--and near to Meyers
another body, with features burned beyond recognition, yet still
retaining certain distinguishing marks of measurement and contour, had
been found and identified as that of Hobart W. Trimm, the convicted
banker. The bodies of these two, with eighteen other mangled dead, had
been removed to a town called Westfield, from which town of Westfield
the account of the disaster had been telegraphed to the New York paper.
In another column farther along was more about Banker Trimm; facts about
his soiled, selfish, greedy, successful life, his great fortune, his
trial, and a statement that, lacking any close kin to claim his body,
his lawyers had been notified.
Mr. Trimm read the account through to the end, and as he read the sense
of dominant, masterful self-control came back to him in waves. He got
up, taking the paper with him, and went back into the deeper woods,
moving warily and watchfully. As he went his mind, trained to take hold
of problems and wring the essence out of them, was busy. Of the charred,
grisly thing in the improvised morgue at Westfield, wherever that might
be, Mr. Trimm took no heed nor wasted any pity. All his life he had used
live men to work his will, with no thought of what might come to them
afterward. The living had served him, why not the dead?
He had other things to think of than this dead proxy of his. He was as
good as free! There would be no hunt for him now; no alarm out, no
posses combing every scrap of cover for a famous criminal turned
fugitive. He had only to lie quiet a few days, somewhere, then get in
secret touch with Walling. Walling would do anything for money. And he
had the money--four millions and more, cannily saved from the crash that
had ruined so many others.
He would alter his personal appearance, change his name--he thought of
Duvall, which was his mother's name--and with Walling's aid he would get
out of the country and into some other country where a man might live
like a prince on four millions or the fractional part of it. He thought
of South America, of South Africa, of a private yacht swinging through
the little frequented islands of the South Seas. All that the law had
tried to take from him would be given back. Walling would work out the
details of the escape--and make it safe and sure--trust Walling for
those things. On one side was the prison, with its promise of twelve
grinding years sliced out of the very heart of his life; on the other,
freedom, ease, security, even power. Through Mr. Trimm's mind tumbled
thoughts of concessions, enterprises, privileges--the back corners of
the globe were full of possibilities for the right man. And between this
prospect and Mr. Trimm there stood nothing in the way, nothing but----
Mr. Trimm's eyes fell upon his bound hands. Snug-fitting, shiny steel
bands irked his wrists. The Grips of the Law were still upon him.
But only in a way of speaking. It was preposterous, unbelievable,
altogether out of the question that a man with four millions salted down
and stored away, a man who all his life had been used to grappling with
the big things and wrestling them down into submission, a man whose luck
had come to be a byword--and had not it held good even in this last
emergency?--would be balked by puny scraps of forged steel and a
trumpery lock or two. Why, these cuffs were no thicker than the gold
bands that Mr. Trimm had seen on the arms of overdressed women at the
opera. The chain that joined them was no larger and, probably, no
stronger than the chains which Mr. Trimm's chauffeur wrapped around the
tires of the touring car in winter to keep the wheels from skidding on
the slush. There would be a way, surely, for Mr. Trimm to free himself
from these things. There must be--that was all there was to it.
Mr. Trimm looked himself over. His clothes were not badly rumpled; his
patent-leather boots were scarcely scratched. Without the handcuffs he
could pass unnoticed anywhere. By night then he must be free of them and
on his way to some small inland city, to stay quiet there until the
guarded telegram that he would send in cipher had reached Walling. There
in the woods by himself Mr. Trimm no longer felt the ignominy of his
bonds; he felt only the temporary embarrassment of them and the need of
added precaution until he should have mastered them.
He was once more the unemotional man of affairs who had stood Wall
Street on its esteemed head and caught the golden streams that trickled
from its pockets. First making sure that he was in a well-screened
covert of the woods he set about exploring all his pockets. The coat
pockets were comparatively easy, now that he had got used to using two
hands where one had always served, but it cost him a lot of twisting of
his body and some pain to his mistreated wrist bones to bring forth the
contents of his trousers' pockets. The chain kinked time and again as he
groped with the undermost hand for the openings; his dumpy, pudgy form
writhed grotesquely. But finally he finished. The search produced four
cigars somewhat crumpled and frayed; some matches in a gun-metal case, a
silver cigar cutter, two five-dollar bills, a handful of silver chicken
feed, the leather case of the eyeglasses, a couple of quill toothpicks,
a gold watch with a dangling fob, a notebook and some papers. Mr. Trimm
ranged these things in a neat row upon a log, like a watchmaker setting
out his kit, and took swift inventory of them. Some he eliminated from
his design, stowing them back in the pockets easiest to reach. He kept
for present employment the match safe, the cigar cutter and the watch.
This place where he had halted would suit his present purpose well, he
decided. It was where an uprooted tree, fallen across an incurving bank,
made a snug little recess that was closed in on three sides. Spreading
the newspaper on the turf to save his knees from soiling, he knelt and
set to his task. For the time he felt neither hunger nor thirst. He had
found out during his earlier experiments that the nails of his little
fingers, which were trimmed to a point, could invade the keyholes in the
little steel warts on the backs of his wrists and touch the locks. The
mechanism had even twitched a little bit under the tickle of the nail
ends. So, having already smashed the gun-metal match safe under his
heel, Mr. Trimm selected a slender-pointed bit from among its fragments
and got to work, the left hand drawn up under the right, the fingers of
the right busy with the lock of the left, the chain tightening and
slackening with subdued clinking sounds at each movement.
Mr. Trimm didn't know much about picking a lock. He had got his money by
a higher form of burglary that did not require a knowledge of lock
picking. Nor as a boy had he been one to play at mechanics. He had let
other boys make the toy fluttermills and the wooden traps and the like,
and then he had traded for them. He was sorry now that he hadn't given
more heed to the mechanical side of things when he was growing up.
He worked with a deliberate slowness, steadily. Nevertheless, it was hot
work. The sun rose over the bank and shone on him through the limbs of
the uprooted tree. His hat was on the ground alongside of him. The sweat
ran down his face, streaking it and wilting his collar flat. The scrap
of gun metal kept slipping out of his wet fingers. Down would go the
chained hands to scrabble in the grass for it, and then the picking
would go on again. This happened a good many times. Birds, nervous with
the spirit that presages the fall migration, flew back and forth along
the creek, almost grazing Mr. Trimm sometimes. A rain crow wove a brown
thread in the green warp of the bushes above his head. A chattering red
squirrel sat up on a tree limb to scold him. At intervals, distantly,
came the cough of laboring trains, showing that the track must have been
cleared. There were times when Mr. Trimm thought he felt the lock
giving. These times he would work harder.
* * * * *
Late in the afternoon Mr. Trimm lay back against the bank, panting. His
face was splotched with red, and the little hollows at the sides of his
forehead pulsed rapidly up and down like the bellies of scared tree
frogs. The bent outer case of the watch littered a bare patch on the
log; its mainspring had gone the way of the fragments of the gun-metal
match safe which were lying all about, each a worn-down, twisted wisp of
metal. The spring of the eyeglasses had been confiscated long ago and
the broken crystals powdered the earth where Mr. Trimm's toes had
scraped a smooth patch. The nails of the two little fingers were worn to
the quick and splintered down into the raw flesh. There were countless
tiny scratches and mars on the locks of the handcuffs, and the steel
wristbands were dulled with blood smears and pale-red tarnishes of new
rust; but otherwise they were as stanch and strong a pair of Bean's
Latest Model Little Giant handcuffs as you'd find in any hardware store
anywhere.
The devilish, stupid malignity of the damned things! With an acid oath
Mr. Trimm raised his hands and brought them down on the log violently.
There was a double click and the bonds tightened painfully, pressing the
chafed red skin white. Mr. Trimm snatched up his hands close to his
near-sighted eyes and looked. One of the little notches on the under
side of each cuff had disappeared. It was as if they were living things
that had turned and bitten him for the blow he gave them.
* * * * *
From the time the sun went down there was a tingle of frost in the air.
Mr. Trimm didn't sleep much. Under the squeeze of the tightened fetters
his wrists throbbed steadily and racking cramps ran through his arms.
His stomach felt as though it were tied into knots. The water that he
drank from the branch only made his hunger sickness worse. His
undergarments, that had been wet with perspiration, clung to him
clammily. His middle-aged, tenderly-cared-for body called through every
pore for clean linen and soap and water and rest, as his empty insides
called for food.
After a while he became so chilled that the demand for warmth conquered
his instinct for caution. He felt about him in the darkness, gathering
scraps of dead wood, and, after breaking several of the matches that had
been in the gun-metal match safe, he managed to strike one and with its
tiny flame started a fire. He huddled almost over the fire, coughing
when the smoke blew into his face and twisting and pulling at his arms
in an effort to get relief from the everlasting cramps. It seemed to him
that if he could only get an inch or two more of play for his hands he
would be ever so much more comfortable. But he couldn't, of course.
He dozed, finally, sitting crosslegged with his head sunk between his
hunched shoulders. A pain in a new place woke him. The fire had burned
almost through the thin sole of his right shoe, and as he scrambled to
his feet and stamped, the clap of the hot leather flat against his
blistered foot almost made him cry out.
* * * * *
Soon after sunrise a boy came riding a horse down a faintly traced
footpath along the creek, driving a cow with a bell on her neck ahead of
him. Mr. Trimm's ears caught the sound of the clanking bell before
either the cow or her herder was in sight, and he limped away, running,
skulking through the thick cover. A pendent loop of a wild grapevine,
swinging low, caught his hat and flipped it off his head; but Mr. Trimm,
imagining pursuit, did not stop to pick it up and went on bareheaded
until he had to stop from exhaustion. He saw some dark-red berries on a
shrub upon which he had trod, and, stooping, he plucked some of them
with his two hands and put three or four in his mouth experimentally.
Warned instantly by the acrid, burning taste, he spat the crushed
berries out and went on doggedly, following, according to his best
judgment, a course parallel to the railroad. It was characteristic of
him, a city-raised man, that he took no heed of distances nor of the
distinguishing marks of the timber.
Behind a log at the edge of a small clearing in the woods he halted some
little time, watching and listening. The clearing had grown up in sumacs
and weeds and small saplings and it seemed deserted; certainly it was
still. Near the center of it rose the sagging roof of what had been a
shack or a shed of some sort. Stooping cautiously, to keep his bare head
below the tops of the sumacs, Mr. Trimm made for the ruined shanty and
gained it safely. In the midst of the rotted, punky logs that had once
formed the walls he began scraping with his feet. Presently he uncovered
something. It was a broken-off harrow tooth, scaled like a long, red
fish with the crusted rust of years.
Mr. Trimm rested the lower rims of his handcuffs on the edge of an old,
broken watering trough, worked the pointed end of the rust-crusted
harrow tooth into the flat middle link of the chain as far as it would
go, and then with one hand on top of the other he pressed downward with
all his might. The pain in his wrists made him stop this at once. The
link had not sprung or given in the least, but the twisting pressure
had almost broken his wrist bones. He let the harrow tooth fall, knowing
that it would never serve as a lever to free him--which, indeed, he had
known all along--and sat on the side of the trough, rubbing his wrists
and thinking.
He had another idea. It came into his mind as a vague suggestion that
fire had certain effects upon certain metals. He kindled a fire of bits
of the rotted wood, and when the flames ran together and rose slender
and straight in a single red thread he thrust the chain into it, holding
his hands as far apart as possible in the attitude of a player about to
catch a bounced ball. But immediately the pain of that grew unendurable
too, and he leaped back, jerking his hands away. He had succeeded only
in blackening the steel and putting a big water blister on one of his
wrists right where the shackle bolt would press upon it.
Where he huddled down in the shelter of one of the fallen walls he
noticed, presently, a strand of rusted fence wire still held to
half-tottering posts by a pair of blackened staples; it was part of a
pen that had been used once for chickens or swine. Mr. Trimm tried the
wire with his fingers. It was firm and springy. Rocking and groaning
with the pain of it, he nevertheless began sliding the chain back and
forth, back and forth along the strand of wire.
Eventually the wire, weakened by age, snapped in two. A tiny shined
spot, hardly deep enough to be called a nick, in its tarnished, smudged
surface was all the mark that the chain showed.
Staggering a little and putting his feet down unsteadily, Mr. Trimm left
the clearing, heading as well as he could tell eastward, away from the
railroad. After a mile or two he came to a dusty wood road winding
downhill.
To the north of the clearing where Mr. Trimm had halted were a farm and
a group of farm buildings. To the southward a mile or so was a cluster
of dwellings set in the midst of more farm lands, with a shop or two and
a small white church with a green spire in the center. Along a road that
ran northward from the hamlet to the solitary farm a ten-year-old boy
came, carrying a covered tin pail. A young gray squirrel flirted across
the wagon ruts ahead of him and darted up a chestnut sapling. The boy
put the pail down at the side of the road and began looking for a stone
to throw at the squirrel.
Mr. Trimm slid out from behind a tree. A hemstitched handkerchief,
grimed and stained, was loosely twisted around his wrists, partly hiding
the handcuffs. He moved along with a queer, sliding gait, keeping as
much of his body as he could turned from the youngster. The ears of the
little chap caught the faint scuffle of feet and he spun around on his
bare heel.
"My boy, would you----" Mr. Trimm began.
The boy's round eyes widened at the apparition that was sidling toward
him in so strange a fashion, and then, taking fright, he dodged past Mr.
Trimm and ran back the way he had come, as fast as his slim brown legs
could take him. In half a minute he was out of sight round a bend.
Had the boy looked back he would have seen a still more curious
spectacle than the one that had frightened him. He would have seen a man
worth four million dollars down on his knees in the yellow dust, pawing
with chained hands at the tight-fitting lid of the tin pail, and then,
when he had got the lid off, drinking the fresh, warm milk which the
pail held with great, choking gulps, uttering little mewing, animal
sounds as he drank, while the white, creamy milk ran over his chin and
splashed down his breast in little, spurting streams.
But the boy didn't look back. He ran all the way home and told his
mother he had seen a wild man on the road to the village; and later,
when his father came in from the fields, he was soundly thrashed for
letting the sight of a tramp make him lose a good tin bucket and half a
gallon of milk worth six cents a quart.
* * * * *
The rich, fresh milk put life into Mr. Trimm. He rested the better for
it during the early part of that night in a haw thicket. Only the
sharp, darting pains in his wrists kept rousing him to temporary
wakefulness. In one of those intervals of waking the plan that had been
sketchily forming in his mind from the time he had quit the clearing in
the woods took on a definite, fixed shape. But how was he with safety to
get the sort of aid he needed, and where?
Canvassing tentative plans in his head, he dozed off again.
* * * * *