I had left the board money and a note for my landlady on the mantel in
the darkened dining-room, had reached the railroad station, and was
about to buy a ticket to the farthest corner of the State, when I
suddenly remembered that I was running away with an additional handicap
to be added to all the others. Leaving the coal company and the city
without notice or explanation, I was making it impossible to keep my
record clear in the monthly report to the prison authorities.
With a sinking heart I realized that I must wait and fight it out with
Mullins to some sort of a conclusion which would give me a clean slate.
There must be nothing that I could not explain clearly to any one who
might ask. I had a job, and I must be able to give my reason for
quitting it. With this new entanglement to put leaden shoes on my
feet, I retraced my steps through the eight weary blocks to the
boarding-house, dodging through back streets and walking because I
hadn't the nerve to face the cheerful throng of theater-goers at that
hour crowding the street-cars.
I think Mullins knew or suspected what was coming when I went to him
the next morning and told him I wished to have a talk with him.
Without a word he grabbed me by the arm and dragged me into the little
private office which was used at odd times by the district manager.
"I'm quitting this morning, Mr. Mullins," I began, when the door was
shut. "If my work has been satisfactory, I should like to have a
letter of recommendation."
The bookkeeper smoked a corn-cob pipe, and he stopped to refill and
light it before he opened on me.
"What's wrong?" he demanded. For an Irishman he was always exceedingly
sparing of his words.
"Suppose we say that the climate doesn't agree with me here."
"You're no sick man!" he shot back; and then: "Want more pay?"
"No; I want a letter of recommendation."
"We never give 'em."
"So I have heard. But this time, Mr. Mullins, you are going to make an
exception and break your rule."
"Not for you, we won't."
"Why not for me?"
"Because we're knowing your record. You're fixing to go back to the
pen, where you came from."
"You knew my record when you hired me. Chief Callahan gave it to you,
and I knew that he did. But that is neither here nor there; I want my
letter, and I want you to say in it that I am leaving to look for a
more favorable climate."
"And if I don't give it to you?--if I tell you to go straight plumb to
hell?"
"In that case I shall take all the chances--_all_ of them, mind
you---and write a letter to the Interstate Commerce Commission."
If the man had had a gun in his hands I believe he would have killed
me. There was manslaughter in his little gray, pig-like eyes. But he
recovered himself quickly.
"If you're that kind of a gink, I'm damned glad to get rid of you at
any price," he rasped; and then went to the district manager's desk and
wrote me the letter, "To Whom it may Concern," practically as I
dictated it.
That ended it, and when the letter was signed and flung across the desk
at me I lost no time in getting out of the noxious atmosphere of the
place. But before I was well out of the yard it occurred to me that I
had still left a loaded weapon in Mullins's hands. Though the threat
of exposure might tie him and his grafting coal company up, he could
still appeal to Callahan, who would doubtless find an excuse for
arresting me before I could leave town. And once in the hands of the
chief crook I should be lost.
Under the spur of this new menace I returned quickly to the coal
office, with some inchoate idea of trying to bully the scoundrelly
chief of police through the hold I had acquired upon the coal company.
The office was empty when I reached it, and at first I thought Mullins
had gone out. But at a second glance I saw that he was in the
telephone closet, the door of which he had left ajar. Overhearing my
own name barked into the transmitter, I listened without scruple.
"----Yes, Weyburn; that's what I'm telling you. He's flew the
coop. . . . Yes, he knows something--too damned much. . . . No, I
wouldn't snag him here; he might talk too loud and get somebody to
believe him--some fool in a Federal grand jury, for instance. Let him
go--with a plain-clothes man to find out where he heads for--and then
wire that outfit that piped him off when he came here. That'll settle
him."
There may have been more of it, but I did not wait to hear. Speed was
my best chance now, and I slipped out noiselessly and ran for the
railroad station. If I should be lucky enough to find a train ready to
leave, I might yet hope to escape whatever trap it might be that the
bookkeeper and his official accomplice were going to set for me.
Reaching the station I found that the first train through would be a
westbound, and that it was not due for half an hour. The wait was
painfully trying. I did not dare to buy a ticket for fear Callahan
might have telephoned the ticket office. As the passengers for the
expected train straggled in I sought vainly to identify the spy who was
undoubtedly among them; and when the train thundered up to the platform
I made haste to board it and to lose myself quickly in the crowded
smoking-car. Later, when the conductor made his round, I paid a cash
fare to the end of the division, forbearing to draw a full breath of
relief until the cesspool city had faded to a smoky blur on the horizon.
With time to think, I began to puzzle anxiously over the new
development of mystery opened up by the overheard telephone talk. Who
or what was the "outfit" that had been meddling in my sorry
affair?--that was to be wired when my new destination should be
ascertained? One by one the suspicious circumstances remarshaled
themselves; the feeling that I had been spied upon, the speedy
publicity which my story had attained in the town where I had made my
earliest attempt at wage-earning, the memorandum which Chief Callahan
had consulted before sending me to the crooked coal company. It seemed
singular to me afterward that the one answer to all of these small
mysteries should not have suggested itself at once. But it did not.
The end of the conductor's run--the point which I had paid fare--came
at midday at the capital of the State, where there was a stop long
enough to enable the train's people--or those who chose to evade the
dining-car--to seek a lunch counter. I went with the others and had a
frugal sandwich and a cup of coffee, hastening afterward to the station
ticket office to buy a ticket to a town well over toward the western
boundary of my prison State, and chosen haphazard from its location on
the wall-map beside the ticket window. A little later, upon resuming
my seat in the train, I had a small shock. Sitting just across the
aisle, and once more barricaded behind his hand-baggage and buried in a
newspaper, was the round-faced salesman who had been my traveling
companion on the day of my release from prison.
Naturally, all the suspicions I had been harboring for the past few
hours leaped alive again at the sight of this man. But at the second
train stop in the westward flight they were promptly disconnected from
my _vis-a-vis_ across the aisle when the salesman gathered his
belongings and disappeared; left the train--as I made sure by looking
out of the window and seeing him cross the station platform. In the
short run from the capital he had not so much as looked in my
direction, emerging from his newspaper only once for a word with the
conductor at the moment of ticket-collecting.
After he was gone I was able to smile grimly and call it a coincidence,
wondering meanwhile, if one of the consequences of my hideously
disarranged life was to be a lapse into chittering cowardice; an
endless starting aside at shadows.
The new field of endeavor, chosen blindly at the ticket window in the
capital, proved to be a small manufacturing city. Here the chief of
police, to whom I reported on the evening of my arrival, was of a type
exactly opposite to the grafting brute from whose jurisdiction I had
fled; a promoted town-marshal, like John Runnels of Glendale; a
shrewd-eyed, kindly old man who heard my story patiently and gave me a
word of encouragement that was like a draft of cold water in the desert.
"You're goin' to get a square deal in this town, my boy," he said,
after I had enlarged upon my story sufficiently to make it include my
late experience with Callahan and Mullins. "It ain't any part of my
job to bruise the broken reed n'r quench the smokin' flax. You don't
look like a thief, and, anyways, if you're tryin' to make an honest
livin', that settles all the old scores--or it ort to. Go find you a
job, if you can. What you've told me stays right in here"--tapping his
broad chest--"leastwise, it won't be used against you as long as you
walk straight."
Under such kindly auspices it did seem as if I ought to be able to dig
a quiet little rifle-pit in the field of respectability and good repute
and to hold it against all comers. But, oddly enough, I couldn't do
it--not to save my life. My experience had all been in office work,
and since business was good in the small city, I had little difficulty
in finding employment. Yet in each case--and there were five of them,
one after another--I secured work only to lose it almost immediately.
By some means my story had got out, and it spread through the town like
an epidemic. After the fifth failure I went back to the fatherly old
chief of police to confess defeat and to notify him that I was leaving
town.
In this interview he made me tell him more about my trial and
conviction, and when I finished he was shaking his head. "There's
something sort o' queer about this pull-down of yours, Weyburn," he
commented. "I gave you my word not to talk unless you went back on me,
and I've kept it. You hain't told anybody else?"
"Not a soul."
"Still, it's been told--not once, but a heap o' times. Have you tried
chasin' it back to its startin' point?"
"Yes; but it is no good. It seems to be in the air."
"Well, it's a dum shame. It looks as if you had somebody houndin' you
out o' sheer spite. Is there anybody back behind that would do that?"
I suppose I was bat-blind; but the suggestion, even when it was added
to the mysterious entanglements that were tripping me at every step,
failed to open my eyes. Truly, Abel Geddis and Abner Withers had used
me ruthlessly as their criminal stop-gap, but since I had paid the
penalty and still bore the criminal odium, I could postulate no
possible reason why they should reach out across the three-year
interval to add cruel persecution to injury.
"No," I said, after a reflective pause. "There are only the two old
men I have named. And now that it is all over, I can see that they
were only shoving me into the breach to save themselves."
He nodded, half-doubtfully, I thought; and then: "You're goin' to try
again somewheres else?"
I replied that there was nothing else to do; whereupon this
white-haired old angel, who seemed so vastly out of place as the head
of even a small city's police department, made an astounding proposal.
"Get your bit of dunnage--I s'pose you hain't got very much, have
you?--and come around here about dark this evenin'. I'll have my buggy
ready and we'll drive over to Altamont, so you can take the train there
instead of here. If there's anybody follerin' you up and blacklistin'
you, maybe that'll throw 'em off the track."
It was a splendid bit of kindness; and when I could swallow the lump it
brought into my throat I accepted joyfully. And as the disappearance
was planned, so it was carried out. In the dusk of the evening the
good old man drove me the ten miles across to the neighboring village,
and after thanking him out of a full heart I boarded a train and began
my wanderings afresh.