He laughed scornfully. "A minute ago I said you were a fool, but
you're worse than that--you're an infant! Why, good hell, Weyburn,
there are a dozen ways to beat the parole game! Look at me: I'm here,
ain't I? And the warden knows all about it, does he? Not on your
life! Every four weeks he gets a letter from me telling him what a
fine time I'm having on Dad's farm down in Wayne, and how I'm all to
the good and thanking him every day for all he did for me. What?"
"Somebody mails those letters for you in Wayne?" I asked.
"Sure! And a little split for the marshal in the nearest town does the
rest. Bimeby, when I've collected enough of the debt I spoke of, I'll
shake the dust and disappear."
"They'll find you and bring you back."
"Not without a fine-tooth comb, they won't. This old world is plenty
good and wide when you learn how to use it."
"I suppose I haven't learned yet; and I don't want to learn--in your
way, Kellow."
Again he gave me the sneering laugh.
"You may as well begin, and have it over with. It's all the same to
you, now, whether you cracked the bank or didn't. You may think you
can live square and live the prison-smell down, but you can't. It'll
stick to you like your skin. Wherever you go, you'll be a marked man."
Though I had devoured the bar hand-out to the final crumb, I was still
half-famished; and hunger is but a poor ally in any battle. What he
was saying was truth of the truth, so far as the blunt facts were
concerned. Every failure I had made in the six weary months confirmed
it. There was little room in the world of the well-behaved for the man
who was honest enough--or foolish enough--to confess himself an
ex-convict; less still for a man who had been made the object of a
persecuting conspiracy. None the less, I had resolution, or obstinacy,
enough to say:
"I don't believe it."
"That's what makes me say you're a fool!" he snapped back. "You've got
the name, and you may as well have the game. The world is dead easy,
if you take it on its blind side; easy living, easy money. Listen,
Weyburn, and I'll show you how you can climb into the bandwagon."
I listened because I could not well help it, being the man's wretched
beneficiary, in a sense. As he talked I felt the ground of good
resolutions slipping from beneath my feet. He was staging the old and
time-honored swindle--the gold-brick game--and he needed a confederate.
The fish was almost as good as landed, and with a little coaching I
could step in and clinch the robbery. Kellow proposed to stake me for
the clothes and the needful stage properties; and my knowledge of
banking and finance, limited as it was, would do the rest. It was a
cinch, he averred, and when it was pulled off we could divide the
spoils and vanish.
It was hardly a temptation. That word calls up a mental picture of
stern virtues assailed on every side and standing like a rock in a
storm. But, stripped of their poetic glamor, the virtues--and the
vices, for that matter,--are purely human; they can rise no higher or
sink no lower than the flesh-and-blood medium through which they find
their expression. The six months of hardship and humiliation which had
brought me to a pass at which I could eat a saloon luncheon at the
expense of a thief were pushing me over the brink. Kellow sat back in
his chair, smoking quietly, but I could feel his black eyes boring into
my brain. When he judged that the time was fully ripe, he drew a fat
roll of bank-notes from his pocket, stripped ten ten-dollar bills from
it and tossed them across the table to me.
"There's the stake, and here's the lay," said he, tersely. "Your
name's Smollett; you've struck it rich, and you're on your way home to
New York, we'll say, from your mine in Colorado. You're stopping at
the Marlborough, and we'll run across you accidentally--I and the
come-on--to-morrow forenoon in the hotel lobby. Get that?"
"I hear what you are saying."
"All right. Now for the preliminaries. Any all-night pawnbroker can
fit you out with a couple of grips and some clothes that will let you
dress the part--or at least let you into the hotel. Then, to-morrow
morning bright and early you can hit the ready-made tailors and blossom
out right as the honest miner spending some of his money for the glad
rags. I'm at the Marlborough myself--J. T. Jewett, Room 706--but, of
course, I won't know you; you'll just butt in as a stranger to both of
us. When we get together I'll give you the cues as we go along."
During all this talk the hundred dollars had lain on the table between
us. It didn't look like money to me; it stood for food and decent
clothing and a bath--but chiefly for food. Slowly I took it up and
fingered it, almost reverently, straightening out the crumpled corners
of the bills and smoothing them down. . . .
I scarcely know how I got away from Kellow, nor do I know why he chose
to stay on there in the back room of that miserable doggery, drinking
whiskey sours alone and smoking his high-priced cigars. But I do know
that I was up against the fight of my life when I went out to face the
bitter night wind in the streets.
It was a singular thing that helped me to win the fight, temporarily,
at least. By all accounts it ought to have been those three
heart-warming days spent with Whitley a month earlier, and his farewell
words of helpfulness and cheer spoken as I was boarding the outgoing
train at the Springville station. But though Whitley's sturdy faith in
me came to do its part, it was another and much longer leap of memory
that made me hesitate and draw back; a flash carrying me back to my
school-days in Glendale . . . to a certain afternoon when a plain-faced
little girl, the daughter of our physics and chemistry teacher, had
told me, with her brown eyes ablaze, what she thought of dishonesty in
general, and in particular of the dishonesty of a boy in her class who
was lying and stealing his way past his examinations.
I don't know to this day why I should have recalled Polly Everton and
her flaming little diatribe against thievery and hypocrisy at that
desperate moment. She, and her quiet college-professor father who had
seemed so out of place teaching in a Glendale school, had dropped out
of my life years before. But the fact remained, and at the memory,
Kellow's bribe, gripped pocket-deep in my hand, burnt me like a coal of
fire. With a gasp I realized that I was over the brink at last,
stumbling and falling into the pit which has no bottom. With a single
dollar of the thief's money spent and gone beyond recall, I should be
lost.
With that memory of little Polly Everton to drive me, I went doggedly
back to the riverside slum and sought for Kellow where I had left him.
He was gone, but the newly aroused resolution, the outworn swimmer's
stubborn steeling of the nerves and muscles to make one more stroke
before he drowns, persisted. Footsore and half-frozen, I tramped the
dozen squares to the great hotel in the business district. The night
clerk sized me up for precisely what I was, listening with only half an
ear to my stammering question. But he deigned to answer it,
nevertheless. Yes; Mr. Jewett was the gentleman who had Number 706,
but he was not in. His key was still in the box.
There were writing-desks in the lobby, a number of them, and I went to
the first that offered. Some guest had left a few sheets of the hotel
paper and an envelope. Without a written word to go with it, I slipped
the unbroken bribe into the envelope, sealed the flap hurriedly and
went back to the clerk.
"Put this in Mr. Jewett's key-box, if you please," I requested; and
when I had seen the thing done, and had verified the number of the box
with my own eyes, I headed once more for the inhospitable streets.
It was on the icy sidewalk, directly in front of the revolving doors of
the big hotel, that my miracle was wrought. While I hesitated, not
knowing which way to turn for shelter for the remainder of the night, a
cab drove up and a man, muffled to the ears in a fur-lined overcoat,
got out. He was apparently an arrival from one of the night trains;
while he was slamming the cab door a bell-hop from the Marlborough
skated across the sidewalk, snatched a couple of grips from the front
seat of the cab and disappeared with them.
Humped and shivering, I was almost at the traveler's elbow when he
turned and felt in his pockets for the money to pay the cab driver. I
was so busy envying him the possession of that warm, fur-lined coat
that I didn't pay much attention to what he was doing, but it was
evident that he had forgotten in which pocket he carried his change,
since he was feeling first in one and then in another.
Suddenly my heart skipped a beat and then fell to hammering a fierce
tattoo as a gust of the highwayman's madness swept over me. The man
had taken out a huge pocket roll of bank-notes and was running the
bills over to see if there were one small enough to serve the
cab-paying purpose. Obviously there was not, and with a grunt of
impatience he searched again, this time unearthing a handful of silver.
Dropping the proper coin into the cabman's outstretched hand, he turned
and disappeared through the revolving doors, and at the same instant
the cabby whipped up his horse and drove away. Then I saw it lying
almost at my feet; a small black pocketbook which the traveler had let
fall in his fumbling search for change.
Judged by any code of ethics--my own, for that matter--what followed
was entirely indefensible. The grab for the treasure, its swift
hiding, the breathless dash into the shadows of the nearest cross
street; all these named me for what I was at the moment--a
half-starved, half-frozen, despair-hounded thief. When I had made sure
that there was no policeman in sight I examined my prize by the light
of a crossing electric. The black pocketbook contained sixty-three
dollars in bills and a single half-dollar in silver. And a hasty
search revealed nothing by which the loser could be identified; there
were no papers, no cards, nothing but the money.
Though a desperate disregard for anything like property rights had
prompted the sudden snatch and the thief-like dash for cover, I am glad
to be able to say that common honesty, or some shadowy simulacrum of
it, revived presently and sent me back to the hotel, though not without
terrible foot-draggings, you may be sure. And as I went, many-tongued
temptation clamored riotously for a hearing: the man had so much--he
would never miss this carelessly spilt driblet; I had no means of
identifying him, and with the fur-lined coat removed I should probably
fail to recognize him; if I should try to describe him, the hotel
clerk, he of the detached and superior manner, would doubtless take the
pocketbook in charge and that would be the last I should ever hear of
it.
Giving these arguments their just weight, I hope I may take some small
credit for the perseverance which finally drove me through the swinging
doors and up to the clerk's counter. For the second time that night I
sought speech with the bediamonded chief lackey, and got it grudgingly.
No; no one had registered within the past few minutes, and no man
answering my exceedingly incomplete description had presented himself
at the counter. Conscious that I must do, there and then, all that
ever could be done, I persisted.
"The gentleman I speak of came in a cab and he had two hand-bags; they
were brought in by one of the bell-boys," I said, thinking that this
might afford the clue.
The clerk looked afar over my head. "Some guest who already has his
room and had gone to fetch his grips." Then, with the contemptuous
lip-curl that I had encountered too often not to recognize it at sight:
"Who are you, anyway?--a plain-clothes man looking for crooks? You'll
not find them in the Marlborough. We don't keep that kind of a house."
I turned away, gripping the precious treasure-trove in my pocket. For
a full half-year I had kept faith with the prison authorities and the
law, living the life of a hunted animal and coming at last to the
choice between starvation and a deliberate plunge into the underworld.
Through it all I had obeyed the requirements of my parole in letter and
in spirit. But now----
The black pocketbook was warm in my hand. It was mine, if not by the
finder's right, at least by the right of possession, and it contained
the price of freedom. Before I had reached the corner, of the first
street my determination was taken, and there had been but one instant
of hesitation. This had come in a frenzied burst of red rage when I
remembered that, when all was said, I owed this last downward step, as
well as all that had gone before, to two old men who . . . I stopped
short in my shuffling race to the railroad station. I had money;
enough to take me to Glendale--and far beyond when the deed should be
done. Years before I had sworn to kill them, and since that time they
had doubly earned their blotting-out.
I don't know to this day whether it was some remaining shreds of the
conventional conscience, or a broken man's inability to screw
retaliatory determination to the murder point, that sent me onward to
the westbound station and framed my reply to the ticket agent's curt
question, "Where to?" when I thrust my money through his wicket. Be
that as it may, a short half-hour later I had boarded a through
westbound train and was crouching in the corner of a seat in the
overheated smoking-car with a ticket to Denver in my pocket. Though I
was not on my way to commit a double murder, I was none the less an
outlaw. I had broken my parole.