A sleety rain was retarding the March dawn and obscuring the Middle
Western farmstead landscape when the lights were turned off in the
through-train smoking-car. A glance at the railroad time-table which
had been given me with my ticket proved that the train was well past
the boundaries of my home State, and suddenly the vile atmosphere of
the crowded, night-fouled car seemed shot through with the life-giving
ozone of freedom.
Before long, however, the reaction set in. True, I was free at last,
but it was the freedom only of the escaped convict--of the fugitive.
To be recaptured now would mean a return to prison and the serving out
of the remainder of the full five-year term, with an added penalty for
the broken parole. I knew well the critical watchfulness with which
the workings of the new law were regarded. The indeterminate sentence
itself was on trial, and the prison authorities and others interested
were resolved that the trial should be fair and impartial. Therefore I
might count confidently upon pursuit.
At first there seemed little likelihood that my midnight flight could
be traced. In the great city I had left behind I had been only an
uncounted unit in a submerged minority. It was doubtful if any one
besides Kellow and the keeper of the police records would know or
remember my name. There had been many travelers to board the through
train with me, and surely one might consider himself safely lost in
such a throng, if only by reason of the unit inconsequence.
But now I was to be brought face to face with a peril which constantly
besets the fugitive of any sort in an age of rapid and easy travel.
Under such conditions the smallness of the modern world has passed into
a hackneyed proverb. I had scarcely rubbed the sleep out of my eyes
and straightened up in the car seat which had served for a bed when
some one came down the aisle, a hand was clapped on my shoulder, and a
cheery voice said:
"Well, I'll be dog-daddled! Bert Weyburn--of all the people in the
world!"
There was murder in my heart when I looked up and recognized a Glendale
man whom I had known practically all my life; a rattle-brained young
fellow named Barton, who had tried a dozen different occupations after
leaving school, and had, at my last account of him, become a traveling
salesman for our single large factory--a wagon-making company.
Under the existing conditions Barton was easily the last man on earth
whom I should have chosen out of a worldful of men for a traveling
companion; but before I could do more than nod a surly response to his
greeting he had slipped into the empty half of the seat and was
offering me a cigar.
At first our talk was awkwardly constrained, as it was bound to be with
one party to it wishing fervently that the other were at the bottom of
the sea. But Horace Barton was much too good-natured, and too
loquacious, to let the constraint remain as a barrier. Working around
by degrees to the _status quo_--my _status quo_--he finally broke the
ice in the pond of the intimate personalities--as I knew he would.
"I'm mighty glad to see you out, and alive and well, Bert," was the way
in which he brushed aside the awkwardnesses. "You've had pretty tough
lines, I know; but that's no reason why you should be grouchy with me.
I'm not letting it make any difference, am I?"
"Not here on the train," I conceded, sourly.
"No; and, by George, I wouldn't let it at home, either! I'll bet
you've got a few friends left in Glendale, right now, and you've had
'em all along. Been back there since you--since--er----"
I shook my head, and he went on as if he were afraid that a stop might
prove fatal to another start.
"It sure isn't any of my butt-in, but I don't believe you ought to
dodge the home town, Bert. There are a lot of good people there, and
if I were in your fix, I believe I'd want to go and bully it out right
where it happened. You've bought your little chunk of experience and
paid for it, and now you're a free man just like the rest of us. You
want to buck up, and tell them that don't like it to go straight plumb
to the dickens."
There was ample reason why he should take this tone with me if he felt
like it. I looked like a derelict and was acting like one. Moreover,
I was tormented to the verge of madness by the fear that the conductor
might come along on a ticket-punching tour, and that by this means
Barton would learn my ultimate destination--which would be equivalent,
I fancied, to publishing it in the Glendale _Daily Courier_.
"Cut it out!" I said gruffly. "If Glendale were the last place in the
universe, I wouldn't go back there."
He dropped the argument with perfect good-humor, and even made apology.
"I take it all back; it's none of my business. Of course, you know
best what you want to do. You're a free man, as I say, and can go
where you please."
His repetition of this "free man" phrase suddenly opened my eyes. He
had forgotten, as doubtless a good many others had, all about the
indeterminate sentence and its terms, if, indeed, he--and the
others--had ever known anything about its conditions. It was not to be
wondered at. Three years and a half will ordinarily blot the best of
us out of remembrance--at least as to details.
It was at this point that I twisted the talk by thrusting in a question
of my own.
"No; I haven't been in Glendale right lately--been out on the road for
a couple of weeks," was Barton's answer to the question. "We've
widened the old wagon-shop out some few lines since you knew us, and
I've been making a round of the agencies. I was in the big city last
night and got a wire to go to St. Louis. The wire got balled up
somewhere, and I didn't get it until late at night. Made me hustle,
too. I'd been out of the city for the day and didn't get back to the
Marlborough until nearly midnight."
This bit of detail made no impression upon me at the moment because I
was too busy with the thoughts suggested by the fact that I might have
Barton with me all day. Returning to Glendale at the end of his round,
he would be sure to talk, and in due time the prison authorities would
learn that I had been last seen in St. Louis. This accidental meeting
with Barton figured as a crude misfortune, but I saw no way to mitigate
it.
About this time came the first call for breakfast in the dining-car,
and I hoped this would relieve me of Barton's presence, for a while, at
any rate. But I was reckoning altogether without my host.
"Breakfast, eh?--that fits me all the way down to the ground," was his
welcoming of the waiter's sing-song call. "Come along, old man, and
we'll go eat a few things. This is on me."
I tried to refuse. Apart from a frantic desire to be quit of him, I
was in no condition to present myself in the dining-car. I showed him
my grimy hands, and at that he made me forgive him in advance for all
the harm he might eventually do me.
"That's perfectly all right," he laughed. "Fellow can't help getting
that way on the road. My sleeper is the first one back, and the
dining-car's coupled on behind. You come along into the Pullman with
me and wash up. I've got a bunch of clean collars and a shirt, if you
want them; and if the Pullman man makes a roar I'll tell him you're my
long-lost brother and give him the best ten-cent cigar he ever
smoked--I get 'em at a discount from a fellow who makes a little on the
side by selling his samples." And when I still hung back--"Don't be an
ass, Bertie. This old world isn't half as mean as you'd like to think
it is."
I yielded, weakly, I was going to say; yet perhaps it wasn't altogether
weakness. For the first time since leaving the penitentiary I was
meeting a man from home; a man who knew, and apparently didn't care. I
went to the Pullman with Barton and was lucky enough to meet the
ticket-punching train conductor on the way. Barton was a step or two
ahead of me and he did not see my ticket. In consequence, the Colorado
destination was still my own secret.
In the Pullman wash-room Barton stood by me like a man, fetching his
own clean linen and tipping the porter to make him turn his back while
I had a wash and a shave and a change. One who has always marched in
the ranks of the well-groomed may never realize the importance of soap
and water in a civilized world. As a moral stimulus, the combination
yields nothing to all the Uplift Foundations the multi-millionaires
have ever laid. When I took my place at the table for two opposite
Barton in the diner, I was able to look the world in the eye, and to
forget, momentarily at least, in the luxury of clean hands and clean
linen, that I was practically an outlaw with a price upon my head.
Yearning like a shipwrecked mariner for home news, I led Barton on to
talk of Glendale and the various happenings in the little town during
my long absence. Though I had quartered the home State in all
directions for half a year he was, as I have said, the first Glendale
man I had met.
He told me many things that I was eager to know; how my mother and
sister were living quietly at the town place, which the income from the
farm enabled them to retain. For several years after her majority my
sister, older than I, had taught in the public school; she was now, so
Barton said, conducting a small private school for backward little ones
at home.
There were other news items, many of them. Old John Runnels was still
chief of police; Tom Fitch, the hardware man, was the new mayor; Buck
Severance, my one-time chum in the High School, was now chief of the
fire department, having won his spurs--or rather, I should say, his red
helmet and silver trumpet--at the fire which had destroyed the
Blickerman Department Store.
"And the bank?" I asked.
"Which one? We've got three of them now, if you please, and one's a
National."
"I meant the Farmers'," I said.
"Something right funny about that, Bert," Barton commented. "The old
bank is rocking along and doing a little business in farm mortgages and
note-shaving at the old stand, same as usual, but it's got a hoodoo.
The other banks do most of the commercial business--all of it, you
might say; still, they say Geddis and old Abner Withers are getting
richer and richer every day."
"Agatha is married?" I asked.
"No; and that's another of the funny things. Her engagement with young
Copper-Money was broken off--nobody knew just how or why--shortly after
your--er--shortly after the trouble at the bank three years and a half
ago. Agatha's out West somewhere now--in a sanitorium, I believe. Her
health has been rather poor for the last year or so."
This was news indeed. As I had known her as girl and woman, Agatha
Geddis had always been the picture of health. I put up a fervent
little prayer that her particular sanitorium might not prove to be in
the vicinity of Denver. If it should be it meant another move for me.
"I didn't see the finish of the bank trouble before they buried me, did
I, Barton?" I queried.
"You bet your life you didn't! There was the dickens to pay all
around. Under the State law, as you probably know, the depositors'
losses had to be made up, to the extent of twice the amount of the
stockholdings, by the stockholders in the bank. When they came to
count noses they found that Geddis and Withers hadn't done a thing but
to quietly unload their bank stock here and there and everywhere, until
they held only enough to give them their votes. There was a yell to
raise the roof, but the stockholders of record had to come across. It
teetotally smashed a round dozen of the best farmers in the county; and
I heard, on the quiet, that it caught a good many outsiders who had
been buying Farmers' stock at a bargain, among them this young Mr.
Copper-Money who was going to marry Agatha--and didn't. Geddis and
Withers played it mighty fine--and mighty low-down."
All this was a revelation to me. In my time Geddis and Withers
together had held a majority of the stock in the close little
corporation known as the Farmers' Bank. The despicable trick by means
of which Geddis, or both of them, had shifted the defalcation loss to
other shoulders proved two things conclusively: that the scheme had
been well planned for in advance, and that the two old men had worked
in collusion. I remembered my suspicion--the one I couldn't
prove--that Withers had been as deep in the mud as Geddis was in the
mire.
"What became of the mining stock?" I inquired.
"Geddis put it into the assets, 'to help out against the loss,' as he
said. Nobody wanted it, of course; and then, to be right large-hearted
and generous, Geddis bought it in, personally--at ten cents on the
dollar."
"And you say Geddis is still running the bank?"
"Oh, yes; he and Withers run it and own it. As you'd imagine, Farmers'
Bank stock was mighty nearly a drug in the market, after all the bills
had been paid, and, just to help their neighbors out of a hole, as they
put it, the two old skinflints went around buying it back. I don't
know what they paid; different prices, I suppose. But Hawkins, our
manager, told me that he sold his for twenty-five cents on the dollar,
flat, and was blamed good and glad to get that much out of it."
It was just here that my breakfast threatened to choke me. If I had
been as guilty as everybody believed I was, I should still have been a
white-robed angel with wings compared with these two old Pharisees who
had deliberately robbed their friends and neighbors, catching them both
coming and going. And yet I was a hunted outlaw, and they were honored
and respected--or at least they were out of jail and able to live and
flourish among their deluded victims.
The choking was only momentary. Barton was in a reminiscent mood, and
he went rambling on about people in whom I was most deeply interested.
It was like a breath of the good old home air in my nostrils just to
sit and listen to him.
But it seems as though there has to be a fly in everybody's pot of
sweetened jam. In the midst of things, at a moment when I was
gratefully rejoicing in the ability to push my wretched
life-catastrophe a little way into the background, I had a glimpse of a
new face at the farther end of the dining-car. A large-framed man with
drooping mustaches had just come in from the Pullman, and the
dining-car steward was looking his car over to find a place for the
newcomer at the well-filled tables.
I did not have to look twice to identify the man with the drooping
mustaches. For three long and weary years I had seen him dally in the
office of the State penitentiary. His name was William Cummings, and
he was the deputy warden.