In due deference to the "mugging" at police headquarters, I had
registered in the Denver employment office as "William Smith." But on
the work, which proved to be the construction of a branch feeder for
the Midland in the heart of the gold district, I took my own name--or
rather that part of it which had been given to the Denver police
inspector--arguing that the only way in which I could be traced would
be by means of the photograph. Against the photographic possibility,
my beard, which had been scraped off by the station barber during the
waiting interval between trains in St. Louis, was suffered to grow
again.
The railroad labor was strenuous, as it was bound to be; and for the
first few days the thin, crisp air of the altitudes cut my already
indifferent physical efficiency almost to the vanishing point.
Nevertheless, there were two pieces of good fortune. My
fellow-laborers in the grading gang were principally Italians from the
southern provinces and their efficiency was also low. This helped, but
a better bit of luck lay in the fact that the contractors on the job
were humane and liberal employers; both of them with a shrewd and
watchful eye for latent capabilities in the rank and file. Within a
week I was made a gang time-keeper, and a fortnight later I became
commissary clerk.
Before I forget it, let me say that my first month's pay, or the
greater part of it, went to replace the sixty-three dollars and a half
in the little black pocketbook which I had stolen--I guess that is the
honest word---from Horace Barton. I debated for some time over the
safest method of returning the pocketbook and its restored contents to
the wagon salesman. I realized that it wouldn't do to let him know
where I was; and it seemed a needless humiliation to confess to him
that I was the "hobo" who had posed, in his imagination, as the skilful
sidewalk pickpocket.
In casting about for a means of communication I thought of Whitley, the
Springville minister. So I wrote him a letter, enclosing the
pocketbook, with a truthful explanation of the circumstances in which
it had come into my possession, and telling him what to do with it. I
laid no commands upon his conscience, but begged him, if he could
consistently do so, to suppress my name and whereabouts. And since I
could not be quite sure as to what the ministerial conscience might
demand, I added, rather disingenuously, I fear, that he needn't reply
to my letter, as I had no permanent address.
It was some little time after my promotion to the commissary that
Dorgan came on the job as a track-laying foreman. He was a heavy-set,
black-browed fellow with a sinister face and deeply caverned, brooding
eyes looking out furtively under their bushy coverts, and his chief
characteristic was a crabbed reticence which not even the exigencies of
handling a crew of steel-layers seemed able to break. His face was one
not to be easily forgotten; from the first sight I had of it, it was
vaguely familiar, and a thoughtful ransacking of the cubby-holes of
memory very shortly recalled it for me. Dorgan was an escaped convict.
His jail-break dated back to my second year in the penitentiary, to a
period just after I had been slated for the prison office work.
Dorgan--his name on the prison books was Michael Murphey, but we knew
him only as "Number 3126"--had "brought" ten years for safe-blowing,
and he was known in the prison yard and shops as a dangerous man.
Twice within my recollection of him he had been put in solitary
confinement for fighting; and he was one of the few to whom the warden
denied the small privileges accorded the "good conducts."
One day a hue and cry was raised and word was quickly passed that
Number 3126 was missing. He had planned his escape craftily. A new
shop building was at that time in process of erection, and each day a
gang of "trusties" went outside to haul stone. Of course, the
safe-blower was not included in this outside gang, but one dark and
rainy morning he included himself by the simple process of hog-tying
and gagging one of the trusties detailed for the job, exchanging
numbered jackets with him, and taking the man's place in the ranks of
the stone-loaders, where he contrived to pass unnoticed by the guards.
The escape was entirely successful. At the critical moment Dorgan had
overpowered the single wagon guard, leaving the man a candidate for
admission to the hospital, and had made his break for liberty. We, of
the inside, never knew, of course, the various steps taken in the
attempt to recapture him. But they all appeared to be fruitless since
Number 3126 was never brought back.
I failed utterly in an endeavor to analyze my own feelings when I
recognized Dorgan and realized that an escaped man from my own prison
was at work for my employers; an escaped criminal and a desperate one,
at that. What was my duty in the premises? Should I bind myself, once
for all, to the brotherhood of law-breakers--the submerged minority--by
shielding this man and conniving at his escape? Or should I turn
informer, telling the contractor-partners of the risk they ran by
keeping Dorgan in the force--the risk that some night, after the money
for the monthly pay-roll had been brought out from town, they would
find the camp safe smashed and its contents gone?
While I was debating this question, inclined first in one direction by
some new generosity on the part of one or the other of my employers,
and again leaning the other way when I remembered that, in the eye of
the law, I, myself, was in precisely the same category with Number
3126, I had another promotion. One evening, just after I had closed
the commissary, one of the water-boys came to tell me that I was wanted
in the contractors' office, a little shack at the far side of the
end-of-track cantonments. Hadley, the senior member of the firm, was
alone when I showed myself at the door.
"Come in, Bertrand," he invited, gruffly genial; "come in and wait a
minute until I go over this estimate again. You'll find cigars in that
box on the bunk."
Having nothing to do while I waited, I sat on a stool in a corner of
the shack, smoking the gift cigar and silently regarding the man who
had sent for me. He was a good example of the better type of Western
contractor and out-door man; big-bodied, burly, whiskered like a miner,
a keen driver on the work, but withal as kindly as a father when
kindness was called for.
In due time he pushed the figuring pad aside and turned to me. "Drag
up your stool, Jim; I want to talk to you," he began. And then: "How
much experience have you had in keeping accounts?"