"When did you telegraph the warden?" I asked.
"Immediately; from Cripple Creek, and as soon as Barrett had told me your
story. We had our reply at once, and I took the first train for
Glendale, your old home town. What I have been able to dig up in that
little dead-alive burg is a great plenty, Bertrand. Your arrest has
turned out to be just about the most unfortunate thing that could
possibly have happened for certain persons who were most anxious to bring
it to pass--namely, two old rascals who made use of the traveling-man
Barton's story and started the pursuit in the right direction."
"Call me Weyburn," I broke in. "That is my name--James Bertrand
Weyburn--and I'm going to wear it, all of it, from this time on."
"I know," laughed the big attorney, drawing up the stool and seating
himself beside the cot much as Whitredge had done at an earlier hour of
the same day. "They call you 'Bert' and 'Herbert' down yonder in your
home village, and they don't seem to know that your middle name is
Bertrand."
"You say you have been digging: what did you find out?" I questioned
eagerly.
"Some things that I was looking for and some that I wasn't. I had the
advantage of being a total stranger to everybody, and all I had to do was
to stroll around and ask questions. Let me ask you one, right now; do
you know who the owners of the Lawrenceburg are?"
"A New York syndicate, I've always understood."
"Not in a thousand years!" retorted the lawyer, laughing again. "It is
owned, pretty nearly in fee simple, by two old friends of yours--Abel
Geddis and Abner Withers. More than that, it is a reorganized and
renamed corporation founded upon a certain gold-brick proposition, called
'The Great Oro Mining and Reduction Company,' promoted and floated down
in your section of the State something like five years ago by two men
named Hempstead and Lesherton. Does that stir up any old memories for
you?"
It did, indeed. "The Great Oro" was the mine for the capitalization of
which Abel Geddis had used the money belonging to his depositors; the
basis of the theft which had cost me three good years of my life.
"But I had understood that the 'Oro' was a fake, pure and simple!" I
protested.
"It was. A claim had been located and a shaft sunk to ninety feet, but
there was no mineral. That shaft is the present main shaft of the
Lawrenceburg. After Geddis and Withers found they had been
'gold-bricked' they went to Colorado and looked the ground over for
themselves. The result of that visit was a determination on their part
to send a little good money after the bad, so they put a force in the
mine and began to drift from the shaft-bottom, and shortly after that the
workings began to pay."
"Which direction did that drift take?" I asked.
Benedict did not answer the question directly. "Things began to fit
themselves together pretty rapidly after I got the facts in the history
of 'The Great Oro'," he went on. "By that time the news of your arrest
and return to the penitentiary had reached Glendale and the gossip bees
were buzzing. Whitredge was rattling around like a pea in a dried
bladder, holding midnight conferences in the bank with the two hoary old
villains who had sworn your liberty away, starting a petition for your
pardon, and I don't know what all. I didn't pay much attention to him
because I was at that time more deeply interested in a number of other
things."
"Go on," I begged breathlessly.
"First, I investigated carefully the records of your trial and it didn't
take very long to discover that Whitredge had doubled-crossed you. He
bribed the two deputies sent to transfer you from the police station in
Glendale to the county seat. They were to bully and browbeat you into
making an attempt to escape--thus affording proof presumptive of your
guilt--and this they proceeded to do. They've admitted it under
oath--after I had shown them what we could do to them if they didn't."
"Whitredge began to plan for that very thing almost at the first," I put
in. "It was he who put the idea of running way into my head."
"Sure he did. But speaking of affidavits, I have another; from a fellow
named Griggs; you remember him, of course,--your understudy in Geddis's
bank at the time when you were bookkeeper and cashier? He swears that
the original stock certificates in 'The Great Oro' were made out in the
name of Abel Geddis--as you know they were--and that on a certain night
just previous to your arrest, when he had been working late and had gone
to the back room for his hat and coat, Geddis and Whitredge came in and
Geddis opened the vault. Are you paying attention?"
I was choking with impatience, as he well knew, but he refused to be
hurried.
"All in good time," he chuckled. "I'm coming to it by littles. Griggs
was curious to know what was going on and he played the spy. He saw
Geddis's name taken out of the stock certificates with an acid and your
name written in its place. You see, they were confidently counting upon
'getting' you through Geddis's daughter and were framing things up to
fit. How much or how little they took the young woman into their
confidence I don't know."
"That doesn't matter now," I hastened to say.
"No; Griggs was the man I wanted, and I got him. He will testify in
court, if he is obliged to. He would have done it at the time if Geddis
and Whitredge hadn't discovered him and scared him stiff with a threat to
put him in the prisoner's dock with you, as an accomplice. After I had
secured Griggs's affidavit I wanted one more thing, and I got it--bought
it. That was a map of the Lawrenceburg underground workings, corrected
up to date. I knew Geddis and Withers must have one, and by a piece of
great good luck I found a young surveyor's clerk who had made a tracing
for Geddis from one of Blackwell's blue-prints. He had spoiled his first
attempt by spilling a bottle of ink on it, so he made another. He didn't
see any reason why he shouldn't sell me the spoiled copy."
"I know what you are going to say!" I shouted.
"I imagine you do," he laughed. "The Lawrenceburg workings have never
gone downhill at all. They've been burrowing in the opposite direction
all the time, and according to their own map they never touched pay-ore
until they cut the Little Clean-Up vein below your hundred-and-fifty-foot
level. Now you know why they have been fighting us so desperately, and
why, as a final resort, they are willing to pay us five million dollars
for a quit-claim to the Little Clean-Up. We've got them by the neck,
Jimmie. We can make them pay for every dollar's worth of ore they have
stolen from us."
It was too big to be surrounded at the first attempt. I completely lost
sight of my own involvement in the upflash of joy at the thought that at
the long last the two old scoundrels who had robbed others right and left
were going to get what was coming to them. Benedict went on with his
story quietly and circumstantially.
"I guessed at once what Whitredge was up to when I found that he was
circulating that pardon petition. He was aiming to make you a
self-confessed criminal before we could have time to turn a wheel. At
that, I wired a Cincinnati detective agency, and a young man who knew his
business was put on the job. The detective's reports showed the whole
thing up. Geddis, Withers and Whitredge were hustling like mad to make
capital out of your recapture by the prison authorities. Whitredge was
to advise you to urge the sale of the Little Clean-Up upon Barrett and
Gifford, and your reward was to be a pardon, by the asking for which you
would be virtually confessing your guilt. Thus the past would be buried
beyond any possibility of a resurrection. Nice little scheme, wasn't it?"
"You have those two papers--the letter and the petition," I said, with an
uncontrollable shudder. "You'll never know how near Whitredge came to
winning out. I was just about to sign when you came."
"Whitredge is a dangerous man," was Benedict's comment. "He took the
train from Glendale last night, and the detective went with him, wiring
me from a station up the line. I caught the next train and got here two
hours ago. I might have headed him off of you, I suppose, but I had a
bit of legal business to attend to first. If you are ready, we'll go.
Your wife is waiting for you in the warden's office, and she'll be
wondering why we are so long about getting the doors unlocked."
"Go?" I stammered. "You--you mean that I'm free?"
"Sure you are! My legal business was to press the _habeas corpus_
proceedings which were begun as soon as I had obtained evidence of the
miscarriage of justice in your trial before Judge Haskins. You are a
free man. I left the order of the court with the warden as I came in."
There is a limit to human endurance, either of sorrow or of joy. I got
up and tried to walk with Benedict to the cell door, which had been left
standing open. I remember catching at the big lawyer's arm, and then the
world went black before my eyes. And that is all I do remember.
* * * * * *
We held our council of war--the final one in the long series--late in the
evening of the day of climaxes in the sitting-room of a Hotel Buckingham
suite, Benedict, Barrett and I. Barrett had arrived just as we were
sitting down to dinner, having hurried east as soon as he could be spared
at Cripple Creek.
"They are all in, down and out," was Barrett's summing-up of the
situation, after he had heard Benedict's story. And then: "It's up to
you, Jimmy"--looking away from me. "You owe those two old men and their
scamp of a lawyer a pretty long score, and I guess you'll be wanting to
pay it."
"I do!" I gritted. In a flash all the injustice I had suffered at the
hands of Abel Geddis and Abner Withers and Cyrus Whitredge piled in upon
me and there was no room in my heart for anything but retaliation.
Benedict clipped and lighted a cigar, and Barrett sat back in his chair
and stared at the gas-fixture in the center of the ceiling.
"I can't blame you much, Jimmie," he offered. "I guess maybe, if the
shoe were on my foot, I'd want to give them the limit. And yet----"
"There isn't any 'and yet'," I cried out.
"Perhaps not; but I don't know, Jimmie. If I were going to be the father
of Polly's children, as you are, I--well, I don't believe I'd care to
hand down that sort of a legacy to the children; a legacy of hatred--even
a just hatred--gorged and surfeited on the thumb-screwing of two old men.
Whitredge will get what is coming to him; the Bar Association will see to
that. But these two old misers who are already tottering on the edge of
the grave----"
"They have robbed me of my good name, and they have robbed us all of our
good money!" I cut in rancorously.
At this, Benedict, who had been saying little, put in his word.
"I saw Whitredge an hour ago. He has been wiring Geddis and Withers--to
tell them that the game is up. He says he supposes he will have to take
his own medicine, but he asked me to intercede for the two old men. They
have wired their Colorado attorneys to withdraw the Lawrenceburg suit and
to lift the injunction, and they offer to turn in all their property if
they are permitted to leave the country. That's as bad as a prison
sentence for two men as old as they are. Will you let them do it, and
call the account square, Weyburn?"
"No, by God!" If I set down the very words that I uttered, it is only in
the interest of truth. At that moment I was like the soldiers who have
seen their dead; I had seen the look in Polly's eyes, put there by that
horrible week of waiting and suspense.
The room, as I have said, was the sitting-room of our suite--Polly's and
mine--and I had neither seen nor heard the door of communication with the
bed-room open. When I glanced up she was standing in the doorway, and I
knew that she had heard. In the turning of a leaf she had flown across
the room to drop on her knees beside me and bury her face in my lap.
"Oh, Jimmie--Jimmie, dear!" she sobbed; "you _must_ forgive--forgive and
forget! For my sake--for your own sake--you must!"
That settled it. Benedict flung his freshly lighted cigar into the grate
and turned away, and Barrett got up and crossed to the window. I stood
up and lifted my dear girl to her feet, and with her tear-stained face
between my palms I turned my back upon the past and told her what we were
going to do.
"It shall be as you say, Polly; we'll go back to the tall hills and
forget it--and make other people forget it. And we'll let Mr. Benedict,
here, do just what he pleases, no more and no less, with a pair of old
plotters who haven't so very many years to wait before they will have to
turn in their score to the Great Evener."
At this Barrett jerked out his watch and broke in brusquely; and as at
other times, the brusquerie was only a mask for the things that a man
doesn't wear on his sleeve.
"Cut it short, you two turtle-doves; you've got about forty-five minutes
before the Westbound Limited is due, and you'd better be packing your
grips. Come on downstairs, Benedict, and I'll buy you a drink to go with
that red necktie of yours. Let's go."